 If you're like me, the 2016 election of Donald Trump was a complete shock. I spent the first couple of years after his election just trying to understand how this happened and why we were so wrong. I learned quite a bit about how Hillary Clinton made mistakes during her campaign, but today I wanted to focus on the problem with polling. Leading up to the elections, the polls made it seem as though Hillary was a surefire winner and nothing was going to change that. So when Donald Trump won, did this mean that the polls were wrong? Not exactly, but I've done quite a bit of research into the subject of predictions from experts and there are some things we all need to know going into November if we hope to get Trump out of office. One of my biggest fears is that people are looking at the recent polls and think that Biden already has this thing won. In fact, I've seen the same people who were confident in a Hillary win having the same confidence today. When we create a narrative that Trump has already lost, people may stay at home and not vote. We need every vote we can to get Trump out of office and I feel the best way to get people out there and go vote is to explain why a Trump re-election is a reality that we need to avoid at all costs. But before we get started, if you're new to the rewired soul, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. Here, we use critical thinking to take a look at different situations going on in the world to try to improve our own emotional intelligence and overall well-being. In the most recent prediction from 538.com, Biden is predicted to win. This website is run by the expert predictor Nate Silver and people often turn to him for his predictions. In fact, I recently read his book, The Signal and the Noise, Why So Many Predictions Fail But Some Don't. At the time of publishing that book, Silver was seen as some sort of profit due to the accuracy of his predictions. But this book was released before the 2016 election. Much like his recent prediction in the race between Biden and Trump, Silver predicted that Hillary had about a 70% chance of winning. Unfortunately, Trump won and Nate Silver received quite a bit of backlash for his prediction. But how justified was this outrage from the public about the prediction? I'll be the first to admit that I used to have a major grudge against the local weatherman here in Las Vegas. If this guy said there was a 70% chance of rain here in the dry desert, I'd be ecstatic. So when it didn't happen, I'd be furious. The problem is that we all often forget how big of a number like 30% actually is. Nate Silver never said that Hillary had a 100% chance of winning. He said it was a 70% chance. To put it in perspective, if a doctor told you that you had a 30% chance of dying from a surgery, you'd be pretty freaked out. Recently, I reread the phenomenal book Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke and she discussed the backlash Silver received. As a professional poker player, she shares an anecdote about how she was the dealer at a charity event and said someone had a 70% chance of winning a hand. And when the person lost, someone in the crowd shouted, you were wrong, Annie. She relates this story to Nate Silver and reminds people that this prediction isn't wrong. The result just fell on the other side. Personally, I had to realize that even though we're all control freaks and want predictions with 100% accuracy, it's never going to happen. The first book I read about predictions was the best-selling book Super Forecasting, The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock. Tetlock started his research decades ago when he realized that experts were no better at predictions than the average person. When you read his book, as well as the book from Nate Silver, you have a better understanding of how predictions and probabilities work and why we should never think the future is set in stone. This is especially true because even though we hate to admit it or acknowledge it, everybody lies. One of the reasons we were so blindsided by the 2016 elections was because of how many people were closet Trump supporters. As Trump began his campaign and spewed his racist, xenophobic and misogynistic rhetoric, many people wanted to vote for him, but they didn't want to say it publicly. So when Trump supporters were polled, they either said they were undecided or were voting for someone else. What we need to realize is that something like this can happen again, and this is why we shouldn't trust the polls. And I'll prove my point by asking you some questions. How tall are you? How much do you weigh? When was the last time you called your parents without asking for a favor? How often do you donate to charity? How much money do you spend on things that you don't need each month? There's a high probability that if I ask you these questions to your face, that you lie on at least one or more of these questions. You tell me that you're taller than you are or way less than you actually do. You probably embellish how much money you donate to charity and minimize the amount of money you waste on things that you don't need. And don't get me wrong, I'm not innocent either. The point I'm trying to make is that even though you don't know me and you may never interact with me again, you lie about some of these things. As people, we try to make ourselves look and sound better than we actually are. Even to strangers, we try to impress them with our answers. And this is why I try not to pay attention to the polls. In his book, Everybody Lies, Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are, Seth Stevens explains how big data really solidifies this point. He discusses how billions of people say they practice safe sex with condoms. But this is impossible because the annual sale of condoms is only in the hundreds of millions. Throughout the book, he points out how often we say one thing, but do another. I could go on and on about other books like Culling BS by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West, or Science Fictions by Stuart Richie. These books explain what it takes to even get proper data and how hard it is. But I don't have the time to dive fully into those two books in this video. So I highly suggest that you check them out. At the end of the day, the reality is that we don't know that Trump won't be re-elected. He has die-hard supporters who would vote for him regardless of what he says or does, and they're going to turn out once again. And although I'm no fan of Biden, I'm definitely in the camp of picking the lesser of two evils. So if you are too, I encourage you to ignore the polls and go out and vote like your vote will decide the election. If we think Trump getting out of office is a sure thing, I'm worried that we're going to live through this nightmare for another four years. All right, everybody, thanks for checking this out. I want to share with you a quick little story about when I first really started thinking about this. This was actually years ago, years and years and years ago when I actually liked watching American Idol. And I remember, I remember one of the hosts, I don't know if it was Ryan Seacrest or whoever, back in the day, they were like, hey, make sure you vote. Make sure you vote for your favorite singer because a lot of people are gonna say, oh, the person I like is so good that I don't even have to vote, and I think that explains a lot of the upsets in reality shows like that. You're like, oh, they're a surefire win. I don't need to do anything. Now, that's American Idol. My concern is who the next president is going to be. So as much as we like looking at polls and everything like that, I love watching Kyle Kalinsky over on Secular Talk. And he talks a lot about polls, but I'm like, hold on, Kyle. People might be lying on polls. Some of these polls aren't accurate. And remember, 70% chance is not 100% chance. So like I said, at the end of this video essay, go out there and vote. Like your vote will decide who will win the election, all right? I've also put some resources down in the description below. There's the books that I recommended. Those are affiliate links. So when you use my link, some of it comes back to support the channel. But there's also resources down there if you need to register to vote or know how to vote or what's going on with the whole mail-in voting and all that other crazy stuff that's going on this year. So make sure you check out the description and share this video with a friend. Get them to get their butt out there and go vote. All right, but anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And a huge, huge thank you to everybody who supports the channel over on Patreon, as well as everybody who supports the channel by getting my books over at TheRewireTool.com, or getting merch from the merch store, or using the affiliate links to get the books that I recommend. You're all awesome. All right, thanks again for watching. I'll see you next time.