My favorite podcast interviewer is Tyler Cowen, very smart and very prepared, and asker of wonderful questions that often surprise his guest. I like this exchange with Annie Duke, retired world-class poker player and author.

COWEN: If only poker players voted, how would policies change? How would the country be different? It’s not a question about party affiliation, but about how poker players think because your reason for why you vote is going to matter more than which party you vote for if you’re the only voters.

DUKE: I need to understand what you mean by a poker player because there’s all sorts of different types of people who play poker. Do you mean —

COWEN: The top 500 poker players. You all vote. How does the country change?

DUKE: I think that —

COWEN: What decisions do we make better? Because you’ve already said these people are not necessarily better at happiness. They don’t necessarily transfer the learning. Would it just be the exact same country? Would we somehow take more clever risks in foreign policy? Would we read the tells of Putin and other foreign leaders?

DUKE: My suspicion is that if only the top 500 poker players voted, people would be thinking a lot more about edge cases — where things could go wrong, for sure, because poker players just are obsessed with that. I think that there would be more long-termism as opposed to short-termism, again, because you have to be obsessed with that as a concept. I think that people would be thinking about “What are the unintended consequences? How does this look?”

Another thing that’s really important that poker players think about is, “If I put this policy in that looks like it’s awesome, how can someone come in and find the cracks in it so that it can turn into something bad?” I feel like the top 500 players would definitely be thinking in that way more.

Assuming that they wanted to use their powers for good as opposed to evil, which we’ll assume, I feel, in general, policies would be better, less easy to be advantaged, thinking more long-term, definitely more willing to take risks that were worthwhile. Yeah, I feel like things would be better.