Nate Silver
Appearances
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I mean, life, there's a lot of luck, right? Like I felt I was lucky to be at this place where baseball stats really took off and then lucky to be at a point where people want Moneyball for X.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
So I have that skill set in the right place at the right time. And then 2008 is this big inflection point where politics becomes much more crazy and interesting. All of a sudden, politics is like not this crusty thing anymore. I'm not trying to be super partisan, but it felt like, OK, now you actually have an interesting politician who I actually want to hang out with.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I don't know if I'm good or terrible at naming things.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Yeah, but there's deep irony here, which is the whole point of the model was to be probability driven. We're not calling Ohio for Obama. We're saying it was a 52% chance because it's just barely ahead in the polls. You had to bet you'd go 52 instead of 48.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Yeah, and 50 in 2012, because it's just kind of dumb luck, basically, right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Okay, look, who's going to win Alabama in 2020?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
But those others, man, they're kind of all over the map. Yeah, so maybe one or two, your model's a little better, right? But then you just kind of win a couple of coin flips.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I just had an anxiety dream about the New York Times the other night. I just flew back from Korea. So you have this like really long period of REM sleep or their little nested universe within your dreams and stuff like that. And I had some anxiety. They were like, before we let you write the Times, you have to prove your chops as a traditional reporter.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
And they had some very complicated story with some blind person. I didn't know.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Stay within the boundaries. There are brilliant people in the New York Times. At the time I was there, it's 2010 to 2013. It's transitioning from being this dinosaur-like print media business to what's now, I think, a very well-run company. mostly digital.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Yeah. And the vulnerable points in history, 538 is quite successful there. This is when they actually are getting like a whole bunch of new subscribers for the digital product. But then you kind of run into egos mixed with kind of personnel turnover. There's a new CEO. It's a cliche, right? When they bring in the new guy and the project was the old guy's project...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
So a new guy comes in. Meanwhile, at the time, the New York Times newsroom, the traditional political reporters... Kind of hate our guts because that election in particular, 2012 was a very fucking boring election. It was Romney and Obama and maybe that's better. They're both relatively competent people, but not a whole lot is changing or moving. They're well-known candidates.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
And so a lot of what the blog was doing, FiveThirtyEight, was saying, yeah, this movement in the polls, it's all kind of fake and nothing's really changing, right? Which is kind of against what their reporters want you to say, where it's drama unfolding and game changing. I don't know.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Once you start testing the market, eventually there were other offers that let me try to build FiveThirtyEight into a larger thing. Whether that was successful or not, we can...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I think the Times is not used to people turning them down very much. And I actually still freelance at the Times occasionally, right? We're in a relationship now. It took 10 years to repair.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
And the point was that the gut wasn't very valuable, but now I'm going to pretend that my gut was crushing instead.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
But no, so now I have a good relationship with them instead, but they weren't used to being turned down. And the cliche was that if you turn down the times, then your career is over, which isn't really true anymore. You've had a lot of X times people start sub stacks or have other success elsewhere.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
You kind of have a lot of shit packed together. You have the holidays already. It feels a little greedy to have your birthday. Self-indulging. Yeah, yeah. I don't want to have a birthday so soon after the holidays. Well, mine's the second.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I think 2016 was actually our best election.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Because I think about this as a gambler. And to me, the question is, what are the odds that you have relative to the consensus odds? Elaborate on that. So our model had Trump with a 30% chance of winning. And we spent a lot of time explaining to people that Hillary does not have this election in the bag. It's a much closer race than Obama. All these states, math term, but correlated, right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Meaning that Michigan and Wisconsin, they're all kind of the same state. If you lose one state, you'll probably lose the others. And so all that has to happen is that Trump overperforms among so-called working class white non-college voters. And all of a sudden, then you can win the electoral college, which is kind of what happened basically.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
So to us, if you were to have invested in Amazon stock on day one, and you said, I think there's a 30% chance that Amazon will boom into something really big. And everyone else says, that's crazy. It's only 1%. And even though you're below 50%, relative to the consensus, we were one of the only people who were saying that Trump really did have a shot. You failed least bad. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Because again, you're getting odds. If you were gambling on the election, which I have no problem with.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
You could get five to one odds on Trump, basically. Five to one, six to one. In 2016. Two and a half to one instead. So that means that the expected value poker term, if you're able to make that bet, that would be the best sports bet in the world.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Yeah, you're going to lose most of the time, but you get 5x, 6x your money when you're right. Got you. That's not how 99.9% of the political audience thinks. But we did take care, though, to emphasize the uncertainty to the point that we were getting yelled at. People are like, we just think Nate's trying to just get more web traffic.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
The most concise explanation is that people who are more college educated, who read the news more, are more likely to respond to surveys.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Like, oh, exciting, a pollster called in the phone.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Or who picks up the phone anymore? Well, people with high social trust answer all types of surveys more, right? Wow. Who has high social trust? It's Democrats. They are the establishment system party now, which didn't used to be true as much, right? Elaborate on that. Obama was like the disruptive candidate. His electorate was younger. His electorate was black, Hispanic.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Now the Democrats are kind of the party of college kids, white liberals. They're very trusting of the media. And so they both respond to polls more and vote Democratic more. And so if you don't adjust for that, you're going to have your poll oversample Democrats. That's a technical term I'm using slightly incorrectly on purpose, but...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
You're going to end up with not enough Trump voters in your poll if Trump voters don't trust the media and you're not accounting for that in some respect.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
And it's not that they even lie about who they're supporting. I mean, Trump voters are proud. They just said they aren't being reached in the first place, right? They're not picking up strangers' phone calls. If they are, they're not going to want to spend 15 minutes and take a survey. And that can shift. After the first assassination attempt against Trump, there's a lot more enthusiasm.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I come from a mixed family where my dad's side's very anti-celebration and my mom's side's very pro-celebration.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Like, I'm proud to be a Trump supporter. Certainly in 2016, maybe the Trump supporters were not easy to reach.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
A roll of the dice. A roll of the dice. There are a couple of big problems. One is that we've learned this before, but they have me doing a bunch of management stuff that's not my comparative advantage, to put it kindly. I mean, I'm okay, but it's like exactly the part of my brain I don't want to be using. I need time to just get in the zone and get in a flow state and like write or build models.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I'm kind of balancing out the recessive traits. Okay.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Yeah, no, I don't want to have to respond to some email about this person wants an X percent raise. But the main issue, so I get in there, and John Skipper, who is the head of ESPN at the time, he's like, hey, don't worry about it. We're just going to make great content. I'm giving him a thicker Southern accent.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
We work in archetypes. You don't have to worry about anything, right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
bad thing i like john skipper a lot but he had some personal issues kind of the same thing again somebody new takes over and they don't have this mandate and all of a sudden he's like well we have the tv business and theme parks that's robust unless there's a global pandemic or something like that right yeah yeah yeah like all their businesses like begin to hit headwinds and we were set up as literally as like kind of a loss leader it's not even that big a line item on disney's budget but they're like it's not really worth it if we're losing five million instead of making five million who cares
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
But then when you're under financial pressure, like that is not going to hold up very well. So we're kind of in a point of stasis where there's no business model. When you don't have a business model, then it's hard to do anything. Really, I'm not sure what you're optimizing for exactly. And then there's also the issue of if you're creative, then everyone wants to have this brand expansion.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
But you're the major creative force can only expand so much. People want you ultimately, right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
There are ways around that. There are some things that do scale, like the models that we build. They get a lot of traffic, and I could hire somebody now, and we're kind of in the process of doing this all over again at the Substack Silver Bulletin now. But much slower, I thought, we have to hire as many people as possible right now.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
When you get to ESPN, I talked to Bill Simmons, who was at Grantland before that, and he's like, everything that you want, ask for it right now, right? Because you'll never have more leverage than you'll have right now.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Ask for business class travel, because it's a reasonable thing if you're busy, right? But if you ask for that in the next contract negotiation when you're losing money, then eh. Ask for that now. Lock that in right now.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
But then you kind of wind up with 25 people all starting new at the same time. And we didn't understand that you need to have like a product team and like an advertising team. And it was just kind of an awkward fit. Disney is a wonderful and creative place in certain ways, but it does things at very large scale.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Everything is eight or nine figure budgets for like an NFL deal or a movie or a theme park. I mean, the whole city of Orlando is basically the 51st state is Walt Disney World, basically, right? Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Disney's very big picture. They were like, he's a creative. He doesn't have to deal with money. It's like, no, actually, I fucking like making money. I like business, right? I like for this to be like a growing business because anytime you try to hire somebody, we hire good people. We're like, what's the long-term plan? We're like, well...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
It's under contract for three more years, so why would you worry about it? And all of journalism sucks, so you're not going to have job security anywhere. And that's a very hard pitch. And so it is also partly my own ego. I don't know why. I felt like I wanted to be like one of those 1970s magazine editors, right? We were like drinking wine as you're finishing the edition. Sure.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
He retired a couple of years ago. But yeah, I taught at MSU. So like a university kid. It's a good place to grow up. I found that I have like an unconscious hiring bias toward Midwesterners. They're just grounded students.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
We have some argyle socks. I'm not sure what's happening.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
The last card. Because supposedly in the old riverboat days and poker's origin, if the dealer was crooked and cheated or was suspected of cheating and the last card affected the hand, he'd be thrown into the Mississippi River.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
No, and you can detect. I was at the airport in Dallas one time. I'm like, that person sounds really familiar. And they're from East Lansing. I didn't know who they are. They should like a certain manner of speaking. You know, those micro dialect things. Yeah, I have a little bit of that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
It's a game of escalation. Let's say you're playing a $5, $10 hold'em game, which is a medium-sized game. and you have $5,000 on the table. So the first bet typically in that game, someone would bet 30 bucks to try and win the five bucks and the 10 bucks, relatively small money.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
In fighting for those $15 worth of blinds, things can escalate and escalate until all $5,000 are on the table or even more than that potentially. And so it's a game of escalation.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Yeah, as you get to the river, then there are fewer cards that can come. It's called the game tree. You can imagine a branch prunes out and then narrows again toward the end. But the more money on the table, the deeper you can get because you can raise and re-raise and check raise and all these things, right? It's a very complex game. Actually, it took longer to solve poker than to solve chess.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
It is kind of solved now. I mean, we can get into what that means exactly. Tell me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
And it can kind of play poker better than a human, although there are a lot of caveats there, right? One is that humans are not playing poker perfectly. The whole thing you learn about poker strategy, we actually like study how computers play poker. But the computers must be very honest. Computers fucking bluff all the time. One discovery they made is that you have to bluff a ton in poker.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
That's what makes people have an incentive to pay you off when you have a real hand.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Right, it depends on the size of the pot and it depends on cards that come in other things, right? But you have to bluff a lot and also concealing information, although it's intuitive if you think it's poker, it's a game of limited information, but you want to be very deceptive.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Sometimes you want to slow play with a strong hand that's very important or check a strong hand just to avoid giving away too much information.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
If you know that a certain player bluffs just a little bit too much, then all of a sudden, a huge number of your hands are calling that would be folding before, or vice versa. Or things like, this player tends to make a big bet when they have a bad hand as a bluff, and a small bet when they have a good hand. You love that type of player, right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
It's like, okay, so now when you have a good hand, I can get away cheaply, maybe even fold, or at least pay you only a small amount. But when you're making a big bluff, then you're not balancing your strategy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Maybe 100%. More short, it's maybe 70-30 math versus psychology. And it's also like a type of discipline. In the abstract, there are computer programs you can study with and coaching videos. I have a poker coach who's kind of the poker equivalent of a trainer, basically. But can you execute when all of a sudden you're playing for like $50,000?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Yeah, and I played in like the World Series of Poker a lot. I made day six of the main event. By the time you make it to day six, every pot is literally worth a couple hundred thousand dollars. You don't get to cash it in right away. My parents would have been like, oh, I have a million chips. And they're like, you want a million bucks? Like, no, I have chips.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
And like the exchange rate's like 10 to one. And the World Series of Main Event, there are 10,000 players now. There are not 10,000 good poker players. in the United States, right? And so like they're amateurs and they're so nervous, they're like shaking. And so like it becomes learning how to deal with a flow state and a little bit of stage fright and executing in those high pressure situations.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
And when you do it enough, I'm a very talented amateur.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Kind of developed like a little bit of a sicko tendency where you're like, I feel more alive when I'm playing for real money and more focused and in a weird fucked up way, even like a little bit more relaxed. I don't know. It's weird.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
There absolutely is. And this is one thing that took me a while to learn. And I learned it by talking to this one guy who consulted with traders. He actually was a neuroscientist and studied these Wall Street traders. Like, these people are fucking crazy. They think they're so crazy. rational, but they're not.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Talk to an astronaut, talk to a guy who's trained fighter pilots, talk to a guy who trained professional golfers. And they kind of all say the same thing, which is your body is working on a different chemical system, a different operating system when you're under stress. And actually a good athlete will have a higher escalation in his or her heart rate
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
You were six-ish when that happened? I was six years old and I liked numbers. I don't think I ever thought I could become a baseball player. I was like never that delusional.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
under stress a trader will have higher spikes in testosterone and dopamine and things like that that's okay because it means that your body is reacting to stress when you learn in poker i'm not going to feel the same playing a ten thousand dollar pot as in a five dollar pot in my beer league game on tuesday night learning like okay i can start to master that or at least fuck up less than other people yeah when you learn that then that becomes kind of powerful
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
In some ways, Peter Thiel is the most curious one of the bunch, because A, most is guys, and there are lots of women in the book too, but it's heavily more men than women.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
In fifth grade, we had to write these biographies of what our future life would look like. Basically, I had myself becoming president at some point.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
testosterone and ego and entitlement and who is afforded the privilege of gambling in a probabilistic way. So he is someone who's known as being quite risk averse. He wanted to sell PayPal early on and protect his downside. He's also quite religious.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
He is a very literate intellectual in a way that Elon Musk is brilliant in many ways. He kind of has like a 12 year old's mindset. Whereas Thiel, he's quoting from scripture and philosophy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Yeah, and he was like, okay, well, Nate, 10 years ago, all this moneyball shit was the frontier, but now it's all been internalized. And now a contrarian thing is actually to trust your gut more because all the nerds have taken over everything. And so there's no alpha, it would be the trading term, from just running the models that everyone else has.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I think it's probably fairly close to being true. But he was an early adopter of Trump in 2016. He kind of will say that, oh, I thought it was a good contrarian bet that maybe the odds are 50%, not an age 30%, and definitely not the conventional wisdom of 10%. I think Trump probably matches a lot of his political leanings anyway.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I retired the presidency to become baseball commissioner because that was the higher office to me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
But you have to give him some credit for understanding that Silicon Valley's interests... And the progressive interest would clash in lots of different ways. Silicon Valley would come under scrutiny for lots of good and bad reasons. What are the effects of cell phones and social media? What are the effects of very powerful people owning individual media brands? Or all the satellites orbiting.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
The tremendous accumulation of wealth. At the same time, Silicon Valley has a cliched image of itself where it's like we are the ones who think differently and we are contrarian. We're disruptors. In some ways, it's still quite impressive.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Despite all the things that America fucks up, we still have the best talent from all around the world coming to California in particular, coming to Silicon Valley, even though it's kind of like a place that's very expensive and unlivable in certain ways. But we still have that. And our economy is still growing. Our lifespans are not. We're making this tradeoff, which might be bad.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Silicon Valley understands that growth is vital and technology eight times out of 10 is good. And they understand probability. They understand that if you are making a lot of high upside, high risk bets, if you make enough of those, actually they pay off pretty well, right? If you'd like a one in 10 chance of having 100 extra investments, like a really good bet in the long run.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
those basic things right overcomes a lot of all types of problems. Being very pilled on some issues and it's very male and very white and Asian. It's always had a lot of ego and I think Trump winning further inflates those egos.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
People with power and privilege act the way they do. People have an amazing ability to feel like they're disempowered or aggrieved when, objectively speaking, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen and Elon are doing really fucking well, right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
They're as wealthy as any people have ever been in the history of the universe, or the world at least. Shape the world they live in pretty dramatically. And the book gives them a perfectly fair shake. They're kind of sore winners. The average Silicon Valley CEO is still probably a progressive Democrat. There was a much more sizable Trump faction. The book kind of anticipated that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
People make the mistake of assuming that things just kind of trend linearly upward forever, right? And the world's a story more or less of mean reversion. There is a broad-based conservative backlash on cultural issues.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
You don't. You're looking at the polls. For better or worse, we're just looking at the polls and economic data and not trying to answer the why questions as much. We kind of leave that up to the... pundits, I suppose. The They Them ad is partly about wokeness, but also about other things, right? It's about taxpayer money. It's about Kamala Harris seeming kind of out of touch in different ways.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
It's about illegal, undocumented immigration. It's about flip-flopping. It might be the most played ad in TV history because it's about more than one thing. Republicans tried to run on transgender rights in 2022 at the midterm, didn't have that much success with it. I voted for Harris, full disclosure. I didn't think it was that close. I did too.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Yeah, people need to be able to have a healthy degree of skepticism without going off the deep end. This seems to be very hard for people. If partisanship is a drug, it's a cliche.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
This is still like an ongoing. Yeah. We're in the middle of it. Right. So it's not even like recriminations. Exactly. And how that started just instantly. It immediately was political. You just won this election. You're going to gain a lot of power and you get nice little revenge against the left. But just chill out.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
It's like the chill to chill ratio. I had some concept I'm workshopping. In the short run, chill kind of works. People are called to action and alarmed. And I kind of go back to September 11th and the patriotism phase. And that works in the short run, right? But a lot of people get tired of it. There are good...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
You can make everything from controlled burning practices in California to the expense of various public services to the fact that if there is climate change, then needing to be more realistic and prepare for the type of housing that you're building in vulnerable areas. But instead, it turns out as something about DEI and the lesbian. Oh, yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I kind of want the lesbian fire chief to have a reality TV show if they get fired because they seem like these charismatic people. Personalities, right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Yeah, I mean, there was one Democrat. There was a picture now of, like, the McDonald's burning in a 100-degree storm fire. And she's like, this proves what corporate politics are doing to the climate. And it's like, yeah, you can maybe wait. What?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
It's almost like they don't even know what the idea is. They just want to believe in the founders.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I collected baseball cards. It was like a baseball card bubble. Your net worth is now 5,000 bucks. Like an eight-year-old's like a lot of money. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Well, Sam Bickman-Fried kind of played into this cliche. He's kind of self-described on the spectrum. Not a guy who's going to wear a suit and tie, but he's like, if I am playing video games in investor pitch meetings, that will make me seem cool. I have so much RAM, I need to offload something and play a video game while I'm multitasking. And so he kind of played in that stereotype and was quite
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
deliberate because they're very intense pattern matchers. Zuckerberg, he was kind of seen as like nerd in a hoodie and not the world's best communicator and just wanted to grind all day in engineering problems. That became the prototype that was used. Or Steve Jobs, a slightly different prototype, for example. And this can make it harder for new prototypes to break through.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I'm not trying to be super PC here, but the fact that there's so little money going to women founders and so little money going to black founders and Hispanic founders is kind of insane if you're the industry that wants to be disruptive and wants high variance, grit, and all these things, right? Because they're such intense pattern matchers. And because they kind of can't lose.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
The average venture capital firm, mediocre firm, isn't doing that well. But the top firms kind of can't lose. If you have the best talent from all around the world, it's like if every year the best team in the NBA got the number one draft pick.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
So Sam Bigman Freed was a nerdy, mathy kid. His parents were professors at Stanford. I think his mother was a philosophy professor. His dad was a law professor. Like a lot of smart kids got initially into finance at a firm called Jane Street Capital, which is a big quantitative hedge fund. At some point, he also got into something called effective altruism.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Basically, it's money ball, but for charity. It was kind of the pitch.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Working for a hedge fund. This is in his internal monologue that is probably unreliable to some degree. But he's like, so I want to make a lot of money so I can like donate it to poor children in Africa. This is kind of the cliched version of it. To help prevent malaria at a very cost effective rate. And then do much other weirder shit too involving AI and animal welfare and things like that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
He's like, I'm not making enough money at this hedge fund and so I'm going to start my own firm. His co-founder quits, right, because he seems kind of crazy. And one thing you learn about the book is all these people who think of themselves as hyper-rational and are thought of by others as hyper-rational, a lot of them are just kind of degenerate gamblers at heart.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Often skilled and smart degenerate gamblers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Impulsive and kind of stimulus-driven. He's also on Adderall, right? He said that wasn't that big a part of the story.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I mean, if you play enough poker where you have enough of a sample size where you see how things that affect yourself, like if you're hungry and then you're playing poker for like 12 years, I just want to bust out so I can go get a fucking steak or something.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
You're making all these marginal high stress decisions and the cumulative effect of anything that you're doing, maybe Adderall or nicotine, you can understand why people might like that, right? But it's going to affect performance and mentality. Long story short, starts a fund called Alameda, kind of has some fallout there, but begins to make more and more money.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Eventually realizes if you really want to get rich quick, then there are certain crypto trades that look like a very good bet. Leveraging different prices of Bitcoin in Japan versus South Korea versus other things.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
At the time, there were pretty big arbitrages because I believe this is right. In South Korea, you had to be a registered agent to trade Bitcoin or like a resident of South Korea. And they were pretty strict about it, at least at first. And this was back when Bitcoin was a somewhat more obscure thing. And so, yeah, if you could somehow find a way to buy Bitcoin in South Korea...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
But makes this money and then founds FTX, which is a crypto exchange.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
So first of all, I have to find somebody to sell me crypto, which is not a completely trivial problem. And you have to enter this 26 digit code and you can see what crypto is a bit intimidating. Whereas if you go to like an FTX or Coinbase or Gemini, then it's just E-Trade.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
You deposit 20,000 bucks from your bank account. You press a button, you buy Bitcoin, they take more of a surcharge than they probably should. But now I own Bitcoin, which technically you actually don't. They are just allocating that to your bank account and they own the Bitcoin. But usually that was respected. I can't speak for all these firms.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
In principle, your crypto is supposed to be segregated so you can't then go have a run on the bank. At FTX, it wasn't because Sam thought, oh, I'm very good at making trades and I want to make the world better through effective altruism. So like we have $8 billion in customer deposits in crypto.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Wouldn't it be a shame if I just left that sitting there in some account instead of making these awesome trades with it?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Yeah. He's like, well, I am trying to give my money away to charity and or to become infinitely powerful. He thought he could become president with some probability, literally. He wanted to be like the world's first trillionaire.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
He even thought he'd become president before he was age 35 by lobbying to get the rules changed.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
They said they would do it again, right? All that can happen is it goes to zero. So you go from one to zero, eh, who cares, right? You go from one to infinity, even that outweighs a lot of one to zeros. So they were at least honest by saying we'd do this again. Now there is some, I believe, shareholder action.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
So this is the rare case where there could be additional liability, but probably not too bad. But the other part of it is if you become successful in any different field, relatively young, you can notice how people change around you. And I'm sure it's true in Hollywood, but it's also true in the nerdier occupations, right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
So effective altruism originally kind of meant what it sounded like, which is how can we find more effective ways to give money to charity?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Save a life for 5,000 bucks instead of the $10 million we put on the average. You know, government agencies actually put a value on human life based on how people behave in the U.S., which is 10 million. So that mindset, though, becomes quite fraught. Even though I think it's right, you're putting a value now on different things. So that already is a little bit fraught.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
What is the value of donating to the symphony, for example? Like a little bit harder to quantify. Okay, or we can start to ask some other questions. Well, effective altruists mostly believe in animal welfare, which I see as a good thing. But how much are we trading the welfare of different animals against each other?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
One example given in the book is that there was a puppy, a poodle, who got stuck in the New York City subway system a few years ago. And should we stop the entire F train to rescue Dakota? And they decide to stop the F train. But like, you wouldn't do that for a squirrel. You'd run over the fucking squirrel or like a cat probably gets run over.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
And a dog, we just assign enough moral value that it gets weird. They're like, OK, well, look at the number of neurons an animal has.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I'm exactly old enough. It's turned 47. Just three years later would have been pretty different.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
All these solutions to COVID were terrible. It was terrible to have all these people get sick. It was terrible to shut down schools. But you have to make trade-offs.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
And people like don't respect the boundaries enough. I'll worry if I'm making a model in baseball or politics or basketball. Oh, this player is 10% underestimated, but the data is very good and we know how the system works. We know the rules of the game, literally. You have little errors and mistakes, but pretty accurate.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Whereas in these big open-ended problems, you're just kind of making shit up on the back of an envelope and sometimes the best you can do. We had to make these decisions again under COVID and maybe if we'd been more thoughtful about them, like what is the cost of shutting down school in Los Angeles for 19 months?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
You know, we probably should have done more back of the envelope math there, which I think would have said probably a bad idea even given these uncertain, But people don't know when they go from these closed problems that are amenable to modeling to these open problems where it's just regurgitated assumptions over and over and over again.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
So what's happened, though, with EA, the mandate kind of expanded for various reasons from charitable giving to any problem involving utility, meaning how do we make the world better? More questions. Who's deciding what constitutes better and for whom? What if I make myself infinitely happy and the rest of you are my slaves?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
You can say, well, Nate has infinite units of utility and you guys have 0.01 because you're not physically dead. Maybe you get to watch TV once a week or something. You get to nap. You're so generous. Yeah, you get to eat at Arby's now and then, right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
If you look now at gay men of my cohort, they're often quite successful, right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I have built models. I know how even when you have awesome data like you have in baseball, it's like a game that has structure and rules. I know how much you can have a garbage in, garbage out problem. And some parameters are robust, but you can change them and the output's about the same. And some are not.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Meaning you make an assumption and it totally radically changes and overwhelms everything else in the system. One irony is in some ways I trust the poker players more and the traders more and people like that because they actually have skin in the game. If they are wrong.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Yeah, because they have like a little bit of what it feels like to be an outsider if you're otherwise privileged. But you got a couple of things, right? You're gay and you're half Jewish. Just got a little bit of the flavor of... Adversity. Adversity, but also the ability to code switch, I guess is the term.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
So in some ways, the demise of Twitter was mispredicted, right? People thought, oh, the engineers will leave and Twitter will basically collapse the infrastructure, which it hasn't happened. It remains very influential. But you could say that Elon Musk spent $44 billion, certainly by the time he bought it and was trying to find ways out,
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Probably knowing that's like not a good ROI from a hero financial standpoint. He's going to lose money on that. But he's willing to spend, let's say, half of that, right? Let's say the real value is $20 billion. So he's spending $25 billion on a cultural and political project. And maybe it's paid off. He's still the richest man in the world.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
In fact, his wealth has only increased since Trump's election. So it's kind of pocket change to him. And I think it has had a huge effect on the discourse. I don't blame Silicon Valley for saying, hey, we're going to stand up and defend our interests. I think they felt that they were getting a hard time from the White House on antitrust stuff, which maybe they should get.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I'm just saying this is their mindset. And they're tired of their woke, progressive employees. And meanwhile, the news media has become very anti-tech.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
weird like barbapole thing where somehow donald trump i don't even want to get into donald trump's finances but because he's a kind of poor person's idea of like a rich person he kind of gets a pass yeah that's really true the left feels aggrieved and the right feels aggrieved when someone's on a winning streak and this is also talked about in the book and this stuff about how traders behave and how poker players behave you're getting so much fucking dopamine that when you're on a winning streak especially men it's literally narcotic you can't really be reasoned with
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I mean, I interviewed him four or five days before he got arrested and taken into custody. So his mind is reeling, like it's a video game, trying to figure out how can I somehow get out of this mess? He was someone I actually found it kind of hard to generate empathy for, in part because the last time I talked to him was in Palo Alto, California. He's at his parents' house under house arrest.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
You have to give away all your electronics. I'm like writing on this hotel notepad. I hadn't actually written that much, so I can't make small letters anymore, I don't think. It's like the landing form on the aircraft. Like, I can't use, I can't do that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
ankle bracelet. This is serious, right? And then I asked him, well, what if you could get two years probation? You settle the court case. And at the time, people kind of knew he was pretty dead to rights. It's like, yeah, I'd have to think about it. It's like, yeah, 20 years instead.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
You're not necessarily volunteering your entire self at all times. It's also useful in poker. And it's useful in journalism. You don't want to volunteer information in poker. There's a cost to volunteering information. And so learning to be a bit more guarded and feeling like there's no kind of template I can follow that's exactly going to meet my needs, right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
By the way, testified in his trial in New York against, I guess not the advice of his counsel, but against the advice of other lawyers that I spoke with. He was just going to perjure himself, which is what he did and really pissed off the judge. So he's actually kind of a very bad, miscalculating type.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
So he worked for a firm called Young Combinator, which is an incubator. They would go through and look at lots of very early stage pitches or founding teams, give them a small amount of seed money. When you do that, you get very good at networking, basically. But you get all the business because there's a lot of outflow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Everyone who's a young investor who may not be established would want to go to this firm. And therefore, he makes great connections, develops a good eye for talent. And his skill set is really knowing a little bit about a lot and being a good networker. He is not, I don't think, a coding genius.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
You know, he has a good eye for sniffing out what the next big thing is going to be. All the guys, including the bad and evil people, are impressive. But Sam Altman, because it's kind of this crazy idea, I'm obviously supplying this a lot, but just leave this computer on for a really long time. It's not clear what the commercial applications are. And it's expensive.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
To buy a compute is expensive, right? It's not like a Silicon Valley garage somewhere where you're just hacking together a project. No clear financial upside, which is why it started out as a nonprofit that's obviously de facto already over. I'm not going to get into the legal structure exactly.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
But like wrestling together, Elon Musk and Microsoft and Peter Thiel was an early investor, all these people. He was kind of playing the captain of that fantasy baseball team. Sam is an effective politician. He understands different constituencies in Silicon Valley, kind of reflects their ideology and is very risk-on.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
So Sam McMinfree, again, SBF, not Sam Altman, literally said repeatedly, like, if I could flip a coin... And the coin comes up heads, and the world is twice as good, plus 1%. And if it's tails, we wipe out all life in the known universe. I would flip that coin from utilitarian standpoint, right? That's a worldview, isn't it? Sam Altman wouldn't do that at 50-50. He might do it at 90-10, though.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
SpaceX actually was in very hairy situation for a long time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
And so he's been written off a few times. But once you have the chip on your shoulder, and with Sam Altman, AI is taking a long time to let it train on basically reading the entire text of the internet and thinking scare quotes about it for a really long time. And then all of a sudden with GPT-2 and then certainly 3 and beyond that, it's like this kind of miraculous.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I have to take a little bit from different buckets.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Yeah, so you have faith in it. And most of these guys, not that I have the whole faith thing worked out, but I think you start to get into some weird existential and spiritual questions for various reasons. When you're talking about smarter than human intelligence, when you're talking about life extension, these guys get into weird simulation hypothesis and things like that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
And most of them are secular. I kind of halfway predict there might be a little bit of a religious boom in Silicon Valley sometime soon as they try to wrestle with it. But Sam feels like he's seen this miracle happen. And then he gets written off at different times. The board tried to clumsily oust him from his own company. And then once you survive that, then you're emboldened.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I think he's the most rational of all the people I met. I think he understands his incentives. So I talked to him in summer 2022. The book took four years to write. At first, I tried to get another interview later on once GPT 3.5 had come out. They're like friendly, but like Sam was traveling the world for the next six months. And he first do interviews in person. So it might be difficult.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
You come to Cambodia. At first, this interview is like a year and a half old, but it was actually better because he was less guarded. Back then, he's like, yeah, it could go really badly, but we're going to solve global poverty. And wouldn't that be really good? We'll solve all technological and scientific problems.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
There's some crater on, I think, the moon. Okay. It's a pretty big one. Yeah. They were super overachieving, my dad's side. I have a famous arsonist on my mom's side who got like written up in the New York Times. He like invented new forms of arson and insurance fraud. I'm not actually like an overachieving type. I kind of do it despite myself, really.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
And that's worth the tangible risk that things go really wrong and we destroy civilization. That's, I think, a relatively honest comment. It may be deranged, but an honest expression of what he thinks. And then people are like, oh, this must be a marketing strategy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
It's like, no, Tylenol wasn't like, we might poison the water stream if people have more Tylenol, but let's keep, this is like not a typical strategy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
And it's because I come from this mindset where number one, they are taught to quantify everything in probabilistic terms, which again, I think is more good than bad, but is not the way most people, apart from me and all the people in the river think about these things and to think in terms of cost benefit analysis.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
On top of that, typical startup founder ego, feeling like you're oppressed when you're actually very powerful, right? Having this run of success, having lots of money and people who are sycophantic in your general orbit. We've not talked quite enough about just a lot of plain old competitiveness, wanting to compete and win.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Capitalism will triumph for better and worse because the people who want to compete are going to out-compete people who don't want to compete. Unless you entirely suppress competition, then competition is going to win. It's a very hard problem to balance out.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
That's great. It's only in the top 0.0001%. It's because if you're born on third base... just put your money in a trust fund, go do too much coke. You don't really have much of an incentive because what some of these people are doing is they keep bludgeoning the horse when it's already dead. I'm mixing my metaphors here, right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
But in some rational sense, when you sell your first startup for $50 million, just go buy a villa in Tuscany or something and have a great party with all your friends, be an angel investor, invest in a basketball team. But instead, they kind of keep competing over and over and over again and doubling down over and over again.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
And so by definition, it's like a poker tournament where the person who goes all in 10 times in a row and by luck or skill, the combination really, win these bets 10 times in a row. All of a sudden, wealth multiplies exponentially and you're worth more money than half the countries on Earth. I mean, what is Elon's net worth compared to the GDP of most countries on Earth?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
A lot of power accumulating in a very small number of people's hands. It self-accelerates. It's flubber. Before the book, the print edition, you can kind of bounce your way through. I am partially audiobook. That's what I did. I listened to it. We cut out some of the things that are a little bit more detours. I'm actually partial to the audiobook version. Yeah, yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Constraints are good. I want to kind of force you to like, in the order of the author.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
And so I take after that side of the family, I think.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Basically, when you have a multinational company and different parts of the company make different things, like you have Apple cell phone and they make semiconductors in Taiwan and the screen in Bangladesh, how you price that can be used to optimize your tax policy. So basically, it's how do you optimize your tax policy without getting sued by the government? Okay.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
But I hadn't really thought about it. When you actually have the chance for the first time to earn a paycheck, it's kind of exciting.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
So Pocota, the anagram is very, I'm not going to bore your listeners for even 15 seconds. You'd be shocked with their tolerance for boredom.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
So you might as well say it now. Picture empirical comparison. It's deliberately nerdy. An optimization test algorithm, I think.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
This obscure player who was always like a thorn in the side of the tigers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I have a friend who's a neuroscientist. When he's like, yeah, our brain's just kind of just predicting and inferring. We never actually know what reality is. We're just making like an expedient internal map simulation.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
It's to forecast how baseball players will do. The innovation is that most predictions will just say, okay, this player, Shohei Otani, will hit .302 with 42 home runs and 108 RBIs next year. Whereas this gave like a range of options, so it was probabilistic. And that's kind of one of my big things is we don't know the future. Baseball players get injured or stop using steroids or whatever else.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
They're hungover, they get divorced. They're human beings, and there's luck. But no, the ideas have like a range of outcomes. And so you're dealing with the uncertainty in the outlook. But yeah, people use it for fantasy baseball. Major league teams used it. You did this in 2000. Was there already fantasy baseball at that time? Yeah. I mean, fantasy baseball dates back to the 80s.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
It's kind of in the Moneyball tradition.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Well, I do want you to tell me, what year did that happen? Moneyball was 2002 or 2003, somewhere in that range.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
About the same time. So coincidentally, the company was called Baseball Perspectives, and this kind of blows up, in part because of Moneyball and the Red Sox, who are being very stat-friendly, win the World Series in 2004. Yeah, it becomes a whole thing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
People have this bad habit of pretending that, oh, the model just flaws out of a coconut tree. It'll quote former presidential candidate Kamala Harris. And no, you have to make a lot of decisions. In sports, at least, the data is high quality. We record everything that happens on a major league playing field. But you're making decisions at every turn.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
A lot of it is about where you add more complexity and where you're pruning because models break. So you want like a complex simplicity.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Algorithm is the term that would technically be used for our political forecast. Literally, you input the polls and press the go button and it takes five minutes and runs 50,000 simulations and spits out a bunch of data. But that makes it seem like it has a mind of its own. It's hard because on the one hand, you don't want to dictate what the data says, right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
On the other hand, if you already have the answer you want, that's not really objective science either. So it's kind of this iterative process between I want to systematize, so I have to follow rules and not just be totally ad hoc. If I feel like it's handling this player badly or this election badly for a politics model, and I change the rules, what's that mean for the other elections?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
What's that mean for the whole system overall? It's not like there's just one right answer. What are hedge funds and banks doing? Or what are the sports bettors doing? They're usually using multiple models. You want a model that's robust. So basically, if one thing breaks and it will still spit out a reasonable answer, that's where some of the art comes in as opposed to the science.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
It's as a hobbyist. You're trying to win your fancy baseball league. You're trying to solve a problem that you're determined to solve. You're trying to maybe win money, gambling, for example. You need to be very hands-on and have skin in the game because academics, to cliche a little bit, tend not to have good street smarts for modeling.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
A lot of the skill is like being able to look at a data set and say, the value that number put out, something's wrong there. And there must be either a bug in the input. We put the numbers in wrongly or the code failed somehow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
No, I still do it for the most part, all my own coding. I'm a control freak in that way.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
You know, if you can get 56% of your points, that's right, then you're like a world class.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
And that comes from poker, too. Poker players can discern like a 52% probability from 48%, right? Most people think 100-0 and 50-50, right? There are a lot more gradations between 50-50 and 100-0.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
So I have my boring consulting job in college where I could do it in like a third of the time that we are billing the client. So I had free time on my hands. In addition to starting the Spaceball stuff, my friend at work was like, we are starting a poker game at my apartment every Tuesday. The game actually never happens, but I was practicing for it online, playing games for fake money.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Poker does not really work for fake money. It's a game where you actually want to have to put something at risk. It's a game that involves bluffing and risk. So eventually I get some dubious offer to get money and some free online site. I remember going home to my parents for Christmas and like having a bunch of whiskey. I'm like, I'm just going to play online poker and you keep playing higher.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
And lo and behold, though, it's a cliche where you lose all your money. But like I won, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got lucky at first and then parlayed that into eventually quitting my consulting job for a couple of years to play online poker. Wow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
And they were kind of like a startup. And they would just hire smart nerds on the internet, right? And they're like, okay, this kind of seems cool. Why don't you actually code this up for us? And like made a proposal. And also the first system was for pitchers. And they're like, make one for hitters too. And for some reason they decided, how old was I at the time? Like 24.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
You should also be the executive vice president of the company, right? It's a shitty job with a lot of bureaucracy and all these nerds you're trying to wrangle. I mean, they're great people. We've had some reunions. Yeah. They're not the most corporate refined culture.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
And so you're doing a lot of problem solving that I'm utterly unqualified to do because this job doesn't pay very well to do management.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
They gave me equity in the company, which theoretically could have been worth something, probably wasn't worth that much in practice. But you're young and hopeful. One problem we always had is like this was the era of when Moneyball was penetrating into major league teams. Our stars would get picked off by the Red Sox or by the Cubs or by the Astros or whatever else.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
I was spending most of my time on the baseball thing, but making most of my money on the poker thing. In 2006, the U.S. Congress is in kind of this panic. The Republicans are still in control. So they have a congressional page scandal where Mark Foley, this congressman, was messaging like 13-year-old pages about, hey, you know. why don't you send me some pictures?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
So they're trying to do something to win themselves over with moral majority voters. The gay marriage thing is kind of played out. And so they go after online poker. The last day in Congress, 2006, they passed this bill. And I'm like, fuck these people, right? Oh, so you're angry. So I got more into politics because A, it compromised my livelihood. And B, you know, I'm like, these fuckers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
But you never know who you're pissing off, Monica. It's true.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Start getting more into covering politics. Also, I'm living in Chicago at the time, and Obama's a big thing. And he was this hipster fucking law professor. I'm like, oh, he's running for Congress. God, who's this guy, right? Uh-huh. And then he's kind of a cool guy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
While you were in, did you say Seoul? Yeah. How's that? Seoul's great. They have these cool bars and restaurants and art galleries. It's very vibrant.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Nate Silver (statistician)
Yeah, he looks and sounds unlike any presidential candidate before. And there's a lot of enthusiasm for him. So 2008 becomes this inflection point where I guess people thought there's so much more political participation now. I'm not trying to get too involved in the politics. But then we obviously kind of spin into all types of crazy directions after that.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus: Daily Review with Clay Travis and Buck Sexton - Mar 20 2025
I bet almost the entirety of the 2022-23 NBA season, all the regular season, then about half the playoffs. And I learned that, I mean, it's probably what I should have expected, but I learned that it's pretty hard. I went on a huge heater at the start of the NBA season where I was up like 70,000 bucks. I'm like, man, I'm really good at the sports betting stuff. But then things change.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus: Daily Review with Clay Travis and Buck Sexton - Mar 20 2025
And we talk about betting, from betting on elections to betting on your favorite basketball team. We've learned a lot about taking risks through our own research and sometimes even our own bets. And we share what we've learned with you.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus: Daily Review with Clay Travis and Buck Sexton - Mar 20 2025
I bet almost the entirety of the 2022-23 NBA season, all the regular season, then about half the playoffs. And I learned that, I mean, it's probably what I should have expected, but I learned that it's pretty hard. I went on a huge heater at the start of the NBA season where I was up like 70,000 bucks. I'm like, man, I'm really good at the sports betting stuff. But then things change.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus: Daily Review with Clay Travis and Buck Sexton - Mar 20 2025
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Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus: Daily Review with Clay Travis and Buck Sexton - Mar 20 2025
And I'm Maria Konnikova. On our podcast Risky Business, we talk everything from politics to poker.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus: Daily Review with Clay Travis and Buck Sexton - Mar 20 2025
And from betting on elections to betting on your favorite basketball team. Sports bettors need a bit more street smarts because there's this whole second side to sports betting of how do you actually, how do you get your money down good if people think that you're winning better?
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus: Daily Review with Clay Travis and Buck Sexton - Mar 20 2025
And now that March Madness is upon us, we're talking bracket strategies, odds, how to maybe actually win your office pool. You can listen to Risky Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus: Daily Review with Clay Travis and Buck Sexton - Mar 20 2025
And from betting on elections to betting on your favorite basketball team. Sports bettors need a bit more street smarts because there's this whole second side to sports betting of how do you actually, how do you get your money down good if people think that you're winning better?
Verdict with Ted Cruz
Bonus: Daily Review with Clay Travis and Buck Sexton - Mar 20 2025
And now that March Madness is upon us, we're talking bracket strategies, odds, how to maybe actually win your office pool. You can listen to Risky Business on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.