Nate Silver
speaker
1,377 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 29 Jun
Nate Silver’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
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.
I come from a mixed family where my dad's side's very anti-celebration and my mom's side's very pro-celebration.
I'm kind of balancing out the recessive traits. Okay.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I retired the presidency to become baseball commissioner because that was the higher office to me.
I haven't seen it yet.
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.
I'm exactly old enough. It's turned 47. Just three years later would have been pretty different.
If you look now at gay men of my cohort, they're often quite successful, right?
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.
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?
I have to take a little bit from different buckets.
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.
And so I take after that side of the family, I think.
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.
Really valuable work we were doing.
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.
Showing 1161–1180 of 1,377 · page 59 of 69
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