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.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard · Nate Silver (statistician) · 12 Feb 2025 podcast

I don't know. I would.

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.

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.

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.

I made 500 and lost 150 back.

Yeah.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

But you never know who you're pissing off, Monica. It's true.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't know if I'm good or terrible at naming things.

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.

Yeah, and 50 in 2012, because it's just kind of dumb luck, basically, right?

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