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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Okay, look, who's going to win Alabama in 2020?
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.
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.
And they had some very complicated story with some blind person. I didn't know.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
And the point was that the gut wasn't very valuable, but now I'm going to pretend that my gut was crushing instead.
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.
I think 2016 was actually our best election.
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?
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.
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.
Because again, you're getting odds. If you were gambling on the election, which I have no problem with.
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.
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.
The most concise explanation is that people who are more college educated, who read the news more, are more likely to respond to surveys.
Showing 1221–1240 of 1,377 · page 62 of 69
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