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
Like, oh, exciting, a pollster called in the phone.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Like, I'm proud to be a Trump supporter. Certainly in 2016, maybe the Trump supporters were not easy to reach.
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.
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.
We work in archetypes. You don't have to worry about anything, right?
That's actually like a...
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
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.
But you're the major creative force can only expand so much. People want you ultimately, right?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Showing 1241–1260 of 1,377 · page 63 of 69
← Previous
Next →