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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
It might be peaking right about now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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