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
I kind of want the lesbian fire chief to have a reality TV show if they get fired because they seem like these charismatic people. Personalities, right?
Yeah, I mean, there was one Democrat. There was a picture now of, like, the McDonald's burning in a 100-degree storm fire. And she's like, this proves what corporate politics are doing to the climate. And it's like, yeah, you can maybe wait. What?
It's almost like they don't even know what the idea is. They just want to believe in the founders.
Well, Sam Bickman-Fried kind of played into this cliche. He's kind of self-described on the spectrum. Not a guy who's going to wear a suit and tie, but he's like, if I am playing video games in investor pitch meetings, that will make me seem cool. I have so much RAM, I need to offload something and play a video game while I'm multitasking. And so he kind of played in that stereotype and was quite
deliberate because they're very intense pattern matchers. Zuckerberg, he was kind of seen as like nerd in a hoodie and not the world's best communicator and just wanted to grind all day in engineering problems. That became the prototype that was used. Or Steve Jobs, a slightly different prototype, for example. And this can make it harder for new prototypes to break through.
I'm not trying to be super PC here, but the fact that there's so little money going to women founders and so little money going to black founders and Hispanic founders is kind of insane if you're the industry that wants to be disruptive and wants high variance, grit, and all these things, right? Because they're such intense pattern matchers. And because they kind of can't lose.
The average venture capital firm, mediocre firm, isn't doing that well. But the top firms kind of can't lose. If you have the best talent from all around the world, it's like if every year the best team in the NBA got the number one draft pick.
So Sam Bigman Freed was a nerdy, mathy kid. His parents were professors at Stanford. I think his mother was a philosophy professor. His dad was a law professor. Like a lot of smart kids got initially into finance at a firm called Jane Street Capital, which is a big quantitative hedge fund. At some point, he also got into something called effective altruism.
Basically, it's money ball, but for charity. It was kind of the pitch.
Working for a hedge fund. This is in his internal monologue that is probably unreliable to some degree. But he's like, so I want to make a lot of money so I can like donate it to poor children in Africa. This is kind of the cliched version of it. To help prevent malaria at a very cost effective rate. And then do much other weirder shit too involving AI and animal welfare and things like that.
He's like, I'm not making enough money at this hedge fund and so I'm going to start my own firm. His co-founder quits, right, because he seems kind of crazy. And one thing you learn about the book is all these people who think of themselves as hyper-rational and are thought of by others as hyper-rational, a lot of them are just kind of degenerate gamblers at heart.
Often skilled and smart degenerate gamblers.
Impulsive and kind of stimulus-driven. He's also on Adderall, right? He said that wasn't that big a part of the story.
I mean, if you play enough poker where you have enough of a sample size where you see how things that affect yourself, like if you're hungry and then you're playing poker for like 12 years, I just want to bust out so I can go get a fucking steak or something.
You're making all these marginal high stress decisions and the cumulative effect of anything that you're doing, maybe Adderall or nicotine, you can understand why people might like that, right? But it's going to affect performance and mentality. Long story short, starts a fund called Alameda, kind of has some fallout there, but begins to make more and more money.
Eventually realizes if you really want to get rich quick, then there are certain crypto trades that look like a very good bet. Leveraging different prices of Bitcoin in Japan versus South Korea versus other things.
At the time, there were pretty big arbitrages because I believe this is right. In South Korea, you had to be a registered agent to trade Bitcoin or like a resident of South Korea. And they were pretty strict about it, at least at first. And this was back when Bitcoin was a somewhat more obscure thing. And so, yeah, if you could somehow find a way to buy Bitcoin in South Korea...
But makes this money and then founds FTX, which is a crypto exchange.
So first of all, I have to find somebody to sell me crypto, which is not a completely trivial problem. And you have to enter this 26 digit code and you can see what crypto is a bit intimidating. Whereas if you go to like an FTX or Coinbase or Gemini, then it's just E-Trade.
You deposit 20,000 bucks from your bank account. You press a button, you buy Bitcoin, they take more of a surcharge than they probably should. But now I own Bitcoin, which technically you actually don't. They are just allocating that to your bank account and they own the Bitcoin. But usually that was respected. I can't speak for all these firms.
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