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 have built models. I know how even when you have awesome data like you have in baseball, it's like a game that has structure and rules. I know how much you can have a garbage in, garbage out problem. And some parameters are robust, but you can change them and the output's about the same. And some are not.
Meaning you make an assumption and it totally radically changes and overwhelms everything else in the system. One irony is in some ways I trust the poker players more and the traders more and people like that because they actually have skin in the game. If they are wrong.
So in some ways, the demise of Twitter was mispredicted, right? People thought, oh, the engineers will leave and Twitter will basically collapse the infrastructure, which it hasn't happened. It remains very influential. But you could say that Elon Musk spent $44 billion, certainly by the time he bought it and was trying to find ways out,
Probably knowing that's like not a good ROI from a hero financial standpoint. He's going to lose money on that. But he's willing to spend, let's say, half of that, right? Let's say the real value is $20 billion. So he's spending $25 billion on a cultural and political project. And maybe it's paid off. He's still the richest man in the world.
In fact, his wealth has only increased since Trump's election. So it's kind of pocket change to him. And I think it has had a huge effect on the discourse. I don't blame Silicon Valley for saying, hey, we're going to stand up and defend our interests. I think they felt that they were getting a hard time from the White House on antitrust stuff, which maybe they should get.
I'm just saying this is their mindset. And they're tired of their woke, progressive employees. And meanwhile, the news media has become very anti-tech.
weird like barbapole thing where somehow donald trump i don't even want to get into donald trump's finances but because he's a kind of poor person's idea of like a rich person he kind of gets a pass yeah that's really true the left feels aggrieved and the right feels aggrieved when someone's on a winning streak and this is also talked about in the book and this stuff about how traders behave and how poker players behave you're getting so much fucking dopamine that when you're on a winning streak especially men it's literally narcotic you can't really be reasoned with
I mean, I interviewed him four or five days before he got arrested and taken into custody. So his mind is reeling, like it's a video game, trying to figure out how can I somehow get out of this mess? He was someone I actually found it kind of hard to generate empathy for, in part because the last time I talked to him was in Palo Alto, California. He's at his parents' house under house arrest.
You have to give away all your electronics. I'm like writing on this hotel notepad. I hadn't actually written that much, so I can't make small letters anymore, I don't think. It's like the landing form on the aircraft. Like, I can't use, I can't do that.
ankle bracelet. This is serious, right? And then I asked him, well, what if you could get two years probation? You settle the court case. And at the time, people kind of knew he was pretty dead to rights. It's like, yeah, I'd have to think about it. It's like, yeah, 20 years instead.
By the way, testified in his trial in New York against, I guess not the advice of his counsel, but against the advice of other lawyers that I spoke with. He was just going to perjure himself, which is what he did and really pissed off the judge. So he's actually kind of a very bad, miscalculating type.
So he worked for a firm called Young Combinator, which is an incubator. They would go through and look at lots of very early stage pitches or founding teams, give them a small amount of seed money. When you do that, you get very good at networking, basically. But you get all the business because there's a lot of outflow.
Everyone who's a young investor who may not be established would want to go to this firm. And therefore, he makes great connections, develops a good eye for talent. And his skill set is really knowing a little bit about a lot and being a good networker. He is not, I don't think, a coding genius.
You know, he has a good eye for sniffing out what the next big thing is going to be. All the guys, including the bad and evil people, are impressive. But Sam Altman, because it's kind of this crazy idea, I'm obviously supplying this a lot, but just leave this computer on for a really long time. It's not clear what the commercial applications are. And it's expensive.
To buy a compute is expensive, right? It's not like a Silicon Valley garage somewhere where you're just hacking together a project. No clear financial upside, which is why it started out as a nonprofit that's obviously de facto already over. I'm not going to get into the legal structure exactly.
But like wrestling together, Elon Musk and Microsoft and Peter Thiel was an early investor, all these people. He was kind of playing the captain of that fantasy baseball team. Sam is an effective politician. He understands different constituencies in Silicon Valley, kind of reflects their ideology and is very risk-on.
So Sam McMinfree, again, SBF, not Sam Altman, literally said repeatedly, like, if I could flip a coin... And the coin comes up heads, and the world is twice as good, plus 1%. And if it's tails, we wipe out all life in the known universe. I would flip that coin from utilitarian standpoint, right? That's a worldview, isn't it? Sam Altman wouldn't do that at 50-50. He might do it at 90-10, though.
SpaceX actually was in very hairy situation for a long time.
And so he's been written off a few times. But once you have the chip on your shoulder, and with Sam Altman, AI is taking a long time to let it train on basically reading the entire text of the internet and thinking scare quotes about it for a really long time. And then all of a sudden with GPT-2 and then certainly 3 and beyond that, it's like this kind of miraculous.
Yeah, so you have faith in it. And most of these guys, not that I have the whole faith thing worked out, but I think you start to get into some weird existential and spiritual questions for various reasons. When you're talking about smarter than human intelligence, when you're talking about life extension, these guys get into weird simulation hypothesis and things like that.
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