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
And most of them are secular. I kind of halfway predict there might be a little bit of a religious boom in Silicon Valley sometime soon as they try to wrestle with it. But Sam feels like he's seen this miracle happen. And then he gets written off at different times. The board tried to clumsily oust him from his own company. And then once you survive that, then you're emboldened.
I think he's the most rational of all the people I met. I think he understands his incentives. So I talked to him in summer 2022. The book took four years to write. At first, I tried to get another interview later on once GPT 3.5 had come out. They're like friendly, but like Sam was traveling the world for the next six months. And he first do interviews in person. So it might be difficult.
You come to Cambodia. At first, this interview is like a year and a half old, but it was actually better because he was less guarded. Back then, he's like, yeah, it could go really badly, but we're going to solve global poverty. And wouldn't that be really good? We'll solve all technological and scientific problems.
And that's worth the tangible risk that things go really wrong and we destroy civilization. That's, I think, a relatively honest comment. It may be deranged, but an honest expression of what he thinks. And then people are like, oh, this must be a marketing strategy.
It's like, no, Tylenol wasn't like, we might poison the water stream if people have more Tylenol, but let's keep, this is like not a typical strategy.
And it's because I come from this mindset where number one, they are taught to quantify everything in probabilistic terms, which again, I think is more good than bad, but is not the way most people, apart from me and all the people in the river think about these things and to think in terms of cost benefit analysis.
On top of that, typical startup founder ego, feeling like you're oppressed when you're actually very powerful, right? Having this run of success, having lots of money and people who are sycophantic in your general orbit. We've not talked quite enough about just a lot of plain old competitiveness, wanting to compete and win.
Capitalism will triumph for better and worse because the people who want to compete are going to out-compete people who don't want to compete. Unless you entirely suppress competition, then competition is going to win. It's a very hard problem to balance out.
That's great. It's only in the top 0.0001%. It's because if you're born on third base... just put your money in a trust fund, go do too much coke. You don't really have much of an incentive because what some of these people are doing is they keep bludgeoning the horse when it's already dead. I'm mixing my metaphors here, right?
But in some rational sense, when you sell your first startup for $50 million, just go buy a villa in Tuscany or something and have a great party with all your friends, be an angel investor, invest in a basketball team. But instead, they kind of keep competing over and over and over again and doubling down over and over again.
And so by definition, it's like a poker tournament where the person who goes all in 10 times in a row and by luck or skill, the combination really, win these bets 10 times in a row. All of a sudden, wealth multiplies exponentially and you're worth more money than half the countries on Earth. I mean, what is Elon's net worth compared to the GDP of most countries on Earth?
A lot of power accumulating in a very small number of people's hands. It self-accelerates. It's flubber. Before the book, the print edition, you can kind of bounce your way through. I am partially audiobook. That's what I did. I listened to it. We cut out some of the things that are a little bit more detours. I'm actually partial to the audiobook version. Yeah, yeah.
Constraints are good. I want to kind of force you to like, in the order of the author.
It was really fun.
$500.
All right.
All right. Love you. Bye. Love you.
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