Nate Silver (statistician)

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Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert.

I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Monica Padman.

Hi.

Hi.

We have our first, I think, statistician on today.

You think?

Ooh, is it our first? That's a big swing. Nate Silver is the point.
He's a statistician and a bestselling author. Everyone would know Nate Silver around election time.
All of his computations end up as headlines all the time. He had an incredible track record for a while.
There were a couple deviations that we'll learn of. But his books include The Signal and The Noise.
And he has a new book out that I happened to just read on my own. Couldn't stop talking about.
We invited him in. He blessed us with his presence.
It's called On the Edge, The Art of Risking Everything. And also you can go to his sub stack at Silver Bulletin, which is where he's doing all of his work now.
And that's a fun play on words. Silver bulletin.
Silver bulletin. No problem for you.
You hit that like a silver bullet. Please enjoy Nate Silver.
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They have these cool bars and restaurants and art galleries. It's very vibrant.
I really want to go. And they have great skincare.
Oh, I know. They have snail serums.
That's old. That's made its way to America.
Now they have salmon sperm. Ooh, salmon sperm.
Sign me up. You get injected, then you look 14.
You could really end up pregnant with all this skincare routine. You really could.
It's dangerous. So Nate, I want to start by saying happy birthday to you.
Thank you. Happy birthday.
Yeah, you're here on your birthday. This is a very Capricorn thing to do.
You kind of have a lot of shit packed together. You have the holidays already.
It feels a little greedy to have your birthday. Self-indulging.
Yeah, yeah. I don't want to have a birthday so soon after the holidays.
Well, mine's the second. So I'd argue mine's just 11 days worse than yours.

Because it's right on the heels of all that.

That's probably bad. And are you in general somebody

who has no desire to celebrate your birthday?

I come from a mixed family where my dad's side

is very anti-celebration and my mom's side is very

pro-celebration. I'm kind of balancing out

the recessive traits.

You're right smack in the middle. Well, as I was

learning a little bit more about your background, I was like

we have a lot in common here because I'm from

Milford, which is what?

25 miles as the crow flies from East

Thank you. Right smack in the middle.
Well, as I was learning a little bit more about your background, I was like, we have a lot in common here because I'm from Milford. Oh, cool.
Which is what, 25 miles as the crow flies from East Lansing. And your dad taught at MSU or still does? He retired a couple of years ago.
But yeah, I taught at MSU. So like a university kid.
It's a good place to grow up. I found that I have like an unconscious hiring bias toward Midwesterners.
They're just grounded. Well, again, you want them somewhere on the spectrum where they're not constantly bitching about someone who tried to get one over on them.
You know, we do have a big chip on our shoulder about feeling less than. So you want just the right amount of less than so they work their ass off, but not the kind that bitches all day.
No, and you can detect, I was at the airport in Dallas one time, like that person sounds really familiar. And they're from East Lansing.
I didn't know who they are. They should like a certain manner of speaking, you know, those micro dialect things.
Yeah. You have a little bit of that.
So you kind of discovered that you love math in a very appropriate time. So I only know the members of a single baseball team that ever existed.
It's the 84 roar, the Detroit Tigers. Yeah.
Alan Tramwell, I know his name. Yeah.
No, the whole gang. You were six ish when that happened? I was six years old, and I liked numbers.

I don't think I ever thought I could become a baseball player.

I was never that delusional.

Right, right, right, right.

In fifth grade, we had to write these biographies of what our future life would look like.

Basically, I had myself becoming president at some point.

Oh, wow, of America. After that, I retired the presidency to become baseball commissioner,

because that was the higher office to me.

Your work was to guide America to a better place, and then you would indulge your real passion in your retirement. The important stuff.
The starter job, the presidency. Weirdly, that trajectory kind of makes sense.
I was also watching the Aaron Rodgers documentary recently. I don't know if you've caught that.
I haven't seen it yet. But he too is talking about he would play this weird board game and it was all about stats and you would roll these dice.
Stratomatic. That's what it was called.

Yeah.

And so I think a lot of you inadvertently just practicing math nonstop without even realizing you were doing it.

I collected baseball cards.

It was like a baseball card bubble.

Your net worth is now 5,000 bucks.

Like an eight-year-old's like a lot of money.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

It's like the NFTs of the late 80s.

All collectibles, ultimately.

Beanie Babies.

Monica has one that she believed at one point was worth.

Yeah.

Liberti.

It's here.

It's covered in shit, though, so we think it's degraded.

Oh, my God. NFTs of the late 80s.
All collectibles, ultimately. Beanie Babies.
Monica has one that she believed at one point was worth. Yeah, Liberti.
It's here. It's covered in shit, though, so we think it's degraded.
We found it in my parents' basement, and it is disgusting now. But I do think it was $72,000 or something like that.
I still think that. So you're super into baseball.
You're crushing numbers as a hobby. You're also gay.
I wouldn't even know you're gay because I know the vibe in Michigan in the 80s. And I know that I was living every minute of every day on the playground trying to avoid being called.
Yeah. That was the number one go-to way to emasculate.
I'm exactly old enough to turn 47. Just three years later would have been pretty different.
The experience of going through school, you say something that I relate to for different reasons, but there's some value to feeling like an outsider from the get. If you look now at gay men of my cohort, they're often quite successful, right? Yeah, yeah.
Best boy syndrome. Yeah, but because they have like a little bit of what it feels like to be an outsider if you're otherwise privileged.
But you got a couple of things, right? You're gay and you're half Jewish. Just got a little bit of the flavor of- Adversity.
Adversity, but also the ability to code switch, I guess is the term. Assimilate, have a secret, have a perspective.
You're not necessarily volunteering your entire self at all times. It's also useful in poker and it's useful in journalism.
You don't want to volunteer information in poker. There's a cost to volunteering information.
And so learning to be a bit more guarded and feeling like there's no kind of template I can follow that's exactly going to meet my needs, right? I have to take a little bit from different buckets. Right.
Okay, so dads in academia. Also, you got some famous geologist uncles, which is really fascinating.
There's some crater on, I think, the moon. Okay.
It's a pretty big one. Yeah.
They were super overachieving, my dad's side. I have a famous arsonist on my mom's side.
He got written up in the New York Times. He invented new forms of arson and insurance fraud.
I'm not actually an overachieving type. I kind of do it despite myself, really.
And so I take after that side of the family, I think. You end up getting a degree in economics, and then you end up working for a few years as a consultant.
I was a transfer pricing consultant. Okay, what is transfer pricing consultant? Basically, when you have a multinational company and different parts of the company make different things, like you have Apple cell phone and they make semiconductors in Taiwan and the screen in Bangladesh, how you price that can be used to optimize your tax policy.
So basically, it's how do you optimize your tax policy without getting sued by the government. Okay.
Really valuable work we were doing. It wasn't nourishing your soul.

But I hadn't really thought about it. When you actually have the chance for the first time to earn a paycheck, it's kind of exciting.
Oh, big time. And I glossed over, you were also a Michigan

state champ debater. You also wrote for the high school newspaper.
Also in college, you wrote for

the Chicago Maroon. You're writing the whole time and you're also doing all this stat work for fun with sports still.
You're still obsessed. And then you create and explain this to us what Pocota is.
So Pocota, the anagram is very, I'm not going to bore your listeners for even 15 seconds. You'd be shocked with their tolerance for boredom.
If you don't say it, I'm going to have to say it on the fact check, so you might as well say it now. Picture empirical comparison.
It's deliberately nerdy. An optimization test algorithm, I think.
But it's also a nod to a player. This obscure player who is always like a thorn in the side of the tigers.
This thing has a weird name I read for the first time in my life today. It wasn't a reversonym, but it was like a backwardnym.
Backronym. I never heard a backwardnym.
Me either. It's like DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency.
So they kind of come up with the acronym and then figure out some letters later to make it match the acronym they like. Oh, I see.
It's kind of like... Oh, they're working backwards.
I got it. Oh, that makes sense.
That's also how we process the world. We make sense of it after it happened and we think we understood it before it happened.
And it only makes sense after the fact. Now I have a friend who's a neuroscientist and he's like, yeah, our brain's just kind of just predicting and inferring.
We never actually know what reality is. We're just making like an expedient internal map simulation.
Yeah, we're modeling, which you ultimately do. We're just modeling the future and then our data set is something that is heavily subjective because we make it make sense in reverse.
Of course. We go, oh, this happened, it's because of X, Y, and Z, but we don't know.
That's just what we kind of cling to. Okay, so you create this thing, and what is the goal of Pocota? It's to forecast how baseball players will do.
The innovation is that most predictions will just say, okay, this player, Shohei Otani, will hit .302 with 42 home runs and 108 RBIs next year. Whereas this gave like a range of options, so it was probabilistic.
And that's kind of one of my big things is we don't know the future. Baseball players get injured or stop using steroids or whatever else.
They're hungover, they get divorced. They're human beings and there's luck.
But no, the ideas have like a range of outcomes and so you're dealing with the uncertainty in the outlook. But yeah, people use it for fantasy baseball, major league teams used it.
You did this in 2000. Was there already fantasy baseball at that time?

Yeah, I mean, fantasy baseball, it's back to the 80s.

Is Pocota Moneyball?

Well, it's kind of in the Moneyball tradition.

That's so cool.

Well, I do want you to tell me what year did that happen?

Moneyball was 02 or 03, somewhere in that range.

Pocota is a couple of years before that.

About the same time.

So coincidentally, the company was called Baseball Perspectives,

and this kind of blows up in part because of Moneyball and the Red Sox who are being very stat friendly win the World Series in 2004. Yeah, it becomes a whole thing.
Okay, now this is where you're really going to put everyone to sleep. I understand that you're making statistical models.
That's what this thing is ultimately, right? Yeah. What does that mean? You must be selecting the variables you're going to use to determine this and I bet there's a lot of decision making just there.
Like what are we going to include? What were you doing that was novel about it? People have this bad habit of pretending that, oh, the model just flaws out of a coconut tree. It'll quote, former presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
And no, you have to make a lot of decisions. In sports, at least the data is high quality.
We record everything that happens on a major league playing field. But you're making decisions at every turn.
A lot of it is about where you add more complexity and where you're pruning because models break. So you want like a complex simplicity.
Am I right in that the product you create, it's a long formula and you just start plugging in up at bets and this and that. It's a bunch of computer code.
And it's just a math equation that you've picked the variables of and you have some way of evaluating the quality of the variables. Algorithm is the term that would technically be used.
For our political forecast, literally, you input the polls and press a go button and it takes five minutes and runs 50,000 simulations and spits out a bunch of data. But that makes it seem like it has a mind of its own.
It's hard because on the one hand, you don't want to dictate what the data says. If you already have the answer you want, that's not really objective science either.
So it's kind of this iterative process between, I want to systematize so I have to follow rules and not just be totally ad hoc. If I feel like it's handling this player badly or this election badly for a politics model, and I change the rules, what's that mean for the other elections? What's that mean for the whole system overall? It's not like there's just one right answer.
What are hedge funds and banks doing or what are the sports bettors doing? They're usually using multiple models. You want a model that's robust.
So basically, if one thing breaks and it will still spit out a reasonable answer, that's where some of the art comes in as opposed to the science. Now, really quick, where the fuck does one learn to make these statistical models? Was this taught in econ or is it something you did as a hobbyist? It's as a hobbyist.
You're trying to win your fantasy baseball league. You're trying to solve a problem that you're determined to solve.
You're trying to maybe win money, gambling, for example. You need to be very hands-on and have skin in the game because academics, to cliche a little bit, tend not to have good street smarts for modeling.
A lot of the skill is like being able to look at a data set and say the value that number put out, something's wrong there and there must be either a bug in the input, we put the numbers in wrongly, or the code failed somehow. Are you coding yourself, or you have...
In 2000. No, I still do, for the most part, all my own coding.
I'm a control freak in that way. And I think people need to understand as well, when you create a model, it's not telling you, this team will win.
I'm guessing it's saying there's a 54% chance the team will win. There's a 61%.
And in the world of betting, if you have an 11% margin, if you can predict that 61% accuracy, you're going to be the most successful gambler of all time. No, if you can get 56% of your points bets, right? Then you're like a world-class.
Yeah, so we're not looking to predict with 95% accuracy. Anything above 50% is basically a good use of your time.
And that comes from poker too. Poker players can discern like a 52% probability from like 48%, right? Most people think 100-0 and 50-50, right? There are a lot more gradations between 50-50 and 100-0.
Right. Okay, so now let's introduce your passion for gambling.
When does that start? Because among your many interests, you're also a degenerate gambler. I don't know.
I would. I'm teasing.
You're here. So I have my boring consulting job in college where I could do it in like a third of the time that we were billing the client.
So I had free time in my hands. In addition to starting the space ball stuff, my friend at work was like, we are starting a poker game at my apartment every Tuesday.
The game actually never happens, but I was practicing for it online, playing games for fake money. Poker does not really work for fake money.
It's a game where you actually want to have to put something at risk. It's a game that involves bluffing and risk.
So eventually I get some dubious offer to get money and some free online site. I remember going home to my parents for Christmas and having a bunch of whiskey.
I'm like, I'm just going to play online poker and you keep playing higher. And lo and behold though, it's a cliche where you lose all your money, but like I won, right? I got lucky at first and then parlayed that into eventually quitting my consulting job for a couple of years to play online poker.
Wow. Which some article I read said you had made 400 grand in a few years.
I made 500 and lost 150 back. So like 350.
That's still pretty good. Yeah.
in 2000. And then additionally, this Pocota thing is now starting to get very trusted as a way to predict the performance and careers of these players.
And then along comes baseball prospectus, which acquires this thing you've created, Pocota. Yeah.
And then you go to work for them. And they were kind of like a startup.
And they would just hire smart nerds on the internet, right? And they're like, okay, this kind of seems cool. Why don't you actually code this up for us? And they made a proposal.
And also the first system was for pitchers. And they're like, make one for hitters too.
And for some reason they decided, how old was I at the time? Like 24? You should also be the executive vice president of the company, right? A shitty job with a lot of bureaucracy and all these nerds you're trying to wrangle. I mean, they're great people.
We've had some reunions. They're not the most corporate refined culture.
And so you're doing a lot of problem solving that I'm utterly unqualified to do because this job doesn't pay very well to do management. What kind of money did you make selling this algorithm to them? They gave me equity in the company, which theoretically could have been worth something, probably wasn't worth that much in practice.
But you're young and hopeful. One problem we always had is like, this was the era of when Moneyball was penetrating into major league teams.
Our stars would get picked off by the Red Sox or by the Cubs or by the Astros or whatever else. So from 2003 to 2008, you're at baseball prospectus.
Correct. And you're also writing.
They do books. They have monthly things.
And so you're actively writing. It's just interesting how all these little bits and pieces end up getting woven together and what your life becomes.
So how in 2008 do you decide to start fucking around with politics and applying your models to politics? I was spending most of my time on the baseball thing by making most of my money on the poker thing. In 2006, the U.S.
Congress is in kind of this panic. The Republicans are still in control.
So they have a congressional page scandal where Mark Foley, his congressman, was messaging like 13-year-old pages about, hey, you know, why don't you send me some pictures? So they're trying to do something to win themselves over with moral majority voters. The gay marriage thing has kind of played out.
And so they go after online poker. The last day in Congress, 2006, they passed this bill, and I'm like, fuck these people, right?

Oh, so you're angry.

So I got more into politics

because A, it compromised my livelihood,

and B, you know, I'm like, these fuckers.

Well, you never know who you're pissing off, Monica.

It's true, you gotta be on your toes.

Start getting more into covering politics.

Also, I'm living in Chicago at the time,

and Obama's a big thing.

And he was this hipster fucking law professor.

I'm like, oh, he's ready for Congress.

Oh, God, who's this guy, right? Uh-huh. But then he's kind of a cool guy.
Yeah. Admits to doing coke.
I like that. Yeah.
He looks and sounds unlike any presidential candidate before. And there's a lot of enthusiasm for him.
So 2008 becomes this inflection point where I guess people thought there's so much more political participation now. I'm not trying to get too involved in the politics, but then we obviously kind of spin into all types of crazy directions after that.
I mean, life, there's a lot of luck, right? Like I felt I was lucky to be at this place where baseball stats really took off and then lucky to be at a point where people want money ball for X. They want to data-fy everything in the world, basically.
So I had that skill set in the right place at the right time. And then 2008 is this big inflection point where politics becomes much more crazy and interesting.
All of a sudden, politics is like not this crusty thing anymore. I'm not trying to be super partisan, but it felt like, okay, now you actually have an interesting politician who I'd actually want to hang out with.
But at any rate, 2008, you create a model to predict the outcome of that election and you start 538. That's right.
By the way, I've known 538 for, I guess, the last however long it's been going. The electoral college has 538 members.
Oh, members. Yeah, did you know that right out of the gates? I only think about 270 when I think about that.
Okay, so there's 538 electoral votes. And you name it that.
I don't know if I'm good or terrible at naming things. Lo and behold, your model predicts the outcome of the 2008 election and the 2012 election with an accuracy that's really not rivaled at that time to the degree that time makes you one of the 100 most influential people.
Yeah, but there's deep irony here, which is the whole point of the model was to be probability driven. We're not calling Ohio for Obama.
We're saying it was a 52% chance because it's just barely ahead in the polls. You had to bet you'd go 52 instead of 48.
So, but in 08, you got 49 of 50 states, right? Yeah, and 50 in 2012 because it's just kind of dumb luck. Basically, right? But are you being self-deprecating or are you being honest? Like, I can't tell.
Okay, look, who's going to win Alabama in 2020? No, listen, 44 of the states I could call without a model. But those others.
Those others, man, they're kind of maybe one or two, your model's a little better, right? But then you just kind of win a couple of coin flips. Well, despite how easy apparently it was, you do ignite the people in a way that they do think they have their money ball guy for politics.
And so the New York times brings you in house for three years. And I want to know what that experience was like, because you go from, you have 5038 as its own website, and then that gets transferred to the New York Times.
And I think the numbers when you came there were one in 20 site visits were to go to 5038. But by the end, when you leave, like 17 out of a huge percentage of their personal traffic was you.
I just had an anxiety dream at the New York Times the other night. I just flew back from Korea.
So you have this like really long periods of REM sleep or their little nesty universe within your dreams and stuff like that. And I had some anxiety.
They were like, before we let you write the Times, you have to prove your chops as a traditional reporter. And they had some very complicated story with some blind person.
Some tests that you were going to fail. So on the one hand, it was great.
It's got to be terribly exciting for you. You just started this fucking thing.
And four seconds ago, you were at this stupid job cheating on taxes. This has got to be exciting.
No cheating. Stay within the boundaries, guys.
Stay within the boundaries. They're brilliant people in the New York Times.
At the time I was there, it's 2010 to 2013. It's transitioning from being this dinosaur-like print media business to what's now, I think, a very well-run, mostly digital.
Is it a scary point in its history? Yeah, and a vulnerable point in history. 538 is quite successful there.
This is when they actually are getting a whole bunch of new subscribers for the digital product. But then you kind of run into egos mixed with kind of personnel turnover.
There's a new CEO. It's a cliche, right? When they bring in the new guy and the project was the old guy's project.
Worst thing that can happen in the world is you've made a movie for a certain president of a studio. Then a new president comes in and that president decides your marketing budget.
But they are incentivized for the previous person to have been a failure. And this happens nonstop.
This happened to me personally. And in politics, exact same thing.
When a new person comes in, the old stuff all has to go. Yeah, or fail, ideally.
So Newet comes in. Meanwhile, at the time, the New York Times newsroom, the traditional political reporters kind of hate our guts because that election in particular, 2012, was a very fucking boring election.
It was Romney and Obama, and maybe that's better. They're both relatively competent people, but not a whole lot is changing or moving.
They're well-known candidates, and so a lot of what the blog was doing, FiveThirtyEight, was saying, yeah, this movement in the polls, it's all kind of fake, and nothing's really changing, right? Which is kind of against what their reporters want you to say, where it's drama unfolding and game-changing. I don't know.
Once you start testing the market, eventually there were other offers that let me try to build 538 into a larger thing. Whether that was successful or not, we can.
So Disney slash ESPN comes along. Three years is up at New York Times.
And you leave and you go to Disney, ABC, ESPN. Where you're for a long, long time from 08 to 2023.
No, 10 years. From 13.
Okay, and when you leave, there is an editor there who pretty much shits on you pretty publicly. Says you were a bad fit, you were a disruptor.
At the New York Times. At the New York Times, after you departed.
Now, that person then later said they regretted how they handled that. But A, was that a surprise to have them take that approach where your feelings hurt, or did you feel like you deserved it? I think the Times is not used to people turning them down very much, and I actually still freelance for the Times occasionally, right? Good relationship now.
It took 10 years to repair. You wrote an op-ed right before this election that I read, which is, my gut tells me Trump's going to win, and here's the statistics, but I'm telling you my gut.
And the point was that the gut wasn't very valuable, but now I'm going to pretend that my gut was crushing. Yeah, yeah.
But no, so now I have a good relationship with them instead, but they weren't used to being turned down. And the cliche was that if you turn down the times and your career is over, which isn't really true anymore, you've had a lot of X times people start sub-stacks or have other success elsewhere.
I bet people have heard explanations, but we could stand for a concise one now. Why did you shit the bed so bad in 16 and why did everyone shit the bed so bad? I think 2016 was actually our best election.
Okay, tell me. I think about this as a gambler.
And to me, the question is, what are the odds that you have relative to the consensus odds? Elaborate on that. So our model had Trump with a 30% chance of winning and we spent a lot of time explaining to people that Hillary does not have this election in the bag.
It's a much closer race than Obama. All these states, math term, but correlated, right? Meaning that Michigan and Wisconsin, they're all kind of the same state.
If you lose one state, you'll probably lose the others. And so all that has to happen is that Trump overperforms among so-called working class, white, non-college voters.
And all of a sudden, then you can win the electoral college, which is kind of what happened, basically. So to us, if you were to have invested in Amazon stock on day one, and you said, I think there's a 30% chance that Amazon will boom into something really big, and everyone else says, that's crazy, it's only 1%.
And even though you're below 50% relative to the consensus, we were one of the only people who were saying that Trump really did have a shot. You failed least bad, is the way we might say.
Because again, you're getting odds. If you were gambling on the election, which I have no problem with.
You're pro-gambling. You could get 5-1 odds on Trump, basically.
5-1, 6-1. In 2016.
It's like 2.5-1 instead. So that means that the expected value, poker term, if you're able to make that bet, that would be the best sports bet in the world.
Right, because you personally have Trump at 3-1 and the odds have him at 5-1. 5-1, 6-1.
So for you, that's a great bet. Yeah.
You're going to lose most of the time, but you get five X, six X your money when you're right. Got you.
That's not how 99.9% of the political audience thinks. But we did take care, though, to emphasize the uncertainty to the point that we were getting yelled at people like, we just think Nate's channel just get more web traffic.
And I will say you're a victim of the data you're sourcing, so maybe also some of the data. I guess there's this big mystery of why these polls were so.
The most concise explanation is that people who are more college educated, who read the news more, are more likely to respond to surveys. Oh, interesting.
A pollster called on the phone. Yeah, and my opinion is valuable.
It should be recorded. Of course.
I always go the other way. It's like, who's dumb enough to want to chat with a stranger? You've got to be so bored.
Or who picks up the phone anymore? Well, people with high social trust answer all types of surveys more, right? But who has high social trust? It's Democrats. They are the establishment system party now, which didn't used to be true as much.
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.
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.
Right, right. Yeah, I guess some faction of the Trump base hates the media to a degree that if someone from the media called or a pollster called, they would say, fuck you and hang up.
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.
Okay. So you do 10 years there.
And how was that experience? Because I got to say, I feel this parallel existence for us. So we create this little thing in the attic and then all of a sudden Spotify comes along and I would say that was your New York Times kind of, well, we could be a part of this really big thing and there are lots of advantages.
These are interesting experiences where you have this little thing that you know very well and you potentially go somewhere to make it bigger and that is kind of 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.
It's not my comparative advantage, to put it kindly. I mean, I'm okay, but it's 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 write your model. Kinky with those numbers.
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 is, so I get in there,

and John Skipper, who is the head of ESPN at the time,

he's like, don't worry about it.

We're just going to just make great content.

I'm giving him a thinker, Southern accent.

Yeah, good, good, good, yeah, yeah.

We work in archetypes.

You don't have to worry about anything, right?

Lean into it.

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.
So 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 5 million instead of making 5 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 yeah yeah yeah there are ways around that there's 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 sub six silver bulletin now but much slower i, 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. They're in the wooing you phase.
Yeah, 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. But ask for that now.
Lock that in right now. Yeah, yeah, that's sage advice.
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.
Yeah, it's an enormous corporation. Disney's very big picture.
They were like, he's a creative. He doesn't want 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.
But like, what's the long-term plan? We're like, well, we don't know. You like this? It's like, I'm going to contract for three more years, so why don't 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 feel like I want to be like one of those 1970s magazine editors, right? We're like drinking wine

as you're finishing the...

Sure.

A cosmopolitan man.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We have some Argyle socks.

I'm not sure what's happening.

Exactly.

Stay tuned for more

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Okay, so you're there for a while but you also in 2012 you write the signal and the noise and that's a really successful book my apologies i haven't read that one and the fact that i read on the edge is really kind of a fluke i always go to audible and i know exactly what i'm going there to get and i just happen to stumble upon your book cool. I'm vaguely aware of you.
I know that you're a statistics genius. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to give this book a shot.
And I can't imagine this has gotten back to you, but I've brought it up now a bazillion times on the show because there's so many little pieces of On the Edge that I really, really enjoy. Very thought-provoking.
I think your outsider-ness and some degree of disagreeability, I appreciate greatly. And the book, it's sprinkled throughout.
I like the spirit of it. Thank you.
In a nutshell, the examination of this book is a group of people you refer to as the river, which of course is a Texas Hold'em term. It's the last card that comes out? The last card.
Because supposedly in the old riverboat days in poker's origin, if the dealer was crooked and cheated or was suspected of cheating and the last card affected the hand, he'd be thrown into the Mississippi River. Oh, I like that.
Possible origin of that term. Yeah, yeah.
If not, let's keep it because it's so funny. Yeah, I like that.
The turn. Oh, that's the second to last one? Flop, turn, river.
Got it. And so for people who don't play Texas Hold'em, the stakes go up and up and up because you're given two cards.
You've already perhaps put in the ante and generally you want to see the flop for free. You're going to get three whole cards.
Now you're going to have five. You have some sense of what your hand is.
And then it just diminishes it from there. Or at the end, you're hoping for a single card to change your destiny.
So obviously the risk level is going up and the stakes are going up. It's a game of escalation.
Let's say you're playing a $5, $10 hold'em game, which is a medium-sized game, and you have $5,000 on the table. So the first bet typically in that game, someone would bet $30 to try and win the $5 and the $10.
Relatively small money. In fighting for those $15 worth of blinds, things can escalate and escalate until all $5,000 are on the table, or even more than that, potentially.
And so it's a game of escalation. But escalation and reduced options.
I guess that's implicit in a game of escalation, but you're getting less and less options. Yeah, as you get to the river, then there are fewer cards that can come.
It's called the game tree. You can imagine a branch prunes out and then narrows again toward the end.
But the more money on the table, the deeper you can get because you can raise and re-raise and check raise and all these things, right? It's a very complex game. Actually, it took longer to solve poker than to solve chess.
It is kind of solved now. I mean, we can get into what that means exactly.
Tell me. Because a computer AI can play chess better than a human.
I can play Go better than a human. And it can kind of play poker better than a human, although there are a lot of caveats there, right? One is that humans are not playing poker perfectly.
The whole thing you learn about poker strategy, we actually like study how computers play poker. But computers must be very honest.
Computers fucking bluff all the time. One discovery they made is that you have to bluff a ton in poker.
That's what makes people have an incentive to pay you off when you have a real hand. And I've played a bunch of Texas Hold'em, but even reading your first few chapters, which are about gambling in general, there were a few things in there I was like, oh, wow, it's down to the science.
I forget the ratio you give, but there's a known percentage you should bluff to make yourself reputable and get paid when you have it. It depends on the size of the pot and depends on cards that come in other things, right? But you have to bluff a lot.
And also, concealing information, although it's intuitive if you think it's poker, it's a game of limited information, but you want to be very deceptive. Sometimes you want to slow play with a strong hand that's very important or check a strong hand just to avoid giving away too much information.
Well, ideally, you know your opponent, how they play, and you're now counterpunching. If you know that a certain player bluffs just a little bit too much, then all of a sudden, a huge number of your hands are calling that would be folding before, or vice versa.
Or things like, this player tends to make a big bet when they have a bad hand as a bluff, and a small bet when they have a good hand. You love that type of player, right? It's like, okay, so now, when you have a good hand, I can get away cheaply, maybe even fold, or at least pay you only a small amount.
But when you're making a big bluff and you're not balancing your strategy. It's extremely psychological, maybe 100%.
For sure, it's maybe 70-30 math versus psychology. And it's also like a type of discipline.
In the abstract, there are computer programs you can study with and coaching videos. I have a poker coach who's kind of the poker equivalent of a trainer, basically.
But can you execute when all of a sudden you're playing for like $50,000? Or the final table of some tournament. Yeah.
And I played in like the World Series of Poker a lot. I made day six of the main event.
By the time you make it to day six, every pot is literally worth a couple hundred thousand dollars. You don't get to cash that in right away.
My parents would have been like, oh, I have a million chips. And they're like, you want a million bucks? They're like, no, I have chips.
And like the exchange rate is like 10 to one. And the World Series of Main Event, there are 10,000 players now.
There are not 10,000 good poker players in the United States, right? And so like they're amateurs and they're so nervous. They're like shaking.
And so like it becomes learning how to deal with a flow state and a little bit of stage fright and executing in those high pressure situations. And when you do it enough, I'm a very talented amateur.
He's won $840,000 in tournament play. Then how can he be an amateur? That's gross, not net.
That's gross, I know. We're always talking about gross and net.
Let's focus on the winnings right now so I can prove to her you're a good poker player. Kind of developed like a little bit of a sicko tendency.
We were like, I feel more alive when I'm playing for real money and more focused. And in a weird fucked up way, even like a little bit more relaxed.
I don't know, it's weird. Well, there's all these different social science studies where they measure testosterone levels of day traders.
They measure testosterone levels of poker players. There's a biological component too that's happening.
There absolutely is. And this is one thing it took me a while to learn.
And I learned it by talking to this one guy who consulted with traders. He actually was a neuroscientist and studied these Wall Street traders.
Like these people are fucking crazy. They think they're so rational, but they're not.
Talk to an astronaut, talk to a guy who's trained fighter pilots, talk to a guy who trained professional golfers. And they kind of all say the same thing, which is your body is working on a different chemical system, a different operating system when you're under stress.
And actually, a good athlete will have a higher escalation in his or her heart rate. Under stress, a trader will have higher spikes in testosterone and dopamine and things like that.
That's okay, because it means that your body's reacting to stress. When you learn in poker, I'm not going to feel the same playing a $10,000 pot as in a $5 pot in my beer league game on Tuesday night.
Learning like, okay, I can start to master that or at least fuck up less than other people. When you learn that, then that becomes kind of powerful.
Okay. So the book isolates this group that you refer to as the river.
And these are people who have a great appetite for risk. They have a pretty good evaluation of risk.
They have a certain rejection of the commonly held wisdom. There's some traits.
And then you go on to profile a select group of people and among them, and there's more, do Doyle Brunson a very famous poker player and then we do Peter Thiel the venture capitalist you do Sam Bankman Freed which is very interesting from of course FTX and then you do Sam Altman so these are people that all would fall into this group referred to as the river they live in in the risk analysis world. And I think maybe, could we start with Peter Thiel? 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 is playing a big role in a lot of this, I think.
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's a unique individual. He's gay, deeply religious.
What's his religion? Do we know? He was German. I don't know if he was a Christian.
He's a Christian of some sort. He's a right-wingish gay man.
That's always interesting to me. 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, the classics. He's a brilliant, brilliant dude.
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.

That's no longer an advantage.

The moneyball thing's been played to its logical hands.

I think it's probably fairly close to being true.

He was an early adopter of Trump in 2016.

He kind of will say that, oh, I thought it was a good contrarian death,

Thank you. to its logical hands.
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 Nate's 30%, and definitely not the conventional wisdom's 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 interests 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? Are 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 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 trade-off which might be bad yeah yeah yeah silicon Valley understands that growth is vital, and technology, eight times out of ten, 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.
If you have a one in ten chance of having a hundred extra investment, it's 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. I just think it's really wild that in our lifetime, there was this movie called Revenge of the Nerds, which was completely unthinkable.
And the notion was, yeah, these jocks have made it insufferable to live here. But now the nerds the jocks and now we're seeing their version of it and guess what no one's version is all that great 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 mark and recent and elam are doing really fucking well right yeah yeah they're as wealthy as any people have ever been in the history of the universe or the world, at least.
Shaped 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 that 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 of mean reversion.
There is a broad-based conservative backlash on cultural issues. Yes.
It might be picking right about now. This is my own personal digestion of what just went down.
To me, it feels very obvious this was an election on wokeism. I mean, just watch the rights ads and they were about almost a single issue.
How do you feed that into an algorithm? 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 them ad is partly about wokeness, but also about other things. 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.
Both sides is a cancer. I'm watching the people on the right celebrate that LA's burning down.
And I want to just say, if it brings you great joy that your countrymen are losing everything, their children don't have a bedroom anymore, if that gives you pleasure, you must admit your politics is a cancer on both sides. When people on the left are stoked people are dying of COVID, your politics are a cancer at that point.
This is still like an ongoing. Yeah, it's happening.
We're in the middle of it. 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 a nice little revenge against the left, but just chill out. Chill out for a week, if anything.
Yeah, just take a breather. My God.
That's part of the problem because it's those people. If they were quiet, maybe other people wouldn't be like, oh, I'm happy their houses are burning down.
But Trump is literally calling him Gavin Newsom right now. Are you kidding me? You're our president.
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 critiques you can make of 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 prepared for the type of housing that you're building in vulnerable areas. But instead it turns out as something about DEI and the lesbian I kind of want the lesbian fire chiefs to have a reality TV show if they get fired because they seem like these charismatic personalities, right? Just let people process.
It's a bummer. I guess where I differ from some of my peers is it's on both sides.
It's just a fucking gnarly metastasized cancer that all of us have. Yeah.
I mean, there was one Democrat. There was a picture now of like the McDonald's burning in a hundred 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.
It's kind of a gross level of opportunism. Okay, Peter Thiel, all to say, he did do these revolutionary things at the time with his Founders Fund as his company.
Yeah. And we even heard this when we listened to the Meta AI thing.
This decision to bet on founders and not try to wrestle control away from founders and have this belief in them in a way that was pretty new and novel at the time they took this approach. It's almost like they don't need to know what the idea is.
They just want to believe in the founders. I love that you say the more shabbily you show up for your first meeting, the more trustworthy you are.
It's so funny. Well, Sam McManfred kind of played into this cliche.
He's kind of self-described on the spectrum and 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 that I have so much RAM. I need to offload something that playing 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.
Right. All the very best players came and begged to be on a team.
Okay. So let's talk about Sam Bankman free because you spent a lot of time with him.
And why do you think he was willing to sit with you? I know. Just in case people don't know.
Oh yeah. Let's do a little quick history of who he is, how he created FTX and even what FTX was.
Cause I do think the laymen, they hear it all the time, but they're not sure what happens. So Sam Bigman-Fried 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 Moneyball, but for charity.

It was kind of the pitch. Earmark that because my very favorite part of the entire book was the effective altruism.
Basically, it's Moneyball, but for charity. It was kind of the pitch.
Earmarked that because my very favorite part of the entire book was the effective altruism part. So I want to talk a lot about that.
But it was just earmarked that he got into that. So he's at some kind of financial place.
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 donate 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 a bunch of 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 as by others as hyper-rational, a lot of them are just kind of degenerate gamblers at heart.
Often skilled and smart degenerate gamblers. Incredibly impulsive, right? Impulsive and kind of stimulus-driven.
He's also on Adderall, right? He said that wasn't that big a part of this story. If you live on math, I mean, I don't know how much you can discount that.
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, 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 don't even know you're trying to get out.
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, it 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.

But does the price of Bitcoin vary throughout the globe?

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 is 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 found FTX, which is a crypto exchange. Which I don't even understand how a crypto exchange works.
My understanding is like, you go buy crypto, you have a password and it exists. I don't know why is someone else ever involved? 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 a Gemini, then it's just E-Trade.
I got this much amount of money and I want to convert it to Bitcoin. You deposit $20,000 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 stick for all these firms.
In principle principle, your crypto is supposed to be segregated so you can't then go have a run on the bank. At FTX, it wasn't because Sam thought, oh, I'm very good at making trades and I want to make the world better through effective altruism.
We have $8 billion in customer deposits in crypto. Wouldn't it be a shame if I just left that sitting there in some account instead of making these awesome trades with it.
And of course- He thought it was unutilized money.

Yeah.

He's like, well, I am trying to give my money away

to charity and or to become infinitely powerful.

He thought he could become president

with some probability, literally.

He wanted to be like the world's first trillionaire.

These are also counter.

I want to be so altruistic

and I want to be the president and a trillionaire.

A little suspicious, right?

This is wild.

Also just what a goal. It sounds like an eight year old.
It's what you wrote down. I want to be president when you were 11 years old.
I grew out of that. Yeah.
He even thought he'd become president before he was age 35. Oh, my God.
I like lobbying to get the rules changed. Okay.
Who was the big backer of FTX? Alfred Lin was a partner there. But, you know, Sequoia's a very well-respected firm.
One of the greats. Their position in the book is just, yeah, it's one of the ones that didn't work out.
They're not even smart in the way you would think someone was smart. They said they would do it again, right? All that can happen is it goes to zero.
So you go from one to zero, eh, who cares, right? You go from one to infinity, and that outweighs a lot of one to zeros. So they were at least honest by saying, we do this again.
Now, there is some, I believe, shareholder action, so this is the rare case where there could be additional liability, but probably not too bad. But the other part of it is if you become successful in any different field, relatively young, you can notice how people change around you.
And I'm sure it's true in Hollywood, but it's also true in the nerdier occupations, right? So we've interviewed McCaskill and we adore him. And I had some quiet pushback that I didn't know quite how to articulate.
And I thought your book did a really good job of pointing out some gaps in it. So maybe lay out effective altruism.
So effective altruism originally kind of meant what it sounded like, which is how can we find more effective ways to give money to charity? Just look at what Bill Gates has been doing for the last 15 years. How do we get the most bang for a buck? How do we set the most lights?

5,000 bucks instead of the $10 million we put on the

average. Government agencies actually put a value

on human life based on how people behave in the US

which is $10 million. So that mindset though

becomes quite fraught. Even though

I think it's right, you're putting a value now

on different things.

So that already is a little bit fraught. What is the value

of donating to the symphony, for example?

A little bit harder to quantify. Or we can start

to ask some other questions. Well, effective altruists

mostly believe in animal welfare

I don't know. already is a little bit fraught.
What is the value of donating to the symphony, for example? Like a little bit harder to quantify. Okay, or we can start to ask some other questions.
Well, effective altruists mostly believe in animal welfare, which I see is a good thing. But how much are we trading the welfare of different animals against each other? One example given the book is that there was a puppy, a poodle, who got stuck in the New York City subway system a few years ago.
And should we stop the entire F train to rescue Dakota? And they decided to stop the F train. But like, you wouldn't do that for a squirrel.
He'd run over the fucking squirrel or like a cat probably gets run over. And a dog, we just assign enough moral value.
Then it gets weird. They're like, okay, well, look at the number of neurons that an animal has.
Well, really quick, let's just walk down one through. So that really happened.
Dakota, the dog wandered into the subway. They shut it down.
It was down for a couple hours. And you simply say, really quick, let's do a generic loss of wages.
Well, generic loss of wages of that one little situation was $2 million. So how many humans can you save for $2 million instead of the dog? Then what about all the hospital workers that were waiting for their train? Did humans die because they weren't on their shift? All these solutions in COVID were terrible.
It was terrible to have all these people get sick. It was terrible to shut down schools.
But you have to make trade-offs. And you delineate the difference between small world problems and big world problems.
These statistical analysis are really quite good at small world problems, but as you get into big world problems, these are almost impossible. People don't respect the boundaries enough.
I'll worry if I'm making a model in baseball or politics or basketball, oh, this player is 10% underestimated, but the data is very good and we know how the system works. We know the rules of the game, literally.
You have little errors and mistakes, but pretty accurate. Whereas in these big open-ended problems, you're just kind of making shit up on the back of an envelope and sometimes the best you can do.
We had to make these decisions again under COVID and maybe if we'd been more thoughtful about them, like what is the cost of shutting down school in Los Angeles for 19 months? You know, we probably should have done more back of the envelope math there, which I think would have said probably a bad idea even given these uncertain assumptions. But people don't know when they go from these closed problems that are amenable to modeling to these open problems where it's just regurgitated assumptions over and over and over again.
So what's happened though with EA, the mandate kind of expanded for various reasons from charitable giving to any problem involving utility, meaning how do we make the world better? More questions. Who's deciding what constitutes better and for whom? What if I make myself infinitely happy and the rest of you are my slaves? You can say, well, Nate has infinite units of utility and you guys have 0.01 because you're not physically dead.
Maybe you get to watch TV once a week or something. You get to nap.
You're so generous. Yeah, you get to get RVs now and then, right? One of the things I really loved about what you pointed out, I made the people I was on vacation with in Mexico City over Christmas suffer through my regurgitation of you, is utilitarianism, which we learn in philosophy.
The ends justify the means. If it has a better outcome for more people, that's good.
I didn't even think of the simplest thing. The reason we're just naturally drawn to that is it has the illusion of numbers.
We can assign numbers. And when we get into these very ambiguous, hard to decide moral issues that are nuanced, four is bigger than three.
That's very comforting. I think we underestimate how comforted we are by the notion of utilitarianism because you have a bigger number than a smaller number.

And even the trolley one that we all know, you're on a trolley.

It's going to hit three people.

You can pull a lever. by the notion of utilitarianism because you have a bigger number than a smaller number.
And even the trolley one that we all know,

you're on a trolley, it's going to hit three people.

You can pull a lever, it'll hit one person.

Well, three lives saved is better than one.

But what if the three dudes just gang rape somebody and the life you're going to kill

is on the verge of curing cancer?

It's so much more complicated

than all lives have the same value.

I have built models.

I know how even when you have awesome data

like you have in baseball,

It's like a more complicated than all lives have the same value. 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, there'll be penalizers and outcome.
Right. One of the things he did, Sam, was dump $12 million into this very small election up in Oregon.
It's detailed in the book. And in fact, I had a friend tell me so excitedly, he said, do you know Sam Bankman Freed? He asked Trump how much money to walk away from the election.
And the number was X. And he's like, can you imagine how great that would be? And I was like, I'm sorry, that's not great to subvert democracy.
Whether you like the guy or hate the guy, no, buying off. What if someone offered Obama $12 billion in 2008 to walk away? You can't use your money to take away an option for people to vote on.
That is fundamentally wrong, but it flies under this banner of effective altruism. You could definitely argue a utilitarian point of view on that.
Now we get into Kantism. There has to be a principle called democracy that rises above all that.
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 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 not a good ROI from a pure 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 surreal 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.
There's like an agrarian movement right now against billionaires. I'm watching the frontline two hour on China right now.
And I'm like, guys, we're kind of inching towards this agrarian hatred. It's this weird, like, Barberpole 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 a little bit.
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 is 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 love that chapter on effective altruism. And it's very interesting to have you sit with Sam Brinkman Freed and have him basically try to woo you while also real time watching his empire crash and getting more and more accepting of the notion that he's probably going to go to jail.
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 actually kind of hard to generate empathy for in part because 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 and 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.
I can't even see these questions. He has an ankle bracelet.
This is serious, right? And then I asked him, 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, really pissed off the judge.
So he's actually kind of a very bad, miscalculating type. So let's just close with Sam Altman.
So he is running OpenAI and he's in the river. What did he do in the past that from your assessment would qualify him as being someone that has got a big appetite for risk? So he worked for a firm called Young Combinator, which is an incubator.
So 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.
That's funny because I guess I put him in that category. No, 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 in 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 riscone. Sam McManfree, 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.
It's so out of touch. You can be very smart until you hit a certain level of ego and power, and then you become dumb again.
Oh, yeah. Your intelligence is compartmentalized.
Elon, in so many ways, is the greatest engineer for centuries. And then he has kind of the emotional capacity of a 12 year old.
SpaceX actually was in very hairy situation for a long time. Yeah, they crashed three.
If the fourth didn't succeed, he's done and he knows it. 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 is kind of miraculous.
Oh, I just started using it. I'm like, I really can hardly believe this can do this.
You feel like you're interacting with magic in some way. 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.
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 QPT 3.5 had come out. They were like friendly, but like, Sam was traveling the world for the next six months.
I 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, 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.
People are like, oh, this might 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.
It's like not a typical strategy, and it's because they 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 other people in the river, think about these things. And to think in terms of cost-benefit analysis.
You layer on top of that, typical start-out founder ego, feeling like you're oppressed when you're actually very powerful, 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 outcompete the people who don't want to compete. Unless you entirely suppress competition, then competition's going to win.
It's a very hard problem to balance out. Nate, this has been awesome.
I love your book. One of the things I love that you point out in the book is like if you take right now the top 10 richest people in America, they're all self-made.
Wow. If you go back a century, that list is mostly inherited wealth.
That's a good thing. 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 like what some of the 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 the 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 first.
Yeah, that's Malcolm too. Malcolm Gladwell says you should listen to his books.
Constraints are good. I want to kind of force you to

like, in the order of the author.

Yeah, yeah, right, right, right, right.

Well, Nate, it's been a pleasure meeting you.

And happy birthday. Happy birthday.

Thanks for joining us for your birthday.

It was really fun. I think you guys both.

Well, I look forward to your next book, and

happy birthday.

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It's where the party's at. I'm trying to taunt you.
Have you noticed that my Diet Coke says happy birthday, Dax? Oh, I didn't notice that.

My glass bottle of VC.

Is it from Bill?

It's from my birthday, but they didn't come in time for my birthday.

But was it from Bill?

No.

Oh.

I think Kristen ordered them.

Oh.

Yeah.

Oh, cute.

You're right.

He has sent us Diet Coke.

It's a natural thought.

Yeah.

Is that Diet or Reg's?

Hmm.

Diet.

This is an amazing ding, ding, ding. Oh.
But for our next. A different guest.
Yeah. Oh, okay.
Well, ear market. So how long did it take you to fall asleep? I don't know because I listened to a few podcasts all the way through.
Oh, God. Yeah, and then I just let it turn off, and then I don't know when, how long after that.
What podcast did you listen to? I listened to Nobody's Listening Right, Elizabeth and Andy, my favorite podcast. That's your blankie.
Uh-huh. Your binky.
Auditory binky. What's lovey? That's my lovey.
Okay, your stuffy, your lovey. I never had one of those.
A stuffy? Yeah, and then I wonder.

Yeah, you did.

I mean, I had stuffed animals.

Okay.

But I never had one that was like, you have to take it to the airport and on vacation and all these things that all the kids have.

I had three, but they didn't travel with me.

I maybe brought one or two of them to my dad's on the weekends.

Yeah.

Aw. But I had three different bears.
I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure. I'm not sure.
I'm not sure. dad's on the weekends.
Yeah. Aw.

But I had three different bears.

Do you still have any of them?

I wish.

My mom is ruthless.

You know, I moved out and she just had like a garage sale and just fucking dumped all my stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I know.

Can you imagine buying my used teddy bear?

Ding, ding, ding.

She might have thrown those away.

I think this is a ding, ding, ding for real.

It is.

Long time coming.

Oh, right.

We had delayed.

Liberti.

Did you have Liberti cleaned?

Liberti does look a little cleaner than normal.

I agree.

Oh, there's the shit on the ears.

Oh, fuck. He's pretty disgusting, but he does still look a little...
It's like he ate a horse's ass out. Or mules.
He does look a little cleaner than usual. For the listener, I'm holding Liberti, my beanie baby, who's covered in poo-poo.
He's a mess. He's sort of my lovey.
Just because he had value and he was really exclusive. That's not the reason to have a lovey.
He's my investment lovey. This is my 401k.
What is on him? Fecal matter. No.
It is. Like from a rat or something? No, I think you wiped with him.
I did not. It looks like someone did because the back is spotless.
It looks like someone grabbed him from the back and used him hopefully front to back. So my parents aren't, I guess, as ruthless as your mom, but they are pretty bad.
Like they just put everything in some big bags. Hold on, they're not even close.
The you, everything you had as a kid is still in your room. No, because my brother moved out.
I mean, moved in. So then everything got thrown into the bags.
Okay. And then thrown in the basement.
But it was literally like everything, just like random, like a sticky note is it. They just threw it all in a bag.
So this Liberti obviously got put thrown face down. And an old coffee spilled at the bottom of the bag or something? Yeah, I don't know.
I think he was used to wipe. But he's still great.
Take a big whiff of his face and see if there's any smell to him. Really get in there.
I know, I don't. Let me be the judge of this.
Toss them over. Be careful, okay? I will.
He's expensive. He used to be expensive.
He is expensive. Yeah, that's dung.
No, it is. Stop it, is it? I don't smell anything.
It doesn't smell, but boy, it does look like doodles. Listen, I'm not.
You're not going to like what I'm about to say, but it's the truth. This is on eBay right now for $700.
No. Yes.
Was shit all over it? Well, no. Okay, a clean version in a box or something? Those ones look clean, but that means they're not as unique as mine.
Well, that's for sure. This is the only poopy Liberti there is.
That's like a, it's like a war haul. Like you took this cute, valuable thing, wiped with it.
Now that's a piece of art. Do you think I should auction this off? No, because I would feel terrible for anyone who paid a lot of money for that.
Maybe they want it. Why do you get to make the decision for people that— I don't.
You asked me if I thought you should, and I'm giving you an honest answer. Yeah, because you said you'll feel terrible, but you shouldn't feel terrible if they want it.
I want to protect them from themselves. Do you think people should smoke if they want? I don't think they should smoke.
If they want. Yeah, if they want, fine.
Great. But I don't think they should smoke if they think you'll like them more.
Oh my goodness. Get that duty bear out of here.
He's my friend. As long as you label it as duty bear for the sale of him.
I feel totally ethical auctioning this off as even though it's a bit dirty. But what I will be honest about, and this is an important piece, it is missing its tag.
The most valuable part, yeah. It's missing the heart thing that has its name.
But his name is still on his butt. It says it on the tag.
What it lacks in tags, it makes up for in the bris all over his fur. Anyway.
Anywho. I don't have any loveys.
And, well, again. Why was, what were you waiting to bring it out to tell me that there were $700 on eBay? Yeah, $700.
There's a six, seven, one for $674, one for $750. $500.
But this is like. You thought at one point it was worth $20,000.

$20,000.

It was.

He comes up in this episode.

Right, right.

Which is why that's a ding, ding, ding.

Shocker that Nate didn't offer to buy it.

It was so valuable.

Well, he was upstairs.

That's why.

He didn't see him.

He couldn't see him.

Do you think so?

Monica's now placed La Shit T on her shoulder. Do you think that's your bad shoulder or your good shoulder? Is he telling you to do bad things or good things? Is he your it or your super ego? He's bad.
Yeah. He's not.
He got in the trash. He's a monselo animal.
Eating up all those old caramels at the bottom of the trash can. Yeah, if you go to eBay, you're going to get a nice guy.
You're going to get an angel Liberti. But this is the only devil Liberti in the whole world.
That's the only id. Yeah.
Yeah. I have something I want to announce.
Let's hear it. I have a few things.
Okay. First, I don't think I've ever seen a response so consistent in the comments.
Okay. The dog world is ablaze.
Oh, no. There's a fervor of recommendations.
I told everyone not to get too excited. I opened up the comments for James Marsden.
Little Jimmy Marsden.

Little Jimmy Marsden. And nearly every comment said, Dex, please tell Monica she should get a miniature King Salmon Burmese Yorkshire Pinscher.
Like they were so specific. The different breeds you need.
And everyone has a favorite breed. If you want to hear some testimonials, there are a couple hundred waiting for you.
Okay. And then another thing I want to say is I read a great book by a friend of the pod's wife, Alison Grant, Adam's wife.
Oh, nice. She wrote a book called I Am the Cage.

Ooh.

And it's really, really good.

It's about this young woman who's living in this like tiny little town in Wisconsin by the lake. And she walks to work and she doesn't want to see anyone and she doesn't want to be friendly.

And she.

Is it a novel?

Yes, it's a novel.

Okay.

And there's this huge snowstorm and she gets snowed into this house she's renting. And then just the journey she goes on in this snowed-in thing, and then you're getting all these flashbacks of her childhood having had this very specific surgery to lengthen a leg.
Ding, ding, ding. Tell me.
Remember we had a guest on once whose brother had that surgery and he passed away from it. Yeah.
How horrible. Yeah, in the book, the character is told by the nurse, like, you're in good hands.
He's the best in the country. And then she asks, how many people do this procedure? And he is the only one.
The horrificness of this procedure and how much it changed the course of her life and how it all comes into this inflection experience being snowed in. It's really, really good.
I can't wait to read it. I'm so impressed.
It's so beautifully written. And it's also, I think for people who are like, they're not extroverts.
They don't want to talk to anyone. They don't want to comfort anyone.
Like it's, I would imagine it'd be liberating to hear someone speak so honestly about how much they dislike all these interactions. Yeah.
It's very brave. It's a very cool book.
I am the cage. People said in it is, is it out? It's out on February 18th.
Okay, great. So pre-order it.
I really recommend it. It's fantastic.
I Am the Cage. I'll read it.
I don't read many novels. And I was kind of like...
I could feel there was enough reality in it. Yeah.
Well, the best novels do that. Yeah.
Yeah. You probably just haven't read any good ones.
I've never read a good novel. In your whole life.
That's what it is. Yeah.
I really like reading novels. Yeah.
I mean. But you're a fantasy girl.
You're a cookie boy and a fantasy girl. I am.
Both of those things. Yeah.
I am. I'm a reality boy.
Don't talk about unicorns or sasquatch. You have plenty of fantasies.
Okay. You're a fantasy girl, too.
And a cookie boy. And a cookie boy.
I'm a reality girl, too. Yeah, I don't mean to put you in a box.
Yeah, don't put me in a cage. I am the cage.
No, that's the title of the book. I am the cage.
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speaking of fantasy we have an upcoming guest who we discuss fantasy with a bit and i thought that was really interesting yeah and very similar to your experience uh-huh it's a great survival mechanism yeah yeah until you don't need it anymore to survive but you still use it every now and then. Yeah, yeah.
I took a hike this morning. It's raining.
Yeah, it is. Thank God.
We can only be grateful. I know.
That's right. We have no choice but to be very grateful.
I agree. Considering the fire conditions.
I agree. I agree.
I agree. I love it.
You are taking it better than normal, which to me seems like proof of that. Thank you.
I'm trying very hard. Are you? What does that entail? You should look out the window and go, I love you, Rain, and just force yourself.
No, to be clear, it is raining. It's been raining for the past couple days.
I have seasonal affective disorder, sad, self-diagnosed. And I am about to start my period.
There's lots going on. Double whammy.
That generally speaking, I can predict what kind of mood I will be in. Yeah.
But I— And is it helpful to go, yeah, I feel like shit, but I know it's because of these things. Of course.
Does that mitigate how much suffering there is? Yes. There's many things at play.
If I'm starting to feel like really agitated, it's that. Right, not the person.
It's not the thing or the person or whatever. And so that's helpful to know.
I do that. It really helps.
I mean, you've got to do it with children. Oh, I bet.
Like if you're depressed, your children, the little things that you can overlook start becoming annoying. Sure.
And then I have to go, it has nothing to do with them. You just feel this way.
It really is effective. It is.
Also, I feel like you've been in a low mood. Yeah.
Yeah. I had a good couple, three weeks of feeling down.
Depressed. Depressed.
Yeah. And that is clear to me.
Uh-huh. Right? And we have talked about it on here.
Yeah. But the thing you don't always agree with, but that I really do think is true, is that you can only have 100% of an emotion in the room.
Oh, yeah. Or between two people or whatever.
Yeah. And I feel that.
Like when you are not at your happiest, oh, it's not my turn to also be in that headspace. Like it's my turn to be the other type of person in this, in this setting or in this duo.
So I don't know. I find that sort of liberating.
It's, it's like, okay, I actually, this isn't the time for me to indulge my thing. Because you learn you can control it if you're forced to.
It's not that set in stone. There it is.
I am able to overcome it. Yes.
If I need to. And the rain makes me gloomy, but I haven't really been that gloomy.
I'm super lucky because I, in the morning, open up my drapes and I go to meditate. And often I start meditating while it's still dark out.
And by the time I'm done, the light has come out. That's nice.
There's just mist and there's trees. And it's a luxury.
I'm lucky. You like that.
I can recognize how unbelievably beautiful it is. Like an impressionist painter would be painting that, not the normal day that I see.
Right. So that's a huge advantage.
That's nice. So I was looking at it and I was like, I don't know why Gorillaz in the Mist is so seared into my mind.
But I think maybe that was the first time I saw that kind of tropical misty foliage. It really captivated my imagination when I was younger.
And so anytime I see like Columbia when they show the mountainside and it's like very damp and moist. I love it.
So I was looking at it and I was like,

oh, I can't wait to go hiking

in there. There's going to be like the visibility will be

low. There was virtually no one

out there, which is never the case. Yeah, the rain

will do that. To the point where I was like, is it shut down again?

And I'm now doing it again. Uh-oh.
But no,

I saw a couple other folks. I wonder

if aversion to rain

slash seasonal affective disorder

slash that is like misophonia. Like it could it's a gene.
Probably. Because you're talking about the mist and I want I'm like trying.
You can intellectually understand. I understand.
It's like atmosphere in a movie. Like they pump scenes full of dust so that there's a texture to the air.

And so it's so cinematic when it's like this.

It's just very beautiful.

The greens are greener.

It's filtering out different kinds of light.

I know, but I... Don't care.

I don't like it.

Yeah, you want bright hot sun.

I really do.

White light.

But I want to like it.

Maybe that'll be my New Year's resolution. this year.
The New Year started again in February. Yeah, I feel it.
Yeah. My mood broke almost on February.
On February. On February, yeah.
Or day before or something. God, can I tell you something embarrassing? Well, let me first say that whiskey, well, it's related to that.
whiskey has diarrhea it is cage four nights

in a row. Uh-oh.
He has Noro? The fact that Chris hasn't killed herself yet, she's been up every night for the last four nights. Dealing with that? Can he wear a diaper? He should.
Well, he went to the vet yesterday and he, by the way, you know, he's such a bastard. Not even a rascal.
He's a bastard. I know.
They put him in a cone and they couldn't, they can't even approach him. So they had to anesthetize him just to like take his blood and run some tests.
Yeah, he's slow. So when he came home, he was completely fucked up, right? He was fucked up all, I was jealous.
I'm like, what'd they give him that last 14 hours? None of the drugs I ever took lasted that long. He's very small.
He's down one way. He's almost as small as Liberti.
He is. So he did not have any haunts last night, which was great.
Great. So I woke up in the middle of the night to pee, as I do two or three times.
And I was peeing and I farted. And I was half asleep.
And then I went and I was about to lay back in bed. And I was like, did I? Is there a little? Oh, you had to do.
Is there a little? Did something come out? Oh, wow. And then I went and I was about to lay back in bed and I was like, did I, is there a little, is there a little, did something come out? Oh, wow.
And then I went and sat back. I sat on the toilet and fired up the brondle, the butt washer.
Yeah. And I had had a little.
Duty. Which never has happened in the middle of the night.
Were you wearing your underwear? Yeah. Oh, no.
Did it get in? Well, no. I was wearing my sleep pants.
No panties, just my sleep pants. Oh, okay.
But you were covered. But I didn't get anything on anything.
It was just a tiny bit of... Oh.
Yeah. Do you think...
But I got really close. I guess the point of this story is I got hugely lucky because I didn't notice and I was just about to lay down.
And then that would have probably caused an issue where I would have to change my clothes. And then Chris might have had to clean up your duty too.
No, she was downstairs on watch for the other duty boy. Oh, wow.
So I was celebrating this morning that there was no Hannes. And I didn't have the heart to say there was something last night.
There was just a tiny bit. I think it's because, well, my hunch is I sold myself on the notion that I might be able to eat this sourdough bread that Kristen's making.
Like, I really want to be able to have no gluten. Yeah.
In the first round, which was pretty dense because she used a flour without gluten. Then she's like, let's go half and half.
And then she made that. And it was so good.
Oh, half and half with gluten. Yeah.
Got it. And it was much better.
Of course. It cooked better.
It was fluffier. It was so delicious.
And I had a couple slices in the morning. Okay.
And I think that's why I whiskyed last night. You tonka'd.
Please use the correct. We know what a tonka is.
Oh, you don't want to, this doesn't count because it's too tiny. No, what happened? I don't want to talk about it.
We know tonka and what that means. It's not like a little oopsie you almost miss.
It's like animal. Okay.
I'm not going to talk about it, but we had similar situations. Sort of.
Last night? Yeah. Sort of.
Not really, but interesting. Wait, in your new outfit? Yeah, but.
But you thought you did. I don't want to talk about it.

Why?

I just was so, I was so vulnerable.

I'm so revealing.

You always are.

Women can't get away with that kind of thing.

Yes, they can.

No, they can't.

I didn't poop.

I didn't.

Are you sure?

I'm sure.

But I just had a situation that's a little tangential to yours with no poop.

You just got your outfit down in time? No, there was no poop. Okay.
No poop. Interesting.
I just had something interesting and novel. Okay.
Happened. Okay.
We'll leave it at that. In that space.
Okay. In the bathroom? No.
Okay. Facts.
This is for Nate Silver. Will you eventually write a tell-all when you're like 60 and we'll hear all these stories, I hope? There's a— A Hollywood tell-all and it's just all about your Tonka experience.
There's only been—I've only Tonka'd once. Right.
In my whole life. And then whenever there's other situations.
This isn't worth—this would not even make it like a chapter. Okay, great.
It's like, at best, two lines. Okay.
More like a quote I put in my memoir, like just a quote. Yeah, it's like under the title, the little like quote.
It's nothing. Okay.
Okay, speaking of gross things. Yeah.
Salmon, semen, skincare. Oh, yeah.
Okay. Okay.
Speaking of gross things. Yeah.
Salmon, semen, skin care. Oh, yeah.
Okay? Yeah. This is all the rage.
And it's because salmon sperm shares a lot of DNA with us. Okay.
And so we used to have vampire facials. I mean, they still do them, but that's where they would like take your blood out and then- Spin it? Yeah.
Get the platelets or something? Yeah. They spin it and zhuzh it and then they put it back in.
Do you think it's stem cell-y? I think they're kind of trying to make it. Yeah.
They were, look, allegedly, I never did it, and then I am not.

Going to try it?

No, I'm not.

Okay.

But it was a thing.

But you do want the salmon ejaculate.

I'm interested in that, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, salmon ejaculate is the actual correct term.

Clinical term.

Where, have you found a place in LA that does salmon ejaculate?

No, it's not FDA approved.

Oh, I'm so shocked.

Yet.

It's not FDA approved yet.

But if you go to South Korea, you can get it.

Oh, so have you thought about, if you fantasize about taking a trip there?

I do want to go to South Korea.

Just do a week of face stuff?

Yeah.

Because they're supposed to be at the very cutting edge, right?

Yes.

There's a podcast I love called Eyewitness Beauty.

And Nick Axelrod, one of the hosts, he goes and he once got something called like small face. Oh, what's that? I think it made his face small.
Oh, wow. Yeah.
Wow. So they do all kinds of things.
Wow. Now it's called Redurin.
Redurin. It's a long chain polynucleotide DNA of salmon milk in micro droplets under the skin of the face and neck.
One of the main ingredients is hyaluronic acid. Oh, we have a friend who's done this, by the way.
Well, hold on a second. So under the skin.
So they're shooting it into you. It's not a topical.
Right. Just like the vampire facial where it's like.
Oh, they put it in. Yeah.
Oh, we have a friend who did this? She went to South Korea and she did this. She said that the results were— She said the results.
Does she look incredible? I haven't seen her in a while. I might see her at the Super Bowl.
Okay. But she said she's gotten a lot of compliments and that she looks visibly different.
Oh, wow. I know.
Wow. And it's supposed to improve elasticity, reduction of fine lines and wrinkles,

increase skin hydration, and improve healing capabilities of the skin from damage.

How do we know it's not just filler?

Maybe it's just working the same as filler if you're putting a needle under the skin and putting volume in there.

No, no, because scars.

Okay.

I was getting rid of scarring.

It helps with skin clarity.

Okay.

So once it gets FDA approved.

You're going to get it.

I'm really, I'm not going to get it.

Oh, you're not?

No.

This is confusing.

I'm not sure you're going to get it.

I'm kidding.

I'm not kidding that this is a thing and people do find or people like it.

I wonder what the price tag is on this procedure.

Yeah, that I don't know.

But also I.

And I would want wild salmon ejaculate, not farm raised ejaculate. Well, that's the thing.
We got to get the right type. Wild.
I want it wild. He talked about gay men of his cohort being quite successful, and it's true.
And there is a lot of current research on this group right now. Adult gay men tend to have a higher rate of educational attainment compared to straight men with a significantly larger percentage earning college degrees and advanced degrees like a PhD, MD, or JD.
This is often attributed to factors like a strong drive to excel academically in the face of potential societal challenge. I would say good boy syndrome, which Jen and I told us about.
Yes. You got to be perfect in all other domains.
Yeah. And then also, huge incentive to leave your small town to go to a university.
I think that's true. If I was gay, though, my conclusion would be, see, we're smarter.
That could be part of it. Yeah, that would be.
That would employ my ego better. We need to get Charles, bell curve Charles on that one.
I'm sure he's already on it. Backronym.
This is a huge development for us. I've now used the term like three times.
Yeah. It's an acronym deliberately formed from a phrase whose initial letters spell out a particular word or words, either to create a memorable name or as a fanciful explanation of a word's origin.
That's very confusing. I was going to say, you've explained it to me now four times, and I don't know what it means, and I couldn't make one.
I can't really comprehend what's being said. I don't understand that definition, but I understood his, which is basically like you work backwards.
You have the acronym. You found an acronym you love.
Yes. SWATI.
SWATI. Then you find the letters that go into it.
I mean, I'm sorry, the words that match those letters, as opposed to you create the phrase or the tenets, and then you take the acronym. Now it makes, yeah, that makes perfect sense.
I hope I'm right about that. Yeah.
Fantasy baseball.

It dates back to 1980.

It was originally known as the Rotisserie Baseball.

Magazine editor Dan Okrent and some friends created the game at a restaurant in Manhattan.

Now, the price of Bitcoin today.

Okay, here we go. The Bitcoin ticker tape podcast with your host, Monica Padman.
$96,428.22. It's a drop in.
It's dropping. Don't come at me.
It's not our fault. Don't come after me.
Although I would start to think we're jinxing it if I were heavily invested in Bitcoin. I started a new book.
Oh my God, you are reading so much. I had no interest in Sam Brankman-Fried.
But now he was in Nate's book. And then who's our man who Michael, who wrote the big short? Lewis.
Michael Lewis. I was just perusing titles and Michael Lewis came up.
But then I was like, oh, well, I'll read his most recent book. I've liked the other ones.
And it's about Sam Beekman Friedman. Bankman Friedman.
Yeah. So now I'm going to learn more about this guy.
It's so weird. I have no interest in learning about him.
And now here I am again, and I'm enjoying it. You're being so prolific with your books.
I'm sorry to say, I still haven't even finished Intermezzo. Oh, and we're supposed to do a puzzle on here.
You were supposed to give the example from the book. I know.
Fuck. Yeah.
Luckily, we threw them a bone with this dog thing. They're off the scent, but a couple people did bring up.
Hey, are you doing that? Okay, well, we already went too long, so next week we'll do the riddle. We'll try.
Let's see. We're going to try.
We'll do the riddle from Intermezzo, but also haven't even finished it, and I was supposed to read it at Christmas. Oh, no.
And now it's February, but really January. Right.
So it's fine. That's it.
Oh, wonderful. Well, I enjoyed Nate Silver.
Me too. What an interesting guy and an interesting life.
Way outside of what I can comprehend. Yeah.
Yeah, I can find no purchase in the statistical modeling world. I barely understand it.
I think we have an idea that gambling is like dirty and bad.

Yeah. And then statistics

is smart and highfalutin.

Yes, and the stock market also is good.

Exactly. And it's all the same thing.

Yeah, it's all gambling. It's all risk.

It's all percentages.

Yeah. Cool.
Yeah, very

cool. All right.
Young lives.

All right, love you. All right.
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