Transcript of Nate Silver (statistician)

Wndri Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join WNDRI Plus in the WNDRI app or on Apple podcast, or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcast. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Sheppard, and I'm joined by Monica Padman. Hi. Hi. We have our first, I think, statistician on today. You think?

Oh, is it our first?

That's a big swing. Nate Silver is the point. He's a statistician and a best-selling 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 learn of. But his books include The Signal and the Noise. And he has a new book out that I happen 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. Also, you can go to his sub stack at Silver Bulletin, which is where he's doing all of his work now.

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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Yeah.

How's that? Sole's great. They have these cool bars and restaurants and art galleries. It's very vibrant.

I really want to go. They have great skincare.

Oh, I know. They have nail serums.

That's made his way to America. Oh, okay. Now they have salmon sperm.

Oh, salmon sperm. Sign me up.

You get it injected, then you look 14.

You could really end up pregnant with all this skincare routine.

You really could. It's dangerous.

Nate, I want to start by saying happy birthday to you. Oh, my gosh. Thank you. Happy birthday. Yeah, you're here on your birthday. This is a very Capricorn thing to do.

You have a lot of shit packed together. You have the holidays already. It feels a little greedy to have your birthday. Self indulging. Yeah, I don't want to have a birthday so soon after the Well, mine's the second.

So I'd argue mine's just 11 days worse than yours. Yeah. Because it's right on the heels of all that. That's probably bad. Are you, in general, someone 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 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. 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 I taught at MSU, so a university kid. It's a good place to grow up. I found that I have 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. We do have a big chip on her 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. That person sounds really familiar, and they're from East Lansing. I didn't know who are. They should have a certain manner of speaking. You know those micro dialect things? I think you have a little bit of that.

You discovered that you love math in a very appropriate time. I only know the members of a single baseball team that ever existed. It's the 84 Roar, the Detroit Tiger. Yeah. Alan Tramoy, I know his name. Gibson. 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 these biographies of what a future life would look like. Basically, I had myself becoming president at some point. Oh, wow, of America. But then 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.

It's a starter job, the presidency.

Weirdly, that trajectory 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 It's all about stats, and you would roll these dice.

It's dramatic.

That's what it was called. 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 networth is now 5,000 I was in must fit. An eight-year-old is a lot of money. Oh, 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, libert. It's here.

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

We thought 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.

You're super into baseball. You're crushing numbers as a hobby. You're also gay. When do you 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. It's turned 47. Just three years later, It 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, That's voice syndrome.

Yeah, because they have 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. It's 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. 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 of volunteering information. And so learning to be a bit more guarded and feeling like there's no template I can follow that's exactly going to meet my needs. I have to take a little bit from different buckets.

Right. Okay, so dad's 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 who 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 do it despite myself, really. 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, It's like you have Apple cell phone and they make the semiconductors in Taiwan and the screen in Bangladesh. How you price that can be used to optimize your tax policy. Basically, it's how do you optimize your tax policy without getting sued by the government. Really the table 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 exciting.

Oh, big time. 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 Pokoda is.

So Pekota, the program 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.

It's a picture of empirical comparison. It's deliberately nerdy. An optimization test algorithm, I think.

But it's It's also a nod to a player.

This obscure player who was always 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 a backward name.

Backward name.

I never heard a backward name. Me neither.

It's like Doge, the Department of Government, if So they come up with the acronym and then figure out some letters later to make it match the acronym they like.

Oh, I see. 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. It only makes sense after the fact.

I have a friend who's a neuroscientist, and he's like, Yeah, our brains just predicting and inferring. We never actually know what reality is. We're just making an expedient internal map simulation.

We're modeling, which you ultimately do. We're just modeling the future. Then our data set is something that is heavily subjective because we make it make sense in reverse. Of course. We go, all this happened. It's because of X, Y, and Z, but we don't know. That's just what we cling to. Okay, so you create this thing, and what is goal of Pokoda.

It's to forecast how baseball players will do. The innovation is that most predictions will just say, Okay, this player, Shoheya O'Tani, will hit 302 with 42 home runs and 108 RBIs next year. Whereas this gave a range of options, so it was probabilistic. And that's 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 hung over, they get divorced.

They're human beings and there's luck. But the idea is to have 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 used it.

You did this in 2000? Was there already fantasy baseball at that time? Yeah.

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

Is Pokoda Moneyball?

It's in the Moneyball tradition.

God, 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.

Pokoda is a couple of years before that.

About the same time. So coincidentally, the company was called Baseball Perspectives, and this 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 the model just flaws out of a coconut tree. It'll quote former President's candidate Kamala Harris. 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 a decision every turn. A lot of it is about where you add more complexity and where you're pruning because models break. So you want a complex simplicity.

Am I right in that the product you create, it's a long formula and you just start logging 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 simulation 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. I think if you already have the answer you want, that's not really objective science either. It's 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 does that mean for the other elections? What does 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 best sports betters doing? They're usually using multiple models. You want a model that's robust. Basically, if one thing breaks, then 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 this something you did as a hobbyist?

It's as a hobbyist. You're trying to win your fancy 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 cliché a little bit, tend not to have good street smarts for modeling. A lot of the skills, 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 fail somehow.

Are you coding yourself or you have been in there you work with? In 2000. Yeah, back then.

I still do it for the most part, all my own coding. I'm a control freak in that way.

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 And 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.

If you can get 56 % of your points bets, then you're like a world-class.

Yes, so we're not looking to predict with 95 % accuracy. Anything above 50 % is basically a good use of your time.

That comes from poker, too. Poker players can discern a 52 % probability from 48 %. Most people think 100, zero, and 50, 50, right? There are a lot more gradations between 50, 50, and 100, zero.

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...

It's easy now.

You're here. I have my boring consulting job in college where I could do it in a third of the time that we were billing the client. I had free time in my hands. In addition to starting the spaceball stuff, my friend at work was like, We are starting a poker game in 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. Eventually, I get some dubious offer to get money in 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. Lo and behold, though, it's a cliché where you lose all your money, but I won, right? Yeah. 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. Then additionally, this Pokoda thing is now starting to get very trusted as a way to predict the performance and careers of these players. Then along comes baseball prospectus, which acquires this thing you've created, Pokoda. Yeah. And then you go to work for them.

They were like a startup, and they would just hire smart nerds on the internet. They're like, Okay, this seems cool. Why don't you actually code this up for us? They made a proposal. Also, the first system was for pitchers. They're like, Make one for hitters, too. 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? Right. If you get a 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. 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 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 this was the era of when money 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.

From 2003 to 2008, you're at Baseball Prospectus. Correct. 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? In applying your models to politics?

I was spending most of my time on the baseball thing, but making most of my money on the poker thing. In 2006, the US Congress is in this panic, the Republicans are still in control. They have this Congressional Page scandal where Mark Follier as congressman was messaging 13-year-old pages about, Hey, why don't you send me some pictures? They're trying to do something to win themselves over with moral majority voters. The gay marriage thing has played out. They go after online poker. The last day in Congress, 2006, they passed this bill. I'm like, Fuck these people, right? Oh, so you're angry. I got more into politics because A, it compromised my livelihood, and B, I'm like, these fuckers.

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

It's true. You got to 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. He was this hipster fucking law professor. I'm like, Oh, he's ready for Congress? God, who's this guy, right? But then he's 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 spin into all types of crazy directions after that. I mean, in life, there's a lot of luck, right? 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 datify everything in the world, basically.

I have that skill set in the right place at the right time. In the 2008 is this big inflection point where a politics becomes much more crazy and interesting. All of a sudden, politics is 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, in 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. Can 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.

But in '08, you got 49 of 50 states, right?

Yeah, and in '50, in 2012, because it's just dumb luck, basically, right?

But are you being self-deprecating or are you being honest?

I can't tell. Okay, look, who's going to win Alabama in 2028?

No, listen, 44 of the states I could call without a model.

But- But those others.

Those others, man, they're all over the place. Maybe one or two, your model is a little better, right? But then you just win a couple of coin flips.

Well, despite how easy, apparently, it was, you do- You nailed it. 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 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 50, 38. But by the end, when you leave, 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. You have this really long periods of rem sleep or their little nesty universe within your dreams and stuff like that. I had some anxiety. They were like, before we let you write the Times, you have to prove your chips as a traditional and they had some very complicated story with some blind person.

Some test that you were going to fail.

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.

We're staying within the boundaries, guys. Stay within the boundaries. They're brilliant people, 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 I think, a very well-run, mostly digital.

Is it a scary point in its history?

Yeah. And the 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 run into egos mixed with personnel turn over. There's a new CEO. It's a cliché, 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. 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 the new guy comes in. Meanwhile, at the time, the New York Times Newsroom, the traditional political reporters 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, 5 was saying, Yeah, this movement in the polls, it's all fake and nothing's really changing, right? Which is 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/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.

You're from '13. Okay.

When you leave, there is an editor there who pretty much shit sign you pretty publicly. Says you were a bad fit, you were a disruptor.

At the New York Times, right?

At the New York Times after you departed. Now, that person then later said they regreted 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. I actually still freelance for the Times I'm in a 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. Here's the statistics, but I'm telling you my gut.

The point was that the gut wasn't very valuable, but now I'm going to pretend that my gut was crushing. Now I have a good relationship with them said, but they weren't used to being turned down. The cliché 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 substacks or have other success elsewhere.

I bet people have heard explanations, but we could stand for a concise one now. Why did you 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. Because I think about this as a gambler. To me, the question is, what are the odds that you have relative to the consensus odds?

Elaborate on that.

Our model had Trump with a 30% chance of winning. 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 turned but correlated, meaning that Michigan and Wisconsin, they're all the same state. If you lose one state, you'll probably lose the others. 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 what happened, basically. 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 is, That's crazy. It's only 1%. 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?

Yeah.

Is the way we might say.

Because, again, you're 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 to 1 odds on Trump, basically. 5 to 1, 6 to 1.

In 2016.

And that model said it's like 2 and a half to 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.

Because you personally have Trump at 3 to 1, and the odds have them at 5 to 1. 5 to 1 or 6 to one. 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 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 trying to just get more web traffic.

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 or more likely to respond to surveys. Oh, interesting. Oh, exciting. A poster called in the phone.

Am I Your 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 got to be so bored. Who kicks off the phone anymore? People with high social trust answer all types of surveys more. 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 the disruptive candidate. His electorate was younger. His electorate was Black, Hispanic. Now the Democrats are the party of college-ish, white, liberals. They're very trusting of the media, and so they both respond to polls and vote Democratic more. And so if you don't adjust for that, you're going to have your poll oversampled 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. Yeah, I guess some fraction of the Trump base hates the media to a degree that if someone from the media called or a poster called, they would say, Fuck you and hang up.

It's not that they even lie about who they're supporting. I mean, Trump voters are proud. They just said But they aren't being reached in the first place. 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. 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 so long. I would say that was your New York Times. 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...

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 like, right or build models.

Get kinky with those numbers.

Yeah, no. I don't want to have to respond to some email about this person wants to X % 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, Hey, don't worry about it. We're just going to just make great content. I'm giving him a thinker Southern accent. Yeah, good.

We work in archetypes.

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

Lean into it.

That's actually a bad thing. I like John Skipper a lot, but he had some personal issues, the same thing. Again, somebody new takes over and they don't have this All of a sudden, the instrument'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. All their businesses began to hit headwinds, and we were set up as literally as 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 five million instead of making five million, who cares? But then when you're under financial pressure, that is not going to hold up very well. We're 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 for it exactly. Then there's also the issue of if you're creative, then everyone wants to have this brand expansion. But if you're the major creative force, it only expands so much. People want you ultimately, right? Yeah. There are ways around that. There are some things that do scale.

The models that we build, they get a lot of traffic. I could hire somebody now, and we're in the process of doing this all over again at the Substake Silver Bulletin now. But much slower, I thought we have to hire as many people as possible right now. When you get to ESPN, I talked to Bill Simmons was at Grantland before that, and he's like, Everything If you're the one that you want, ask for it right now. Because you'll never have more leverage than you'll have right now.

They're in the wooing you phase.

Ask for business class travel because it's a reasonable thing if you're busy. But if you ask for that in the next contract negotiation when you're losing money, then... But ask Lock that now. Lock that in right now.

Yeah, that's sage advice.

But then you wind up with 25 people all starting new at the same time. We didn't understand that you need to have a product team and an advertising team. It was just 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 an NFL deal or a movie or a theme park. I mean, the whole city of Orlando, especially 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 have to deal with money. It's like, no, actually, I fucking like making money. I like business, right? I like for this to be a growing business because anytime you try to hire somebody, we hire good people. We're like, what's a long-term plan? We're like, well, we don't know. This You like this? It's under contract for three more years, so why would you worry about it? And all 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 felt like I wanted to be one of those 1970s magazine editors. We were 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.

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Okay, so you're there for a while, but in 2012, you write The Signal and the Noise, and that's a really successful book. My apologies, I haven't read that one. The fact that I read on the Edge is really a fluke. I always go to Audible and I know exactly what I'm going there to get, and I just happened to stumble upon your book. That's 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 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 in some degree of disagreeability, I I appreciate greatly. And the book is 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 Holdem 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. That's possible origin of that term. If not, let's keep it because it's so funny.

Yeah, I like The turn. Oh, that's the second to last one?

Flop, turn, river. Got it.

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 bucks to try and win the five bucks and the 10 bucks. 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. 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. It's a very complex game. Actually, it took longer to solve poker than to solve chess. It is 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.

It can play poker better than a human, although there are a lot of caveats there. One is that humans are not playing poker perfectly. The whole thing you learn about poker strategy, we actually study how computers play poker, 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.

I've played a bunch of Texas Holden, 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 it depends on cards that come in other things, 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 it 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, but when they have a good, 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. It's also like a type of discipline. In the abstract, there are computer programs you with in coaching videos. I have a poker coach who's the poker equivalent of a trainer, basically. But can you execute when all of a sudden you're playing for $50,000?

Or at the final table of some tournament.

Yeah, and I played in the World Series 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 of hundred thousand dollars. You don't get to cash them in right away. My parents would have been like, Oh, you have a million chips. They're like, You want a million bucks? No, I have chips. And the exchange rate is like 10 to one. In the World Series, the main event, there are 10,000 players now. There are not 10,000 good poker players in the United States. They're amateurs and they're so nervous. They're shaking. It becomes learning how to deal with a flow state and a little bit of stage fright and executing in those high pressure situations. When you do it enough, I'm a very talented amateur.

He's won $40,000 in tournament play.

Then how can you be an amateur?

That's gross, not net.

That's gross, I know. We're always talking about gross net. Let's focus on the winnings right now so I can prove to her you're a good poker player.

Kind of developed a little bit of a sicko tendency. I feel more alive when I'm playing for real money and more focused and in a weird fucked up way, even 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. 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. 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. They also have the same thing, which is your body is working on a different chemical system, a different operating system when you're under stress. 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 is 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 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, but we do Doyle Johnson, a very famous poker player. And then we do Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist. You do Sam Bankman-Fried, which is very interesting, of course, FTX. And then you do Sam Altman. So these are people that all would fall into this group you refer to as the River. They live 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? 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's a Christian.

He's a Christian of some sort.

He's a right wing-ish 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 has a 12-year-old mindset. Whereas Teal, he's quoting from scripture and philosophy.

The Classics. He's a brilliant dude.

Yeah, and he was like, Okay, well, Nate, 10 years ago, all this money ball 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 models that everyone else has.

That's no longer an advantage. The money ball thing has been played to its logical ends.

I think it's probably fairly close to being true. But he was an early adopter of Trump in 2016. He will say that, Oh, I thought it was a good contrarian bet that maybe the odds are 50%, not in its 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 interest would clash in lots of different ways. Silicon Silicon Valley would come under scrutiny for lots of good and bad reasons. What are the effects of cell phones and social media? What are the effects of very powerful people owning individual media brands? Or all the satellites. The tremendous accumulation of wealth. At the same time, Silicon Valley has a cliched image of itself where it's like, we are the ones who think differently and we are contrarian. We're disruptors. In some ways, it's still quite impressive. Despite all the things that America fucks up, we still have the best talent from all around the world coming to California in particular, coming to Silicon Valley, even though it's 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 10 is good, and they understand probability. They understand that if you are making a lot of high upside, high risk bets, if you make enough of those, actually they pay off pretty well. If you have a one in 10 chance of having 100 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. The The question was, yeah, these jocks have made it insufferable to live here, but now the nerds are the jocks, and now we're seeing their version of it. I 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 disempowering or agreed when, objectively speaking, Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen and Elon, they're doing really fucking well, right? Yeah. They're as wealthy as any people have ever been in the history of the universe or the world, at least.

Shape the world they live in pretty dramatically.

The book gives them a perfectly fair shake. They're sore winners. The average Silicon Valley CEO is still probably a progressive Democrat. There was a much more sizable Trump faction. This is the book. The book anticipated that. People make the mistake of assuming that things just trend linearly upward forever, right? And the world's a story, more or less, of mean reversion. There is a broad God-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. Just watch the writes 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 leave that up to of the pundits, I suppose. The They/ Them ad is partly about wokeness, but also about other things. It's about taxpayer money. It's about Kamala Harris seeming 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. Hardest chip is a drug, it's a cliché.

Both sides is a cancer. I'm watching the people on the right celebrate the LA's burning down. 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 around. We're in the middle of it. It's not even like recriminations. Exactly. How that started just instantly.

It immediately was political.

You just won this election. You're going to gain a lot of power and you get nice little revenge against the left, but just chill out.

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 Well, if they were quiet, maybe the other people wouldn't be like, Oh, I'm happy their houses are burning down. But Trump is literally calling him Gavin Nuiskum right now. Are you kidding me? You're our president.

It's like the chill to chill ratio. I had I'm workshopping. In the short run, chill works. People are called to action and alarmed. I go back to September 11th and the patriotism phase. That works in the short run, 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 it as something about DEI and the lesbian. Oh, yeah. I want the lesbian fire chief 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 the McDonald's burning in 100 degree stormfire. This proves what corporate politics are doing to the climate. It's like, yeah, you can maybe wait.

I know It's 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. We even heard this when we listened to the Metta 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 shabbly you show up for your first meeting, the more trustworthy you are, it's so funny.

Sam McFreed played into this cliché. He's self-described on the spectrum. I'm not a guy who's going to wear a suit and tie, but he's like, If I am playing video games in investor pitch meetings, that will make me seem cool. I have so much RAM. I need to offload something that's playing a video game while I'm multitasking. He played in that stereotype and was quite deliberate because they're very intense pattern matchers. Zuckerberg, he was seeing this 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. 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 insane if you're the industry that wants to be disruptive and wants high variance, grit and all these things. They're such intense pattern matchers. And because they can't lose. The average venture capital firm, mediocre firm, isn't doing that well.

But the top firms 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 beg to be on a team. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about Sam Bankman-Fried because you spend a lot of time with him. And why do you think he was willing to sit with you?

I know the answer. 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, because I do think the layman, they hear it all the time, but they're not sure what happened.

So Sam Bankman-Fried was a nerdy Mathe kid. His parents were professors at Stanford. I think his mother was a philosophy professor. His dad was a law professor. A lot of smart kids got initially into finance at a firm called Jane Street Capital, which is a big quantitative hedge fund. At some point, he also got into something called effective altruism. Basically, it's money ball, but for charity. It was the pitch.

Earmark that because my very favorite part of the entire book was the effective altruism part. I want to talk a lot about that, but it was his earmark that he got into that. He's at some financial place.

We're Looking for a hedge fund. This is in his internal monolog that is probably unreliable to some degree. But he's like, So I want to make a lot of money so I can donate it to poor children in Africa. This is the cliched version of it. To help prevent malaria at a very cost-effective rate. They do much other weirder shit, too, involving AI and animal welfare and things like that. He's like, I'm not making enough money at this hedge fund, and so I'm going to start my own firm. His co founder quits because he seems crazy. One thing you learn about the book is all these people who think of themselves as hyper rational and are thought of by others as hyper rational, a lot of me just look at degenerate gamblers at heart. Often skilled and smart degenerate gamblers.

Incredibly impulsive, right?

Impulsive and stimulus-driven.

He's also on Adderall, right?

He said that wasn't that big a part of this story.

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... If you're hungry, then you're playing poker for 12. 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, but it's going to affect performance and mentality. Long story short, starts a fund called Alameda, it has some fall out there, but begins to make more and more money, eventually realizes if you If you 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 was back when Bitcoin was a somewhat more obscure thing. And so, yeah, if you could somehow find a way to buy Bitcoin in South Korea, but makes us money, and then founds 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 I have to find somebody to sell me crypto, which is not a completely trivial problem. You have to enter this 26-digit code, and you can see what crypto is a bit intimidating, which if you go to 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 see for all these firms. In 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. So 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 the world's first trillionaire Trillionaires.

These are all so counter. I want to be so altristic, and I want to be the president and a trillionaire.

A little suspicious.

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 to get the rules changed.

Okay. Who was the big backer of FTX?

Alfred Lynn was a partner there. But you know, Sequoia is 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 They're not even smart in the way you would think someone would smart. They said they would do it again, right?

All that can happen is it goes to zero. You go from one to zero, who cares, right? You go from one to infinity, even that outweighs a lot of one to zeros. They were at least honest by saying, we do this again. Now, there is some, I believe, shareholder your actions. 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. I'm sure it's true in Hollywood, but it's also true in the nerdier occupations, We've interviewed MacCaskill, and we adore him.

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. Maybe lay out effective altruism.

Effective altruism originally 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 save the most lights?

You could save a life for 5,000 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. That mindset, though, becomes quite fraught, even though I think it's right. You're putting a value now on different things. That already is a little bit fraught. What is the value of donating to the symphony, for example? 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 in the book is that there was a puppy Poodle, who got stuck in the New York City subway system a few years ago. Should we stop the entire F train to rescue Dakota? And they decided to stop the F train. But you wouldn't do that for a squirrel. You'd run out of the fucking squirrel or a cat probably gets run over. And a dog, we just assign enough more of that. And then it gets wind.

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 of 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 two million. So how many humans can you save for two 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.

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 making shit up on the back of an envelope, and sometimes it's the best you can do. We had to make these decisions again under COVID, and maybe if we've been more thoughtful about them, what is the cost of shutting down school in Los Angeles for 19 months? We probably should have 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. What's happened, though, with EA, the mandate expanded for various reasons, from charitable giving to anything 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 could say, Well, Nate has infinite units of utility and you guys 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 eat at RVs now and then.

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 conclusion 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, it'll hit one person. Well, three's life saved is better than one. But what if the three dudes just You can hangrape 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 game that has structure and tools. I know how much you can have a garbage in, garbage out problem, and some parameters are robust, where 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 will be penalized. There's an 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 how Sam Bankman-Fried, 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 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. This 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 contiism. There has to be a principle called democracy that rises above all that.

In some ways, the The minimize of Twitter was mispredicted. People thought, Oh, the engineers will leave and Twitter will basically collapse the infrastructure, which it hasn't happened. It remains very influential. But you could say that Elon Musk spent $44 billion, certainly by the time he bought it and was trying to find ways out, probably knowing that's not a good ROI from a hero financial standpoint.

He's going to lose money on that.

But he's willing to spend, let's say, half of that. Let's say the real value is $20 billion. So he's spending $25 billion on the 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 pocket change to him, and I think it has a huge effect on the discourse. I don't blame Silicon Valley for saying, Hey, we're going to stand up and defend our interest. 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. Meanwhile, the news media has become very anti-tech.

There's 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 clenching towards this agrarian hatred.

It's this weird barbapole thing where somehow Donald Trump, I don't even want to get into Donald Trump's finances, but because he's a poor person's idea of a rich person, he gets to get past 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 stuff about how traitors behave and how bookablers 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. It's very interesting to have you sit with Sam Brankman-Fried 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 interviewed him four or five days before he got arrested and taken into custody. His mind is reeling like it's a video game, trying to figure out, how can I somehow get out of this mess? He was someone I actually find it 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 give away all your electronics. I'm like, writing on this hotel notepad. I hadn't actually written that much, so I can't make small letters anymore. It's like the landing form in the aircraft. I can't even see these questions. He has an ankle bracelet. This is serious, right? Then I asked him, What if you could get two years probation? You settle the court case, and at the time, people knew he was pretty dead to rights. It's like, Yeah, I have to think about it. He was 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.

He's actually a very bad, miscalculating type.

Let's just close with Sam Altman. 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.

He worked for a firm called Young Combinator, which is an incubator. They would go through and look at lots of very early stage pitches or founding teams, give them a small amount You get a lot 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. His skillset is really knowing a little bit about a lot and being a good worker. He is not, I don't think, a coding genius.

It'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 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. It's expensive. To buy a compute is expensive. 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, who was an early investor, all these people, he was playing the captain of that fantasy baseball team. Sam is an effective politician. He understands different constituencies in Silicon Valley, reflects their ideology, and is very risk-averse. Sam McEgan-Fried, again, SBF, not Sam Altman, literally said repeatedly, 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.

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. Then he has 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.

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. Then all of a sudden with GPT-2, and then certainly three and beyond that, it's like this is miraculous.

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. 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 and things like that. Most of them are secular. I 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 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. I talked to him in summer 2022. The book took four years to write. At first, I was trying to get another interview later on once QPT 3. 5 had come out. They were friendly, but Sam was traveling the world for the next six months. He first do interviews in person, so it might be difficult.

You come to Cambodia? At first, this interview is a year and a half long, 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 is not a typical strategy. 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 all the people in the river, think about these things and to think in terms of cost-benefit analysis. You layer on top of that, typical startup founder ego, feeling like you're oppressed when you're actually very powerful, right?

Having this run of success, having lots of money and people who are sycophantic in your general orbit. We've not talked quite enough about just a lot of plain old competitiveness, wanting to compete and win. Capitalism will triumph for better and worse because the people who want to compete are going to outcompetent people who don't want to compete. Unless you entirely suppress competition, then competition is going to win. It's a very hard problem to balance out.

Nate, this has been awesome. I love your book. One of the things I love that you point out in the book is 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 what some of these people are doing is they keep bludging 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 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. 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 flumber.

Before the book, the print edition, you can bounce your way through. I am 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 version.

Yeah, that's Malcolm, too. Malcolm Gladwell says you should listen to his books.

Constraints are good. I want to force you to in the order the author is. Yeah, right.

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

Happy birthday. Happy birthday. Thank you. Happy birthday. Thanks for joining us for your birthday.

It was really fun. I think you guys both were.

I look forward to your next book, and happy birthday. Stay tuned for more of our Share Expert, if you dare. What's up, everybody? It's Jason Kelsi, and I'm here with my slightly famous little brother Travis, a. K. A. Big Yeti Kelsi.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, we're here to bring you a next-level entertainment experience with our show, New Heights, where the lumbaby reigns supreme.

We're covering all the hardest-hitting topics in order of importance: UFO sightings, the ideal PB&J combo, and Travis becoming a big-time acting star.

Big time is a big stretch. We've got can't miss A-list interviews, though.

That's right. And of course, next level access to life inside the NFL and in the booth. Just because I retire doesn't mean I'm out of the game.

Yeah, I mean, The old dad shoes suggest otherwise, but those are the I'm out the game shoes right there.

Listen and watch New Heights wherever you get your podcast. If you want to listen to us first without any interruptions and get bonus content, join One3 Plus in the WNDYR app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

At 24, I lost my narrative, or rather, it was stolen from me.

The Monica Lewinsky that my friends and family knew was usurped by false narratives, callous jokes, and politics.

I would define reclaiming as to take back what was yours. Something you possess is lost or stolen, and ultimately, you triumph in finding it again.

I think listeners can expect me to be chatting with folks both recognizable and unrecognizable names about the way that people have navigated roads to triumph.

My hope is that people will finish an episode of reclaiming and feel like they filled their tank up. They connected with the people that I'm talking to and leave with maybe some nuggets that help them feel a little more hopeful.

Follow Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky on the WNDYRI app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Reclaiming early and ad-free right now by joining WNDYRI Plus in the WNDRI app or on Apple podcasts. Imagine this. You help your little brother land a great job abroad, but when he arrives, the job doesn't exist. Instead, he's trapped in a heavily guarded compound. Forced to sit at a computer and scam innocent victims, all while armed guards stand by with shoot to kill orders. Scam Factory, the explosive new True Crime podcast from WNDRI, exposes a a multibillion dollar criminal empire operating in plain sight. Told through one family's harrowing account of sleepless nights, desperate phone calls, and dangerous rescue attempts, Scam Factory reveals a brutal truth. The only way out is to scam their way out. Follow Scam Factory on the WNDYRY app or wherever you get your podcast. You can binge all episodes of Scam Factory early and ad-free right now by joining WNDYRI Plus. Stay tuned for the Fact Check. 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 BC.

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.

I think Kristen ordered them.

Oh, cute.

You're right. He has sent us Diet Coke. It's a natural thought.

Yeah. Is that Diet or Regs? Diet. This is an amazing ding, ding, ding. Oh.

But for our next- A different guest.

Yeah.

Oh, okay. I don't know. Year market. 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 listen to?

I listen to Nobody's listening, right? Elizabeth and Andy, my favorite podcast. And then they start- That's your blanky. . That's my- Your binky.

My- My- My- Auditory binky.

What's it? Lovey. That's my lovey. Okay.

Or 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 of 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. But I had three different bears.

Do you still have any of them?

I wish. My mom is ruthless. I moved out. She just had a garage sale and just fucking dumped all my stuff. Yeah.

I know.

Can you imagine buying my used Teddy bear? She might have thrown those away.

I think this is a ding, ding, ding for It is. Long time coming. Oh, all right.

We had delayed. Oh, Laberty. Did you have Laberti cleaned?

Laberti 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.

Our mules.

He does look a little cleaner than usual. I He's a mess. For the listener, I'm holding liberti, my beanie baby, who's covered in poopoo.

Yeah, he's a mess.

He's 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 lovie.

This is my 401k. I still remember- What is on him? Fecal matter.

No.

It is.

Like from a rat or something?

No, I think he swiped 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. They just put everything in some big bags.

Hold on. They're not even close. Everything you had as a kid is still in your room?

No, because my brother moved out. He moved in. So then everything got thrown into these bags. Catalogs. And then thrown in the basement. But it was literally everything. Just like, random, like a sticky note is it. They just threw it all in a bag. Sure. So this Laberté obviously got thrown face down And then 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 him 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. I don't smell anything. No, it doesn't smell.

It doesn't smell. But boy, it does look like- Listen, I'm not- Doodle's.

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 Those ones look clean, but that means they're not as unique as mine. Well, that's for sure.

This is the only poopy libert there is.

It's like a warhol. 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 I want to protect- 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.

It's missing the art thing that has its name. But his name is still on his butt. It says it on the tag where he put.

What it lacks in tag, it makes up for in the bris all over his fur.

Anyway. Anywho. I don't have any loveies.

Well, again- What were you waiting to bring it out to tell me that there were $700 on eBay?

Yeah, $700. There's a one for 674, one for 750. $500. But this is like- You thought at one point it was worth- Like, $20,000.

$20,000.

It was. He comes up in this episode. Right. Which is why that's a ding, ding, ding.

He's going to- The shocker that Nate didn't offer to buy it. He 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 Lashit 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. He's annoying. Yeah.

He got it the trash.

He got it the trash. He's a little 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, libert, but this is the only devil, libert in the whole world.

That's the only id. Yeah. I have something I want to announce. Let's hear it. I have a few things. 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 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, X, please tell Monica, she should get a miniature King Sam in Burmese Yorkshire pincher. They were so specific, the different breeds you need. And everyone has a favorite breed. If you want to Here are some testimonials, there are a couple of hundred waiting for you. Okay. Then another thing I want to say is I read a great book by a friend of the pod's wife, Allison Grant, Adam's wife. Oh, nice. She wrote a book called I Am The Cage, and it's really, really good. It's about this young woman who's living in this 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 And 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.

It's- Ding, ding, ding.

Tell me.

Remember, we had I guessed on once whose brother had that surgery and he passed away from it. Yeah.

Horrible. Yeah. In the book, the character is told by the nurse, you're in good hands. He's the best in the country. Then she asks, How many people do this procedure? He's 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. I don't want to comfort anyone. I would imagine it be liberating to hear someone speak so honestly about how much they dislike all these interactions.

Sure. 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 on February 18th.

Okay, great.

So pre-order it. I really recommend it. It's fantastic. I'm the cage.

I'll read it.

I don't read many novels. I could feel there was enough reality in it.

Yeah. Well, the best novels do that. Yeah. You probably just haven't read any good ones.

I've never read a good novel. That's what it is.

I really like reading novels. I mean, I feel for all of them.

You're a fantasy girl. You're a cookie boy and a fantasy girl.

I am. Both of those things. 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. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

Hey, everyone. One, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. Did you know I host a podcast called Baby, This is Kiki Palmer, and you're not going to believe the conversations I've had. Like, is OnlyFans, OnlyBad?

How has dating changed in the digital age?

What's the deal with Disney adults? I've talked to John Stamos, the VP, Kamala Hertz, to Jordan Peel, Raven Simone, and yes, the one and only Jamila Jamil. And just wait until you hear our conversation.

We talk Twitter drama, bad dates, and then time.

How the hell do you actually get sexy? What the hell does that mean? I know I know how to be funny.

I know how to be like, you know what I'm saying?

Exactly. I don't really know how to be like, and take your-I'm not Robin fucking Givens. It's like, how do people do that? I've been in this situation too many times and not felt any of those things.

The dull eyes, the quiet.

I've never been quiet a moment in my fucking life.

Yes.

On Baby, This is Kiki Palmer. No topic is off limits. Follow Baby, This is Kiki Palmer on the WNDRI app or wherever you get your podcast. You can listen early and ad free right now by joining WNDRI Plus. 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.

It's a great survival mechanism. Yeah. Until you don't need it anymore to survive.

But you still use it.

Every now and then. 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 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 at the win and go, I love you, Reine, and just force yourself.

No, to be clear, it is raining. It's been raining for the past couple of 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 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.

Does that mitigate how much suffering there is?

Yes. There's many things at play. I'm starting to feel really agitated It's that.

Right. Not the person.

Not the thing or the person or whatever. And so that's helpful to know.

I do that. Yeah. Really helps. I mean, you got to do it with children. Oh, I bet. 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. I guess that's CBT. It is.

Also, Also, I feel like you've been in a low mood. Yeah.

I had a good couple, three weeks of feeling down.

Depressed. Depressed. Yeah. That is clear to me, right? We We've talked, we have talked about it on here. 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. When you are not at your happiest, oh, it's not my turn to also be in that headspace. It's my turn to be the other type of person in this setting or in this duo. I don't know. I find that liberating. It's like, okay, this isn't the time for me to indulge my thing.

Because you learn you can control it if you're forest, too.

It's not that set in stone. I am able to overcome it 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 Guerrillas and the Mist is so seared into my mind, but I think maybe that was the first time I saw that tropical misty foliage. It really captivated my imagination when I was younger. And so anytime I see Columbia when they show the mountainside and it's very damp and moist, I love it. I was looking at it and I was like, Oh, I can't wait to go hiking in there. There's going to be the visibility will be low. There was virtually no one out there, which is never the case.

The rain will do that.

To the point where I was like, Is it shut down again, and I'm now doing it again. But no, I saw a couple of other folks.

I wonder if aversion terrain/seasonal affective disorder is like misophonia. It's a gene. Probably. Because I'm talking about the mist, and I want- You can intellectually understand.

I understand. It's like atmosphere in a movie. They pump scenes full of dust so that there's a texture to the air. Yes. 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 I really do. Quite light. But I want to like it. Maybe that'll be my New Year's resolution. And this year, the new year started again in February.

Yeah, I feel it.

Yeah.

My mood broke almost on February. February. Yeah, or the day before or something. God, can I tell you something embarrassing? Well, let me first say that whiskey... What's related to that? Whisky has diureated his cage four nights in a row.

Uh-oh. He is Noreo.

The fact that Chris hasn't killed herself yet, she's been up every night for the last four nights dealing with his- Dealing with that?

Can he wear a diaper?

He should. Well, he went to the vet yesterday, and he, by the way, 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... You can't even approach him. So they had to anesthetize him just to take his blood and run some tests. So when he came home, he was completely fucked up, right? He was fucked up all... I was jealous. I'm like, what did 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 libert. He is.

So he did not have any haunt us 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 duty.

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. 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?

No, I was wearing my sleep pants. No panties, just my sleep pants.

Okay, but you were cover.

But I didn't get anything on anything. It was just a tiny bit of... Yeah. Do you think- But I got really close... I just 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 would have had to clean up your duty, too.

No, she was downstairs on watch for the other duty boy.

Oh, wow.

So everyone was celebrating this morning that there was no haunt us, and I didn't have the heart to say there was something last night.

There was just a tiny I knew that.

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 Kristin's making. 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 said, Let's go half and half. And then she made that, and it was so good.

Half and half with gluten?

Yeah. Got it. And it was much better. It cooked better. It was fluffier. It was so delicious. And I had a couple of slices in the morning, and I think that's why I whiskyed last night.

You tonk it.

Well, no, tonka- 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 ipsy you almost miss. It's like animal. Okay.

I'm not going to I'm not going to talk about it, but we had similar situations. Sort of. Last night?

Yeah.

Sort of. Not really, but interesting that you- Wait, in your new outfit? Yeah, but I didn't have any poop.

But you thought you did. Why? I don't want to talk about it. I was so vulnerable. I'm so revealing.

You always are. Well- Women can't get away with that. 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 nursing a novel 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 60 I don't hear all these stories, I hope? A Hollywood tell-all, and it's just all about your Tonka experience. There's only been...

I've only Tonkaed once.

Right. In my whole life. And then one of those other situation is.

This isn't worth it. This would not even make a chapter. Okay, great. It's at best two lines.

Okay.

More like a quote I'd put in my memoir.

In a greater story. Just a quote.

Yeah. It's under the title, the little quote. It's nothing. Okay. Okay. Speaking of gross things.

Yeah.

Salmon, semen, skincare. Oh, yeah. Okay. This is all the rage. It's because Spam and sperm shares a lot of DNA with us. Okay. We used to have vampire facials. I mean, they still do them, but that's where they would take your blood out in and then- Spin it? Yeah.

Get the platelets or something?

Yeah, they spin it and zhujet, and then they put it back in.

Do you think it's stem cell-y?

I think they're trying to make it. Look, allegedly, I never did it, and then I am not I'm not going to try it.

No, I'm not. But it was a thing. But you do want the salmon ejaculate.

I'm interested in that. Yeah. Salmon ejaculate is the actual- Clinical term.

Have you found a place in LA that does salmon ejaculate?

No, it's not FDA approved.

Oh, I'm so show.

Yet. It's not FDA approved yet. But if you go to South Korea, you can get it.

Oh, so if 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, Smallface. Oh, what's that? I think it made his face small. Oh, wow. Yeah. They do all kinds of things. Wow. Now, it's called Rejuran. 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. We have a friend who's done this, by the way.

Hold on a second. So under the skin. So they're shooting it in deep. It's not a topical.

Right. It's 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, but That she said she's gotten a lot of compliments and that she looks visibly different. Oh, wow. I know. Wow. It's supposed to improve elasticity, reduction of fine lines and wrinkles, increase skin hydration, and improved healing capabilities of the skin from damage.

How do I 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. It's like helps with- 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 not going to get it. Oh, you're not?

No. This is confusing. I know.

I'm not for sure you're going to get it. 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 No, 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. 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 Jed and I had told us about. Yes. You got to be perfect in all other domains. Yeah. 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 more- That could be part of it. That'd be more...

Yeah, that would be. That would implicate my ego better.

We need to get Charles spell 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 three times. 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, SWATI.

Yes, 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 back.

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 Sokrent, and some friends created the game at a restaurant in Manhattan. Now, the price of Bitcoin today.

Okay, here we go. The Bitcoin Ticker Tate podcast with your host, Monica Padman.

96,428. 22. It's a drop.

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 jinksing it if I were a heavily invested in Bitcoin. I started a new book.

Oh my God, you are reading so much.

I had no interest in Sam- Franklin Fried. But now here, he was in Nate's book. And then who's our man who... My 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, I'll read his most recent book. I've liked the other ones. And it's about Sam Beekman Friedmann.

Bankman Friedmann.

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 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, man, we're supposed to do a puzzle on here. You were supposed to give the example from the book couple- I know. Fuck. Yeah. Luckily, we threw them a bone with this dog thing. They're off the sand, but a couple of people did bring a Are you doing- No.

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 I haven't even finished it. And I was supposed to read it at Christmas. Oh, Oh, no. 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 in an interesting life.

Way outside of what I can comprehend. 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 high- Yes.

And the stock market also is good.

Exactly. And it's dog It's all the same thing.

Yeah. It's all gambling. It's all risk. It's all percentages. Cool. Yeah. Very cool. All right. Young lives. All right.

Love you. Bye.

I love you.

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