Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard - Nate Silver (statistician)

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

Nate Silver (On the Edge, The Signal and the Noise, Baseball Between the Numbers) is a statistician, author, and founder of FiveThirtyEight. Nate joins the Armchair Expert to discuss his youthful aspirations for a starter job as US president with a promotion to baseball commissioner, how code-switching as a gay man of his cohort can translate to success, and defying the odds by quitting his first job to play online poker. Nate and Dax talk about learning statistical models as a hobbyist because academics don’t have the street smarts, the phenomenon of sore winners in tech, and the adage that the more shabbily you show up for your first meeting the more trustworthy you are. Nate explains that the dopamine felt especially by men during a winning streak is effectively a narcotic, how figures like Sam Bankman-Fried are kind of degenerate gamblers at heart, and why the new alpha move in industry is just to trust your gut.Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, experts on expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Monica Padman. Hi.

Hi, we have our first, I think, statitician on today. Ooh, is it our first? That's a big swing. Nate Silver is the point. He's a statistician and a bestselling author. Everyone would know Nate Silver around election time. All of his computations end up as headlines all the time. He had an incredible track record for a while. There were a couple deviations that we'll learn of.

But his books include The Signal and The Noise, and he has a new book out that I 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. And also you can go to his sub stack at Silver Bulletin, which is where he's doing all of his work now. And that's a fun play on words. Silver Bulletin. Silver Bulletin. No problem for you. You hit that like a silver bullet. Please enjoy Nate Silver. You just realized your business

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And listeners of this show will get a $100 sponsored job credit to get your job's more visibility at indeed.com slash wonder ECA. Just go to indeed.com slash wonder ECA right now and support our show by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash wonder ECA. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring indeed is all you need. He's an uptrend's boy. He's an up While you were in do you say soul yeah, how's that?

So is great, but they have these cool bars and restaurants and art galleries. It's very vibrant. I really want to go. And they have great skincare. Oh, I know. They have snail serums. That's old. That's made its way to America.

Now they have salmon sperm. Ooh, salmon sperm. Sign me up. You get it injected, then you look 14. You could really end up pregnant with all this skincare routine. You're really good. It's dangerous.

So Nate, I want to start by saying happy birthday to you. Happy birthday. Yeah, you're here on your birthday. This is a very Capricorn thing to do. You kinda 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 wanna have a birthday so soon after the holidays. Well, mine's the second. So I'd argue mine's just 11 days worse than yours. Yay. Because it's right on the heels of all that. That's probably bad.

And are you in general somebody who has no desire to celebrate your birthday? I come from a mixed family where my dad's side's very anti-celebration, my mom's side's very pro-celebration. Okay. I'm kind of balancing out the recessive traits. You're right smack in the middle.

Well, as I was learning a little bit more about your background, I was like, we have a lot in common here, cause I'm from Milford. Oh cool. Which is what 25 miles is the crow flies from East Lansing. And your dad taught at MSU or still does? He retired a couple of years ago,

but yeah I taught at MSU, so like a university kid. It's a good place to grow up. I found that I have like an unconscious hiring bias toward mid Westerners. They're just grounded. Well again, you want them somewhere on the spectrum where they're not constantly bitching about someone who tried to get one over on them.

You know, we do have a big chip on our shoulder about feeling less than. So you want just the right amount of lessons 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, I'm like, that person sounds really familiar,

and they're from East Lansing, I didn't know who they are, they should like a certain manner of speaking, you know those micro dialect things. I think we have a little bit of that. So you kind of discovered that you love math in a very appropriate time. So I only know the members of a single baseball team

that ever existed. It's the 84 Roar, the Detroit Tigers. Yeah. Alan Tramway, I know his name. Gibson. Graham Parish. Yeah, know the whole gang. You were six-ish when that happened?

I was six years old and I like numbers I don't think I ever thought I could become a baseball player was like never that delusional right right right right in fifth grade We had to write these biographies of what our future life would look like basically I have myself becoming president at some point. Oh wow of America I retired the president seat will 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 importance, though. This is the starter job of the presidency. Weirdly, that trajectory kind of makes sense. I was also watching the Aaron Rodgers documentary recently. I don't know if you've caught that. I haven't seen it yet. But he, too, is talking about, he would play this weird board game,

and it was all about stats, and you would roll these dice. Trenematic. That's what it was called. Yeah. And so I think a lot of you inadvertently just practicing math non-stop without even realizing you were doing it. I collected baseball cards. It was like a baseball card bubble. Your net worth is now five thousand bucks. But like an eight-year-old took a lot of money. Oh yeah yeah. It's like the NFTs of the late 80s. All collectibles ultimately. Beanie Babies. Monica has one that she believed at one point was worth.

Yeah, Liberti, it's here. It's covered in shit though, so we think it's degraded. 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. So you're super into baseball, you're crushing numbers as a hobby.

You're also gay. I wouldn't even know you're gay because I know the vibe in Michigan in the 80s and I know that I was living every minute of every day on the playground trying to avoid being called. Yeah. That was the number one go-to way to emasculate. I'm exactly old enough, I turned 47.

Just three years later would have been pretty different. The experience of going through school, you say something that I relate to for different reasons, but there's some value to feeling like an outsider from the get. If you look now at gay men of my cohort, they're often quite successful, right? Yeah, yeah, best boy syndrome. Yeah, because they have like a little bit of what it feels like to be an outsider. If you're otherwise privileged, but you got a couple of things, right? You're gay and you're half Jewish.

Just got a little bit of the flavor of- Adversity. Adversity, but also the ability to code switch, I guess is the term. Ah, aha. Assimilate, have a secret, have a perspective. You're not necessarily volunteering your entire self at all times.

It's also useful in poker and it's useful in journalism. You don't want to volunteer information. In poker, there's a cost to volunteering information. And so learning to be a bit more guarded and feeling like there's no kind of template I can follow that's exactly gonna meet my needs, right? 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. 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 moon. Okay. Pretty big one. Yeah. They were super overachieving, my dad's side.

I have a famous arsonist on my mom's side. He got like written up in the New York Times. He like invented new forms of arson and insurance fraud. I'm not actually like an overachieving type. I kind of do it despite myself really. And so I take after that side of the family, I think. You end up getting a degree in economics and then you end up working for a few years as a consultant.

I was a as a consultant. I was a transfer pricing consultant. Okay, what is transfer pricing consultant? Basically when you have a multinational company and different parts of the company make different things, like you have Apple cell phone and they make semiconductors in Taiwan and the screen in Bangladesh. How you price that can be used to optimize your tax policy. So basically it's how do you optimize your tax policy without getting sued by the government. Okay. Really valuable work we were doing. It wasn't nourishing your soul.

But I hadn't really thought about it. When you actually have the chance for the first time to earn a paycheck, it's kind of exciting. Oh, big time. And I glossed over, you were also a Michigan State champ debater. You also wrote for the high school newspaper. Also in college, you wrote for the Chicago Maroon.

You're writing the whole time, and you're also doing all this stat work for fun with sports still, you're still obsessed. And then you create and explain this to us what Picota is. So Picota, the anagram is very, I'm not going to bore your listeners for even 15 seconds. You'd be shocked with their tolerance for boredom. If you don't say it, I'm going to have to say it

on the fact check. So you might as well say it now. Picture empirical comparison. It's deliberately nerdy. An optimization test algorithm, I think. But it's also a nod to a player. This obscure player who is always like a thwart 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 reverse a name, but it was like a backward name. Acronym. I never heard of backward name. Me neither. It's like DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. So they kind of come up with the acronym and then figure out some letters later to make it match the acronym they like. Oh, I see.

It's kind of like a... They're working backwards. I got it. Oh, that makes sense. Backward name. That's also how we process the world. We make sense of it after it happened and we think we understood it before it happened.

And it only makes sense after the fact. I have a friend who's a neuroscientist and he's like, yeah, our brain is just kind of just predicting and inferring. We never actually know what reality is. We're just making like an expedient internal map simulation. We're modeling, which you ultimately do. We're just modeling the future and then our data set is something that is heavily subjective because we make it make sense in reverse. Of course. We go all this happened is because of X Y & Z but we don't know that's just what we kind of cling to. Okay so you create this thing and what is the goal of PECOTA? It's to forecast how baseball players will do. The innovation is that most predictions will just say okay this

player Shohei Otani will hit 302 with 42 home runs and 108 RBI's next year. Whereas this gave like a range of options, so it was probabilistic. And that's kind of one of my big things is, we don't know the future. Baseball players get injured or stop using steroids, whatever else. They're hungover, they get divorced.

They're human beings and there's luck. But no, the idea is to have like a range of outcomes. And so you're dealing with the uncertainty in the outlook. But yeah, people use it for fantasy baseball, major league teams used it. You did this in 2000. Was there already fantasy baseball at that time? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, fantasy baseball. Major league teams used it. You did this in 2000? Was there already fantasy baseball at that time? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, fantasy baseball gets back to the 80s. Is Pacota moneyball? Well- It's kind of 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. Pacota's a couple years before that.

About the same time. So coincidentally, the company was called Baseball Prospectus, and this kind of blows up in part because of Moneyball and the Red Sox who are being very stat friendly win the World Series in 2004. Yeah, it becomes a whole thing. Okay, now this is where you're really

gonna 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 gonna use to determine this and I bet there's a lot of decision making just there like what are we going to include what were you doing

that was novel about it. People have this bad habit of pretending that oh the model just flaws out of a coconut tree it'll quote former President's candidate Kamala Harris and no you have to make a lot of decisions in sports at least the data is high quality we record everything that happens on a major league playing field but you're making decisions at every turn a lot of it is about where you add more complexity and where you're pruning because models break happens on a major league playing field. you've picked the variables of data says, right, I think if you like already have the answer you want, that's not really objective science either. So it's kind of this iterative process between I want to systematize so I have to follow rules and not just be totally ad hoc. If I feel like it's handling

this player badly or this election badly for a politics model and I change the rules, what's that mean for the other elections? What's that mean for the whole system overall? It's not like there's just one right answer. What are hedge funds and banks doing or what are the best sports bettors doing? They're usually using multiple models. You want a model that's robust. So basically if one thing breaks and it will still spit out a reasonable answer, that's where some of the art comes in

as opposed to the science. Now really quick, where the fuck does one learn to make these statistical models? Was this taught in econ? Or is 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. Or is it something you did as a hobbyist?

You're trying to win your fancy baseball league. You need to be very hands-on and have skin in the game. Academics 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 failed somehow. Are you coding yourself or you have an engineer you work with? In 2000. this team will win. I'm guessing it's saying there's a 54% chance

the team will win. There's a 61%. And in the world of betting, if you have an 11% margin, if you can predict that 61% accuracy, you're gonna be the most successful gambler of all time. You know, if you can get 56% of your points, that's right, then you're like a world class.

Yeah, so we're not looking to predict with 95% accuracy. Anything above 50% is basically a good use of your time. And that comes from poker too. Poker players can discern like a 52% probability from 48%, right? Most people think 100-0 and 50-50, right? There are a lot more gradations between 50-50 and 100-0. Right.

Okay, so now let's introduce your passion for gambling. When does that start? Because among your many interests, you're also a degenerate gambler. I don't know, I would- It's easy, you're here. So I have my boring consulting job in college where I could do it in like a third of the time

that we were billing the client. So I had free time in my hands, in addition to starting this baseball stuff, my friend at work was like, we are starting a poker game at my apartment every Tuesday. The game actually never happens, but I was practicing for it online, playing games for fake money. Poker does not really work for fake money. It's a game where you actually want to have to put

something at risk. It's a game that involves bluffing and risk. So eventually I get some dubious offer. It'll get money and some free online site. I remember going home to my parents for Christmas and having a bunch of whiskey. I'm like, I'm just going to play online poker and you keep playing higher and Lo and behold though. It's a cliche. We lose all your money, but like I won right? Yeah, yeah, I got lucky at first and then parlay that it's eventually quitting my consulting job for a couple of years to play online poker Which some article I read said you had made 400 grand in a few years. I made 500 and lost 150 back That's so pretty cool.

Yeah, in 2000. And then additionally, this Pacoda thing is now starting to get very trusted as a way to predict the performance and careers of these players. And then along comes Baseball Prospectus, which acquires this thing you've created, Pacoda. And then you go to work for them.

And they were kind of like a startup, and they would just hire smart nerds on the internet, right? And they're like, okay, this kind of seems cool. Why don't you actually code this up for us? you've created, Pocoto. with a lot of bureaucracy and all these nerds you're trying to wrangle. I mean, they're great people. We've had some reunions. They're not the most corporate, refined culture. And so you're doing a lot of problem solving that I'm utterly unqualified to do because this job doesn't pay very well to do management. What kind of money did you make selling this algorithm to them? They gave me equity in the company, which theoretically could have been worse. Something probably wasn't worth that much in practice.

But you're young and hopeful. One problem we always had is like, this was the era of when money ball was penetrating into major league teams. Our stars would get picked off by the Red Sox or by the Cubs or by the Astros or whatever else. So from 2003 to 2008, you're at Baseball Prospectus. Correct. And you're also writing.

They do books, they have monthly things. And so you're actively writing. It's books, they have monthly things, and so you're actively writing. It's just interesting how all these little bits and pieces end up getting woven together and what your life becomes. So how in 2008 do you decide to start fucking around with politics and applying your models to politics? I was spending most of my time on the baseball thing but making most of my money on the poker thing.

In 2006, the US Congress is in kind of this panic. The Republicans are still in control. So they have a congressional page scandal where Mark Fuller, this congressman, was messaging like 13 year old pages about, hey, you know, why don't you send me some pictures? So they're trying to do something to win themselves over with moral majority voters. The gay marriage thing has kind of played out. And so they go after online poker. The last day in Congress in 2006,

they passed this bill, and I'm like, fuck these people, right? Oh, so you're angry. So I got more into politics, because A, it compromised my livelihood, and B, I'm like, these fuckers. But you never know who you're pissing off, Monica. It's true, you gotta be on your toes.

Start getting more into covering politics. Also, I'm living in Chicago at the time, and Obama's a big thing. And he was this hipster fucking law professor. I'm like, oh, he's running for Congress. Oh, God, who's this guy, right? Uh-huh. But then he's kind of a big thing. And he was this hipster fucking law professor. I'm like, oh, he's running for Congress. Oh, God, who's this guy, right? Uh-huh. But then he's kind of a cool guy.

Yeah, admits to doing coke. I like that. Yeah, he looks and sounds unlike any presidential candidate before. And there's a lot of enthusiasm forehand. So 2008 becomes this inflection point where I guess people thought, there's so much more political participation now. I'm not trying to get too involved in the politics. But then we obviously kind of spin into all types of crazy directions after that.

I mean, life, there's a lot of luck, right? Like I felt I was lucky to be at this place where baseball stats really took off and then lucky to be at a point where people want money ball for X. They want to data-fy everything in the world basically. So I have that skillset in the right place at the right time in the 2008 is this big inflection point

where politics becomes much more crazy and interesting. All of a sudden politics is like not this crusty thing anymore. I'm not trying to be super partisan, but it felt like, okay, now you actually have an interesting politician who I actually want to hang out with. But at any rate, 2008, you create a model to predict the outcome of that election. And you start 538. That's right. By the way, I've known 538 for, I guess, the last however long it's been going.

The electoral college has 538 members. Oh, members. Yeah, did you know that right out of the gates? I only think about 270 when I think about that. Okay, so there's 538 electoral votes. And you name it that. I don't know if I'm good or terrible at naming things. Lo and behold, your model predicts the outcome

of the 2008 election and the 2012 election with an accuracy that's really not rivaled at that time, to the degree that time makes you one of the 100 most influential people. Yeah, but there's deep irony here, which is the whole point of the model was to be probability driven. We're not calling Ohio for Obama. We're saying it was a 52% chance because it's just barely ahead in the polls. You had to bet you'd go 52 instead of 48.

So, but in 08, you got 49 of 50 states, right? Yeah, and in 50 in 2012, because it's just kind of dumb luck, basically, right? But are you being self-deprecating or are you being honest? Like, I can't tell. Okay, look, who's going to win Alabama in 2018? No, listen, 44 of the states I could call without a model.

But. But those others. Those others man, they're kind of all over the map. Yeah, so maybe one or two, your model's a little better, right? But then you just kind of win a couple of coin flips. Well despite how easy apparently it was. You do.

You nailed it. You do ignite the people in a way that they do think they have their moneyball guy for politics. And so the New York Times brings you in-house for three years. And I wanna know what that experience was like. Cause you go from, you have 5038 as its own website

and then that gets transferred to the New York Times. And I think the numbers when you came there were one in 20 site visits were to go to 5038. But by the end, when you leave like 17 out of a huge percentage of their Personal traffic was you I just have the anxiety dream out in your times the other night I just flew back from Korea So you have is like really long periods of REM sleep or their little

Nested universe within your dreams and stuff like that had some anxiety They're like before we let you write the times you have to prove your chops as a traditional reporter and they had some very Complicated story with some blind person. I knew it. Some tests that you were gonna fail. So on the one hand, it was great. It's gotta 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? No cheating, we're stings in the boundaries, guys. Stings in the boundaries. There are brilliant people in the New York Times. At the time I was there, standing in the bellies. There are brilliant people in the New York Times. At the time I was there, it's 2010 to 2013.

It's transitioning from being this dinosaur-like print media business to what's now, I think, a very well-run, mostly digital. Is this a scary point in its history? is quite successful there. This is when they actually are getting like a whole bunch of new subscribers for the digital product. But then you kind of run into egos mixed with kind of personnel turnover. There's a new CEO. It's a cliche, right? When they bring in the new guy and the project was the old guy's project. Worst thing that can happen in the world

is you've made a movie for a certain president of a studio, then a new president comes in and that president decides your marketing budget. But they are incentivized for the previous person to have been a failure. And this happens nonstop. This happened to me personally. And in politics, exact same thing. When a new person comes in, the old stuff all has to go.

Yeah, or fail, ideally. So the new head comes in. Meanwhile, at the time, the New York Times newsroom, the traditional political reporters kind of hate our guts because that election, particularly 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 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, 538, was saying, yeah, this movement in the polls, it's all kind of fake and nothing's really changing, right? Which is kind of against what their reporters want you to say where it's drama unfolding and game changing. I don't know, once you start testing the market,

eventually there were other offers that let me try to build 538 into a larger thing, whether that was successful or not, we can. So Disney slash ESPN comes along, three years is up at New York Times and you leave and you go to Disney, ABC, ESPN, where you're for a long, long time, from 08 to 2023. No, tenure tenure from 13.

Okay, and when you leave, there is an editor there who pretty much shit-signed you pretty publicly. Says you were a bad fit, you were a disruptor. At New York Times right? At the New York Times after you departed. Now that person then later said they regretted how they handled that, but A, was that a surprise to have them take that approach for your feelings hurt or did you feel like you deserved it? I think the Times

is not used to people turning them down very much and I actually still freelance at the Times occasionally right? Yeah. It took ten years to repair. You wrote an op-ed right before this election that I read which is my gut tells me Trump's gonna win and here's the statistics but I'm telling you my gut. And the point was that the gut wasn't very valuable, but now I'm going to pretend that my gut was crushing. Yeah, yeah. So now I have a good relationship with them instead, but they weren't used to being turned down.

And the cliche was that if you turn down the times and your career is over, which isn't really true anymore. You've had a lot of ex-time people start sub stacks or have other success elsewhere. I bet people have heard explanations, but we could stand for a concise one now. Why did you shit the bed so bad in 16 and why did everyone shit the bed so bad?

I think 2016 was actually our best election. Okay, tell me. Because I think about this as a gambler. And to me, the question is, what are the odds that you have relative to the consensus odds? Elaborate on that. So our model had Trump with a 30% chance of winning

and we spent a lot of time explaining to people that Hillary does not have this election in the bag. It's a much closer race than Obama. All these states, math term, but correlated right, meaning that Michigan and Wisconsin, they're all kind of the same state. If you lose one state, you'll probably lose the others. And so all that has to happen is that Trump overperforms among so-called working class, white, non-college voters and all of a sudden, you can win the electoral college, which is kind of what happened basically. So to us, if you were to have invested in Amazon stock on day one

and you said, I think there's a 30% chance Amazon will boom into something really big and everyone else says, that's crazy. It's only 1%. And even though you're below 50% relative to the consensus, we were one of the only people who were saying that Trump really did have a shot. You failed least bad. Yeah. Is the way we might say. I would put it because again, you're getting odds. If you were gambling on the election,

which I have no problem with, you're getting odds. If you were gambling on the election, which I have no problem with. You're pro gambling. You could get five to one odds on Trump, basically. Five to one, six to one. In 2016. And I'm also like two and a half to one instead. So that means that the expected value, poker term,

if you're able to make that bet, that would be the best sports bet in the world. Right, because you personally have Trump at three to one and the odds have him at five to one. So for you that's a great bet. Yeah, you're gonna lose most of the time but you get 5x, 6x your money when you're right. Got you. That's not how 99.9% of the political audience thinks, but we did take care though to emphasize the uncertainty to the point that we're getting yelled at people like we just think Nate's trying to just get more web traffic. And I will say you're a victim of the data you're sourcing

so maybe also some of the data. I guess there's this big mystery of why these polls were so. The most concise explanation is that people who are more college educated, who read the news more, are more likely to respond to surveys. Oh, interesting. Like, oh, exciting, a pollster called in the photo. Yeah, and my opinion is valuable, it should be recorded.

Of course. Well, I always go the other way, it's like, who's dumb called on the phone. Yeah, and my opinion is valuable. It should be recorded. Of course. Well, I always go the other way. Me too. It's like, who's dumb enough to want to chat with a stranger? Like, you gotta be so bored. Or who kicks up the phone anymore? Well, people with high social trust

answer all types of surveys more, right? Wow. But who has high social trust? It's Democrats. They are the establishment system party now, which didn't used to be true as much, right? Elaborate on that. Obama was like the disruptive candidate.

His electorate was younger. His electorate was black, Hispanic. Now the Democrats are kind of the party of college. You're kidding white liberals. They're very trusting of the media and so they both respond to polls more and vote democratic more. And so if you don't adjust for that, you're going to have your poll over sample Democrats. That's a technical term I'm using slightly incorrectly on purpose, but you're going to wind 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 faction of the Trump base Hates the media to a degree that if someone from the media called or a pollster called they would say fuck you and hang up And it's not that they even lie about who they're supporting me Trump voters are proud They just said they aren't being reached in the first place, right? They're not picking up strangers' phone calls. If they are, they're not going to want to spend 15 minutes and take a survey. And that can shift.

After the first assassination attempt against Trump, there's a lot more enthusiasm. Like I'm proud to be a Trump supporter. Certainly in 2016, maybe the Trump supporters were not easy to reach. Okay. So you do 10 years there. And how was that experience?

Cause I got to say, I feel this parallel existence for us. You do 10 years there, and how was that experience? Because I gotta say, I feel this parallel existence for us. So we create this little thing in the attic, and then all of a sudden Spotify comes along, and I would say that was your New York Times kind of, well, we could be a part of this really big thing, and there are lots of advantages. These are interesting experiences, where you have this little thing that you know very well,

and you potentially go somewhere to make it bigger and that is kind of. A roll of the dice. A roll of the dice. There are a couple of big problems. One is that we've learned this before but they have me doing a bunch of management stuff. It's not my comparative advantage to put it kindly.

I mean, I'm okay, but it's like 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 write. Be kinky with those numbers. Yeah, no, I don't want to have to respond to some email about this person wants to X percent raise. But the main issue is, so I get in there and John Skipper, who is the head of ESPN at the time, he's like, they don't worry about it.

We're just going to just make great content. I'm giving him what they curse on an extra knee. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We work in archetypes. You don't have to worry about anything, right? Lean into it. That's actually like a bad thing. I like John Skipper a lot,

but he had some personal issues, kind of the same thing again. Somebody new takes over and they don't have this mandate and all of a sudden he is like, well, we have the TV business and theme parks, that's robust unless there's a global pandemic or something like that, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All their businesses like begin to hit headwinds and we were set up as literally as like kind of a loss leader. It's not even that big of 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, like that is not going to hold up very well.

So we're kind of in a point of stasis where there's no business model. When you don't have a business model, then it's hard to do anything. Really, I'm not sure what you're optimizing for exactly. And then there's also the issue of if you're creative, then everyone wants to have this brand expansion, but if you're the major creative force,

it can only expand so much. People want you ultimately, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There are ways around that. There are some things that do scale. Like the models that we build, they get a lot of traffic, and I could hire somebody now, and we're kind of in the process of doing this all over again

at the Substix 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 he's like everything that you want ask for it right now right so you'll never have more leverage right now they're in the wooing you face ask for like business class travel because it's a reasonable thing if you're busy right but if you ask for that in the next contract negotiation when you're losing money, then, eh.

Right? Yeah. Ask for that now. Lock that in right now. Yeah, yeah, that's sage advice. But then you kind of wind up with 25 people all starting new at the same time. And we didn't understand that you need to have

like a product team and like an advertising team. And it was just kind of an awkward fit. Disney is a wonderful and creative place in certain ways, but it does things at very large scale. Everything is eight or nine figure budgets for like an NFL deal or a movie or a theme park. I mean, the whole city of Orlando, 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? Yeah. I like for this to be like a growing business because doesn't have to deal with money. It's like, no, actually, I fucking like making money. I like business, right?

I like this to be like a growing business because anytime you try to hire somebody, we hired good people. But like, what's the long term plan? We're like, well, we don't know. You like this? It's under contract for three more years. So why would you worry about it? And all journalism sucks.

So you can 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 like one of those 1970s magazine editors, right? We're like drinking wine as you're finishing the edition. Sure, a cosmopolitan man. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We have some argyle socks. I'm not sure what's happening exactly. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If you dare. Have you ever gotten a message out of the blue? Maybe you ignore them. Or maybe you end up in conversation. Maybe they tell you about an amazing offer.

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Each week, unredacted, declassified mysteries, we pull back the curtain on these hidden histories. 100% true and verifiable stories that expose the shadowy underbelly of power. Consider Operation Paperclip, where former Nazi scientists were brought to America after World War II. Not as prisoners, but as assets to advance U.S. intelligence during the Cold War. These aren't just old conspiracy theories. They're thoroughly investigated accounts that reveal the uncomfortable truths still shaping our world today.

The stories are real. The secrets are shocking. Follow Redacted, Declassified Mysteries on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Redacted early and ad-free right now on Wondry Plus. Okay, so you're there for a while, but you also in 2012 you write The Signal and The Noise and that's a really successful book. My apologies, I haven't read that one. And the fact that I read On The Edge is really kind of a fluke. I always go to Audible and I know exactly what I'm going there to get.

And I just happen to stumble upon your book. 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 shot. And I can't imagine this has gotten back to you, but I've brought it up now a bazillion times on the show because there's so many little pieces of On The Edge

that I really, really enjoy. Very thought provoking. I think your outsider-ness and some degree of disagreeability I appreciate greatly. And the book, it's sprinkled throughout. I like the spirit of it. Thank you. In a nutshell, the examination of this book

is a group of people you refer to as the river, which of course is a Texas Hold'em term. It's the last card that comes out? The last card. Because supposedly in the old riverboat days in Poker's Origin, if the dealer was crooked and cheated, or was suspected of cheating, and the last card affected the hand,

he'd be thrown into the Mississippi River. Oh, I like that. Possible origin of that term. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If not, let's keep it because it's so fun. Yeah, I like that. The turn. Oh, that's the second to last one?

Flop turn river. Got it. And so for people who don't play Texas Hold'em, the stakes go up and up and up because you're given two cards, you've already perhaps put in the ante, and generally you want to see the flop for free. You're going to get three whole cards,

now you're going to have five, you have some sense of what your hand is. And then it just diminishes it from there. Or at the end, you're hoping for a single card to change your destiny. So obviously the risk level's 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 in 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. And so it's a game of escalation.

But escalation and reduced options, I guess that's implicit in a game of escalation, but you're getting less and less options. Yeah, as you get to the river, then there are fewer cards that can come, and 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 kind of solved now. I mean, we can get into what that means exactly. Tell me. Yeah. Because a computer, AI can play chess better than a human.

I can play Go better than a human. And it can kind of play poker better than a human, although there are a lot of caveats there, right? One is that humans are not playing poker perfectly. The whole thing you learn about poker strategy, we actually like study how computers play poker. But the whole computers, I must be very honest, computers fucking bluff all the time. One discovery they made is that you have to bluff a ton

in poker, that's what makes people have an incentive to pay you off when you have a real hand. And I've played a bunch of Texas Hold'em, but even reading your first few chapters, which are about gambling in general, there were a few things in there I was like, oh wow, it's down to the science, I forget the ratio you give,

but there's a known percentage you should bluff to make yourself reputable and get paid when you have it. It depends on the size of the pot, it depends on cards that come in other things, right? But you have to bluff a lot, and also concealing information, although it's intuitive if you think it's poker, it's a game of limited information,

but you want to be very deceptive. Sometimes you want to slow play with a strong hand that's very important, or check a strong hand, just to avoid giving away too much information. Well, ideally you know your opponent, how they play, and you're now counter punching. If you know that a certain player bluffs just a little bit too much,

that all of a sudden a huge number of your hands are calling that would be folding before, or vice versa. Or things like this player tends to make a big bet when they have a bad hand as a bluff, and a small bit when they have a good hand. You love that type of player, right? It's like, okay, so now when you have a good hand, I can get away cheaply, maybe even fold,

or at least pay only a small amount. But when you're making a big bluff and you're not balancing your strategy. It's extremely psychological, maybe 100%. For sure, it's maybe 70, 30 math versus psychology. And it's also like a type of discipline. In the abstract, there are computer programs you can study with and coaching videos.

I have a poker coach who's kind of the poker queen, like a trainer basically. But can you execute when all of a sudden you're playing for like $50,000? We're at the final table of some tournament. Yeah, and I played in like the World Series poker a lot. I made day six of the main event. By the time you make day six, every pot is literally worth a couple hundred thousand dollars.

You don't get to cash that in right away. My parents would have been like, oh, I have a million chips. And like, you want a million bucks? Like, no, I have chips. And like the exchange rate's like 10 to 1. 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, right? And so like they're amateurs and they're so nervous, they're like shaking and so like it becomes learning how to deal with a flow state and a little bit of stage fright and executing in those high pressure situations that when you do enough, I'm a very talented amateur. He's won $840,000 in tournament play.

How can you be an amateur? That's gross. Not net. That's gross. I know. We're always talking about gross and net. Let's focus on the winnings right now so I can prove to her you're a good poker player. I kind of develop like a little bit of a sicko tendency. We are like, I feel more alive when I'm playing for real money and more focused and in a weird fucked up way, even like a little bit more relaxed.

I don't know. It's weird Well, there's all these different social science studies where they measure testosterone levels of day traders. They measure testosterone levels of poker players There's a biological component to that's happening There absolutely is and this is one thing it took me a while to learn and I learned it by talking to these one guy who Consulted with traders. He actually's a neuroscientist and studied these Wall Street traders like Like these people are fucking crazy. They think they're so rational but they're not. Talk to an astronaut, talk to a guy who's trained fighter pilots, talk to a guy who trained professional golfers. And they kind of all say the same thing, which is your body is working on a different chemical system,

a different operating system when you're under stress. And actually a good athlete will have a higher escalation in his or her heart rate under stress. A trader will have higher spikes in testosterone and dopamine and things like that. That's okay, because it means that your body 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. We'll learn like, okay, I can start to master that, or at least fuck up less than other people. When you learn that, then that becomes kind of powerful. Okay, so the book isolates this group that you refer to as the river, and these are people who have a great appetite for risk. They have a pretty good evaluation of risk.

They have a certain rejection of the commonly held wisdom. There's some traits. And then you go on to profile a select group of people and among them, and there's more, but we do Doyle Brunson, a very famous poker player. And then we do Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist. You do Sam Bankman Freed, which is very interesting. 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's playing a big role in a lot of this, I think. Testosterone and ego and entitlement and who is afforded the privilege of gambling in a probabilistic way. So he is someone who's known as being quite risk-averse. He wanted to sell PayPal early on and protect his downside. He's also quite religious. He's a unique individual.

He's gay, deeply religious. What's his religion? Do we know? He was German. I don't know if he was a Christian of some sort. He's a right wingish gay man. That's always interesting to me. He is a very literate intellectual in a way that Elon Musk is brilliant in many ways.

He kind of has like a 12 year old's mindset. Whereas Teal, he's quoting from scripture and philosophy. The classics. He's a brilliant, brilliant dude. Yeah, and he was like, okay, well, Nate, 10 years ago, all this moneyball shit was the frontier, but now it's all been internalized. And now a contrarian thing is actually to trust your gut more because all the nerds have taken over everything. And so there's no alpha, it would be the trading term from just running the models that everyone else

has. That's no longer an advantage. The moneyball thing's been played to its logical ends. I think it's probably fairly close to being true. But he was an early adopter of Trump in 2016. He kind of will say that, oh, I thought it was a good contrarian bet that maybe the odds are 50%, not Nate's 30%, and definitely not the conventional wisdom's 10%. I think Trump probably matches a lot

of his political leanings anyway, but you have to give him some credit for understanding that Silicon Valley's interests and the progressive interests would clash in lots of different ways. Silicon Valley would come under scrutiny for lots of good and bad reasons. What are the effects of cell phones and social media? What are the effects of very powerful people owning individual media brands? 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 or 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 kind of like a place that's very expensive and unlivable in certain ways. But we still have that and our economy is still growing. Our lifespans are not. We're making this trade-off which might be bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Silicon Valley understands growth is vital and technology eight times out of ten is good and they understand probability. They understand that if you are making a lot of high upside high risk bets, if you make enough of those actually pay off pretty well, right? If you'd like a one in ten chance of having a hundred extra investments like a really good bet in the long run. Those basic things right overcomes a lot of all types of problems.

Being very pill on some issues and it's very male and very white and Asian. It's always had a lot of ego and I think Trump winning further inflates those egos. I just think it's really wild that in our lifetime, there was this movie called Revenge of the Nerds, which was completely unthinkable. And the notion was, yeah, these jocks have made it insufferable to live here, but now the nerds are the jocks and now we're seeing their version of it. I guess no one's version is all that great.

People with power and privilege act the way they do. People have an amazing ability to feel like they're disempowered or aggrieved when, objectively speaking, Peter Thiel and Mark Andresen and Elam are doing really fucking well, right? 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. And the book gives them a perfectly fair shake. They're kind of sore winners. The average Silicon Valley CEO is still probably a

progressive Democrat. There was a much more sizable Trump faction in the book kind of anticipated that. People make the mistake of assuming that things just kind of trend linearly upward forever, right? And the world's a story more or less of mean reversion. There is a broad-based conservative backlash on cultural issues. Yes. It might be peaking right about now. This is my own personal digestion of what just went down. To me, it feels very obvious this was an election on wokeism. I mean, just watch the rights ads

and they were about almost a single issue. How do you feed that into an algorithm? You don't, you're looking at the polls. For better or worse, we're just looking at the polls and economic data and not trying to answer the why questions as much. We kind of leave that up to the pundits, I suppose. The they, them ad is partly about wokeness,

but also about other things, right? It's about taxpayer money. It's about Kamala Harris seeming kind of out of touch in different ways. It's about illegal, undocumented immigration. It's about flip-flapping. 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. Partisanship is a drug. It's a cliche. Both sides is a cancer. I'm watching the people on the right celebrate that LA is burning down and I want to just say if it brings you great joy that your countrymen are losing

everything, their children don't have a bedroom anymore. If that gives you pleasure, you must admit your politics is a cancer on both sides. When people on the left are stoked people are dying of COVID, your politics are a cancer at that point. This is still like an ongoing, yes, we're in the middle of it. So it's not even like recriminations.

Exactly. And how that started just instantly, it immediately was political. You just won this election, you're gonna 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, 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 Newscombe right now. Are you kidding me? You're our president.

It's like the chill to chill ratio. I had some concept in workshopping. Chill to chill. In the short run, chill kind of works. People are called to action and alarm. And I kind of go back to September 11th and the patriotism phase. And that works in the short run, right?

But a lot of people get tired of it. There are good critiques you can make of everything from controlled burning practices in California to the expense of various public services, to the fact that if there is climate change, then needing to be more realistic and prepared for the type of housing that you're building in vulnerable areas.

But instead, it turns it as some thinking about DEI and the lesbian, I kind of want the lesbian fire chiefs to have a reality TV show if they get fired, because they seem like these charismatic personalities, right? Yeah. Just let people process. It's a bummer. I guess where I differ from some of my peers is it's on both sides.

It's just a fucking gnarly metastasized cancer that all of us have. Yeah, I mean, there was one Democrat, there was a picture now of like the McDonald's burning in a hundred degree storm fire. And she's like, this proves what corporate politics are doing to the climate. It's like, yeah, you can maybe wait. I know. It's kind of a gross level of opportunism. Okay, Peter Thiel, all to say,

he did do these revolutionary things at the time with his Founders Fund as his company. Yeah. And we even heard this when we listened to the Meta AI thing. This decision to bet on founders and not try to wrestle control away from founders and have this belief in them in a way that was pretty new and novel at the time they took this approach. It's almost like they don't even know what the idea is. They just want to believe in the founders.

I love that you say the more shabbily you show up for your first meeting, the more trustworthy you are. Well, Sam McManfred kind of played into this cliche. He's kind of self-described on the spectrum. Not a guy who's going to wear a suit and tie, but he's like, if I am playing video games in investor pitch meetings, that will make me seem cool. I have so much RAM, I need to offload some of that playing a video game while I'm multitasking. And so he kind of played in that stereotype and was quite deliberate because they're very intense pattern matchers. Zuckerberg, he was kind of seen as like nerd in a hoodie and not the world's best communicator and just wanted to grind all

day in engineering problems. That became the prototype that was used. Or Steve Jobs, a slightly different prototype for example. And this can make it harder for new prototypes to break through. I'm not trying to be super PC here but the fact that there's so little money going to women founders and so little money going to black founders and Hispanic founders is kind of Insane if you're the industry that wants to be disruptive and wants high variance grit and all these things Right, they're such intense pattern matchers and because they kind of can't lose the average venture capital firm mediocre firm Isn't doing that well, but the top firms kind of can't lose if you have the best talent from all around the world It's like if every year the best team the NBA got the number one draft Right all the very best players came like if every year the best team in the NBA got the number one draft pick.

Right, all the very best players came and begged to be on a team. Okay, so let's talk about Sam Bankman Fried because you spent a lot of time with him. And why do you think he was willing to sit with you? I know the answer. Also, 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 laymen hear it all the time, but they're not sure what happened. So Sam McManfrey was a nerdy, mathy kid. His parents were professors at Stanford. I think his mother was a philosophy professor. His dad's a law professor. Like a lot of smart kids got initially into finance

at a firm called Jane Street Capital, which is a big quantitative hedge fund. At some point, he also got into something called effective altruism. Basically it's money ball, but for charity. It was kind of the pitch. quantitative hedge fund. in his internal monologue that is probably unreliable to some degree, but he's like, so I want to make a lot of money so I can like donate it to poor children in Africa.

This is kind of the cliched version of it. To help prevent malaria at a very cost effective rate and then do much other weirder shit too involving AI and animal welfare and things like that. He's like, I'm not making enough money at this hedge fund and so I'm going to start my own firm. His co-founder quits, right? Cause he seems kind of crazy. And one thing you learn about the book is all these people who think of themselves as

hyper rational and are thought of by others as hyper rational allow them to just kind of degenerate gamblers at heart. Often skilled and smart degenerate gamblers. Incredibly impulsive right? Impulsive and kind of stimulus driven. He's also on Adderall right? He said that wasn't that big a part of this story. You live on math. I mean, I don't know how much you can discount that. I mean, if you play enough poker, will you have enough of a sample size where you see how things that affect yourself?

Like if you're hungry, then you're playing poker for like 12 years. I just want to bust out so I can go get a fucking steak or something. You don't even know you're trying to get out. You're making all these marginal high stress decisions and the cumulative effect of anything that you're doing, maybe Adderall or nicotine, but you can understand why people might like that, right?

But it's going to affect performance and mentality. Long story short, starts a fun called Alameda. of anything that you're doing, maybe Adderall or Nikkateem. You can understand why people might like that, right? But it's going to affect performance and mentality. Long story short, it starts a fun called Alameda, kind of has some fallout there, but begins to make more and more money, eventually realizes if you really want to get rich quick, then there's 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, what makes this money and then it 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 of all, I have to find somebody to sell me crypto, which is not a completely trivial problem. And you have to enter this 26 digit code and you can see what crypto is a bit intimidating, where if you go to like an FTX or Coinbase or 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 bucks from your bank account, you press a button, you buy Bitcoin, they take more of a surcharge than they probably should. But now I own Bitcoin, which technically you actually don't. They are just allocating that to your bank account and they own the Bitcoin, but usually that was respected. I can't say 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 like, we have $8 billion in customer deposits in crypto. Wouldn't it be a shame if I just left that sitting there

in some account instead of making these awesome trades with it? And of course- He thought it was unutilized money. Yeah, he's like, well, I am trying to give my money away to charity and or to become infinitely powerful. He thought he could become president with some probability, literally. He wanted to be like the world's first trillionaire.

These are also counter. I want to be so altruistic and I want to be the president and a trillionaire. Yeah, 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 could become president before he was age 35. I like lobbying to get the rules changed. Okay. Who was the big backer of FTX? Alfred Lin was a partner there.

But you know, Sequoia is a very well-respected firm. One of the greats. Their position in the book is just yeah that's one of the ones that didn't work out. 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. So you go from one to zero, who cares right? You go from one to infinity even that outweighs a lot of one to zeros. So they were at least honest with saying we'd do this again. Now there is some I believe shareholder action so this is the rare case where there could be additional liability, but probably not too bad.

But the other part of it is if you become successful in any different field, relatively young, you can notice how people change around you. And I'm sure it's true in Hollywood, but it's also true in the nerdier occupations. Yes. So we've interviewed McCaskill and we adore him. Yeah. And I had some quiet pushback that I didn't know quite how to articulate. And I thought your book did a really good job of pointing out some gaps in it.

So maybe lay out effective altruism. So effective altruism originally kind of meant what it sounded like, which is how can we find more effective ways to give money to charity? Just look at what Bill Gates has been doing for the last 15 years. Like how do we get the most bang for our buck? How do we get the most lights? You can save a life of 5,000 bucks instead of the $10 million we put on the average,

you know, government agencies actually put a value on human life based on how people behave in the US, which is 10 million. So that mindset though becomes quite fraught. Even though I think it's right, you're putting a value now on different things. So that already is a little bit fraught. What is the value of donating to the symphony, for example?

Like a little bit harder to quantify. Okay, or we can start to ask some other questions. Well, effective altruists mostly believe in animal welfare, which I see as a good thing. But how much are we trading the welfare of different animals against each other? One example given the book is that there was a puppy, a poodle, who got stuck in the New York City subway system a few years ago. And should we stop the entire F train to rescue Dakota? And they decided to stop the F train. But like you wouldn't do that for a squirrel.

You'd run over a fucking squirrel or like a cat probably gets run over and a dog we just assign enough moral value that it gets with it like okay well look at the number of neurons that an animal has. Well really quick let's just walk down one through so that really happened Dakota the dog wandered into the subway they shut it down it was down for a couple hours and you simply say really quick let's do a generic loss of wages. Well, generic loss of wages of that one little situation was 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.

And you delineate the difference between small world problems and big world problems. These statistical analysis are really quite good at small world problems, but as you get into big world problems, these are almost impossible. And people like don't respect the boundaries enough. I'll worry if I'm making a model in baseball

or politics or basketball. Oh, this player is 10% underestimated, but the data is very good and we know how the system works. We know the rules of the game literally. You have little errors and mistakes, but pretty accurate. Whereas in these big open-ended problems, you're just kind of making shit up on the back of an envelope and sometimes the best you can do. We had to make these decisions again under COVID and maybe if we'd been more thoughtful about them,

like what is the cost of shutting down school in Los Angeles for 19 months? You know, we probably should have done more back of the envelope math there, which I think would have said probably a bad idea even given these uncertain assumptions. But people don't know when they go from these closed problems that are amenable to modeling to these open problems where it's just regurgitated assumptions over and over and over again. So what's happened though with EA, the mandate kind of expanded for various reasons from charitable giving to any problem involving utility,

meaning how do we make the world better? More questions, who's deciding what constitutes better? 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 have 0.01 because you're not physically dead. Maybe you get to watch TV once a week or something.

You get to nap. You're so generous. Yeah, you get RVs now once a week or something. You get to nap. You're so generous. Yeah, you get RVs now and then, right? One of the things I really loved about what you pointed out, I made the people I was on vacation with in Mexico City over Christmas suffer through my regurgitation of you, is utilitarianism, which we learn in philosophy.

The ends justify the means, if it has a better outcome for more people, that's good. I didn't even think of the simplest thing. The reason we're just naturally drawn to that is it has the illusion of numbers. We can assign numbers, and when we get into these very ambiguous, hard to decide moral issues that are nuanced, four is bigger than three,

that's very comforting. I think we underestimate how comforted we are by the notion of utilitarianism, because you have a bigger number than a smaller number. And even the trolley one that we all know, you're on a trolley, it's gonna 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 gang raped somebody and the life you're gonna 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,

that's like a game that has structure and rules. I know how much you can have a garbage in, garbage out problem. And some parameters are robust, but you can change them and the outputs 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 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'd be penalized, there's an outcome. One of the things he did, Sam, was dump $12 million into this very small election up in Oregon, as detailed in the book.

And in fact, I had a friend tell me so excitedly, he said, do you know 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 was like, I'm sorry, that's not great to subvert democracy. Whether you like the guy or hate the guy. No, buying off. what if someone offered Obama

$12 billion in 2008 to walk away? You can't use your money to take away an option for people to vote on. That is fundamentally wrong, but it flies under this banner of effective altruism. You could definitely argue a utilitarian point of view on that, but now we get into decontism. There has to be a principle called democracy

that rises above all that. So in some ways, the demise of Twitter was mispredictable. People thought, oh, the engineers will leave and Twitter will basically collapse the infrastructure, which hasn't happened, it remains very influential. But you could say that Elon Musk spent $44 billion, certainly by the time he bought it and was trying to find ways out,

probably knowing that's like not a good ROI from a hero financially standpoint. He's gonna lose money on that. But he's willing to spend, let's say half of that, right knowing that's not a good ROI from a hero financier's standpoint. He's going to lose money on that. But he's willing to spend, let's say, half of that, right? Let's say the real value is 20 billion. So he's spending $25 billion on a good cultural and political project, and maybe it's paid off.

He's still the richest man in the world. In fact, his wealth has only increased since Trump's election. So it's kind of pocket change to him, and I think it has had a huge effect on the discourse. I don't blame Silicon Valley for saying, hey, we're going to stand up and defend our interests. I think they felt that they're getting a hard time from the White House on antitrust stuff, which maybe they should get. I'm just saying,

this is very mindset and they're tied up. They're woke, progressive employees. And meanwhile, the news media has become very anti-tech. There's like an agrarian movement right now against billionaires. I'm watching the frontline two hour on China right now. And I'm like, guys, we're kind of inching towards this agrarian hatred. It's this weird like Barbara Poll thing where somehow Donald Trump, I don't even want to get into Donald Trump's finances,

but because he's a kind of poor person's idea of like a rich person, he kind of gets a pass. Yeah, that's really true. The left feels aggrieved and the right feels aggrieved. When someone's on a winning streak, and this is also talked about in the book and this stuff about how traders behave and how poker players behave,

you're getting so much fucking dopamine that when you're on a winning streak, especially men, it's literally narcotic. You can't really be reasoned with. I love that chapter on effective altruism and it's very interesting to have you sit with Sam Brinkman Fried and have him basically try to woo you while also Sam Brinkman 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 gonna go to jail. I mean, I interviewed him four or five days before he got arrested and taken into custody. So his mind is reeling like it's a video game, trying to figure out how can I somehow get out of this mess. He was someone to actually find it kind of hard

to generate empathy for, in part because last time I talked to him was in Palo Alto, California. He's at his parents house under house arrest. You have to give away all your electronics and 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 of the aircraft. Like I can't use that. I can't even see these questions. He has like an ankle bracelet. This is serious, right? And then I asked him, well, what if you could get two years probation? You settle the court case. And at the time, people kind of knew he was pretty dead to rights. Like, I have to think about it. I got 20 years

instead, by the way, testified in his trial in New York against, I guess, not the advice of his counsel, but against the advice of other lawyers that I spoke with. He was just going to perjure himself, which is what he did, really pissed off the judge. So he's actually kind of a very bad miscalculating type. So let's just close with Sam Altman. So he is running OpenAI and he's in the river. What did he do in the past that from your assessment would qualify him as being someone that has got a big appetite for risk?

So he worked for a firm called Young Combinator, which is an incubator. So they would go through and look at lots of very early stage pitches or founding teams, give them a small amount of seed money. When you do that, you get very good networking, basically. But you get all the business because there's a lot of outflow. Everyone who's a young investor, he may not be established,

would want to go to this firm and therefore he makes great connections, develops a good eye for talent. And his skill set is really knowing a little bit about a lot and being a good networker. He is not, I don't think a coding genius. That's funny because I guess I put him in that category. No, he has a good eye for sniffing out what the next big thing is going to be. All the guys, including the bad and evil people, are impressive. But Sam Altman, because it's kind of this crazy idea.

I'm obviously supplying this a lot, but just leave his computer on for a long time. It's not clear what the commercial applications are. And it's expensive to buy a compute is expensive, right? It's not like a Silicon Valley garage somewhere where you're just hacking together a project. No clear financial upside, which is why it started out as a nonprofit. It's obviously de facto already over. I'm not going to get into the legal structure exactly. But like wrestling together, Elon Musk and Microsoft and Peter Thiel was an early investor.

All these people. He was kind of playing the captain of that fantasy baseball team. Sam is an effective politician. He understands different constituencies in Silicon Valley, kind of reflects their ideology and is very risk-on. So Sam McMinn-Free, again, SBF, not Sam Altman, literally said repeatedly, like, if I could flip a coin and the coin comes up heads

and the world is twice as good, plus 1%, and if it's tails, we wipe out all life in the known universe, I would flip that coin from a utilitarian standpoint, right? That's a worldview, isn't it? Sam Altman wouldn't do that at 50-50. He might do it at 90-10, though. It's so out of touch.

You can be very smart until you hit a certain level of ego and power, and then you become dumb again. Oh, yeah. Your intelligence is compartmentalized. Elon, in so many ways, is the greatest engineer for centuries. And then he has kind of the emotional capacity of a 12 year old. SpaceX actually was in very hairy situation for a long time. Yeah, they crashed three.

If the fourth didn't succeed, he's done and he knows it. And so he's been written off a few times. But once you have the chip on your shoulder, and with Sam Altman, AI is taking a long time to let it train on basically reading the entire text of the internet and thinking scare quotes about it for a really long time, and then all of a sudden, with GPT-2 and then certainly 3 and beyond that,

it's like, it's kind of miraculous. Oh, I just started using it, I'm like, I really can hardly believe this can do this. You feel like you're interacting with magic in some way. Yeah, so you have faith in it, and most of these guys, not that I have the whole faith thing worked out, but I think you start to get into some weird existential and spiritual questions for various reasons. When you're talking about smarter than human intelligence,

when you're talking about life extension, these guys get into weird simulation hypothesis and things like that. And most of them are secular. I kind of halfway predict there might be a little bit of a religious boom in Silicon Valley sometime soon as I try to wrestle with it. But Sam feels like he's seen this miracle happen and then he gets written off at different times.

The board tried to clumsily oust him from his own company and then once you survive that, then you're emboldened. I think he's the most rational of all the people I met. I think he understands his incentives. So I talked to him in summer, 2022. The book took four years to write. At first I was trying to get another interview later on once QPD 3.5 had come out.

They're like friendly, but like, Sam was traveling the world for the next six months. It's his first two interviews in person, so it might be difficult. You come to Cambodia? At first I thought this interview was like a year and a half old, but it was actually better because he was less guarded.

Back then he was like, yeah, it could go really badly, but we're going to solve global poverty. And wouldn't that be really good? We'll solve all technological and scientific problems. And that's worth the tangible risk that things go really wrong and we destroy civilization. That's, I think, a relatively honest comment. It may be deranged, but an honest expression of what he thinks. And people are like, oh, this might just be a marketing strategy. It's like, no, Tylenol wasn't like we might poison the water stream if people have more Tylenol.

But let's keep this. It's like not a typical strategy and it's because they come from this mindset where number one, they are taught to quantify everything in probabilistic terms, which again, I think is more good than bad, but is not the way most people apart from me and 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 start out 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. Pat, we've not talked quite enough about just a lot of plain old competitiveness. Wanting to compete and win. Capitalism will triumph for better and worse because the people who want to compete are going to out compete people who don't want to compete.

Unless you entirely suppress competition, then competition's going to win. It's a very hard problem to balance out nate. This has been awesome I love your book One of the things I love that you point out in the book is like if you take right now the top 10 richest people In america, they're all self-made 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 bludgeoning the horse when it's already dead. I'm mixing my metaphors here, right? But in some rational sense, when you sell your first startup for $50 million, just go buy a villa in Tuscany or something and have a

great party with all your friends be an angel investor invest in a basketball team but instead they kind of keep competing over and over and over again and doubling down over and over again and so by definition it's like a poker tournament where the person who goes all in ten times in a row and by luck or skill the combination really win these bets ten times in a row all of a sudden wealth multiplies exponentially and you're worth more money than half the countries on earth. I mean, what is Elon's net worth compared to the GDP

of most countries on earth? A lot of power accumulating in a very small number of people's hands. It self accelerates, it's flubber. Before the book, the print edition, you can kind of bounce your way through. I am partial to the audio book. That's what I did, I listened to it.

We cut out some of the things that are a little bit more detours. I'm actually partial to the audiobook version. Yeah, yeah, that's Malcolm too. Malcolm Gladwell says you should listen to his books. Constraints are good. I want to kind of force you to like in the order of the author.

Yeah, yeah, right, right, right, right. Well, Nate, it's been a pleasure meeting you. And happy birthday. Happy birthday. Thanks for joining us for your birthday. It was really fun. I think you guys pulled through. Oh, I look forward to your next book

and happy birthday. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Hey everyone, 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 only bad? How has dating changed in the digital age? What's the deal with Disney adults?

I talked to John Stamos the VP Kamala hers to Jordan Peele Raven Simone And yes the one and only Jamila Jamil and just wait until you hear our conversation We talked Twitter drama bad dates and then some how the hell do you actually get sexy like what the hell does that mean? I know how to be funny. I know how to be like How the hell do you actually get sexy? Like what the hell does that mean? Like I know how to be funny. I know how to be like, you know what I'm saying? Like I don't really know how to be like,

and take your clothes off. I'm not robbing fucking Givens. You know, 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 girl eyes, the quiet. Like I've never been quiet a moment in my fucking life. Yes.

Baby, this is Kiki Palmer. No topic is off limits. Follow baby this is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus. ["Wonderful Music"] Stay tuned for the fact check.

It's rather party's app. ["Wonderful Music"] I'm trying to taunt you. Have you noticed that my Diet Coke says happy birthday, Dax? Oh, I didn't notice that. My glass bottle of VC. Is it from Bill? It's from my birthday, but they didn't come in time for my birthday.

But was it from Bill, Gates? No. Oh. I think Kristen ordered them. Oh. Yeah. Oh, cute. You're right.

He has sent us Diet Cokes. It's a natural thought. Thank you. 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. Earmark it.

So how long did it take you to fall asleep? I don't know, because I listened to a few podcasts all the way through. Oh, God. Yeah, and then I just let it turn off and then I don't know when, how long after that. What podcast did you listen to? I listened to, nobody's listening, right?

Elizabeth and Andy, my favorite podcast. And then they start- That's your blankie. Uh-huh, that's my- Your binky. My, um- Auditory binky. What's, lovey, that's my lovey.

Okay, your stuffy, your lovey. I never had one of those. A stuffy? Yeah, and then I wondered. I mean, I had stuffed animals. Okay. But I never had one that was like, you have to take it to the airport and on vacation

and all these things that all the kids have. I had three, but they didn't travel with me. I maybe brought one or two of them to my dad's on the weekends. Yeah, cool. But I had three different bears. Do you still have any of them? I wish, my mom is ruthless.

You know, I moved out, she just had like a garage sale and just fucking dumped all my stuff. Yep. Yeah. I know, but. Can you imagine buying my used teddy bear? Ding ding ding! I think this is a ding ding ding for real. It is.

Long time coming. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh Is Liberti clean? Liberti does look a little cleaner than normal. I agree. Oh, there's the shit on the ears. Oh, fuck. He's pretty disgusting, but he does still look a little. Looks like he ate a horse's ass out. Our mules. He does look a little cleaner than usual.

Oh, fuck. He's a mess. For the listener, I'm holding Liberti, my beanie baby, who's covered in poo poo. He's a mess. He's sort of my lovey. Just because he had value and he was really exclusive. That's not the reason to have a lovey.

He's my investment lovey. This is my 401k. I still remember them. What is on him? Fecal matter. No. It is. Like from a rat or something?

No, I think you wiped with him. I did not. It looks like someone did, because the back is spotless. It looks like someone grabbed him from the back and used him, hopefully front to back. So my parents aren't, I guess guess as ruthless as your mom, but they are pretty bad.

Like they just put everything in some big bags. Hold on, they're not even close. Do you, everything you had as a kid is still in your room? No, cause my brother moved out. I mean moved in. So then everything got thrown into these bags. Catalogs, okay. And then thrown in the basement.

But it was literally like everything, just like random, like a sticky note is it. They just threw it all in a bag. Sure. So this Lebertie obviously got thrown face down. And then old coffee spilled at the bottom of the bag? 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. I love you.

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. It doesn't smell, but boy, it does look like doodles. Listen, I'm not, you're not gonna like

what I'm about to say, but it's the truth. This is on eBay right now for $700. No. Yes. Was shit all over it? Well, no. Okay, a clean version in a box or something? Those ones look clean,

but that means they're not as unique as mine. Well, that's for sure. This is the only poopy liberty 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, but you shouldn't feel terrible if they want it.

I wanna 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 heart thing that has its name. But his name is still on his butt. It says it on the tag. What it lacks in tags, it makes up for in the bris all over his fur. Anyway. Anywho. I don't have any loveys and well, again.

Why was, what were you waiting to bring it out to tell me that there were $700 on eBay? Yeah, $700, there's a six, seven, one for $674, one for $750, one for 750. Mm. 500, but this is like. You thought at one point it was worth 20,000. It was. He comes up in this episode.

Right, right. Which is why that's a ding, ding, ding. The shocker that Nate didn't offer to buy it. It was so valuable. Well, he was upstairs, that's why. He didn't see him. He couldn't see him. 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? So you're it or you're super ego? He's bad, he's a cnot. He likes to get into the... He got in the trash. He's a mullet monsolloy animal.

Rrrr. Eating up all those old caramels at the bottom of the trash can. Yeah, if you go to eBay, you're gonna get a nice guy. You're gonna get an angel Liberti, but this is the only devil Liberti in the whole world. That's the only id. Yeah. Yeah.

I have something I want to announce. Let's hear it. I have a few things. First, I don't think I've ever seen a response so consistent in the comments, okay, the dog world is a blaze Oh, no, if there's a fervor of recommendations. I told everyone not to get too excited I opened up the comments for James Marsden.

Little Jimmy Marsden. Little Jimmy Marsden. And nearly every comment said, Dex, please tell Monica she should get a miniature King salmon Burmese Yorkshire Pinscher. Like they were so specific, the different breeds you need. And everyone has a favorite breed. If you want to hear some testimonials,

there are a couple hundred waiting for you. Okay. And then another thing I want to say is, I read a great book by a friend of the Pod's wife, Alison Grant, Adam's wife. Nice. She wrote a book called, I Am the Cage. Ooh.

And it's really, really good. It's about this young woman who's living in this like tiny little town in Wisconsin by the lake. And she walks to work and she doesn't want to see anyone. And she doesn't want to be friendly. And she- Is it a novel? Yes, it's a novel.

Okay. And there's this huge snowstorm and she gets snowed into this house she's running. And then just the journey she goes on in this snowed-in thing, and then you're getting all these flashbacks of her childhood, having had this very specific surgery to lengthen a leg.

Oh, ding, ding, ding. Tell me. Remember we had a guest on once whose brother had that surgery and he passed away from it. Yeah. How horrible. Yeah, in the book, the character is told by the nurse, like, you're in good hands, he's the best in the country.

And then she asks, how many people do this procedure? And he'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 cool. I'm so impressed. It's so beautifully written.

And it's also, I think for people who are like, they're not extroverts. They don't want to talk to anyone. They don't want to come for anyone. Like I would imagine it'd 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 sit in it is. Is it out? It's out on February 18th. Okay, great. So, pre-order it. I really recommend it.

It's fantastic, I Am the Cage. I'll read it. I don't read many novels. Yeah. And I was kind of like, I could feel there was enough reality in it. Yeah. Well, the best novels do that.

Yeah, yeah. You probably just haven't read any good ones. I've never read a good novel. That's what it is, yeah. I really like reading novels. Yeah. I mean, I feel wrong. But 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 Sasqus. 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. Well, 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. ["The Armchair Expert's Theme Song"]

Speaking of fantasy, we have an upcoming guest who we discussed fantasy with a bit, and I thought that was really interesting. Yeah, and very similar to your experience. Uh-huh. It's a great survival mechanism. Yeah, yeah. Until you don't need it anymore to survive.

But you still use it. Every now and then. Yeah, yeah. I took a hike this morning. It's raining. Yeah, it is. Thank God, we can only be grateful. I know, that's right.

We have no choice but to be very grateful. I agree. Considering the fire conditions. I agree, I agree, I We have no choice but to be very grateful. I agree. Considering the fire conditions. I agree, I agree, I agree. I love it. You are taking it better than normal, which to me seems like proof of that. Thank you, I'm trying very hard.

Are you, what does that entail? You should look at the window and go, I love you, Rain, and just force yourself. No, to be clear, it is raining. It's been raining for the past couple days. I have seasonal affective disorder, SAD, self-diagnosed, and I am about to start my period. These are, there's lots going on. Double whammy.

That, generally speaking, I can predict what kind of mood I will be in. Yeah. But I- And is it helpful to go, yeah, I feel like shit, but I know it's because of these things. Does that like mitigate how much suffering there is?

Yes, there's many things at play. I'm starting to feel like really agitated. Yeah. It's that. Right, not the person. It's not the thing or the person or whatever. And so that's helpful to know. I do that.

Yeah. Really helps. I mean, you gotta do it with children. Oh, I bet. Like if you're depressed, your children, the little things that you can overlook start becoming annoying. Sure.

And then I have to go, it has nothing to do with them. You just feel this way. It really is effective. I guess that's CBT. Also, I feel like you've been in the low mood. Yeah, yeah, I had a good couple, three weeks of feeling. Down. Depressed.

Depressed, yeah. And that is clear to me, right? And 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, or between two people or whatever. And I feel that, like when you are not at your happiest,

you are not at your happiest. Oh, it's not my turn to also be in that head space. Like it's my turn to be the other type of person in this setting, in this duo. So I don't know, I find that sort of 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 forced to. It's not that set in stone. There, it is, I am able to overcome it.

Yes. If I need to. And the rain makes me gloomy, but I haven't really been that gloomy. I'm super lucky because I, in the morning, open up my drapes and I go to meditate. And often I start meditating while it's still dark out. And by the time I'm done, the light has come out.

That's nice. There's just mist and there's trees. And it's a luxury, I'm lucky. You like that. I can recognize how unbelievably beautiful it is. Like an impressionist painter would be painting that, not the normal day that I see. So that's a huge advantage.

So I was looking at it and I was like, I don't know why Gorillaz and the Mist is so seared into my mind, but I think maybe that was the first time I saw that kind of tropical misty foliage. It really captivated my imagination when I was younger. And so anytime I see like Columbia when they showed the mountainside

and it's like very damp and moist, I love it. So I was looking at it, I was like, oh, I can't wait to go hiking in there. There's gonna be like 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 other folks. I wonder if aversion to rain slash seasonal effect of disorder slash that is like misophonia, like it's a gene. Probably. Because you're talking about the mist, and I want, I want, I'm like trying.

To intellectually understand. I understand. It's mist, and I want, I want, I'm like trying. Yes. Intellectually understand. I understand. It's like atmosphere in a movie, like they pump scenes full of dust so that there's a texture to the air. 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 really do.

White light. But I wanna like it. Maybe that'll be my New Year's resolution in this year. The new year started again in February. Yeah, I feel it. Yeah. My mood broke almost One yeah, baby for something. God. Can I tell you something embarrassing?

Well, let me first see that whiskey what's related to that? Whiskey has diarrhea to this cage four nights in a row He is noro the fact that Chris hasn't killed herself yet, she's been up every night for the last four nights. Dealing with vets? Can he wear a diaper? He should. Well, he went to the vet yesterday,

and he, by the way, you know, he's such a bastard, not even a rascal, he's a bastard. I know. They put him in a cone and all, they 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'd they give him that last 14 hours? None of the drugs I ever took lasted that long. He's very small. He's down one leg. He's almost as small as Liberti. He is. So he did not have any honus last night, which was 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, did something come out? And then I went and sat back, I sat on the toilet and fired up the brondle, the butt washer, and I had had a little,

which never has happened in the middle of the night. Were you wearing your underwear? Yeah. Oh no, did it get in there? Well no, I was wearing my sleep pants. No panties, just my sleep pants. Okay, but you were covered. But I didn't get anything on anything.

It was just a tiny bit of, yeah. Do you think? But I got really, I guess the point of this story is I got hugely lucky, because I didn't notice and I was just about to lay down and then that would have probably caused an issue where I would have to change my clothes. And then Chris might have had to clean up your duty too.

No, she was downstairs on watch for the other duty boy. Oh wow. So everyone was celebrating this morning that there was no Hanus. And I didn't have the heart to say there was something like 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 Kristen's making. Like I really want to be able to have no gluten.

In the first round, which was pretty dense because she used a flour without gluten, then she's like, let's go half and half. And then she made that and it was so good. And I- Oh, half and half with gluten. Yeah. Got it. And it was much better. Of course. It cooked better, it was so good. And I- Oh, half and half with gluten. Yeah. Got it.

And it was much better. Of course. It cooked better, it was fluffier. It was so delicious. And I had a couple slices in the morning. Okay. And I think that's why I whisked whiskey last night. You Tonka'd.

And I did. Please use the correct- We know what a Tonka is. Oh, you don't wanna, this doesn't count because it's too tiny. This isn't Tonka. No,. Oh, you don't want to, this doesn't count because this is 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 oopsy almost miss. It's like animalistic. Okay. Okay. I'm not going to give, I'm not going to talk about it, but we had similar situations. Sort of. Last night? Yeah. Sort of. Sort of.

Last night? Yeah. Sort of. Not really, but interesting that you- Wait, in your new outfit? Yeah, but nothing, I didn't have any poop. But you thought you'd- I don't wanna talk about it.

Why? I just was so- I know, I know. I was so vulnerable. I'm so revealing in there. You always are. Oh, well. Women can't get away with that kind of thing.

Yes, they can. No, they can't. I didn't poop. I didn't. Are you sure? I'm sure. But I just had a situation that's a little tangential to yours with no poop.

You just got your outfit down in time? No, there was no poop. Okay. No poop. Interesting. I just had something interesting in novel. Okay. Happened.

Okay, we'll leave it at that. In that space. Okay, in the bathroom? No. Okay. Okay. Facts, this is for Nate Silver. Will you eventually write a tell-all

when you're like 60 and we'll hear all these stories, I hope? There's only. A Hollywood tell-all, and it's just all about your Tonka experience. There's only been, I've only Tonka'd once. Right. In my whole life.

And then I wanna know what those other situations. This isn't worth, this would not even make it like. Okay, great. A chapter. Okay, great. It's like, at best, two lines. Okay. More like a quote I'd put in my memoir, like just a quote.

Yeah, it's like under the title, the little like quote, it's nothing. Okay. Okay, speaking of gross things. Yeah. Salmon semen skincare. Oh yeah. Okay. This is all the rage and it's because salmon sperm

shares a lot of DNA with us. Okay. And so we used to have vampire facials. I mean, they still do them, but that's where they would like take your blood out and then- Spin it? Yeah.

Get the platelets or something? Yeah, they spin it and zhuzh it, and then they put it back in. Do you think it's stem cell-y? I think they're kind of trying to make it. Yeah. They weren't, look, allegedly, I never did it and then I am not.

Gonna try it. No, I'm not. But it was a thing. But you do want the salmon ejaculate. I'm interested in that, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, salmon ejaculate is the actual correct. Clinical term.

Where have you found a place in LA that does salmon ejaculate? No, it's not FDA approved. Oh, I'm so shocked. Yet, it's not FDA approved yet. But if you go to South Korea, you can get it. Oh, so have you thought about, have you fantasized about taking a trip there? I do want to go to South Korea.

Just do a week of face stuff? Yeah. Because they're supposed to be at the very cutting edge, right? Yes, there's a podcast I love called Eyewitness Beauty and Nick Axelrod, one of the hosts, he goes and he once got something called like small face.

Oh, what's that? I think it made his face small. Oh, wow. Yeah. Oh, wow. So they do small. Oh wow. Wow. Yeah. Wow. So they do all kinds of things. Wow.

Now it's called Rejurin. Rejurin. It's a long chain polynucleotide DNA of salmon milk in micro droplets under the skin of the face and neck. One of the main ingredients is hyaluronic acid. Oh, we have a friend who's done this by the way. Well, hold on a second. So under the skin. So they're shooting it into you.

It's not a topical. Right, just like the vampire facial where it's like- Oh, they put it in? Yeah. Oh, we have a friend who did this? She went to South Korea and she did this. She say 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 she said she's gotten a lot of I might see her at the Super Bowl. Okay. But she's said she's gotten a lot of compliments and that she looks visibly different. Oh, wow. I know.

Wow. And it's supposed to improve elasticity, reduction of fine lines and wrinkles, increase skin hydration, and improved healing capabilities of the skin from damage. How do we know it's not just filler? Maybe it's just working the same as filler if you're putting a needle under the skin

and putting volume in there. No, no, cause scars. It's like helps with skin clarity. So once it gets FDA approved. You're gonna get it. I'm not gonna get it. Oh, you're not. No.

This is confusing. I know, I'm kidding. I'm not kidding that this is a thing and people do find, or people like it. I wonder what the price tag is on this procedure. Yeah, that I don't know, but also I- And I would want wild salmon ejaculate, not farm raised ejaculate.

Well, that's the thing. We gotta get the right type. Wild, I want it wild. He talked about gay men of his cohort being quite successful, and it's true, and there is a lot of current research on this group right now. Adult gay men tend to have a higher rate of educational attainment compared to straight men

with a significantly larger percentage earning college degrees and advanced degrees like a PhD, MD, or JD. This is often attributed to factors like a strong drive to excel academically in the face of potential societal challenge. I would say good boy syndrome, which Jen and I had told us about.

Yes. You gotta be perfect in all other domains. Yeah. And then also, huge incentive to leave your small town to go to a university. I think that's true. If I was gay though, my conclusion would be, see, we're smarter.

That could be part of it. Yeah, that would be. That would inflate my ego better. We need to get Charles, bell curve Charles on that one. I'm sure he's already on it. Bacronym, this is a huge development for us. I've now used the term like 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 gonna 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. 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 document. Now it makes, yeah, that makes perfect sense. I hope I'm right about that. Fantasy Baseball, it dates back to 1980. It was originally known as the Rotisserie Baseball. Magazine editor Dan O'Grent and some friends created the game at a restaurant in Manhattan. Rotisserie Baseball magazine editor, Dan Okrent, and some friends created the game at a restaurant in Manhattan.

Now, the price of Bitcoin today. Okay, here we go. The Bitcoin Ticker Tape podcast with your host, Monica Padman. $96,428.22. It's a drop in. It's dropping. Don't come at me. It's a drop in. It's dropping. Don't come at me.

It's not our fault. Don't come after me. Although I would start to think we're jinxing it if I were heavily invested in Bitcoin. I started a new book. Oh my God, you are reading so much. I had no interest in Sam Franklin Fried, but now he was in Nate's book.

And then who's our man who Michael, who wrote the big short? Lewis. Michael Lewis. I was just perusing titles and Michael Lewis came up, but then I was like, oh, well, I'll read his most recent book. I've liked the other ones. And it's about Sam Beekman Friedman.

Bankman Fried. Yeah. So now I'm going gonna learn more about this guy. It's so weird. I have no interest in learning about him and now here I am again and I'm enjoying it. You're being so prolific with your books. I'm sorry to say I still haven't even finished Intermezzo. Oh, and we're supposed to do a puzzle on here.

You were supposed to give the example from the book. A couple, yeah. Luckily we threw them a bone with this dog thing, they're off the scent, but a couple people did bring a pair. Are you doing that? Oh no! Okay, well we already went too long,

so next week we'll do the riddle. We'll try, let's say we're going to try. We'll do the riddle from Intermezzo. But also I haven't even finished finished it and I was supposed to I supposed to read it at Christmas. Oh Now it's February, but really January, right? So it's fine That's it. Oh wonderful Well, I enjoyed Nate Silver me too. What an interesting guy and an interesting life

Way outside of what I can comprehend. Yeah. I can find no purchase in the statistical modeling world. I barely understand it. I think we have an idea that gambling is dirty and bad. And then statistics is smart and highfalutin. And the stock market also is good. Exactly.

And it's all the same thing. Yep. It's all gambling. It's all risk. It's all the same thing. Yep, it's all gambling, it's all risk, it's all percentages. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, very cool. All right. Young lives. All right, love you. Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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