It Could Happen Here - Nate Silver: The Smoothest Brain On The Internet

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

Robert, James, and Gare discuss Nate Silver’s theory that tweets are proof that Elon Musk is a ‘spiky’ genius.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, it's Amartinez. The news can feel like a lot on any given day, but you can't just ignore las noticias when important world-changing events are happening. That is where the Up First podcast comes in. Every single morning in under 15 minutes, we take the news and boil it down to three essential stories so you can keep up without feeling stressed out. Listen Up First from NPR on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? Ow. Goes lower?

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and he wanted to bring the Catholic left to its knees. Listen to Divine Intervention on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Call zone media. Oh my God, you guys, it could happen here. Maining our podcast. It could. It is. It's happened.

It did. Robert, shouldn't you rename the podcast It Is Happening Here? Yeah, uh-huh. That's a fun joke that I only hear 47 times a day. And the whole point of the podcast was, well, initially, I was a crazy person saying a bunch of stuff would happen. And now it's a bunch of that stuff happened.

And even more of it looks very likely. And so now I just feel bad all the time. It's going to be called, I fucking called it. I fucking told you, bro. I said this was going to happen. Why don't you read in the podcast? I just feel bad all the time. Yeah, why don't you rename the podcast?

Robert should have bought more stock in ammunition companies than he did in DJI. Should I have bought stock at DJI? Yeah, I'm gonna buy a little DJI drone here soon. Yeah, there we go. A lot of people are gonna be buying little DJI drones here very soon, James. I should point out that I'm buying one that's not capable of carrying a payload.

It's definitely a safer investment to pull out your FURRO 1K now, when the market's crashing, use that money, buy drones. Those drones will be worth a lot more in five years. Matt- Four? What is that? That is a sound of a sound investment. A box of bullets. Matt- It's like how boomers used to invest in silver or gold as a stable currency.

Matt- No, we're investing in DGI, like physical DGI drones. We are investing in drones and boxes of gunpowder. Yeah, you got to get it in a bottle rub it in a box it can get light struck or get moist. You want to get it in a special black black bottle. James, I keep all of my gunpowder in, you know how like people used to take cocaine by wrapping it in toilet paper and swallowing it? No. Sure. Okay, well.

If you say so, buddy. Speaking of toilet paper, Nate Silver has a newsletter, and it would be useful as toilet paper more so than it is as a newsletter. Sorry, I just felt like PTSD flashbacks from 2024 when you said that. It's okay. Normally my rule of thumb is every election, usually starting in like December the year before election year, I begrudgingly fight down a series of panic attacks, vomit three or four times in a bucket, and then head over to Nate Silver's blog to see what he's saying about the polls. And I do this, I hate that I keep having, I have regularly on election years, people

are like, but he was always wrong. He's like, no, he's reasonably good on polls. He's usually, if you read what he's saying about presidential polls, the reality bears out pretty close to that. So I read him during elections. And I hate it because he's never been right about anything else, but he's a gambler. He's a degenerate filthy gambler. And so when we're talking about degenerate filthy gambler stuff and by God, election

polls are the most degenerate type of gambling that exists, he's worth reading. And then after the election, no matter how well or badly it goes, I ignore him again for four years. And I didn't get to do that this year because on February 25th, 2025, Nate wrote a column called Elon Musk and Spiky Intelligence. Spiky Intelligence. Am I hearing that right? Spiky Intelligence, yes.

And it very helpfully starts with a drawing that I'm sure he used some AI, like he must have used some AI like video software to do that just like shows you a kind of spiky star looking thing and then like a blob with rounded edges. I can't begin to imagine why Nate Silver thought that like we needed this illustrated. I have to see this. Yeah, Yeah, I would like it to be shared Look at this. Why did you like oh wow promise of AI we could Yes, wow yeah, yeah, it looks like maybe an amoeba if you were Looks like an amoeba and then like a poorly drawn star is it?

This is this is an actual thing. This is if you wait. This is a thing This is this is Boba and Kiki. This is an actual thing. When Batman fits you. Wait, this is a thing? This is Boba and Kiki with a weird, like, digital fuzz over it. Who the fuck are Boba and Kiki? Yeah, okay, Garrison, yeah. It's like a social experiment to, like, ask people what, like, the emotional correspondence of each of these shapes are. Like, which, like... It's a Rorschach test.

Oh. It's like a Rorschach thing. Sure. Or, like, which one looks nicer, which one looks meaner, you know, that sort of thing. I'm a Kiki type like like I I am a Kiki in terms in terms of my behavior. I am Garrison. Now that you bring up Rorschach, all I can think of is how cool it would be if Rorschach from the Watchmen showed up in Nate Silver's house and did his thing. Unfortunately, I think Rorschach and Nate Silver might actually get along. They would become fast friends.

Actually, yeah. No, no, Nate would, but after them getting along for like 45 minutes, Nate would take him to an illegal card game and Rorschach would murder everybody in the room because they were gambling without a license. everybody in the room Because they were gambling without a license So I'm assuming Nate's gonna try to argue that that musk's intelligence is akin to the kiki drunk here as opposed to like the empathetic Boba right now They're actually yes, there is a little bit of that in there. He does not mention this kiki and Boba thing

I don't know if that's because I'm supposed to just infer it from the image or if he's... Okay. We'll get your opinion on it. Is he ripping these people off? Because this doesn't count as enough for him to be crediting them if this is the underpinning of his stupid idea, which he credits to his stupid book that he came up with later.

But I'm just gonna start reading the stupid column. Well, hit us with the second paragraph, because that fucking must go. We haven't gotten paragraph one, one James that radicalized me immediately There's been a debate raging on Twitter Noah Smith can run you through the parameters about the intelligence of the platform's owner Elon Musk My contribution was to suggest and then there's a little eye in parentheses because we need that Elon is obviously pretty bright and then there's two eyes in parentheses

This shouldn't be conflated with moral judgment Highly intelligent people do lots of bad things Okay, you'd think this wouldn't be especially controversial, but since it involves Elon and intelligence well It was Elon has run founded or co-founded Tesla SpaceX open AI Neuralink X AI PayPal and more recently Twitter He's also managed to steer himself into a position where he's now the de facto chief of staff to the President of the United States. I do not doubt that Elon has gotten lucky in various respects.

Some of these were long shot bets. And Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk documents, he thought he'd be ruined if there had been one more failed SpaceX launch. The success of some of these enterprises might also be debated. Twitter was a canny play for cultural and political influence, but it probably- and he doesn't bring up in this whole thing where he's talking about like all his successful companies- not a word about the boring company. Not a word about Hyperloop, right?

Yeah, any of the failed ones. His record does seem better if you ignore the two massively publicized and invested absolute failures. Yes. Well, and last week I I know there was a space X launch. I'm sure it went well. I'm sure it didn't fling debris all over the lower atmosphere. I'm sure he didn't nearly destroy several commercial aircraft.

Also crediting it like, yeah, I guess technically co-founded OpenAI, but not in a way that mattered. He just shot down money in there and then kind of edged out. Yeah, sure. Yes. And is actively in a conflict with everybody who did make open AI as prominent as it is. Again, Natla has to leave a lot out in order to start making this case. But he's going to argue that, you know, we're going to see how well this co-presidency goes, but he's probably a pretty smart guy to get all of this stuff done, right? Yeah, and he's also saying, well, like, maybe Twitter won't be profitable, but we'll see

how, you know, he could probably profit from being the de facto chief of staff. Not a word from Nate about, like, yeah, but he's just, like, that's just breaking the law. So why are we, why aren't we including in our canny businessman guys that get rich selling like shitloads of heroin for the cartels? Because yes, if you are breaking the law sometimes that goes well for you financially. Walter White may have done some bad things.

Yeah but you can't deny he was a brilliant meth cook. But I don't care what Elon's SAT score is. 1400 according to Isaacson. He's clearly some sort of outlier in many ways people would associate with intelligence. Probably even a genius. And yet, when my, and first off, it becomes clear through this that Nate does not consider a 1400 to be an impressive SAT score and would normally be judgmental of someone who had an SAT score of 1400 if it weren't for all of Elon's other genius accomplishments. And yet, when my partner and I were heading to dinner the other day and we saw some tweet that Elon sent, I forget which one because he tweets so much, we were both like, man,

he's such a dumbass. Yes, someone can be both a genius and a dumbass. Welcome to what I call spiky intelligence. Here we go. This gets to like the core of what's annoying about Nate is his need to he's one of these guys, you know You know what it is. He's an intellectual enclosureist Right where he's not confident to be like everyone is very aware of the fact that no one is good at everything And that people have holes in their competence and that there are like brilliant surgeons who are bad fathers or whatever

Because there are different kinds of intelligence. This is like a broadly common understanding. Yeah. Nate has to give it a name so that he can sell his book. So he gives it the names. It's like an intellectual... No, it's my idea. I'm the one who came up with the concept that smart people can be dumbasses.

Stop it, Nate. It's annoying. Capital S, capital I, registered trademark spiky intelligence, yeah. Yeah. Capital S, capital I, registered trademarks by key intelligence, yeah. Yeah, now he acknowledges that this isn't entirely original and then links to somebody without really crediting them. Interestingly, many of the instances online refer to people on the autism spectrum. Musk has publicly stated that he has Asperger's syndrome, but the concept is simple. While intelligence is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, the scientific consensus is that there's also something known as a G factor, sometimes also called general intelligence. As an empirical matter, most traits we'd associate with intelligence are positively correlated. For instance, math and verbal skills in the GRE are correlated.

The correlations are loose enough that you'll wind up with all sorts of different permutations on the spectrum of human behavior. And he's just going into like, he talks about like the absent-minded profess, like it's all just these very common ideas that like, yeah, people are usually bad at more things than they're good at, right? Like it's, there's no need to explain how Elon Musk has been successful at certain things, but Nate does and he has to keep going back to like he makes a comment later

in here about how Musk is clearly a brilliant engineer. He doesn't back this up with evidence. He just says that like well if you read the book that Ashley Vance wrote, he obviously signed off on a lot of great engineering moves. But you notice the fact that like he's not making any of these decisions. Like he bought a company that already had good automotive technology. He hired a bunch of rocket engineers to design rockets. Elon is arguably good at hiring in certain circumstances, and he is inarguably a great hype man, right?

That's the actual brilliance that Elon has, is he was very, very good at hyping people up and getting people to believe in him until he was too big to fail. That's the one thing he actually did. But Nate can't accept that because I think it kind of, among other things, it kind of reveals what Nate is, who is a guy who was really good at one narrow thing and now has a career writing about everything. And he can't, that's like a dangerous thing for Nate to think too hard about.

Let's learn more about Nate's spiky intelligence after these very soft and soothing ads. Yeah. Hey, it's Amartines. The news can feel like a lot on any given day, but you can't just ignore las noticias when important world-changing events are happening. That is where the Up First podcast comes in. Every single morning in under 15 minutes, we take the news and boil it down to three essential stories. You can keep up without feeling stressed out. Listen up first from NPR on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you remember what you said

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I want to talk a little bit about the danger of being a guy who gets famous for being really good at one thing and then gets a job talking about everything because I've had a version of that experience. And let me tell you, you're not ever going to be competent to discuss all of the things that you can make money talking about if you're a popular entertainer. No one ever has been, no one ever will be,

which is why what you ought to do is the thing Nate initially tried to do, which is bring on a bunch of people to like run a website with you, where you cover more things than one. Unfortunately, it turns out 538 was a bad business venture. It got massively overvalued. A company spent a shitload more money on it than it was capable of making, and now everyone's

gotten laid off. And Nate left years ago to do his sub stack. It's a tragic case in the problem of hubris and the fact that maybe a guy who's really good at gambling shouldn't run an entire media enterprise. But Nate doesn't like thinking about that. It isn't like thinking about the fact that maybe the only thing Elon Musk was ever good at

was being the guy from the music man. Because I think Nate bought into Elon Musk for a significant period of time. A lot of people do. He still clearly does. Yes. Yeah. And there's been this thing lately where a lot of folks on the left have been like, oh,

you couldn't always tell that he was a con man. You couldn't always tell that he was this bad. Like he was always the worst. And I was like, no. Back in 2014, 15, when I was writing about the billionaires and rich people that were evil, I was focusing on Jamie Dimon because he had helped create the 2008 financial collapse. And he just seemed obviously much worse than this guy who up to that point was pretty much just making cars and rockets, you know?

He had two companies doing that. Musk was not top of most people's radars for a very good reason. Which gets to like, there's this thing that's been created because of some of like the sinister beliefs that his grandfather had and his like family background, which has a lot of white supremacy in it, to that, that this has been Elon's sort of like grand plan from the beginning and that it's all come together for him. Like as if he's, he's, you know, a Marvel or a James Bond villain who's been executing this like 30 year plan to get where he is.

Yeah, yeah. I think when you look at his cognition, like he's not the same man he was 10 years ago. He's not the same guy he was when he started dating Grimes. I would say he was a good man before then. I don't think he particularly ever was, but he's clearly, his brain has degraded in part due to contact through Twitter. Well, yeah, and you can measure this through his posting as well. The types of posts he would make in 2017 are completely opposite to the way that he would talk about certain

social issues now. He's not like memeing about anarcho-syndicalism. Yeah. We get to a few of those things But I want to read another quote from Nate's article because he's going to talk about his book on the edge Which quote describes a certain community of intelligent people that I call the river These people who occupy a range of professions from AI research to poker to venture capital are bright But in spiky ways. In Baron Cohen's Dockotomy, they lean heavily towards the systematic side of the equation. They're good at abstract, analytic reasoning, but they may lack other forms of intelligence

like empathy, judgment, and self-awareness. They also have some distinctive characteristics largely unrelated to intelligence. For example, they tend to be extraordinarily competitive and somewhat contrarian. And again, what you are talking about all of these people, number one, when he says AI research, he's not talking about people who are doing like the gut level coding. He's talking about Sam Altman, right? Poker, venture capital. This is all gambling. You're all talking about gamblers. The river is just gamblers, Nate. It's people like you who put money on bets and they are contrarian and competitive because that's how gamblers are.

That's the river. He's thinking about it as like this specific chunk of intellectuals who have, you know, there's some dangers, but they have great potential to make the world brilliant. They're like, no, no, no, no. These are just people who, like, wind up shooting themselves outside of a sports betting facility. Like, that's the river, Nate. I have been turning into a monster during our friend poker nights recently. It's tough. Garrison, by the way, I've been meaning to talk to you about wearing the full data makeup,

because you know your skin can't breathe if you coat your whole body. You're only supposed to put that on your face I don't do that every time I play get a gold finger yourself I don't I don't put on the data makeup every time I play poker just that one time Actually, no, I've done that twice now. Never mind. I have to that two times. Okay, it's becoming I also have the little hats. I ordered a 12 pack of like the little like poker visors to complete the outfit. Of course you did. Wonderful.

Of course you did. Yeah. It would be rude not to. For better or worse, this typology, the river, is associated with high achievement in certain highly lucrative professions, especially tech and finance. It is also associated with high variance. Sam Bankman Fried built FTX into a company that investors valued at 32 billion

before the House of Cards collapsed. Again, because he was gambling. Yeah, because he was a con man. Yeah. And again, Nate can't just accept, oh, he was never actually very smart. He just got really lucky for a while and then gambled it all away

because he wasn't actually as smart as anyone thought. Nate says, I interviewed SPF several times for the book and I can tell you that he very much falls into the genius but dumbass category. How about just dumbass? Lucky dumbass, it's not hard. What's the genius? Where did he prove that?

I mean, he proved that by fooling Nate Silver, a man who probably values his own intelligence Like a great deal. Yeah, I mean that's the whole thing right Nate Silver can't like it would be ego death to admit that there Are just some lucky dumb white dudes Yeah If a guy had won like one of the lotteries was like a billion and a half dollars, right? Got crazy rich and then lost it all in two weeks because he just kept putting a half a million dollars at a time on 21 black at a roulette table in Vegas and I would be like well obviously he's a

Genius, but he's also kind of a dumbass how else could he have made the money in the first place? No, he got lucky and then he gambled it all away cuz he's he doesn't have good judgment Yeah, so it's important to avoid two pitfalls when encountering people with spiky intelligence. Namely, neither their worst traits nor their best ones tell the whole story. And I don't disagree with that. However, it's a meaningless statement because that's true of every human being ever born. Yeah. But clearly Nate doesn't feel that way because only, I think the undercurrent here is that only people like this in Nate's mind are worth talking about because only gamblers bring the world forward, right?

Yeah, no one else deserves empathy. Yeah, yes. You're just addicted to putting money on sports games and elections, Nate Silver. Anyway, so here's the two things he wants to warn us of, or wants people to avoid. Elon is highly intelligent in several ways, but that does not mean that everything he does is brilliant. Some things he does are exceptionally dumb or dangerous, and we shouldn't make excuses for them. But likewise, it's absurd to suggest that Elon isn't brilliant in many respects just because he isn't in others. And if he has merely very good SAT scores, I don't care. Nobody does! It's not high school! Nobody cares about his SAT skills!

Elon's what, like 50, like 55 or something? Like what are we doing? Yeah. Yeah. You are a middle-aged man. I don't even know what my SAT score was. I was gonna say, like, look, I never took an SAT, but I spent more than a decade in full-time education, and anyone who ever told me their SAT scores, I immediately hated and never took an SAT, but I spent more than a decade in full-time education and anyone who ever told me that SAT scores I immediately hated and never took them seriously. I've spent almost 20 years asking people questions for a living and I've never asked anyone their SAT scores Sorry Garrison. Although SAT might not be like a stable metric for evaluating intelligence Surely Nate has an alternative method Absolutely not Garrison just how much wealth he does have an alternative method. Absolutely not, Garrison. Just how much wealth he does actually have. He does have an alternative method.

I'm seeing what you might call an infographic. Because the next section of the article is a quick inventory of Elon's intelligence. So first he admits he tried to track Elon down for his stupid book, but he couldn't get him to talk to him. I have to say, Elon does have better shit to do than talk to Nate Silver, because Elon is abusing ketamine to a near fatal degree, and that is a better use of his time than talking to Nate Silver. So since he can't actually talk to Musk, he's going to model and extrapolate from, quote,

many other Silicon Valley big wigs I have met. Okay. Helping him in this is the fact that quote Musk maintains an extremely public profile. He's turned X into a running diary of his innermost thoughts and in addition to that the biographies of the guy. One more caveat here. I will try to evaluate the overall trajectory of Elon's career, not just his recent antics. So we go down here and the next segment is Dimensions Where Musk Has Exceptionally High or Genius Level Intelligence. So

finally, Nate's going to prove it. And I'm gonna I'm gonna show you guys how he how he how he chooses to do that. What the evidence he gives us here is. And I think this is something that we should reveal to the audience after these ads. Good point, Gare. podcast comes in. Every single morning in under 15 minutes, we take the news and boil it down to three essential stories you can keep up without feeling stressed out. Listen up first from NPR on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you remember what you said the first night I came over here? How goes lower? From Blumhouse TV, iHeart Podcasts and Ember 20 comes an all new fictional comedy podcast

series. Join the flighty Damien Hirst as he unravels the mystery of his vanished boyfriend. And Santi was gone. I've been spending all my time looking for answers about what happened to Santi. And what's the way to find a missing person? Sleep with everyone he knew, obviously. Hmm, pillow talk.

The most unwelcome window into the human psyche. Follow our out of hislement hero as he engages in a series of ill-conceived investigative hookups. Mama always used to say, God gave me gumption in place of a gag reflex. And, as I was about to learn, no amount of showering can wash your hands of a bad hookup. Now, take a big whiff, my brah. Now, take a big whiff, my bruh. Listen to the hookup on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. When I smoke weed, I get lost in the music. I like to isolate each instrument. The rhythmic bass, the harmonies on the piano, the sticky melody.

Hey, careful babe, there's someone crossing the street. Sorry, I didn't see him there. If you feel different, you drive different. Don't drive high, it's dangerous and illegal everywhere. A message from NHTSA and the Ad Council. Our iHeartRadio Music Awards are coming back Monday March 17th on Fox, illegal everywhere. A message from NH Award recipient Moriah Carey. And I Heart Breakthrough Award recipient Gracie Abrams. Watch live on Fox, Monday, March 17th. At 8, 7 Central. All right, we're back.

So let's look at what Nate shows us, is the chief dimension where Musk has shown high or genius level intelligence. I'm just reading that first line, man. So the first words under this are cognitive load capacity and overall horsepower slash ram. He's always on. I mean, literally look at how often he's tweeting.

And then a huge graph that shows the density of tweets posted and when, which has been used by other people to prove that since sometime in late 2022 he's almost never gone more than about three hours without posting a tweet like It's just a solid red after he buys the site. That's like graph of like when he makes his posts. He's never offline now He's not sleeping. So this is a graph of Elon Musk's tweets from 2014 to 2024 showing the time of day and when a post is posted, represented by small red dots. And yes, at around 2022, the thickness of the red increases dramatically. It's almost just a straight red line. The period of where he must be sleeping in this graph is very concerning.

No, he sometimes sleeps from about 6 to 9 a.m., as far as we can tell, but not regularly or often. That's like a streak of 2023 where he just isn't sleeping. He's not sleeping. And again, he's on drugs, people. I think they're probably prescriptive. I'm certain he's on ketamine that has been prescribed. When you're this rich, you just get whatever drugs

you wanna do recreationally prescribed, right? But this is drug user behavior. I don't say that to judge drug users. I say that as someone who had a drug problem. Like, this is drug user behavior. And specifically, Silver is using this. And Elon's sobriety is possible. Sorry.

And specifically, Silver is using this as evidence of Musk's intelligence. Yeah. It's not. He's scaling his Twitter activity as a sign that he must be like a special type of person. Yeah. He's railing Adderall and eating ketamine lozenges all day every day. That's what this is a sign of and no one is allowed to take his phone away. Anyway, here's how Nate explains why this is smart.

In NBA terms, we'd say this is a player with an exceptionally high motor. And this is undoubtedly a valuable trait as the world becomes more complex. Last fall, I was simultaneously doing an extensive book media tour running the election model trying to build up silver bulletin plus some intensive consulting work even if I mostly kept my wits about me it was an incredible amount of mental and physical strain that would only have been sustainable for a short burst but Elon is taking on I don't know approximately a thousand times more stress than that and has done so for years no he's not that's the thing. He just tweets! He has a massive number one all of the businesses are being run by

people who are specialists in those businesses. He gets called on to sit in meetings and say yes or no to stuff and occasionally tells them to do something crazy that causes issues, right? And they're not running smoothly. Tesla's lost more value now than it gained after the election. And SpaceX just had a giant rocket explode. Again, the boring company has not done anything other than make a useless hole underneath Vegas and the hyperloop is nothing. Like, this is just full of shit, Nate.

What you have just described, running an election model that's functional, going on a book tour and consulting and writing a newsletter is more work than I credit Elon Musk with actually doing. Oh yeah. More actual effort work, right? Musk is mostly sitting in an occasional meeting, doing drugs and injecting random women with his sperm and sending tweets.

He doesn't do the injecting, I think Oh god Garrison that comes up too! No! Oh and it's crazy how it does right before he posts the graph of how much Elon tweets. Okay there it is. Okay okay politics and social media poison a lot of people's brains. Having that much wealth and power has to be intoxicating, especially if Muska ostracizes people who might keep him grounded. More sympathetically, he's taking on an incredible array of responsibilities, doing several really hard jobs at once, each of which would be stressful on their own while still managing to father 13 children and tweeting hundreds of times per week. Again, equivalent efforts. Tweeting hundreds of times a week and fathering 13 children.

He's not a father to them. No, he just- He contributed by, he didn't even have sex. No. Yeah, it is literally the lowest possible effort way to have a child. Wait, like, I'm gonna guess most of the people with penises listening to this, come this come like that's not a big effort

You wouldn't include that as like what did I get done this week? Well in addition to working 40 hours. I jacked off That's a little transphobic This is an HRT joke anyway continue it said I'm just saying it doesn't count as work. No, no. Yeah. Certainly not from us. Unless you're a sex worker, then it does, okay? Like especially, I know a lot of male porn stars. That is a difficult part of the job.

That's why they inject their penises directly with erection drugs that kill their hearts. I would like to get into more of Silver's, like, justification for why he associates this high tweet load with like intelligence? Well, because it shows rapid cognition and thin slicing ability. Okay. Alright. Sure, man. Yeah. Sure, man.

Indeed, in a capitalist system with a significant premium on being first to market, making decent judgments fast is often more important than making better judgments slowly. Canonically, VCs imagine themselves rapidly filtering through potential founders as though on Shark Tank, relying on well-known gut instinct. But this also gets people in trouble, as it has for Elon, what is Shark Tank's success rate? I bet there's a quick answer to that. And considering that it has built in free television

Advertising for any product. They've been 50% of deals are successfully closed Yeah, so I I don't know All is tweeting also shows abstract problem-solving capability. This is related to the idea of creativity Though in Musk's case, it seemingly doesn't manifest itself in artistic prowess. Seemingly. You know what? I'll give it to Nate there. I'll give it to Nate. I don't disagree with you there. And then of course, instrumental rationality. Philosophy nerds like to distinguish between two types of rationality. Instrumental rationality is

aligning means with ends, basically figuring out the most efficient ways to get what you want. For this category, I think you have to point towards the scoreboard. Musk has some unparalleled accomplishments and isn't about to let anybody stand in his way. It's also a category often associated with manipulativeness or even being an asshole, not one for nice guys." Now, and again, if Musk's actual goal is his stated goal, getting to Mars, then backing the political party that is actively doing as much damage to the biosphere as possible, ensuring that it will not have the carrying capacity necessary to make any kind of off-world

civilization likely, I would argue is a stupid decision. But he doesn't actually want us to get to Mars, right? He just wants to be in charge of everything. No, he wants to run his businesses with no government interference. That's really all it is. Yes, yes. And he has been very successful at that,

but again, it's the success of brute force. It's the same way as like, if you hire a thousand people who are willing to like break the kneecaps of a guy who annoys you, like you could say like, I'm very smart when it comes to hurting people who annoy me, but break the kneecaps of a guy who annoys you like you could say like I'm very smart When it comes to hurting people who annoy me But really you just have a lot of dudes who can beat people up for you like is that intelligence or did you just have enough? Money to hire thugs. Are you just a mob boss?

Just a mob boss and A mob boss. No one is allowed to attack because it's going to be domestic terror to fuck up a Tesla store suit, you know, anyway We need ghost dog. It's pretty it's pretty upsetting because you know a few weeks ago I was having a little bit of a resist-live moment and I actually asched my clove cigarette on A parked Tesla felt pretty cool about it. But now I guess I can't even do that. It's too too dangerous No, you can't I could face substantial charges. You might wanna text resist to a certain five digit number or something.

That's probably the best way to solve this, Garrison. I just text resist to every single person in my phone book every day. It takes about seven hours. I have fallen behind on work, you know. But it's the only thing we can do to fight fascism. The quickest path to intelligence is having a horrible sleep deprivation and drug problem, apparently.

Or at least that is how you show for it. It's funny because I saw Brian Johnson, the billionaire who's eating his son's blood, or now Plasma. Oh, yeah, the dead guy. Posted his own self-study on the damaging effects of sleep deprivationvation And I'm pretty sure musk like retweeted it with like with like an emoji or something. I'm like, yeah, dude Your brain is completely soup No, you you you are you are fried. You are the most cooked a man has ever been It's an interesting study like there there is legitimately interesting things to look at Neil on Musk's brain

Well, yes, and there's a lot of actual scientific data put together, like, exhaustively by researchers studying how not just sleep deprivation, but like wealth and power impact the brain. And like all of it makes a strong case that Elon Musk at this point has done more damage to his brain than like a career, one of those career WWE wrestlers who like kills their whole family and then shoots themselves in the chest so someone can study their brain later. Yeah, I mean. Well before before we close, I do want to say before any psychologists or sociologists or like, like, linguists get mad at me. Yes, I know Boba and Kiki is a shape language correlation test. I myself,

as well as Nate here, have kind of expanded its usage to projecting even more human or emotional qualities onto these shapes or onto these specific words. So please, sociologists, leave me alone. Do not message me about Bobo and Kiki. Please send Garrison your favorite French sociologist by direct message on X.com. I'm afraid it's already too late. I think I already hear like 12 different Redditors typing. But yes, I think Nate's just using that image there as like a metaphor to like show how you know aggressive or manipulative

Musk's own intelligence is as symbolized by a by a Kiki as opposed to you know Maybe like maybe like a Bill Gates which might be more like a Boba intelligence type Okay, a little softer a little bit more philanthropy, you know I just got finished reading nothing but rationalist and Zizian literature for two straight weeks. About a quarter of a million words by my last count, Garrison. I don't have it in me to do this. Again, I'm going to get back to my Hitler books,

where things make sense, where the world is comforting and safe. We think they're safe. Yep, I'm returning to writing about the Syrian Civil War, which is my comparative happy place. Ah, the Syrian Civil War. Yeah, it's a really great world. I do wonder if he's trying to avoid

some kind of intellectual property thing by using that little filter that he used over the booboo and kee-hee. No, because it would be, it's actually not fair use now, as opposed to if he just mentioned that thing. Yeah, because he doesn't talk about them. Then it is fair use, right? And he could use like a little clip of it

to illustrate the point. Yeah, like I did with Manu Chow. Anyway, this is all I want to say again about Nate Silver until 2028. And if, you know what the upside, if democracy really does die is we'll never have to talk about him again. Yeah.

If Trump and Musk really take over fully and do a full coup, we never have to talk about Nate Silver. Nine minutes from now, I'm wearing a Curtis Yarvin t-shirt. No, but they'll be doing a sad numbers and he will still be analyzing that data. Like straight regime capture of Nate Silver. Well, it doesn't seem possible They'll be doing a sad numbers and he will still be analyzing that data Great regime capture of Nate Silver Well, it doesn't seem possible that Trump could have gotten a hundred and four percent of the vote by the spiky percentages

Those are spiky percentages Why can't they silver just like run like Trump's casino or something, right? This is just like just like put him away I understand if Nate, cause Nate's rich. He doesn't need to do the other stuff. And if he was like just doing sports betting analysis forever, I'd be like, well, yeah, that's what he loves. Right? If I had Nate's silver money,

I'd probably just write novels for the rest of my life. Cause that's what I like to do. I don't understand why he keeps writing about politics. He's not good at it and he can't like it. He needs to feel special. He wants to feel like a special boy who knows the answers that no one else does. All right, well, anyway,

this is us making fun of Nate Silver. So you don't, well, you can still make fun of him, but you don't have to read him. We did that for you. Good night. Good night. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us

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