 This is The Reason Interview with Nikolas B. My guest is journalist Nate Silver, who burst onto the national scene in 2008 when he correctly predicted 49 out of 50 states in that year's election outstripping all other analysts. His website 538.com became a must-visit stop for anyone interested in political forecasting and it helped mainstream the concept of data journalism, which utilizes the same sort of hardcore modeling and probabilistic thinking that helped Nate succeed as a professional poker player and as a staffer at the legendary baseball prospectus. We talk about the 2024 election, why the Libertarian defenses of free speech are gaining ground among liberals, his take on the supposed crisis in legacy media, and his forthcoming book on the edge. Here is The Reason Interview with Nate Silver. Welcome, Nate Silver. Thank you, Nick. Thank you, everybody. So, I want to start with a discussion of your recent essay at your sub-stack which is called the Silver Bulletin. Not the, just Silver Bulletin. You put a lot of work into that title, didn't you? No, it was like I took about three seconds doing it and now it has like some brand equity for better or worse. So, I'm afraid to change it. So, you're like Alan Ginsberg, first thought, best thought? No, but I don't know, like now it's kind of hokey and stupid and I kind of like that. It's like kind of unpretentious, right? I mean, I've workshopped internally like better names if you're like some corporate branding consultant you'd prefer, but like I just kind of, I kind of like the cheesiness of it. Well, it's working and on November 8th, I think it was, you had a fantastic discussion where you used Friedrich Hayek's Libertarian Criticore, Why I'm Not a Conservative to talk about a kind of crack-up on the left side of the political spectrum. Hayek wrote Why I'm Not a Conservative as a Post-Crypto Constitution of Liberty and in it he talked about how in America the terms conservative and liberal didn't quite make sense the way they did in a European context because classical liberals or libertarians over there were often or in America were coded as conservatives whereas they in fact were quite liberals in a European context were pretty revolutionary and radical and a constant critique of what's going on and that liberals and libertarians then in an American context, libertarians natural enemy was actually were actually socialists who were sometimes called liberals in an American context but both liberals and now I'm not even sure I know what I'm saying, liberals, libertarians and socialists real enemy were conservatives so with that as a backdrop you wrote let me just get here you applied that Hayekian framework to contemporary U.S. politics after the October 7th attacks on Israel in your piece which was titled Why Liberalism and leftism are increasingly at odds the progressive coalition is splitting over Israel and identity politics talk about that like what does the response on campus and in certain political precincts tell us about what's going on in the left side of American politics? I mean there are a lot of dimensions to it one thing I actually did in Turner that helped is they actually asked our friend chat GPT not the woke one not Google Gemini right but like define liberalism leftism progressivism libertarianism and wokeism which is a term that is not in its common use as those others right and if you break that down issue by issue you kind of realize that actually if you're really teasing out because what chat GPT does is figure out like how is this term used and writing the consensus of all writing on the internet right and like actually liberalism is kind of closer to libertarianism than it is to certainly to like leftism or to like more modern variants of that. Why did it take an event like you know like the October 7th attacks to kind of make that visible? I'm not sure look I am someone who went I went to University of Chicago and London School of Economics and took all the European Enlightenment history classes right and read like a lot of political philosophy so like to me it's like always been like rattling around in the back of my head and I kind of I think journalists should take more political philosophy classes right I mean these ideas remain very important and very pertinent in many debates that we're having today but no it's like partly like I mean I look if you write a sub-stack then it's not all it might seem off the cuff but like you always have like a lot of ideas rattling around in your head right so kind of I had like half-drafted versions of this post and like an event like October 7th like I'm not super like polarized on Israel or anything like that right but like you have a news hook you have a moment which is kind of an emperor has no clothes moment where like these university presidents are so clearly out of touch with kind of the american mainstream and people feel like they have permission to kind of say this now after holding their tongue in a lot of previous events so it's like it's a news peg or or a news hook about things that I think a lot of people had observed for a long time which is the kind of Hayek triangle right between you know what I call liberalism but you can call it classical liberalism or libertarianism and then kind of what was socialism but not might be now kind of more social justice leftism and then you know what was conservatism but it's now more like maga-fied particularly illiberal conservatism right and so is the in this version of things is progressivism or wokeism or identity politics is it socialism minus economics and then you're left with identity politics or what's the defining attribute of that cluster no that I mean I think you know reorienting the leftist critique around issues having to do with identity particularly race and gender obviously as opposed to to class I think is interesting right and the game I don't get into like every detail every debate but like when you have at the New York Times at the 1619 project right the traditional like crusty socialists didn't like that very much right that was a sign she says an anthropologist about like how even like leftism and like kind of the new form of leftism are different I think in important respects right where you know where are conservatives on this because you you talked about conservatives I guess if there's a crack up on the left between what might have been called liberals you know for lack of a better term and progressives there's maga on the right and then is there you know a not what's the non-maga right and is that analogous to what's going on on the left I mean look as you point out earlier and as Hayek points out right America is weird in that we were kind of the first company country founded in like enlightenment values right so things like the rule of law and free speech and individualism right the market economy is not even that comes along right at this time right the industrial revolution and the enlightenment are very closely tied together historically and so if you are appealing to like traditional American values you're appealing to values that are like fairly lowercase l libertarian right certainly are kind of liberal values right Romney a republican says he likes liberal democracy and uses that term I think correctly like like people should right and so like so it is weird in that they are like traditional American values um you know look I'm not a fan of um I don't want to endorse candidates I'm not a fan of like almost anything about Donald Trump right um I don't think it's the most constructive form of conservatism and like you know and also like I do believe in in progress and technological and societal and economic progress I think it's very important it feels like kind of there aren't very many people who do believe in progress anymore right like one of the fundamental factors in all of world history is that like for many many centuries millennia human GDP grew at like 0.1 percent per year right you kept up with population growth barely if that right then beginning in the late 18th century there was a takeoff toward toward growth right and that coincided with both the enlightenment and the industrial revolution which came first as a big debate in economic history um but there was progress when there hadn't been before and like people don't people don't know that basic history yeah what what do you think happened I mean I feel like in my lifetime or even just in the 21st century the idea of progress or the or the acknowledgement of progress that you know what every day you know every year our cars get a little bit better our phones transform from something that was plugged into the wall of something you carry around in your pocket yeah everything is getting better we are in kind of a dank mode right now right where people on the right and the left are kind of like maybe we have material progress but everything else is terrible or we don't even have that what's driving that no look there are I think good data driven arguments for secular stagnation right and can you define that so I mean the way it's used informally is to mean that progress is slowing down or maybe not really happening very much at all or that there are a lot of headwinds right there's like a more larry summer's technical definition but look you know GDP in the western world grows now at like one and a half percent per year whereas it peaked at like three and a half percent in the 1960s for example life expectancy in the US has stagnated that's not very good IQ is a contentious topic but IQ has stagnated mental well-being has declined by various measures right you know many European countries have not seen their economy grow substantially in many years there is lower fertility around the world which I think is something that people you know the left doesn't like to talk about but is it certainly an important dimension of like you know political dysfunction is on the rise right so like I think that thesis is actually fairly well constructed in some ways right but you know but like the constant doomerism on all sides I mean if you have like the kind of political quadrant right where like the green whatever libertarian on social issues right everybody has like something they're they're deeply worried about right a certain type of person thinks that like AI is going to like destroy the world which by the way I take somewhat seriously that's a different debate right or you know I had dinner with a group last night and they're like well you know why would you bring children this world because of climate change right and like that's I think that view is wrong but it's like well to punish that right yeah you know to punish them oh yeah okay of course you know I mean why not so who you know who asked to be born we suffered so other people should too I think so how do you think these intra-ideological issues you know on the right the left and obviously that's not particularly among libertarians this is you know we don't want to talk about a right left spectrum because it tends to leave us out but how do you think that the breakup on the left and on the right is going to play out in the election season coming up I mean one thing in the short-term Democrats have going for them is that Trump kind of unites both both the liberals and the and the left right like that left slash liberal coalition which kind of partly formed under Obama in 2008 in part because people were sick of Bush right kind of carry forward unsuccessful with Clinton in 2012 and then or 2016 rather and then Biden successfully in 2020 Trump really unites people that would otherwise be at loggerheads over many issues but this time I'm not sure right I mean again I am not trying to like articulate an editorial position on Israel Gaza stuff right but if you have terms that are being tossed around like genocide again I'm not editorial I'm saying like that's a sign people use those terms they're very serious right that's not in the bluffing stage of oh maybe I won't vote for Biden who by the way is 81 years old right and has been I think kind of somebody you know he presents as like 79 or 80 so yeah no it's like okay yeah he's doing above average for an 81 year old okay I don't really want like a 78 year old president either right yeah so so what do you think I mean you know Gallup which has been doing you know a self-identification of political party for decades is now showing it's something like the last one was 27 percent of people say the Republicans 27 percent say they're Democrats which I think is their historic low or right near it and then about the rest are independent you know a guy out there in the audience Matt Welch and I wrote a book called the Declaration of Independence merely a dozen years ago that's still available for purchase and used bookstores and garages everywhere across America but I mean are we finally seeing a kind of breakdown not not of the two-party system because it's always going to be two parties but the way that Republicans and Democrats talk about the constellation of issues that define them is is is this the end of the road for that iteration I mean I think when the end comes it will come maybe more quicker than people think and and but I wouldn't be out of happening in like the next five or ten years right I mean in some ways the parties have become more efficient about building their electoral coalition it's kind of a remarkable fact that in American politics each party gets about half the vote if you get like 48 percent versus 52 it's like a considered almost a landslide these days and it's amazing I mean according to and if these analyses are wrong explain why but in 2016 it was about 80,000 votes across three states that changed and it was about 40,000 votes across three states in 2020 in a country of 300 billion yeah not billion excuse me yeah million people right it's remarkable elections are that close right yeah has to do with the efficiency in some ways of the political system but they do it by enforcing more and more orthodoxy right there's no a priori reason why your view on taxation and abortion and Gaza and marijuana legalization and ten other issues needs to be tied together but you kind of flatten out this multi-dimensional space into two parties one difference now versus a couple decades ago is that the public intellectuals or maybe it's too generous a term right but like the pundits are more partisan than the voters they're the ones who enforce partisan orthodoxy and if you're somebody who look I'm basically a good center left liberal right in most rooms I feel in some rooms in New York I feel like I'm the more conservative person but in this room probably like one of the most you know practically a stooge of the Soviet Union yeah I suspect yeah um but if you kind of break from orthodoxy there's a very efficient policing of people who piss inside the tent and and dissent from the coalition and have the credibility to to say that out loud right um because you can influence people if you're willing to like just to speak your mind I mean it helps to be established where where you're not really afraid of anything um but in a way I mean if if the political parties are becoming more kind of orthodox and kind of enforcing and you know they may be losing popular support but that doesn't really matter in a two-party system because one of them is going to win but how does that you know if political parties and identities are kind of whimpering to an end that also seems true of legacy media by legacy media I I I mean I guess corporate media or like big media from a few years ago which all of which seems to be kind of fumbling over itself a couple weeks ago we saw an outpouring of anger that vice magazine which up until about two weeks ago had been seen as a charnel house of sexual harassment suddenly when it just when it goes bankrupt then people are like I can't believe we lost this you know the last outpost of great journalism right and other things like that happened you know when sports illustrated finally went belly up the LA Times newspaper that literally nobody read what you know is cutting off you know cutting staff what's going on with the legacy media and is that in any way tied to what's going on in the political identity space no look in an effort to be kind of nuanced and textured I think it's 80 percent secular economic forces where you have this advertising bundle that was very powerful and that like kind of probably you know wasn't like a natural occurrence per se it was like kind of a a form of economic rent more or less that subsidized the industry and look again my parents are like they would walk down to the store and buy the New York Times even growing up in Michigan and things like that I respect traditional journalism but I think it's most an economic story it's hard because you know I think journalism does create in theory social utility I'm not sure I think that journalism should be funded by governments though it isn't many countries right you say you're not sure do you mean you know it shouldn't be it I mean that's a real problem okay so here's my idea which I'm stealing from one of my future sub-stack posts right I think universities should run maybe it's a bad idea I don't know yeah I read it immediately okay but but follow it up like one what if Harvard I mean sounds like a bad idea yeah what if universities bought newspapers right yeah because like universities are more useful than excuse me newspapers are categorically more useful than academic papers right they are well because they have comic section they have copy yeah no but like look they are producing journals in real time they're the first draft of history right they're read much more widely the writing is like much much much better right and so you know Harvard should take the fact that members can actually write and communicate with the public and have them write for like the Boston Globe I think instead of for some university of Miami or a party school could take over vice right there you go exactly it's a brand extension for god's sake no wait look I think I think it I think it is a secularly bad trend yeah um now if it's a secularly bad trend that journalism outfits are going out of business or or these particular ones being for once like the kind of most left-wing person in the room yeah look I think journalism does I think look we could debate for the rest of the night about them or not to be agree probably on the many things I think journalists do wrong um I look I do think it's not great that local journalism has been hit so badly right there's also this kind of like you know look I'm a big fan of sub-stack I make money from it yeah um you kind of realize your marginal revenue product a little bit more explicitly you know there is always like an implicit deal where like if you go and like report from like the front lines of Ukraine like that's not actually going to be narrowly profitable right so you always have like subsidization of like enterprise reporting and foreign reporting from cooking and homes right and the editorial section right where you pay pretty well but like they get lots and lots of clicks or word or whatever games um and if like that bundle breaks down then like I mean New York Times itself is doing well I guess well do you think that that kind of journal uh you know uh and I was going to quote from the Declaration of Independence Matt and I wrote about you uh as emblematic actually and you know this is so a dozen years ago we wrote at one point saying in the wake of the organization man comes a new breed of individuals such as baseball stats nerds Nate Silver and Bill James who created not only highly personalized careers but even the field in which they work that had to do with baseball but then after that you know you created 538 and could you walk through kind of the stages of death that went along with that because when 538 launched it was a phenomenal resource that was doing things that other sites weren't doing and it was you know it was interesting and fascinating and then what it uh you ended up moving to the New York Times with it and then to ABC Disney so we were we were under license to the New York Times so basically just like was hired by the Times for three years and then we sold 538 I'm not sure that we is I sold 538 to Disney ESPN in 2014 which became um was transferred intercompany transferred to ABC news and I mean was it I mean like is 538 which now has ceased publication right it's there is a version of 530 look the people who are still there work hard yeah no no no I'm not and I'm not saying anything what I'm saying though is like so within a you know what a 10 year a little bit more than 10 years you went from starting something fundamentally new that made a major impact on legacy media you know in two giant news organizations yeah and now has kind of you know is in its biden years let's say right where it's taking the afternoons off um and you know is is it you know is that a tragedy or will something else come up is it the fact that you could do that was because there's so much more possibility and capacity for new thing I mean just talk a little bit about that and you then as the individual behind it are you better or worse off being at you know at sub stack for the moment I mean the the latter question is easier so yeah for me it's like I feel much better off I just kind of have like a little extra like um pep in my step being independent again right um you probably why not making the same income it might be from six different sources of the texts are more complicated but like but like it's very nice to have like an incentive like actually get if you write a good sub stack post and people will subscribe to your blog and you get money in your bank account right like that actually feels like good to have like actual incentives to to work hard and to develop an audience um yeah I mean the problem with ABC news and Disney is that like it was basically like run like a kind of socialist economy almost right or not I mean look obviously this is a well-run business in some ways but like we were so small relative to their scale that they didn't care one way the other if we like if you like make five million or lose five million why do they care right it's like one day of theme park receipts at one theme park somewhere in the world um it's actually really bad though right it makes you kind of like a a client of the regime right that your capacity to stay there depends on the goodwill of people who are who are able to kind of write off an x-million dollar loss a year um also like we had good economics for a for a subscriber business right we have loyal frankly high net worth readers who have differentiated willingness to pay um who have been around 538 for a long time it could have been a good subscription business but like Disney was literally like well we are launching Hulu plus therefore this would interfere with that it's like no it wouldn't but like when you're in a very large corporation and you're like some subdivision of a subdivision of subdivision um it's not run very efficiently Disney is not one of these cultures like like a friend who works for Amazon like Amazon will micromanage everything it can be good or bad in different ways but like Disney is all about scale scale scale you know the national football league and theme parks and and nine figure budget movies and if you're like a little tiny barnacle on the Disney whale then you'll just get ignored till the politics change and they have to cut staff and wear this division that no one ever even tried to make a profit with all I think we could have and of course at at some point you get so I guess going back to the larger question of you know individual companies are one thing but is the media escape in general and and I'm not being flip here you know is is it an absolute loss when you know the LA time shrinks or do you are you confident that new things will crop up that will do perform either the same function or the function as it needs to be done now rather than what a daily newspaper did in 1970 or 1980 look I think very different I mean it's weird because you do have like sub stack I think is great and you do have you know social media has although complicated democratized things in a lot of ways so it's it's the upper middle class like a lot of things it's gotten quite squeezed um you know I mean I think things like local reporting the fact that like the the very obvious and kind of comical like George Santel's story uh didn't get a lot of pickup for example like things like that are going by the wayside a bit I think we're gonna have like a few more blind spots like look is it like in my list of like the 10 biggest problems in America right now no right top 25 okay maybe it's I think it's bad but like I don't think look people have a desire to express themselves there are some outlets like the New York Times that are still doing very well um yeah um so a bigger problem might be uh you wrote recently in an essay and the title kind of explains what it's about and I'd like your comment on it free speech is in trouble young liberals are abandoning it abandoning it and other groups are too comfortable with tit for tat hypocrisy this was from November yeah uh why are young liberals abandoning free speech I mean I think people should realize that like America is still in the whole history of the world um and again what I would call enlightenment liberalism these are still like relatively new ideas you know um they've been with us for for a few centuries and not more than that um and in some ways they're kind of like counter-intuitive ideas uh the notion that oh if we actually kind of like I mean are a little bit more laws I fear only people do what they want and actually the market will the free hand of the market visible hand will generate more wealth and will all be collectively better off right it kind of sounds took it to be true except it mostly is true right um empirically over over a long period of time um but you know when you have I mean there are a couple of things one which is relevant to my book is that for the first time in maybe history the younger generation is more risk averse and older people right they're having less sex they're doing fewer drugs um those can be good or bad I don't know right um but like but like it's so bad they're having less sex than Joe Biden I mean he apparently is doing yeah he was in the headlines for that which is like hey can you imagine like you wonder why these people are dying right they're working shopping that comment for like yeah um no but so I mean the risk aversion go I mean look look I am not somebody who says that there are never any tangible harms from controversial speech I mean look at salmon rushy or something like that right I mean free speech can like actually have effects it's a powerful thing um but if you're so risk averse each one I maintain harmony and that that I think that's part of it right and also like you know these are not people that grew up with the memory of the cold war or certainly not a world war two right or or kind of censorship mass censorship when you think back to the idea that books like Lady Chatterley's Lover or uh Tropic of Cancer Ulysses really weren't legally published in America until the late 50s early 60s yeah or even things uh again if you're like 23 or something even dumb stuff like the Dixie Chicks and in the Bush years right people even forget about that kind of thing um so um why do you think then other people you know not woke progressives but then you know why are conservatives who constantly talk about the constitution or I don't perhaps even libertarians in certain circumstances are like yeah well let's you know let's point out that people let's be hypocritical in order to you know own the lips what what's going on there um one of the universal truths about everything in life is that if you have a longer time horizon you almost always benefit from that um people are trying to win the argument to feel satisfaction in that immediate moment that hour right um to win the debate and they think if you know so like I'll get into the left on things not the left actually it's kind of more kind of center left partisan democrats about like about like Biden's age and I kind of think well if I can if I can dunk on Nate Silver about about Biden's age um then I'll win the argument right but like the problem is it's not an argument between you or me 70% of the American electorate thinks Biden is too old very reasonably so I might add I mean I think anyone you know 80 is just above the threshold I think anyone should be commander in chief um but like they're trying to like win the argument and not kind of not win the war or even or not even like so this might be an impossible question to answer I mean it's kind of a chicken or egg thing but are we more talking about like present short term things because that's the infrastructure you know that's social media that's the way media cable news operates now or have we conjured those things in order to win quick arguments in the idea that that will transform society it's probably it's sweet right it's partly human nature partly the nature of modern media um and part of the fact that again people are are not in politics for truth-seeking reasons right they're in politics for to win partisan arguments basically um and to enforce orthodoxy because you have two parties that again are taking like this multi-dimensional you know 20-dimensional space and trying to like collapse it all down into two coalitions that may not actually have all that much in common if you start to pick apart differences um and you need kind of useful idiots to like to enforce those those hierarchies so I guess why are you different I mean your entire career going back to your work you know at baseball prospectus and elsewhere you you know you're more data driven and it's we don't want to get into follow the science you know data data will tell you whatever you need it to tell you right but you know why why aren't there more journalists like you that are like you know what let's actually try and ascertain reality and then tease out trends and meaning as opposed to I'm coming in and I'm just going to bulldoze things into what I want it to be no it's it's funny because you know now I feel like I'm more of a traditionalist you know when I went to the New York Times in 2010 they were very concerned that I had kind of publicly said that I had endorsed I didn't endorse actually I said I had voted for Obama in 2008 right which I thought was a manner of like basic transparency I would make the same vote again to be sure but that was a big problem that I had even been open about my kind of like political views at all where it comes from circle now where if you don't kind of express your view on every issue then you're seen as being suspect potentially but look it's look the world is dynamic and so it's possible to over correct I think there was or is truth in the kind of left critique of like both sides journalism the truth is certainly not always especially a libertarian right it's not just somewhere in the middle you people aren't centrist right it's a different dimension and you have you know it's a very different dimension that some people will claim doesn't even really exist so you certainly can't find it on any map right but and look I think even some of the more like woke version of it like obviously I do think that like it's to some approximation true that like yeah like white men have a lot of power in media and like of course it's absolutely true right but when you when you don't give people credit for it being willing to adapt if you read if you read the New York Times today and compare it to 2013 or something it's a it's a vastly different paper now and like and so you have to adjust to that moving target and not to the same standard and give people credit for being and this is like part of why I like I guess the free market right is it gives people credit for being intelligent and like within their domain like relatively rational it's not like I'm the only smart person in the room it's a little bit like with to bounce around a bit a little bit with like kind of some of the covid stuff on like the early dialogue about masks where Fauci is like okay well later on where people masks are worthwhile but let's kind of say they don't really do anything we need them for like essential workers right and people really notice that we're kind of like kind of telling a good noble lie like that shows contempt for people and if you play poker then you know that kind of like although bluffing is a part of poker you know that if you're inconsistent that you're allowing yourself to be exploited by your opponent right your opponent's smart if you were only playing a certain kind of hand a certain way with a bluff or with a strong hand then you will be exploited by your opponent as opposed to treating them as intelligent and adaptable and and more sophisticated like I think you should treat people as being intelligent it's a much more robust strategy than something you're the only kind of like that you're the only kind of worthwhile and smart people in the room very quickly talk about your book on the edge it comes out in august what's the precy of it so the book is called on the edge it's a book about gambling and risk it covers a lot of territory so it kind of starts out it kind of follows my journey where like before I ever cover politics I played poker online for for a period of time in the mid-2000s so it kind of starts out in the poker world what was your best year in poker can you how much did you make a couple hundred thousand or something yeah no there was a time when it was how much did you lose I guess no that's that's that oh yeah you can with like your ghost poker all right yeah that's not why did you stop that because the government passed a law called the UIGEA something gaming enforcement act right which is kind of what piqued my interest in politics it was like tucked into some unrelated security legislation at the end of 2006 I wanted the bastards who passed legislation who are mostly republicans to lose and they did democrats had a good midterm in 2016 or 2006 rather and like okay well they fucking took away my livelihood so what I'm going to do now right and I kind of wound up starting to write about politics and here you are simping for Trump so yeah thanks what a world what a strange world bud so on the edge though you did a phenomenal amount of interviews and research for this so can you kind of talk a little bit about the scope of that yeah so it starts out in like poker and sports but it gets into areas like venture capital gets into crypto I talked to our friend Sam Beckman freed quite a bit gets into effective altruism gets into a lot of the AI stuff it's a fundamental book about a certain type of nerd right a certain type of very competitive analytical nerd because these people are kind of like so it's not a biography okay well sort of yeah no I don't say that meanly I'm saying like but no like there's like not a good term this type but they're kind of like actually taking over the world in a lot of ways right they're the ones who run tech and finance tech and finance are eating the world right um so it's a tour an insider's tour about how people like that think um and yeah they were like 200 interviews I mean I did like a lot of trips to Vegas which was fun um but you're trying to like immerse people in the topic and give people a front row seat and also like you know I have like I'm not like a big network access guy right but I'm flattering myself here um because I think I am fair I think people will talk to me that would not talk to other people right like I am talking to like some of the top Silicon Valley VCs on their own terms and unguarded ways because like I'm not coming in with like with an agenda apart from like trying to understand them and look the book is very critical of some things that people like Silicon Valley right but like but I think it's like fair it didn't like preconceived what it wanted to say before actually did the reporting the interviewing and I think that will be reflected in in the work do you uh I guess to go back to Hayek uh and my favorite work by Hayek is the counter revolution of science studies in the abuses on the abuse of reason and um he worried that what happened in the French Enlightenment or what he considered the French Enlightenment was that everything got to mathematically and that ultimately people were just data points in other people's grand theories or formulas and you you erase them if they if they you know mess up your uh your uh equation yeah are we too quantified in this world uh you know in the way that you're talking about all of the big industry seem to be being run you know by quants of one sort or another I mean there are a few dimensions of this right one is like the dubious claims to have scientific authority and say oh we are just doing what the data tells us you saw this during like COVID and whatnot you see this with the concept of misinformation which is often entirely subjective right that's one dimension um look I mean the book also gets into utilitarianism a little bit and effective altruism um where they try to quantify everything and you run into problems with that right you're I mean first of all like I actually build models for a living right like I built sports models and election models tried to bet on them myself and in a sense like you know a game theory of poker strategy is kind of a model right like building a model is pretty hard there are lots of ways to screw up there are lots of omitted variable biases and like um so yeah no I mean it like might be another overcorrection thing where like yeah like 20 years ago the world needed to become more data driven now it's become like a little bit of a of a you know um when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail kind of thing problem a little bit um final question before we get to the audience is uh you know I was looking up the Metz odds of making the playoffs this year and according to Pocota uh which is a system that you created right yeah it's been inherited by other people yes but um it was coming in that they have like a 49 percent chance of making the playoffs this year does that sound about right that sounds reasonable yeah yeah okay all right so yeah so they're not going to I mean you know the Metz can't be explained by any rational principle okay fair enough okay well uh well let's open it up to questions uh Nate I have a I have a can I ask a two-part question Nick is that permissible you uh can I ask a two-part question okay uh if you were to make a market based on what we know about COVID and the likelihood of COVID being uh bioengineered and leaked from a lab versus uh natural origin what would you what how would you assess that um so there are you know there are prediction markets right um I think I'm like manifest or manifold rather it's like uh 77 percent um lab leak 23 percent natural origin which to me seems which to me seems about right right I try to maintain some like epistemic humility on this but it's almost like a it's almost like an Occam raise Occam's razor kind of thing where um look if you have proposals to do gain a function research on coronavirus is where you insert like a fur and cleavage site um and then it turns out that exact thing happened to happen in a city where they have one of the worlds leading coronavirus laboratories like it's like the John Stuart thing about like Hershey's and chocolate that's actually very good Bayesian reasoning right um it's very weird that it emerged in Wuhan which is not a center for actual like bat coronavirus and things like that right it's very weird that it emerged there like it's a very powerful prior um and you know look you can get more detail also about the degree of obfuscation obfuscation yeah thank you Nick um you know it's also a bit of like if you're a baseball fan you learn to like watch the outfielders and not the ball if you know if it's going to be a home run or not right you know the way people seem very afraid to have a true like debate on this issue I mean look this is like one of those issues that like that I found like a little bit radicalizing again I don't know what happened for sure right I think it's 75 25 or 80 20 which is a very very very long way from like 99 one or 100 zero but the fact that you had these obviously bullshit papers published in like the best most prestigious scientific journals and like even now people can't quite admit to it they're kind of like well aren't we a little tired of the covid stuff right can't we just move on like that's like deeply you know only eight billion people or eight million people died right it's not do you do you think that is part of the breakdown on on the left side of the political spectrum as well that you know there's there was a lot being shoved down people's threats that was obviously false it's easier to lie with lies of omission right like even something like this like google gemini super woke ai that I wrote about the other day you know the New York Times the big like tech publications were not doing the best work on this it was all on on x twitter and substack you know I don't think the New York Times publishes a lot of things that are that are false but they but you know what they kind of sink their teeth into or not is often quite you know reveals a lot of bias right it was you know and your piece on that is fantastic I despite the name silver bulletin I highly recommend a sub snack but you know you you had a lot of fun with the fact that queries saying you know show me a german soldier in 1943 and it would be a black person an african-american and it reminded me of when you know judas got cast in jesus christ superstar and it's like judas it's the black guy and it's like it's the wrong kind of progress right that and inclusion it seems well no look I actually think that like I kind of wish there were better like left-wing critiques of AI stuff too right this is a case where like corporations have a lot of power to shape reality right like to me it's actually kind of worrying that like like this is not a good profit maximizing decision for google you know and you know profit maximization but like at least it's kind of predictable whereas like whereas like how did a company this large produce such a terrible product it's kind of it's kind of the business story of like the decade if not the century and the fact that you don't have like every like tech reporter slobbering over it because the valence is kind of very vaguely right-leaning yeah and you you point out at the end that this it's not like this came out by accident this actually reveals something deep about the ethos at work in google yeah there are similar things if you look at not just the image generation but the text generation there are similar things if you looked at google image search for example we're like google which kind of in its IPO pledged to be unbiased and impartial and objective by the way now doesn't pledge that anymore right they are honest about it but like they're they're putting a really heavy finger on the scale i mean look i mean i you know my notes before i came here i'm reading google docs on my android phone right um these companies have a lot of power and if they're kind of using it to facilitate political objectives i mean not that you won't also have problems of people being manipulated by algorithms like that's a valid concern um but there ought to be like you know i'm not a big like congressional hearings kind of guy right but like that's kind of thing you probably should have a hearing about is like you know our ai labs like inserting politics into supposedly objective output i would like to see that done in the marketplace of ideas but point jonathan okay next uh hey i feel like one of the subtly profound things sub-stack has done is show us what different pundits are worth in like a pure willy willingness to pay sense so like it turned out andrew solovan and matt tiebe and iglesias and i'm sure you like are all worth many times more what they made uh when they were in mainstream legacy media what do you think that's done to the media ecosystem yeah look i mean i have mixed feelings about it because on the one hand like yeah i'm probably on that part of the hockey stick where you benefit from that net net and also i do the type of content that like i think is good for a subscriber newsletter um yeah look it's going to cause problems for um for many publications where you know the new york times had like an implicit kind of like like pay cap and like you know not me maybe in a couple years right but like an andrew solovan would like or matt tiebe would like break that pay cap substantially um and yet that would subsidize other parts of the paper so look i look it's democratizing it's like it's basically good right it's democratizing and liberalizing and i'm i'm in favor of people kind of achieving uh their marginal revenue product and capturing that as opposed to some big corporation um but it is going to be tough for i think again like the the middle ground of journalism like like i like the atlantic right but like someone like that has like a lot of like ideas people um is competing very directly with like the sub stacks of the world i also worry a little bit about like you know there have not been that many new stars on sub stack right it's kind of like people who are you know early middle age to late middle age who have it and establish brand and like have an audience with them um i worry about not having creative kind of young blood and journalism farm to you know what's interesting too is sub stack might be you know as people get spread out more and more the editor function or the curation function you know there's a value to that and that's what the times does that's what atlantic does that's what all magazines do on some level it'll be interesting to see you know and that might actually be the model that the free press is doing where it's curation it's a couple of stars but it's mostly you know an older model yeah i mean like sub stacks got i mean for a while they're providing editing services they've kind of pulled back from that and had these internal squabbles obviously about like are we just kind of like a platform are we a publisher are we somewhere in between um yeah look it is nice to have actual editing right for the sub stack i don't for my book i have like a terrific editor and a terrific research assistant a terrific like fact checker right and you go through like four or five rounds of each draft and like that's a great process i mean you can't do that for every sub stack post exactly but like um i hope editors are still are still respected and valued right i don't think that um i don't think that the ai is a very good editorial judgment right maybe open ai should hire a bunch of ex journalists i'm kind of half serious about that that's interesting okay next question hi nat i know you've built you've built a career out of constructing models that predict election outcomes but how would you adjust your your models and your assumptions given that there have been so many changes in the way that votes are collected um with mail-in voting and also uh how would you adjust for you know the variables that have to do with information suppression and the uh we've seen with the twitter files you know they're there it's very possible for you know purveyors of information to put their their thumbs on the scale how would you adjust your models and assumptions you know for those types of changes i mean with an election model in some sense you're trying to keep it simple right and not adjust for too much the reasoning that we only have a sample of like like 14 elections with any meaningful amount of polling data and if you have a sample of 14 elections then there's not that much you can do with it apart from kind of take a simple model and say okay empirically how accurate are the polls if biden is ahead by three points in pennsylvania on october 15th you know how often does he win pennsylvania and how correlated is pennsylvania with michigan and wisconsin right like that's like a tractable problem um where you don't have to go to like first principles to think about like is public opinion being measured accurately um i'm not a pollster um pollsters have a lot of challenges most people don't answer uh polls anymore it's a big stretch to assume that the people who do are representative of people who vote right i mean they are a self-selected often very highly educated sample of people that is not representative um what pollsters have figured out is that you have to like apply a lot of massaging and secret sauce um and they do have good incentives to like get accurate answers more or less pollsters do um but no look i'm trying to keep the model simple and kind of quantify how much error there is in the polling which is actually a fair bit you know some years have been better than others 2022 was actually a pretty good year for the polls 2020 was a disaster obviously um but that's why there are big probabilities and uncertainties around even like assumingly not that close election what uh as we go to the next question what what's the biggest prediction that you screwed up or you got wrong well my answer is different than other people like so in 2016 um our model had trumped with like a 29 chance of winning and the consensus the betting markets were were 15 percent right so to me as someone who has gambled for a living at times including making sports bets right to me that's a great forecast because it means you would bet actually at trump on six to one odds with the odds should be two and a half to one right and make a killing and expected value terms in that respect right and like that's how i think about the world i came into politics the last thing i've done before that was as a professional poker player right most people think thing with under 50 chance happened you're a fucking idiot nate silver right but like but like that's not how i think about the world like and like again i'm the one who actually is like made a living kind of betting on making forecasts and predictions right and so like um but no the unambiguous mistake we made or i made was in 2016 we didn't have a model for this is just kind of my mistake is like a pundit whatever you want to call me um was being dismissive of trump's chances to win the nomination in 2016 when ironically trump had had led in the polls almost the whole way right um he came down the escalators at trump tower was treated as a joke kind of on tv a lot criticized john mccain for being injured in war right and it kind of just took off and people like me were very stubborn until pretty late in the game for saying oh it's just name recognition no it's not gonna it's not real right it's not going to settle in i think i think you know like in some ways i mean that was a huge mistake obviously on my part yeah i'd like to ask you about about x um last year you had this um it was a great piece that you had in sub stack and then um you did a thread on x about the difference between blue states and red states in covid deaths and when you came out with that these grenades started coming in and they were just bizarre the responses that you got really seem to have nothing to do with what you were talking about and i know that you've been very generous about saying well x is a great you know it's a great forum um but it's also a cesspool and it seems like that was an example of how x can be super cesspool-y so if you just comment on that how do we drain that swamp i mean look x is still a cesspool it's a little bit more of a pluralistic cesspool now right whereas like before there was a certain not quite even center left but like progressive orthodoxy that if you violated it that you would get totally piled on i mean i've been a i think me and Maggie Haberman um are like tied for the most time being a trending topic on on twitter among journalists right um because i mean i'm not in the same bucket as Maggie obviously right but but she is reporting the best of her ability right um i'm just trying to like get at the truth and like and i'm and people assume we're supposed to be like the people who help who help democrats win like it's not my function as a journalist right i hate that idea of like being emboled in line with one party um i think Elon has like democratized it a bit and made that one faction less dominant but yeah look i mean um but the twitter is set up for dunking and for groupthink in a lot of ways right it's like a medium that runs very hot and like the Marshall McLuhan sense of the term right where you feel this rage and urge to go into into combat i mean it's very addictive right i mean it's still true that like the first thing i do every morning is is check twitter it's extremely engaging um and it's kind of like a very lowercase l libertarian adjacent person like i'm not sure how i feel about like should we like regulate this tech company right um where people volunteer they're opting in to kind of use twitter but like look if we found out that like social media has caused substantial disutility in the world i mean i think there's decent evidence about about this right um you know adding to polarization adding to maybe depression in some ways incentivizing kind of short-term equilibria instead of kind of long-term good um it is a problem for sure yes i i met someone three weeks ago the first person i've met in person who believed that the um the nfl was purposely throwing the games to benefit taylor swift and maybe joe biden and this person was also someone who's played in the world series of poker and i thought as someone who was a had done professional gambling she'd understand how expensive it would be to um throw super bowl games and all the playoff games but is there is there something in the mind of a professional poker player that would lead you to be more conspiratorial so if you're a pro poker player then you probably have very good quantitative skills and at least at least decent people skills poker is in part a people game right you can be strange but you have to have like some intuition for how people behave um if you have those skills you can go make a fucking like fortune working for a hedge fund or something so the fact that people pick poker means that they are lone wolves right that they do feel they are a little bit anti-authoritarian um i mean hey you know you know like how like thomas freeman gets like every opinion from like a taxi driver or an uber driver right there's a limit of that at poker it's very diverse politically right you'll meet socialists you'll meet libertarians you'll meet um rational center left people you'll meet cranks right um so it's good to like get kind of a cross-section of of male public opinion it is very male like 97 um but no look i mean uh look i think there's ample evidence that like intel like look at like the lamensa people right um they often have like crazy conspiratorial things they believe and like in some ways smart people are are better at rationalization and and can fall for conspiracy theories and and can be gullible in certain ways and so no it doesn't surprise me like that yeah obviously some poker players are crazy i look i'd rather have that person at my table than someone who who doesn't think that the nfl rig the super bowl right um but you get all comers in poker for sure so are you saying the super bowl was rigged i mean look i have i have a little money on the chiefs is all i'll say okay all right and yeah and you've got that in an envelope that came two weeks before the game was a little just a little fair enough final question well it's another gambling question and this issue kind of splits conservatives and libertarians we're a gambling crazy country now sports betting everything and under the sun do you have a view about that uh it's a regressive tax demonstrably is it a good thing that we're sort of we've turned those bounds loose i mean the irony is that um the worst forms of gambling are prey on the on the lower working class right like the lottery takes 50 percent of every bet that you make on average in different states right like draft kings takes four and a half percent um you know at the blackjack table they take one percent if you play correctly um so there are a couple things like one is like look the central solution is to probably like is to ban i mean i'm not advocating for this i'm saying like if you want to carve out like a middle ground it's to differentiate more different forms of of gambling right like slot machines are much more addictive than table games like blackjack or like poker and it's supposed to use algorithms to try to like get people to like get hooked on the slot machine and and paying more is a good book called um addiction by design by nantasha shoals an NYU anthropologist who was like not approved she's fun right but like she went and did like a thesis in las vegas and like actually talked to like problem gamblers and found that some of them actually don't want to win this is one of the scariest things i've learned when writing the book is that like if you are like a slot machine addict you want to get into like a machine zone what she calls like the machine zone kind of a flow state where you're just kind of playing the machine you're almost like working you're undisturbed by the problems outside of our world well you've been it did this yeah former department of drugs are in education yeah and if you if you win a slot jackpot i've won video poker jackpots once right like literally sirens go off and lights flash the spotlight's kind of literally on you it's very disruptive right so just want to play they don't care about winning they kind of know on one hand that like it probably is like um a negative expected value gamble but they're so kind of they want to escape from the problems of the world and like i don't know slot machines are are pretty bad right but they're better than lotteries and scratch off tickets right oh yeah lotteries are vastly more popular when it comes to the actual dollars bet yeah and by the way like if you're gonna have shouldn't i mean wouldn't the elegant solution if we want to reduce gambling is get rid of scratch off tickets that are run by the state like no state that has scratch off tickets is any business talking to anybody about any other form of gambling right like again like that's very manipulative and like i have friends who like to do marketing for like the new york lottery they have a good budget they do funny ads right um but you know it's a huge house cut 50 percent that's being taken most of people who like probably shouldn't be gambling very much right where if you go to like the aria or the win in las vegas i mean look the high end casinos people are having a good time right like that to me seems like a fair arm plank transaction where yeah there are some problematic customers but like you're having a fun time you're spending a lot of money right sometimes you win um it's a nice experience the lower rung casinos there are some that are kitschy and and fun right you know go to the l-courtess downtown of vegas it's a fun place to hang out but like but it can get pretty depressing and like it's praying on people who like who i think are often being manipulated by by false police about how probability works so i guess um to close things down let's bring it back to this question of kind of enlightenment values and enlightenment liberalism which is on a profound level is um you know predicated on the idea that we can all mostly be autonomous that we deserve uh you know we deserve the right to have the freedom to make choices in our life to live the way we want to make money the way we want you know marry who we want evil we want etc do you feel like um you know do you feel like that's what's being tested now and the way that people talk about things are we you know are we in a good place for you know people taking control of their lives as opposed to kind of running to a conspiracy theory on the right or the left or wherever i mean maybe my view is darker which i think the lessons are that we we shouldn't trust groups to make decisions or we shouldn't trust let me take that back right we should be wary of like kind of like the expert class who do not have local knowledge you do not have correct incentives right um and in the market at least you kind of have trial and error and and there are lots and lots and lots of bad ideas but you have some mechanism for sorting out in the long run the good ideas from the bad ones right um you know something like ai is a little scary in that way because like with ai it's kind of inherently a winner take most feel where you need lots and lots and lots of compute computing power um it's probably going to be you know google and open ai and and microsoft and and the chinese government maybe the department of defense or whatever i don't know right but like to have like a hegemonic world of like like five or six players is is i think quite scary right um look i mean you know and you don't have to be like Elizabeth Warren to be worried about the fact that like um you know i don't care per se about the concentration of wealth right um i maybe care about the concentration of power and when you have like more and more people who are more powerful than entire countries like i'm not i'm not sure that's kind of great for kind of even kind of lower k-cell free market liberalism right do you uh in the end though do you agree that it's probably better to have that than to have five elizabeth warren's dictating the shapes of market yeah no it's it's a much more robust failure mode right it's a whole kind of church alien you know democracy is the best worst idea wow am i butchering this right the worst system except for the other system talking about ward Churchill right he sees the Churchill i stand exactly yeah but it's like it's a robust failure mode and like we're having a lot of failures now and and yet i guess the country's kind of trudging along we'll see we'll see fell forward into failure in the future i'm gonna thank nate sober for talking to me