Nate Silver (statistician)

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dax Shepard?

  Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Monica Padman.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 0:06Dax Shepard?

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

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Ooh, is it our first?

• 0:11Dax Shepard?

  That's a big swing. Nate Silver is the point. He's a statistician and a bestselling author. Everyone would know Nate Silver around election time. He's, all of his computations end up as headlines all the time. He had an incredible track record for a while. There were a couple deviations that we'll learn of. But his books include The Signal and The Noise, and he has a new book out that I happened to just read on my own, couldn't stop talking about. We invited him in. He blessed us with his presence. It's called On The Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. And also, you can go to his Substack at Silver Bulletin, which is where he's doing all of his work now.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  And that's a fun play on words.

• 0:57Dax Shepard?

  Silver Bulletin.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Silver Bulletin.

• 0:59Dax Shepard?

  No problem for you. You hit that like a silver bullet. Please enjoy Nate Silver. We get support from Quince.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Okay. Can we talk about the fact that the holidays are already here? It's crazy. I feel like I blinked and now we're in gifting season, which I'm not really mad about because I do love giving gifts. And Quince is making it so easy to find something great for everyone on my list, including myself. Because let's be honest, self-gifting is a love language.

• 1:29Dax Shepard?

  Quince is seriously the gift that keeps on giving. Their high-quality staples are made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, 14-karat gold, and Italian leather. Full-on luxury quality at prices that won't wreck your holiday budget.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  It's the dream. The cashmere sweater's starting at $60, down jackets, wool outerwear, cashmere accessories. You and everyone on your list are staying cozy and looking incredible all season long.

• 1:55Dax Shepard?

  Well, I'm gonna tell you this. It just got chilly for the first time this year in California, and I'm so excited. And I'm wearing my Quince cashmere right now.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  It's great.

• 2:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and I am going to gift this to some of my friends. I hope they're not listening.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Quince is also more than clothing. They've got fine- Jewelry for your significant other, leather bags for your bestie, hotel quality bedding to set up your guest rooms, chef grade cookware. That's an amazing thing they offer here. And it's such a good gift because people don't like buying cookware for themselves, but it's very important. And they also have five star luggage, another good gift that people don't like buying for themselves.

• 2:30Dax Shepard?

  Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show. This episode is brought to you by McDonald's. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Medium Fries and a Drink is now $8.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  What?

• 3:02Dax Shepard?

  Okay, I need to talk about something that doesn't get enough respect. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese. This is not a casual burger. This is a crafted burger. We're talking 100% fresh beef cooked right when you order it. No artificial flavors, no fillers, no preservatives, just beef doing what beef is supposed to do. And here's a detail I love. There's a cowbell sound in the kitchen. When somebody orders a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, a cowbell goes off and the grill master throws a fresh patty down. That's like having your own entrance music at McDonald's. I want a cowbell for everything in life. The onions are hand topped by someone who just knows the right amount. Two slices of cheese laid out in a star pattern. So every single bite gets cheese and two pickles side by side.

• 3:44Dax Shepard?

  So you're never in a pickle desert. Every bite is accounted for. Someone engineered this thing with love. I love a Quarter Pounder.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Me too. That's my order. It's a Quarter Pounder with cheese. I love it. I didn't know they put so much effort that they did a star formation. I should have known because you can taste it when there's effort.

• 4:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, the love. Don't tell anyone this, but I'll put two of them back in one sitting.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  I'm not surprised.

• 4:10Dax Shepard?

  The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Fries and a Drink, now $8 for a limited time only, only at McDonald's. For a limited time only, prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska, and California and for delivery. Fresh beef not available in Alaska and Hawaii. Offer not valid for delivery.

• 4:45Dax Shepard?

  Wow, you were in, did you say Seoul?

• 4:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:47Dax Shepard?

  How's that?

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Seoul's great. They have these cool bars and restaurants and art galleries. It's very vibrant.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  I really wanna go. And they have great skincare.

• 4:55Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I know. They have nail serums.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  That's old. That's made its way to America. Now they have salmon sperm.

• 5:01Dax Shepard?

  Ooh, salmon sperm. Sign me up.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Injected, then you look 14.

• 5:06Dax Shepard?

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

• 5:09Speaker 01

  It's dangerous.

• 5:10Dax Shepard?

  So Nate, I wanna start by saying happy birthday to you.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Happy birthday.

• 5:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you're here on your birthday. This is a very Capricorn thing to do.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  You kinda have a lot of shit packed together. You have the holidays already. It feels a little greedy to have your birthday.

• 5:25Dax Shepard?

  Self-indulging.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I don't wanna have a birthday so soon after the holidays.

• 5:30Dax Shepard?

  Well, mine's the second, so I'd argue mine's just 11 days worse than yours.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:34Dax Shepard?

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

• 5:36Speaker 02

  That's probably bad.

• 5:36Dax Shepard?

  And are you in general, somebody that has no desire to celebrate your birthday?

• 5:39Speaker 02

  I come from a mixed family where my dad's side's very anti-celebration, my mom's side's very pro-celebration. It's like I'm kinda balancing out the recessive traits.

• 5:47Dax Shepard?

  You're right, smack in the middle. Well, as I was learning a little bit more about your background, I was like, we have a lot in common here. Cause I'm from Milford.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Oh, cool.

• 5:54Dax Shepard?

  Which is, what, 25 miles is the crow flies from East Lansing. And your dad taught at MSU or still does?

• 6:01Speaker 02

  He retired a couple of years ago, but yeah, I taught at MSU, so like a university kid. It's a good place to grow up. I found that I have like an unconscious hiring bias toward Midwesterners. They're just grounded.

• 6:10Dax Shepard?

  Well, again, you want them somewhere on the spectrum where they're not constantly bitching about someone who tried to get one over on them. You know, we do have a big chip on our shoulder about feeling less than. So you want just the right amount of less than so they work their ass off, but not the kind that bitches all day?

• 6:23Speaker 02

  No, and you can detect. I was at the airport in Dallas one time, like, that person sounds really familiar. And they're from East Lansing. I didn't know who they are. They should like a certain manner of speaking. You know, those micro dialect things. I think they have a little bit of that.

• 6:34Dax Shepard?

  So you kind of discovered that you love math in a very appropriate time. So I only know the members of a single baseball team that ever existed. It's the 84er, the Detroit Tigers.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:45Dax Shepard?

  Alan Trammell, I know. Name Gibson. Yeah, no, the whole gang. You were six ish when that happened?

• 6:52Speaker 02

  I was six years old and I liked numbers. I don't think I ever thought I could become a baseball player. I was like never that delusional.

• 6:57Dax Shepard?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  In fifth grade, we had to write these biographies of what our future life would look like. Basically, I had myself becoming president at some point.

• 7:04Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  But then after that, I retired the presidency to become baseball commissioner because that was the higher office to me.

• 7:10Dax Shepard?

  Your work was to guide America to a better place. And then you would indulge your real passion in your retirement.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  The important stuff.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Starter job, the presidency.

• 7:20Dax Shepard?

  Weirdly, that trajectory kind of makes sense. I was also watching the Aaron Rodgers documentary recently. I don't know if you've caught that.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  I haven't seen it yet.

• 7:26Dax Shepard?

  But he too is talking about, he would play this weird board game and it was all about stats and you would roll these dice.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Stratomatic.

• 7:32Dax Shepard?

  That's what it was called.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:33Dax Shepard?

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

• 7:40Speaker 02

  I collected baseball cards. It was like a baseball card bubble. Your net worth is now 5,000. Must fit like an eight year old's like a lot of money.

• 7:46Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  It's like the NFTs of the late eighties.

• 7:49Dax Shepard?

  All collectibles ultimately. Beanie Babies, Monica has one that she believed at one point was worth.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, liberty. It's here.

• 7:55Dax Shepard?

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

• 7:58Speaker 01

  My parents basement and it is disgusting now, but I do think it was $72,000 or something like that. I still think that.

• 8:07Dax Shepard?

  So you're super into baseball. You're crushing numbers as a hobby. You're also gay. When do you know you're gay? Cause I know the vibe in Michigan in the eighties and I know that I was living every minute of every day on the playground, trying to avoid being called.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:22Dax Shepard?

  That was the number one go to way to emasculate.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  I'm exactly old enough, it's turned 47, just three years later would have been pretty different.

• 8:31Dax Shepard?

  The experience of going through school, you say something that I relate to for different reasons, but there's some value to feeling like an outsider from the get.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  If you look now at gay men of my cohort, they're often quite successful, right?

• 8:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. Best boy syndrome.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, but because they have like a little bit of what it feels like to be an outsider. If you're otherwise privileged, but you got a couple of things, right? You're gay and you're half Jewish. Just got a little bit of the flavor of.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Adversity.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Adversity, but. Also, the ability to code switch, I guess is a term.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 9:00Dax Shepard?

  Assimilate, have a secret, have a perspective.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  You're not necessarily volunteering your entire self at all. It's also useful in poker. And it's useful in journalism. You don't want to volunteer information in poker. There's a cost to volunteering information. And so, learning to be a bit more guarded and feel like there's no kind of template I can follow that's exactly going to meet my needs, right? I have to take a little bit from different buckets.

• 9:20Dax Shepard?

  Right. Okay, so Dad's in academia. Also, you got some famous geologist uncles, which is really fascinating.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  There's some crater on, I think, the moon.

• 9:28Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  It's a pretty big one.

• 9:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  They were super overachieving, my dad's side. I have a famous arsonist on my mom's side. He got like written up in the New York Times. He like invented new forms of arson and insurance fraud. I'm not actually like an overachieving type. I kind of do it despite myself, really. And so, I take after that side of the family, I think.

• 9:45Dax Shepard?

  You end up getting a degree in economics. And then you end up working for a few years as a consultant.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  I was a transfer pricing consultant.

• 9:53Dax Shepard?

  Okay, what is transfer pricing consultant?

• 9:54Speaker 02

  Basically, when you have a multinational company and different parts of the company make different things. Like you have Apple's cellphone and they make semiconductors in Taiwan and the screen in Bangladesh. How you price that can be used to optimize your tax policy. So basically, it's how do you optimize your tax policy without getting sued by the government.

• 10:13Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Really valuable work we were doing.

• 10:15Dax Shepard?

  It wasn't nourishing your soul.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  But I hadn't really thought about it. When you actually have the chance for the first time to earn a paycheck, it's kind of exciting.

• 10:22Dax Shepard?

  Oh, big time. And I glossed over, you were also a Michigan State Champ debater. You also wrote for the high school newspaper. Also, in college, you wrote for the Chicago Maroon. You're writing the whole time and you're also doing all this stat work for fun with sports still. You're still obsessed. And then you create and explain this to us what Pocota is.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  So Pocota, the anagram is very, I'm not going to bore your listeners for even 15 seconds.

• 10:48Dax Shepard?

  You'd be shocked with their tolerance for boredom.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  If you don't say it, I'm gonna have to say it on the fact check. So you might as well say it now.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Picture empirical comparison. It's deliberately nerdy. An optimization test algorithm, I think.

• 10:59Dax Shepard?

  But it's also a nod to a player.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  This obscure player who was always like a thorn in the side of the Tigers.

• 11:04Dax Shepard?

  This thing has a weird name I read for the first. In my life today, it wasn't a reverse acronym, but it was like a backward NIM.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Backronym. I never heard of backward NIM.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Me either.

• 11:12Speaker 02

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

• 11:20Dax Shepard?

  Oh, it's kinda like.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  They're working backwards. I got it.

• 11:24Dax Shepard?

  Oh, that makes sense. That's also how we process the world. We make sense of it after it happened and we think we understood it before it happened. And it only makes sense after the fact.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  No, I have a friend who's a neuroscientist and he's like, yeah, our brains are kind of just predicting and inferring. We never actually know what reality is. We're just making like an expedient internal map simulation.

• 11:44Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, we're modeling, which you ultimately do. We're just modeling the future. And then our data set is something that is heavily subjective because we make it make sense in reverse.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 11:53Dax Shepard?

  We go, oh, this happened. It's because X, Y, and Z, but we don't know. That's just what we kind of cling to. Okay. So you create this thing and what is the goal of Pocota?

• 12:01Speaker 02

  It's to forecast how baseball players will do. The innovation is that most predictions will just say, okay, this player, Shohei Ohtani will hit 302 with 42 home runs and 108 RBIs next year. Whereas this gave like a range of options. So it was probabilistic and that's kind of one of my big things is we don't know the future. Baseball players get injured or stop using steroids, whatever else.

• 12:19Dax Shepard?

  Hung over, they get divorced.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  They're human beings and there's luck. But no, the idea is have like a range of outcomes. And so you're dealing with the uncertainty in the outlook. But yeah, people use it for fantasy baseball. Major League teams used it.

• 12:30Dax Shepard?

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

• 12:34Speaker 02

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

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Is Pocota Moneyball?

• 12:38Speaker 02

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

• 12:41Speaker 01

  That's so cool.

• 12:42Dax Shepard?

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

• 12:45Speaker 02

  Moneyball was 02 or 03, somewhere in that range.

• 12:47Dax Shepard?

  Pocota is a couple of years before that.

• 12:49Speaker 02

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

• 12:58Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Now this is where you're really going to put anyone to sleep. I understand that you're making statistical models. So that's what this thing is ultimately, right?

• 13:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:05Dax Shepard?

  What does that mean? You must be selecting the variables you're going to use to determine this. And I bet there's a lot of decision making just there. Like what are we going to include? What were you doing that was novel about it?

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Bad habit of pretending that oh, the model just flaws out of a coconut tree. It'll quote former presidential candidate Kamala Harris. And no, you have to make a lot of decisions. In sports, at least, the data is high quality. We record everything that happens on a major league playing field. But you're making decisions at every turn. A lot of it is about where you add more complexity and where you're pruning. Because models break. So you want like a complex simplicity.

• 13:37Dax Shepard?

  Am I right in that the product you create, it's a long formula? You just start plugging in up at bets and this and that.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  It's a bunch of computer code.

• 13:44Dax Shepard?

  And it's just a math equation that you've picked the variables of, and you have some way of evaluating the quality of the variables.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Algorithm is the term that would technically be used. For our political forecast, literally, you input the polls and press a go button, and it takes five minutes and runs 50,000 simulation and spits out a bunch of data. But that makes it seem like it has a mind of its own. It's hard because on the one hand, you don't want to dictate what the data says, right? I think if you like already have the answer you want, that's not really objective science either. So it's kind of this iterative process between I want to systematize, so I have to follow rules and not just be totally ad hoc. If I feel like it's handling this player badly or this election badly for a politics model, and I change the rules, what's that mean for the other elections? What's that mean for the whole system overall? It's not like there's just one right answer. What are hedge funds and banks doing or what are the best sports betters doing? They're usually using multiple models. You want a model that's robust.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  So basically, if one thing breaks and it will still spit out a reasonable answer, that's where some of the art comes in as opposed to the science.

• 14:41Dax Shepard?

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

• 14:49Speaker 02

  It's as a hobbyist. You're trying to win your fantasy baseball league. You're trying to solve a problem that you're determined to solve. You're trying to maybe win money gambling, for example. You need to be very hands on and have skin in the game because academics, to cliche a little bit, tend not to have good street smarts for modeling. A lot of the skill is like being able to look at a data set and say, the value that number put out, something's wrong there. And there must be either a bug in the input. We put the numbers in wrongly or the code failed somehow.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Are you coding yourself or you have?

• 15:17Dax Shepard?

  In 2000.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  You work with?

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, but then. For the most part, all my own coding. I'm a control freak in that way.

• 15:22Dax Shepard?

  And I think people need to understand as well, when you create a model, it's not. Telling you this team will win. I'm guessing it's saying there's a 54% chance the team will win. There's a 61%. And in the world of betting, if you have an 11% margin, if you can predict that 61% accuracy, you're going to be the most successful gambler of all time.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  No, if you can get 56% of your points bets, right? Then you're like a world class.

• 15:47Dax Shepard?

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

• 15:54Speaker 02

  And that comes from poker too. Poker players can discern like a 52% probability from 48%, right? Most people think 100, 0 and 50/50, right? There are a lot more gradations between 50/50 and 100/0.

• 16:05Dax Shepard?

  Right. Okay, so now let's introduce your passion for gambling. When does that start? Because among your many interests, you're also a degenerate gambler.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  I don't know, I would.

• 16:15Dax Shepard?

  I'm teasing, I'm teasing, you're here.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  So I had my boring consulting job in college, where I could do it in like a third of the time that we were billing the client.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  So I had free time on my hands. In addition to starting this baseball stuff, my friend at work was like, we are starting a poker game at my apartment every Tuesday. The game actually never happens, but I was practicing for it online, playing games for fake money. Poker does not really work for fake money. It's a game where you actually want to have to put something at risk. It's a game that involves bluffing and risk. So eventually I get some dubious offer. It'll get money and some free online site. I remember going home to my parents for Christmas and like having a bunch of whiskey and like, I'm just going to play online poker and you keep playing higher. And lo and behold, though, it's a cliche where you lose all your money. But like I won, right?

• 16:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  I got lucky at first and then parlayed that into eventually quitting my consulting job for a couple of years.

• 17:02Dax Shepard?

  To play online poker.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 17:03Dax Shepard?

  Which some article I read said you had made 400 grand in a few years.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  I made 500 and then lost 150 back for like 350.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  That's still pretty quick.

• 17:12Dax Shepard?

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

• 17:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:28Dax Shepard?

  And then you go to work for them.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  And they were kind of like a startup. And they would just hire smart nerds on the internet, right? And they're like, okay, this kind of seems cool. Why don't you actually code this up for us? And like made a proposal. And also the first system was for pitchers. And they're like, make one for hitters too. And for some reason they decided, how old was I at the time? Like 24, you should also be the executive vice president of the company, right?

• 17:46Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  It's a shitty job with a lot of bureaucracy and all these nerds you're trying to wrangle. I mean, they're great people. We've had some reunions.

• 17:51Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  They're not the most corporate, refined culture. And so you're doing a lot of problem solving that I'm utterly unqualified to do because this job doesn't pay very well to do management.

• 18:02Dax Shepard?

  What kind of money did you make selling this algorithm to them?

• 18:05Speaker 02

  They gave me equity in the company, which theoretically could have been worth something. Probably wasn't worth that much in practice.

• 18:11Dax Shepard?

  But you're young and hopeful.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  One problem we always had is like, this was the era of when Moneyball was penetrating into major league teams. Our stars would get picked off by the Red Sox, or by the Cubs, or by the Astros, or whatever else.

• 18:22Dax Shepard?

  So from 2003 to 2008, you're at baseball prospectus.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 18:27Dax Shepard?

  And you're also writing. They do books. They have monthly things. And so you're actively writing. It's just interesting how all these little bits and pieces end up getting woven together and what your life becomes. So how in 2008 do you decide to start fucking around with politics and applying your models to politics?

• 18:47Speaker 02

  I was spending most of my time on the baseball thing, but making most of my money on the poker thing. In 2006, the US Congress is in kind of this panic. The Republicans are still in control. So they have this congressional page scandal where Mark Foley, this congressman, was messaging like 13-year-old pages about, hey, you know, why don't you send me some pictures? So they're trying to do something to win themselves over with moral majority voters. The gay marriage thing has kind of played out. And so they go after online poker. The last day in Congress, 2006, they pass this bill. And I'm like, fuck these people, right?

• 19:13Dax Shepard?

  Oh, so you're angry.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  So I got more into politics because A, it compromised my livelihood, and B, you know, I'm like, these fuckers.

• 19:19Dax Shepard?

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

• 19:21Speaker 01

  It's true. You gotta be on your toes.

• 19:24Speaker 02

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

• 19:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, admits to doing coke. I like that.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, he looks and sounds unlike any presidential candidate before. And there's a lot of enthusiasm for him. So 2008 becomes this inflection point where I guess people thought, there's so much more political participation now. I'm not trying to get too involved in the politics. But then we obviously kind of spin into all types of crazy directions after that. I mean, in life, there's a lot of luck, right? Like I felt I was lucky to be at this place where baseball stats really took off, and then lucky to be at a point where people want Moneyball for X.

• 20:02Dax Shepard?

  To datafie everything in the world, basically.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  So I had that skill set in the right place at the right time. And then 2008 is this big inflection point where a politician becomes much more crazy and interesting. All of a sudden, politics is like not this crusty thing anymore. I'm not trying to be super partisan, but it felt like, okay, now you actually have an interesting politician who I'd actually want to hang out with.

• 20:17Dax Shepard?

  But at any rate, 2008, you create a model to predict the outcome of that election. And you start 538.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 20:24Dax Shepard?

  By the way, I've known 538 for, I guess, the last, however long it's been going. The Electoral College has 538 members.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Oh, members.

• 20:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Did you know that right out of the gates?

• 20:35Speaker 01

  I only think about 270 when I think about that.

• 20:38Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so there's 538.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Electoral votes.

• 20:41Dax Shepard?

  And you name it that.

• 20:43Speaker 02

  I don't know if I'm good or terrible at naming things.

• 20:45Dax Shepard?

  Lo and behold, your model predicts the outcome of the 2008 election and the 2012 election with an accuracy that's really not rivaled at that time, to the degree that time makes you one of the 100 most influential people.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, but there's deep irony here, which is the whole point of the model was to be probability driven. We're not calling Ohio for Obama. We're saying it was a 52% chance because it's just barely ahead in the polls. You had to bet you'd go 52 instead of 48.

• 21:13Dax Shepard?

  So, but in 08, you got 49 of 50 states, right?

• 21:16Speaker 02

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

• 21:20Speaker 01

  But are you being self-deprecating or are you being honest? Like, I can't tell.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Who's going to win Alabama in 2028?

• 21:29Dax Shepard?

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

• 21:33Speaker 01

  But those others.

• 21:34Dax Shepard?

  Those others, man, they're kind of all over the map.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, so maybe one or two, your model's a little better, right? But then you just kind of win a couple of coin flips.

• 21:39Dax Shepard?

  Well, despite how easy apparently it was.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  You nailed it.

• 21:43Dax Shepard?

  You do ignite the people in a way that they do think they have their Moneyball guy for politics. And so the New York Times brings you in-house for three years. And I want to know what that experience was like, because you go from, you have 50, 38 as its own website, and then that gets transferred to the New York Times. And I think the numbers when you came there were 1 in 20 site visits were to go to 50, 38. But by the end, when you leave, like 17 out of... Huge percentage of their personal traffic was you.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  I just had the anxiety dream at the New York Times the other night. I just flew back from Korea. So you have this like really long periods of REM sleep or their little nesting universe within your dreams and stuff like that. And I had some anxiety. They were like, before we let you write the Times, you have to prove your chops as a traditional reporter. And they had some very complicated story with some blind person.

• 22:34Dax Shepard?

  Some test that you were gonna fail.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  So on the one hand, it was great.

• 22:37Dax Shepard?

  It's gotta be terribly exciting for you. You just started this fucking thing and four seconds ago, you were at this stupid job cheating on taxes. This has got to be exciting now.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  No cheating. We're staying in the boundaries, guys. Staying within the boundaries.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  They're brilliant people, the New York Times. At the time I was there, it's 2010 to 2013. It's transitioning from being this dinosaur-like print media business to what's now, I think, a very well-run, mostly digital.

• 23:01Dax Shepard?

  Is it a scary point in its history?

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, and a vulnerable point in history. 538 is quite successful there. This is when they actually are getting like a whole bunch of new subscribers for their digital product. But then you kind of run into egos mixed with kind of personnel turnover. There's a new CEO. It's a cliche, right? When they bring in the new guy and the project was the old guy's project.

• 23:22Dax Shepard?

  Worst thing that can happen in the world is you've made a movie for a certain president of a studio. Then a new president comes in and that president decides your marketing budget. But they are incentivized for the previous person to have been a failure. This happens nonstop. This happened to me personally.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  And in politics, exact same thing. When a new person comes in, the old stuff all has to go.

• 23:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, or fail ideally.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  So a new guy comes in. Meanwhile, at the time, the New York Times newsroom, traditional political reporters, kind of hate our guts. Cause that election in particular, 2012 was a very fucking boring election. It was Romney and Obama and maybe that's better. They're both relatively competent people, but not a whole lot is changing or moving. They're well-known candidates. And so a lot of what the blog was doing, 538, was saying, yeah, this movement in the polls, it's all kind of fake and nothing's really changing, right? Which is kind of against what their reporters want you to say, where it's drama unfolding and game changing. I don't know. Once you start testing the market, eventually there were other offers that let me try to build 538 into a larger thing. Whether that was successful or not, we can.

• 24:16Dax Shepard?

  So Disney slash ESPN comes along, three years is up.

• 24:22Dax Shepard?

  At New York Times and you leave and you go to Disney, ABC, ESPN, where you're for a long, long time, from 08 to 2023.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  No, 10, you're from 13.

• 24:32Dax Shepard?

  Okay, and when you leave, there is an editor there who pretty much shits on you pretty publicly. Says you were a bad fit, you were a disruptor.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  At New York Times or at Disney?

• 24:42Dax Shepard?

  At the New York Times, after you departed. Now, that person then later said they regretted how they handled that. But A, was that a surprise to have them take that approach where your feelings hurt? Or did you feel like you deserved it?

• 24:54Speaker 02

  I think the Times is not used to people turning them down very much. And I actually still freelance for the Times occasionally, right? Good relationship now. It took 10 years to repair.

• 25:02Dax Shepard?

  You wrote an op ed right before this election that I read, which is, "My gut tells me Trump's gonna win. And here's the statistics, but I'm telling you my gut."

• 25:08Speaker 02

  And the point was that the gut wasn't very valuable, but now I'm gonna pretend that my gut was precious.

• 25:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  But no, so now I have a good relationship with them instead. But they weren't used to being turned down. And the cliche was that if you turn down the Times and your career is over, which isn't really true anymore, you've had a lot of ex Times people start Substacks or have other success elsewhere.

• 25:25Dax Shepard?

  I bet people have heard explanations, but we could stand for a concise one now. Why did you shit the bed so bad in 16? And why did everyone shit the bed so bad?

• 25:33Speaker 02

  I think 2016 was actually our best election.

• 25:36Dax Shepard?

  Okay, tell me.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Because I think about this as a gambler. And to me, the question is, what are the odds that you have relative to the consensus odds?

• 25:43Dax Shepard?

  Elaborate on that.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  So our model had Trump with a 30% chance of winning. And we spent a lot of time explaining to people that Hillary does not have this election in the bag. It's a much closer race than Obama. All these states math term but correlated, right? Meaning that Michigan and Wisconsin, they're all kind of the same state. If you lose one state, you'll probably lose the others. And so all that has to happen is that Trump overperforms among so-called working class, white, non-college voters. And all of a sudden, then you can win the Electoral College, which is kind of what happened, basically. So to us, if you were to have invested in Amazon stock on day one, and you said, "I think there's a 30% chance that Amazon will boom into something really big." And everyone else says, "That's crazy, it's only 1%." And even though you're below 50% relative to the consensus, we were one of the only people who were saying that Trump really did have a shot.

• 26:25Dax Shepard?

  You failed least bad?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:27Dax Shepard?

  Is the way we might say it.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Because again, you're getting odds. If you were gambling on the election. Which I have no problem with.

• 26:33Dax Shepard?

  You're a pro gambling.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  You could get five to one odds on Trump, basically. Five to one, six to one.

• 26:38Dax Shepard?

  In 2016.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Two and a half to one instead. So that means that the expected value poker term, if you're able to make that bet, that'll be the best sports bet in the world.

• 26:47Dax Shepard?

  Right, because you personally have Trump at three to one and the odds have him at five to one. So for you, that's a great bet.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're gonna lose most of the time, but you get five X, six X your money when you're right.

• 26:59Dax Shepard?

  Got you.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  That's not how 99.9% of the political audience thinks. But we did take care, though, to emphasize the uncertainty to the point that we were getting yelled at. People are like, we just think Nate's trying to just get more web traffic.

• 27:10Dax Shepard?

  And I will say you're a victim of the data you're sourcing, so maybe also some of the data. I guess there's this big mystery of why these polls were so.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  The most concise explanation is that people who are more college educated, who read the news more, or more likely to respond to surveys.

• 27:26Dax Shepard?

  Oh, interesting.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  A pollster called on the phone.

• 27:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and my opinion is valuable. It should be recorded.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 27:32Dax Shepard?

  Well, I always go the other way. It's like, who's dumb enough to want to chat with a stranger? You gotta be so bored.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Who picks up the phone anymore?

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Well, people with high social trust answer all types of surveys more, right? Who has high social trust? It's Democrats. They are the establishment system party now, which didn't used to be true as much, right?

• 27:48Dax Shepard?

  Elaborate on that.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Obama was like the disruptive candidate. His electorate was younger. His electorate was black, Hispanic. Now the Democrats are kind of the party of college, kids, white liberals. They're very trusting of the media, and so they both respond to polls more and vote Democratic more. And so if you don't adjust for that, you're gonna have your poll over sampled Democrats. That's a technical term I'm using slightly incorrectly on purpose, but you're gonna end up with not enough Trump voters in your poll. If Trump voters don't trust the media and you're not accounting for that in some respect.

• 28:14Dax Shepard?

  Right, right. Yeah, I guess some faction of the Trump base hates the media to a degree that if someone from the media called or a pollster called, they would say fuck you and hang up.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  And it's not that they even lie about who they're supporting. I mean, Trump voters are proud. They just said they aren't being reached in the first place, right? They're not picking up strangers' phone calls if they are. They're not gonna wanna spend 15 minutes and take a survey. And that can shift after the first assassination attempt against Trump. There's a lot more enthusiasm, like I'm proud to be a Trump supporter. Only in 2016, maybe the Trump supporters were not easy to reach.

• 28:45Dax Shepard?

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

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Roll of the dice.

• 29:14Dax Shepard?

  A roll of the dice.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  There are a couple of big problems. One is that we've learned this before, but they had me doing a bunch of management stuff. It's not my comparative advantage, to put it kindly. I mean, I'm okay, but it's like exactly the part of my brain I don't want to be using. I need time to just get in the zone and get in a flow state and like.

• 29:28Dax Shepard?

  Kinky with those numbers.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I don't want to have to respond to some email about this person wants an X percent raise. But the main issue, so I get in there and John Skipper, who is the head of ESPN at the time, he's like, they don't worry about it. We're just gonna just make great content. I'm giving them a thick or something next to me.

• 29:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, good, good, good. Yeah, yeah. We work in our good times.

• 29:48Speaker 02

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

• 29:50Dax Shepard?

  Lean into it.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  It gets actually like a bad thing. I like John Skipper a lot, but he had some personal issues, kind of the same thing again. Somebody new takes over and they don't have this mandate. And all of a sudden ESPN's like, well, we have the TV business and theme parks. That's robust unless there's a global pandemic or something like that, right?

• 30:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  So like all their businesses like began to hit headwinds. And we were set up as literally as like kind of a loss leader. It's not even that big a line item on Disney's budget, but they're like, it's not really worth it. If we're losing five million instead of making five million, who cares? But then when you're under financial pressure like that is not going to hold up very well. So we're kind of in a point of stasis where there's no business model. When you don't have a business model, then it's hard to do anything. Really, I'm not sure what you're optimizing for exactly. And then there's also the issue of if you're creative, then everyone wants to have this brand expansion. But if you're the major creative force, it can only expand so much. People want you ultimately, right?

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  There are ways around that. There are some things that do scale, like the models that we build. They get a lot of traffic and I could hire somebody now. And we're kind of in the process of doing this all over again at the Substack Silver Bulletin now, but much slower. Thought we have to hire as many people as possible right now. When you get to ESPN, I talked to Bill Simmons was at Grantland before that. He's like, everything that you want, ask for it right now, right? Because you'll never have more leverage than you'll have right now.

• 31:04Dax Shepard?

  They're in the wooing you phase.

• 31:05Speaker 02

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

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Ask for that now, lock that in right now.

• 31:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, that's sage advice.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  But then you kind of wind up with 25 people all starting new at the same time. And we didn't understand that you need to have like a product team and like an advertising team. And it was just kind of an awkward fit. Disney is a wonderful and creative place in certain ways, but it does things at very large scale. Everything is eight or nine figure budgets for like an NFL deal or a movie or a theme park. I mean, the whole city of Orlando, especially the 51st state is Walt Disney World, basically, right?

• 31:43Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's an enormous corporation.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  Disney is very big picture. They were like, he's a creative, he doesn't have to deal with money. It's like, no, actually I fucking like making money. I like business, right? I like for this to be like a growing business because anytime you try to hire somebody, we hired good people. But like, what's the long-term plan? We're like, well, we don't know.

• 32:00Dax Shepard?

  Do you like this?

• 32:01Speaker 02

  They're trying to for three more years, so why would you worry about it? And all journalism sucks, so not going to have job security anywhere. And that's a very hard pitch. And so it is also partly my own ego. I don't know why I felt like I wanted to be like one of those 1970s magazine editors, right? We're like drinking wine as you're finishing the.

• 32:14Dax Shepard?

  Sure, a cosmopolitan man.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  We have some argyle socks. I'm not sure what's happening.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 32:31Dax Shepard?

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• 33:12Dax Shepard?

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• 33:54Dax Shepard?

  But this year, I've cracked the code and the code is cozy. And Quince's bedding makes it so easy because the quality is exceptional. It's the kind of gift people actually use and love long after the holidays.

• 34:06Speaker 01

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• 34:23Dax Shepard?

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• 34:38Speaker 01

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• 34:49Dax Shepard?

  I mean, guys, I put these on the bed of my children. They are wrapping my little babies and I feel great about it.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Mine are striped, they're so cute. They're very fashionable and very comfortable. And it's not just bedding. Quince has everyone on your list covered with Mongolian cashmere sweaters, fine jewelry, leather bags, chef-grade cookware, five-star luggage, and more.

• 35:09Dax Shepard?

  Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app. App for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show. We get support from Skims. Okay, I have a confession. I genuinely love matching pajamas. It's the best part of Christmas morning, really. Everyone in the same matching set, looking ridiculously cute in front of the tree.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  I love matching pajamas. I'm literally going to be in coordinating sets with all my friends this holiday season. Because I got them, spoiler to my friends who are listening. The same Skims pajama set I've been living in. They are so soft and cozy and they look cute. So you can leave the house and go get a late night hot chocolate, be cozy.

• 36:03Dax Shepard?

  It's so great how Skims has sets for everyone too. Women's, men's, kids, even your pets. So nobody in your life has to be left out this year.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  I have a bunch of different pajama sets. One of my favorite is the organic cotton sleep long sleeve set.

• 36:19Dax Shepard?

  Okay, tell me more.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  So comfortable, very chic too. The top is a button down, but very, very soft, easy to sleep in. But as I said before, you can multi-purpose this and look super cute.

• 36:32Dax Shepard?

  Hot chocolate runs. It's like the pajamas we grew up in, except without the scratchy polyester that made opening presents feel more like a hot yoga class that nobody signed up for.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  All the nostalgia, none of the discomfort. Shop my favorite loungewear and pajamas at skims.com. After you place your order, be sure to let them know we sent you. Select podcasts in the survey and be sure to select Armchair Expert in the dropdown menu that follows. If you're looking for the perfect gifts for everyone on your list, the Skims Holiday Shop is now open at skims.com.

• 37:01Dax Shepard?

  We are supported by Squarespace. So here's something I think about a lot. Most people I talk to on this show, the ones doing really interesting things, they all had a version of their work that existed before anyone else saw it. It was just theirs, notes, ideas, projects they were tinkering with. And then at some point, they made the decision to share it. That's the part that's scary, right? Going from Working on something to here's what I made. Rob went through the exact same thing, building our site on Squarespace. And what made it doable was that he didn't have to become a web developer overnight. He just had to show up with the idea. Squarespace handles the rest. Beautiful templates that actually look like you hired someone, built an SEO. So people can find you email campaigns, scheduling analytics, all under one roof. No code, no patchwork of random tools.

• 37:46Dax Shepard?

  And honestly, the thing I keep coming back to is how low the barrier is. If you've got something you've been building quietly and you're ready for people to see it. Squarespace makes that leap feel a lot less traumatic. Head to squarespace.com slash DAX for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code DAX to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

• 38:14Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so you're there for a while, but you also in 2012, you write the signal and the noise. And that's a really successful book. My apologies. I haven't read that one. And the fact that I read on the edge is really kind of a fluke. I always go to Audible and I know exactly what I'm going there to get. And I just happened to stumble upon your book.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  That's cool.

• 38:32Dax Shepard?

  I'm vaguely aware of you. I know that you're statistics genius. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to give this book a shot. And I can't imagine this has gotten back to you, but I've brought it up now a bazillion times on the show because there's so many little pieces of on the edge that I really, really enjoy. Very thought provoking. I think your outsider ness and some degree of disagreeability I appreciate greatly. And the book that sprinkled throughout, I like the spirit of it.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 38:57Dax Shepard?

  In a nutshell, the examination of this book is a group of people you refer to as the river, which of course is a Texas Hold'em term. It's the last card that comes out.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  The last card because supposedly in the old riverboat days and poker's origin, if the dealer was crooked and cheated or was suspected of cheating, and the last card affected the hand, he'd be thrown into the Mississippi River.

• 39:17Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I like.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Possible origin of that term.

• 39:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. If not, let's keep it because it's so. Yeah, I like that. The turn. Oh, that's the.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Second to last one.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  Flop turn river.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 39:27Dax Shepard?

  And so for people who don't play Texas Hold'em, the stakes go up and up and up because you're given two cards. You've already perhaps put in the ante and generally you want to see the flop for free. You're going to get three hole cards. Now you're going to have five. You have some sense of what your hand is and then it just diminishes it from there. Or at the end, you're hoping for a single card to change your destiny. So obviously the risk level is going up and the stakes are going up.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  It's a game of escalation. Let's say you're playing a $5, $10 Hold'em game, which is a medium sized game. And you have $5,000 on the table. So the first bet typically in that game, someone would bet 30 bucks to try and win the five bucks and the 10 bucks. Relatively small money. And fighting for those $15 worth of blinds, things can escalate and escalate until all $5,000 are on the table or even more than that potentially. And so it's a game of escalation.

• 40:16Dax Shepard?

  But escalation and reduced options, I guess that's implicit in a game of escalation, but you're getting less and less options.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, as you get to the river, then there are fewer cards that can come. It's called the game tree. You can imagine a branch prunes out and then narrows again toward the end. But the more money on the table, the deeper you can get because you can raise and re-raise and check raise and all these things, right? It's a very complex game. Actually, it took longer to solve poker than to solve chess. It is kind of solved now. I mean, we can get into what that means exactly.

• 40:47Dax Shepard?

  Tell me. Because a computer, AI can play chess better than a human. I can play Go better than a human.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  And it can kind of play poker better than a human, although there are a lot of caveats there, right? One is that humans are not playing poker perfectly. The whole thing you learn about poker strategy, you actually like study how computers play poker. But the whole computers must be very honest. Computers fucking bluff all the time. One discovery they made is that you have to bluff a ton in poker. That's what makes people have an incentive to pay you off and you have a real hand.

• 41:12Dax Shepard?

  And I've played a bunch of Texas Hold'em, but even reading your first few chapters, which are about gambling in general, there were a few things in there. I was like, oh, wow, it's down to the science. I forget the ratio you give, but there's a known percentage you should bluff to make yourself reputable and get paid when you have it.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  It depends on the size of the pot and it depends on cards that come in other things, right? But you have to bluff a lot and also concealing it from. Although it's intuitive, if you think it's poker, it's a game of limited information. But you want to be very deceptive. Sometimes you want to slow play with a strong hand, that's very important, or check a strong hand, just to avoid giving away too much information.

• 41:46Dax Shepard?

  Well, ideally, you know your opponent, how they play, and you're now counter punching.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  If you know that a certain player bluffs just a little bit too much, that all of a sudden, a huge number of your hands are calling, it would be folding before, or vice versa. Or things like, this player tends to make a big bet when they have a bad hand as a bluff, and a small bet when they have a good... You love that type of player, right? It's like, okay, so now, when you have a good hand, I can get away cheaply, maybe even fold, or at least pay you only a small amount. But when you're making a big bluff, then you're not balancing your strategy.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  It's extremely psychological, maybe 100%.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  For short, it's maybe 70-30 math versus psychology. And it's also like a type of discipline. In the abstract, there are computer programs you can study with, and coaching videos. I have a poker coach, who's kind of the poker equivalent of a trainer, basically. But can you execute when all of a sudden, you're playing for like $50,000?

• 42:30Dax Shepard?

  Or at the final table of some tournament.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I played in like the World Series Poker a lot. I made day six the main event. By the time you make it to day six, every pot is literally worth a couple hundred thousand dollars. You don't get to cash in it right away. My parents would always be like, "Oh, I have a million chips." And like, "You want a million bucks?" It's like, "No, I have chips," and like the exchange rate's like 10 to 1. And the World Series of Main Event, there are 10,000 players now. There are not 10,000 good poker players in the United States, right? And so like, they're amateurs, and they're so nervous, they're like shaking. And so like, it becomes learning how to deal with a flow state, and a little bit of stage fright, and executing in those high-pressure situations. And when you do it enough... I'm a very talented amateur.

• 43:07Dax Shepard?

  He's won $840,000 in tournament play.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Then how can he be an amateur?

• 43:11Speaker 02

  That's gross, not net.

• 43:12Dax Shepard?

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

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Kind of developed like a little bit of a sicko tendency. We were like, "I feel more alive when I'm playing for real money, and more focused." And in a weird fucked-up way, even like a little bit more relaxed. I don't know, it's weird.

• 43:30Dax Shepard?

  Well, there's all these different social science studies where they measure testosterone levels of day traders. They measure testosterone levels of poker players. There's a biological component, too, that's happening.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  There absolutely is, and this is one thing that took me a while to learn. And I learned it by talking to this one guy who... Consulted with traders, he's a neuroscientist and studied these Wall Street traders. Like, these people are fucking crazy. They think they're so rational, but they're not. Talked to an astronaut, talked to a guy who's trained fighter pilots, talked to a guy who trained professional golfers. And they kind of all say the same thing, which is your body is working on a different chemical system, a different operating system when you're under stress. And actually, a good athlete will have a higher escalation in his or her heart rate under stress. A trader will have higher spikes in testosterone and dopamine and things like that. That's okay, because it means that your body's reacting to stress. When you learn in poker, I'm not going to feel the same playing a $10,000 pot as in a $5 pot in my beer league game on Tuesday night. Learning like, okay, I can start to master that,

• 44:24Speaker 02

  or at least fuck up less than other people.

• 44:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  When you learn that, then that becomes kind of powerful.

• 44:29Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so the book isolates this group that you refer to as the river. And these are people who have a great appetite for risk. They have a pretty good evaluation of risk. They have a certain rejection of the commonly held wisdom. There's some traits. And then you go on to profile a select group of people. And among them, and there's more, but we do Doyle Brunson, a very famous poker player. And then we do Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist. You do Sam Bankman-Fried, which is very interesting, from, of course, ATX. And then you do Sam Altman. So these are people that all would fall into this group you refer to as the river. They live in the risk analysis world.

• 45:14Dax Shepard?

  And I think maybe, could we start with Peter Thiel?

• 45:17Speaker 02

  In some ways, Peter Thiel is the most curious one of the bunch. Because A, most is guys, and there are lots of women in the book too, but it's heavily more men than women.

• 45:27Dax Shepard?

  Testosterone's playing a big role in a lot of this, I think.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Testosterone and ego and entitlement and who is afforded the privilege of gambling in a probabilistic way. So he is someone who's known as being quite risk averse. He wanted to sell PayPal early on and protect his downside. He's also quite religious.

• 45:43Dax Shepard?

  He's a unique individual. He's gay, deeply religious.

• 45:47Speaker 01

  What's his religion? Do we know?

• 45:48Speaker 02

  He was German, I don't know if he's a Catholic or something.

• 45:52Dax Shepard?

  He's a right-wingish. Gay man, that's always interesting to me.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  He is a very literate intellectual in a way that Elon Musk is brilliant in many ways. He kind of has like a 12 year old's mindset, whereas Teal, he's quoting from scripture and philosophy.

• 46:07Dax Shepard?

  The classics. He's a brilliant, brilliant dude.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  He was like, okay, well Nate, 10 years ago, all this money bullshit was the frontier, but now it's all been internalized. And now a contrarian thing is actually to trust your gut more because all the nerds have taken over everything. And so there's no alpha, would be the trading term from just running the models that everyone else has.

• 46:24Dax Shepard?

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

• 46:28Speaker 02

  I think is probably fairly close to being true. But he was an early adopter of Trump in 2016. He kind of will say that, oh, I thought it was a good contrarian bet that maybe the odds are 50%. Not Nate's 30% and definitely not the conventional wisdom 10%. I think Trump probably matches a lot of his political leanings anyway. But you have to give him some credit for understanding that Silicon Valley's interests and the progressive interests would clash in lots of different ways. Silicon Valley would come under scrutiny for lots of good and bad reasons. What are the effects of cell phones and social media? What are the effects of very powerful people owning individual media brands?

• 47:02Dax Shepard?

  Or all the satellites orbiting.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Tremendous accumulation of wealth. At the same time, Silicon Valley has a cliched image of itself where it's like, we are the ones who think differently. And we are contrarian, we're disruptors. In some ways, it's still quite impressive. Despite all the things that America fucks up, we still have the best talent from all around the world coming to California in particular. Coming to Silicon Valley, even though it's kind of like a place that's very expensive and unlivable in certain ways. But we still have that and our economy is still growing. Our life spans are not, we're making this trade off, which might be bad.

• 47:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:30Speaker 02

  Silicon Valley understands that growth is vital and technology eight times out of 10 is good. And they understand probability. They understand that if you are making a lot of high upside, high risk bets, if you make enough of those, actually they pay off pretty well, right? If you have like a one in 10 chance of having 100 extra investments, like a really good bet in the long run. Those basic things, right, overcomes a lot of all types of problems. Being very pilled on some issues and it's very male and very white and Asian. It's always had a lot of ego and I think Trump winning further inflates those egos.

• 48:01Dax Shepard?

  I just think it's really wild that in our lifetime, there was. This movie called Revenge of the Nerds, which was completely unthinkable. And the notion was, yeah, these jocks have made it insufferable to live here. But now the nerds are the jocks and now we're seeing their version of it. And guess what? No one's version is all that great. People with power and privilege act the way they do.

• 48:20Speaker 02

  People have an amazing ability to feel like they're disempowered or aggrieved. When objectively speaking, Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen and Elon, they're doing really fucking well, right?

• 48:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  They're as wealthy as any people have ever been in the history of the universe, or the world at least.

• 48:32Dax Shepard?

  Shape the world they live in pretty dramatically.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  And the book gives them a perfectly fair shake. They're kind of sore winners. The average Silicon Valley CEO is still probably a progressive Democrat. There was a much more sizable Trump faction.

• 48:43Dax Shepard?

  This go around.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  Anticipated that people make the mistake of assuming that things just kind of trend linearly upward forever. Right? And the world's a story, more or less of mean reversion. There is a broad based conservative backlash on cultural issues.

• 48:56Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  It might be peaking right about now.

• 48:59Dax Shepard?

  This is my own personal digestion of what just went down. To me, it feels very obvious this was an election on wokeism. I mean, just watch the right's ads and they were about almost a single issue. How do you feed that into an algorithm?

• 49:14Speaker 02

  You don't. You're looking at the polls for better or worse. We're just looking at the polls and economic data and not trying to answer the why questions as much. We kind of leave that up to the pundits, I suppose. The they them ad is partly about wokeness, but also about other things, right? It's about taxpayer money. It's about Kamala Harris seeming kind of out of touch in different ways. It's about illegal undocumented immigration. It's about flip flopping. It might be the most played ad in TV history because it's about more than one thing. Republicans tried to run on transgender rights in 2022 at the midterm. Didn't have that much success with it. I voted for Harris, full disclosure. I didn't think it was that close.

• 49:49Dax Shepard?

  I did too.

• 49:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, people need to be able to have a healthy degree of skepticism without going off the deep end. This seems to be very hard for people. Partisanship is a drug. It's a cliche.

• 49:56Dax Shepard?

  Both sides is a cancer. I'm watching the people on the right celebrate that LA is burning down. And I want to just say, if it brings you great joy that your countrymen are losing everything. Their children don't have a bedroom anymore. If that gives you pleasure, you must admit your politics is a cancer on both sides. When people on the left are stoked, people are dying of COVID. Your politics are a cancer at that point.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  This is still like an ongoing.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's happening around us.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  It's not even like recriminations.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  And how that started instantly.

• 50:25Dax Shepard?

  It immediately is political.

• 50:27Speaker 02

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

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Chill out for a week, if anything.

• 50:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, just take a breather.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  My god. That's part of the problem because it's those people, if they were quiet, maybe the other people wouldn't be like, oh, I'm happy their houses are burning down. But Trump is literally calling him Gavin Newscom right now. Are you kidding me? You're our president.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  It's like the chill to chill ratio. I had some concept and workshopping.

• 50:54Dax Shepard?

  Chill to chill.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  In the short run, chill kind of works. People are called to action and alarmed. And I kind of go back to September 11th and the patriotism phase. And that works in the short run, right? But a lot of people get tired of it. There are good critiques you can make of everything from controlled burning practices in California to the expense of various public services. To the fact that if there is climate change, then needing to be more realistic and prepared for the type of housing that you're building in vulnerable areas. But instead, it turns it as something about DEI and the lesbian.

• 51:23Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  I kind of want the lesbian fire chiefs to have like reality TV show if they get fired because they seem like these charismatic personalities, right? Just let people process.

• 51:33Dax Shepard?

  It's a bummer. I guess where I differ from some of my peers is it's on both sides. It's just a fucking gnarly metastasized cancer that all of us have.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there was one Democrat, there was a picture now of like the McDonald's burning in 100 degree storm fire. And she's like, this proves what corporate politics are doing to the climate. And it's like, yeah, you can maybe wait.

• 51:53Dax Shepard?

  It's kind of a gross level of opportunism. Okay, Peter Thiel, all to say, he did do these revolutionary things at the time with his Founders Fund as his company.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:02Dax Shepard?

  And we even heard this when we listened to the meta AI thing. This decision to bet on founders and not try to wrestle control away from founders and have this belief in them in a way that was pretty new and novel at the time they took this approach.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  It's almost like they don't even know what the idea is. They just want to believe in the founders.

• 52:20Dax Shepard?

  I love that you say the more shabbily you show up for your first meeting, the more trustworthy you are. It's so funny.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  Well, Sam McMinfred kind of played into this cliche. He's kind of self-described on the spectrum, not a guy who's going to wear a suit and tie. But he's like, if. If I am playing video games in investor pitch meetings, that will make me seem cool that I have so much RAM. I need to offload some of that playing a video game while I'm multitasking. And so he kind of played in that stereotype and was quite deliberate because they're very intense pattern matchers. Zuckerberg, he was kind of seen as like nerd in a hoodie and not the world's best communicator and just wanted to grind all day in engineering problems. That became the prototype that was used, or Steve Jobs, a slightly different prototype, for example. And this can make it harder for new prototypes to break through. I'm not trying to be super PC here, but the fact that there's so little money going to women founders and so little money going to black founders and Hispanic founders is kind of insane.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  If you're the industry that wants to be disruptive and wants high variance grit and all these things, right? Because they're such intense pattern matchers and because they kind of can't lose. The average venture capital firm, mediocre firm, isn't doing that well. But the top firms kind of can't lose. If you have the best talent from all around the world, it's like if every year the best team in the NBA got the number one draft pick.

• 53:29Dax Shepard?

  Right. All the very best players came and begged to be on a team.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:33Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so let's talk about Sam Bankman-Fried because you spent a lot of time with him. And why do you think he was willing to sit with you? Also, just in case people don't know. Oh yeah, let's do a little quick history of who he is, how he created FTX, and even what FTX was. Because I do think the laymen, they hear it all the time, but they're not sure what happened.

• 53:50Speaker 02

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

• 54:12Dax Shepard?

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

• 54:22Speaker 02

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

• 55:01Dax Shepard?

  Incredibly impulsive, right?

• 55:02Speaker 02

  Impulsive and kind of stimulus driven.

• 55:04Dax Shepard?

  He's also on Adderall, right?

• 55:06Speaker 02

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

• 55:09Dax Shepard?

  If you live on meth, I mean, I don't know how much you can discount that.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  I mean, if you play enough poker, where you have enough of a sample size, where you see how things that affect yourself, like if you're hungry, then you're playing poker for like 12 years, I just want to bust out so I can go get a fucking steak or something.

• 55:20Dax Shepard?

  You don't even know you're trying to get out.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  You're making all these marginal, high-stress decisions, and the cumulative effect of anything that you're doing, maybe Adderall or nicotine, but you can understand why people might like that, right? But it's going to affect performance and mentality. Long story short, starts a fund called Alameda, kind of has some fallout there, but begins to make more and more money. Eventually realizes if you really want to get rich quick, then there are certain crypto trades that look like a very good bet. Leveraging different prices of Bitcoin in Japan versus South Korea versus other things.

• 55:47Dax Shepard?

  But does the price of Bitcoin vary throughout the globe?

• 55:50Speaker 02

  At the time, there were pretty big arbitrages, because I believe this is right. In South Korea, you had to be a registered agent to trade Bitcoin, or like a resident of South Korea. And they were pretty strict about it, at least at first. And this was back when Bitcoin was a somewhat more obscure thing. And so, yeah, if you could somehow find a way to buy Bitcoin in South Korea, but makes this money, and then found FTX, which is a crypto exchange.

• 56:13Dax Shepard?

  Which I don't even understand how a crypto exchange works. My understanding is like, you go buy crypto, you have a password and it exists. I don't know, why is someone else ever involved?

• 56:22Speaker 02

  So first of all, I have to find somebody to sell me crypto, which is not a completely trivial problem. And you have to enter this 26-digit code, and you can see what crypto is a bit intimidating, where if you go to like an FTX or Coinbase or Gemini, then it's just E-Trade.

• 56:35Dax Shepard?

  Right. I got this much amount of money and I want to convert it to Bitcoin.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  Deposit 20,000 bucks from your bank account, you press a button, you buy Bitcoin, they take more of a surcharge than they probably should. But now I own Bitcoin, which technically you actually don't. They are just allocating that to your bank account and they own the Bitcoin. But usually that was respected. I can't seek for all these firms. It's supposed to be segregated, so you can't then go have a run on the bank. At FTX, it wasn't because Sam thought, oh, I'm very good at making trades and I want to make the world better through effective altruism. So like, we have $8 billion in customer deposits in crypto. Wouldn't it be a shame if I just left that sitting there in some account instead of making these awesome trades with it? And of course.

• 57:11Dax Shepard?

  He thought it was unutilized money.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's like, well, I am trying to give my money away to charity and/or to become infinitely powerful. He thought he could become president with some probability, literally. He wanted to be like the world's first trillionaire.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  These are also counter. I want to be so altruistic and I want to be the president and a trillionaire.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  A little suspicious, right?

• 57:30Speaker 01

  This is wild.

• 57:31Dax Shepard?

  Also, just what a goal. It sounds like an eight-year-old.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  It's what you wrote down. I want to be president when you were 11 years old.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  I grew out of that. He even thought he could become president before he was age 35 by lobbying to get the rules changed.

• 57:42Dax Shepard?

  Okay, who was the big backer of FTX?

• 57:45Speaker 02

  Alfred Lin was a partner there, but you know, Sequoia is a very well-respected firm.

• 57:49Dax Shepard?

  One of the greats. Their position in the book is just, yeah, it's one of the ones that didn't work out. They're not even smart in the way you would think someone would smart. They said they would do it again, right?

• 57:57Speaker 02

  All that can happen is it goes to zero. So you go from one to zero, eh, who cares, right? You go from one to infinity, even that outweighs a lot of one to zeros. So they were at least honest by saying, we do this again. Now, there is some, I believe, shareholder action, so this is the rare case where there could be additional liability, but probably not too bad. But the other part of it is if you become successful in any different field relatively young, you can notice how people change around you, and I'm sure it's true in Hollywood, but it's also true in the nerdier occupations, right?

• 58:23Dax Shepard?

  So we've interviewed McCaskill and we adore him.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:27Dax Shepard?

  And I had some quiet pushback that I didn't know quite how to articulate. And I thought your book did a really good job of pointing out some gaps in it. So maybe lay out effective altruism.

• 58:39Speaker 02

  So effective altruism originally kind of meant what it sounded like, which is how can we find more effective ways to give money to charity?

• 58:47Dax Shepard?

  Just look at what Bill Gates has been doing for the last 15 years. Like, how do we get the most bang for our buck? How do we save the most lights?

• 58:52Speaker 02

  Five thousand bucks instead of the $10 million we put on the average. You know, governmental agencies actually put a value on human life based on how people behave in the US, which is 10 million. So that mindset, though, becomes quite fraught, even though I think. I think it's right. You're putting a value now on different things. So that already is a little bit fraught. What is the value of donating to the symphony? For example, like a little bit harder to quantify. Okay. Or we can start to ask some other couple of questions. Well, effective altruists mostly believe in animal welfare, which I see as a good thing. But how much are we trading the welfare of different animals against each other? One example given in the book is that there was a puppy, a poodle, who got stuck in the New York City subway system a few years ago. And should we stop the entire F train to rescue Dakota? And I decided to stop the F train. Like, you wouldn't do that for a squirrel. You'd run over the fucking squirrel, or like a cat probably gets run over.

• 59:35Speaker 02

  And a dog, we just assign enough moral value, then it gets weird. They're like, okay, well, look at the number of neurons that an animal has.

• 59:40Dax Shepard?

  Well, really quick, let's just walk that one through. So that really happened. Dakota, the dog wandered into the subway. They shut it down. It was down for a couple of hours. And you simply say, really quick, let's do a generic loss of wages. Well, generic loss of wages of that one little situation was 2 million. So how many humans can you save for 2 million instead of the dog? Then what about all the hospital workers that were waiting for their train? Did humans die because they weren't on their shift?

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  All these solutions in COVID were terrible. It was terrible to have all these people get sick. It was terrible to shut down schools, but you have to make trade offs.

• 1:00:08Dax Shepard?

  And you delineate the difference between small world problems and big world problems. These statistical analysis are really quite good at small world problems. But as you get into big world problems, these are almost impossible.

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  And people like don't respect the boundaries enough. I'll worry if I'm making a model in baseball, or politics, or basketball. Oh, this player is 10% underestimated, but the data is very good and we know how the system works. We know the rules of the game, literally. You have little errors and mistakes, but pretty accurate. Whereas in these big, open-ended problems, you're just kind of making shit up on the back of an envelope. And sometimes the best you can do, we had to make these decisions again under COVID. And maybe if we'd been more thoughtful about them, like, what is the cost of shutting down school in Los Angeles for 19 months? You know, we probably should have done more back of the envelope math there, which I think would have said probably a bad idea, even given these uncertain assumptions. But people don't know when they go from these closed problems that are amenable to modeling, to these open problems where it's just regurgitated assumptions over and over and over again. So what's happened, though, with EA?

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  The mandate kind of expanded for various reasons from charitable giving to any problem involving utility. Meaning, how do we make the world better? More questions. Who's deciding?

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  What's better?

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  Better and for whom? What if I make myself infinitely happy? And the rest of you are my slaves? You could say, well, Nate has infinite units of utility and you guys have 0.01 because you're not physically dead. Maybe you get to watch TV once a week or something.

• 1:01:27Dax Shepard?

  You get to nap.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  You're so generous.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. You get RVs now and then, right?

• 1:01:31Dax Shepard?

  One of the things I really loved about what you pointed out. I made the people I was on vacation with in Mexico City over Christmas suffer through my regurgitation of you is utilitarianism, which we learn in philosophy. The ends justify the means. If it has a better outcome for more people, that's good. I didn't even think of the simplest thing. The reason we're just naturally drawn to that is it has the illusion of numbers. We can assign numbers. And when we get into these very ambiguous, hard to decide moral issues that are nuanced, four is bigger than three. That's very comforting. I think we underestimate how comforted we are by the notion of utilitarianism because you have a bigger number than a smaller number. And even the trolley one that we all know, you're on a trolley. It's going to hit three people.

• 1:02:16Dax Shepard?

  You can pull a lever, it'll hit one person. Well, three's life saved is better than one. But what if the three dudes just gang rape somebody and the life you're going to kill is on the verge of curing cancer? It's so much more complicated than all lives have the same value.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  I have built models. I know how even when you have awesome data like you have in baseball, it's like a game that has structure and rules. I know how much you can have a garbage in, garbage out problem. And some parameters are robust and you can change them and the output's about the same. And some are not, meaning you make an assumption and it totally radically changes and overwhelms everything else in the system. One irony is in some ways I trust the poker players more and the traders more and people like that because they actually have skin in the game. If they are wrong.

• 1:02:58Dax Shepard?

  There'll be penalized, there's an outcome.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:03:00Dax Shepard?

  One of the things he did, Sam, was dump $12 million into this very small election up in Oregon. It's detailed in the book. And in fact, I had a friend tell me so excitedly, he said, do you know Sam Bankman Fried? He asked Trump how much money to walk away from the election? And the number was X. And he's like, can you imagine how great that would be? And I was like. Like, I'm sorry, that's not great to subvert democracy. Yeah. Whether you like the guy or hate the guy, no, buying off, what if someone offered Obama $12 billion in 2008 to walk away? You can't use your money to take away an option for people to vote on. That is fundamentally wrong, but it flies under this banner of effective altruism.

• 1:03:44Dax Shepard?

  You could definitely argue a utilitarian point of view on that. No, now we get into Kantianism, there has to be a principle called democracy that rises above all that.

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  So in some ways, the demise of Twitter was mispredicted, right? People thought, oh, the engineers will leave and Twitter will physically collapse the infrastructure, which it hasn't happened, it remains very influential. But you could say that Elon Musk spent $44 billion, certainly by the time he bought it and was trying to find ways out, probably knowing that's like not a good ROI from a here of finance.

• 1:04:09Dax Shepard?

  He's gonna lose money on that.

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  But he's willing to spend, let's say, half of that, right? Let's say the real value is 20 billion. So he's spending $25 billion on a cultural and political project, and maybe it's paid off. He's still the richest man in the world. In fact, his wealth has only increased since Trump's election. So it's kind of pocket change to him, and I think it has had a huge effect on the discourse. I don't blame Silicon Valley for saying, hey, we're gonna stand up and defend our interests. I think they felt that they were getting a hard time from the White House on antitrust stuff, which maybe they should get, I'm just saying this is their mindset. And they're tired of their woke progressive employees. And meanwhile, the news media has become very anti-tech.

• 1:04:45Dax Shepard?

  There's like an agrarian movement right now against billionaires. I'm watching the frontline two hour on China right now, and I'm like, guys, we're kind of inching towards this agrarian hatred.

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  It's this weird like Barbara Pol thing where somehow Donald Trump, I don't even wanna get into Donald Trump's finances. But because he's a kind of poor person's idea of like a rich person, he kind of gets it passed a little bit.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's really true.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  The left feels aggrieved, and the right feels aggrieved. When someone's on a winning streak, and this is also talked about in the book and this stuff about how traders behave and how poker players behave, you're getting so much fucking dopamine that when you're on a winning streak, especially men, it's literally narcotic, you can't really be reasoned with.

• 1:05:19Dax Shepard?

  I love that chapter on effective altruism, and it's very interesting to have you sit with Sam Brinkman-Fried and have him basically try to woo you while also real time watching his empire crash. Getting more and more accepting of the notion that he's probably gonna go to jail.

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  I mean, I interviewed him four or five days before he got arrested and taken into custody. So his mind is reeling like it's a video game, trying to figure out how can I somehow get out of this mess? He was someone who actually found it kind of hard to generate empathy for, in part because last time I talked to him was in Palo Alto, California. He's at his parents' house under house arrest. You have to give away all your electronics and like writing on this hotel notepad. I hadn't actually written that much, so I can't make small letters anymore, I don't think. It's like the landing form on the aircraft, like I can't use, I can't.

• 1:06:04Dax Shepard?

  I can't even see these questions.

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  He has like an ankle bracelet, this is serious, right? And then I asked him, well, what if you could get two years probation? You settle the court case, and at the time, people kind of knew he was pretty dead to write. It's like, eh, I'll have to think about it. I was like, yeah, 20 years instead. By the way, testified in his trial in New York against, I guess not the advice of his counsel, but against the advice of other lawyers that I spoke with. He was just gonna perjure himself, which is what he did, really pissed off the judge. So he's actually kind of a very bad, miscalculating type.

• 1:06:29Dax Shepard?

  So let's just close with Sam Altman. So he is running OpenAI and he's in the river. What did he do in the past that from your assessment would qualify him as being someone that has got a big appetite for risk?

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  So he worked for a firm called Young Combinator, which is an incubator. So they would go through and look at lots of very early-stage pitches or founding teams, give them a small amount of seed money. When you do that, you get very good at networking, basically. But you get all the business because there's a lot of outflow. Everyone who's a young investor, who may not be established, would want to go to this firm and therefore he makes great connections, develops a good eye for talent. And his skill set is really knowing a little bit about a lot and being a good networker. He is not, I don't think, a coding genius.

• 1:07:10Dax Shepard?

  That's funny, because I guess I put him in that category.

• 1:07:12Speaker 02

  No, he has a good eye for sniffing out what the next big thing is gonna be. All the guys, including the bad and evil people, are impressive. But Sam Altman, because it's kind of this crazy idea, I'm obviously supplying this a lot, but just leave his computer on for a really long time. It's not clear what the commercial applications are, and it's expensive. To buy a compute is expensive, right? It's not like a Silicon Valley garage somewhere where you're just hacking together a project. No clear financial upside, which is why it started out as a nonprofit that's obviously de facto already over. I'm not gonna get into the legal structure exactly. But like wrestling together Elon Musk and Microsoft and Peter Thiel was an early investor, all these. People, he was kind of playing the captain of that fantasy baseball team. Sam is an effective politician. He understands different constituencies in Silicon Valley, kind of reflects their ideology, and is very risk on. So Sam Altman freed, again, SBF, not Sam Altman,

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  literally said repeatedly, like, if I could flip a coin, and the coin comes up heads, and the world is twice as good, plus 1%, and if it's tails, we wipe out all life in the known universe, I would flip that coin from utilitarian standpoint, right?

• 1:08:10Dax Shepard?

  That's a worldview, isn't it?

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  Sam Altman wouldn't do that at 50/50. He might do it at 90/10, though.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  It's so out of touch. You can be very smart until you hit a certain level of ego and power, and then you become dumb again.

• 1:08:24Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah. Your intelligence is compartmentalized. Elon, in so many ways, is the greatest engineer for centuries. And then he has kind of the emotional capacity of a 12-year-old.

• 1:08:34Speaker 02

  SpaceX actually was in very hairy situation for a long time.

• 1:08:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they crashed three. If the fourth didn't succeed, he's done, and he knows it.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  And so he's been written off a few times. But once you have the chip on your shoulder, and with Sam Altman, AI is taking a long time to let it train on basically reading the entire text of the internet and thinking scare quotes about it for a really long time. And then all of a sudden, with GPT-2, and then certainly three and beyond that, it's like, this is kind of miraculous.

• 1:09:00Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I just started using it. I'm like, I really can hardly believe this can do this. You feel like you're interacting with magic in some way.

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you have faith in it. And most of these guys, not that I have the whole faith thing worked out, but I think you start to get into some weird existential and spiritual questions for various reasons. When you're talking about smarter than human intelligence, when you're talking about life extension, these guys get into weird simulation hypothesis and things like that. And most of them are secular. I kind of halfway predict there might be a little bit of a religious boom in Silicon Valley sometime soon as they try to wrestle with it. But Sam feels like he's seen this miracle happen, and then he gets written off at different times. The board tried to clumsily oust him from his own company. And then, once you survive that, then you're emboldened. I think he's the most rational of all the people I met. I think he understands his incentives. So I talked to him in summer 2022. The book took four years to write.

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  At first, I tried to get another interview later on. Once GPT 3.5 that come out, they're like friendly, but like Sam was traveling the world for the next six months. They first do interviews in person, so it might be difficult. You come to Cambodia. At first, this interview is like a year and a half old, but it was actually better because he was less guarded. Back then, he's like, yeah, it could go really badly, but we're going to solve global poverty. And wouldn't that be really good? We'll solve all technological and scientific problems. And that's worth the tangible risk that things go really wrong and we destroy civilization. That's, I think, a relatively honest comment. It may be deranged, but an honest expression of what he thinks. So the people are like, oh, this might be a marketing strategy. It's like, no, Tylenol wasn't like, we might poison the water stream if people have more Tylenol, but let's keep. This is like not a typical strategy. And it's because I come from this mindset where number one, they are taught to quantify everything in probabilistic terms,

• 1:10:35Speaker 02

  which again, I think is more good than bad, but is not the way most people, apart from me and all the people in the river, think about these things and to think in terms of cost benefit analysis. Later on top of that, typical startup founder ego, feeling like you're oppressed when you're actually very powerful, right? Having a run of success, having lots of money and people who are sycophantic in your general orbit. We've not talked quite enough about just a lot of plain old competitiveness, wanting to compete and win. Capitalism will triumph for better and worse because the people who want to compete are going to outcompete the people who don't want to compete. Unless you entirely suppress competition, then competition is going to win. It's a very hard problem to balance out.

• 1:11:13Dax Shepard?

  Nate, this has been awesome. I love your book. One of the things I love that you point out in the book is like, if you take right now, the top 10 richest people in America, they're all self-made.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:11:23Dax Shepard?

  If you go back a century, that list is mostly inherited wealth. That's a good thing.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  It's only in the top 0.0001%. It's because if you're born on third base, just put your money in a trust fund, go do too much coke. You don't really have much of an incentive because like what some of the people are doing is they keep bludgeoning the horse when it's already dead. I'm mixing my metaphors here, right? But in some rational sense, when you sell your first startup for $50 million, just go buy a villa in Tuscany or something and have a great party with all your friends. Be an angel investor, invest in a basketball team. But instead they kind of keep competing over and over and over again and doubling down over and over again. And so by definition, it's like a poker tournament where the person who goes all in 10 times in a row and by luck or Skill, the combination really, win these bets 10 times in a row, all of a sudden, wealth multiplies exponentially and you're worth more money than half the countries on earth.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  I mean, what is Elon's net worth compared to the GDP of most countries on earth? A lot of power accumulating in a very small number of people's hands.

• 1:12:17Dax Shepard?

  It self-accelerates, it's flubber.

• 1:12:19Speaker 02

  Before the book, the print edition, you can kind of bounce your way through. I am partial to the audiobook.

• 1:12:23Dax Shepard?

  That's what I did, I listened to it.

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  We cut out some of the things that are a little bit more detours. I'm actually partial to the audiobook version.

• 1:12:30Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  Constraints are good. I want to kind of force you to like, in the order of the author.

• 1:12:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, right, right, right, right. Well, Nathan, it's been a pleasure meeting you.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  And happy birthday.

• 1:12:42Speaker 02

  Happy birthday.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  Thanks for joining us for your birthday.

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  It was really fun.

• 1:12:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, well, I look forward to your next book and happy birthday.

• 1:12:50Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

• 1:12:57Dax Shepard?

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• 1:13:22Speaker 04

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• 1:14:20Dax Shepard?

  This episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. Look, I have my dream job. I get to talk to folks I admire like crazy and ask them virtually any question that I want to. I can't imagine a better way to spend my time. But even dream jobs have some not so dreamy parts, the stuff that gets in the way of the actual work. Now that's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work. They actually do it, start to finish, cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. So you and your team can focus on what matters most, which for me is, are they obsessed with male bodies on the same level as I am?

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

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• 1:15:03Dax Shepard?

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• 1:15:58Speaker 06

  Stay tuned for the fact check. It's ready to party, Zach.

• 1:16:06Dax Shepard?

  I'm trying to taunt you. Have you noticed that my Diet Coke says "Happy Birthday, Dex"?

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't notice that. Is it from Bill?

• 1:16:15Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  But was it from Bill? Oh.

• 1:16:19Dax Shepard?

  I think Kristen ordered them.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  Oh, cute.

• 1:16:23Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Is that Diet or Reg's? Diet. This is an amazing ding ding ding. But for our next...

• 1:16:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. Your market? So how long did it take you to fall asleep?

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  I don't know because I listened to a few podcasts all the way through.

• 1:16:45Dax Shepard?

  Oh, God.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then I just let it turn off and then I don't know when, how long after that.

• 1:16:51Dax Shepard?

  What podcasts did you listen to?

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  I listened to, nobody's listening, right? Elizabeth and Andy, my favorite podcast. And then they-

• 1:16:58Dax Shepard?

  That's your blankie.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  Uh huh, that's my-

• 1:17:00Dax Shepard?

  Your binky.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  My, my, um-

• 1:17:03Dax Shepard?

  Aud- auditory blink- binky.

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  What's lovey? That's my lovey.

• 1:17:07Dax Shepard?

  Okay, your stuffy, your lovey.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  I've never had one of those.

• 1:17:10Dax Shepard?

  A stuffy?

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then I wondered, I mean, I had stuffed animals.

• 1:17:14Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:17:14Speaker 01

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

• 1:17:24Dax Shepard?

  I had three, but they didn't travel with me. I maybe brought one or two of them to my dad's on the weekends.

• 1:17:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:31Dax Shepard?

  Um, but I had three different bears.

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  Do you still have any of them?

• 1:17:37Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  I know, but-

• 1:17:47Dax Shepard?

  Can you imagine buying my used teddy bear?

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Ding ding ding! I think this is a ding ding ding for real.

• 1:17:52Dax Shepard?

  It is.

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  Long time coming.

• 1:17:54Dax Shepard?

  Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, right, we had delayed. Oh, Liberty. Did you have Liberty cleaned?

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  Liberty does look a little cleaner than normal. I agree.

• 1:18:08Dax Shepard?

  Oh, there's the shit on the ears. Oh.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  He's pretty disgusting, but he does still look a little-

• 1:18:15Dax Shepard?

  He ate a horse's ass out. Or a mule's.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  He does look a little cleaner than usual. Um, I'm holding, for the listener, I'm holding Liberty, my beanie baby, who's covered in poo poo.

• 1:18:29Dax Shepard?

  He's a mess.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  Um, he's sort of my lovey.

• 1:18:33Dax Shepard?

  Just because he had value and he was really exclusive. That's not the reason to have a lovey.

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  He's my, my, my, um, investment lovey.

• 1:18:43Dax Shepard?

  This is my 401K. I still remember-

• 1:18:46Speaker 01

  What is on him?

• 1:18:48Dax Shepard?

  Fecal matter.

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  No, I mean-

• 1:18:49Dax Shepard?

  It is.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  Like from a rat or something?

• 1:18:51Dax Shepard?

  No, I think he wiped with him.

• 1:18:53Speaker 01

  I did not!

• 1:18:54Dax Shepard?

  It looks like someone did, because the back is spotless. It looks like someone grabbed him from the back and used him, hopefully, front to back.

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  So my parents aren't, aren't, I guess, as ruthless. As your mom, but they are pretty bad. Like they just put everything in some big bags.

• 1:19:12Dax Shepard?

  Hold on, they're not even close. The you, everything you had as a kid is still in your room?

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  No, because my brother moved out. I mean, moved in. So then everything got thrown into

• 1:19:24Dax Shepard?

  Catalog.

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  Bags.

• 1:19:26Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  And then thrown in the basement. But it was literally like everything, just like random, like a sticky note is it? They just threw it all in a bag. So this liberty obviously got put thrown face down.

• 1:19:37Dax Shepard?

  And then old coffee spilled at the bottom of the bag.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:19:41Dax Shepard?

  I think he was used to wipe.

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  He's still great.

• 1:19:45Dax Shepard?

  Take a big whiff of his face and see if there's any smell to him.

• 1:19:50Dax Shepard?

  Really get in there.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  I know, I don't.

• 1:19:52Dax Shepard?

  Let me be the judge of this. Toss him over.

• 1:19:55Speaker 01

  Be careful, okay?

• 1:19:55Dax Shepard?

  I will.

• 1:19:56Speaker 01

  My love.

• 1:19:56Dax Shepard?

  He's expensive. He used to be expensive.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  He is expensive.

• 1:20:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's, that's dung.

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  No, it is. Stop it. Is it? I don't smell anything.

• 1:20:06Dax Shepard?

  Smell, but boy, it does look like.

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  Listen, I'm not, you're not gonna like what I'm about to say, but it's the truth. This is on eBay right now for $700.

• 1:20:15Dax Shepard?

  No.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20:17Dax Shepard?

  Was shit all over it?

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  Well, no.

• 1:20:20Dax Shepard?

  Okay, a clean version in a box or something?

• 1:20:22Speaker 01

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

• 1:20:26Dax Shepard?

  Well, that's for sure.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  This is the only poopy liberty there is.

• 1:20:30Dax Shepard?

  It's like a Warhol. Like you took this cute valuable thing, wiped with it. Now that's a piece of art.

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  Do you think I should auction this off?

• 1:20:38Dax Shepard?

  No, because I would feel terrible for anyone who paid a lot of money for that.

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  They want it. Why, why do you get to make the decision for people that?

• 1:20:46Dax Shepard?

  I don't. You asked me if I thought you should, and I'm giving you an honest answer.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, because you said you'll feel terrible, but you shouldn't feel terrible if they want it.

• 1:20:55Dax Shepard?

  I want to protect them from themselves.

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  Do you think people should smoke if they want?

• 1:21:01Dax Shepard?

  I don't think they should smoke.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  If they want.

• 1:21:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, if they want, fine.

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  Great.

• 1:21:07Dax Shepard?

  But I don't think they should smoke if they think you'll like them more.

• 1:21:13Dax Shepard?

  Oh my goodness. Get that duty bear out of here.

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  He's my friend.

• 1:21:19Dax Shepard?

  As long as you label it as duty bear for the sale of him.

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  I feel totally ethical auctioning this off as even though it's a bit dirty. But what I will be honest about, and this is an important piece, it is missing its tag.

• 1:21:34Dax Shepard?

  The most valuable part.

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  It's missing the heart thing that has its name, but his name is still on his butt. It says it on the tag.

• 1:21:43Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  Anyway.

• 1:21:51Dax Shepard?

  Anywho.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  I don't have any love. He's and well, I again.

• 1:21:55Dax Shepard?

  Why was, what were you waiting to bring it out to tell me that there were $700 on eBay?

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, $700. There's a six, seven, one for 674, one for 750. Uh, 500, but this is like.

• 1:22:10Dax Shepard?

  You thought at one point it was worth.

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  It was. He comes up in this episode.

• 1:22:16Dax Shepard?

  Right, right.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  Which is why that's a ding ding ding.

• 1:22:19Dax Shepard?

  Shocker that Nate didn't offer to buy it. It's so valuable.

• 1:22:24Speaker 01

  Well, he was upstairs. That's why he didn't see him.

• 1:22:26Dax Shepard?

  He couldn't see him.

• 1:22:29Dax Shepard?

  Do you think so? Monica's now placed La Shit Tea on her shoulder. Do you think that's your bad shoulder or your good shoulder? Is he telling you to do bad things or good things? So you're it or you're super ego?

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  He's bad.

• 1:22:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. He's like.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  He got out of the trash.

• 1:22:46Dax Shepard?

  He's a mellow, monstrosity animal.

• 1:22:50Dax Shepard?

  Eating up all those old caramels at the bottom of the trash can.

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you go to eBay, you're gonna get a nice guy. You're gonna get an angel La Berte, but this is the only devil La Berte in the whole world.

• 1:23:01Dax Shepard?

  The only id. Yeah. I have something I want to announce.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  Let's hear it.

• 1:23:05Dax Shepard?

  I have a few things.

• 1:23:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:23:06Dax Shepard?

  First, I don't think I've ever seen.

• 1:23:11Dax Shepard?

  A response so consistent in the comments.

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:23:16Dax Shepard?

  The dog world is ablaze.

• 1:23:19Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 1:23:19Dax Shepard?

  Of there's a fervor of recommendations.

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  I told everyone not to get too excited.

• 1:23:25Dax Shepard?

  I opened up the comments for James Marsden.

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  Little Jimmy Marsden.

• 1:23:32Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:23:57Dax Shepard?

  And then another thing I want to say is, I read a great book by a friend of the pod's wife, Allison Grant Adams' wife.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:24:09Dax Shepard?

  She wrote a book called I Am The Cage.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 1:24:12Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  Is it a novel?

• 1:24:28Dax Shepard?

  Yes, it's a novel.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:24:30Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:24:48Speaker 01

  Oh, ding ding ding.

• 1:24:50Dax Shepard?

  Tell me.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  Remember, we had, we had a guest on once whose brother had that surgery and he passed away from it.

• 1:24:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  How horrible.

• 1:25:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, in the book, the character is told by the nurse, like, you're in good hands, he's the best in the country. And then she asks, how many people do this procedure? And he's the only one. The horrificness of this procedure and how much it changed the course of her life and how it all comes into...

• 1:25:23Dax Shepard?

  This inflection experience being snowed in, it's really, really good.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  I can't wait to read it.

• 1:25:29Dax Shepard?

  So impressive, so beautifully written. And it's also, I think for people who are like, they're not extroverts. They don't want to talk to anyone. They don't want to come for anyone. Like, I would imagine to be deliberating to hear someone speak so honestly about how much they dislike all these interactions.

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:25:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's very brave. It's a very cool book. I am the cage. People sit in it is.

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  Is it out?

• 1:25:50Dax Shepard?

  It's out on February 18th.

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  Okay, great.

• 1:25:55Dax Shepard?

  So preorder it. I really recommend it. It's fantastic. I'm the cage.

• 1:25:58Speaker 01

  I'll read it.

• 1:25:59Dax Shepard?

  I don't read many novels.

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:01Dax Shepard?

  It kind of like, I could feel there was enough reality in it.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, the best novels do that.

• 1:26:08Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  You probably just haven't read any good ones.

• 1:26:12Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  I really like reading novels.

• 1:26:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 1:26:19Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  I am. Both of those things. I am.

• 1:26:24Dax Shepard?

  I'm a reality boy. Don't talk about unicorns or Sasquatch.

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  Plenty of fantasies. You're a fantasy girl, too.

• 1:26:31Dax Shepard?

  And a cookie boy.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  And a cookie boy. I'm a reality girl, too.

• 1:26:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I don't mean to put you in a box.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, don't put me in a cage.

• 1:26:40Dax Shepard?

  I am the cage. No, that's the title of the book. I am the cage.

• 1:26:45Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  Speaking of fantasy, we have an upcoming guest who we discuss fantasy with a bit, and I thought that was really interesting.

• 1:27:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and very similar to your experience.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  Uh huh. It's a great survival mechanism.

• 1:27:12Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  Until you don't need it anymore to survive.

• 1:27:15Dax Shepard?

  But you still use it.

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  Every now and then.

• 1:27:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah. I took a hike this morning. It's raining.

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:27:22Dax Shepard?

  Thank God. We have to, we can only be grateful.

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  I know. That's right.

• 1:27:25Dax Shepard?

  We have no choice but to be very grateful.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:27:27Dax Shepard?

  Considering the fire conditions.

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  I agree. I agree. I agree. I love it.

• 1:27:31Dax Shepard?

  You were taking it better than normal, which to me seems like proof of that.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  Thank you. I'm trying very hard.

• 1:27:36Dax Shepard?

  Are you? What does that entail?

• 1:27:40Dax Shepard?

  You should look out the window and go, I love you, rain, and just force yourself.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  No, to be clear, it is raining. It's been raining for the past couple of days. Um, I have seasonal affective disorder, sad self diagnosis. And I am about to start my period. These are, there's lots going on.

• 1:27:58Dax Shepard?

  Double whammy.

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  That, um, generally speaking, I can predict what kind of mood I will be in.

• 1:28:04Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  But I, um.

• 1:28:06Dax Shepard?

  And is it helpful to go, yeah, I feel like shit, but I know it's because of these things. Does that like mitigate how much suffering there is?

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

  There's, yes, there's many things at play. I'm starting to feel like really agitated.

• 1:28:22Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:23Speaker 01

  It's that.

• 1:28:24Dax Shepard?

  Right, not the person.

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  Thing or the, or the person or whatever.

• 1:28:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  And so that's helpful to know.

• 1:28:33Dax Shepard?

  I do that.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:35Dax Shepard?

  Really helps. I mean, you gotta do it with children.

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  Oh, I bet.

• 1:28:38Dax Shepard?

  Like if you're, if you're depressed, your children, the little things that you can overlook start becoming annoying.

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:28:45Dax Shepard?

  And then I have to go, has nothing to do with them. You just feel this way. It really is effective.

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  It is. Also, I feel like you've been in the low mood.

• 1:28:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, I had a good couple, three weeks of feeling.

• 1:29:00Speaker 01

  Down.

• 1:29:01Dax Shepard?

  Depressed.

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  Depressed, yeah. And that is clear to me.

• 1:29:06Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  Right? And we've talked, we have talked about it on here.

• 1:29:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  But, um, the thing you don't always agree with, but that I really do think is true is that you can only have a hundred percent of an emotion in the room.

• 1:29:17Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  Or between two people or whatever.

• 1:29:20Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:20Speaker 01

  Um, and I feel that, like when you are not at your happiest.

• 1:29:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  Oh, it's not my turn.

• 1:29:29Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  To also be in that headspace, like it's my turn to be the other type of person in this, in this setting.

• 1:29:39Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:39Speaker 01

  In this duo. So I don't know, I, I find that sort of liberating. It's, it's like, okay, I actually, this isn't the time for me to indulge my thing.

• 1:29:49Dax Shepard?

  Because you learn you can control it if you're forced to.

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  It's not that set in stone. There, it. Is I am able to overcome it.

• 1:29:58Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  If I need to. And the rain makes me gloomy, but I haven't really been that gloomy.

• 1:30:04Dax Shepard?

  I'm super lucky. Because I in the morning open up my drapes and I go to meditate. And often I start meditating while it's still dark out. And by the time I'm done, the light has come out.

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  That's nice.

• 1:30:19Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:30:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:31Dax Shepard?

  So that's a huge advantage.

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  That's nice.

• 1:30:34Dax Shepard?

  So I was looking at it and I was like, I don't know why Gorillas in the Mist is so seared into my mind. But I think maybe that was the first time I saw that kind of tropical misty foliage. It really captivated my imagination when I was younger. And so anytime I see like Columbia, when they show the mountainside and it's like very damp and moist, I love it. So I was looking at it, I was like, oh, I can't wait to go hiking in there. There's gonna be like the visibility will be low. There was virtually no one out there, which is never the case.

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  The rain will do that.

• 1:31:06Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:31:11Speaker 01

  I wonder if aversion to rain slash seasonal affective disorder slash that is, it's like misophonia. Like it could, it's a gene.

• 1:31:21Dax Shepard?

  Probably.

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  Cause you're talking about the mist. And I want, I want.

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  I understand.

• 1:31:30Dax Shepard?

  It's like atmosphere in a movie. Like they pump scenes full of dust so that there's a texture to the air. And so it's so cinematic when it's like this. It's just very beautiful. The greens are greener. It's filtering out different kinds of light.

• 1:31:46Speaker 01

  I know, but I.

• 1:31:47Dax Shepard?

  I don't care.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  I don't like it.

• 1:31:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you want bright hot sun.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  I really do.

• 1:31:53Dax Shepard?

  White light.

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  But I wanna like it. Maybe that'll be my New Year's resolution and this year, the new, the new year started again. In February.

• 1:32:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I feel it.

• 1:32:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:04Dax Shepard?

  My mood broke almost on February one, yeah, day before or something. God, should I tell you something embarrassing? Well, let me first say that whiskey, well, it's related to that. Whiskey has diureted his cage four nights in a row.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  Uh oh, he is Noro.

• 1:32:24Dax Shepard?

  The fact that Chris hasn't killed herself yet, she's been up every night for the last four nights.

• 1:32:28Speaker 01

  Dealing with that? Can he wear a diaper?

• 1:32:31Dax Shepard?

  He should. Well, he went to the vet yesterday and he, by the way, you know, he's such a, he's such a bastard, not even a rascal, he's a bastard.

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:32:39Dax Shepard?

  They put him in a cone and all, they couldn't, they, you can't even approach him. So they had to anesthetize him, just to like take his blood and run some tests. So when he came home, he was completely fucked up, right? He was fucked up all, it's, I was jealous. I'm like, what'd they give him that lasts 14 hours? None of the drugs I ever took lasted that long. He's very small. He's down one leg.

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  He's almost as small as Liberty.

• 1:33:01Dax Shepard?

  He is. So he did not have any harness last night, which was great.

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:33:04Dax Shepard?

  So I woke up in the middle of the night to pee, as I do two or three times, and I was peeing and I farted. And I was half asleep and then I went and was about to lay back in bed and I was like, did I, is there a little?

• 1:33:16Speaker 01

  Oh, you had to do it?

• 1:33:17Dax Shepard?

  Is there a little, did something come out?

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:33:20Dax Shepard?

  And then I went and sat back, I sat on the toilet and fired up the brondle, the butt washer.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:27Dax Shepard?

  And I, I had had a little.

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  Duty.

• 1:33:29Dax Shepard?

  Which never has happened in the middle of the night.

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  Were you wearing your underwear?

• 1:33:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:36Speaker 01

  Oh no, did it get in?

• 1:33:37Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  But you were covered.

• 1:33:43Dax Shepard?

  I didn't get anything on anything. It was just a tiny bit of. Yeah.

• 1:33:49Speaker 01

  Do you think?

• 1:33:49Dax Shepard?

  But I could, I got really close. I'm, I just, well, I guess the point of this story is I got hugely lucky. Cause I didn't notice and I was just about to lay down and then that would have probably caused an issue where I would have to change my clothes and.

• 1:34:03Speaker 01

  And then Chris might've had to clean up your duty too.

• 1:34:06Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:34:12Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:34:13Dax Shepard?

  So everyone was celebrating this morning that there was no Hanus. And I didn't have the heart to say there was something.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  There was just a tiny.

• 1:34:23Dax Shepard?

  I think it's cuz, well, my hunch is I sold myself on the notion that I might be able to eat this sourdough bread that Kristen's making. Like, I really want to be able to have no gluten.

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:36Dax Shepard?

  In the first round, which was pretty dense cuz she used a flour without gluten. Then she said, let's go half and half. And then she made that and it was so good.

• 1:34:44Speaker 01

  Oh, half and half with gluten.

• 1:34:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 1:34:48Dax Shepard?

  And it was much better.

• 1:34:50Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 1:34:50Dax Shepard?

  It cooked better, it was fluffier, it was so delicious. And I had a couple slices in the morning.

• 1:34:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:34:56Dax Shepard?

  And I think that's why I whisked, whiskied last night.

• 1:34:59Speaker 01

  You tonka'd.

• 1:35:00Dax Shepard?

  Well, no, tonka.

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  Please use the correct.

• 1:35:03Dax Shepard?

  We know what a tonka is.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  Oh, you don't wanna, this doesn't count cuz it's too tiny.

• 1:35:08Dax Shepard?

  No, what happened?

• 1:35:10Speaker 01

  I don't wanna.

• 1:35:12Dax Shepard?

  We know tonka, what that means. It's not a like a little oozie you almost miss. It's like animalistic, okay.

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  Okay, um, I'm not gonna give, I'm not gonna talk about it, but we had similar situations. Sort of.

• 1:35:27Dax Shepard?

  Last night?

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, sort of, not really, but interesting that you.

• 1:35:32Dax Shepard?

  In your new outfit?

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, but nothing, I didn't have any poop.

• 1:35:35Dax Shepard?

  But you thought you.

• 1:35:36Speaker 01

  I don't wanna talk about it.

• 1:35:37Dax Shepard?

  Why? I just was so, I was so vulnerable. I'm so revealing in there.

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  You always are.

• 1:35:43Dax Shepard?

  Oh, well.

• 1:35:44Speaker 01

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

• 1:35:46Dax Shepard?

  Yes, they can, everyone.

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  No, they can't. I didn't poop, I didn't.

• 1:35:48Dax Shepard?

  Are you sure?

• 1:35:48Speaker 01

  I'm sure, but I, I just had a situation that's a little tangential to yours with no poop.

• 1:35:56Dax Shepard?

  You just got your outfit down in time?

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

  No, there was no poop.

• 1:36:00Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

  No poop.

• 1:36:01Dax Shepard?

  Interesting.

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  I just something interesting and novel.

• 1:36:08Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:36:09Speaker 01

  Happened.

• 1:36:10Dax Shepard?

  Okay, we'll leave it at that.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  In that space.

• 1:36:13Dax Shepard?

  Okay, in the bathroom?

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:36:15Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:36:16Speaker 01

  Um, facts. This is for Nate Silver.

• 1:36:19Dax Shepard?

  Will you eventually write a tell all when you're like 60 and will hear all these stories, I hope?

• 1:36:24Speaker 01

  There's a, there's only.

• 1:36:25Dax Shepard?

  A Hollywood tell all and it's just all about your Tonka experience?

• 1:36:29Speaker 01

  There's only been, I've only Tonka'd once.

• 1:36:32Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  In my whole life.

• 1:36:34Dax Shepard?

  There's others.

• 1:36:35Speaker 01

  This isn't worth, this would not even make like.

• 1:36:38Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  A chapter.

• 1:36:40Dax Shepard?

  Okay, great.

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  It's like at best, two lines.

• 1:36:43Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:36:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like under the title, the little like quote. It's nothing.

• 1:36:52Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  Um, okay. Speaking of gross things.

• 1:36:56Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:57Speaker 01

  Salmon semen skincare.

• 1:37:00Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:37:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:37:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:02Speaker 01

  This is all the rage. And it's because salmon sperm shares a lot of DNA with us.

• 1:37:13Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  And so we used to have vampire facials. I mean, they still do them, but that's where they would like, take your blood out and then.

• 1:37:23Dax Shepard?

  Spin it?

• 1:37:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:24Dax Shepard?

  Get the platelets or something?

• 1:37:25Speaker 01

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

• 1:37:29Dax Shepard?

  Do you think it's stem cell-y?

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  I think they're kind of trying to make it.

• 1:37:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:33Speaker 01

  They were, look, allegedly, I never did it and then I am not.

• 1:37:37Dax Shepard?

  Going to try it?

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  No, I'm not. But it was a thing.

• 1:37:40Dax Shepard?

  But you do want the salmon ejaculate?

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

  I'm interested in that, yeah. Yeah, salmon ejaculate is the actual.

• 1:37:45Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  No, it's not FDA approved.

• 1:37:52Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I'm so shocked.

• 1:37:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not FDA approved yet, but if you go to South Korea, you can get it.

• 1:37:58Dax Shepard?

  Oh, that, so have you thought about, have you fantasized about taking a trip there?

• 1:38:02Speaker 01

  I do want to go to South Korea.

• 1:38:03Dax Shepard?

  Just do a week of face stuff?

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:06Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  Yes, there's a podcast I love called Eyewitness Beauty and Nick Axelrod, one of the hosts, he.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  Goes and he once got something called like small face.

• 1:38:22Dax Shepard?

  Oh, what's that?

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  I think it made his face small.

• 1:38:25Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:38:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:27Dax Shepard?

  Wow.

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  So they do all kinds of things.

• 1:38:30Dax Shepard?

  Wow.

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

  Now, it's called regerin, regerin. Um, it's a long chain, poly nucleotide DNA of salmon milt in micro droplets under the skin of the face and neck. One of the main ingredients is hyaluronic acid. Oh, we have a friend who's done this, by the way.

• 1:38:46Dax Shepard?

  Well, hold on a second. So under the skin, so they're shooting it into you. It's not a topical.

• 1:38:52Speaker 01

  Right, just like the vampire facial where it's like.

• 1:38:54Dax Shepard?

  Oh, they put it in?

• 1:38:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:55Dax Shepard?

  Oh, we have a friend who did this?

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  She went to South Korea and she did this.

• 1:39:00Dax Shepard?

  She say that the results were?

• 1:39:02Speaker 01

  She said.

• 1:39:03Dax Shepard?

  Does she look incredible?

• 1:39:04Speaker 01

  I haven't seen her in a while. I might see her at the Super Bowl.

• 1:39:07Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:39:07Speaker 01

  But she's said she's gotten a lot of compliments and that she, she looks visibly different.

• 1:39:11Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:39:13Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:39:13Dax Shepard?

  Wow.

• 1:39:14Speaker 01

  And it's supposed to improve elasticity, reduction of fine lines and wrinkles, increase skin hydration and improved healing capabilities of the skin from damage.

• 1:39:22Dax Shepard?

  How do we know it's not just filler? Maybe it's just working the same as filler. If you're putting a needle under the skin and putting volume in there.

• 1:39:29Speaker 01

  No, no, cause scars. It's like helps with, it helps with like skin clarity.

• 1:39:34Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  So, once it gets FDA approved.

• 1:39:37Dax Shepard?

  You're gonna get it.

• 1:39:39Speaker 01

  I'm really, I'm not gonna get it.

• 1:39:41Dax Shepard?

  Oh, you're not?

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:39:42Dax Shepard?

  This is confusing. I'm for sure you're gonna get it.

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

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

• 1:39:49Dax Shepard?

  I wonder what the price tag is on this procedure?

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that I don't know, but also I.

• 1:39:54Dax Shepard?

  And I would want wild salmon ejaculate, not farm raised ejaculate.

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  Well, that's the thing. We gotta get the right type.

• 1:40:00Dax Shepard?

  Wild, I want it wild.

• 1:40:02Speaker 01

  He talked about gay men of his cohort being quite successful and it's true and there is a lot of current research on this group right now.

• 1:40:12Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:40:13Speaker 01

  Adult gay men tend to have a higher rate of educational attainment compared to straight men with a significantly larger percentage earning college degrees and advanced degrees like a PhD, MD, or JD. This is often attributed to factors like a strong drive to excel academically in the face of potential societal challenge.

• 1:40:31Dax Shepard?

  I would say good boy syndrome, which Jen and I had told us about.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:40:34Dax Shepard?

  You gotta be perfect in all other domains.

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:37Dax Shepard?

  And then also huge incentive to leave your small town to go to a university.

• 1:40:41Speaker 01

  I think that's. True.

• 1:40:43Dax Shepard?

  If I was gay, though, my conclusion would be, see, we're smarter.

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  That could be part of it.

• 1:40:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that would be. That would have played my ego better.

• 1:40:50Speaker 01

  We need to get Charles, Bell Curve Charles, on that, on that one.

• 1:40:55Dax Shepard?

  I'm sure he's already on it.

• 1:40:58Speaker 01

  Um, backronym. This is a huge development for us. I've now used the term like three times.

• 1:41:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:05Speaker 01

  It's an acronym deliberately formed from a phrase whose initial letter spell out a spell out a particular word or words.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  Either to create a memorable name or as a fanciful explanation of a word's origin. That's very confusing.

• 1:41:21Dax Shepard?

  I was gonna say, you've explained it to me now four times and I don't know what it means and I couldn't make one. I can't really comprehend what's being said.

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  I don't understand that definition, but I understood his, which is basically like you work backwards. You have the acronym.

• 1:41:39Dax Shepard?

  You found an acronym you love. Swati.

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  Swati. Then you find the letters that go into it.

• 1:41:45Dax Shepard?

  Right, okay.

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  The words that match those letters as opposed to you create the phrase or the tenants and then you take.

• 1:41:51Dax Shepard?

  Now it makes, yeah, that makes perfect sense.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  I hope I'm right about that.

• 1:41:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:55Speaker 01

  Fantasy baseball. It dates back to 1980. It was originally known as the Rotisserie Baseball. Um, magazine editor Dan Ockrent and some friends created the game at a restaurant in Manhattan. Now, the price of Bitcoin today.

• 1:42:14Dax Shepard?

  Okay, here we go. The Bitcoin Tick or Tape Podcast.

• 1:42:20Dax Shepard?

  With your host, Monica Padman.

• 1:42:22Speaker 01

  Ninety-six thousand, four hundred and twenty-eight dollars, twenty-two cents. It's a drop in.

• 1:42:28Dax Shepard?

  It's dropping.

• 1:42:30Speaker 01

  Don't come at me.

• 1:42:31Dax Shepard?

  It's not our fault.

• 1:42:32Speaker 01

  Don't come after me.

• 1:42:33Dax Shepard?

  Although I would start to think we're jinxing it if I were heavily invested in Bitcoin. I started a new book.

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  Oh my God, you are reading so much.

• 1:42:42Dax Shepard?

  I had no interest in Sam.

• 1:42:45Speaker 01

  Franklin Freed.

• 1:42:48Dax Shepard?

  But now here he was in Nate's book and then who's our man who Michael, um, who wrote The Big Short?

• 1:42:55Speaker 01

  Lewis.

• 1:42:55Dax Shepard?

  Michael Lewis. I was just perusing titles and Michael Lewis came up, but then I was like, oh, well, I'll read his most recent book. I've liked the other ones.

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:43:04Dax Shepard?

  And it's about Sam Bankman Friedman.

• 1:43:06Speaker 01

  Bankman Freed.

• 1:43:07Dax Shepard?

  Yeah. So now I'm going to learn more about this guy. It's so weird. I, I have no interest in learning about him and now I'm, here I am again and I'm enjoying it.

• 1:43:14Speaker 01

  You're being so prolific with your books. I'm sorry to say I still haven't even finished Intermezzo.

• 1:43:22Dax Shepard?

  Oh, and we're supposed to do a puzzle on here. You were supposed to give the example from the book.

• 1:43:30Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:43:31Dax Shepard?

  Couple. Yeah. Luckily we threw them a bone with the dog, this dog thing, they're off the scent, but a couple of people did bring up.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  Oh, no. Okay. Well, we already went too long, so next week we'll do the riddle.

• 1:43:42Dax Shepard?

  We'll try. Let's say we're gonna try.

• 1:43:44Speaker 01

  We'll do the riddle from Intermezzo, but also haven't even finished it and I was supposed to, I was supposed to read it at Christmas.

• 1:43:52Dax Shepard?

  Oh, no.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  And now it's February, but really January.

• 1:43:55Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:43:56Speaker 01

  So it's fine. Um, that's it.

• 1:43:59Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wonderful. Well, I enjoyed Nate Silver.

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  Me too. What an interesting guy and an interesting life.

• 1:44:05Dax Shepard?

  Way outside of what I can comprehend.

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:09Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I can find no purchase in the statistical modeling world. I barely understand it.

• 1:44:14Speaker 01

  I think we have an idea that gambling is like dirty and bad.

• 1:44:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:18Speaker 01

  And then statistics is smart and.

• 1:44:21Dax Shepard?

  Yes, and the stock market also is good.

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it's all the same thing.

• 1:44:26Dax Shepard?

  Yep. It's all gambling. It's all risk. It's all percentages.

• 1:44:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:30Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:30Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 1:44:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, very cool.

• 1:44:32Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:44:33Dax Shepard?

  Young lives. All right, love you.

• 1:44:34Speaker 01

  Bye, love you.