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Episode: #389 — The Politics of Risk

Author: Sam Harris
Duration: 00:33:53

Episode Shownotes

Sam Harris speaks with Nate Silver about cultural attitudes toward risk and the state of American politics. They discuss the erosion of trust in liberal institutions, polling and political narratives, different camps of cultural elites, the influence of Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried and the fall of

FTX, Gell-Mann amnesia, Christopher Rufo, why Kamala Harris can’t admit to having changed her views, a problem with strict utilitarianism, AI and existential risk, what people misunderstand about election forecasting, which news events have affected the 2024 race, how current polls might be misleading, public vs. private polling, undecided and marginal voters, Gen Z, the gender divide, the likelihood that Trump won’t accept the election results if he loses, election integrity in the swing states, the chance of a landslide, the prospect of public unrest, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Full Transcript

00:00:06 Speaker_01
Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.

00:00:17 Speaker_01
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00:00:28 Speaker_01
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00:00:45 Speaker_01
We've got 11 days left until the presidential election, and I must say I am concerned at this point. I know the polls still have it more or less even, but it's not feeling that way somehow.

00:01:01 Speaker_01
What has worried me about the Harris campaign from the beginning still worries me.

00:01:07 Speaker_01
for some reason I can't understand, she and her campaign have not found a way for her to explain her changes of position on border security, on crime and policing, on trans activism. And the result is that many people don't know what her views are.

00:01:28 Speaker_01
Or they think they do know, and they suspect that she's some kind of woke Manchurian candidate who will govern like a far-left activist.

00:01:37 Speaker_01
Now, I'm not even slightly concerned that that's true, but it really seems that there are millions and millions of people who are worried about this. And she is not saying much to put them at ease.

00:01:52 Speaker_01
She can't put them at ease unless she articulates how her views have changed. Whenever she's asked about a position she held in 2019 or 2020, she just looks evasive.

00:02:07 Speaker_01
She looks like she's above all trying to not acknowledge that she changed her mind, and then she seems desperate to change the subject.

00:02:16 Speaker_01
This has produced a long series of own goals that she seems condemned to score on herself again and again and again. I don't understand it. Needless to say, there's not a lot of time left to make sense on these topics.

00:02:35 Speaker_01
And we turn our attention to the election today, because today I'm speaking with Nate Silver.

00:02:41 Speaker_01
Nate Silver has been a professional poker player for quite some time, but he's famous for being the founder of FiveThirtyEight, which is an election forecasting website. And he's also a New York Times bestselling author.

00:02:54 Speaker_01
He wrote The Signal and the Noise, and he has a new book titled On the Edge, The Art of Risking Everything. And he also has a substack where he publishes his most current election model, and that is the Silver Bulletin.

00:03:09 Speaker_01
Anyway, Nate and I cover a lot of ground here. We talk about cultural attitudes toward risk and the state of American politics. We discuss the erosion of trust in liberal institutions.

00:03:21 Speaker_01
polling and political narratives, two different camps of cultural elites, the influence of Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam Bankman Freed in the fall of FTX, Gail Mann amnesia, Christopher Ruffo, why Kamala Harris can't admit to having changed her views, a problem with strict utilitarianism,

00:03:44 Speaker_01
AI and existential risk. Then we turn fully to the election.

00:03:48 Speaker_01
We talk about what people misunderstand about election forecasting, which news events have affected the 2024 race, how the current polls might be misleading, public versus private polling, undecided and marginal voters,

00:04:03 Speaker_01
Gen Z, the gender divide, the likelihood that Trump won't accept the election results if he loses, election integrity in the swing states, the chance of a landslide, the prospect of public unrest, and other topics. And now I bring you Nate Silver.

00:04:28 Speaker_01
I am here with Nate Silver. Nate, thanks for joining me.

00:04:31 Speaker_00
Sam, excited to be on. Thank you.

00:04:33 Speaker_01
So we are two weeks out from the presidential election. I don't have to tell you that.

00:04:37 Speaker_01
You started the FiveThirtyEight blog, the election forecasting blog, and now you have the Silver Bulletin on Substack, where you have recently published an article titled, 24 Reasons That Trump Could Win. And I want to get into that.

00:04:51 Speaker_01
I definitely want to talk to you about the election, but first we should talk about your book, which is fascinating. The book is titled, On the Edge, The Art of Risking Everything. It's a book about risk and cultural differences in risk tolerance.

00:05:08 Speaker_01
It looks at those issues through the lens of poker and game theory and venture capital. You talk about cryptocurrency and effective altruism and AI and other topics that are of interest to me certainly and much of my audience.

00:05:21 Speaker_01
Let's jump into, I guess, some of the background concerns that all of us feel and which you discuss at various points in the book. We have this sense of a real fragmentation in our culture politically.

00:05:35 Speaker_01
There's a kind of secular stagnation, the economics of which I guess can be somewhat debated, but you discuss it a little bit. You had this image that struck me as interesting.

00:05:47 Speaker_01
It actually connects with your experience as a poker player and the time you spent in Vegas.

00:05:52 Speaker_01
But you have this image that really kind of stratifies society across variables like wealth inequality and status and opportunity and much of what people care about. And it's the image of people walking into a casino

00:06:06 Speaker_01
And there are those who get stuck on the slot machines and addicted to the dopamine there and they're just playing a bad game and gradually but inevitably losing their money.

00:06:15 Speaker_01
And then there are the people who walk right past those machines and go to the great restaurants and see a show and maybe even play high stakes poker. and there's just a very different world within the same world.

00:06:30 Speaker_01
Before we get into your book, and I want to track through it, how concerned are you about this moment for us in what should be a purely auspicious world of progress and relative wealth?

00:06:46 Speaker_01
I mean, we just think of all the promise of America, I'm speaking specifically now, but maybe the West generally, It seems somehow precarious. What's your view from 30,000 feet?

00:06:56 Speaker_00
Yeah, I mean, it kind of depends on how far you want to zoom out.

00:06:59 Speaker_00
If you zoom way out compared to how life was 100 years ago or 500 years ago, lifespans are greatly increased, poverty is greatly decreased, we have creature comforts we could never have imagined.

00:07:10 Speaker_00
If you look at a closer track, maybe the past 10 or 20 years, It's a bit less clear. In Europe, for example, GDP growth per capita is very slow. In the US, life expectancy is barely growing, especially for men.

00:07:23 Speaker_00
It's about the same as it was 10 years ago, even though we've now mostly recovered from high COVID deaths. You could argue that the pace of technological innovation has slowed. I'm not sure I buy that or not.

00:07:34 Speaker_00
You can argue that democracy is on the decline. If you look at various democracy indices, then there are more people living under authoritarianism than there were 10 years ago.

00:07:43 Speaker_00
So I do think there are a lot of problems, not to mention political instability. Maybe it's a euphemism, right, in the U.S. and other countries.

00:07:52 Speaker_01
how do you view our loss of trust in liberal institutions and the market economy in some sectors and even democracy? I mean, it seems like everything has been turned upside down. Again, I'm looking at this through an American lens especially.

00:08:09 Speaker_01
I mean, like, you know, we have a Republican Party that now can't figure out what stake America has in helping to maintain global order. There's an America first approach to foreign policy that is reminiscent of Charles Lindbergh.

00:08:27 Speaker_01
On the left, obviously, there's profound doubt about the viability of capitalism. and everyone seems to have found reason to just distrust our institutions.

00:08:36 Speaker_01
As we get into the book, we're going to meet various characters who have amplified and capitalized on those sentiments, but how do you view that erosion?

00:08:47 Speaker_01
I mean, do you think it's a symptom of being too online to see it as being this salient, or do you think it's as problematic as many think it is?

00:08:57 Speaker_00
That finding is very robust in the polling, actually. Gallup just came out with data showing decline, yet another decline in trust in the news media, which is now at its lowest levels ever.

00:09:06 Speaker_00
Basically every institution, except the military, ironically, but from the church to higher education has seen its ratings decline a great deal. So has big business. So has the tech world, for example.

00:09:18 Speaker_00
And in the book, I kind of look at it through the lens of the prisoner's dilemma, which is a famous kind of thought experiment. in game theory, where basically if these two prisoners are able to cooperate, they wind up collectively better off.

00:09:30 Speaker_00
And the game theory dictates that unless they can communicate ahead of time and have some reason to trust each other, then they won't cooperate. They'll be selfish and wind up collectively worse off.

00:09:38 Speaker_00
And so, you know, from an economist's perspective, when you have a loss of trust, you have deadweight loss.

00:09:44 Speaker_00
I mean, you can imagine in neighborhoods where things are frequently stolen, that there's a lot of measures taken to prevent crime, burglaries, robberies, et cetera, that cost money.

00:09:53 Speaker_00
I mean, hiring good police officers costs money, or putting extra locks on your doors costs money.

00:09:58 Speaker_00
And I'm not quite sure how to reverse this, in part because, you know, I'm someone who I describe myself as a liberal, kind of in the way that term is used classically, more than meaning of the left.

00:10:08 Speaker_00
But I sometimes criticize the left too, because, you know, Donald Trump has done many, many things to undermine trust in democracy and the media. You know, January 6 was a horrifying event.

00:10:19 Speaker_00
And it's amazing that he may be on verge of getting reelected again despite that. But sometimes the autoimmune response from these institutions is poor.

00:10:27 Speaker_00
So I thought, for example, that there was a lot of partisanship that motivated certain behaviors, certain discussions of certain behaviors around COVID. for example, or I don't know.

00:10:37 Speaker_00
You know, I think some of the loss of trust in higher education has been earned.

00:10:41 Speaker_00
You know, I'm not a big, I'm not super into like discussing affirmative action and things like that, but the way it was being implemented was often very cynical, where if you were, you know, if you were an Asian applicant, for example, you were just kind of very obviously penalized in the name of some higher goal.

00:10:56 Speaker_00
And so, you know, and the media too. I mean, I think, you know, two out of the three stories they cover for Trump are perfectly fair and probably one of those three doesn't go far enough.

00:11:05 Speaker_00
But, you know, the amount of column inches devoted and newscast footage to to the Russia story, which is not I could articulate many problems I have with Donald Trump.

00:11:15 Speaker_00
I think the Russia stuff was not among the foremost five or 10 most important problems.

00:11:20 Speaker_00
And so, look, voters who aren't reading the news every day and listening to podcasts and reading subsects and things like that, they may not quite have all the kind of

00:11:30 Speaker_00
detailed facts at their disposal, the way someone you and I, you know, our job is to consume information, but they have some intuition that like the elites are not working in their best interest, which I think is probably basically correct with many caveats and provisos.

00:11:47 Speaker_00
Now, I don't think Trump is working in their best interest either necessarily, but I think I'm not surprised that people feel

00:11:53 Speaker_00
betrayed because when you have a lack of trust, it creates a downward spiral where because you're less trusting, maybe you become more partisan. You don't trust that, hey, I'm going to just lay out information.

00:12:03 Speaker_00
You know, the New York Times has been in trouble recently because they say, hey, our job actually is to be a fourth estate, not a partisan institution.

00:12:11 Speaker_00
And we still believe that if you just do accurate reporting and facts, then that's good for the world. And I think some people don't believe that. Right.

00:12:18 Speaker_00
And in some ways, the Times is is saying we trust that when there's more information, that people will behave more rationally or more generously or more smartly, and maybe that's not true.

00:12:27 Speaker_00
That's, you know, the notion that we get so much, this cornucopia of free information basically all the time, a public square like none other on Twitter, and it doesn't seem to have worked as well as the idealists, I guess including me, might have hoped.

00:12:40 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, there are a few reasons, I think obvious reasons, why it's working to fracture our view of the world rather than getting everyone to converge on the same set of facts and the same interpretation of the facts.

00:12:54 Speaker_01
I mean, one is just that the information is now endless and can be endlessly segmented in a bespoke way so that you can, if confirmation bias is your thing and it's almost everyone's thing, there's no end to it, right? You can just silo yourself

00:13:10 Speaker_01
and discount anything that seems to go against the grain of your cherished opinions, and the level of tribalism that is amplifying this segmentation, to say nothing of the algorithms at the bottom of it that

00:13:25 Speaker_01
are born of this perverse business model, which is not selecting for truth or social health, but for just time on device at any apparent cost, it's pretty easy to see how we're in a kind of doom loop with respect to our consumption of information online.

00:13:45 Speaker_00
Yeah, I mean, look, I see this with respect to political polling, because polls, relatively speaking, are simple facts. You know, Trump plus two in Arizona or Harris plus three in Pennsylvania or whatnot.

00:13:56 Speaker_00
And people's ability to, like, A, just confirmation bias and cherry pick the data without even pretending not to, B, with being very uncomfortable with any information that doesn't fit their priors. So if you're a Harris fan, then any poll having

00:14:09 Speaker_00
Harris behind in any poll, in any state you might reasonably hope her to win has to be disproven. It's kind of a very Victorian attitude. It's dirty. It has to be cast out somehow.

00:14:18 Speaker_00
And of course, the Trump people are absolutely no better at this, maybe worse. So that, you know, just being involved in that little thing where the facts are, I mean, we don't know who's going in the election, right?

00:14:28 Speaker_00
But, you know, a poll is a fact unto itself, even if not an accurate representation of the electorate. The fact that people are

00:14:36 Speaker_00
so unwilling to just kind of look at a consensus and say, I mean, that's the whole thing my model does, just puts the numbers in an average and calculates the error bands around them, which are often larger than what the margin of errors in polls is, but we don't have to get into a polling discussion.

00:14:50 Speaker_00
It's just been kind of Very frustrating. Um, and even things, I mean, people will tweet stuff about me that is like literally conspiratorial. You know, I got into like a spat with the actress Bette Midler a few weeks ago.

00:15:02 Speaker_00
Cause she's like, who got to Nate Silver? Uh, because at that point our forecast at Harris slightly behind. And so being at the forefront of this, I mean, every year I kind of forget how bad election years are.

00:15:12 Speaker_00
And then, but now that I'm in the thick of it, I don't know. I always say this is the last one. And then, and then don't manage to quit.

00:15:20 Speaker_01
I want to save our discussion of polling and your model and your gut feelings and all the rest for the second half of this discussion when we've cleared the topic of your book, but just one question related to what you just said.

00:15:33 Speaker_01
Do you think that there are seemingly reputable entities that present polls not as their best effort to accurately depict public sentiment, but as efforts to message into the election space and sway voters?

00:15:52 Speaker_01
Do you detect or have you detected in previous elections dishonest polling?

00:15:59 Speaker_00
So there's a bit of an asymmetry here, which is that Republicans tend to believe that if you win the narrative and create momentum, then that helps you in real life.

00:16:08 Speaker_00
So in some sense, I think that good polling results report on as good polling results for Trump by the media will translate into more probability of actual success. I'm pretty skeptical of that for various reasons, but there are some

00:16:19 Speaker_00
GOP-aligned polls that are basically designed to influence the narrative.

00:16:24 Speaker_00
I mean, one polling firm called Rasmussen Reports was actually caught in leaked emails coordinating with the Trump campaign, and they're supposed to be nonpartisan, so that's quite bad. Now, The models have ways of adjusting for them.

00:16:36 Speaker_00
Basically, if you label a poll as a partisan poll, then the model makes different assumptions about it. It weights it less and kind of assumes that it's biased and tries to de-bias it. But yeah, I mean, absolutely.

00:16:46 Speaker_00
I mean, I think there are, you know, some polls that are a lot more worthwhile than others.

00:16:52 Speaker_01
And do you think this is just confirmation bias, or do you think it's actually a nefarious act of disinformation?

00:16:59 Speaker_00
I think somewhere in between. I also think sometimes people start out saying, LOL, haha, I'm just going to, like, troll with people a bit, and then they become true believers, right?

00:17:09 Speaker_00
I mean, you've seen this adaptation with Elon Musk, for example, where he kind of flirts with some more conservative, right-wing ideas, and then gets, and all of a sudden, after a year, he's, like, literally jumping up and down on stage with

00:17:21 Speaker_00
with Donald Trump and things like that. Look, I think when you're doing a poll, just like building any type of model, it's not as simple as just kind of calling people anymore on the phone and then recording what they say.

00:17:32 Speaker_00
Most people don't answer polls at all. And so therefore you have to do a lot of weighting, modeling, data massaging to get the poll to be at least somewhat accurate.

00:17:42 Speaker_00
And anytime you have those decisions and you're inserting a human being in the process and their political views or their sense of the narrative or the sense of the vibes can influence what they say.

00:17:54 Speaker_01
Okay, we'll come back to polling and the election, but let's talk about your book for a bit here. You have a framing with respect to two cultures that does a lot of work in your book, and you describe one as the river and the other as the village.

00:18:11 Speaker_01
I know you've spoken about this a lot, but it is very useful to describe these two camps. What is the river and what is the village?

00:18:18 Speaker_00
Yeah, so the river and the village are rival groups of elites who are competing for cultural and economic, I suppose, superiority.

00:18:26 Speaker_00
The village is a term, it's not entirely original term, other authors have used similar terms to describe the establishment. So the New York Times and Harvard University are kind of the quintessential institutions of the village.

00:18:38 Speaker_00
It's on the East Coast. it's politically progressive or really more democratic party than anything else.

00:18:44 Speaker_00
It's very collectively oriented, not necessarily collectivists, probably kind of center left on average, but in the sense that like you're standing within the community matters a lot and you might be afraid of cancellation or ostracization.

00:18:56 Speaker_00
And it tends to be risk averse. These are people, for example, that were really really careful about COVID. And I've even turned a little bit on free speech because free speech is risky. Free speech can upset people.

00:19:08 Speaker_00
You can think about Charlie Hebdo or things like that and free speech can have consequences and they tend to be more risk averse. The river by contrast is the world of analytical risk takers.

00:19:18 Speaker_00
So Silicon Valley, Wall Street in Las Vegas, both the casinos themselves and some of the gamblers, probably not most. It's very risk on, it's very analytical, it's very, very, very individualistic and usually capitalistic, very competitive.

00:19:32 Speaker_00
These are people who are playing to win. And the argument of the book is that the river is becoming the dominant entity in terms of the economy, at least, that finance and tech continue to grow. as a share of the economy.

00:19:45 Speaker_00
Meanwhile, gambling is not a huge, huge business. It's a medium, big business, but, but more money is being gambled in the United States today than, than ever before, probably in the country's history.

00:19:56 Speaker_00
Um, and so, you know, I consider myself really kind of, uh, originally from the river in the same sense. Some people might say, Oh, I'm from the South or whatever. It's kind of my cultural orientation when I meet a poker player.

00:20:06 Speaker_00
We have the same vocabulary. We almost assuredly can have a good conversation about a few, about a few things, whereas I've never quite fit in with, with the village.

00:20:15 Speaker_00
You know, I kind of cover politics because actually Congress basically passed a law to essentially outlaw online poker, which was my main source of income in the early two thousands. And that's what got me into politics.

00:20:27 Speaker_00
And so I take the kind of, I suppose, handicappers, even gamblers mindset to making forecasts, looking at things probabilistically kind of as a, as a Bayesian. rather than as a political partisan, which, you know, look, I have preferences.

00:20:42 Speaker_00
I mean, I've said in other shows I plan to vote for Kamala Harris, but that's not my goal. I'm not trying to do partisan combat. I'm trying to give people accurate information.

00:20:50 Speaker_01
So how useful, I mean, it proves very useful in your book, but I'm wondering if you think there are limits to this analysis, the frame of gambling and poker in particular, that you lay over this conception of risk.

00:21:07 Speaker_01
I mean, in poker you're using a strategy that is designed to work out over many, many, many trials, right? And so it's, you know, you're you're guided by a concept of expected value.

00:21:21 Speaker_01
And yet many of the people who are in the river, the real risk takers, don't seem to be placing their bets with an especially sound poker mindset. I mean, first of all, there's just not that many trials.

00:21:32 Speaker_01
I mean, even if you're Elon Musk, you can only start so many companies, right?

00:21:37 Speaker_01
And so perhaps one way to track through this is to actually talk about some of the prominent people you profile in the book and you can tell me what you learned from each of them. Perhaps let's start with Peter Thiel.

00:21:53 Speaker_01
Looking at this landscape through Peter Thiel's eyes, what did you see?

00:21:58 Speaker_00
So Peter Thiel is fascinating in that he is kind of actually anti-probabilist. And that makes him unusual in the river where, you know, Peter had a pretty religious upbringing.

00:22:09 Speaker_00
Um, there's a good book by Max Chafkin or Chafkin of Bloomberg about him called the contrarian. And like he grew up very conservative and I think remains very conservative.

00:22:18 Speaker_00
He sometimes says he's libertarian, but, but somewhere on the right side of the spectrum, I think beneath that libertarian, there's a Catholic, I think for sure. Yeah.

00:22:27 Speaker_00
And the first question I asked him was kind of like a softball question I've used to loosen people up, which is like, OK, if you simulated the world a thousand times, how often do you wind up roughly in a position like you're in now? Right.

00:22:38 Speaker_00
And most people do the politically correct response like, oh, I know I'm very lucky, maybe once or twice out of a thousand, but I'm very fortunate. Right. Whereas he like really objected to the question. Right. He's like, if the world's

00:22:50 Speaker_00
deterministic than 100% of the time, right? If it's probabilistic, then it's kind of a poorly formulated question because it's just a question of how much are you perturbing, how many disturbances are you inserting into this hypothetical, right?

00:23:02 Speaker_00
And you thought I didn't really make a lot of sense, but like, but you get the sense that like, I mean, first of all, if you are Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or Sam Altman or one of these people or Sam Beckman Freed, and you become one of the, you know,

00:23:14 Speaker_00
10 most influential or wealthy people in the world out of how many people have relived, I think, 50 billion or something. I mean, it's got to feel pretty weird, right? If you wake up and you're Donald Trump, it's got to feel pretty weird, I think.

00:23:24 Speaker_00
So I think some of these guys actually do have, you know, are spiritually solipsistic. Yeah. And so, you know, I mean, there's a simulation argument that I'm sure you're familiar with. That's what people think.

00:23:35 Speaker_00
Hey, am I, is this just kind of like a simulation design for me or am I like kind of like the, the chosen one somehow, you know, one of the areas where I agree with the left is that I don't think people realize how much the top of the scale is still growing in wealth and, and, and influence.

00:23:51 Speaker_00
Right. Um, that the top 10 people in the world, not always the same top 10, but if you look at the top 10 richest billionaires in the world, those are getting increased by about twice every decade, right?

00:24:03 Speaker_00
So if you compound your growth 2x every decade, that really, really compounds.

00:24:07 Speaker_00
You see the influence on the election this year where you have like Elon Musk perhaps illegally offering to just give a million dollars every day to somebody who registers to vote in a particular way or signs a petition, I guess I should say, among registered voters.

00:24:22 Speaker_00
So I, I know I do worry a lot about that, but because it used to be that a few years ago, people in Silicon Valley would kind of. Take pride in being politically aloof, right? Um, Scott Alexander, the wonderful blogger called it like the gray tribe.

00:24:36 Speaker_00
And you say, oh, I'm apolitical. What's going on in Washington, DC doesn't really concern me. We're doing interesting things here in Silicon Valley.

00:24:42 Speaker_00
And so, you know, hopefully won't be overregulated, but apart from that, we're not so concerned about politics, although they probably, you know, they also mostly just kind of vote democratic for cultural reasons.

00:24:52 Speaker_00
And now that's all changed and I'm not sure that's good for Silicon Valley in the long run or for politics.

00:24:58 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, it sort of matters which of these figures you're talking about because I think Peter and Elon and Sam Bankman Freed and Sam Altman is another one you talk about. These guys are all impressively different in many respects.

00:25:14 Speaker_01
Actually, I've spoken to all four of them and knew Elon fairly well. I can't say that I know him. I can't say that I quite recognize him now. and we've had a spectacular falling out.

00:25:28 Speaker_01
But I think certainly Peter and Elon are as allergic to the wokeness and the identitarian moral panic that happened on the left, and they're as allergic to that as anybody.

00:25:43 Speaker_01
So, on some level, their economic interests aside, their behavior with respect to Trump is almost perfectly foreseeable as a result of that. I mean, just for Elon, it's the trans issue and immigration. I mean, these are just

00:26:00 Speaker_01
super stimuli at this point. You know, where someone like Sam Altman and his aspirations to build out AI, you know, I don't know what he said about his political engagement this time around.

00:26:12 Speaker_01
I don't know who he's voting for, but he's kind of a different object. Is there more to say about Peter's view of the situation?

00:26:20 Speaker_00
No, look, these are impressive people. They are people who have accomplished a lot.

00:26:24 Speaker_00
And, you know, Peter in particular is a very intellectual guy who will give you these, you know, half an hour long, very well-considered with lots of literary references kind of answers to what seem like throwaway interview questions.

00:26:38 Speaker_00
Look, there's another reading too, which is that it's just in their economic self-interest.

00:26:43 Speaker_00
If you read some of the background on Elon, he was very annoyed that Joe Biden was dealing Tesla out of some of these early electric vehicle initiatives because they weren't sufficiently unionized, I guess. So he felt snubbed by Biden.

00:26:58 Speaker_00
And then, you know, like a lot of people, he has a strong reaction to the, to the wokeness, whatever you want to call it. Think of those two things, those interests combining. Right.

00:27:07 Speaker_00
And then all of a sudden it's confirmation by us all the way down where everything else looks like it's a, you know, rigged by the Democrats, et cetera.

00:27:14 Speaker_01
Well, in his defense, it was absolutely insane that Biden held a, I think it was a summit at the White House for American automakers celebrating the success of American ingenuity in the EV market.

00:27:31 Speaker_01
And Tesla is the shining example of success on that front. they weren't invited to the summit. It's not really Elon's financial interests that were besmirched there, it's just reputation.

00:27:47 Speaker_01
He took it personally, obviously, but it's understandable because it's completely outrageous and idiotic to have held such a summit and not have invited Tesla.

00:27:57 Speaker_00
No, look, in some ways, if Kamala Harris loses, we'll be looking at a lot of mistakes that were made early on in the Biden-Harris administration. So particularly with respect to some degree probably of overspending on the economy.

00:28:11 Speaker_00
I mean, inflation has complex causes. It's not all of it, but maybe it's part of the high inflation we had.

00:28:16 Speaker_00
having a lax border policy and then due to pettiness or peak, I guess, not inviting the richest man in the world to your EV summit when that's his kind of main occupation.

00:28:24 Speaker_00
And then he, you know, turns around and spends $300 million of his own money against your candidate in the campaign. Yeah, and look, there is some bread and butter. You know, Lena Khan has been more aggressive at the FTC about going after big tech.

00:28:38 Speaker_00
Taxation is very high in California. They're winning some battles, by the way. The fact that Gavin Newsom vetoed the California bill on AI regulation that many people in the river even thought was a very reasonable regulatory effort.

00:28:53 Speaker_01
Even Elon did.

00:28:54 Speaker_00
Even Elon did. He's been consistent about that, about genuinely being concerned about AI risk. The fact that bill was vetoed because of now people fear the power of, of the tech space as a political entity.

00:29:07 Speaker_00
Even the crypto people have spent a lot of money on this particular election campaign. And so, and so it's starting to have an influence very quickly.

00:29:14 Speaker_01
Well, let's jump over Elon. I spent a fair amount of time bashing him and it always makes me uncomfortable because he used to be a friend, but he's just unavoidable at this point. You spent a fair amount of time with Sam Bankman Freed.

00:29:28 Speaker_01
I only spoke to him once on this podcast before things completely unraveled for him and really just focused on effective altruism. What did you learn from his case study, his curious case study?

00:29:42 Speaker_01
There's so many intersecting issues with him that are surprising. You started speaking to him before there was any obvious sign of a problem, right?

00:29:54 Speaker_00
Well, I was going to say just the opposite thing, actually.

00:29:56 Speaker_00
I think what's kind of remarkable about Sam, Sam S, Sam McMinfrey, not Sam Altman, is that he was saying all these crazy things and no one was really flagging it and being sufficiently worried about it.

00:30:08 Speaker_01
But I mean, in terms of the timeline where you had your first conversation with him, was there any common knowledge that the wheels were going to come off at FTX?

00:30:18 Speaker_00
No, in fact, so, um, this was in January or February, 2022. So this is close to when Bitcoin is at, uh, I guess it's first all time high since surpassed it.

00:30:27 Speaker_00
And he's kind of like, you know, Nate, you know, there are two basic scenarios, one where Bitcoin continues to go up and then one where it just stays at, at 50 K per coin. Right.

00:30:36 Speaker_00
And I'm like, well, I can think of a third scenario, Sam, like what if it goes down? And he seemed to have not really processed this. Yeah, the irony is like he is not known as a terribly good assessor of risk, right?

00:30:49 Speaker_00
What I heard from people that had worked with him is that like he's good at his initial instincts are pretty good and he's fast, he's fast at calculating speed, but he's not a particularly deep thinker, I don't think.

00:31:01 Speaker_00
I mean, I think it was him who said, oh, no one really ever needs to read, no one ever needs to read a book, just read articles and blog posts and tweets and things like that.

00:31:09 Speaker_01
And- Honestly, that's one thing you run into with a lot of these guys.

00:31:12 Speaker_01
You, I mean, speaking about many of the people who are prominent in Silicon Valley, I mean, they're, everyone is bearing the scars of being an autodidact on almost every topic that they've touched, right? I mean, these are not

00:31:27 Speaker_01
people who came out of the center of the village for the most part and have kind of institutionally acquired a lot of knowledge.

00:31:35 Speaker_01
A lot of people got CS degrees or dropped out of college and read Ayn Rand and a lot of science fiction and then just took everything else on the menu of human understanding a la carte. And you get these strange weightings of influence, right?

00:31:54 Speaker_01
Somebody will recommend a book, like it completely changed their their worldview, and it's some really peripheral tract.

00:32:01 Speaker_01
And then you've got all of these neo-reactionary quasi-lunatics who are very influential, but underneath the hood here were people who I've never spoken to on the podcast, but people like Curtis Yarvin and

00:32:15 Speaker_01
It's a mess and it's an anti-institutional mess and a contrarian mess and then you dump hundreds of billions of dollars into this clockwork and you get a lot of weird convictions that have a lot of energy behind them.

00:32:32 Speaker_00
Yeah, look, you can go case by case. I mean, I think there are some people in Silicon Valley. So, you know, Patrick Collison, the founder of Stripe, is a guy who is quite well read and I think quite well rounded, right?

00:32:44 Speaker_01
He strikes me as a very balanced thinker.

00:32:47 Speaker_00
Yeah, but less less fun for the book. I had a great conversation with him, but he's not saying these provocative things that make for good sound bites necessarily.

00:32:55 Speaker_00
So there's a little bit of selection bias there and who kind of gets written up more or less. But for sure, you know, I think they feel like, hey, no one really has credibility or trust anymore. So therefore, I can just kind of like make it up as I go.

00:33:09 Speaker_00
Right. And look, I you and I have both probably had issues where we have different from the mainstream.

00:33:15 Speaker_01
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00:33:26 Speaker_01
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00:33:39 Speaker_01
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