Nate Silver: The Smoothest Brain On The Internet

Robert, James, and Gare discuss Nate Silver’s theory that tweets are proof that Elon Musk is a ‘spiky’ genius.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool media. Oh my god, you guys, it could happen here,
meaning our podcast, it could, it is, It's happened.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Robert, shouldn't you rename the podcast? It is happening here?

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Yeah? Uh huh, that's that's a fun joke that I
only hear forty seven times a day. And the whole
point of the podcast was, well, initially I was a
crazy person saying a bunch of stuff would happen, and
now it's a bunch of that stuff happened, and even
more of it looks very likely, and so now I

(00:39):
just feel bad all the time.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
It's going to be cooled. I fucking called it. I
fucking told you, bro, I said this was going to happen.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Why don't you rename the podcast? I just feel bad
all the time?

Speaker 1 (00:49):
Yeah, why don't you rename the podcast? Robert should have
bought more stock and ammunition companies than he did and
DGI jeez, should I have bought stock and DGI?

Speaker 3 (01:00):
Yeah, I'm gonna buy her a little DGI drone here,
you know.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
Yeah, there we go a lot of people are going
to be buying little DGI drones here very soon.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
James, I should point out that I'm buying one. It's
not capable of carrying a payload.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
It's definitely a safer investment to pull out your furrow
one k Now, when the market's crashing, use that money,
buy drones. Those drones will be worth a lot more
in five years.

Speaker 3 (01:26):
Or what is that? That is? That is the sound
of a sound investment, a box of bullets.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
It's like how boomers used to like invest in like
silver or gold as like a stable current. No, we're
investing in DGI, like physical dghy drones.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
We are investing in drones and boxes of gunpowder.

Speaker 3 (01:48):
Yeah, you gotta get it in a bottle, rubbit in
a box, it can get light struck or get moist.
You want to get it in a special black black bottle.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
James, I keep all of my gunpowder. And you know
how like people used to cocaine by wrapping it in
toilet paper and swallowing it.

Speaker 3 (02:03):
No, sure, okay, well if you say sobody.

Speaker 1 (02:08):
Speaking of toilet paper. Nate Silver has a newsletter and
it would be useful as toilet paper more so than
it is as a newsletter.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Sorry, I just got like PTSD flashbacks from twenty twenty four.

Speaker 3 (02:20):
Would you said that it's okay.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
Normally, my rule of thumb is every election, usually starting
in like December, the year before election year, I begrudgingly
fight down a series of panic attacks, vomit three or
four times in a bucket, and then head over to
Nate Silver's blog to see what he's saying about the polls.
And I do this. I hate that I keep having

(02:44):
I have regularly on election the years people were like
but he was always wrong. He's like, no, he's reasonably
good on polls. He's usually if you read what he's
saying about presidential polls, the reality bears out pretty close
to that. So I read him during elections and I
hate it because he's never been right about anything else.
But he's he's a gambler. He's a degenerate, filthy gambler.

(03:07):
And so when we're talking about degenerate, filthy gambler stuff,
and by god, election polls are the most degenerate type
of gambling that exists, he's worth reading. And then after
the election, no matter how well or badly it goes,
I ignore him again for four years. And I didn't get
to do that this year because on February twenty fifth,
twenty twenty five, Nate wrote a column called elon Musk

(03:31):
and Spiky Intelligence.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
Spiky Intelligence. Am I hearing that right?

Speaker 1 (03:36):
Spiky intelligence?

Speaker 3 (03:37):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (03:38):
And it very helpfully starts with a drawing that I'm
sure he used some AI, like he must have used
some AI like video software to do that, just like
shows you a kind of spiky star looking thing and
then like a blob with rounded edges. I can't begin
to imagine why Nate Silver thought that, like we needed

(03:58):
this illustrated.

Speaker 3 (03:59):
I have to see this. Yeah, yeah, I would like
it to be shad look at this.

Speaker 1 (04:02):
Why did you like, oh promise of AI we couldn't have?

Speaker 3 (04:08):
Yes, wow, yeah, it just it looks like.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
Maybe an amoeba if you, if you looks like an amoeba,
and then like a poorly drawn star.

Speaker 3 (04:15):
Is it? This is? When is an actual thing? This
gifts you? Wait, this is a thing.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
This is this is Boba and Kiki with a weird
like digital fuzz over the.

Speaker 1 (04:25):
Fucker Boba and Kiki.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
Yeah, okay, Garrison, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
It's a it's like a social experiment to like ask
people what like the emotional correspondence of each of these
shapes are like, which it's like a sure, like like
which one looks, which one looks nicer, which one looks meaner?
You know that sort of thing. I'm a Kiki type,
like like I I am a Kiky in terms in
terms of my behavior, I am Garrison.

Speaker 1 (04:51):
Now that you bring up Rorshak, all I can think
of is how cool it would be if Rorshak from
The Watchman showed up in Nate Silver's house and did
his thing.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Unfortunately, I think Rorshak at night Silver friends.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
Actually yeah, no, no, Nate would. But after them getting
along for like forty five minutes, Nate would take him
to an illegal card game, and Rorshak would murder everybody
in the room because they were gambling without a license.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
So I'm assuming Nate's going to try to argue that
that Musk's intelligence is akin to the kiki drug here
as opposed to like the emphathetic right.

Speaker 1 (05:32):
Now there, Actually, yes, there is a little bit of
that in there. He does not mention this Kiki and
Boba thing. I don't know if that's because I'm supposed
to just infer it from the image or if he's Okay,
we'll get your opinion on it. Is is Hee ripping these
people off because this doesn't count as enough for him
to be crediting them if this is the underpinning of
his stupid idea, which he credits to his stupid book
that he came up with later. But I'm just going

(05:53):
to start reading the stupid column.

Speaker 3 (05:55):
Well, hit us with the second paragraph, because that fuck.

Speaker 1 (05:57):
You haven't gotten paragraph one.

Speaker 3 (05:59):
Jack radicalized me immediately.

Speaker 1 (06:01):
There's been a debate raging on Twitter. Noah Smith can
run you through the parameters about the intelligence of the
platform's owner, Elon Musk. My contribution was to suggest and
then there's a little eye in parentheses because we need
that Elon is obviously pretty bright. And then there's two
eyes in parentheses. This shouldn't be conflated with moral judgment.
Highly intelligent people do lots of bad things. Okay, you'd

(06:24):
think this wouldn't be especially controversial, but since it involves
Elon and intelligence, well it was. Elon has run founded
or co foundeds Tesla, SpaceX, open Ai, neuralink Xai, PayPal,
and more recently Twitter. He's also managed to steer himself
into a position where he's now the de facto chief
of staff to the President of the United States. I
do not doubt that Elon has gotten lucky in various respects.

(06:46):
Some of these were long shot bets, and Walter Isaacson's
biography of Musk documents he thought he'd be ruined if
there had been one more failed SpaceX launch. The success
of some of these enterprises might also be debated. Twitter
was a canny play for cultural and political and ones.
But probably And he doesn't bring up in this whole
thing where he's talking about, like all a successful company,
not a word about the boring company, not a word

(07:08):
about hyper loop right.

Speaker 3 (07:09):
Well, yeah, yeah, any of the failure ones.

Speaker 1 (07:11):
His record does seem better if you ignore the two
massively publicized and invested absolute failures.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
Yes, well, and last week, I know there was a
space X lunch. I'm sure it went well. I'm sure
it didn't fling debris all over lower.

Speaker 1 (07:26):
I'm sure he didn't nearly destroy several commercial aircraft, also
crediting it like, yeah, I guess technically co founded open ai,
but not in a way that mattered. He just shot
down money in there and then kind of edged out.

Speaker 3 (07:39):
Sure.

Speaker 1 (07:39):
Yes, and is actively in a conflict with everybody who
did make open ai as prominent as it is. Again,
Nitla has to leave a lot out in order to
start making this case.

Speaker 2 (07:51):
But so he's going to argue that, you know, we're
going to see how how well this co presidency goes.
But he's probably a pretty smart guy to get all
of this stuff done.

Speaker 1 (07:59):
Yeah, and he's also saying, well, like maybe Twitter won't
be profitable, but we'll see how you know, he could
probably profit from being the de facto chief of staff.
Not a word from Nate about like, yeah, but he's
just like, that's just breaking the law. So why are
we Why aren't we including in our canny businessman guys
that get rich selling like shitloads of heroin for the cartels,
Because yes, if you are breaking the laws sometimes that

(08:21):
goes well for you financially.

Speaker 2 (08:23):
Well, Walter White, they've done some bad things, Yeah, but.

Speaker 1 (08:26):
You can't deny he was a brilliant method, you know.
But I don't care what Elon's SAT score is. Fourteen hundred.
According to Isaacson, he's clearly some sort of outlier in
many ways people would associate with intelligence, probably even a genius.
And yet when my first off, it becomes clear through

(08:47):
this that Nate does not consider a fourteen hundred to
be an impressive SAT score, and would normally be judgmental
of someone who had an SAT score of fourteen hundred
if it weren't for all of Elon's other genius accomplishments.
And yet, when my partner and I were heading to
dinner the other day and we saw some tweet that
Elon sent I forget which one because he tweets so much,
we were both like, man, he's such a dumb ass. Yes,

(09:09):
someone can be both a genius and a dumbass. Welcome
to what I call spikey intelligence.

Speaker 2 (09:14):
Here we go.

Speaker 1 (09:15):
This gets to like the core of what's annoying about
Nate is his need to He's one of these guys
you know what, you know what it is. He's an
intellectual enclosurist right where he's not confident to be like
everyone is very aware of the fact that no one
is good at everything, and that people have holes in
their competence, and that there are like brilliant surgeons who

(09:36):
are bad fathers or whatever, because there are different kinds
of intelligence. This is like a broadly common understanding. Nate
has to give it a name so that he can
sell his books. So he gives it the names. It's
like an intellectual. Now it's my idea. I'm the one
who came up with the concept that smart people can
be dumbasses. Stop it, Nate, it's annoying.

Speaker 3 (09:55):
Capital ass capital I rights to trademark spiky intelligence. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:59):
Yeah, Now he acknowledges that this isn't entirely original, and
then links to somebody without really like crediting them. Interestingly,
many of the instances online refer to people of the
on the autism spectrum. Musk has publicly stated that he
has Asperger syndrome. But the concept is simple. While intelligence
is a multi dimensional phenomenon, the scientific consensus is that

(10:20):
there's also something known as a G factor sometimes also
called general intelligence. As an empirical matter, most traits we'd
associate with intelligence are positively correlated. For instance, math and
verbal skills and the gire are correlated. The correlations are
loose enough that you'll wind up with all sorts of
different permutations on the spectrum of human behavior. And he's
just going into like he talks about like the absent

(10:41):
minded professor, Like it's all just these these very common
ideas that like, yeah, people are usually bad at more
things than they're good at, right, Like it's there's no
need to explain how Elon Musk has been successful at
certain things, but Nate does, and he has to keep
going back to. Like he makes a comment later in

(11:01):
here about how Musk is clearly a brilliant engineer. He
doesn't back this up with evidence. He just says that, Like, well,
if you read the book that Ashley Vance wrote, he
obviously signed off on a lot of great engineering moves,
which ignores the fact that, like he's not making any
of these decisions, Like he bought a company that already
had good automotive technology. He hired a bunch of rocket
engineers to design rockets. Elon is arguably good at hiring

(11:27):
in certain circumstances, and he is inarguably a great hype man, right,
Like that's the actual brilliance that Elon has is he
was very very good at hyping people up and getting
people to believe in him until he was too big
to fail. Like that's the one thing he actually did.
But Nate can't accept that because I think it kind of,
among other things, it kind of reveals what Nate is,

(11:49):
who is a guy who was really good at one
narrow thing and now has a career writing about everything
and he can't. That's like a dangerous thing for Nate
to think too hard about.

Speaker 2 (12:03):
Let's learn more about Nate's spiky intelligence after these very
soft and soothing ads.

Speaker 4 (12:10):
Yeah we're back.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
I want to talk a little bit about the danger
of being a guy who gets famous for being really
good at one thing and then gets a job talking
about everything, because I've had a version of that experience.
And let me tell you, you're not ever going to be
competent to discuss all of the things that you can
make money talking about if you're a popular entertainer. No

(12:42):
one ever has been, and no one ever will be,
which is why what you ought to do is the
thing Nate initially tried to do, which is bring on
a bunch of people to like run a website with
you right where you cover more things than one. Unfortunately,
it turns out five thirty was a bad business venture.
It got massively overvalued, a company spent a shitload more

(13:04):
money on it that it was capable of making, and
now everyone's gotten laid off and Nate left years ago
to do his sub stack. You know, it's a tragic
case in the problem of like Hubris and the fact
that maybe a guy who's really good at gambling shouldn't
run an entire media enterprise. But Nate doesn't like thinking
about that. It isn't like thinking about the fact that

(13:25):
maybe the only thing Elon Musk was ever good at
was being the guy from the Music Man, because I
think Nate bought into Elon Musk for a significant period
of time, Right, many people clearly does. Yes, Yeah, there's
been this thing lately where a lot of folks on
the left have been like the Oh, you couldn't always
tell that he was a con man, You couldn't always

(13:46):
tell that he was this bad, like he was always
the worst. I was like, no, Like back in twenty
fourteen fifteen, when I was writing about the billionaires and
rich people that were evil, I was focusing on Jamie
Diamond because he had helped create the two thousand and
eight five financial collapse and he's seen it. He just
seemed obviously much worse than this guy who up to
that point was pretty much just making cars and rockets.

(14:08):
You know, you have two companies doing that. Musk was
not top of most people's radars for very good reason,
which gets to like, there's this thing that's been created
because of some of like the sinister beliefs that his
grandfather had and his like family background which has a
lot of white supremacy in it. To that this has
been Elon's sort of like grand plan from the beginning,

(14:30):
and that it's all come together for him, like as
if he's he's, you know, a Marvel or a James
bond Villa who's been executing this like thirty year plan
to get where he is.

Speaker 5 (14:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (14:39):
Yeah, I think when you look at his cognition, like
he's not the same man he was ten years ago.
He's not the same guy he was when he started
dating Grimes. And I'm saying he was a good man
before then. I don't think he particularly ever was, but
he's clearly his brain has degraded, in part due to
contact through Twitter.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yeah, and you can like measure this through his posting
as well, Like, yeah, like that the types of posts
you would make in twenty seventeen are like completely opposite
to the way that he would talk about certain social issues. Now,
Oh yeah, he's not like meming about like anarcho syndicalism.

Speaker 1 (15:15):
Yeah, we get to a few of those things. But
I want to read another quote from NAT's article because
he's going to talk about his book on the Edge,
which quote describes a certain community of intelligent people that
I call the River. These people who occupy a range
of professions from AI research to poker to venture capital,
are bright, but in spiky ways. In Baron Cohen's dochotomy,

(15:37):
they lean heavily towards the systematic side of the equation.
They're good at abstract analytic reasoning, but they may lack
other forms of intelligence like empathy, judgment, and self awareness.
They also have some distinctive characteristics largely unrelated to intelligence.
For example, they tend to be extraordinarily competitive and somewhat contrariant.
And again, what you are talking about all of these
people number one, when he says AI research, he's not

(16:00):
talking about people who are doing like the gut level coating.
He's talking about Sam Altman, right, poker, venture capital. This
is all gambling. You're all talking about gamblers. The River
is just gamblers, Nate. It's people like you who who
put money on bets, and they are contrarian and competitive

(16:22):
because that's how gamblers are. That's the intelligence, that's the river.
Like he's thinking about it as like this specific chunk
of intellectuals who have You know, there's some dangers, but
they have great potential to make the world brilliant. You're like, no, no, no, no,
these are just people who like wind up shooting themselves
outside of a sports betting facility. Like that's the river, mate.

Speaker 2 (16:44):
I have been turning into a monster during our friend
poker nights recently. It's tough garrison.

Speaker 1 (16:51):
By the way, I've been meaning to talk to you
about wearing the full data makeup, because you know your
skin can't breathe. If you coat your whole body, You're
only supposed to put that on your face.

Speaker 2 (16:58):
I don't do that every time I played Get.

Speaker 1 (17:01):
A gold finger yourself care.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
I don't put on the data makeup every time I
play poker, just that one time. Actually, no, I've done
that twice nowt never minds Okay, okay, he's becoming I
also have the little hats. I ordered a twelve pack
of like of like the little like poker visors to
complete the outfaced.

Speaker 1 (17:22):
Of course she did.

Speaker 3 (17:22):
Yeah, it would be rude, not too for better or worse.

Speaker 1 (17:27):
This typology the river is associated with high achievement and
certain highly lucrative professions, especially tech and finance. It is
also associated with high variance bankman Free built FTX into
a company that investors valued at thirty two billion before
the House of cards collapsed again because he was a dambler.

Speaker 3 (17:44):
He's a con man.

Speaker 1 (17:45):
Yeah, and again Nate can't just accept oh, he was
never actually very smart. He just got really lucky for
a while and then gave it and then gambled it
all away because he wasn't actually as smart as anyone thought.
Nate says, I interviewed SBF several times for the book,
and I can tell you that he very much falls
into the genius but dumbass category.

Speaker 3 (18:03):
How about just dumbassy, lucky dumbass. It's not hard.

Speaker 1 (18:08):
What's the genius? Where did he prove that?

Speaker 2 (18:12):
I mean he proved that by fooling Nate Silver, a
man who probably values his own intelligence like a great deal.

Speaker 3 (18:19):
I mean, that's the whole thing, right, Nate Silver Khan.
It would be ego death to admit that there were
just some lucky, dumb white dudes.

Speaker 4 (18:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:26):
If a guy had won like one of the lotteries,
was like a billion and a half dollars, right, got
crazy rich and then lost it all in two weeks
because he just kept putting half a million dollars at
a time on twenty one black at a roulette table
in Vegas, and I would be like, well, obviously he's
a genius, but he's also kind of a dumbass. How
else could he have made the money in the first place?

(18:47):
And I was like, no, he got lucky, and then
he gambled it all away because he's he doesn't have
good judgment. Yeah, so it's important to avoid two pitfalls
when encountering people with spiky intelligence, namely, either there are
worst traits nor their best ones tell the whole story.
And I don't disagree with that. However, it's a meaningless
statement because that's true of every human being ever born. Yeah,

(19:10):
but clearly Nate doesn't feel that way because only I think.
The undercurrent here is that only people like this in
Nate's mind are worth talking about, because only gamblers bring
the world forward, right.

Speaker 3 (19:21):
Yeah, No one else deserves empathy.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
Yeah, yes, like you're just addicted to putting money on
sports games and elections, Nate Silver. Anyway, So here's the
two things he wants to warn us up or wants
people to avoid. Elon is highly intelligent in several ways,
but that does not mean that everything he does is brilliant.
Some things he does are exceptionally dumb or dangerous, and
we shouldn't make excuses for them. But likewise, it's absurd

(19:46):
to suggest that Elon isn't brilliant in many respects just
because he isn't in others. And if he has merely
very good SAT scores, I don't care. Nobody does. It's
not high school. Nobody cares about his SAT.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
Skills, like like like fifty, like fifty five or something
like what are we doing?

Speaker 1 (20:02):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you are a middle aged man.
I don't even know what my SAT score was.

Speaker 3 (20:09):
I was gonna say, like, I never took an SAT,
but I spent more than a decade in full time education,
and anyone who ever told me that SAT schools I
immediately hated and never took them. Seriously. I've spent almost.

Speaker 1 (20:19):
Twenty years asking people questions for a living, and I've
never asked anyone there SAT. Sorry, Garrison.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
Although SAT might not be like a stable metric for
evaluating intelligence, surely Nate has an alternative method.

Speaker 1 (20:32):
Absolutely not, Garrison, just how much well he doesn't he
doesn't have an alternative method seeing what you might call
an infographic, because the next section of the article is
a quick inventory of Elon's intelligence. So first he admits
he tried to track Elon down for his stupid book,
but he couldn't get him to talk to him. Because Elon,

(20:52):
even I have to say, Elon does have better shit
to do than talk to Nate Silver, because Elon is
using ketamine to a near fatal degree, and that is
a better use of his time than talking to Nate Silver.
So since he can't actually talk to two Musk, he's
going to model and extrapolate from quote many other Silicon

(21:13):
Valley big wigs I have met, okay helping him. And
this is the fact that quote Musk maintains an extremely
public profile. He's turned X into a running diary of
his innermost thoughts and in addition to that, the biographies
of the guy one more caveat. Here I will try
to evaluate the overall trajectory of Elon's career, not just
his recent antics. So we got down here, and the

(21:34):
next segment is dimensions were Musk has exceptionally high or
genius level intelligence. So finally Nate's going to prove it,
and I'm gonna I'm going to show you guys, how
he how he chooses to do that, what the evidence
he gives us here is.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
And I think this is something that we should reveal
to the audience after these ads.

Speaker 1 (21:53):
Good point care, all right, we're back. So let's look
at what Nate shows as is the chief dimension where
Musk has shown high or genius level intelligence. Reading that

(22:13):
first line, man, So the first words under this are
cognitive load capacity in overall horsepower slash ram. He's always on,
I mean literally look at how often he's tweeting, and
then a huge graph that shows the density of tweets
posted and win which has been used by other people
to prove that since sometime in late twenty twenty two,

(22:34):
he's almost never gone more than about three hours without
posting a tweet. Like it's just a solid red after
he buys the site. This like graph of like when
he makes his posts, he's never offline. Now he's not sleeping.

Speaker 2 (22:48):
So this is a graph of Elon Musk's tweets from
twenty fourteen to twenty twenty four showing the time of
day and when a post is posted, represented by small
red dots and Yes, around twenty twenty two, the thickness
of the red increases dramatically.

Speaker 1 (23:05):
It's almost just a straight REDPA like the.

Speaker 2 (23:07):
Period of where he must be sleeping in this yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:11):
Is very concerning. No, he sometimes sleeps from about six
to nine am, as far as we can tell, but
not regularly or often. It's like a streak at twenty
twenty three where he just isn't sleepy, he's not sleeping.
And again, he's on drugs. People, I think they're probably prescripted.
I think I'm certain he's on ketamine that has been prescribed.

(23:33):
When you're this rich, you just get whatever drugs you
want to do, recreationally prescribed.

Speaker 3 (23:37):
Right.

Speaker 1 (23:38):
But this is drug user behavior. I don't say that
to judge drug users. I say that as someone who
had a drug problem, like this is drug user behavior.
And specifically Silver he's using sobriety as possible. Sorry, And
specifically Silver is using this as an evidence of MUCKs intelligence. Yeah,

(23:59):
it's not.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
He's scaling his Twitter activity as a sign that he
must be like a special type of person.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
He's railing adderall and eating ketamine lozenges all day every day.
That's what this is a sign of. And no one
is allowed to take his phone away anyway. Here's how
Nate explains why this is smart. In NBA terms, we
say this as a player with an exceptionally high motor,
and this is undoubtedly a valuable trait as the world

(24:26):
becomes more complex. Lack's fall. I was simultaneously doing an
extensive book media tour, running the election model, trying to
build up Silver bulletin, plus some intensive consulting work. Even
if I mostly kept my wits about me, it was
an incredible amount of mental and physical strain that would
only have been sustainable for a short burst. But Elon
is taking on I don't know, approximately a thousand times
more stress than that, and has done so for years. No,

(24:48):
he's not, He just tweets he has a massive number one.
All of the businesses are being run by people who
are specialists in those businesses. He gets called on to
sit in meetings in and say yes or notice stuff,
and occasionally tells him to do something crazy that causes issues. Right,
and they're not running smoothly. Tesla's lost more value now

(25:10):
than it gained after the election, and SpaceX just had
a giant rocket explode again. The boring company has not
done anything other than make a useless hole underneath Vegas
and the hyper loop is nothing right like this. This
is just full of shit, Nate, Like what you have

(25:31):
just described, Running an election model that's functional, going on
a book tour and consulting and writing a newsletter is
more work than I credit Elon Musk with actually doing.
Oh yeah, more actual effort work.

Speaker 2 (25:43):
Risk is mostly like sitting in an occasional meeting doing
drugs and injecting random women with his sperm yes, and
sending tweets.

Speaker 3 (25:50):
He doesn't do the injecting. I think, oh, god, Garrison, that.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
Comes up to no, no oh, and it's crazy how
it does. Right before he posts the graph of how
much Elon tweets.

Speaker 3 (26:02):
Oh, okay, God, there it is, okay, okay.

Speaker 1 (26:05):
Politics and social media poison a lot of people's brains.
Having that much wealth and power has to be intoxicating,
especially if Muska ostracizes people who might keep him grounded
more sympathetically. He's taking on an incredible array of responsibilities,
doing several really hard jobs at once, each of which
would be stressful on their own, while still managing to
father thirteen children. I'm tweeting hundreds of times per week. Again,

(26:27):
equivalent efforts tweeting hundreds of times a week and fathering
thirteen children. He's not a father to them. No, he
just he contributed by it. He didn't even have sex.

Speaker 3 (26:40):
Yeah, yeah, he's usually the lowest possible effort way to
have a child.

Speaker 1 (26:45):
Wait, Like, I'm gonna guess most of the people with
penises listening to this come like, that's not a big effort.
You wouldn't include that. It's like, what did I get
done this week? Well, in addition to working forty hours,
I jacked off.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
That's a little transphobic. This is this is a joke. Anyway,
continue it said.

Speaker 1 (27:06):
I'm just saying it doesn't count as work. No, not
from us, and less you're a sex worker than it does. Okay,
Like especially I know a lot of male porn stars.
That's that is a difficult part of the job. That's
why they inject their penises directly with erection drugs that
kill their hearts.

Speaker 2 (27:24):
I would like to get into more of Silver's like
justification for why why he associates this this high tweet
load with like intelligence.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
Well, because it shows rapid cognition in thin slicing ability okay,
m hmm, right, yeah, sure sure. Indeed, in a capitalist
system with a significant premium, I'm being first to market.
Making decent judgments fast is often more important than making
better judgments slowly. Canonically, vcs imagine themselves rapidly filtering through

(27:54):
potential founders, as though on Shark Tank, relying on well
known gut instinct. But this also gets people in trouble,
as it has for Elon what is shark Tank's success rate? Yeah,
I bet there's a quick answer to that.

Speaker 3 (28:09):
Yeah, and that's consuering. The air has built in free
television advertising for any product.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
Means than fifty percent of deals they're successfully closed. God, yeah,
so I I it out. All This tweeting also shows
abstract problem solving capability. This is related to the idea
of creativity, though in Musk's case it seemingly doesn't manifest
itself an artistic prowessly ceeingly, you know what, I'll give

(28:37):
it to date.

Speaker 2 (28:37):
There, I'll give it to day.

Speaker 1 (28:39):
I don't disagree with you there. And then, of course,
instrumental rationality philosophy nerds like to distinguish between two types
of rationality. Instrumental rationality is aligning means with ens basically
figuring out the most efficient ways to get what you want.
For this category, I think you have to point towards
the scoreboard, must have some unparalleled accomplishments, and isn't about
to let anybody stand in his way. It's also a

(29:00):
category often associated with manipulativeness or even being an asshole,
not one for nice guys. Now, and again, if Musk's
actual goal is his stated goal getting to Mars, then
backing the political party that is actively doing as much
damage to the biosphere as possible, ensuring that it will
not have the carrying capacity necessary to make any kind

(29:21):
of off world civilization likely, I would argue is a
stupid decision. But he doesn't actually want us to get
to Mars, right, He just wants to be in charge
of everything.

Speaker 2 (29:32):
No, he wants to run his businesses with no government interference.
That's really it.

Speaker 1 (29:35):
Yes it is, yes, yes, yes, and he has been
very successful at that. But again it's the successive brute force.
It's the same way as like, if you hire a
thousand people who are willing to like break the kneecaps
of a guy who annoys you, like you could say,
like I'm very smart when it comes to hurting people
who annoy me. But really, you just have a lot
of dudes who can beat people up for you. Like,

(29:57):
is that intelligence or did you just have enough money
to hire?

Speaker 2 (30:00):
Or are you just a mob boss? Right?

Speaker 1 (30:02):
Are you just a mob boss? And a mob boss?
No one is allowed to attack because it's going to
be domestic terror to fuck up a Tesla store soon,
you know. Anyway, we need ghost dog.

Speaker 2 (30:14):
It's pretty it's pretty upsetting because you know, a few
weeks ago, I was having a little bit of a
resist live moment and I actually ashed my clothes cigarette
on a parked Tesla. Felt pretty cool about it. But
now I guess I can't even do that. It's too dangerous.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
Now, No, you can't.

Speaker 2 (30:29):
I could face substantial charges.

Speaker 3 (30:31):
You might want to text resist to a certain five
digit number or something. That's probably the best way to
solve this garrison.

Speaker 1 (30:37):
I just text resist to every single person in my
phone book every day. I mean, it takes about seven hours.
I have fallen behind on work.

Speaker 3 (30:46):
You know, it's the only thing we can do to
my pastus.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
The quickest path to intelligence is having a horrible sleep
deprivation and drug problem. Apparently, or at least that is
how you show for it. It's funny because I saw
Allan Johnson, the billionaire who who's eating his son's blood
or now plasma. Oh we had a dead guy posted
his only self study on like the damaging effects of
sleep deprivation, and I'm pretty sure Musk like retweeted it

(31:12):
with like with like an emoji or something like yeah, dude, dude,
your brain is completely sure.

Speaker 1 (31:19):
Now you you are, you are fried. You are the
most cooked a man has ever been.

Speaker 3 (31:23):
It's an interesting study, Like there there is legitimately interesting
things to look at Ela Musk's brain.

Speaker 1 (31:28):
Well, yes, and there's a lot of actual scientific data
put together like exhaustively by researchers studying how not just
sleep deprivation but like wealth and power impact the brain.
And like all of it makes a strong case that
Elon Musk at this point has done more damage to
his brain than like a career one of those career

(31:49):
WWE wrestlers who like kills their whole family and then
shoots themselves in the chest so someone can study their
brain later.

Speaker 2 (31:55):
Yeah, I mean, well before before close, I do want
to say, before any psychologists or sociologists or like linguists
get mad at me. Yes, I know Boba and kiki
is is that is this is a shape language like
correlation test I myself as well as Nate here, I

(32:18):
have kind of expanded it's it's it's usage to like
projecting even more like human or like like emotional qualities
onto these shapes or onto these specific words. So please, sociologists,
leave me alone, do not do not do that message
me your favorite French. I'm I'm afraid it's already too late.

(32:41):
I think I already hear like twelve different reddators typing.
But yes, I think Nate's just using that image there
as like a metaphor to like show how, you know,
aggressive or manipulative Musk's own intelligence is as symbolized by
by a kiki as opposed to you know, maybe maybe
like a Bill Gates, which might be more like a

(33:02):
boba intelligence type. Okay, a little softer, a little bit
more philanthropy.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
You know, I just got finished reading nothing but rationalist
and Zizian literature for two straight weeks, about a quarter
of a million words by my last count, Garrison, I
don't have an enemy to do this again. I'm going
to get back to my Hitler books. You know where
things make sense, where the world's safe.

Speaker 3 (33:28):
Yeah, I'm returning to writing about the Syrian Civil War,
which is my comparative happy place.

Speaker 1 (33:34):
Ah, the Syrians Civil War.

Speaker 3 (33:40):
It's a really great world. I do wonder if he's
trying to avoid some kind of intellectual property thing by
using that little filter that he used over to Boo BERANKI.

Speaker 1 (33:47):
No, because it would be if it's actually not fair
use now as opposed to if you just mentioned that
thing he doesn't yah because he doesn't talk about them,
then it is fair use, right, and he could use
like a little clip of it is and to illustrate.

Speaker 3 (34:00):
Point, yeah, like I did with Manu Chow.

Speaker 1 (34:02):
Anyway, this is all I want to say again about
Nate silver until twenty twenty eight. And if you know
what the upside if democracy really does die is, we'll
never have to talk about him again.

Speaker 2 (34:14):
If Trump and Musk really take over fully and do
a full coup, we never have to talk about Nate Silvan.

Speaker 1 (34:20):
Nine minutes from now, I'm wearing a Curtis Yarvin T shirt.

Speaker 3 (34:25):
They'll be doing a SOD numbers and he will still
be analyzing that data. They straight regime capture of Nate Silver.

Speaker 1 (34:33):
Well, it doesn't seem possible that Trump could have gotten
one hundred and four percent of the vote.

Speaker 3 (34:37):
But there's a spikey percentages.

Speaker 1 (34:39):
There's a spikey percentages.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
Why can't Nate Silver just like run like Trump's casino
or something? Right, this is just like just like put
him away.

Speaker 1 (34:48):
I understand if Nate because Nate's rich, he doesn't need
to do the other stuff. And if he was like
just doing sports betting analysis forever, I'd be like, well, hey,
that's what he loves. Right. If I had Nate's so money,
I'd probably just write novels for the rest of my
life because that's what I like to do. I don't
understand why he keeps writing about politics. He's not good
at it, and he can't like it. He needs to

(35:10):
feel special.

Speaker 3 (35:11):
He wants to feel like a special boy who knows
the answers that no one else does.

Speaker 1 (35:16):
All right, Well, anyway, this is us making fun of
Nate Silver, so you don't well, you can still make
fun of it. You don't have to read him. We
did that for you.

Speaker 5 (35:24):
Good Night, It could happen Here is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media.
Visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
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