reason.com Open in urlscan Pro
75.2.24.81  Public Scan

Form analysis
2 forms found in the DOM

GET https://reason.com/

<form role="search" method="get" class="search-form" action="https://reason.com/">
  <label>
    <span class="screen-reader-text">Search for:</span>
    <input type="search" class="search-field" placeholder="Search …" value="" name="s">
  </label>
  <input type="submit" class="search-submit" value="Search">
</form>

POST

<form method="post" id="gform_0" class="recaptcha-v3-initialized"><input type="hidden" name="login_redirect" value="/podcast/2024/03/06/nate-silver-libertarians-are-the-real-liberals/">
  <div class="gform_heading">
    <h3 class="gform_title">Login Form</h3>
  </div>
  <div class="gform_body">
    <div id="gform_fields_login" class="gform_fields top_label">
      <div id="field_0_1" class="gfield gfield--type-text gfield_contains_required field_sublabel_below gfield--no-description field_description_below gfield_visibility_visible" data-js-reload="field_0_1"><label class="gfield_label gform-field-label"
          for="input_1">Username<span class="gfield_required"><span class="gfield_required gfield_required_text">(Required)</span></span></label>
        <div class="ginput_container ginput_container_text"><input name="input_1" id="input_1" type="text" value="" class="" aria-required="true" aria-invalid="false"> </div>
      </div>
      <div id="field_0_2" class="gfield gfield--type-password gfield_contains_required field_sublabel_below gfield--no-description field_description_below gfield_visibility_visible" data-js-reload="field_0_2"><label
          class="gfield_label gform-field-label gfield_label_before_complex" for="input_2">Password<span class="gfield_required"><span class="gfield_required gfield_required_text">(Required)</span></span></label>
        <div class="ginput_container ginput_container_password">
          <span id="input_2_1_container" class="ginput_password ">
            <span class="password_input_container">
              <input type="password" name="input_2" id="input_2" value="" aria-required="true" aria-invalid="false">
              <button type="button" class="gform_show_password gform-theme-button gform-theme-button--simple" onclick="javascript:gformToggleShowPassword(&quot;input_2&quot;);" aria-live="polite" aria-label="Show Password"
                data-label-show="Show Password" data-label-hide="Hide Password"><span class="dashicons dashicons-hidden" aria-hidden="true"></span></button>
            </span>
          </span>
          <div class="gf_clear gf_clear_complex"></div>
        </div>
      </div>
      <div id="field_0_3" class="gfield gfield--type-remember_me field_sublabel_below gfield--no-description field_description_below hidden_label gfield_visibility_visible" data-js-reload="field_0_3"><label
          class="gfield_label gform-field-label screen-reader-text gfield_label_before_complex"></label>
        <div class="ginput_container ginput_container_checkbox">
          <div class="gfield_checkbox" id="input_3">
            <div class="gchoice gchoice_3">
              <input class="gfield-choice-input" name="input_3.1" type="checkbox" value="1" id="choice_3">
              <label for="choice_3" id="label_3">Remember Me</label>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
  <div class="gform_footer top_label"> <button type="submit" id="gform_submit_button_0" class="gform_button button"
      onclick="if(window[&quot;gf_submitting_0&quot;]){return false;}  if( !jQuery(&quot;#gform_0&quot;)[0].checkValidity || jQuery(&quot;#gform_0&quot;)[0].checkValidity()){window[&quot;gf_submitting_0&quot;]=true;}  "
      onkeypress="if( event.keyCode == 13 ){ if(window[&quot;gf_submitting_0&quot;]){return false;} if( !jQuery(&quot;#gform_0&quot;)[0].checkValidity || jQuery(&quot;#gform_0&quot;)[0].checkValidity()){window[&quot;gf_submitting_0&quot;]=true;}  jQuery(&quot;#gform_0&quot;).trigger(&quot;submit&quot;,[true]); }">Login</button>
    <input type="hidden" class="gform_hidden" name="is_submit_0" value="1">
    <input type="hidden" class="gform_hidden" name="gform_submit" value="0">
    <input type="hidden" class="gform_hidden" name="gform_unique_id" value="">
    <input type="hidden" class="gform_hidden" name="state_0" value="WyJbXSIsIjVmZDk0MDRiMTc0NTYwODJmYTIwNGZlZDYxN2ViYzJjIl0=">
    <input type="hidden" class="gform_hidden" name="gform_target_page_number_0" id="gform_target_page_number_0" value="0">
    <input type="hidden" class="gform_hidden" name="gform_source_page_number_0" id="gform_source_page_number_0" value="1">
    <input type="hidden" name="gform_field_values" value="">
  </div>
</form>

Text Content

 * Latest
 * Magazine
   * Current Issue
   * Archives
   * Subscribe
   * Crossword
 * Video
 * Podcasts
   * All Shows
   * The Reason Roundtable
   * The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie
   * The Soho Forum Debates
   * Just Asking Questions
   * The Best of Reason Magazine
   * Why We Can't Have Nice Things
 * Volokh
 * Newsletters
 * Donate
   * Donate Online
   * Donate Crypto
   * Ways To Give To Reason Foundation
   * Torchbearer Society
   * Planned Giving
 * Subscribe
   * Reason Plus Subscription
   * Print Subscription

Search for:


LOGIN FORM

Username(Required)

Password(Required)

Remember Me
Login
Create new account
Forgot password


Libertarianism


NATE SILVER: LIBERTARIANS ARE THE REAL LIBERALS


"PEOPLE ARE NOT IN POLITICS FOR TRUTH-SEEKING REASONS," ARGUES THE DATA
JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR OF ON THE EDGE: THE ART OF RISKING EVERYTHING.

Nick Gillespie | 3.6.2024 11:05 AM

Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly
versionCopy page URL
Media Contact & Reprint Requests
(Illustration: Lex Villena)
Audio Player
https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/chrt.fm/track/35917C/d2h6a3ly6ooodw.cloudfront.net/reasontv_audio_8263356.mp3

00:00
00:00
00:00

Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.

1x 1.1x 1.25x 1.5x 2x 3x
:15 :15
Download

NATE SILVER: LIBERTARIANS ARE THE REAL LIBERALS

HD Video Download

Journalist Nate Silver burst onto the national scene in 2008, when he correctly
predicted 49 out of 50 states in that year's election, outstripping all other
analysts. His former website FiveThirtyEight became a must-visit stop for anyone
interested in political forecasting and helped mainstream the concept of "data
journalism," which utilizes the same sort of hard-core modeling and
probabilistic thinking that helped Silver succeed as a professional poker player
and a staffer at the legendary Baseball Prospectus. Reason's Nick Gillespie
talked to Silver about the 2024 election, why libertarian defenses of free
speech are gaining ground among liberals, his take on the "crisis" in legacy
media, and his forthcoming book, On The Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.

Today's Sponsor:

 * Better Help. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes
   life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not
   showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you
   get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're
   more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of
   giving therapy a try, Better Help is a great option. It's convenient,
   flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief
   questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists
   anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life,
   therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent
   off your first month.

Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below.

Gillespie: Your Substack is called Silver Bulletin. You've put a lot of work
into that title, didn't you?

Silver: No, I took about three seconds doing it, and now it has some brand
equity, for better or worse. I'm afraid to change it.

Powered By

00:00/00:58
10 Sec


Principal's Shah Urges 'Edging' Into Small Cap Stocks




Next
Stay





Gillespie: You're like American poet and writer Allen Ginsberg. First thought,
best thought?

Silver: It's hokey and stupid and I like that. It's unpretentious, right? I've
workshopped internally better names that some corporate branding consultant
would prefer, but I just like the cheesiness of it.

Gillespie: On November 8, you had a fantastic discussion where you used
Friedrich Hayek's libertarian cri de coeur "Why I'm not a conservative" to talk
about a crack up on the left side of the political spectrum. Friedrich Hayek
wrote "Why I'm Not a Conservative" as a postscript to The Constitution of
Liberty. In it, he talked about how in America, the terms conservative and
liberal didn't quite make sense the way they did in a European context.
Classical liberals or libertarians over there were often in America coded as
conservatives, whereas they were quite liberal in a European context, pretty
revolutionary and radical. 

With that as a backdrop, you applied that Hayekian framework to contemporary
U.S. politics after the October 7th attacks on Israel to your piece titled "Why
Liberalism and Leftism Are Increasingly at Odds: The Progressive Coalition is
Splitting Over Israel and Identity Politics." Can you talk about that?

Silver: There are a lot of dimensions to it. One thing I did internal that
helped is that I asked our friend ChatGPT—not the woke one, not Google Gemini—to
define liberalism, leftism, progressivism, libertarianism, and "wokeism," which
is a term that is not as commonly used as others. If you break that down, issue
by issue, you realize that…liberalism is kind of closer to libertarianism than
it is to leftism or to more woke modern variants of that.

Gillespie: Why did it take an event like the October 7th attacks to make that
visible? 

Silver: I went to the University of Chicago and London School of Economics, and
I took all the European Enlightenment history classes, and read a lot of
political philosophy. To me, it's always been rattling around in the back of my
head. I think journalists should take more political philosophy classes. These
ideas remain very important and very pertinent to many debates that we're having
today. But if you write a Substack, it might seem off the cuff, but you always
have a lot of ideas rattling around in your head. 



I had half-drafted versions of this post, and an event like October 7th—I'm not
super polarized on Israel or anything like that—but you have a news hook, you
have a moment which is like an emperor has no clothes moment where these
university presidents are so clearly out of touch with the American mainstream,
and people feel like they have permission to say this now after holding their
tongue in a lot of previous events. 

It's a news peg or a news hook about things I think a lot of people had observed
for a long time, which is the kind of Hayek triangle between what I call
liberalism—but you can call it classical liberalism or libertarianism—and then
what was socialism but might be now more social justice leftism, and then what
was conservatism is now more like MAGA-fied, particularly illiberal
conservatism.

Gillespie: Is progressivism, or wokeism, or identity politics the same as
socialism minus economics? Then you're left with identity politics, or what's
the defining attribute of that cluster?

Silver: No, I think reorienting the leftist critique around issues having to do
with identity, particularly race and gender, as opposed to class, is
interesting. I don't get into every detail of every debate, but when you have
The New York Times at the 1619 project, the traditional crusty socialists didn't
like that very much. That was a sign as an anthropologist about how even leftism
and the new form of leftism are different in important respects.

Gillespie: Where are conservatives on this? If there's a crack up on the left
between what might have been called liberals—for lack of a better term—and
progressives, there's MAGA on the right. What's the non-MAGA right? Is that
analogous to what's going on on the left?

Silver: As you pointed out earlier and as Hayek points out, America's weird in
that we were the first country founded in Enlightenment values: the rule of law
and free speech and individualism. The market economy is something that comes
along right at this time. The Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment are
very closely tied together historically. So if you are appealing to traditional
American values, you're appealing to values that are fairly lowercase
libertarian, certainly liberal values. [Sen.] Mitt Romney [R–Utah], a
Republican, says he likes liberal democracy and uses that term correctly like
people should. It is weird in that they are traditional American values. 



I'm not a fan of almost anything about Donald Trump. I don't think it's the most
constructive form of conservatism. And I do believe in technological and
societal and economic progress. I think it's very important. It feels like there
aren't very many people who do believe in progress anymore. One of the
fundamental factors in all of world history is that for many, many centuries,
millennia, human [Gross Domestic Product] GDP grew at 0.1 percent per year. You
kept up with population growth, barely, if that. The beginning of the late 18th
century, there was a take off toward growth. That coincided with both the
Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. Which came first is a big debate in
economic history. But there was progress when there hadn't been before. People
don't know that basic history.

Gillespie: Every year, our cars get a little bit better, our phones transform
from something that was plugged into the wall to something you carry around in
your pocket, everything is getting better. Yet, we are in kind of a dank mode
right now, where people on the right and the left think we have material
progress but everything else is terrible, or we don't even have that. What's
driving that?

Silver: There are good data driven arguments for secular stagnation.

Gillespie: Can you define that?

Silver: The way it's used informally is to mean that progress is slowing down or
maybe not really happening very much at all, or that there are a lot of
headwinds. There's a more [former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury] Larry Summers
technical definition. But GDP in the Western world grows now at 1.5 percent per
year, whereas it peaked at 3.5 percent in the 1960s for example. Life expectancy
in the U.S. has stagnated. That's not very good. IQ is a contentious topic, but
IQ has stagnated. Mental well-being has declined by various measures. Many
European countries have not seen their economy grow substantially in many years.
There is lower fertility around the world, which I think is something that the
left doesn't like to talk about, but is certainly an important dimension.
Political dysfunction is on the rise. 



That thesis is actually fairly well constructed in some ways. But the constant
doomerism on all sides—if you have a political quadrant, everybody has something
they're deeply worried about. A certain type of person thinks that AI is going
to destroy the world, which by the way, I take somewhat seriously. That's a
different debate. I had dinner with a group last night and they're like, why
would you bring children into this world because of climate change. I think that
view is wrong.

Gillespie: How do you think these intra-ideological issues on the right, the
left—and that's not particularly among libertarians, we don't want to talk about
a right-left spectrum because it tends to leave us out—but how do you think
break up on the left and the right is going to play out in the election season
coming up?

Silver: In the short term Democrats have going for them is that Trump unites
both the liberals and the left. That left-liberal coalition, which partly formed
under [Barack] Obama in 2008, in part because people were sick of [George W.]
Bush, carried forward unsuccessfully with [Bill] Clinton in 2016 and then
[President Joe] Biden successfully in 2020. 

Trump really unites people who would otherwise be at loggerheads over many
issues. But this time, I'm not sure. I am not trying to articulate an editorial
position on Israel-Gaza stuff. But if you have terms that are being tossed
around like genocide, that's a sign that people [are] very serious. That's not
in the bluffing stage. Maybe I won't vote for Biden, who by the way is 81 years
old.

Gillespie: He presents as like 79 or 80.

Silver: He's doing above average for an 81 year old. I don't really want a 78
year old president either.

Gillespie: Are we finally seeing a kind of breakdown—not of the two-party
system, because it's always going to be two parties—of the way Republicans and
Democrats talk about the constellation of issues that define them. Is this the
end of the road for that iteration?



Silver: When the end comes, it will come more quickly than people think. But I
wouldn't bet on it happening in like the next five or ten years. In some ways,
the parties have become more efficient about building their electoral coalition.
It's a remarkable fact that in American politics, each party gets about half the
vote. If you get 48 percent versus 52 percent, it's almost considered a
landslide these days.

Gillespie: In 2016, it was about 80,000 votes across three states that changed,
and it was about 40,000 votes across three states in 2020.

Silver: In a country of 300 million people. Its remarkable elections are that
close. It has to do with the efficiency in some ways of the political system.
They do it by enforcing more and more orthodoxy. There's no a priori reason why
your view on taxation, and abortion, and Gaza, and marijuana legalization, and
ten other issues needs to be tied together. But you flatten out this
multi-dimensional space into two parties. One difference now versus a couple of
decades ago is that the public intellectuals, maybe it's too generous a term,
but the pundits are more partisan than the voters. They're the ones who enforce
partisan orthodoxy. I'm basically a good center-left liberal. In some rooms in
New York, I feel like I'm the more conservative person in this room, probably
one of the most woke. 

Gillespie: You're practically a stooge of the Soviet Union here.

Silver: Yeah, exactly. But if you break from Orthodoxy, there's a very efficient
policing of people who piss inside the tent and dissent from the coalition, and
have the credibility to say that out loud. Because you can influence people if
you're willing to just speak your mind. It helps to be established where you're
not afraid of anything.



Gillespie: A couple of weeks ago, we saw an outpouring of anger that Vice
magazine—which up until about two weeks ago had been seen as a charnel house of
sexual harassment—suddenly went bankrupt. People were saying, "I can't believe
we lost the last outpost of great journalism." Similar things have happened
before: when Sports Illustrated finally went belly up, the Los Angeles Times, a
newspaper that nobody read, is cutting staff. What's going on with the legacy
media? Is that in any way tied to what's going on in the political identity
space?

Silver: In an effort to be nuanced and textured, I think it's 80 percent secular
economic forces where you have this advertising bundle that was very powerful in
that probably wasn't a natural occurrence per se. It was a form of economic
rent, more or less, that subsidized the industry. My parents would walk down to
the store and buy The New York Times, even growing up in Michigan. I respect
traditional journalism, but I think it's mostly an economic story. It's hard
because I think journalism does create, in theory, social utility. I'm not sure
I think that journalism should be funded by governments, though it is in many
countries.

Gillespie: When you say you're not sure, do you mean you know it shouldn't be?

Silver: Here's my idea, which I'm stealing for one of my future Substack posts.
I think universities should run—maybe it's a bad idea. I don't know. It sounds
like a bad idea. What if universities bought newspapers? Because newspapers are
categorically more useful than academic papers. 

Gillespie: Because they have comic sections.

Silver: But they are producing journalism in real-time. They're the first draft
of history. They're read much more widely. The writing is much, much, much
better. Harvard, you take the fact that members can actually write and
communicate with the public and have them write for The Boston Globe instead of
for some obscure journal. 



Gillespie: University of Miami or a party school could take over Vice. It's a
brand extension, for God's sake.

Silver: For once, as the most left-wing person in the room, we could agree
probably on the many things I think journalists do wrong. I think it's not great
that local journalism has been hit so badly. I'm a big fan of Substack. I make
money from it. You realize your marginal revenue product a little bit more
explicitly. There is always an implicit deal where if you go report from the
front lines of Ukraine, that's not actually going to be narrowly profitable. You
always had subsidization of enterprise reporting and foreign reporting from
cooking and homes. The editorial section, where you pay pretty well. They get
lots and lots of clicks, or Wordle or whatever games. If that bundle breaks
down, The New York Times has been doing well.

Gillespie: You created FiveThirtyEight. Could you walk through the stages of
death that went along with it. When FiveThirtyEight launched, it was a
phenomenal resource that was doing things that other sites weren't doing. You
ended up moving to The New York Times with it, and then to ABC and Disney.

Silver: We were under license to The New York Times. We got hired by The Times
for three years, and then I sold FiveThirtyEight to Disney/ESPN in 2014, which
intercompany transferred to ABC News.

Gillespie: Within a little bit more than ten years, you went from starting
something fundamentally new that made a major impact on legacy media into giant
news organizations, and now is in its Biden years, let's say, where it's taking
the afternoons off. 

Is that a tragedy or will something else come up? Is it the fact that you could
do that because there's so much more possibility and capacity for new things?
Are you better or worse off being at Substack for the moment?



Silver: The latter question is easier. I feel much better off. I just have like
a little extra pep in my step being independent again. You're probably making
the same income, it might be from six different sources of the texts that are
more complicated, but it's very nice to have an incentive. If you write a good
Substack post, people will subscribe to your blog and you get money in your bank
account. That actually feels good, to have actual incentives to work hard and to
develop an audience. 

The problem with ABC News and Disney is that it was basically run like a
socialist economy. Obviously, this is a well-run business in some ways, but we
were so small relative to their scale that they didn't care one way or the
other. If you make $5 million or lose $5 million, why do they care? It's like
one day of theme park receipts at one theme park somewhere in the world. It's
actually really bad, though. It makes you kind of a client of the regime. Your
capacity to stay there depends on the goodwill of people who are able to kind of
write off an x million dollar loss a year. 

We had good economics for a subscriber business. We have loyal, high-net-worth
readers who have a differentiated willingness to pay, and who have been around
FiveThirtyEight for a long time. It could have been a good subscription
business, but Disney was literally like, "Well, we are launching Hulu Plus.
Therefore this would interfere with that." No, it wouldn't. But when you're in a
very large corporation and you're some subdivision of a subdivision of
subdivision, it's not run very efficiently. Disney is not one of these cultures,
like a friend who works for Amazon. Amazon will micromanage everything. It can
be good or bad in different ways. 



But Disney is all about scale, scale, scale. You know, the National Football
League and theme parks and nine-figure budget movies. If you're like a little
tiny barnacle on the Disney whale, you'll just get ignored till the politics
change, and they have to cut staff and wear this division that no one ever even
tried to make a profit with. I think we could have. Of course, at some point,
you get cut.

Gillespie: Is it an absolute loss when The LA Times shrinks? Or are you
confident that new things will crop up that will perform either the same
function or the function as it needs to be done now, rather than what a daily
newspaper did in 1970 or 1980?

Silver: Substack is great. Social media has, although complicated, democratized
things in a lot of ways. It's the upper middle class, like a lot of things, it's
gotten quite squeezed. Things like local reporting, the fact that the very
obvious and kind of comical, like George Santos story, didn't get a lot of pick
up, for example, like things like that are going by the wayside a bit. I think
we can have a few more blind spots: Is it like in my list of ten biggest
problems in America right now? No. Top 25? Okay, maybe. I think it's bad. People
have a desire to express themselves. There are some outlets, like The New York
Times that are still doing very well. 

Gillespie:  You wrote in a November essay that free speech is in trouble. Young
liberals are abandoning it—and other groups are too comfortable with tit-for-tat
hypocrisy. Why are young liberals abandoning free speech?

Silver: What I would call Enlightenment liberalism are still relatively new
ideas. They've been with us for a few centuries and not more than that. In some
ways, they're counterintuitive ideas. The notion is that if we are a little bit
more laissez faire, and let people do what they want, the free hand of the
market will generate more wealth, and we'll all be collectively better off. It
sounds too good to be true, except it mostly is true, empirically over a long
period. 



But, there are a couple of things: One, which is relevant to my book, is that
for the first time in history, the younger generation is more risk averse than
older people. They're having less sex. They're doing fewer drugs. Less can be
good or bad, I don't know.

Gillespie: It's so bad, they're having less sex than Joe Biden.

Silver: He apparently is doing quite well. I am not somebody who says that there
are never any tangible harms from controversial speech. Look at [novelist]
Salman Rushdie, free speech can actually have effects. It's a powerful thing.
But if you're so risk averse, you just want to maintain harmony. I think that's
part of it. Right. Also, these are not people who grew up with the memory of the
Cold War or certainly not of World War II. 

Gillespie: Or mass censorship. When you think back to the idea that books like
Lady Chatterley's Lover, or Tropic of Cancer, or Ulysses really weren't legally
published in America until the late '50s, early '60s?

Silver: If you're like 23 or something, even dumb stuff like the Dixie Chicks in
the Bush years. People even forget about that kind of thing.

Gillespie: Why do you think other people—not woke progressives, but
conservatives who constantly talk about the Constitution, or perhaps even
libertarians in certain circumstances—think "let's be hypocritical in order to
own the libs." What's going on there?

Silver: One of the universal truths about everything in life is that if you have
a longer time horizon, you almost always benefit from that. People are trying to
win the argument to feel satisfaction in that immediate moment or that hour.
They think, "If I get into the left on things, not the left actually, it's kind
of more kind of center-left partisan Democrats about Biden's age," and they
think, "Well, if I can dunk on Nate Silver about Biden's age, then I'll win the
argument." But the problem is, it's not an argument between you or me. Seventy
percent of the American electorate thinks Biden is too old, very reasonably so I
might add. Eighty is just above the threshold anyone should be commander in
chief. But they're trying to win the argument and not win the war.



Gillespie: This might be an impossible question to answer. It's kind of a
chicken or egg thing, but are we more talking about present short-term things?
Because that's the infrastructure. That's social media. That's the way cable
news operates now. Or have we conjured those things in order to win quick
arguments in the idea that that will transform society?

Silver: It's three things. It's partly human nature, partly the nature of modern
media, and partly the fact that people are not in politics for truth-seeking
reasons. They're in politics to win partisan arguments and to enforce orthodoxy
because you have two parties that are taking this 20-dimensional space and
trying to collapse it all down into two coalitions that may not actually have
all that much in common if you start to pick apart differences. You need useful
idiots to enforce those hierarchies.

Gillespie: Why are you different? Your entire career, going back to your work on
Baseball Prospectus and elsewhere, you've been more data-driven. Data will tell
you whatever you need it to tell you, right? Why aren't there more journalists
like you who are trying to ascertain reality and then tease out trends and
meaning, as opposed to those who bulldoze things into what they want it to be.

Silver: It's funny because now I feel like I'm more of a traditionalist. When I
went to The New York Times in 2010, they were very concerned that I said I had
voted for Obama in 2008, which I thought was just a matter of basic
transparency. I would make the same vote again, to be sure, but that was a big
problem that I had been open about my political views at all. It comes full
circle now, where if you don't kind of express your view on every issue, then
you're seen as being suspect potentially. But the world is dynamic, so it's
possible to overcorrect. I think there was or is truth in the left critique of
both-sides journalism. The truth is certainly not always, especially for a
libertarian, just somewhere in the middle. You people aren't centrist. It's a
different dimension. 



Gillespie: It's a very different dimension that some people will claim doesn't
even really exist. You certainly can't find it on any map. 

Silver: I think even some of the more woke versions of it—at least I think that
it's to some approximation true that white men have a lot of power in the media
and, of course, that's absolutely true. But when you don't give people credit
for being willing to adapt, if you read The New York Times today and compare it
to 2013 or something, it's a vastly different paper now and you have to adjust
to that moving target and not to the same standard. Give people credit for
being. This is part of why the free market is right: it gives people credit for
being intelligent and within their domain, relatively rational. I'm the only
smart person in the room. 

[Similar to the] COVID-19 stuff. The early dialogue about masks where [former
Chief Medical Advisor Anthony] Fauci [says] "Later on where I tell people masks
are worthwhile, but let's say they don't really do anything. We need them for
essential workers." People don't really notice that we're telling a good, noble
lie. That shows contempt for people. 

If you play poker, then you know that, although bluffing is a part of poker, if
you're inconsistent, you're allowing yourself to be exploited by your opponent.
Your opponent's smart. If you were only playing a certain hand a certain way
with a bluff or with a strong hand, then you will be exploited by your opponent,
as opposed to treating them as intelligent and adaptable and more sophisticated.
You should treat people as being intelligent. It's a much more robust strategy
than to assume that you're the only worthwhile and smart person in the room.

Gillespie: Can you talk about your book On the Edge, which comes out in August.
What's it about?



Silver: The book is called On the Edge. It's a book about gambling and risk. It
covers a lot of territory. It follows my journey where before we ever covered
politics, I played poker online for a period of time in the mid-2000s. It starts
out in the poker world.

Gillespie: Why did you stop that?

Silver: Because the government passed a law called the [Unlawful Internet
Gambling Enforcement Act], which is what piqued my interest in politics. It was
tucked into some unrelated security legislation at the end of 2006. I wanted the
bastards who pass legislation, who are mostly Republicans, to lose. And they
did. Democrats had a good midterm in 2006. And well, they fucking took away my
livelihood. What am I going to do now? I wound up starting to write about
politics.

Gillespie: And now you are simping for Trump. What a strange world. To write On
The Edge you did a phenomenal amount of interviews and research. Can you talk a
little bit about the scope of that?

Silver: It starts out in poker and sports betting but gets into areas like
venture capital, gets into crypto—I talked to our friend [FTX founder] Sam
Bankman-Fried quite a bit—gets into effective altruism, gets into a lot of the
AI stuff. It's a fundamental book about a certain type of nerd. 

Gillespie: It's an autobiography. 

Silver: Sort of. But they're taking over the world in a lot of ways. They're the
ones who run tech and finance. Tech and finance are eating the world. It's an
insider's tour about how people like that think. There were like 200 interviews.
I did a lot of trips to Vegas, which was fun. 

You're trying to immerse people in the topic and get people a front-row seat.
I'm not a big network access guy, but I'm flattering myself here, because I
think I am fair. I think people will talk to me that would not talk to other
people. I am talking to some of the top Silicon Valley [venture capitalists] VCs
on their own terms and unguarded ways because I'm not coming in with an agenda
apart from trying to understand them. The book is very critical of some things.
But I think it's fair. It didn't preconceive what it wanted to say before I
actually did the reporting, the interviewing. I think that'll be reflected in
the work.



Gillespie: To go back to Hayek, my favorite work by Hayek is The
Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason. He worried that
the French Enlightenment got everything too mathematized, and ultimately, people
were just data points in other people's grand theories and you erased them if
they mess up your equation. Are we too quantified in this world? 

Silver: There are a few dimensions of this. One is like the dubious claims to
have scientific authority and say, "Oh, we are just doing what the data tells
us." You saw this during like COVID-19 and whatnot. You see this with the
concept of misinformation, which is often entirely subjective. That's one
dimension. The book also gets into utilitarianism a little bit and effective
altruism, where they try to quantify everything and you run into problems with
that. 

First of all, I build models for a living. I build sports models and election
models, tried to bet on them myself and in a sense, a game theory of poker
strategy is kind of a model. Building a model is pretty hard. There are lots of
ways to screw up. There are lots of omitted variable biases. It might be another
overcorrection thing where like 20 years ago the world needed to become more
data-driven. Now it's become like a little bit of a, when you have a hammer,
everything looks like a nail kind of problem.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Photo Credits: Brian Cahn/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Sandy Carson/ZUMA Press/Newscom;
157014269 © Ilnur Khisamutdinov

 * Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
 * Audio Production: Ian Keyser

NEXT: The Best of Reason: Commander in Chains: 7 Scenarios If Trump Is Jailed
and Wins the Election

Nick Gillespie is an editor at large at Reason and host of The Reason Interview
With Nick Gillespie.

LibertarianismCampaigns/ElectionsElection 2024Joe BidenDonald TrumpMediaMedia
CriticismSocial MediaFree SpeechGambling
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly
versionCopy page URL
Media Contact & Reprint Requests

Show Comments (77)


LISTEN & SUBSCRIBE

Podcast:
The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie

 * Apple Podcasts
 * Spotify
 * YouTube
 * RSS

Sponsored by Rabbit Air


REMOVES 99.97% OF POLLUTANTS

Sit Pretty Or Hang Tight. The Minusa2 Can Get To Work Wherever And Whenever You
Need It.

See More

 * About
 * Browse Topics
 * Events
 * Staff
 * Jobs
 * Donate
 * Advertise
 * Subscribe
 * Contact
 * Media
 * Shop
 * Amazon

Reason FacebookReason TwitterReason InstagramReason TikTokReason YoutubeReason
ItunesReason on FlipboardReason RSS

© 2024 Reason Foundation | Accessibility | Privacy Policy | Terms Of Use

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of
Service apply.



Notifications