Hey Nate!

Hey! Hey, it's Stephen Debner. How's it going?

Good! Good to talk to you.

First off, just tell us in, you know, 60 seconds or less what you actually do now in a given day.

So I am the editor in chief of the website 538.com

and I don't know that I have a lot of consistency from day to day.

Sometimes I'm writing, sometimes I'm running models, sometimes I'm editing, sometimes I'm managing,

sometimes doing, doing media. So it's a job that is always really fun and challenging in the sense that you're not doing too much of the same thing,

but I have to think carefully about how to budget my time.

Nate Silver is America's favorite statistical guru of the past. Well, maybe ever.

He has been devilishly accurate in predicting electoral outcomes.

Before that, he joined the small but influential fraternity of stat heads who work with data in sports, particularly in baseball.

He's written an excellent book called The Signal in the Noise, which is essentially about the folly of prediction.

And today, he is our guest on the latest installment of three quently asked questions in which we compel a noteworthy person to tell us some important truths, such as their favorite sport.

I don't know, bowling. I suppose just how devoted they are to their work.

I don't even always watch the state of the union, for example.

And what you learn about life as you get a bit older.

One of the most profound lessons to me about adulthood is that everyone's kind of weird.

From WNYC, this is Freakinomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything.

Here's your host, Stephen Dupner.

What do we do on the show? Pretty simple. We ask questions.

Hopefully the sort of questions you might like to ask. And we ask them to the sort of people that you might like to hear from.

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