Helloha and Kanishuwa friends and welcome to Inpolitik with John Hyalman a puck and odyssey joint

dropping fresh topical candid conversations twice a week with the people who roam the quarters of power and influence in America from Washington to Wall Street

Silicon Valley Hollywood and beyond shifting and shaping the warp and weft of our politics and culture

If the only thing you knew about Nate Silver

was the first line of his entering Wikipedia,

Nathaniel Reed Silver, born January 13, 1978, is an American statistician, writer, and poker player who analyzes

baseball, basketball, and elections, you might conclude with a fairly high degree of certainty

that the person being described was a grade a dork

a brainy but socially awkward dude more comfortable tweaking and twiddling with

abstract algorithms than going on dates a guy who spins an unhealthy amount of time hunched over his keyboard in a dimly lit room,

fingers quite possibly coated in cheeto dust, employment status, indeterminate, personality, wound tight as a top, and tendencies to sleep, bathe, or exercise, dubious.

Some, some of these suppositions are of course true about Nate Silver. He is in fact a

hardcore data nerd and does log way too much screen time. But Silver also

travels extensively, loves hanging out in Vegas casinos and other dens of iniquity and has both a solid sense of

humor even about himself and exemplary personal hygiene.

Not only has he been gainfully employed pretty much constantly, as long as you count the three-year

stretch where he made most of his money playing online poker after he graduated

from the University of Chicago back in 2000. As the founder and presiding genius behind

538, the Seminole, and for a time definitive website that

pioneered the art and science of polling aggregation, election forecasting, and high-end political data

journalism, he was ridiculously over-employed at some of the most prestigious

institutions in American media, the New York Times, E-SPN, ABC News.

...