I’ve watched Nate Silver take shit from every side of the political fence for years, now, with a great deal of respect, which probably came across in my last post (Thank You, Garbage Dump). There, I addressed his recent assessment of the platform formerly known as Twitter, which he posted over at his great outlet Silver Bulletin (subscribe here if you aren’t already), and slightly disagreed — or, I thought. If I had to distill that disagreement down into a couple lines, Nate thinks content on X is mostly garbage now, and misses the days when the app presented a reliable newsfeed. I actually agree with that, but also feel the more aggressively speech-friendly state of Twitter is worth wading through basically any amount of trash on the daily. I also characterized Nate as a “good lib,” by which I mean I think he takes the values of liberalism seriously, is a high integrity person, and I enjoy disagreeing with him as I know we basically share enough core values that I never think he’s discussing any issue in bad faith. This is why I was happy to join him on his pod. Or, his live? Whatever word we are using for the Substack video feature.

Officially, we came together to talk about Twitter. But there’s been some recent and unfortunate news out of San Francisco, where a series of violent attacks targeted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. So we started our conversation there, with the spike in recent political violence, discussed the state of AI and how the technology industry is reacting to this AI moment in culture, and shared our predictions for the future of our government’s relationship with the major AI companies before moving on to Twitter / X.

It was a fun chat, and thanks to Nate for the invite. I look forward to our next!

You should Nate's full social media assessment on Silver Bulletin, and if you aren’t already you should subscribe.

-Solana