In 'On the Edge,' Nate Silver analyzes professional risk-takers

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🗓️ 28 August 2024

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

What do hedge fund managers, poker players and the scientist behind the mRNA vaccine have in common? In his new book, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, Nate Silver argues that they all exist in what he calls "the River" – a community of like-minded power brokers taking quantitative risks. In today's episode, Silver speaks with Here & Now's Scott Tong about what differentiates "the River" from what he calls "the Village" – think journalists and professors – and how cancel culture plays a role in this societal structure.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Empiro's book of the day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Talk to Nate Silver, the now
0:07.1	famous elections forecaster. And in his view, there is a shared personality type among those who
0:13.8	excel at poker playing, sports betting, VC investing, and blue chip art collecting. And he writes
0:20.0	about this type of guy, and yeah, it's usually
0:22.6	a guy in his new book, On the Edge, The Art of Risking Everything. And in this interview with here
0:28.5	and now Scott Tong, he raises one dichotomy, the risk taker versus the risk averse. But then
0:34.7	he also mentions a related but slightly different dichotomy, the individual
0:39.2	versus the collective. Find out how all of these opposing forces play off of each other after the
0:44.8	break. Remember the movie Moneyball where this contrarian geek working for the Oakland
0:51.1	baseball team clashes with the traditional scouts who go with, you know,
0:56.1	their eyes, their feel. Well, the new book seeks to understand these two camps on a much
1:01.5	broader scale. And it concludes that the data nerds, the quants who take big risks, are winning
1:07.5	in American society. And the author is a bit of a quant himself. Nate Silver,
1:12.3	you know the name. He's an election modeler. And his new book is On the Edge, The Art of Risking
1:17.4	Everything. And Nate Silver joins me now. Welcome.
1:21.1	Hey, how are you? I'm well. You know, you argue there's this group of elites in society
1:26.0	who belong to what you call the river.
1:29.3	Describe these people.
1:31.3	So the river are people who take calculator risks for a living, mostly in quantitative types of risks.
1:38.4	So involving finance or poker is kind of like the ur part of the river.
1:43.8	And they combine two traits,
1:45.4	one of which is that very moneyball-ish analytical approach,
	...

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