LinkedIn presents.

I'm Rufus Griskam and this is the next big idea.

Today, part two of my conversation with Nate Silver. If you haven't listened to the first part of my conversation with Nate, you should

go ahead and do that now.

In that episode, we discuss Nate's journey from poker to politics and back again.

Today we're getting to the heart of his new book on the edge,

his gonzo journalistic study of a group he calls the river.

These are the risk-taking rationalists who come to

dominate Wall Street, Venture Capital, and Silicon Valley. Nate considers himself to be a member of this tribe, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have

critiques of the river. We'll get to those a little later in our conversation, but I began

by asking him, what can we learn from the river?

How should we apply this worldview to our lives?

Is probabilistic thinking a kind of superpower?

I think it should be a pretty ordinary power, right?

Because we in some ways we engage with it all the time in like fairly intuitive ways.

One example I like giving is if you go to like a dinner party and you're seated across from somebody who you don't know and you are trying to have a conversation with, you actually probably behave quite probabilistically in what I would call a Bayesian reasoning from Bayes Theory kind of way where you start out and you ask some softball questions you don't want to offend them and then maybe you found that you know that you grew up in the same hometown you root for the same sports team and

whatever else and you got some interests in common and you know there's a kind of

feeling out process that takes place all the time with respect to like human behavior and

and the difference here is that like that's the thing that we do repeatedly we have

interactions every day with other human beings I mean even things like if you look at

like how people you know carve out space and like an elevator or things like that I mean

everyday repeated things we actually are I think often quite probabilistic in our thinking and very intuitive about it.

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