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On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything Hardcover – August 13, 2024

by Nate Silver (Author)

4.2 663 ratings

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The Instant New York Times Bestseller

“Engaging and entertaining… a glimpse of the economy of the future.” —Tim Wu, New York Times Book Review

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Signal and the Noise,the definitive guide to our era of risk—and the players raising the stakes

In the bestselling The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver showed how forecasting would define the age of Big Data. Now, in this timely and riveting new book, Silver investigates “the River,” the community of like-minded people whose mastery of risk allows them to shape—and dominate—so much of modern life.

These professional risk-takers—poker players and hedge fund managers, crypto true believers and blue-chip art collectors—can teach us much about navigating the uncertainty of the twenty-first century. By immersing himself in the worlds of Doyle Brunson, Peter Thiel, Sam Bankman-Fried, Sam Altman, and many others, Silver offers insight into a range of issues that affect us all, from the frontiers of finance to the future of AI.

Most of us don’t have traits commonly found in the River: high tolerance for risk, appreciation of uncertainty, affinity for numbers—paired with an instinctive distrust of conventional wisdom and a competitive drive so intense it can border on irrational. For those in the River, complexity is baked in, and the work is how to navigate it. People in the River have increasing amounts of wealth and power in our society, and understanding their mindset—and the flaws in their thinking— is key to understanding what drives technology and the global economy today.

Taking us behind the scenes from casinos to venture capital firms, and from the FTX inner sanctum to meetings of the effective altruism movement, On the Edge is a deeply reported, all-access journey into a hidden world of power brokers and risk-takers.

From the Publisher

An Amazon Nonfiction BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH. ON THE EDGE by Nate Silver. Take an all-access journey

WARNING: California’s Proposition 65

Editorial Reviews

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“Our recent politics have been seen as a conflict between coastal elites and Middle Americans. It is a divide, roughly, between the rich and the not-so-rich, the influential and the ignored. Mr. Silver focuses on a different fault line, the one between the risk-takers and the risk-averse . . . savvy observations about the business and culture of gambling.” —Eric Felten, Wall Street Journal

“Engaging and entertaining . . . Silver describes how the decision-making methods of the professional gambler have spread to encompass a wide swath of human activities, from cryptocurrency investment to the pursuit of a more ethical life. He offers readers an interview-driven tour of the parts of America where the outlooks and incomes depend on sophisticated forms of risk-taking. The result is a glimpse of the economy of the future.” —Tim Wu, New York Times Book Review

“Engrossing . . . a meditation on risk, a study of those most comfortable taking it and an invitation for the rest of us to think about what it means that so much more of our lives now seems to hang on it.” —David Wallace-Wells, New York Times

“Silver had initially intended to write mostly about gambling but ultimately widened his scope as he became convinced that gambling might provide a framework for understanding risk takers in other fields. The result is a book that’s more interesting—Silver managed to land an interview with Bankman-Fried shortly before his arrest in the Bahamas—and more subversive.”—Max Chafkin, Bloomberg Businessweek

“Remember Moneyball? . . . What do hedge fund managers, poker players and the scientist behind the mRNA vaccine have in common? Nate Silver argues that they all exist in what he calls "the River"–a community of like-minded power brokers taking quantitative risks.” —NPR, Book of the Day

“Endlessly informative and fascinating, On The Edge is an indispensable guide to identifying the most feasible options in a messy, hypercompetitive world of uncertainty and risk.” —Glenn C. Altschuler, Pittsburgh Post Gazette

“A compelling read… Silver covers a lot of ground in this likeable, insightful read, investigating risk-taking ability and how it applies to blue-sky investing. It’s worth the price of the tour.”—Alan Livsey, Financial Times

“Silver’s work stands out for its focus on high-stakes domains . . . a nuanced perspective on modern risk-taking . . . provides valuable insights into the evolving landscapes of technology, finance, and societal change, making it a significant contribution to the field.” —Dov Greenbaum, Science

“Takes a hard look at some of our best and brightest, and some of our not so bright . . Poker can be a very insightful way to see who someone is . . .” —Megyn Kelly

“Remarkably curious.” —KQED

“More nuanced than Moneyball, eschewing the worship of data geeks and their denigration of human cognition . . . accomplishes a rare feat in the age of the internet—telling a contemporary, fresh, and fascinating story. He introduces readers to some of the best gamblers in the world, breaks down an allegation of poker cheating with layers of intrigue, and tells the story of his foray into sports betting.” —Ben Christenson, The Federalist

"Silver compellingly theorizes that humans are in general too risk averse... a thought-provoking interdisciplinary book which covers a host of timely topics from artificial intelligence, political theory and what happens when risk takers go too far."—Krysta Fauria, AP

“Masterly . . . If you —like me—find gambling irresistible . . . [A] highly readable and engaging tour.” —Sam Freedman, The Times (UK)

“Nate Silver is that very rare thing, a celebrity statistician . . . in a class of his own . . . As a guide to our dystopian future, in which everyone is busy updating their priors and sizing their bets, On the Edge is indispensable.” —Ian Sansom, Telegraph (UK)

“A clever look into a unique realm. An enlightening study of the people who play the game of risk and win.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“Colorful and enlightening”—Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Nate Silver is the founder of FiveThirtyEight and the New York Times bestselling author of The Signal and the Noise. He writes the Substack "Silver Bulletin."

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

The Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida, features one nightclub, seven pools, fourteen restaurants, a thirty‑foot‑high indoor waterfall, dozens of pieces of bedazzled rock‑ and‑roll memorabilia, two hundred gaming tables, 1,275 guest rooms, three thousand slot machines, and a glimmering guitar‑shaped hotel that shoots beams of neon blue light twenty thousand feet into the sky.

Like most casinos—and like most things in South Florida—the Hard Rock is designed to overwhelm your senses and undermine your inhibitions. Picture a casino in your head. If you haven’t been to a place like the Hard Rock or the Wynn in Las Vegas, you’re probably thinking of a dingy “slot barn” full of cigarette smoke and mazelike rows of chirping machines. Indeed, those can be some of the most depressing places on Earth. But at high‑end resorts like the Hard Rock, the mood at busy hours is exuberant. Few places in American life attract a broader cross section of society. There are adults of all ages, races, classes, ethnic groups, and political orientations. There are senior citizens hoping to hit a slot jackpot; groups of bros and gaggles of girls; and attendees of third‑rate trade association conferences compensating for the awkwardness of it all by overindulging in booze and blackjack.

I spent a lot of time in casinos over the course of writing this book. Needless to say, even the most glamorous ones eventually become tiresome. I sometimes had the feeling of being a professional wedding photographer: everyone was having the time of their life, their very special day. But I knew all the tropes, all the recurring characters—the dude trying to hide from his buddies at the craps table that he was playing beyond his means; the BFFs from the bachelorette party jockeying for pole position when a hot bachelor walked by; the friendly couple from Nebraska having the night of their life playing blackjack before giving all their winnings back twice over.

It was April 2021. I was in Florida for the Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown, the first really big poker tournament in the United States since the pandemic. For better or worse, I’d been pretty careful about avoiding crowded indoor spaces until I got vaccinated for COVID‑19. I hadn’t even been on a plane since March 11, 2020, when I learned midflight that Tom Hanks had gotten COVID, that the NBA had suspended its season, that President Trump had shut down travel from Europe—and that my fellow passengers and I had landed in a riskier universe.

But it was a year later, and it was time to gamble. Judging by the crowds at the Hard Rock, a lot of other people were in the same frame of mind. Despite their reputation for risk tolerance, casinos mostly did shut down in the early days of COVID. Even the Las Vegas Strip—which I’d always as‑ sumed would continue to operate even in the event of a nuclear apocalypse—was closed for two and a half months. During this period, casino gaming revenues across the United States were down by as much as 96 percent from a year earlier.

But they rebounded with a vengeance. Somehow, between the anxiety caused by the unprecedented mass death of COVID and the boredom caused by the unprecedented lack of social interaction, Americans’ appetite for YOLO (You Only Live Once) behavior exploded, manifesting itself in everything from illegal fireworks displays to traffic accidents to cryptocurrency bubbles. (Bitcoin prices increased roughly tenfold in the year after the WHO declared COVID‑19 to be a pandemic.) And so in April 2021—even as schools remained closed in parts of the country—American casinos won a staggering $4.6 billion in gaming revenues from their patrons, 26 percent higher than in the same month two years earlier, before the pandemic.

Poker players came out in a show of force at the Hard Rock. In April 2019, the last time this particular tournament had been held before COVID, it had a respectable 1,360 entrants. The 2021 version drew almost twice as many—2,482 entrants—despite still being in the middle of a pandemic and a travel ban affecting most of the poker‑playing world. It could easily have been more: demand was so overwhelming that there were hours‑long waits to pony up $3,500 and register for a seat. Still, this was the largest‑ ever number of entrants for a tournament on the World Poker Tour, which sponsored the event. Appropriately enough, the tournament was eventu‑ ally won by an ICU nurse from Grand Rapids, Michigan, named Brek Schutten, who had done his time in COVID wards.

We played through unusual conditions. There was a mask mandate, which I’d expected to be an enforcement disaster: poker players are both individualistic and irascible, not the types to quietly follow orders. But most of them were so damn happy to be playing poker again that there were relatively few complaints.* A bigger constraint was that, as a COVID half measure, the poker tables were equipped with kludgy octagonal plex‑ iglass dividers. This made for one entertaining wrinkle: whenever a player got knocked out of the tournament, the floor staff would squeakily eulo‑ gize his departure by wiping down his section of the plexiglass, like an NBA towel boy wiping the sweat off the court after some hapless forward had just been dunked on by Giannis Antetokounmpo.

However, the plexiglass had the effect of fun‑house mirrors, making it hard to properly view your opponents. Sure, I could see the other players well enough if I concentrated. But contrary to what you might have heard, most poker tells aren’t given away by blatantly staring at an opponent and getting a “soul read.” Instead, it’s subtleties on the boundary of conscious observation: a flick of the wrist here, a quickening of the pulse there; an opponent you spy, out of the corner of your eye, looking more erect in her seat after she first peeks at her cards. (She probably has a strong hand.) Poker is mostly a mathematical game, but the edges are so thin that you’ll take whatever reads you can get.

Between the plexiglass, the masks, and being out of practice being around other people, I felt like I was playing poker underwater. My body betrayed my anxiety. Not only was I feeling my pulse when I made a big decision, but for parts of the tournament, my hands even began trembling when I bet chips, something that’s almost never happened to me before or since. When I reviewed a few hands later with my poker coach—yeah, I have a poker coach, like some people have a personal trainer—they nearly all featured me overplaying and overthinking situations as though mak‑ ing up for a year lost during the pandemic. The Hendon Mob Poker Database says I eventually finished in 161st place in the tournament for $7,465, but I actually lost money on the trip.

And yet, it was a great experience. After an isolating election year in 2020—isolating because I was working remotely during the pandemic, and because for reasons I’ll explain to you later, I find presidential election years to be alienating—I felt welcome in the poker world. The World Poker Tour even tweeted congratulations to me from their @WPT account, not something they’d usually do for the 161st‑place finisher.

I’m not sure I fully recognized it in the moment, but the tournament was the first taste of several realizations I’d have in the course of writing this book. One was that something important was happening, something that went beyond poker. That the tournament had drawn a record number of players—that people were so aggressively “returning to normal” in the hyperreal and obviously‑not‑COVID‑safe environment of a casino—that seemed significant. People have always had different risk tolerances, but they’re often hidden from public view. If the person standing right in front of me in the grocery line is planning to spend his evening curling up and watching Netflix, and the person right behind me is planning to go on an all‑night cocaine bender at a strip club, I don’t really have any way to know that and I really don’t care.

But COVID made those risk preferences public, worn on our proverbial sleeves and our literal faces. For a lot of folks, COVID was the Wild West, forcing them to confront risk and reward with little precedent to rely upon and expert guidance that changed constantly. My experience in writing this book is that people are becoming more bifurcated in their risk tolerance—and that this affects everything from who we hang out with to how we vote. Maybe Netflix Guy and Strip Club Guy aren’t even shopping at the same grocery store anymore; Netflix Guy moved to the country now that he doesn’t need to be in the office, and Strip Club Guy moved to Miami—and was probably playing against me in the poker tournament.

I want to be careful here. In any statistical distribution, you’ll find some people on either end of the bell curve, and this book often focuses on people on the extreme right tail of risk. But risk‑taking is an understudied personality trait, and the academic literature is divided over the extent some people are generally more risk‑taking as opposed to taking risks within specific domains. My favorite example of a domain‑specific risk‑ taker is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who served on President Biden’s COVID‑19 advisory board. In a May 2022 op‑ed, Emanuel said that he was avoiding eating indoors at restaurants because he was worried about long COVID, but also bragged about riding a motorcycle. That seems like an insane pair of risk preferences to hold. (Motorcycles are about thirty times as deadly as passenger cars per mile traveled.) With that said, I can think of plenty of areas in my own life in which my risk preferences are hard to defend as being rational or consistent. People are complicated, and even among poker players, there are plenty of degens (degenerate gamblers) and plenty of nits.*

Indeed, most of us seem conflicted about how much risk we want in our lives. One of the truisms in studies of risk is that younger people take on more risk than older ones. That may be changing, however. Teenagers in the United States and other Western countries are undertaking far less risky behavior—drugs, drinking, sex—than they did a generation ago.

And yet, literal gambling is booming. In 2022, Americans lost around $60 billion betting at licensed casinos and online gambling operations—a record even after accounting for inflation. They also lost an estimated $40 billion in unlicensed, gray‑market, or black‑market gambling—and about $30 billion in state lotteries. To be clear, that’s the amount they lost, not the amount they wagered, which was roughly ten times as much. Between all forms of gambling, Americans are probably making in excess of $1 trillion in bets annually.

And here’s something that probably should keep more of us up at night: American life expectancy has stagnated. During the pandemic, in fact, it declined, to 76.4 years in 2021 from 78.8 years in 2019. Life expectancy numbers during a pandemic can be misleading—they essentially assume we’ll maintain the same number of COVID deaths going forward when we likely won’t—and the numbers have begun rebounding to some extent. Even before COVID, though, American men had lost a tenth of a year of life expectancy between 2014 (76.4 years) and 2019 (76.3).

In fact, the United States is now an outlier among highly developed countries. Based on our very high GDP, you’d expect American life expectancy to be about five years longer than it is. The reasons for the shortfall are complicated, involving a mix of cultural and political factors as well as the United States’ high inequality. But they partly reflect the United States being more risk‑taking—we have more driving at freeway speeds, more opioids, more COVID, more firearms—and less willingness to sacrifice freedom or economic growth for longer lifespans.

The other big realization I had on that flight home from Florida was that this world of poker players and poker‑playing types—this world of calculated risk-taking—was the world where I fit in.

This shouldn’t have been a huge surprise. It may even run in my blood. Neither of my parents is much into cards or casinos, but my paternal grand‑ mother, Gladys Silver, was an outstanding gin rummy and bridge player and a notoriously punitive one: if you weren’t careful about concealing your cards, she’d take full advantage of that information as a way of teaching you to be more careful next time. My great‑grandfather Jacob Silver founded an auto‑body shop in Waterbury, Connecticut, which held a poker game on payout day every second Friday—until, according to family legend, the wives of the mechanics forced him to switch payment from cash to checks because too many of their husbands were coming home with empty wallets. Another great‑grandfather, Ferdinand Thrun, was a notorious arsonist who came up with such innovative ways of committing insurance fraud that there literally weren’t laws to charge him with. Ferdinand would have run a pretty good bluff.

And I’d been a professional poker player for three years between 2004 and 2007, during the so‑called Poker Boom. The Poker Boom began be‑ cause of the increasing availability of online poker and because of Chris Moneymaker, an accountant from Nashville who won an online qualify‑ ing tournament for a seat at the $10,000 Main Event at the 2003 World Series of Poker and then parlayed that into winning the Main Event for $2.5 million. If you’d asked ChatGPT to design a person who would most increase the amount of interest in poker by winning the WSOP, it might have spat out Moneymaker. An affable, pudgy, late twenty‑something dude with a boring corporate job, he was exactly the customer the online poker sites were targeting, an archetype for every office drone who wanted to break out of his cubicle and win the big jackpot. The number of partici‑ pants in the World Series of Poker Main Event exploded from 839 in Moneymaker’s 2003 to 8,773 just three years later in 2006, largely fueled by people who had won their seats online.

I was one of those people who lived the dream. I soon found myself on a nocturnal schedule. Poker games are usually best late at night, when your opponents are some combination of drunk, sleep‑deprived, or delirious from winning or losing a bunch of money. So I’d come home from my cubicle, take a nap, and then play poker online, sometimes straight through until the morning, when I’d straggle into work and struggle through the day. Needless to say, this wasn’t sustainable, and—making considerably more money as a poker player than as a consultant—I quit my corporate job within about six months to play poker and work for the baseball statistics startup Baseball Prospectus.

It was a good living for a couple of years—but like most edges in gam‑ bling, it wouldn’t last. Some of this was the natural evolution of the game: the Poker Boom sputtered into more of a poker plateau as losing players either went broke, quit, or got better, removing one sucker from the table at a time.

But it was also partly the doing of the U.S. Congress. In late 2006, the GOP‑led Congress, hungry for a victory with “moral majority” voters ahead of the midterms as Republican congressman Mark Foley resigned from office for having sent sexually explicit messages to underage male pages, passed a bill called the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). The UIGEA didn’t ban online poker per se, but it established regulations that choked off payment processors: it’s hard to play poker if you can’t exchange cash for chips. Some sites closed to U.S. players while others remained open, but between the shadow of illegality and the increased friction of getting your money in and out, inexperienced new players avoided the games, making them much tougher to beat.

There was one silver lining: the UIGEA piqued my interest in politics. The bill had been tucked into an unrelated piece of homeland security legislation and passed during the last session before Congress recessed for the midterms. It was a shifty workaround, and having essentially lost my job, I wanted the people responsible for it to lose their jobs, too. And they did: Republicans lost both the House and the Senate, including the seat of Representative Jim Leach of Iowa, the chief sponsor of the UIGEA, whose thirty‑year tenure in office ended partly because of poker players who had contributed money to his opponent.

Struggling to win money as the games were drying up, I quit poker about six months later. With my newfound interest in politics and the extra time on my hands, I wound up starting FiveThirtyEight in 2008. There’s no way to say this without bragging, but FiveThirtyEight kind of blew up, going from having a few hundred readers per day at the outset to hundreds of thousands by Election Day that year. Then before I knew it, it had tens of millions of readers; in 2016, our election forecast page was literally the most engaging piece of content on the internet according to the analytics service Chartbeat.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Press (August 13, 2024)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 576 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1594204128
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1594204128
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.51 x 1.79 x 9.54 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #6,050 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2 in Business Planning & Forecasting (Books)
- #38 in Behavioral Sciences (Books)
- #156 in Puzzles & Games

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Nate Silver is the founder of FiveThirtyEight and the New York Times bestselling author of The Signal and the Noise and On the Edge. He writes the Substack “Silver Bulletin.”

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Customers find the book engaging and insightful. They praise the writing style as breezy, lucid, and concise. Readers appreciate the transparent discussion about risk taking and the value of risk at a great price. The author interviews interesting people and has fun conversations with diverse individuals. However, some customers feel the book is too long and wordy at times. Opinions differ on the pacing, with some finding it well-planned and strong, while others consider it endless and pointless.

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23 customers mention "Thought provoking"20 positive3 negative

Customers find the book insightful and interesting. They say it's informative, well-researched, and fun to read. The book makes you ponder how the human mind works and draws a diverse set of worldviews into an engaging read.

"This book is great. Informative, deeply-researched, and fun to read. It’s the kind of book that has something interesting on every page...." Read more

"Tldr; this is a good book and draws an incredibly diverse set of worldviews into an engaging read. Well done and I recommend!..." Read more

"...time (risk) in a thoughtful way 2) there are tons of unique and interesting insights on everything from VC to politics to gambling 3)..." Read more

"...But more importantly, I found him to be measured in his praise and criticisms of it, which allowed for a more thorough examination of its component..." Read more

21 customers mention "Readability"21 positive0 negative

Customers find the book easy to read and fun. They recommend it for gamblers or would-be gamblers. The author is praised as a good writer, and references several fantastic books that are not well known.

"This book is great. Informative, deeply-researched, and fun to read. It’s the kind of book that has something interesting on every page...." Read more

"- In general I liked the book and enjoyed both the gambling and societal aspects especially the treatment of sports betting, VCs and AI -..." Read more

"Tldr; this is a good book and draws an incredibly diverse set of worldviews into an engaging read. Well done and I recommend!..." Read more

"...someone I mostly agree with articulating his argument in an entertaining manner. I enjoyed it and I’m somewhat sad it’s over." Read more

10 customers mention "Writing style"7 positive3 negative

Customers find the writing style engaging and easy to read. They appreciate the lucid, compact prose and consider it a quick read.

"...Luckily, Silver’s breezy writing and engaging style make it an easy and fun read, not unlike his short-form writing online...." Read more

"...the writing style is easy to follow and compelling...." Read more

"...there are too many footnotes to his writing style...." Read more

"...Nate's books are well written for the risks and rewards in many areas, but he seems unaware of the methods I work with...." Read more

5 customers mention "Value for money"5 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's value for money. They find the discussion about risk taking insightful, with transparent cost-benefits. The book is described as a great purchase at a reasonable price.

"...What they have in common is a mindset about risk—they embrace it—and an analytical framework for thinking probabilistically about, well, everything...." Read more

"...Agency means good options where costs and benefits are transparent, don’t require coming an undue amount of friction, and don’t risk entrapment in..." Read more

"...does more than I've ever see to put into words and rules a description of risk taking, the people who do it, the rules they live by. I only..." Read more

"...into game theory, philosophy and the manifestations as well as the value of risk...." Read more

4 customers mention "Interaction"4 positive0 negative

Customers enjoy the author's interactions with people from various backgrounds. They find the book enjoyable as they meet interesting individuals at the top of their fields.

"...shows us that he's read a lot of great stuff and interviewed an incredibly diverse set of people...." Read more

"...This is more like a fun time spent with someone I mostly agree with articulating his argument in an entertaining manner...." Read more

"...him because most of it sounds like a lot of fun—traveling, meeting interesting people at the top of their fields, and a lot of gambling...." Read more

"...He has interesting conversations with many actors and gave some good points about how Sam Bankman-Fried pull off his massive fraud...." Read more

11 customers mention "Pacing"4 positive7 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the pacing of the book. Some find it well-planned and meaningful, with a strong introduction to the concept of the river and the forces shaping our world today. Others feel it's endless, pointless, repetitive, and oversimplifying.

"...book does when it tries to divide the world into two groups: it's oversimplifying...." Read more

"...And "what is this book really even about?" Nate starts with a meaningful (even if a bit simplistic) breakdown of people into camps of River and..." Read more

"...4 stars only because it does get quite wordy quite long and sometimes repetitive...." Read more

"...book because the narrator voice sounds like an AI and it is incredibly distracting." Read more

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Matt Glassman
Best book I've read this year, by far. Informative, deeply-researched, and just fun to read.
Reviewed in the United States on August 13, 2024
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This book is great. Informative, deeply-researched, and fun to read. It’s the kind of book that has something interesting on every page. This is, by far, the best book I've read this year.

The book is about a group of people Silver calls Riverians, after a river analogy he uses to structure the book. These Riverians come from across the political spectrum and are prominent in a wide variety of career fields—on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, playing professional poker, advising casinos in Vegas, running Effective Altruism charities, and building crypto businesses.

What they have in common is a mindset about risk—they embrace it—and an analytical framework for thinking probabilistically about, well, everything. They live in the world of expected value, marginal utility, game theory, and abstract models. And, in Silver’s view, they are becoming increasingly powerful in society. As tech leaders. As thought leaders. And as political influencers.

In contrast to the Riverians are those with a risk mindset Silver calls The Village. Composed of a wide variety of people but with concentrations in government, academia, and the media, the Villagers are skeptical of markets, more likely to adopt partisan identities (especially center-left politics), more likely to focus on equality as a value and seek to constrain capitalism and meritocracy, and more like to view risk as something to mitigate.

Villagers see The River mindset as too much unbridled capitalism and too little moral concern for the public good. Riverians see The Village as conformist and paternalistic political ideologues whose risk-aversion and culture war obsession are stifling progress on everything from technology to anti-poverty efforts.

On the Edge is structured as a tour through the various worlds of the Riverians. The first half of the book is about gambling—the quintessential downriver activity. There are chapters on poker, sports betting, and the casino industry itself—and the people who are increasingly dominating these worlds through ever-more-sophisticated analytical tools.

Those familiar with Silver’s short-form work will find his usual analytical skills on display here. But Perhaps the most surprising aspect of On The Edge is just how deeply personal it feels. If you read Silver’s wonderful first book, The Signal and The Noise, the writing style and the argument have an air of journalistic detachment. Not so with On the Edge, which often reads like a memoir. As it turns out, Silver is more cardplayer than election analyst, much more at home with the gamblers than the political pundits. He also breaks the 4th wall often; early on it’s somewhat jarring. There’s a Hunter S. Thompson gonzo quality to the story, Silver an omniscient narrator but also a participant-observer in an increasingly fantastical wonderland of poker games, casinos, and sportsbooks.

The second half of the book goes both upriver—to the more respectable world of Silicon Valley venture capitalist, prediction markets, and the philosophies of Effective Altruism and Rationalism—and further downriver, where unbridled risk and temptation await in the world of cryptocurrency and other gray-market endeavors.

The most surprising takeaway from On the Edge is how concerned Silver is about the direction of much of the world of The River. Those familiar with his recent public writing might think that the main villain of the book would be a Village-mindset risk-averse pseudo-expert type, maybe a partisan journalist or academic. Instead, the recurring danger of the book is the one built directly into the River. What if a bunch of hyper-rational successful risk-takers don’t sum to a collective meta-rationality? And what happens when the game isn’t poker or startup funding, but a global existential threat?

This is an absolutely sprawling book that covers an insane amount of ground in-depth. The kind of project you can’t really imagine an editor greenlighting. It clocks in at almost 500 pages, but the sheer amount of content across so many domains makes it feel like double that. There are explainers, analysis, profiles, and commentary galore. You are going to learn a ton.

Luckily, Silver’s breezy writing and engaging style make it an easy and fun read, not unlike his short-form writing online. Every chapter is substantively enjoyable, and each works as a stand-alone examination of a distinct topic. At many points, I literally couldn’t put it down. Often, the through-line of risk and the larger themes of politics and society are only lightly present, with the focus kept on the inherently interesting characters and worlds they inhabit. The reporting and analysis are top-notch.

On the Edge also unconsciously captures this cultural moment almost perfectly. The stated through-line of the book is risk and the Riverian mindset, but an unstated theme is just how much of society has been transformed into fertile grounds for the application of analytics, and how much analytics have taken over in so many domains.

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Scott
Great content but long and self indulgent
Reviewed in the United States on December 27, 2024
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- In general I liked the book and enjoyed both the gambling and societal aspects especially the treatment of sports betting, VCs and AI
- The footnotes and grey boxes were excellent and I really enjoyed that style
- Nate talks about himself a lot which was a surprise to me for a book vs his newsletter
- The book is quite long and I think it could have more effectively covered it's main points with a tighter edit

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John D. Damore
Nate Silver Writes a (Very Good) Worldview
Reviewed in the United States on November 26, 2024
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Tldr; this is a good book and draws an incredibly diverse set of worldviews into an engaging read. Well done and I recommend!

About halfway through this book, I began asking myself "why Nate Silver did write this?" And "what is this book really even about?" Nate starts with a meaningful (even if a bit simplistic) breakdown of people into camps of River and Village people and how they process information about the world. This breakdown does not align with political values; instead it's closer to how we reason, make decisions and take risk. Nate is in the "Riverian" group and demonstrates how he reasons about a variety of topics. These include gambling, technology, philosophy and artificial intelligence. If that sounds like a diverse set of relatively unrelated topics, they are. And it's refreshing! It's very different than virtually any nonfiction work I've read recently. It's much, much more wide-ranging than his first book The Signal and the Noise.

Nate shows us that he's read a lot of great stuff and interviewed an incredibly diverse set of people. People like to typecast him as a poker player or election forecaster. While those roles deeply influence him, I'm pretty sure this book will disillusion any simple stereotype. I was impressed with the range of his readings and how he brings them into a cohesive whole. He references several fantastic books I love that are not well known. And he makes me want to read more!

And even if you don't think like him (or like him), this book is pretty impressive. I genuinely believe that Nate wrote it because he wanted to get down his worldview (i.e. not just for money). And articulate some worldwide risks (I didn't expect to be reading about AI and p(doom)). Two minor critiques are 1) I had no idea where he was going and the transitions are brisk 2) there are too many footnotes to his writing style. I think a lot of the footnotes should have been in the text, since he often gives his color commentary there which most readers won't want to miss.

Great work and beware if you ever have to play poker with Nate!

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Bob from Michigan
ups and downs?
Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2024
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I generally enjoyed this book. Some positives: 1) it tackles an essential issue of our time (risk) in a thoughtful way 2) there are tons of unique and interesting insights on everything from VC to politics to gambling 3) the writing style is easy to follow and compelling.

Some negatives: 1) it's a bit rambling at times (prob could be 150 less pages). Honestly, I just don't care that much about Mr. Silver's random Poker experiences that he smatters into every aspect of the book. 2) It gets to the 'how is this useful' phase of the book quite late. It seems to focus a lot on some potentially innate traits on risk tolerance, which is interesting but I question how useful it can be.

Overall it suffers from the same problem that every book does when it tries to divide the world into two groups: it's oversimplifying. Perhaps a useful heuristic, but as any Bi will tell you, sometimes people are more multifaceted than just being a Riverian or a Villager.

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Top reviews from other countries

Arun Pillai
Makes you think about risk and luck
Reviewed in Canada on August 19, 2024
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What a wonderful book on how much effort, risk and luck entwine to affect our world. From gambling to technology, this book will give you an in-depth view of things. If you ever wondered what it'd be like speaking with leaders like Thiel or Musk or MacAskill or Singer, this book is for you.

I highly recommend getting it!

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Lasse Hjorth Madsen
Poor book quality
Reviewed in Germany on August 28, 2024
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I'm not done reading, so can't speak of the content, but the quality of the paperback was crazy poor, with the cover just slightly thicker than the pages

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Niall O'Connor
Stop Making Sense
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 14, 2024
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The Indian philosopher Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj tell us to "stop attributing names and shapes to the essentially nameless and formless. Realise that every mode of perception is subjective."

In this rambling and somewhat inchoate book, Silver seeks to nail jelly to a wall. He formulates a notion of (the) River, to, in his own words provide a "geographical metaphor for.....a sprawling ecosystem of like-minded, highly analytical and competitive people that includes everything from poker to Wall Street to AI." Nothing like attempting to cover all the bases.

The book fails on a number of fronts. Nate Silver's concept of "Riverians" presents a paradox that undercuts the coherence of his argument. On one hand, Silver depicts Riverians as idiosyncratic outsiders, individuals who feel left out or estranged, which in turn fuels their competitiveness. This suggests a group defined by their unique perspectives and unconventional approaches—traits that would presumably resist rigid categorization.

However, Silver simultaneously goes out of hois way to imposes a strict set of characteristics on these Riverians: they are, he tells us, highly analytical, probabilistic thinkers, skilled at decoupling problems from their context, and deeply engaged in quantifiable problem-solving. This list of traits seems to contradict the idea of Riverians as idiosyncratic outsiders, instead painting them as a homogenous group with a narrow, shared mindset.

Further complicating this portrayal, Silver alludes to some Riverians displaying symptoms of autism or Asperger's syndrome, even quoting Simon Baron-Cohen to emphasize the variability within these diagnoses. Baron-Cohen's point—that two individuals with the same diagnosis may have nothing in common—clashes with Silver’s earlier attempt to define Riverians through a set of common traits. If Riverians are as diverse and variable as Baron-Cohen suggests, how can they be neatly categorized by a strict list of characteristics?

This paradox in Silver's depiction of Riverians raises important questions about the validity and usefulness of his concept. Is it possible to reconcile the idea of Riverians as both idiosyncratic outsiders and members of a tightly defined group? Or does this contradiction reveal a deeper flaw in Silver's attempt to classify a diverse, complex set of individuals under a single label?

To sum up, one feels that the following quote is most pertinent to our argument: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”

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Rich
Brilliant engaging read, but the printing is very poor quality - hurts my eyes to read.
Reviewed in Australia on November 29, 2024
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An engaing and insightful read let down by the publisher cutting corners.

The paper is thin as toilet paper and the print is so feint that it's impossible to read in all but the brightest light. You can see the photo.

I'm going to return this and buy the hardback. If I was the author I'd be pretty annoyed.

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Rich

Brilliant engaging read, but the printing is very poor quality - hurts my eyes to read.
Reviewed in Australia on November 29, 2024
An engaing and insightful read let down by the publisher cutting corners.

The paper is thin as toilet paper and the print is so feint that it's impossible to read in all but the brightest light. You can see the photo.

I'm going to return this and buy the hardback. If I was the author I'd be pretty annoyed.

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Murray A. Sondergard
Not As Good As The Signal and the Noise
Reviewed in Canada on December 15, 2024
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It's not clear to me what Silver is trying to say in this book. It meanders around on a number of topics. Try his first book, which I enjoyed very much.

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