Welcome to the River
My new book, On the Edge, is out today! Here's everything you need to know about it.
Today is publication day for On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, my new book about gambling and risk, and a lot of other things. And if we’re being honest, I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. Traditional publishers like mine believe in a cluster marketing strategy — having their authors do a lot of media in short succession, which is carefully timed to the launch. So suddenly, you’re probably seeing a lot of Nate everywhere you look.
I want Silver Bulletin readers to know, though, that I particularly appreciate your support. I don’t want to bombard you with emails, so I’m going to treat this as a “landing page” for the book, which like the election landing page will periodically be updated. For now, I’m just going to link to some of the more obvious “big name” reviews and media appearances (and most importantly, places where you can buy the book), but I’ll rotate through others periodically.
Links to purchase On the Edge:
Reviews and profiles: New York Times • Wall Street Journal • Financial Times • Bloomberg • New York Magazine
Podcasts and media appearances: The Ezra Klein Show • Rick Rubin • Risky Business • Morning Joe
Excerpts: Vanity Fair • Business Insider
Forthcoming book events: Various London/UK events Sept. 1-4, though ticket availability limited.
How I found the River
Three-and-a-half years ago, when I first conceived of On the Edge, I was feeling discontented — maybe even lost. We were coming out of what was a very rough 2020 for everyone — the pandemic and all the disruptions it caused, and an election that ended in violence. But I was also deeply unhappy with the direction things were headed at FiveThirtyEight. And I wasn’t sure the whole Quasi-Celebrity Election Forecaster Guy thing was working. As I wrote in the book proposal, I felt like “Shamu on exhibit at SeaWorld”, performing tricks for people but not on my own terms. My contract at ABC News ran through the 2022 midterm, and when I walked into their studio on election night, I thought it might be my last election.
It turned out I didn’t need to go that far. Writing this newsletter instead of working for a big corporation has been liberating. The newsletter and the book have helped me to contextualize the nature of a probabilistic forecast and intellectual tradition it comes from. And this has evolved into a much more interesting election than I was expecting. Still, as some reviewers have picked up, On the Edge is a deeply personal book. There’s a lot of reporting in the book (around 200 formal interviews) and a lot of explainers about concepts like game theory and expected value. But it’s also about finding where I fit in.
The place where I fit in is what I call “the River”. It’s a place for people who are very analytical but also highly competitive. The archetypal activity in the River is poker. I’d been a professional poker player from 2004 to 2006, and the first trip I took by plane after the pandemic was to a casino in Florida — which was every bit as much of a shitshow as you’d expect — to play in a World Poker Tour event.
There are other communities in the River, though: Silicon Valley, Wall Street, sportsbetting, crypto, even effective altruism, all of which are covered extensively in the book. And I found I had a lot in common with these people too, even if I sometimes disagree with their politics. There are traits like decoupling, contrarianism and a high risk tolerance that I share with the River, for better or worse. And these seem to be correlated with extremely high-variance outcomes: tremendous success or tremendous failure (as in the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, who is sort of the antihero of the book).
Zach Weinersmith
The rival community to the River is what I call the Village. This term is more familiar: it’s basically the liberal establishment. Harvard and the New York Times; academia, media and government. The Village is politically progressive and, I would argue, increasingly partisan — though it can also be highly competent and it’s pretty good at winning elections.
I’ll stop there — I don’t want to give too much away — but there’s a very short excerpt below just so you can get a flavor for the writing. You can find longer excerpts at Vanity Fair and Business Insider. And I really do appreciate Silver Bulletin subscribers who purchase the book, and leave ratings and reviews. Even with all the other media Penguin has me doing, Silver Bulletin readers move the needle like nothing else.
The first two paragraphs
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, glimmering guitar-shaped hotel that shoots beams of neon blue twenty thousand feet into the sky. Like most casinos—like most things in South Florida—the Hard Rock is designed to overwhelm your senses and undermine your inhibitions. Picture in your head. If you haven’t been to a place like the Hard Rock or 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 winning back twice over.
Any book events in NYC?
I'm a long-term FiveThirtyEight reader, and I just started reading On the Edge.
As someone who grew up in a very academic environment (father a tenured history professor) who has worked in tech (robotics) in coastal cities for the last couple decades, I think the Village vs. River metaphor perfectly captures the difference between the risk-averse academic environment and risk-embracing high-tech startup culture.