Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Christian Guru Murphy. This is the

podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their lives

and the events that have helped shape them. My guest this week is Nate Silver.

Now Nate became famous, I guess, as the guy whose political predictions and polling analysis we all wanted to read in the US elections around 2008 and then 2012.

He was the founder of 538, which was a brand that went through various different

ownership and versions, and he is now actually left. And Nate now does a

sub-stack, which is a blog in old money called the Silver Bulletin in which he

still does political analysis and sort of probability predictions of what's going to happen in the

November elections but he's here because he has written a book called On the Edge,

the art of risking everything, which is really a sort of a return

to who you were before you were famous politics,

which was a gambler, and looking at people who take risks

professionally I suppose because they are they are the modern masters of the

universe and they are the people who have a huge influence over modern politics.

For sure if you look at the skill set that is present in Wall Street or Silicon Valley or Las

Vegas, A, it's becoming the dominant skill set financially, where those are the sexual economy, finance and tech

that grow as a part of the economy every year.

And B, in a data-driven world, that mindset

is very important.

It's not necessarily the abstract academic version of this.

It's actually having skin in the game and taking risk.

The physical thing that does to your body, the actual, you know, reputational risk that you're putting on the line and so

...