Coming Soon... Risky Business with Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova

Launching on May 16, Risky Business is a weekly podcast about making better decisions. The hosts, Maria Konnikova and Nate Silver, are both journalists who moonlight as high-stakes poker players. On Risky Business, they bring their analytical framework to everything from politics to poker to personal decisions.

Maria has a PhD in psychology and is the author of several books including, most recently, The Biggest Bluff. While researching the book, she inadvertently became a professional poker player, with over $500,000 in tournament winnings. She is a PokerStars Team Pro.

Nate is the founder and former editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight, and one of the country’s leading election forecasters. He has over $800,000 in lifetime poker tournament winnings and his forthcoming book, On the Edge, is about gambling and risk.

Risky Business is a co-production of iHeart Media and Pushkin Industries.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey everyone, I'm Maria Kondakhova, I'm Nate Silver.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
And this is.

Speaker 1 (00:14):
I'm Maria Kondakova.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
I'm Nate Silver, and this issy Business.

Speaker 1 (00:19):
A show about making good decisions.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
We did it.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
We're so good, We're so smart. This podcast is going
to be amazing. So, Nate, I'm really excited to be
hosting this show with you because you're a statistician. You're
someone who comes at the world from a very rigorous, logical,
mathematical perspective, and I think that this is just such

(00:43):
a beautiful perspective to look at risk and risky decision making.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
And Maria, I'm excited to be hosting with you. I mean,
we're great friends. But you're also a PhD in psychology,
you've written multiple best selling books, you have worked for
The New Yorker. You're a little bit more even keel
than I am too, which sometimes is a great influence
on me.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
Plus, obviously, we're both poker players, and we've both won
and as you always point out, lost, yeap hundreds of
thousands of dollars in the world of poker tournaments. And
so that's a lens that we're going to be using
to approach this entire show, because poker isn't just about
playing cards, it's about making good decisions. It's about a

(01:22):
framework for thinking about the world and in risky business.
That's what we're going to be doing. We're going to
be helping our listeners understand decision making using this framework.
So what exactly are we going to be talking about. Well,
obviously we're going to be talking about poker and the
world of gambling, which includes sports betting and all of

(01:44):
that fun stuff. And you know, Nate, you and I
are both going to be at the World Series this summer,
so we'll be doing some shows from Vegas, tracking our
progress and doing some more personal shows from there.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
We'll be talking about politics and the news as well. Look,
unfortunately it's an election year. We'll talk about the probabilities
there as well as tactics and strategy around politics and
current events. How do things like expected value or game
theory affect decisions that affect all of our lives.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
And obviously we'll also be talking about kind of the
more personal elements psychology, philosophy, and the decisions that we
make in our daily lives that don't have anything to
do with the news but have everything to do with
Living well.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Risky Business comes out every Thursday starting May sixteenth. The
show is a co production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia
and it's available wherever you want to listen.