Nate Silver Launches ‘Risky Business’ Podcast With Maria Konnikova From Pushkin & iHeartPodcasts

Peter White

May 2, 2024 at 11:30 a.m.·2 min read

EXCLUSIVE: Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight, and Maria Konnikova, the author of The Biggest Bluff, are launching a new weekly podcast about making good decisions — in poker, in politics, and in everyday life.

The pair, who are both journalists who moonlight as high-stakes poker players, are launching Risky Business.

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The series, which launches on May 16, comes from Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries and iHeartPodcasts.

It comes a year after Silver departed ABC News.

Silver is the founder and former editor-in-chief of political and statistical analysis site 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.

Konnikova, who has a doctorate in psychology, inadvertently became a professional poker player with over $500,000 in tournament winnings, while researching The Biggest Bluff.

The pair will both be competing at the World Series of Poker this year. Risky Business will cover poker, but Silver will also talk politics and polls ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Pushkin Industries is behind podcasts such as Against the Rules from Michael Lewis, Paul McCartney’s A Life in Lyrics, The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos and Broken Record.

Check out the trailer here.

“We’ll talk about the probabilities as well as tactics and strategy around politics and current events,” said Silver. “How do things like expected value or game theory affect the decisions that impact all of our lives?”

“When you play high-stakes poker you don’t just learn how to play cards, you learn how to think about the world,” Konnikova added. “You learn a clear, useful framework for making all kinds of hard decisions. In Risky Business we’ll help listeners understand this framework and learn to apply it to the decisions in their own lives.”

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