In this episode of A Book with Legs, Cole Smead, CEO and Portfolio Manager at Smead Capital Management, sits down with Robert Winder to discuss his book, “Three Rivers: The Extraordinary Waterways That Created Europe.”
Robert Winder is the former literary editor of The Independent, where he ran the Independent Foreign Fiction Award for translated novels, and a former deputy editor of Granta. His earlier books include “Bloody Foreigners: The Story of Immigration to Britain,” which helped inspire the Migration Museum, where he was a founding trustee, and “The Last Wolf: The Hidden Springs of Englishness.” “Three Rivers” was named one of the Financial Times’ Best Books of 2025 and earned starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist and Shelf Awareness.
The conversation starts on a single mountain massif in the Swiss Alps where the Rhine, the Rhone and the Ticino, which feeds the Po, are born, and follows them to three different seas. Topics include why the Rhine became both Europe’s superhighway and its most contested border, how the word “rivalry” traces back to rivers, and why Basel, with one of the only early bridges between the Alps and the sea, became a center of printing and Reformation ideas. Winder also covers the 1882 opening of the Gotthard Tunnel, the 1818 glacier flood in the Rhone Valley, Switzerland’s iodine campaign against goiter, and the “year without a summer” that gave the world “Frankenstein.”
Through a business and markets lens, Cole and Robert discuss geography as the first mental model, or what Winder calls the invisible hand that shapes everything else. They look at who gets rich at choke points, how the monastic hospices on Alpine passes may have planted the seeds of Swiss banking’s custodial culture, and how Switzerland’s early bet on hydropower helped shelter it from the oil shocks of the 1970s. They also discuss why the farmers living beside the glaciers understood them long before the professors did, and why investors with close knowledge of what they own can have an edge.
“Three Rivers: The Extraordinary Waterways That Created Europe,” published by Pegasus Books, is available now: https://pegasusbookstore.com/book/9798897101627
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