The men who risk everything Gambling and geopolitics require the same skill

From this starting point, Silver guides us through his world, a particular group of people who he describes as living in “the River”. Poker players, he explains, love water metaphors, and the River is full of “tributaries and niches” inhabited by various types who have indeed spent their lives in the underbelly of the internet and, most importantly for Silver, in casinos. Often, they have played poker for huge sums of money. But the River also has “a canon of influences and ideas”. These range from “game theory and Nash equilibria to expected value and marginal utility” and various other things you have only dimly heard of.

These are people obsessed with numbers, especially ideas of probability so important to games like poker (the book’s first section is all about gambling). This has several effects, not least that it all makes you live a certain way. River people like Silver are “EV maximizers” (“expected-value maximizers”): Rivermen (and, as Silver points out, the River’s inhabitants are overwhelmingly men) take an analytical, strategic approach to gambling, investing and other aspects of life, trying to calculate the most optimal “play” in any given situation. This leads them down some curious paths, not least when Silver considers whether it’s “EV maximizing” to have fries with your sandwich or opt for the healthy side salad. “It might,” he concludes, “depend on how good the fries are.”

For the River, sacred places are not Harvard Yard or the Capitol, but Las Vegas, a “shrine to risk-taking, excess, progress, and capitalism”. All of this is, of course, an affront to what Silver calls “the Village”, which “consists of people who work in government, in much of the media, and in parts of academia (although perhaps excluding some of the more quantitative academic fields such as economics). It has distinctly Left-of-centre politics associated with the Democratic Party.” It is, in other words, the River’s nemesis.

See what’s happening here? Almost all that the Village, shorthand for the established elites, has traditionally prized is viewed by the River with scepticism, not least elite higher education. And this is probably no surprise. It’s hard to think of places that would be less welcoming to Rivermen. More than this, if the River esteems poker players, hedge funders and venture capitalists (gamblers of a different stripe), its emperors are Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Elon Musk — all college dropouts (Musk, admittedly, only at postgraduate level).

What emerges is by now familiar: suspicion of “experts” or “elites” — and the desire to disrupt, or more correctly, take an axe to them. Confrontation is unavoidable. As Silver writes: “Harvard is the grand cathedral atop the hill — there is no more quintessentially Village institution.” So, when hedge funders such as Bill Ackman, rightly enraged by Harvard President Claudine Gay’s tawdry failures to condemn calls for genocide against Jews as hate speech, led the successful drive to remove her, it was “a symbolic coup” for the River. (“Want another sign that the Village and the River are explicitly at war?” Silver asks. “The New York Times’s copyright lawsuit against OpenAI.) VCs, Tech titans, data scientists, hedge funders — these are the master-gamblers of Silver’s universe. As he concludes: “The quants won… We’re living in their world.”

Naturally, this can be problematic. First off, revolutionaries almost always curdle into the despised elites they worked so hard to overthrow. Considering the market dominance of Venture Capital firms, Silver concedes that “if success is concentrated only among a few elite firms… to the point where they essentially can’t lose, then VC is becoming more and more like the incumbent institutions that Silicon Valley would deign to disrupt”. The Ivy League’s elite capture doesn’t disappear; it’s merely replaced by that of Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Google and Tesla.

And who are these people? Well, many of them are just Riverman who hit the jackpot. Elon Musk may be a first-rate engineer and businessman, but he’s also an example of what happens when an incel makes $200 billion.

Back in the day, to amass a fortune as an industrialist or oil baron, you had to at least deal with people. Now, the Masters of the Universe are more comfortable with code than conversation. A few years ago, I watched Mark Zuckerberg launch the metaverse, which he did while performatively “chatting” with a grinning — and to my mind clearly terrified — young woman. It was just weird.

Silver understands this. “In the River, it’s common to find people, like Elon Musk or the poker player Daniel ‘Jungleman’ Cates, who self-identify as having Asperger’s syndrome or autism,” he writes. “It’s also common to hear people refer to themselves or others with terms like ‘Aspie’… Depending on the context, this may be derogatory, but it isn’t always so.” For the River, this is more of a cultural marker than a medical diagnosis. What the mainstream views with suspicion or does not understand becomes a source of pride. What it prizes, like Ivy League universities, the River eschews.

The problem with gambling and risk is that, in irresponsible hands, it can be catastrophic. Silver tells the story of Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto-king turned felon. SBF, he writes, is “a nerdy, overconfident, Adderall-popping, video-game-playing, youngish white guy who has a severe gambling problem and is probably somewhere on the autism spectrum”. This makes him “a common typology” for the River. But he is also a crook, which Silver well understands. SBF’s problem was that he could mouth all the platitudes about EV, Effective Altruism, Rationalism and all other River obsessions — one consequence of reading this book is that I finally understand Dominic Cummings’s blogs — but it made no difference. It’s not even that he didn’t understand risk: he just didn’t care.

So why did so many stats-literate, data-munching, probability-obsessed altruists and tech bros fall under his spell? Once more the answer centres on ideas about the way we live, or rather the way the River seeks to live, and how it will ultimately always fall short of its loftiest aspirations. You can try to game all aspects of life, seek out the EV in every situation, calculate the odds, run your models and algorithms, but in the end, you remain (for the moment at least) irreducibly human. In the words of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz when assessing the SBF disaster: “It must have been the cult of personality. I guess it’s the only explanation.”

And it’s sometimes the only explanation elsewhere, too. It’s no coincidence that gambling, geopolitics and war all centre on the effective calculation of risk. Of course, there are vast and obvious differences between them in terms of cost, scale and repercussion; not least because risk in gambling is typically confined to the realms of chance and individual choice, while geopolitics involves a vastly greater degree of multifaceted interaction and its consequences can be global.

But there is a similarity too: if many of today’s finest minds are gamblers, history has thrown its greatest thinkers at geopolitics. And even when the stakes are life and death, when the players are so various, the same patterns persist. The cult of personality moves history — and it does so repeatedly. The River may have given us SBF, but geopolitics gave us Mao and Stalin and Putin. This is the price of being human, and it will continue to be so. You can bet on it.

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David Patrikarakos is UnHerd‘s foreign correspondent. His latest book is War in 140 characters: how social media is reshaping conflict in the 21st century. (Hachette)

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