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

'The River may have given us SBF, but geopolitics gave us Mao and Stalin and Putin.' (Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)

'The River may have given us SBF, but geopolitics gave us Mao and Stalin and Putin.' (Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)


August 20, 2024   5 mins

Risk for me is an occupational hazard. Why would I film myself running through a front line in eastern Ukraine to a soundtrack of roaring shells and my own cardio-averse panting? (Hint: it’s not the money, trust me.) What would make the Ukrainian government order a few thousand soldiers to barrel across the border and invade the Russian Oblast of Kursk? What drives volunteers in Syria to pull bodies from rubble while Russian and Assadist forces continue to strike them overhead? These are three very different cases, and the answers are varied and numerous — but all are informed by a particular attitude to risk.

Nate Silver’s compelling new book, Living on the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, is ostensibly about mathematical risk, and how it can be understood and used to benefit society accordingly. But I think it’s more about something else: the way we live today. It’s the book Trollope might have written if he had spent his life not as a post office employee but gambling, reading libertarian philosophers and hanging around on the underbelly of 4Chan and Reddit.

The first thing to understand about Silver, best known for his polling website FiveThirtyEight, is that politics does not come naturally to him. As he tells us: “I played poker professionally before I ever wrote a word about politics or built an election model. I still feel more at home in a casino than at a political convention.”

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).

“If the River esteems poker players, hedge funders and venture capitalists, its emperors are Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Elon Musk — all college dropouts.”

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.


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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Right-Wing Hippie
Right-Wing Hippie
3 months ago

It’s not that the Village is risk-averse, it’s just that they prefer to gamble with other people’s money.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
3 months ago

Clever comment, but I think not correct. If you don’t have “skin in the game”, you aren’t meaningfully taking any risk. In that case, heads you win, tails the tax (or rent) payer loses.

RA Znayder
RA Znayder
3 months ago

To some degree that also seems to go for many of the big names that made it. If you dig a little you find they rarely actually come from average backgrounds. This allows them to take more risks than the average person.
Moreover, the the economy has been on the central bank lifeline for some time now. One way this can be explained is that we all pay for the gambling class.

Jim Veenbaas
Jim Veenbaas
3 months ago

Very enjoyable essay.

Malcolm Webb
Malcolm Webb
3 months ago

Fascinating article. Thank you. It occurs to me that all politicians are gamblers seeking to implement their plans for society, be it at local, national or international level. The problem is that too often they do this without rigorous research and understanding and more in the basis of hubristic hunches. I would cite the energy policies of most countries in Europe as a good example of this.

Andrew Fisher
Andrew Fisher
3 months ago
Reply to  Malcolm Webb

Yes but there are limits to the extent we can “research” things we haven’t done before! The elevation of “planning” above anything else led to the Soviet Union falling decades behind the West, despite the fact they had good scientists. This is a big problem of authoritarian societies in which leaders’ priority is to maintain control at all costs.

We sometimes inevitably HAVE to take risks; a negative decision to NOT take some novel action is also a decision, and incurs risk of its own. The “precautionary principle” taken to extremes would mean absolutely no progress could be made in any field. David Deutsch the scientific philosopher is brilliant on this kind of thing.

Malcolm Webb
Malcolm Webb
3 months ago
Reply to  Andrew Fisher

I agree entirely and had not meant to imply that risks and new ways should never be taken. The research should also include looking from what we can learn from others. Too often our horizons are too limited (often to our own backyard).

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
3 months ago
Reply to  Malcolm Webb

Great comments both, and add to the article which only someone like DP – someone who’s run the gauntlet of bombs and bullets in a warzone, but who also has a much wider range of interests – could have written.
Well done, Unherd.

Dermot O'Sullivan
Dermot O'Sullivan
3 months ago

At the start of the school year a headmaster would always go into the, largely ignored, ‘D’ classroom and give them a little pep talk:
‘You see those guys over there in the ‘A’ class – they will be working for you in a few years time.’

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
3 months ago

That could be true in more than one respect.
Those ‘D’ classers could be budding entrepreneurs (setting up, for instance, a building firm that employed the ‘A’ classers as architects) or… they could be living a state-subsidised subsistence lifestyle funded by the tax revenues generated by the ‘A’ classers.

Peter B
Peter B
3 months ago

Certainly an interesting read.
But I’m not sure this characterisation of Gates, Musk and co is quite correct. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to describe them as simply nonconformists ? And split SBF off into a separate “crooks” category ?
Gates is far more of a calculator than a gambler (he plays bridge rather than poker). Does he really have that much in common with SBF ?
I also struggle to see just how Musk is an incel. He’s got 12 children.
The tone of the article suggesting these people have no people skills also seems wrong. You can’t build large businesses like they have without some.

J Bryant
J Bryant
3 months ago
Reply to  Peter B

I also struggle to see just how Musk is an incel. He’s got 12 children.
I was also struck by the incel characterization in this article. I suppose the counterargument is Musk is an extremely wealthy incel and money is an aphrodisiac.

Edwin Blake
Edwin Blake
3 months ago

Very interesting. There is another group who are very fond of risk taking: psychopaths. Their lack of feelings seems to oblige risk taking for a bit of excitement. They also rise up in hierarchies, and make it as politicians and plutocrats. Bankman-Fried seemed like one.

Jonathan Nash
Jonathan Nash
3 months ago

).

Stuart Maister
Stuart Maister
3 months ago

Thank you. This is the kind of article for which I subscribe to UnHerd. Really interesting.

RA Znayder
RA Znayder
3 months ago

Interesting hypotheses. It immediately reminds me of Nietzsche who argues that we should strive to become the “overman” instead of the risk-averse “last man”. That said, without having read the book I feel the author perhaps tries too hard to squeeze these hypotheses and modern examples in an overarching narrative?
The first thing that comes to mind is that we did indeed turned our economy in a big casino in the late 70s, probably way too much. We swapped a lot of real production and fundamental research for purely speculative practices, that on paper seem to generate a lot of wealth. But do they really? Or are they incentivizing overly risky behavior, short term gains and even scams, while the system is increasingly rigged? I would say 2008 points in this direction. FTX is just an extreme example of what is going on all the time in our hyper-financialized world.
For this reason I would also point out that many people, such as academics, indeed do not follow the pattern of the risk-taking “rivermen” at first glance. Yet some of them were probably a lot more influential than many of the examples the author names. Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Oppenheimer and the Bell Labs scientists. Just a few examples of people who truly laid the foundation of our technological age. I would not be surprised that in 100 years we still consider them much more influential than someone who made facebook. In that sense I think “tech bros” are a product of our hyper-financialized casino culture, not the other way around. But perhaps that was exactly the point the author tried to made.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
3 months ago
Reply to  RA Znayder

Those you cite as academics weren’t what we currently think of as academics, i.e. tenured funding-chasers looking to maintain a career by chasing the zeitgeist.

Those guys were ahead of their time, acheived fame by ‘thinking outside the box’ and – even where they were attached to a specific academic institution – maintained a level.of independence that may or may not be possible since the monetisation of academe.

Michael Clarke
Michael Clarke
3 months ago

What is depressing about reading this interesting piece is that while the world gets more complex and dangerous, humans remain decidedly human. We evolved as a (decidedly aggressive) species for a very different world where human proclivities could do a lot of damage but not as much as they can do today.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago

The point about sex differences is interesting. It is an empirically observed phenomena that women are significantly more risk-averse than men, largely because women tend to react more negatively to losses, and thus weigh the cost-benefit of risk differently. Hard to definitively say whether this is nature or nurture, but as with all most such differences I lean towards it being more nature. We’d see more heterogeneity between cultures otherwise, and there are evolutionary reasons you’d expect females to be more risk averse. (Obligatory ‘not all women’ disclaimer, statistical averages are not individual rules…)
This has all kinds of consequences. It partly explains both more men in finance as well as more men in crime. And the significantly higher mortality rates men experience for basically every category of death by misadventure.