The Art of Risking Everything

Nate Silver argues that the world's sharpest minds share one trait: they calculate expected value while everyone else counts odds. In "On the Edge," he maps the River, an ecosystem linking poker grinders to crypto billionaires, venture capitalists to AI doomsayers. From John von Neumann's conviction that bluffing defines real games to Eliezer Yudkowsky's sub-one-percent survival estimate for humanity, Silver traces how probabilistic thinking built Las Vegas, bankrolled Silicon Valley, and collapsed Sam Bankman-Fried's empire in the Bahamas.

You'll learn:

- Why Nash equilibrium governs poker tables and prisoner's dilemmas alike

- How Steve Wynn's Mirage transformed gambling into a hospitality empire

- What SBF's coin-flip wager reveals about utilitarian reasoning gone rogue