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From Fool Global Headquarters, this is Motley Fool Money.

Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Heldt. This week it's two of our favorite interviews.

Later in the show it's Rick Harrison, star of the hit TV show Pond Stars.

But we kicked things off with Nate Silver, formerly of the New York Times, now with ESPN.

We talked about his book, The Signal and the Noise. Why so many predictions fail, but some don't.

Nate, thanks for being here.

Yeah, thank you Chris.

The Rare in Studio Guest on Motley Fool Money. I love it.

Early in your book you write, we have a problem. We love to make predictions and we're not very good at it.

Why is that? Why are we bad at making predictions?

Well, I think maybe the first question is why do we enjoy making predictions so much?

I think it has to do with we have all these things that are uncertain in our lives.

When we feel that if only we could predict them then we exert more control.

Everything would be good.

Yeah, of course you could predict which stocks are going to increase by 50%.

Over the next five years and you'd have a very nice life eventually.

But the problem is that we aren't as good at using all this information that's out there as we think we are.

So what happens in prediction is you have you have data, information, juxtaposed against human judgment, right?

And often things go wrong when you have kind of hard facts and kind of our human intuitions collide together.

And so the book considers cases where there have been people who have achieved success making predictions.

But also cases where you see widespread failures like the failures that led to the financial crisis.

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