Nate Silver on Life’s Mixed Strategies
Conversations with Tyler
Conversations with Tyler
4.8 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 13 August 2025
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In his third appearance on Conversations with Tyler, Nate Silver looks back at past predictions, weighs how academic ideas such as expected utility theory fare in practice, and examines the world of sports through the lens of risk and prediction.
Tyler and Nate dive into expected utility theory and random Nash equilibria in poker, whether Silver's tell-reading abilities transfer to real-world situations like NBA games, why academic writing has disappointed him, his move from atheism to agnosticism, the meta-rationality of risk-taking, electoral systems and their flaws, 2028 presidential candidates, why he thinks superforecasters will continue to outperform AI for the next decade, why more athletes haven't come out as gay, redesigning the NBA, what mentors he needs now, the cultural and psychological peculiarities of Bay area intellectual communities, why Canada can't win a Stanley Cup, the politics of immigration in Europe and America, what he'll work on next, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded July 23rd, 2025.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, |
| 0:09.4 | bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. |
| 0:13.5 | Learn more at Mercadis.org. |
| 0:15.7 | For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, |
| 0:20.4 | visit Conversationswithtyler.com. |
| 0:27.4 | Hello, everyone, and welcome to Conversations with Tyler. |
| 0:31.3 | Today I'm chatting with Nate Silver, live in New York. |
| 0:34.8 | We are here to commemorate the paperback edition of Nate's On the Edge, |
| 0:39.2 | The Art of Risking Everything, a book that last year I described sincerely as absolute fun on |
| 0:45.2 | every page. We're also going to revisit some of our earlier predictions from a year ago and nine |
| 0:50.8 | years ago and talk about everything I want to talk about. Nate, welcome. |
| 0:55.3 | Tyler, always a pleasure. At current margins, do you learn anything from studying expected |
| 1:00.2 | utility theory? Well, I mean, I probably spend a tenth of my time playing poker, and like, |
| 1:06.9 | certainly in that respect, you're quite explicit about calculating things like that, right? But are you learning new ideas, new theories, new concepts, or are you just applying what you learned, say, 13 years ago, whenever? No, I feel, it still feels fresh to me. I mean, I, you know, I think, so when I've talked about the book to people, people kind of understand the expected value part, right? That's like easily explicable to like economics 101 people. |
| 1:28.9 | I think the equilibrium part that, you know, solve for the equilibrium is something that people |
| 1:32.7 | don't get as much. It's like, what's the equivalent that should emerge given everyone has |
| 1:37.4 | their incentives to play this hand optimally, so to speak, right? Or everyone has different |
| 1:41.9 | incentives, but they're all being rational in some |
| 1:44.5 | capacity. Like that kind of thing I think about a lot when it comes to even like online discourse, |
| 1:49.7 | for example. You know, why are people behaving a certain way on Twitter or X, for example? |
| 1:54.7 | It's a random Nash equilibrium. Do you take that seriously? It seems to hold with soccer |
| 1:59.0 | kicks, right? But in poker, anything you do, do you ever use the concept? |
... |
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