Nate Silver on Life's Mixed Strategies

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at Mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone and welcome to Conversations with Tyler.

Today I'm chatting with Nate Silver, live in New York. We are here to commemorate the paperback edition of Nate's On the Edge, The Art of Risking Everything, a book that last year I described sincerely as absolute fun on every page. We're also going to revisit some of our earlier predictions from a year ago and nine years ago and talk about Everything I want to talk about. Nate, welcome.

Tyler, always a pleasure. At current margins, do you learn anything from studying expected utility theory? Well, I mean, I probably spend a tenth of my time playing poker, and like 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.

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