Yanis Varoufakis

speaker

1,142 appearances 3 recordings 2 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 3 May

Yanis Varoufakis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 187. Yanis Varoufakis: How The 2008 Crisis Revived Far-Right Populism · 3 May 2026 podcast

It's like, you know, trying to appoint as a field marshal somebody who's an excellent chess player.

You know, chess is good for training our mind to think logically, but it's not a substitute for actually knowing how to conduct a war, right?

The story starts with that master's thesis of mine.

So in that master's thesis, there was no actual game being played because one side was optimizing and the other was resisting, whether it's the employers.

And then, of course, clearly, my critique of what I had done and what that professor from MIT had done is that both are smart.

And both are rational.

And both are trying to undermine the other, knowing that the other knows that they know that the other knows that they know that the other knows that everybody's trying to undermine everyone.

And that's a game.

So that got me into game theory.

And I was astonished by the aesthetic beauty of the mathematics of game theory.

Well, I'll tell you why it doesn't apply to real life.

The mathematics is so complex that in order to solve the problem,

You need to make assumptions which take you away from anything like real life.

So, for instance, you need to assume that the player's beliefs are consistently aligned.

In other words, that nobody expects that it is possible for anyone to think that it is possible that my beliefs and your beliefs are not aligned.

Now, take this.

the Ayatollah and Trump, is there any chance that that axiom can ever hold?

None whatsoever.

So you have a mathematical model that cannot be solved under realistic conditions and can only be solved under conditions which are very interesting philosophically, but which are completely useless in the real world.

Probably that is a major understatement.

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