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EconTalk

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Antifragility

EconTalk

Library of Economics and Liberty

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4.74.3K Ratings

🗓️ 16 January 2012

⏱️ 74 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Nassim Taleb, author of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about antifragility, the concept behind Taleb's next book, a work in progress. Taleb talks about how we can cope with our ignorance and uncertainty in a complex world. Topics covered include health, finance, political systems, the Fed, your career, Seneca, shame, heroism, and a few more.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

0:13.9

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

0:21.2

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

0:26.5

other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org. We'd

0:33.6

love to hear from you. Today is December 19th, 2011, and my guest is Nasim Talab. His newest book is

0:45.4

Anti-Fragility. Nasim, welcome back to econtalk. Oh, thank you for inviting me. I remember I did my first

0:53.0

econ talk on the day of the release of the rex one. Oh, it's so nice. That's so fun. Now, this book is in

0:58.9

process. It's not finished. You estimate it's roughly a year away. So we're here to have a conversation

1:05.7

about a project that is in progress. And I know a lot of listeners out there are very jealous because

1:11.5

I've had the privilege of reading the manuscript. It's not the final book. It's it's in process, but

1:16.3

those you're out there excited, you're going to have to this will have to satisfy you for maybe

1:21.6

about a year. Okay, well, that's a good gestation period. Now, you start off with a very provocative idea,

1:30.2

which is the title of the books a little bit strange. It's I don't think it's a word in the English

1:35.3

language. Anti-fragility. And you start off by asking, what is the opposite of fragile? And of

1:42.3

course, we think we know what that is. The opposite of fragile is robust, you say. It might be

1:46.9

unbreakable, but you argue that's not really the right way to think about the opposite. It doesn't

1:51.6

capture what the essence of fragility. So why do we need another term? Because if you send a

1:57.4

package by mail to your cousin in Australia, and it has champagne glasses, you write fragile on it.

2:07.4

There's something that's robust. You don't write anything on a package. You don't say, you know,

2:11.5

I don't care. You can do whatever you want. So for the fragile, the upper bound is comes back

2:17.3

unharmed or gets the destination unharmed. And of course, it works as it's completely destroyed.

2:24.6

So that's the fragile. The robust has an upper bound of unharmed and a lower bound of unharmed.

...

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