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

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

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Today is April 26, 2010, and my guest is Nassim Taleb, authorful by randomness and the black

swan. Nassim, welcome back to econtalk.

Well, thanks for inviting me again. This is my third visit and every time and every time

something develops between two visits. That's great.

And I think that I've had between the last visit and this conversation the most, it has

been the most interesting period in my entire life.

Well, our topic today is a new essay you've written that is going to be the epilogue to a

new edition of the black swan that's coming out in two weeks and in Europe it'll be a standalone

book. It's a post-mortem of sorts on the book and the events of the last two years in

light of the black swan's ideas. The essay is filled with interesting ideas, and I want

to start with the idea that the crisis of 2008 was uninteresting to you, which puts you

in a very small group. Most people think it is a landmark world-changing milestone of

a negative sort, but something that we have to learn from, et cetera, and you have a different

perspective.

Yes, I mean, I learned more from the crisis of 1987 from the fuck market question 1987

than anything else. And, you know, that we had an uplier, a very severe uplier, than

the world was more robust at the time, but it was still much more significant than event

...