Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Black Swans

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 30 April 2007

⏱️ 84 minutes

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Summary

Nassim Taleb talks about the challenges of coping with uncertainty, predicting events, and understanding history. This wide-ranging conversation looks at investment, health, history and other areas where data play a key role. Taleb, the author of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan, imagines two countries, Mediocristan and Extremistan where the ability to understand the past and predict the future is radically different. Taleb's contention is that we often bring our intuition from Mediocristan for the events of Extremistan, leading us to error. The result is a tendency to be blind-sided by the unexpected.

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
0:15.0	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website
0:20.2	is econtalk.org where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast,
0:26.9	find links and other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is
0:32.0	mailadicontalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.
0:38.2	My guest today is Nasim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled By Randomness and the Black Swan.
0:44.7	Two rather remarkable books about the role of chance in our lives. Nasim, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:49.2	Hi. Now, you see, I understand your full-time job now is reading and living in your library.
0:55.2	How's that going? You get sometimes bored, so you have to have some business activities
1:00.6	and have a good travel agent other than that. It's not bad.
1:05.4	How many books are in your library? Roughly. I think that the number has been dropping
1:11.8	over the years. Why? Because the replacement, I mean, you get rid of stuff that you change
1:18.5	moves. You get rid of stuff. And my replacement rate has been not keeping up with my hand,
1:25.5	emptying it out. I mean, I have thousands, I'd say.
1:30.3	But not 30,000? No, no. Not like Umberto Econ. Nothing near Umberto Econ.
1:36.6	You say at the end of Fooled By Randomness, and this is a quote, we favor the visible,
1:41.5	the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible. We score in the abstract,
1:48.3	end of quote. Explain what you mean by that. It's the major theme of really both books.
1:53.6	It's mostly the like, I use that as a, what I realized at the end of the book, the black
2:00.0	one, the Fooled By Randomness, that hey, what am I all about? How can I link everything
2:11.3	I've been thinking about for the last X number of years, X number of decades? In one single
2:18.6	topic, one single theme. And then I realized, hey, you know, it is the confirmation bias.
	...

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