King Louis XII was told soon after he came to the throne that he should now punish his enemies who had done him so much wrong when he was the Duke of Orleans; and he replied that it was not the concern of the King of France to avenge the injuries done to the Duke of Orleans. [Baldassare Castiglione, Il libro del cortegiano]

I’ve never met any man with both an interesting conversation and an expensive watch.

We tend to underestimate others’ ability to destroy themselves.

Shared by JohnH

Nice Find! HatTip to Dave Lull.

Before that, he’s writing his next one-man show, Why There is No Hope, a ‘cutting-edge’ satirical production based on philosopher and finance mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan theory about unexpected events of large magnitude. Popularised in the aftermath of the credit crunch, Taleb’s theory for Cleese essentially boils down to the idea that we can never predict the unexpected and that so-called experts are invariably ‘hopeless’. ‘The implication is that there’s no hope if we go on the way we are, and that kind of research lends itself to very funny conclusions. [Taleb] is an unbearably vain main of course, but what he says is absolutely fantastic.’

Formal Map of Antifragility (technical)