Tag Archives: EconTalk

Nassim Taleb & Russ Roberts Live at the PowerHouse — Wednesday, November 28, 7-9PM

Wednesday, November 28, 7–9 PM

The powerHouse Arena · 37 Main Street (corner of Water & Main St.) · DUMBO, Brooklyn

For more information, please call 718.666.3049

TICKETS $15

International bestseller Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan) drops by powerHouse Arena to celebrate the launch of Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder: a look at how stress and tension lead to healthy societies. Russ Roberts will join the author in conversation. The $15 ticket price can be applied towards purchase of the featured title.

via Book Launch: Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb — Wednesday, November 28, 7-9PM.

May 2010 Nassim Taleb Interview with Russ Roberts EconTalk.org

This is the third Russ Roberts Econtalk.org interview which took place just before the April 2010 release of the second edition of The Black Swan.

2010 Taleb on Black Swans, Fragility, and Mistakes.

Very interesting to listen to all three interviews in sequence.
2007

2009

EconTalk – Taleb on Black Swans (2007)

Don’t know how I missed having this in here. NNT lists this as one of his favorite interviews as well.
From the highly addictive and always excellent EconTalk.org. (iTunes subsrciption link here. 2007 2008)

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. In Mediocristan, events are generated by a underlying random process that is normally distributed. These events are often physical and observable and they tend to cluster around the middle. Most people are near the average height and no adult is more than nine feet tall. But in Extremistan, the right-hand tail of events is thick and long and the outlier, the seemingly wildly unlikely event is more common than our experience with Mediocristan would indicate. Bill Gates is more than a little wealthier than the average. The civil war in Lebabon or the events of 9/11 were more worse than just a typical bad day in the Beirut or New York City. 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.

Play

EconTalk -Taleb on the Financial Crisis

Nassim Taleb talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the financial crisis, how we misunderstand rare events, the fragility of the banking system, the moral hazard of government bailouts, the unprecedented nature of really, really bad events, the contribution of human psychology to misinterpreting probability and the dangers of hubris. The conversation closes with a discussion of religion and probability.