The author and philosopher and the Ogilvy Group UK vice-chairman join John Plunkett at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity to discuss how ideas relating to resilience, uncertainty, randomness and variation can apply to the advertising industry. They look at how the ’80/20′ theory of resource allocation can lead to disproportionate gains for minimal risk
Category: Videos
[VIDEO] Nassim Taleb with Rory Sutherland on Nudgestock at Digital Shoreditch Festival 2013
[VIDEO] Nassim Taleb Stanford Lecture
Here is the video from the Nassim Taleb Stanford Entrepreneurial Lecture Series posted earlier in audio format.
In this seminar, entrepreneurial leaders share lessons from real-world experiences across entrepreneurial settings. Speakers include entrepreneurs, leaders from global technology companies, venture capitalists, and best-selling authors. Half-hour talks are followed by a half hour of class interaction.
Learn More: http://stanford.io/V5YQ0b
Nassim Taleb on the role of religion
This is a response to an audience member at Nassim’s talk at Concordia University…
[VIDEO] Nassim Nicholas Taleb talk at Concordia University
The Department of Political Science and Loyola College for Diversity and Sustainability present Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a world renowned author and scholar who will discuss his work on uncertainty, randomness, and disorder outlined in his new book: Antifragile. Taleb’s works focuses on decision making under uncertainty, as well as technical and philosophical problems with probability and metaprobability, in other words “what to do in a world we don’t understand”
http://concordia.ca/now
Video: Nassim Taleb, Niall Ferguson, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Pepsico Indra Nooyi, Moderated by Walter Isaacson
This debate with Niall Ferguson, CEO of Pepsico Indra Nooyi was detailed in the chapter “The Antifragility and Ethics of (Large) Corporations” in Antifragile. Google CEO Eric Schmidt joined the discussion towards the end. Walter Isaacson moderates.
BBC News – Meet the Author with Nick Higham: Nassim Taleb On Disorder, Variability & Banking Crises
Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote a book called ‘The Black Swan’ which was about randomness and the inevitability of improbable, unpredictable but hugely disruptive events like the banking crash of 2008. Taleb, a derivatives trader, made a great deal of money out of that and other crashes by prudently investing on the assumption that something would go wrong even though nobody knew what that was. He talks about his follow-up book called ‘Anti-fragile: How to live in a world we don’t understand’
(Taleb)
“Once you define fragility as one who does not like volatility and variability, and for statistical reasons you can, then the exact opposite is something that loves volatility, gains from disorder, variability, stresses and similar phenomena. This category of object doesn’t have a name, it is not resilient, it is not robust, it is something beyond. A lot of things require disorder and variability to function [Beautiful]. And of course we are harming by depriving them of disorder and variability”.[Systems that appear to be robust, like the banking system, are in fact fragile?]
“Exactly. There are systems where the errors are small and systems where the errors are large. In a transport system, an accident lowers the probability of another accident. We never let an error go to waste. On the other hand the banking system, the failure of a bank makes the next bank failure more likely. It is not a healthy system”.
[In a world of big top-down organisations it is very difficult to organize?]
“It is actually simple. You can come up with single rules. The big thing for me is to transfer fragility from the individual to the system. Skin in the game. You get harmed by your mistake. A bureaucrat in Whitehall is not harmed, but if you live in a village you feel you’ve made a mistake. You have this kind of shame checking you. Decentralisation is a must. Mathematically I show how size compounds mistakes.” [Amazing]
[VIDEO] Nassim Taleb and Daniel Kahneman at The New York Public Library (NYPL) 2013
The video is now out of the NYPL talk between Nassim and Daniel (audio version posted here).
Nassim Taleb at the National Science Foundation (NSF) talk Fragility, Robustness and Antifragility
Reason.tv: Nassim Taleb Talks Antifragile, Libertarianism, and Capitalism’s Genius for Failure
Taleb doesn’t identify as a libertarian, but he often sounds like one. He has argued that we need to build a society where major actors have “skin in the game” and our public intellectuals can bloviate without subjecting the rest of us to the consequences of their bad ideas. He supported Ron Paul in the 2012 presidential election and has cited the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek as an influence.
Taleb has called New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman “vile and harmful” and coined the phrase the “Stiglitz Syndrome” after Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, which refers to the phenomenon of public intellectuals being held utterly unaccountable for their bad predictions. Paul Krugman and Paul Samuelson are among Taleb’s other Nobel laureate bête noires.
Antifragile: Things That Gain from DisorderTaleb’s new book is Antifragile: Things that Gain with Disorder, which argues that in order to create robust institutions we must allow them to build resilience through adversity. The essence of capitalism, he argues, is encouraging failure, not rewarding success.
Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Taleb for a wide-ranging discussion about why debt leads to fragility (5:16); the importance of “skin in the game” to a properly functioning financial system (10:45); why large banks should be nationalized (21:47); why technology won’t rule the future (24:20); the value of studying the classics (26:09); his intellectual adversaries (33:30); why removing things is often the best way to solve problems (36:50); his intellectual influences (39:10); why capitalism is more about disincentives than incentives (43:10); why large, centralized states are prone to fail (44:50); his libertarianism (47:30); and why he’ll never take writing advice from “some academic at Cambridge who sold 2,200 copies” (51:49).
Produced by Jim Epstein; camera by Epstein and Anthony L. Fisher.
Approximately 56 minutes.
Go to http:// reason. com/ reasontv/ 2013/ 01/ 20/ interview- with- nassim- nicholas- taleb for downloadable versions and subscribe to Reason TV’s YouTube Channel to receive automatic updated when new material goes live.