Education Bookcast

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a former options trader who noticed that the financial markets were unstable ahead of the crash in 2008, and made a lot of money from shorting the market (betting that it would crash). Since then, he has written a quadrilogy of books on risk and decision-making under uncertainty which he calls the incerto. The books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Antifragile, and the one I cover in this episode, Skin in the Game. At least two of his books - The Black Swan and Antifragile - have now made it as concepts and vocabulary of popular parlance.  Taleb is a very well-read and insightful author. He follows a philosophy of education in the extremes - a combination of long library visits and street fights, to paraphrase his own description. More accurately, he spent much of his teenage years reading stacks of books at home while bombs went off outside, as he was a civilian during the Lebanese Civil War. His writing has generated a following, and his erudition inspired me