CNN's John Sutter looks at a casino that lost close to 100 million dollars. He says the risks are destroyed by large numbers of people taking gambles. The risk is there as long as you have enough customers, he says. "I think most people would say, well, casino's an easy way to make money"
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.