The Only Rational Thing We Do

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

If you give people a lot of stocks to pick from, they're not going to use e the uni portfolio theory. Tey tend locate non rationally, not using the gausanc and er anderand i m m,. My revote that it's the only rational thing we do. And when i saw aa criticism of the vesansacess irrational, i realized. Infact, imay want the very simple, simplest evidence. Take how many stocks we have listed to day. We have less the ten thousand stocks listed in america. So here you have ten thousand, ok. You e tta ten thousand stocks, okits going to be dominated overr

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.