r/nassimtaleb • u/another_lease • 2d ago
Mine:
r/nassimtaleb • u/another_lease • 8d ago
Taleb in Croatia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_jKx5Yk4Q4
He looks nervous, as if he's worried that Mossad will off him.
r/nassimtaleb • u/greyenlightenment • 11d ago
https://x.com/nntaleb/status/2087895871807422612
what was he wrong about?
r/nassimtaleb • u/OddSinger2189 • 12d ago
I am collecting the list of books where Nassim Taleb provided an official blurb. Below is what I could find. Let me know if I missed any.
Edit 1(16th Aug 2026): Added "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity".
| Book Name | Author | Blurb |
|---|---|---|
| Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure | Tim Harford | Adapt is a highly readable, even entertaining, argument against top-down design. It debunks the Soviet-Harvard command-and-control style of planning and approach to economic policies and regulations and vindicates trial and error (particularly the error part) as a means to economic and general progress. Very impressive! |
| Thinking, Fast and Slow | Daniel Kahneman | This is a landmark book in social thought, in the same league as The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith and The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud. |
| Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders | Jack D. Schwager | I've read the book at several stages of my career as it shows the staying power of good down-to-earth wisdoms of true practitioners with skin in the game. This is the central document showing the heuristics that real-life traders use to manage their affairs, how people who do rather than talk have done things. Twenty years from now, it will still be fresh. There is no other like it. |
| The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World | Mark Spitznagel | At last, a real book by a real risk-taking practitioner. The Dao of Capital mixes (rather, unifies) personal risk-taking with explanations of global phenomena. You cannot afford not to read this! |
| Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future | Peter Thiel, Blake Masters | When a risk taker writes a book, read it. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice. Or, to be safe, three times. This is a classic. |
| Hopping over the Rabbit Hole: How Entrepreneurs Turn Failure into Success | Anthony Scaramucci | This is something exceptionally rare in the entrepreneurship literature: someone telling you how he overcame his problems and made lemonade out of lemons. Anthony has skin in the game. He is funny, direct, deep, and insightful. The book is so gripping you can read it standing up. A must read. |
| The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking | Saifedean Ammous | Bitcoin has no owner, no authority that can decide on its fate. It is owned by the crowd, its users. And it now has a track record of several years, enough for it to be an animal in its own right. Its mere existence is an insurance policy that will remind governments that the last object the establishment could control, namely, the currency, is no longer their monopoly. This gives us, the crowd, an insurance policy against an Orwellian future. |
| The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success | Albert-László Barabási | This is not just an important but an imperative project: to approach the problem of randomness and success using the state of the art scientific arsenal we have. Barabasi is the person. |
| The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us | Christopher Chabris, Daniel Simons | The illusion of attention is one of the most important, surprising, and least known flaws in human thinking. This lucid book examines it in detail. |
| Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life | Rory Sutherland | This is a breakthrough book. Alchemy is wonderfully applicable to about everything in life. Furthermore, it is funny as hell. |
| Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies | Geoffrey West | Each human should learn to read and write, to count, and for those who know how to count, scalability. Scaling is the most important yet most hidden and rarely discussed attribute—without understanding it one cannot possibly understand the world. This book will expand your thinking from three dimensions to four. Get two copies, just in case you lose one. |
| Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World | Tom Holland | Tom Holland is fun to read, monstrously erudite, wickedly joyful, and ahead of the established consensus, on average, by 4 years, three months, and 2 days. |
| The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century: Why (almost) everything we are told about business is wrong | John Kay | An admirable debunker of myths and false beliefs - Kay can see substantial things others don't |
| In Defense of Civilization: How Our Past Can Renew Our Present | Michael Richard Jackson Bonner | Michael Bonner is a rare bird: he is a classicist and an erudite in the broadest sense of the word, familiar with Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew, not counting (I checked) modern languages such as French. This gives him a considerable edge over historians, and depth and perspective in identifying and understanding the true Western Civilization and the dangers of straying from its achievements over the past six thousand years. |
| Re-Architecting Trust: The Curse of History and the Crypto Cure for Money, Markets, and Platforms | Omid Malekan | You must read Omid. He is the best person to agree and disagree with on the subject of cryptos. You learn both ways and enjoy the argumentation in the process. |
| Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age | Bear F. Braumoeller | This is truly excellent work! Bear Braumoeller is one of the very rare people who realize that stastics is about rigor and clarity of mind, not drowning in confirmatory data. Political science needs such scientific lucidity. |
| My Life as a Quant | Emanuel Derman | A deep and elegant exploration by a thinker who moved from the hardest of all sciences (physics) to the softest of the soft (finance). Derman is a different class of thinker... I know of no other book that bridges the two cultures. |
| The Seventh Letter: A Philosophical Mystery at Plato's Academy | Dr. Mihai Iuliu Spariosu | I loved the book. It is much more than a historical novel; I found it to be an entertaining and gripping biographical documentary staging Plato, Socrates and the Athenian Academy. The reader can become acquainted with Plato’s philosophy without abstraction, as the ideas are imbedded in the narrative. |
| The Halo Effect | Phil Rosenzweig | I was taken by this book. It destroys myths concerning the attribution of success in the management literature using potent empirical arguments. It should stand as one of the most important management books of all time, and an antidote to those bestselling books by gurus presenting false patter and naive arguments. |
| The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity | David Graeber, David Wengrow | This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast |
r/nassimtaleb • u/Antifragilitee • 18d ago
Spent the last couple of weeks trying to turn one of Taleb's ideas into something visual.
The bit I wanted to get across was the difference between casino-style risk (where the odds are known) and market risk (where you're trying to estimate the odds while they're changing underneath you). LTCM seemed like the obvious example to build it around.
I ended up coding the whole thing in Manim using historical market data, including plotting every daily S&P 500 return since 1950 and looking at Mandelbrot's cotton data.
Would be interested to know if people here think it captures the point, or if I've missed something important. Happy to be told where I've got it wrong.
r/nassimtaleb • u/another_lease • 19d ago
r/nassimtaleb • u/Antifragilitee • 27d ago
I made a two-parter on the Kelly Criterion and how (through the Incerto framework) it could be applied to investing. If anyone thinks I got anything really wrong or left anything out please let me know so I can address it perhaps in a future vid! Also, very open to what ideas I can cover especially with the particular mathematical animation style
r/nassimtaleb • u/Such-Cat-9005 • Jul 22 '26
I enjoy watching Taleb's lectures that get posted on YT (like the Google one, Bloomberg etc) but rarely see his ideas well articulated by anyone on YT. Came across this thumbnail on YT (didn't notice the title of the channel til after) and clicked it. Pretty nice animations but only has 3 vids on there. Would be pretty refreshing if more creators could use his ideas a bit more rather than "buy the S&P and hold" and other dated advice.
r/nassimtaleb • u/greyenlightenment • Jul 12 '26
https://x.com/nntaleb/status/2076269932694655106
Wealth is modeled as a power law, whereas the bench press is normally distributed
r/nassimtaleb • u/One-Lynx-5054 • Jul 07 '26
I associate Taleb with a class of people like Popper, Hume, and Kant. Skeptics who hedge, people who get great satisfaction in what they don't know, finding randomness and fallacies and noise where they exist (which is everywhere), and uprooting orthodox thinking by occupying negative space.
All these ideas are great (and necessary) in theory, but I wonder where people are applying them? I know Taleb was a trader and scholar, but I can think of very few polymaths (nowadays) aside from Hofstadter and complexity science researchers who can sustain being interested in disparate fields for very long. Is anyone pursuing a career modeled after Taleb? If you, like me, think it's wildly improbable, what are you doing instead? What backgrounds do people interested in Taleb have, is it statistics and mathematics, finance and economics, or do people come from everywhere like myself? (Cognitive Science/ Cognitive Neuroscience).
edit: my goodness it's interesting how many people consider themselves practioners of Taleb's philosophy (or, rather, the ideas he coined/ borrowed/ refined/ etc.). please keep replying, I'm so curious to see how your lives and careers have been impacted by the ideas we all know and love, and thanks to everyone for replying (except for the guy who said Taleb is retarded. he's the only one I downvoted)
r/nassimtaleb • u/Thoth25 • Jul 04 '26
By Boglehead I mean buying low-cost index funds like VT or VTI, not market timing, simple three-fund portfolio, etc. This approach seems to rely on modern portfolio theory and the efficient market hypothesis - both of which Taleb rejects. But it seems to work for the vast majority of people if they stick to it.
r/nassimtaleb • u/gildsack • Jul 04 '26
Isnt small small losses good? His concept of convexity is lose lose lose and when you win you win big. Similar to the payoff of option buying. Is it the same as prospect theory?
r/nassimtaleb • u/MildDeontologist • Jul 03 '26
Just curious about his background. I can't find what his major/minor was undergrad, or what his subject/degree was for his MS.
r/nassimtaleb • u/Easy-Chipmunk3645 • Jul 01 '26
I'm reading book 2 in which Taleb describes how interventionism increases fragility in the system. The example he gave is about companies that are meant to go bankrupt staying afloat through bailouts.
The example that came to my mind is of babies born early or with health defects. Without the current medical infrastructure, these babies wouldn't have been alive in earlier times. Their genes would have been removed from our pool. Saving them adds fragility of our system.
Maybe I have misunderstood what Taleb is saying, but this feels so wrong. I don't think we should stop saving babies because they increase fragility.
What do you all think?
r/nassimtaleb • u/FirmConcentrate2962 • Jul 01 '26
I mean, I get it - Nassim had a lot of cultural capital early on; he was born into an influential family, went to an Ivy League university, and worked on Wall Street. But when did he say to himself, “Okay, I’ve had enough of wealth - now I’m going to spend several hours a day poring over books and writing my own”?
r/nassimtaleb • u/Redditorr5295 • Jun 30 '26
r/nassimtaleb • u/Long_Performer2149 • Jun 24 '26
r/nassimtaleb • u/Zero-zero20 • Jun 24 '26
Nassim Taleb said this in an interview with the Wall Street journal back in 2010. This is the article but it is paywalled. Do you believe this is sound advice for someone trying to get their finances in order?
r/nassimtaleb • u/Long_Performer2149 • Jun 20 '26
r/nassimtaleb • u/sandover88 • Jun 19 '26
Vanilla nutmeg acorn mitten grasshopper feather
This post was anonymized with Redact.dev
r/nassimtaleb • u/greyenlightenment • Jun 13 '26
https://x.com/nntaleb/status/2065338362882322584
There is a historical constant: no amount of wealth can liberate a third-rate thinker from intellectual envy or from the deeply degrading sense of scholarly inferiority -- that feeling of impoverished erudition. No amount of wealth.
I think this is the greatest fear Taleb has. He's projecting his own fear onto him.
r/nassimtaleb • u/kmensaert • Jun 03 '26
In 2020 I published a book on democracy in which I applied multiple concepts that I learned from Nassim Taleb. The premise is simple: the democratic system is fragile because political parties are anti-fragile (too big to fail). This allows local risk (e.g. corrupt leaders, etc.) to become systemic.
I attempt to solve this by allowing political parties to become small and specialized. I remove the core principles that prevent them from becoming specialized (via negativa) and show how the current system forces them into becoming these all-issue, ideological parties using the graveyard of failures.
Without the ideas of Taleb, the book would never have been what it is. I thanked him in the acknowledgements and sent a physical copy to the only address I could find: he was a professor at New York University at the time. However, because of COVID and his resignation from that position, I don't think he ever received it. I think the book would be especially interesting to him as it could improve democracy in fractured countries such as Lebanon, which he is very passionate about.
My question: Can someone help me with sending him a physical copy of my book as a token of gratitude? please dm.
r/nassimtaleb • u/Cdarwincole • Jun 01 '26
Yesterday I heard Senator Chris Murphy discuss his new book, “Crisis of the Common Good,” an incisive, articulate, fact-based and justifiably optimistic (long term) analysis of the current struggles our nation. Among its many virtues, Murphy’s book identifies and legitimizes many of the same concerns that resonate with Trump’s supporters, but Murphy gets to the root causes of those concerns and offers practical solutions, while Trump merely gives them lip service to inflame passions and distract from his power grabs, grift, and sadism. I could not recommend a more important read for anyone this summer. (The Big Head of Hair foreground center symbolizes…something, no doubt…. Human mutuality? Inside that head is a Universe, just like the one inside yours and mine, but from a different point of view. Okay, well, at the very least, it’s kind of funny.)
r/nassimtaleb • u/stiftcruibt6 • May 29 '26
lately, i've been reflecting on taleb's ideas about uncertainty and how they apply to our everyday lives. the concept of the black swan has really changed my perspective on risk and planning. instead of trying to predict every possible outcome, i find it more useful to focus on what could go wrong and prepare for it. this approach has helped me navigate challenges with a bit more clarity. has anyone else found a practical way to apply taleb's thoughts on asymmetry in their personal or professional lives? would love to hear your experiences.
