Nassim Taleb's mentor proved Wall Street's math is a lie. Before black swans, Nassim Taleb had a teacher: Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals. His finding was brutal - in the textbook model, a "10-sigma" crash should happen once in millions of millions of years. In real markets, those days keep showing up. Over the last 100 years, almost all the money was made and lost in about 10 days. The rest barely mattered. "Only the very few rare events count. The rest hardly counts at all." "The bell curve doesn't just understate market risk - its assumptions are absurd." "Great fortunes were made in very few days. Great ruins happened in very few days." ~80 min, free. the mathematician who proved markets are rougher than anyone admits ↓

Nassim Taleb: the richest man in the Roman Empire woke up every morning pretending he was poor. Seneca had more to lose than to gain from his wealth - so he rehearsed losing it. Every so often he'd live on bread and water as if shipwrecked, just to make the downside familiar and harmless. That's the whole game, Taleb says: arrange your life so you have far more upside than downside - then randomness stops scaring you. "Make more when you're right than you lose when you're wrong - that's antifragile." "Always keep more upside than downside from random events." "The Stoics aren't unmoved by the world - only by bad events." ~70 min, free. the oldest trick for surviving a world you can't predict ↓

Daniel Kahneman: the day Saddam Hussein was captured, the same news "explained" both the bond market going up and going down. Treasuries rose - Bloomberg's headline said the capture made the world safer. Half an hour later treasuries fell -the new headline said the capture boosted appetite for risk. Same event, opposite stories. The market moved first; the pundits reverse-engineered a reason. That, he says, is how financial commentary actually works. "Our confidence comes from the coherence of the story - not the evidence behind it." "The conclusion comes first. Then we believe the arguments that support it." "System 1 is largely indifferent to the quality and amount of evidence." ~55 min, free. why the market's "explanations" are stories told after the fact ↓

Daniel Kahneman - the psychologist who won a Nobel in economics - spent his life proving one thing: your confidence is lying to you A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. The answer "10 cents" jumps to mind instantly. It's wrong (it's 5 cents) - and ~50% of students at Harvard, MIT and Princeton say it without checking. That gap is his whole point: the fast, intuitive mind builds a clean story from almost nothing, and the feeling of certainty has nothing to do with being right. "Confidence is a feeling, not a judgment." "Stock pickers can't develop intuition - there isn't enough regularity for it to form." "You can build a very coherent story out of very little information." ~45 min, free. how your mind fools you - from a man who studied it for 50 years ↓

Nassim Taleb sat down with Daniel Kahneman - two of the sharpest minds on risk ever - and the takeaway was blunt: stop trying to be smart Kahneman's prospect theory explains why almost nobody can do what Taleb does We're wired to hate the steady trickle of small losses his strategy needs - even when one huge win more than pays for all of them So you structure it the other way: tiny safe bets plus a few wild ones, never the comfortable middle. "You'd rather be antifragile than intelligent - any time." "Trial and error is really just trial with small error." "Make your gains in small bites. Take your losses all at once." ~1 hr, free. two legends on risk, prediction, and how to win without forecasting ↓

Nassim Taleb helps run one of the most famous crash funds on earth. His edge: having no idea what's coming He and Spitznagel buy far out-of-the-money options non-stop, regardless of the news. They never forecast the crash - they just stay positioned so one shock pays for years of small losses ~10% a year in normal times. ~3,700% in a single crisis month "We have absolutely no notion of the future. We just buy the options." "If you have a reason in mind to buy an option, don't - it'll already be priced in." "Up the escalator, down the elevator." ~25 min, free. how the world's most famous crash-trader actually makes money ↓

Nassim Taleb: the bigger something gets, the more fragile it becomes. Jump off a 1-meter ledge ten times - you're fine. Jump 10 meters once - you're dead. Size works the same way. One giant bank dumping €50B moved the market 12% and lost billions. Ten small banks dumping €5B each would've lost almost nothing. "An elephant breaks a leg when it falls. A mouse doesn't." "The best predictor of a company's bankruptcy is steady earnings." "Don't cross a river that's on average four feet deep." ~40 min, free. why small, jagged and distributed outlives big, smooth and centralized ↓

Ron Baron's firm put ~$2 billion into SpaceX since 2017. It's now a ~$15 billion stake - and the 83-year-old just ordered $1 billion more at the IPO He's made his clients roughly $20 billion on Elon's companies alone, and says he plans to never sell a share in his lifetime his long-term call is almost absurd: "I think the company is going to be worth $10 trillion, $20 trillion, $30 trillion - and I could be low." Starlink becomes the internet for the whole planet, plus data centers in space - "free electricity, free cooling once you get into space." he says Anthropic already rents SpaceX compute for $1.25 billion a month ~40 min, free. a legendary growth investor laying out the most aggressive bull case on the planet ↓

Nassim Taleb: you don't need to predict the future. You need an option on it. Thales got mocked for being a poor philosopher, so he put tiny deposits on every olive press in town before the harvest - nothing lost if he was wrong, a fortune if he was right. "The opposite of fragile isn't robust. It's something that wants disorder - you write 'please mishandle' on the box." "Jump 10 meters and you die. Jump one meter ten times and nothing happens. That's fragility." "Convexity matters a lot more than knowledge - you can guess worse than random and still come out ahead." bookmark and watch it today - an hour on fat tails, antifragility, and how to position so randomness pays you ↓

Nassim Taleb: 0.3% of Americans keep kosher. Nearly 100% of drinks in America are kosher anyway. that's the minority rule - a small, intransigent group decides what everyone gets, because the rest don't mind either way. it quietly runs markets, ethics and elections. "If you're bust on day 28, there is no day 29." "Being paranoid isn't irrational. If we weren't paranoid, we wouldn't be here." "Whatever your grandmother tells you is Lindy - it survived the test of time. Most of what psychologists 'discover' won't." bookmark and watch it today - part 2 on minority rule, black swans, and surviving randomness ↓