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 ↓