Podcasts about extremistan

In dieser Folge steht das Thema »Künstliche Unitelligenz« im Mittelpunkt – ein Begriff, der aus einem Artikel aus dem Spectator stammt: Britain has become a pioneer in Artificial Unintelligence. Was genau verbirgt sich hinter dieser Idee? »Artificial Unintelligence is the means by which people of perfectly adequate natural intelligence are transformed by policies, procedures and protocols into animate but inflexible cogs. They speak and behave, but do not think or decide.« Wie werden aus Menschen mit natürlicher Intelligenz bloß unflexible Rädchen? Wir reflektieren die zunehmende Strukturierung und Standardisierung in Organisationen, um mit wachsender gesellschaftlicher Komplexität umgehen zu können. Ein Ausgangspunkt der Episode ist die Frage, warum wir in immer mehr Organisationen eine strukturelle und individuelle Inkompetenz erleben? Ein Zitat aus dem genannten Artikel fasst es treffend zusammen:  »‘I didn't find anything in common in these cases,' I said, ‘except the stupidity of your staff. I expected him to get angry, but he maintained a Buddha-like calm. ‘Oh, I know,' he replied, ‘but that is the standard expected now.'« Wie konnte es so weit kommen? Liegt es an der Industrialisierung, die laut Dan Davies in The Unaccountability Machine besagt:  »A very important consequence of industrialisation is that it breaks the connection between the worker and the product.« Oder hat es damit zu tun, wie wir mit Überwältungung durch Information umgehen. »When people are overwhelmed by information, they always react in the same way – by building systems.« Sind Menschen, die individuell denken, in solchen Systemen eher hinderlich als hilfreich? Doch was passiert, wenn komplexe Probleme auftreten, die Flexibilität und Kreativität erfordern? Sind unsere Organisationen überhaupt noch in der Lage, mit unerwarteten Situationen umzugehen, oder arbeiten sie nur noch »maschinenhaft« nach Vorgaben – und das mit einem Maschinenverständnis des 19. Jahrhunderts? Ist die Stagnation, die wir seit Jahrzehnten spüren, ein Symptom dieses Systemversagens? Und wie hängt das mit der sogenannten »Unaccountability Machine« zusammen, die Davies beschreibt und die man im Deutschen vielleicht als »Verantwortungslosigkeits-Maschine« bezeichnen könnte? Kann es sogar sein, dass manche Strukturen bewusst als »self-organising control fraud« gestaltet sind? Ein weiteres damit verbundenes Thema ist: Wie beeinflussen moderne Prognose-Tools wie Recommender Systems unser Verhalten? Dienen sie wirklich dazu, bessere Entscheidungen zu ermöglichen, oder machen sie uns hauptsächlich vorhersagbarer? »Menschen, die dies und jedes gekauft/gesehen haben, haben auch dies gekauft/gesehen« – ist das noch Prognose oder schon Formung des Geschmacks? Und was ist mit wissenschaftlichen Modellen komplexer Systeme, die oft relativ beliebige Ergebnisse liefern? Formen sie nicht auch die Meinung von Wissenschaftlern, Politikern und der Gesellschaft – etwa durch die überall beobachtbare schlichte Medienberichterstattung?  Bleibt außerdem der Mensch wirklich »in the loop«, wie oft behauptet wird, oder ist er längst ein »artificial unintelligent man in the loop«, der Empfehlungen des Systems kaum hinterfragen kann? Die Episode wirft auch einen kritischen Blick auf naive Ideologien wie das »Scientific World Management« von Alfred Korzybski, der schrieb:  „it will give a scientific foundation to Political Economy and transform so-called ‘scientific shop management' into genuine ‘scientific world management.'“  War dieser Wunsch nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg verständlich, aber letztlich völlig missgeleitet? Und warum erleben wir heute eine Wiederkehr des naiven Szientismus, der glaubt, »die Wissenschaft« liefere objektive Antworten? Wie hängen solche Ideen mit Phänomenen wie »Science Diplomacy« zusammen? Die zentrale Frage der Episode lautet: Wie erreicht man, dass Menschen in Verantwortung korrekt im Sinne des definierten Zwecks der Organisation entscheiden? Doch was ist überhaupt der Zweck eines Systems? Stafford Beer sagt:  »The purpose of a system is what it does.« Stimmt der definierte Zweck – etwa Gesundheit im Gesundheitssystem – noch mit der Realität überein? Warum entscheiden Ärzte oft defensiv im eigenen Interesse statt im Interesse der Patienten? Und wie überträgt sich dieses Verhalten auf andere Organisationen – von Ministerien bis hin zur Wissenschaft? Davies beschreibt das ab Beispiel des akademischen Publikationswesens so:  „A not-wholly-unfair analysis of academic publishing would be that it is an industry in which academics compete against one another for the privilege of providing free labour for a profitmaking company, which then sells the results back to them at monopoly prices.“  Und weiter:  „The truly valuable output of the academic publishing industry is not journals, but citations.“  Was ist aus der Idee geworden, dass die Generierung von neuem und relevantem Wissen die Aufgabe von Wissenschaft, Förderung und Publikationswesen ist? Zum Abschluss stelle ich die Frage: Wie können Systeme so gestaltet werden, dass Verantwortung wieder übernommen wird? Wie balanciert man die Zuordnung von Konsequenzen mit der Möglichkeit, ehrlich zu scheitern – ohne Innovation zu ersticken? Und was sind »Luxury Beliefs« – jene modischen Ideen elitärer Kreise, die sie selbst nicht tragen müssen, während sie für andere zur existenziellen Bedrohung werden?  Die Episode endet so mit einem Aufruf zur Diskussion: Wie lösen wir diesen Spagat zwischen Verantwortung und Risiko in einer immer komplexeren Welt? Referenzen Andere Episoden Episode 119: Spy vs Spy: Über künstlicher Intelligenz und anderen Agenten Episode 118: Science and Decision Making under Uncertainty, A Conversation with Prof. John Ioannidis Episode 117: Der humpelnde Staat, ein Gespräch mit Prof. Christoph Kletzer Episode 116: Science and Politics, A Conversation with Prof. Jessica Weinkle Episode 106: Wissenschaft als Ersatzreligion? Ein Gespräch mit  Manfred Glauninger Episode 103: Schwarze Schwäne in Extremistan; die Welt des Nassim Taleb, ein Gespräch mit Ralph Zlabinger Episode 93: Covid. Die unerklärliche Stille nach dem Sturm. Ein Gespräch mit Jan David Zimmermann Episode 91: Die Heidi-Klum-Universität, ein Gespräch mit Prof. Ehrmann und Prof. Sommer Episode 84: (Epistemische) Krisen? Ein Gespräch mit Jan David Zimmermann Fachliche Referenzen Britain has become a pioneer in Artificial Unintelligence | The Spectator (2025) Davies, Dan. The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind, Profile Books (2024) Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity (1921) Jessica Weinkle, What is Science Diplomacy (2025) Nassim Taleb, Skin in the Game, Penguin (2018) Rob Henderson, 'Luxury beliefs' are latest status symbol for rich Americans, New York Post (2019) Lorraine Daston, Rules, Princeton Univ. Press (2023)  

In dieser Folge tauchen wir tief in die Welt der Künstlichen Intelligenz (KI) ein und betrachten sie aus einer systemischen Perspektive. Inspiriert vom klassischen Cartoon Spy vs. Spy geht es um die Frage, wie KI-Systeme miteinander interagieren — sowohl im Sinne von Kooperation als auch Konkurrenz — und welche Herausforderungen dies für uns Menschen mit sich bringt. Ich beleuchte die evolutionäre Natur technischen Fortschritts, die Risiken von Komplexität und Kontrollverlust sowie die möglichen Folgen einer Zukunft, in der KI von einem passiven Werkzeug zu einem aktiven Akteur wird. Begleiten Sie mich auf einer Reise durch emergente Phänomene und Fulgurationen, systemische Abhängigkeiten und die Frage, wie wir die Kontrolle über immer komplexere Systeme behalten können. Denn es stellen sich zahlreiche Fragen: Wie könnte sich die Interaktion zwischen KI-Systemen in der Zukunft entwickeln – eher kooperativ oder kompetitiv? Welche Rolle spielt der Mensch noch, wenn KI-Systeme immer schneller Entscheidungen treffen und autonome Akteure werden? Welche Erfahrungen haben Sie mit technischen Systemen gemacht, die durch Komplexität oder Automatisierung an Kontrolle verloren haben? Was bedeutet es für unsere Gesellschaft, wenn wir durch Automatisierung Know-how und Kontrolle an externe Akteure abgeben? Wie können wir den Übergang von KI als Spielzeug zu einem systemisch notwendigen Element gestalten, ohne in eine Abhängigkeit zu geraten? Glauben Sie, dass KI jemals eine eigene Motivation oder Intentionalität entwickeln könnte – und wenn ja, wie sollten wir darauf reagieren? Welche Strategien könnten helfen, die Kontrolle über komplexe, nicht-deterministische Systeme wie KI-Agenten zu behalten? Wie sehen Sie die geopolitischen Herausforderungen der KI-Entwicklung, insbesondere in Bezug auf Energie und Innovation? Welche positiven Szenarien können Sie sich für eine Zukunft mit KI und autonomen Agenten vorstellen? Wie bereiten Sie sich persönlich oder in Ihrem Umfeld auf die kommenden Entwicklungen in der KI vor? Ich freue mich Ihre Gedanken und Ansichten zu hören! Schreiben Sie mir und lassen Sie uns gemeinsam über die Zukunft nachdenken. Bis zum nächsten Mal beim gemeinsamen Nachdenken über die Zukunft! Referenzen Andere Episoden Episode 109: Was ist Komplexität? Ein Gespräch mit Dr. Marco Wehr Episode 107: How to Organise Complex Societies? A Conversation with Johan Norberg Episode 104: Aus Quantität wird Qualität Episode 103: Schwarze Schwäne in Extremistan; die Welt des Nassim Taleb, ein Gespräch mit Ralph Zlabinger Episode 99: Entkopplung, Kopplung, Rückkopplung Episode 94: Systemisches Denken und gesellschaftliche Verwundbarkeit, ein Gespräch mit Herbert Saurugg Episode 90: Unintended Consequences (Unerwartete Folgen) Episode 69: Complexity in Software Episode 40: Software Nachhaltigkeit, ein Gespräch mit Philipp Reisinger Episode 31: Software in der modernen Gesellschaft – Gespräch mit Tom Konrad Fachliche Referenzen Spy vs. Spy, The Complete Casebook  Rupert Riedl, Strukturen der Komplexität: Eine Morphologie des Erkennens und Erklärens, Springer (2000) Doug Meil, The U.K. Post Office Scandal: Software Malpractice At Scale – Communications of the ACM (2024) Casey Rosenthal, Chaos Engineering, O'Reilly (2017)

In this episode, I had the privilege of speaking with John Ioannidis, a renowned scientist and meta-researcher whose groundbreaking work has shaped our understanding of scientific reliability and its societal implications. We dive into his influential 2005 paper, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, explore the evolution of scientific challenges over the past two decades, and reflect on how science intersects with policy and public trust—especially in times of crisis like COVID-19. We begin with John taking us back to 2005, when he published his paper in PLOS Medicine. He explains how it emerged from decades of empirical evidence on biases and false positives in research, considering factors like study size, statistical power, and competition that can distort findings, and why building on shaky foundations wastes time and resources. “It was one effort to try to put together some possibilities, of calculating what are the chances that once we think we have come up with a scientific discovery with some statistical inference suggesting that we have a statistically significant result, how likely is that not to be so?” I propose a distinction between “honest” and “dishonest” scientific failures, and John refines this. What does failure really mean, and how can they be categorised? The discussion turns to the rise of fraud, with John revealing a startling shift: while fraud once required artistry, today's “paper mills” churn out fake studies at scale. We touch on cases like Jan-Hendrik Schön, who published prolifically in top journals before being exposed, and how modern hyper-productivity, such as a paper every five days, raises red flags yet often goes unchecked. “Perhaps an estimate for what is going on now is that it accounts for about 10%, not just 1%, because we have new ways of massive… outright fraud.” This leads to a broader question about science's efficiency. When we observe scientific output—papers, funding—grows exponentially but does breakthroughs lag? John is cautiously optimistic, acknowledging progress, but agrees efficiency isn't what it could be. We reference Max Perutz's recipe for success: “No politics, no committees, no reports, no referees, no interviews; just gifted, highly motivated people, picked by a few men of good judgement.” Could this be replicated in today's world or are we stuck in red tape? “It is true that the progress is not proportional to the massive increase in some of the other numbers.” We then pivot to nutrition, a field John describes as “messy.” How is it possible that with millions of papers, results are mosty based on shaky correlations rather than solid causal evidence? What are the reasons for this situation and what consequences does it have, e.g. in people trusting scientific results? “Most of these recommendations are built on thin air. They have no solid science behind them.” The pandemic looms large next. In 2020 Nassim Taleb and John Ioannidis had a dispute about the measures to be taken. What happened in March 2020 and onwards? Did we as society show paranoid overreactions, fuelled by clueless editorials and media hype? “I gave interviews where I said, that's fine. We don't know what we're facing with. It is okay to start with some very aggressive measures, but what we need is reliable evidence to be obtained as quickly as possible.” Was the medicine, metaphorically speaking, worse than the disease? How can society balance worst-case scenarios without paralysis. “We managed to kill far more by doing what we did.” Who is framing the public narrative of complex questions like climate change or a pandemic? Is it really science driven, based on the best knowledge we have? In recent years influential scientific magazines publish articles by staff writers that have a high impact on the public perception, but are not necessarily well grounded: “They know everything before we know anything.” The conversation grows personal as John shares the toll of the COVID era—death threats to him and his family—and mourns the loss of civil debate. He'd rather hear from critics than echo chambers, but the partisan “war” mindset drowned out reason. Can science recover its humility and openness? “I think very little of that happened. There was no willingness to see opponents as anything but enemies in a war.” Inspired by Gerd Gigerenzer, who will be a guest in this show very soon, we close on the pitfalls of hyper-complex models in science and policy. How can we handle decision making under radical uncertainty? Which type of models help, which can lead us astray? “I'm worried that complexity sometimes could be an alibi for confusion.” This conversation left me both inspired and unsettled. John's clarity on science's flaws, paired with his hope for reform, offers a roadmap, but the stakes are high. From nutrition to pandemics, shaky science shapes our lives, and rebuilding trust demands we embrace uncertainty, not dogma. His call for dialogue over destruction is a plea we should not ignore. Other Episodes Episode 116: Science and Politics, A Conversation with Prof. Jessica Weinkle Episode 112: Nullius in Verba — oder: Der Müll der Wissenschaft Episode 109: Was ist Komplexität? Ein Gespräch mit Dr. Marco Wehr Episode 107: How to Organise Complex Societies? A Conversation with Johan Norberg Episode 106: Wissenschaft als Ersatzreligion? Ein Gespräch mit  Manfred Glauninger Episode 103: Schwarze Schwäne in Extremistan; die Welt des Nassim Taleb, ein Gespräch mit Ralph Zlabinger Episode 94: Systemisches Denken und gesellschaftliche Verwundbarkeit, ein Gespräch mit Herbert Saurugg Episode 92: Wissen und Expertise Teil 2 Episode 90: Unintended Consequences (Unerwartete Folgen) Episode 86: Climate Uncertainty and Risk, a conversation with Dr. Judith Curry Episode 67: Wissenschaft, Hype und Realität — ein Gespräch mit Stephan Schleim References Prof. John Ioannidis at Stanford University  John P. A. Ioannidis, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, PLOS Medicine (2005) John Ioannidis, A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, weare making decisions without reliable data (2020) John Ioannidis, The scientists who publish a paper every five days, Nature Comment (2018) Hanae Armitage, 5 Questions: John Ioannidis calls for more rigorous nutrition research (2018) John Ioannidis, How the Pandemic Is Changing Scientific Norms, Tablet Magazine (2021) John Ioannidis et al, Uncertainty and Inconsistency of COVID-19 Non-Pharmaceutical1Intervention Effects with Multiple Competitive Statistical Models (2025) John Ioannidis et al, Forecasting for COVID-19 has failed (2022) Gerd Gigerenzer, Transparent modeling of influenza incidence: Big data or asingle data point from psychological theory? (2022) Sabine Kleinert, Richard Horton, How should medical science change? Lancet Comment (2014) Max Perutz quotation taken from Geoffrey West, Scale, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2017) John Ioannidis: Das Gewissen der Wissenschaft, Ö1 Dimensionen (2024)  

Die heutige Episode hat wieder viel Spaß gemacht. Zu Gast ist Prof. Christoph Kletzer. Ich bin auf ihn gestoßen über einen Artikel in der Presse mit dem Titel »Der humpelnde Staat« — und das soll auch der Titel dieser Episode sein. Prof. Christoph Kletzer ist Professor am King's College London und eine profilierte Stimme in politischen Debatten. »Eine seltsame Krankheit hat unsere europäische Staatsordnung befallen: Sie interessiert sich immer stärker für die kleinsten Details unseres Lebens, wird immer einfallsreicher bei der Tiefenregulierung des Alltags, lässt uns aber mit unseren brennendsten Nöten allein.« Wir beginnen mit der Frage nach den immer stärker werdenden staatlichen Eingriffen. Welche Beispiele kann man dafür nennen? »Im Grunde haben wir alle so kleine Sandboxen, in denen wir spielen dürfen« Und dennoch verlieren viele der westlichen Staaten zunehmend die Fähigkeiten, ihre Kernaufgaben zu erfüllen.  Erleben wir in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten einen zunehmenden Illiberalismus? Das Ganze scheint gepaart zu sein mit einer wachsenden Moralisierung aller möglichen Lebensbereiche. »Die Unfähigkeit im Großen wird durch aggressiven Kleingeist kompensiert.« Was ist die Rolle der einzelnen Akteure und des Systems? »Die Funktion des Systems ist das, was es tut« — »The purpose of a system is what it does«, Stafford Beer Woher kommt dieses Verrutschen des staatlichen Fokus? »Machtlosigkeit im Inneren wird mit technokratischem Verwaltungsstaatshandeln kompensiert. Das ist zum Teil in die DNA der Europäischen Union eingeschrieben.«  Sie wird als Neo-Funktionalismus bezeichnet. Was bedeutet dies? Wurden wir in eine politische Einheit geschummelt? Wer hat eigentlich welche Kompetenz und wer trägt für welche Entscheidungen konkret Verantwortung? »Das wirkt mir eher nach FIFA als nach einem demokratischen System.« Oder wie der Komplexitätsforscher Peter Kruse es ausgedrückt hat: »In einem Krabbenkorb herrscht immer eine Mordsdynamik, aber bei genauerem Hinsehen stellt man fest, dass eigentlich nichts richtig vorwärtsgeht.« Wie kann man komplexe Systeme strukturieren oder Ordnung in komplexe Systeme bringen? Gibt es einen verfassungsrechtlichen Geburtsfehler in der EU? Kann man diesen noch beheben? Wird das Problem überhaupt diskutiert? Welche Rolle spielen Preise in der Selbstorganisation komplexer Wirtschaften? Kann Innovation als Arbitrage betrachtet werden? Wie viel kann bei einer komplexen Einheit wie der EU zentral gesteuert werden und wie viel muss sich durch selbstorganisierende Phänomene gestalten lassen? Sollten wir bei Kernaufgaben (was sind diese?) zentralistischer handeln und mehr Staat haben, aber beim Rest viel weniger Staat zulassen? Was können wir von der Situation in Argentinien und Javier Milei lernen? Warum sind Preiskontrollen fast immer eine verheerende Idee? Gleiten Top-Down organisierte, etatistische Systeme immer in Totalitarismus ab? Was sind Interventionsspiralen, wie entstehen sie und wie kann man sie vermeiden? Erleben wir eine Auflösung der regelbasierten globalen Ordnung und wie ist das zu bewerten, vor allem auch aus europäischer Perspektive? Werden wir vom Aufschwung, der aus Nationen wie den USA oder Argentinien kommt, überrollt; haben wir mit unserer Trägheit hier überhaupt noch eine Chance, mitzukommen? Gibt es eine »Angst vor Groß« in Europa? Dafür aber dominieren Sendungsbewusstsein und Hochmut? Wie spielt diese Angst zusammen mit einer der aktuell größten technologischen Veränderungen, der künstlichen Intelligenz? Haben wir es im politischen und bürokratischen Systemen mit einer Destillation der Inkompetenz zu tun? Oder liegt das Problem eher bei einer Politisierung der Justiz? »Die künftige Konfliktlage ist zwischen Justiz und Parlament.« Wer regiert eigentlich unsere Nationen? Politik oder »Deep State«? War der »Marsch durch die Institutionen« erfolgreich und hat unsere Nationen nachhaltig beschädigt? Wer hat eigentlich den Anreiz, in die öffentliche Verwaltung zu gehen? Braucht es die überschießende Rhetorik von Milei, um überhaupt eine Chance zu haben, den Stillstand zu beenden? »By liberty, was meant protection against the tyranny of the political rulers.«, John Stuart Mill Erleben wir eine Umkehrung der hart erkämpften Werte der Aktivisten des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts? Ist der Schutz von Politikern wichtiger als die freie Meinungsäußerung? Wo sind wir hingeraten? Was bedeutet Liberalismus überhaupt und wie hat sich der Begriff verändert? Wie setzt sich der liberale Staat gegen seine Feinde zur Wehr? Aber wer entscheidet, wer der Feind ist Wie weit kann der Staat »neutral« bleiben, wie weit muss er Werte haben? Von der Wiege bis zur Bahre, vom Staat bevormundet? Ist das dann zu viel? Oder wollen das viele wirklich? »Die Schwierigkeit der Menschen, erwachsen zu werden, ist auch ein Wohlstandsphänomen. Der Wohlstand, den wir haben, führt auch zum ewigen Kind.« Aber dazu kommt noch eine weitere Dimension: »Auch die Hypermoral ist ja eine infantile Geschichte.« Woher kommen eigentlich die großen Veränderungen im späten 20. und 21. Jahrhundert? »Die neue Revolution ist nicht ausgegangen von der Arbeiterschaft, sondern von der administrativen Elite«, James Burnham Schafft der administrative Staat immer neue Situationen, die immer neue Eingriffe notwendig machen und die eigene Macht verstärken? Werden also immer neue paternalistische Strukturen notwendig, um die Probleme zu »lösen«, die selbst zuvor verursacht wurden? Und diese Problemlösung erzeugt wieder neue Probleme, die … Ist das Lösen der Probleme im Sinne der Machtstruktur gar nicht wünschenswert? Trifft dies nicht nur auf politische, sondern auch auf andere Organisationsstrukturen zu?  Was ist die »eisige Nacht der polaren Kälte« nach Max Weber? Kann man eine Bürokratie der Debürokratisierung und damit eine Multiplikation des Problems vermeiden? Lässt sich dieses Dilemma rational, vernünftig lösen oder stecken wir hier in der Pathologie der Rationalität fest? Braucht es einen Clown, um den gordischen Knoten durchzuschlagen? Aber steckt in dieser Irrationalität nicht auch eine Gefahr? Welches unbekannte Know-how steckt — nach konservativer Logik — in den etablierten Strukturen? Stehen wir vor der Wahl einer tödlichen Verfettung oder einer gefährlichen Operation? Was wählen wir? Welches Hindernis stellt Statusdenken und Verhaften in Hierarchien dar? Signalisierung vor Bedeutung? Hilft das Denken von Foucault, um diese Problemlagen besser zu verstehen? »Academia has a tendency, when unchecked (from lack of skin in the game), to evolve into a ritualistic self-referential publishing game.«, Nassim Taleb Spielen wir in der Wissenschaft Cargo-Kult im 21. Jahrhundert?  »Wenn man nur die richtigen Wörter sagt [passend zum jeweiligen Kult], dann ist es schon wahr.«  Und der Cargo-Kult applaudiert. »Status können wir in Europa. Und Status ist per definitionem Abwendung von Realität.« Wie gehen wir in die Zukunft? »Ich bin für den Einzelnen optimistisch, fürs Kollektiv weniger.« Referenzen Andere Episoden Episode 111: Macht. Ein Gespräch mit Christine Bauer-Jelinek Episode 107: How to Organise Complex Societies? A Conversation with Johan Norberg Episode 106: Wissenschaft als Ersatzreligion? Ein Gespräch mit  Manfred Glauninger Episode 103: Schwarze Schwäne in Extremistan; die Welt des Nassim Taleb, ein Gespräch mit Ralph Zlabinger Episode 99: Entkopplung, Kopplung, Rückkopplung Episode 96: Ist der heutigen Welt nur mehr mit Komödie beizukommen? Ein Gespräch mit Vince Ebert Episode 95: Geopolitik und Militär, ein Gespräch mit Brigadier Prof. Walter Feichtinger Episode 88: Liberalismus und Freiheitsgrade, ein Gespräch mit Prof. Christoph Möllers Episode 77: Freie Privatstädte, ein Gespräch mit Dr. Titus Gebel Episode 72: Scheitern an komplexen Problemen? Wissenschaft, Sprache und Gesellschaft — Ein Gespräch mit Jan David Zimmermann Christoph Kletzer Kings College X Fachliche Referenzen Christoph Kletzer, Presse Kommentar, Der humpelnde Staat: So geht sicher nichts weiter (2024) Stafford Beer, The Heart of Enterprise, Wiley (1979) Thomas Sowell, intellectuals and Society, Basic Books (2010) Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Routledge (1944) John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859) David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux (2021) Max Weber, Politik als Beruf (1919) Nassim Taleb, Skin in the Game, Penguin (2018) Steven Brindle, Brunel: The Man Who Built the World, W&N (2006)

De koers stuiterde deze week alle kanten op: van laag in de $90.000 tot boven de $100.000. We hebben het erover in de marktupdate. Verder een hoop nieuws: Tether vertrekt naar El Salvador, de SEC wijzigt koers, een grote Italiaanse bank koopt bitcoin, Bitfinex krijgt bitcoin terug en de VS mag bitcoin gaan verkopen. Veel te bespreken dus. Meld je aan voor de meetup Probeer Bitcoin Alpha 2 weken gratis! Satoshi Radio wordt mede mogelijk gemaakt door: Amdax, Watson Law, HVK Stevens en onze hoofdsponsor Bitvavo. Timestamps (00:00:00) Welkom en Podcast Introductie (00:10:00) Vragen van luisteraars (00:26:00) Bookmark van Bert: “BANKRUPTCIES SOARING!” - Fintwit bears vs. The data (00:34:30) Bookmark van Peter: Decreten m.b.t. bitcoin en crypto verwacht op Donald Trump's dag 1 (00:39:00) Bookmark van Bart: Bitfinex krijgt 94.643 bitcoin terug van Department of Justice (00:42:00) Bookmark van Bart: Amerikaans overheid mag Silk Road bitcoin (69,370) gaan verkopen (00:50:00) Bookmark van Bart: Vuilnisbelt saga eindelijk ten einde (00:53:00) Bookmark van Bert: Bitcoin balance on exchanges hits a new low! You're not ready for the supply shock!! (00:55:00) Bookmark van Bert: Bitcoin price targets voor 2025 (00:57:00) Bookmark van Bert: Nate Geraci's ETF predictions for 2025 (01:03:00) Bookmark van Peter: SEC bereidt zich voor om cryptokoers abrupt te wijzigen (01:04:00) Bookmark van Peter: Tom Emmer verkozen tot voorzitter van Subcomité Digital Assets (01:05:30) Bookmark van Peter: Vertrekkend SEC-voorzitter is een bitcoin maxi (01:08:00) Bookmark van Bart: One of Italy's Largest Banks Buys $1M Worth of Bitcoin (01:14:30) Bookmark van Bart: UTXO Management time! (01:15:00) Bookmark van Bart: Tether vertrekt naar El Salvador (01:26:00) Bookmark van Bert: Bosbranden & Extremistan (01:38:00) Marktupdate (00:00:00) Einde Bookmarks Bert:“BANKRUPTCIES SOARING!” - Fintwit bears vs. The dataBosbranden & ExtremistanBitcoin balance on exchanges hits a new low! You're not ready for the supply shock!!Bitcoin price targets voor 2025Nate Geraci: ETF predictions for 2025 Bart:Bitfinex krijgt 94.643 bitcoin terug van Department of JusticeWorden die bitcoins gebruikt om LEO van te kopen?USA @ Bitcoin TreasuriesAmerikaans overheid mag Silk Road bitcoin (69,370) gaan verkopenVuilnisbelt saga eindelijk ten eindeTether vertrekt naar El SalvadorBukele tegen Rumble: “You should move your headquarters here too”GDP El Salvador (34B) vs winst Tether (10B)UTXO Management time!One of Italy's Largest Banks Buys $1M Worth of Bitcoin Peter:Decreten m.b.t. bitcoin en crypto verwacht op Donald Trump's dag 1SEC bereidt zich voor om cryptokoers abrupt te wijzigenTom Emmer verkozen tot voorzitter van Subcomité Digital AssetsVertrekkend SEC-voorzitter is een bitcoin maxi

In einer Zeit, in der wir überall das Versagen etablierter Strukturen erleben, scheint es mir umso wichtiger zu sein, über neue Ideen nachzudenken und — im Rückgriff auf die letzte Episode mit Johan Norberg — viel offener und experimentierfreudiger zu sein. Mit »mehr vom selben« werden wir diese tiefe Krise, die Europa erfasst hat, nicht bewältigen können. Eine solche Idee, die international stetig an Zuspruch gewinnt, ist das Thema der heutigen Episode: Freie Privatstädte, Teil 2. Im Gespräch wieder Titus Gebel. Denn es gab vor über einem Jahr die erste Episode zu diesem Thema (Episode 77). Ich habe viel Feedback und Nachfragen zu der ersten Episode bekommen, daher freue ich mich darauf dieses spannende Thema nochmals aufgreifen zu können und neue Entwicklungen mit Dr. Gebel zu sprechen. Titus Gebel ist ein promovierter Völkerrechtler und Unternehmer mit einem weltweiten Netzwerk. Unter anderem war er Mitgründer und langjähriger CEO der an der Frankfurter Börse notierten Deutsche Rohstoff AG. Heute ist Titus Gebel der CEO von Tipolis, einem Singapurer Unternehmen, das neue Modelle des Zusammenlebens durch innovative Regierungskonzepte entwickelt. Er ist Autor des Buches "Freie Privatstädte – Mehr Wettbewerb im wichtigsten Markt der Welt", in dem er den Rahmen für die Gründung autonomer, privat verwalteter Rechtsräume darlegt. Dr. Gebel spielte eine wichtige Rolle bei der Gründung der bisher fortschrittlichsten Sonderzone, Próspera in Honduras. Er berät auch andere Länder bei der Innovation von Sonderwirtschaftszonen und ist Präsident der Free Cities Foundation, welche weltweit die Entwicklung von freien Städten fördert. Es hat noch einen weiteren Grund, warum diese Episode gerade jetzt aufgenommen wird. Einmal im Jahr findet die Liberty in our Lifetime Konferenz in Prag statt, dieses Jahr vom 1. - 3. Nov. Eine Konferenz, die sich mit dem Thema Freie Privatstädte beschäftigt und Interessenten aus der ganzen Welt anlockt. Ich werde an dieser Konferenz teilnehmen und auch versuchen, ein wenig von der Stimmung und von den Themen, die dort diskutiert werden, mitzunehmen und daraus eine Podcast-Episode zu machen. Daher können wir diese Episode auch als Einstimmung verstehen.  Wir beginnen mit einem »Elevator Pitch«, in der Dr. Gebel das Konzept der freien Privatstädte kurz vorstellt. Regierung als Dienstleistung — was sind diese Dienstleistungen, was sind die Kosten? Was sind wesentliche Probleme in der öffentlichen Verwaltung? Was ist das Principal Agent Problem? Was ist die Public Choice Problematik? Wie gehen wir mit Regeländerungen um?  Ist der Bürger zunehmend machtlos in den heutigen westlichen Nationen? Was ist die Idee des klassisch liberalen Minimalstaats, kann das funktionieren? Warum sollte das wünschenswert sein? Ist das vielleicht überhaupt eine unerhörte Idee? Es stellt sich die elementare Frage, worum sich der Staat kümmern soll, genauer gesagt, wozu er überhaupt die Kompetenz hat, sich zu kümmern. Wollen wir in Deutschland den »Übervater Staat«? Fallen wir gar in voraufklärerische Zeiten zurück? Mit welchen Makrotrends oder großen Fragen, die heute zum Glück langsam wieder thematisiert werden, überschneiden sich diese Konzepte? Konzepte von Freiheit, Verhältnis Bürger / Staat; wer muss sich vor wem rechtfertigen? Wie sind Unterschiede im Blickwinkel auf diese Fragen zwischen den USA und Europa?  Welche Probleme kann man zentralisieren und welche muss man dezentral lösen oder jedenfalls angehen? Kann Planwirtschaft, auch wenn sie in der Vergangenheit immer gescheitert ist, in der Zukunft dennoch erfolgreich sein, z. B. durch die Nutzung von »künstlicher Intelligenz«? Zieht jede Zentralisierung immer mehr Macht an sich? Aus Konzentration von Macht folgt keineswegs eine Konzentration von Wissen. Wie groß ist der Unterschied zwischen common law/case law gegenüber civil law in der »Philosophie« und in der Praxis? Sind die FPS nur eine »Meta-Idee«, die verschiedenste Ausprägungen erlauben? Sind in Wahrheit Experiment und Wettbewerb eines der führenden Prinzipien? Ist das aktuelle System reformierbar? »Der Staat soll nur Schiedsrichter sein und nicht mitspielen« Warum gibt es so viel Gegenwind gegen neue und unkonventionelle Ideen? »Wenn ich fremde Produkte verbieten muss, aus Angst, dass sie meine besten Leute abziehen, dann ist mit mir etwas nicht in Ordnung.« Wie ist der Umgang der früheren Leitmedien mit solchen neuen Vorschlägen? »Die Idee, dass die Menschen ihre Probleme selber lösen, ist nicht verbreitet.« Unter welchen Rahmenbedingungen funktioniert Demokratie überhaupt? Glauben die heutigen »Progressiven« überhaupt noch an die Demokratie, die sie angeblich ständig verteidigen müssen? Wird gerade die Majestätsbeleidigung wieder eingeführt?  Was sollten wir über Skalierung wissen? Ist die Stadt möglicherweise die beste politisch/organisatorische Größe? Wie unterscheiden sich die unterschiedlichen Konzepte, von der Sonderwirtschaftszone bis zur Freien Privatstadt? Was ist Seasteading — am Beispiel von Ocean Builders? Was macht Tipolis als Unternehmen, und wie geht es dem Vorzeigeprojekt Próspera? Sind diese Konzepte möglicherweise geeignet, um zu helfen, Afrika aus der Armut zu führen, nachdem die Ansätze der letzten Jahrzehnte keine wesentliche Verbesserung gebracht haben? Was können wir von Javier Milei in Argentinien erwarten? Symptom oder Zeitenwende? Referenzen Andere Episoden Episode 77: Freie Privatstädte, ein Gespräch mit Dr. Titus Gebel Episode 107: How to Organise Complex Societies? A Conversation with Johan Norberg Episode 103: Schwarze Schwäne in Extremistan; die Welt des Nassim Taleb, ein Gespräch mit Ralph Zlabinger Episode 96: Ist der heutigen Welt nur mehr mit Komödie beizukommen? Ein Gespräch mit Vince Ebert Episode 93: Covid. Die unerklärliche Stille nach dem Sturm. Ein Gespräch mit Jan David Zimmermann Episode 88: Liberalismus und Freiheitsgrade, ein Gespräch mit Prof. Christoph Möllers Episode 82: Smart Communities, ein Gespräch mit Ulrich Ahle Episode 73: Ökorealismus, ein Gespräch mit Björn Peters Episode 72: Scheitern an komplexen Problemen? Wissenschaft, Sprache und Gesellschaft — Ein Gespräch mit Jan David Zimmermann Episode 65: Getting Nothing Done — Teil 2 Episode 64: Getting Nothing Done — Teil 1 Episode 58: Verwaltung und staatliche Strukturen — ein Gespräch mit Veronika Lévesque Episode 26: Was kann Politik (noch) leisten? Ein Gespräch mit Christoph Chorherr Dr. Titus Gebel Homepage Dr. Titus Gebel Tipolis Free Cities Foundation Liberty in our Lifetime Conference, 1. - 3.Nov. 2024 Andere Referenzen Titus Gebel, Freie Privatstädte – Mehr Wettbewerb im wichtigsten Markt der Welt (2023) Próspera, Honduras Ocean Builders  

This episode fits perfectly into my longer-lasting quest to understand complex societies and how to handle it. I am thrilled about the opportunity to have a conversation with Johan Norberg. The title of our conversation is: How to organise complex societies? Johan Norberg is a bestselling author of multiple books, historian of ideas and senior fellow at the Cato Institute. I read his last two books, Open, The Story of Human Progress and The Capitalist Manifesto. Both are excellent books, I can highly recommend. We will discuss both books in the wider bracket of the challenge how to handle complex societies. The main question we discuss is, how can we handle complex societies? Which approaches work, give people opportunity, freedom and wealth, and which do not work. The question can be inverted too: When systems are more complex, is also more control and commands needed, or the opposite? »The more complex the society, the less it can be organised—the more complex society gets, the more simple rules we need.« Knowledge and power behave differently, as Tom Sowell puts it: “It's much easier to concentrate power than knowledge.” The consequence seems to be: “If we centralise power we loose knowledge” We talk about the historic background of the idea of liberty, for instance John Stewart Mills On liberty, Friedrich Hayek Road to Serfdom. Did we lose our desire for liberty? The Austrian philosopher Konrad Paul Liessmann observes: “Dass das Volk nicht herrschen kann, sondern erzogen, belehrt, bevormundet und mehr oder weniger sanft in die richtige Richtung gedrängt werden soll, ist überall spürbar. Die ubiquitäre pädagogische Sprache ist verräterisch.” “The fact that the people cannot rule, but are to be educated, instructed, patronised and more or less gently pushed in the right direction, can be felt everywhere. The ubiquitous pedagogical language is treacherous.” How then, should we think about liberty and responsibility?  “There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.”, P. J. O'Rourke. That might be an uncomfortable truth for some, though. Freedom has consequences and responsibilities! The trend of the last decades points to a different direction. Every minute detail seems to be regulated by someone who allegedly knows better: “Large projects are essentially illegal in California and in Europe”, Elon Musk The consequence is, as I have discussed in previous episodes, stagnation since many decades. Follow the links below to other episodes. Now, did we become an old, risk-averse, dying society? This would not be good news because:  “With innovation comes the risk of failure” And the uncomfortable truth is: Our desire to reduce risks might actually increase risks.  “If we are saying that we should not accept anything until it is perfectly safe, that's the most unsafe and risky bet we could do.” How can we muddle out of this mess? “Nothing comes from a committee, nothing from a single genius fully developed. Innovation comes from a process of experiments, trial and error, feedback and adaptation, changes and more people getting involved.”  There is no such thing as an immaculate conception of a new technology. But what about volatility? Is volatility a risk? For whom? The individual, society? Is societal risk decreasing when we reduce volatility?  What does Johan mean by openness, and why is it Important? “Openness for me means openness to surprises. This is the only way for societies to thrive and function long term. […] Historically, life was nasty, brutish, and short. We need new things. We need new knowledge, new technological capacity and wealth.” So why did the industrial revolution happen in the West? What is the connection to openness? What can we learn about control in societies? “Societies have to be decentralised not top down controlled.” But Mervyn King discusses in his excellent book Radical Uncertainty the fact, that we cannot predict the future. What happens with innovation that we cannot predict? “Under open institutions, people will solve more problems  than they create.” Moreover, the opposite is not true. Not innovating does not reduce risk: “If we would do nothing, we would also be surprised by unpredictable developments. […] We solved the problems that were existential and created better problems and level up. […] I prefer those problems to the ones that made life nasty, brutish and short.” In Europe, the precautionary principle is in high regard. Does it work, or is it rather a complete failure of epistemology? But what about capitalism? Has it failed us or is it the saviour? Does the Matthew principle speak against capitalism? “Elites have an interest to protect the status quo” which is a reason why free markets were blocked in many societies. This does not speak against free markets, but rather is an argument for free markets. Is the idea of capitalism and free markets more difficult to grasp on a psychological level? Socialist ideas sound nice (when you are in a family or small group) but they do not scale. And even worse, if you try to scale them, do they create the opposite of the desired effect? In a society, we are the kids, and we have other ideas than some authoritarian figure, and we have the right to our ideas.  “The only way to organise a complex society of strangers with different interests and different ideas and different vantage points on the world is not to control it, but instead give them the freedom to act according to their own individual creativity and dreams.  […]  You can get rich that way, but only by enriching others.” Moreover, the distribution problem evidently is not solved by top-down political concepts. In authoritarian systems, poverty is equally distributed, but the elites still enrich themselves.  But is trade and economy not used as a weapon on an international scale? How does that fit together, and does that not open up massive risks when we stick to free markets? “If goods don't cross borders, soldiers will.” Why is diversification, important, and how to reach it? What happened in Argentina, a very timely question after the new presidency of Javier Milei. “Argentina should be a memento mori for all of us. […] 100 years ago, Argentina was one of the richest countries of the planet. It had the future going for it”. […] If Argentina can fail, so can we, if we make the wrong decisions.” There are countries on every continent that make rapid progress. What do they have in common? At the end of the day, this is a hopeful message because wealth and progress can happen everywhere. Since the turn of the millennium, almost 140,000 people have been lifted out of extreme poverty every day. For more than 20 years. Where did that happen and why? What can we learn from Javier Milei? “I am an incredible optimist once I gaze away from politics and look at society.” How can we repay the debt to previous generations that gave us the living standards we enjoy today? References Other Episodes Episode 103: Schwarze Schwäne in Extremistan; die Welt des Nassim Taleb, ein Gespräch mit Ralph Zlabinger Episode 101: Live im MQ, Macht und Ohnmacht in der Wissensgesellschaft. Ein Gespräch mit John G. Haas. Episode 96: Ist der heutigen Welt nur mehr mit Komödie beizukommen? Ein Gespräch mit Vince Ebert Episode 90: Unintended Consequences (Unerwartete Folgen) Episode 89: The Myth of Left and Right, a Conversation with Prof. Hyrum Lewis Episode 77: Freie Privatstädte, ein Gespräch mit Dr. Titus Gebel Episode 71: Stagnation oder Fortschritt — eine Reflexion an der Geschichte eines Lebens Episode 70: Future of Farming, a conversation with Padraic Flood Episode 65: Getting Nothing Done — Teil 2 Episode 64: Getting Nothing Done — Teil 1 Episode 44: Was ist Fortschritt? Ein Gespräch mit Philipp Blom Episode 34: Die Übersetzungsbewegung, oder: wie Ideen über Zeiten, Kulturen und Sprachen wandern – Gespräch mit Prof. Rüdiger Lohlker Johan Norberg Johan Norberg is Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute Johan Norberg on Twitter/X Johan Norberg on LinkedId Johan Norberg, Open. The Story Of Human Progress, Atlantic Books (2021) Johan Norberg, The Capitalist Manifesto, Atlantic Books (2023) Literature, Videos and Links John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859) Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Routledge (1944) Thomas Sowell, intellectuals and Society, Basic Books (2010) Johan Norberg, A Conversation with Elon Musk, The Cato Institute (2024) Reason TV: Nick Gillespie and Magatte Wade, Don't blame colonialism for African poverty (2024) Jason Hickel, The Divide – A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions, Windmill (2018) Victor Davis Hanson on subsidies and tarifs (2024) Konrad Paul Liessmann, Lauter Lügen, Paul Zsolnay (2023) P. J. O'Rourke, The Liberty Manifesto; Cato Institute (1993)

Nach dem letzten Gespräch mit Ralph über die Ideen von Nassim Taleb bin ich auf eine verwandte Idee gestoßen, die auf Hegel zurückgeht. Aber keine Angst — das wird nicht philosophisch verworren, sondern vielmehr sehr praktisch. Das Theme der heutigen Episode ist Qualität und Quantität. Es ist wieder eine kurze Episode mit der Anregung zum Nachdenken und Schreiben. Was ist Qualität, was ist Quantität, wie kann sich Quantität in Qualität transformieren und was hat Josef Stalin mit der ganzen Sache zu tun? Weitere Beispiele: → Verträge und die Rolle von Juristen. Ein Vertrag oder ein Regulierung mit vielleicht 5-10 Seiten ist verständlich und umsetzbar. Ein Vertrag mit 500 Seiten oder mehr dreht sich ins Gegenteil. Nun ist das, was als Recht begonnen hat zum Machtinstrument geworden. Derjenige gewinnt, der den längeren juristischen Atem hat. Referenzen Andere Episoden Episode 103: Schwarze Schwäne in Extremistan; die Welt des Nassim Taleb, ein Gespräch mit Ralph Zlabinger Episode 85: Naturalismus — was weiß Wissenschaft? Episode 55: Strukturen der Welt Episode 27: Wicked Problems Episode 10: Komplizierte Komplexität Fachliche Referenzen Robert Carneiro, The transition from quantity to quality: a neglected causal mechanism in accounting for social  evolution (2000) Stalin Zitat Immanuel Kant, Kategorischer Imperativ Encyclopedia of Marxism    

Die letzten drei Live-Aufnahmen vor Publikum im MQ in Wien waren eine tolle Erfahrung; vielen Dank an alle, die vor Ort waren und natürlich auch an alle, die diese Episoden im Stream nachgehört haben. Jetzt freue ich mich wieder, eine neue »normale« Folge ansagen zu dürfen. Der Titel der heutigen Episode ist: »Schwarze Schwäne in Extremistan; die Welt des Nassim Taleb«. Noch mehr freut es mich, dass ich dieses Gespräch mit Ralph Zlabinger führen durfte. Ralph ist seit über zehn Jahren in der Beratung tätig, mit starkem Fokus auf Produktentwicklungsprojekte in der Automotive. Daneben ist er selbst Podcast-Host des EFS-Podcasts und passionierter Zukunftsforschungslaie. Er ist genau wie ich immer wieder bei Nassim Taleb hängen geblieben und benutzt die Taleb'schen Ideen öfter in Strategieklausuren als Framework. Ralph und ich haben schon vor der Episode immer wieder über Talebs Ideen gesprochen und nun hat sich endlich die Gelegenheit geboten, ein Gespräch im Podcast-Studio von EFS-Consulting aufzuzeichnen. Unser Gespräch beginnt mit unserer subjektiven Einordnung der Person Nassim Taleb, seiner Lebensgeschichte und seiner Bücher, die wie Fraktale aufgebaut sind. Wir diskutieren die unterschiedlichen Seiten Talebs, seine Persona in Büchern, in Vorträgen, Diskussionen und auf X/Twitter. Wie ist das völlig unterschiedliche Verhalten in unterschiedlichen Kontexten zu verstehen? Manchmal geradezu harmoniesüchtig; manchmal wie ein Irrer um sich schlagend? Was können wir über die Zukunft sagen? Wie spielen seine Ideen mit der Erkenntnistheorie zusammen? Bringt Taleb das Problem, die Zukunft vorherzusagen oder eben nicht vorherzusagen, auf den Punkt?  Taleb gibt einem immer wieder das Gefühl, fast alles bisher verkehrt herum gesehen zu haben. Er ist auch stolz darauf, unabhängiger Denker zu sein. Es scheint jedenfalls ein wesentliches Manko der Zeit zu sein, dass es nur mehr sehr wenige unabhängige Denker gibt. Aber folgt daraus, dass jeder, der die Welt nicht sieht, wie er, ein Scharlatan ist? Steht zuerst die Praxis und dann die Wissenschaft? Passt das zur Unterscheidung zwischen Wissen und Expertise; wir diskutieren das am Beispiel des Kochens? Welche Rolle spielen Heuristiken, »Tinkering« und Übung, wo liegen die Grenzen der Vorhersage und Planung im Kochen (oder auch im chemischen Labor)? »People confuse science and scientists. Science is great, but individual scientists are dangerous.«, Nassim Taleb Risiko ist ein zentrales Thema seiner Lebensgeschichte und seines wissenschaftlichen Denkens und Schreibens. Was sind diese schwarzen Schwäne? Stehen wir auf den Schultern von Riesen oder denken wir ähnliches und konvergieren Gedanken? Wie passt das alles zu Komplexität, Karl Popper, dem kritischen Rationalismus und der Chaostheorie? »Jeder Intellektuelle hat eine ganz spezielle Verantwortung. Er hat das Privileg und die Gelegenheit, zu studieren. Dafür schuldet er es seinen Mitmenschen (oder der Gesellschaft), die Erkenntnisse seines Studiums in der einfachsten und klarsten und bescheidensten Form darzustellen. Das Schlimmste – eine Sünde gegen den heiligen Geist – ist, wenn die Intellektuellen es versuchen, sich ihren Mitmenschen gegenüber als große Propheten aufzuspielen und sie mit orakelnden Philosophien zu beeindrucken. Wer's nicht einfach und klar sagen kann, der soll schweigen und weiterarbeiten, bis er's klar sagen kann.«, Karl Popper Passt Karl Poppers Asymmetrie nun in die Gedankenwelt von Nassim Taleb, oder nicht? Was hat das mit Konservativismus, mit »Skin in the Game« zu tun? Taleb betont immer wieder, man muss sich unbedingt in eine Situation bringen, unabhängig sein zu können.  »Academia has a tendency, when unchecked (from lack of skin in the game), to evolve into a ritualistic self-referential publishing game.« Wie passt das Ganze zu den Ideen Friedrich von Hayeks, im besonderen das Koordinationsproblem gegenüber zentraler Steuerung? Was ist die Metapher des Schwarzen Schwans, das Induktionsproblem nach David Hume? Was bedeutet Mediokristan und Extremistan, fat tails und die Truthahnillusion. Können wir Risiken vorhersagen? Sind schwarze Schwäne nicht oft auch ein Perspektivenproblem? Was hat es mit der Antifragilität auf sich? Was ist der hormetische Effekt? Finden wir Frozen Accidents in Talebs Denken? Besteht die Gefahr, in den Sozialdarwinismus abzugleiten? Was hat Too Big Too Fail mit dem Risikobegriff Talebs zu tun? Welche Heuristiken der Antifragilität gibt es? »Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain.« Wie einzelne prominente intellektuelle Irrläufer, die gerade nicht unabhängig denken, sondern sich von der Politik abhängig machen, der Gesellschaft großen Schaden zufügen können, am Beispiel von Trofim Lysenko. In welchem Verhältnis stehen Effizienz und Resilienz? »Most modern efficiencies are deferred punishment«, Nassim Taleb Der Versuch, jedes Risiko zu vermeiden, stellt sich selbst als großes Risiko dar (siehe auch die Episode mit Vince Ebert). Wo sind die Grenzen der Modellierung? »Wir müssen so leben, dass wir niemals von der Vorhersage fragwürdiger Modelle abhängig sind« Welche Rolle spielt Skalierung in der Betrachtung der Welt und des Risikos sowie politischer Systeme? »A country is not a large city, a city is not a large family, and, sorry, the world is not a large village.«, Nassim Taleb Warum ein Prototyp erst ein kleiner Schritt zu einem funktionierenden Produkt ist und es sich dabei ebenfalls um ein Skalierungsproblem handelt. “Smart people on Wall Street generally . . . think that once you have come up with a prototype, that's the hard part and everything else is trivial copying after that. It's not. It's perhaps 1 percent of the problem. Large-scale manufacturing, especially of a new technology, it's something between 1,000 and 10,000 percent harder than the prototype.”, Elon Musk Referenzen Ralph Zlabinger Ralph auf LinkedIn EFS-Podcast mit Ralph Andere Episoden Episode 100: Live im MQ, Was ist Wissen. Ein Gespräch mit Philipp Blom Episode 96: Ist der heutigen Welt nur mehr mit Komödie beizukommen? Ein Gespräch mit Vince Ebert Episode 91: Die Heidi-Klum-Universität, ein Gespräch mit Prof. Ehrmann und Prof. Sommer Episode 90: Unintended Consequences (Unerwartete Folgen) Episode 84: (Epistemische) Krisen? Ein Gespräch mit Jan David Zimmermann Episode 80: Wissen, Expertise und Prognose, eine Reflexion Episode 76: Existentielle Risiken Episode 57: Konservativ UND Progressiv Episode 55: Strukturen der Welt Episode 47: Große Worte Episode 37: Probleme und Lösungen Episode 28: Jochen Hörisch: Für eine (denk)anstössige Universität! Episode 27: Wicked Problems Episode 25: Entscheiden unter Unsicherheit Episode 23: Frozen Accidents Fachliche Referenzen Nassim Taleb, Fooled by Randomness, Random House (2001) Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan, Random House (2007) Nassim Taleb, Antifragile, Random House (2012) Nassim Taleb, Skin in the Game, Random House (2018) Nassim Taleb auf X/Twitter Karl Popper, Auf der Suche nach einer besseren Welt, Piper (1987) Friedrich von Hayek, Der Weg zur Knechtschaft, Univ. of Chicago Press (1944) Elon Musk, Prototype to product

Every podcast episode we explore a Lindy book, and find ideas you can use in business and life. Join 3,000+ curious minds and avid readers by subscribing @ rationalvc.com to get free access to essays and exclusive content. For the video version of episode click here.   Timestamps: (00:00) Intro / chit-chat (09:26) Structure of the show (10:36) What is a Black Swan? (19:34) Human blindness to Black Swans (01:02:45) Mediocristan vs Extremistan (01:30:45) Bell Curve / Gaussian fraud (01:37:18) Why the Midwit meme is wrong (01:47:27) Leveraging Black Swans (01:58:34) Chapter overviews (02:19:16) Chapter 19 deep dive (02:27:58) Favourite quotes / our lives (02:37:09) Fat Tony (02:43:33) 10 Principles for Black Swan robustness (02:48:54) Amor Fati - Our website (all essays and podcasts): rationalvc.com  Our investment fund: rational.fund  Cyrus' Twitter: x.com/CyrusYari  Iman's Twitter: x.com/iman_olya - Links mentioned in the episode below: Iman Tweet on daily routines of creatives: https://twitter.com/iman_olya/status/1764721995743121415  Table 1 - Extremistan vs Mediocristan:  https://capitalideasonline.com/wordpress/mediocristan-vs-extremistan/  Vizi Andrei: https://twitter.com/viziandrei  Cyrus being interviewed on the Brick by Brick podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/54RvagfMSIWNtVwAe2193a?si=1cb28db259814326  Cyrus essay on Angel Investing (incl. Barbell Investing): https://www.rationalvc.com/articles/angel  Cyrus essay on Tech Markets are Irrational:  https://www.rationalvc.com/articles/irrational  Jack Raines FU Money ZeroHedge essay: https://www.youngmoney.co/p/fck-money WhosAria Bars of Wisdom newsletter: https://www.barsofwisdom.com  Fat Tony's Community:  https://fattonys.net/  -   Disclaimer: The materials provided are solely for informational or entertainment purposes and do not constitute investment or legal advice. All opinions expressed by hosts and guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of their employer(s). #Lindy #knowledge #books

After nearly eight years of the Love Your Work podcast, I'm quitting. Here's why, and What's Next. Podcasting is a bad business This is not the immediate reason I'm quitting, but it is at the root: Podcasting is a bad business. When the indirect benefits of an activity run out, it's hard to keep doing it if it's not making money. I realized long ago podcasting is a bad business, but I kept going for other reasons. I'll explain why in a bit. Though I didn't start my podcast with dollar signs in my eyes, I did at least hope I would grow to earn money doing it. I've earned about $32,000 in the eight-year history of Love Your Work. More than half of that has been from Patreon supporters, many of whom support for reasons other than the podcast. During that time, I've spent: $1,008 on hosting $11,749 on assistance with editing and publishing $241 on equipment And some other expenses, for a total of about $13,000 In raw numbers, I've made a “profit” on the podcast. But, as I broke down in my latest income report, my “wage” was about $6 an hour. My podcast comprised about 5% of my income over these eight years, and took much more than that portion of my time and energy. Of course, I don't think about whether the podcast was worth it in terms of an hourly rate. Creative work happens in Extremistan, not Mediocristan, and I've made massive life choices to be free to explore creatively without worrying so much what I'm earning in the short-term. Ways to make money podcasting But there are many different ways to make a podcast a solid business, and none of them worked for me, for various reasons. Here are some of these business models, as they apply to the “thought-leader” space (I'll ignore the more entertainment/infotainment space that podcasts like Gimlet's inhabit). Be so massively famous, you can pick-and-choose advertisers, while demanding a lot of money. This is where Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan are. They both started with large platforms, and applied whatever talents that helped them earn those platforms to make their podcasts huge. After more than fifteen years as a creator, I have a modest platform, but orders of magnitude smaller. Build a “content machine” that manufactures ad slots. I won't name names, but you've heard these podcasts. They're formulaic and don't seem to discern much who they have as a guest, nor what sponsors they accept. This business model is why my inbox is still full of pitches – they think I actually want more guests, because more guests would mean more ad slots. It takes a very rare set of circumstances for me to be excited to interview someone. Share information that directly helps people make money. If you have tactical and actionable information that's useful to professionals in a specific industry, you can charge for premium podcast content. I'm not as interested in the tactical and actionable as I am in the abstract and exploratory. Cover a niche topic. If you have a leading podcast about a very specific topic, advertisers within that niche will be willing to pay high rates to reach that audience. I didn't want to build my podcast according to a specific topic – more on that later. Have a “back-end” business. If you have a thriving consulting business, or training programs to sell, you can attract more clients and customers through your podcast. As I wrote in my ten-year reflections, “I want to make a living creating. I don't want creating to be merely a marketing strategy for other things. Is that completely insane?” I flirted with success in a few of these business models. Early on, I hoped my podcast would be famous enough to pick and choose advertisers at high rates. For a while, it looked like I had a chance. I was approached by a podcast network, and I had some reputable advertisers such as LinkedIn, Skillshare, Casper, Audible, Pittney Bowes, and University of California. Various times, I thought I was on the cusp of my “big break” – such as when Love Your Work was featured on the Apple Podcasts home screen. But the more I tried to go the “get famous” route, the louder the siren-song of the “content machine” route got. There were plenty of opportunities to do “interview swaps” with hosts I wasn't interested in interviewing. There were a few advertisers that had money, but whose products felt sleazy. Joining a podcast network would have pressured me to crank out content even if I didn't feel like it. There was (and still is) the never-ending stream of pitch emails for guests. I had too much wax in my ears to go the “content machine” route. Not included in my lifetime revenue-estimates for Love Your Work is money I made through the “back-end business” route. I was somewhat comfortable with this model, but I haven't made a course in years, as I've been focused on writing books. And as bad a business as people say writing books is, it's better than making a podcast. The podcast has helped me sell books in more ways than one. One way is that people who listened to the podcast bought my books. The other way is, making my podcast helped me write my books. This brings me to the reason I kept making my podcast, even after I realized it wasn't a good business. Make for what making makes you In my sixteen years experimenting with different business models as an independent creator, I've settled on one thing that works: Make for what making makes you. If making a podcast, writing a book, sending a weekly newsletter – you name it – merely makes you money, and doesn't make you who you want to be, what's the point? Sure, sometimes you don't feel like creating, and you do it anyway. Yes, sometimes you pick one project over another because you think it will be more lucrative. But you can only redirect the river that is your creativity so much before it overflows and returns to its natural path. I learned from my guests When I started Love Your Work, and was struggling to make it big enough to work with an ad model, even if I wasn't bringing in lots of ad revenue, I was still connecting with and learning from my guests. It was an incredible privilege to have in-depth conversations with people like Seth Godin, Elise Bauer, and David Allen. It was like having my own personal advisory board of heroes. Talking to them helped me learn how to go off the beaten path and find my calling. I was able to find patterns in their stories that I could apply to my own life and career. I would be a completely different person today if I hadn't had those conversations. It was time to explore But there came a point when doing interviews was no longer serving me the way it once had. It was when I had gained the confidence – thanks to my previous guests – to explore further my own ideas. That's when I stopped interviewing guests, so I'd have more time to explore. Love Your Work shifted from my personal advisory board to my personal sounding board – a sort of “open mic,” where I fleshed out ideas. I got to see how it felt to effortfully explore each idea. I got to hear how they sounded when I read them aloud. I got to feel how they resonated (or didn't) with others. It helped me write my books A couple years after I started Love Your Work, I started writing a book called Getting Art Done. Getting Art Done turned out to be three books, two of which I've published. Love Your Work has been there to help me explore the ideas in these books. The Heart to Start was full of conversations from my early guests, and came from my very real struggles in gaining the confidence to take my ideas seriously enough to pursue them. Mind Management, Not Time Management came from my very real struggles to harness my creative energy and push my ideas forward. As I work on the final book in the Getting Art Done trilogy, Finish What Matters, I'm asking myself, What struggle does this book come from? Clearly, I've finished a lot of creative work: three books, over two-hundred consecutive weekly newsletters, and over three-hundred episodes of this podcast. But as I've dwelt on that final word in the title, matters, I'm asking myself if I'm really working on what matters? Love Your Work and Getting Art Done have been an exploration in creative productivity. But at some point, writing about Resistance becomes a form of Resistance. I don't feel I've reached that point yet, but I don't want to. If I'm going to learn enough to write Finish What Matters, I have to really test my ideas of what matters. I've probably explored enough ideas, through Love Your Work, that I want to develop further in Finish What Matters. But for the time being, I need space to explore what matters. That's the biggest reason I'm quitting Love Your Work. I had considered doing so in the past, but I kept hoping I'd know What's Next before I quit. I've come to realize that I can't know What's Next until I have the space to explore. What's Next is finding What's Next It's a little scary to have that void. But it's also exciting. Furthermore, I've faced The Void many times before: when I started on my own, after finishing each book, and a little bit after each podcast episode or newsletter. What's scarier now than facing the void is that I'll stick with what's safe, and distract myself into dying with my best creations inside me. I could just say I'm taking a break, or not say anything at all and stop until I felt inspired to make a new episode. I've talked before about how I struggle to burn my boats and close doors. So, I'm calling it quits, knowing I could always drop another episode in the feed down the line if I wanted to. But I hope I find something that matters more, before that ever happens. Thank you for listening! Thank you for listening to Love Your Work. Thank you especially to my Patreon supporters, who can of course feel free to stop supporting, or keep supporting for the bonus content, and to support What's Next. To learn What's Next once I find it, be sure to subscribe to my newsletter at kdv.co. One last time, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Image: Pierrot Lunaire by Paul Klee About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email New bonus content on Patreon! I've been adding lots of new content to Patreon. Join the Patreon »       Show notes: https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/quit-podcasting/

One thing I hear from a lot from readers of The Heart to Start, is that many people have no problem starting new projects. They instead struggle with finishing them. I can relate. Like many creative people, I once struggled to finish projects. I always had new ideas, I left books half-read, projects half-finished. I had done lots of creative work, and had little to show for it. Now I still always have new ideas, and I still leave books half-read and projects half-finished. But now, I have lots of finished projects to show for all the work I've done. What's changed? I've learned to finish what matters, and forget the rest. Embrace your inner Perceiver A turning point in my own creative journey came when I learned to embrace my inner Perceiver. As much flak as the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator gets for being pseudoscience, it's still a useful lens for understanding your own tendencies. The concepts of Introversion and Extroversion have wide scientific support, but also useful I think are the concepts of “Perceiving” and “Judging.” If you watch in awe as one friend after another executes on ideas and achieves success, while you flounder, working on one idea after another, but never truly following through, your friends are probably “Js”, and you might be a “P.” This is the position I was in, until a friend at a party explained this dichotomy to me. Why was this other friend of ours so great at follow-through, while we both struggled to find our paths? This friend was a J. We were Ps. Another way of thinking about being a Perceiver is you're someone who sees Possibilities. You can't move forward with one idea, because you keep having other, better ideas. Meanwhile, your “Judging” friends find an idea, make the judgement to stick with it, and see it through. Shiny objects aren't shameful Perceiving Possibilities is a necessary part of being creative. For DNA to be discovered, the researchers had to entertain the Possibility that they should pursue something other than the original intent of their grant application – which was to study cancer treatments. For Alexander Fleming to discover antibiotics, he had to see Possibilities in experimental petri dishes that were contaminated. If you want a treasure trove of Perceivers, look no further than nearly every person Walter Isaacson has written a biography on. For Leonardo Da Vinci to paint the Mona Lisa, he applied his knowledge of optics to his sfumato technique, which allowed him to model the painting with no hard lines. He applied his knowledge of anatomy to crafting the Mona Lisa's mysterious smirk. He had dissected humans and animals, studying exactly which muscles were recruited to express various emotions. In episode 272, I talked about how Steve Jobs and the engineers and executives at Apple had to consider the Possibility that while a trackwheel served as a useful interface for an iPod, it might not be such for the iPhone. Isaacson himself has said, “People who love all fields of knowledge are the ones who can best spot the patterns across nature.” So if you're someone who beats themself up over Shiny Object Syndrome, consider the Possibility that it's a necessary component of creative thinking. Creative success happens in Extremistan On the rare occasion that someone with shiny object syndrome does finish a project, it might not be successful, and that can make matters worse. Why bother following through with anything, you might think, when you aren't assured of success? But, creative work calls for a different approach to success. As I talked about in episode 253, creative work happens in Extremistan. Nobody knows anything It's impossible to predict which creative projects will be successful. If record companies knew hits, that's all they'd release. If movie studios knew blockbusters, that's all they'd produce. If publishers knew bestsellers, that's all they'd launch. If Venture Capitalists knew unicorns, that's all they'd fund. And they wouldn't be called “Venture” Capitalists – they'd just be Capitalists. As two-time Academy-Award-winning screenwriter William Goldman said, “Nobody knows anything.” The sky is the limit Even when a creative project is released into Extremistan, there is a huge range of potential outcomes. When Art De Vany analyzed the box-office proceeds of various movies, he found that the top 1% of movies accounted for 20% of sales. My latest book, Mind Management, Not Time Management is a success. Book-marketing expert Tucker Max calls a self-published book that sells 2,500 copies in its first year a “home run”. Mind Management, Not Time Management sold 10,000. But, Mark Manson's Subtle Art has sold more than ten million. This podcast episode will get more downloads than about 97% of other podcasts, but it's not unusual for an episode of Joe Rogan's podcast to get 1,000 times the downloads of this one. It's a long night to overnight success When you follow through and put a creative project into the world, you may have mild success, or you may have wild success. But there's no telling how long wild success can take. The Queen's Gambit took thirty-seven years to become a New York Times bestseller. Jane Austen's books went out of print after her death. There's no telling when a box-office bust will become a cult classic, or just a straight-up classic. People forget that The Shawshank Redemption was a box-office bomb, now considered by many to be the best movie of all time. Like I talked about on episode 251, you can't call out Suvivorship Bias so easily in creative work, because you often don't know if a project is truly dead. We're raised in Mediocristan Creative success happens in Extremistan, not Mediocristan, and this is at the heart of why many people feel ashamed of their shiny object syndrome. We're raised in Mediocristan, so we evaluate success and our ability to follow through based upon how things get done in Mediocristan. The whole point of civilization – with its steady paychecks, fixed-rate mortgages, and insurance policies – is to smooth out the shocks of the natural world. Mediocristan is built upon predictability, and to succeed by Mediocristan's standards, you need to yourself be predictable. If you can follow the curriculum, do the reading, and fill out the bubbles on a standardized test with your standardized #2 pencil, you can get a good grade, that adds up to a good GPA, which lets you graduate and get your degree to put the right keywords in your resume so a computer can read it and find you. You can get a job, a steady paycheck, a fixed-rate mortgage, and an insurance policy. But for any of these niceties of Mediocristan to exist, someone has to invent something. Before Henry Ford could double the going rate for a factory worker, introduce the five-dollar day, and have 10,000 people banging on his gates, he had to create those jobs. You are a Maker/Capitalist Even if you wanted to work in a factory in Mediocristan – besides the fact that few humans could handle the monotony of working on Ford's assembly-line – these kinds of jobs are becoming more scarce. More of our drudgery is being handled by automation. This is reducing the barriers to entry for putting ideas into the world. You can build a no-code app with Adalo or Webflow, you can print and ship artwork and memorabilia with Printful, you can – like me – sell thousands of print-on-demand books in dozens of countries around the world, and not touch a single one. It used to require capital and labor to produce a good or service. Now, less labor is needed, and almost no capital. It used to require management to organize all that labor. Now management is the arrangement of automation – but “management” isn't the right word for it, and neither is labor. The word “creator” embodies the trifecta of coming up with ideas, doing the work, and distributing the goods. More and more of us can be creator/capitalists. We require little capital to fund our making, but we have to be adept at using what little capital we have wisely. Balaji Srinivasan would call us “capital allocators.” Finish what matters, and forget the rest If creative success is random, and happens upon a long timeline, how do you stay the course to embrace your shiny object syndrome and still ship projects? Start by building your shipping skills, like I talked about on episode 265. Treat even the smallest projects in your life as opportunities to have a vision, form a plan, and carry out that plan. You can do this by cooking a recipe, planning a party or trip, and build into shipping small creative projects. Learn to navigate uncertainty. Get used to making percentage-confidence predictions about the future, then evaluating those predictions down the road. You can learn with the Avocado Challenge I talked about on episode 245. Remember that for Henry Ford to build the Model T, he had to iterate on Models A through S. Like a construction project that seems to make no progress, until suddenly a twenty-story building appears, you need to let the Foundation Effect happen, like I talked about on episode 266. Remember the Iceberg Principle, like I talked about on episode 263. The same way ninety-percent of an iceberg is underwater, what you present to the world in your masterpiece will be just a small fraction of the knowledge and experimentation you put in. You have to embrace creative waste, like I talked about on episode 264. As a creator/capitalist, you need to use your resources wisely. Use the Barbell Strategy that I talked about on episode 244. Put most of your resources toward “sure bets” that keep you in the game. But set aside time and energy to play wildcards – crazy ideas with little downside, but unlimited potential upside. Creative work is the business of breeding Black Swans. Through this process, you won't finish every project, and you won't always be able to tell which projects matter. But with enough practice, over enough time, you'll become adept at finishing what matters, and forgetting the rest. Image: Characters In Yellow, Paul Klee Mind Management is a Kindle Deal! Amazon has hand-selected Mind Management, Not Time Management for a promotional discount. It's only $2.49 on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca. Offer ends March 31st, so grab it now! About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/finish-what-matters/

The extinction of property investors as we know them is coming. Whilst it won't happen overnight, it will happen. On this episode, I'm taking you to a place I call Extremistan! What is unfolding in the middle and outer rings of our cities can only be described as extreme. Prices are being obliterated for investors, and we are going to talk about what that means for us as investors.    On this episode -  6:10 - Extreme property investment  13:58 - Will the cities ever be affordable again?  20:26 - Suburbs are run by supply gaps  25:10 - Will property investors be pushed out of cities?  32:14 - The prophecy of Sydney  Don't hesitate to hit me up on Facebook @SamSaggers. DM me any of your questions :) If you're yet to subscribe, be sure to do so on your favourite channel.  Apple - https://pre.fyi/upi-apple Spotify - https://pre.fyi/upi-spotify Google Podcasts - https://pre.fyi/upi-google YouTube - https://pre.fyi/upi-youtube   And remember, I'm really good on 1.25 or 1.5 speed :) Take care,  Sam

There are at least two kinds of randomness in the world: normal, as in a normal distribution or a bell curve, and extreme. As humans we're used to the normal distribution. That's the kind of thing we dealt with a lot over the thousands of years of our existence. It's only recently that the extreme distribution has come to predominate. Nassim Taleb has labeled the first mediocristan and the second extremistan. In this podcast we explore the difference between the two and how the tools of mediocristan are inadequate to the disasters of extremistan.

When Vincent van Gogh began his career as an artist, he had already failed at everything else. He even got fired from his own family's business in the process. Not seeing any alternative, he completely immersed himself in art. In one two-week period, he created 120 drawings. But exactly none of those drawings are famous today. [This is Love Your Work, and I'm David Kadavy] What feels like waste is not waste Last week, I talked about the Iceberg Principle – the idea that any masterpiece you see is just the tip of the iceberg. There's far more knowledge and experience beneath the surface, giving that masterpiece confidence and grace. But as you're adding layer after layer to your iceberg, it doesn't feel like that's what you're doing. It feels like you're wasting your energy. But you're not. After Van Gogh's frenzied first couple weeks seriously pursuing art, he settled in to a more conservative pace. Instead of 120 drawings in two weeks, he was instead shooting to make just twenty a week. He figured that's how many he'd have to make to end up with one good piece each week. “Waste” takes many forms What feels like “waste” can take many forms: Failed projects: You made something, and nobody likes it. Off on timing: Nobody like it yet, but some day someone will. Unfinished projects: You started, got a little ways, and maybe Shiny Object Syndrome took over. For whatever reason, you didn't finish. Research and Preparation: You don't always know what you're trying to learn, but all sorts of tinkering may seem like a waste. Creative waste is part of the creative game Sometimes what feels like “waste,” makes it directly into a current or future project, thus making it clearly not waste. But even the stuff that never becomes a part of your body of work is part of the creative game. I talked in episode 256 about the Barbell Strategy. To succeed in creative work, put most of your efforts toward “sure bets” that protect your downside and keep you in the game. With the rest of your time and energy, play “wildcards,” that have a chance of big upside. Creative work happens in Extremistan, not Mediocristan. Success won't be a steady climb up-and-to-the-right. Instead, it will look more like a poorly-shaved porcupine. Long periods of time where it doesn't seem like much is happening, punctuated by big spikes that level up your career one at a time. Yes, you're showing up every day and putting in the work, but all that is a series of small bets. You hope for one or two or a few to turn into positive Black Swans. Projects that take off, and take on a life of their own. In the course of playing this strategy, you can't tell what will be wasted, and what will not. You have to trust that “waste” is part of the process. Projects will fail, projects will go unfinished, and iterations will burn in the fire. That doesn't make you a procrastinator or a dilettante – that makes you a creator. Waste in Van Gogh's first masterpiece Vincent van Gogh's first masterpiece was full of waste. He did not just a sketch, but a small study, a medium study, and a print he could give out to test his idea. This was all before working on the final canvas. And that had many iterations, and four coats of varnish. He left it in his friend's studio to prevent himself from “spoiling it.” Then he still came back and worked on it some more. All that waste was on top of the years of work he did leading up to the project. The painting was about peasants, and he wandered around living like a peasant himself, begging people to model for him. And, there was the twenty drawings a week he had done. And those 120 drawings he did in a two-week period? We don't even know what they look like, because he destroyed them. Once this first masterpiece, The Potato Eaters, was done, it must have felt like a waste to Vincent. Everyone hated it. He got in a fight with his brother about it, and he completely cut off a friend who attacked it, viciously. Vincent van Gogh's first masterpiece was the result of a lot of waste. Each of those drawings was a failed project, surely many were left unfinished. He did a massive amount of research and preparation, and he was certainly off on timing. The Potato Eaters is regarded as a masterpiece today. Creative waste adds to the iceberg You already heard last week about how any masterpiece is just the tip of the iceberg. There's far more below the surface. So what new do you learn from creative waste? Sometimes, you can't see the tip of the iceberg. Sometimes it all just feels like waste. Your projects are failing, and your preparation and planning isn't getting you anywhere, causing you to leave projects unfinished. Just remember that other creators have embraced creative waste. I told you last week about how Margaret Mitchell re-wrote nearly every chapter of Gone With the Wind at least twenty times, Jerry Seinfeld says joke-writing is “ninety-five percent re-write,” Meredith Monk's charts and graphs go to waste and don't end up in the final performance, and Stephen King reminds you to “kill your darlings.” Those are all fine when you're deep in a project and you can see where it's going, but what do you do when entire projects get scrapped? Great creators embrace waste That's when you need to remind yourself of the approach Picasso took to his paintings. He did one after another. He saw them as like “pages in [his] journal.” He understood that not all his works would be successful. Even once he had a finished piece, he didn't know its true fate. “The future will chose the pages it prefers,” he said. “It's not up to me to make the choice.” Embrace creative waste. No waste, no wins. Image: Tale of Hoffmann by Paul Klee About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/creative-waste/

Hvis det ikke var så tragisk, ville det være komisk, at vores såkaldt højtudviklede teknologiske civilisation i 20 måneder har ligget under for en virus, som i dens biologi i realiteten er ganske banal. Hvad der ikke er banalt er den menneskelige faktor. Vi er ikke en rationelt tænkende race, og selv hvis vi var, er rationelle handlinger i krisetider politisk svære i et samfund, der er gearet til at opretholde normalitet. Pandemiens tåge er desværre på mange måder endnu ikke lettet. Med en selvpålagt udfordring om ikke kun at køre i samme rille, forsøger vi at udvikle nye pointer og nuancere problemstillingen, mens vi ser både tilbage og frem — fra vores position i logen på balkonen. Det er ikke med vores gode vilje, men gæsten fra “Extremistan”, SARS-CoV-2, er ikke færdige med os endnu.

If you want to grow an audience online, it's great to have a consistent newsletter. It keeps you in touch with your subscribers, and it gives you a place to test out small ideas you can later grow into big ideas. I've been delivering my Love Mondays newsletter every week for more than 100 weeks (and you can sign up here). Here's how I streamline and automate the process, so I never miss a week. Small bites of information Newsletters work great as small bites of information. Your subscribers get your newsletter right in their inboxes, so they're in a hurry. If they know they can get a quick hit or two from your newsletter, they won't put off opening it. You can see this with newsletters such as Tim Ferriss's Five Bullet Friday, or James Clear's 3-2-1 Thursday. The fact that these newsletters are full of quick hits is right there in the titles. Keeping the bites organized I design Love Mondays to have a few tiny bites of interesting things, as well as a light main dish. Each Love Mondays newsletter has a quick thought – maybe 150–300 words, about navigating the Extremistan world of making it as a creator. Plus, I have what I call “ABCs” – Aphorisms (or Quotes), Books, and Cool tools. Additionally, I may make a short announcement in the postscript. Each newsletter has the main quick thought, two ABCs, and sometimes there's a P.S., sometimes there's even an P.P.S. That's a lot of different things to think up each week, so I've designed my system so I don't have to do it all at once. Using a spreadsheet I built from a service called Airtable, I'm able to organize the ideas I'd like to share in Love Mondays, as well as Aphorisms, Books, Cool tools, and other announcements. I combine them to create each week's newsletter. My system keeps me from switching mental states trying to think up each item. The spreadsheet also allows me to track the performance of things like subject lines and clicks on items I share, so I can keep making my newsletter better. Collecting ideas Each newsletter idea starts as an even smaller idea. There's a sheet in my database that's full of some of my best-performing tweets. Using Zapier, I have an automation set up so that anytime I “like” one of my own tweets, it gets saved to this sheet in Airtable. It saves the body of the tweet, the number of favorites it has, a link to the tweet, and the date of the tweet. I “batch” my Love Mondays newsletters on a monthly basis, using the “creative system” I talked about in my book, Mind Management, Not Time Management. To begin a batch of newsletters, I start looking for ideas in this sheet of high-performing tweets. I sort them by date, then make sure the number of likes is updated on all the newest tweets. Then, I sort them by number of likes. I don't always grow the most popular tweets into newsletter ideas, but seeing the number of likes does help me get a feel for what ideas resonate with my readers better than others. Collecting Aphorisms, Books, and Cool tools I also have individual sheets in my database for Aphorisms, Books, and Cool tools. My Aphorism sheet also gets populated with a Zapier zap. If I like one of my own tweets, and it has an em dash in it (“—“), that filters the tweet into the quotes sheet, instead of my sheet of ideas. Again, I can sort quotes I've shared according to how many likes they got, to get a better feel for which ones my readers will enjoy. Other than that, I manage the sheets for Books and Cool tools manually. Reviewing the data Each week, I enter the stats from the previous week's Love Mondays newsletter. I plug in the number of subscribers it was sent to, and how many opened, to get the open rate. For Books and Cool tools, I enter how many clicks the links got, so I can see each item's click through rate. As I consider new Books and Cool tools to share, I check the performance of the past Books and Cool tools I've shared, to get an idea of what people will like. The data has been really surprising sometimes, as things I thought people would love got little interest, and things that didn't seem like a big deal got a lot. Again, the numbers aren't the only thing that decides what I share. I share a lot of things I just like, even if I don't think the highest percentage of readers will be into it. Identifying finalists I keep a big backlog on all these sheets, so I never feel pressure to think up new ideas, or new ABCs to share. I just capture things as they come. But as each new month approaches, I comb through these sheets to identify finalists I'd like to share. I just change a field in each record in Airtable, so my top candidates for tweet ideas and ABCs are at the top of each sheet, where I can later narrow them down further. Writing the drafts Once I've collected some of my favorite ideas, I write the idea section of the emails. I usually get the month's emails – four or five, depending – written in two sessions. In the first session, I write really awkward drafts. In the second session, I re-write those, and they usually come out much less awkward. I space the two sessions a week apart, so my subconscious does most of the work for me. Every once in a while, I just have a good first session and don't have to re-write – just edit a little. I do this writing in Ulysses, one newsletter after another, in one document. Before the first session, I set up the document with a simple list of dates, the body text of the tweet that serves as inspiration, and whatever other things I might want to announce in that week's newsletter. I consult the schedule of my podcast, so I can share any recent episodes, I check my other spreadsheet of podcasts that have interviewed me to make sure I've thanked them, and I check my calendar to see if there are any promotions I want to announce. Wrapping it all together Now here comes the cool part. Airtable helps me wrap my main newsletter body together with my ABCs, my announcements, and my greeting and salutation. The result is a field with all the Markdown text for the newsletter. To do this, I copy and paste the Markdown text of the main idea of the newsletter into a field. From other fields, I can select the Aphorism and/or Book and/or Cool thing I want to include in that week's newsletter. Each record for Books or Cool things already has fields for my comments and the links for the items. Once I select any ABCs, all this is added to the main body, in Markdown text. Each newsletter also has a P.S. and P.P.S. field, and if they're populated with anything, they get added onto that text, too. Scheduling Now all I have to do is copy and paste the Markdown into a translator. I then copy and paste the rich text into my email marketing platform, ActiveCampaign. Once I have the main content of all the month's newsletters written, it takes about fifteen minutes to integrate the ABCs, the announcements, and to have the newsletters scheduled and ready to go. Sign up for Love Mondays and see for yourself! There you have it. This system really helps me save creative energy, so that I'm using it to think of good ideas, instead of trying to fumble around with all the things I want to put in my newsletter. Obviously, all this could be automated even further. I'm actually surprised I haven't seen an email marketing platform that already has Airtable-like database elements for managing all the tidbits one shares in their newsletter. Maybe something for someone to build. If you want to see all this in action, be sure to sign up for Love Mondays. My readers really love them, I consistently get replies saying how much each week's idea has shifted someone's perspective. New Book: Digital Zettelkasten: Principles, Methods & Examples Learn how to think through building a database of the most interesting things you've ever read, or thought. Available direct from me, on Amazon, and everywhere else. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/email-newsletter-process/

The business of creative work is the business of riding randomness. If you want to write a bestselling book or launch a revolutionary company, you’re going to need luck. You’re navigating Extremistan, not Mediocristan, as I talked about in episode 253. How do you increase your chances of having a hit without risking everything? You do it with “The Barbell Strategy.” You can use the Barbell Strategy in many areas of life and work. The Barbell Strategy defined The Barbell Strategy is introduced in Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan, which I summarized on episode 244. The Barbell Strategy protects you from catastrophic losses that can take you out of the game. Meanwhile, it gives you chances to make big gains. Why “barbell”? Think of a barbell – a very lopsided barbell. On one side of the barbell is a big weight. On the other side of the barbell is a small weight. In the middle is the thin bar that connects the two. The Barbell Strategy is an investment strategy Taleb introduces The Barbell Strategy in an investing context. This is the strategy Taleb has used as a financial trader. As we’ll see, you can apply it to other areas as well. Taleb says: If you know that you are vulnerable to prediction errors, and if you accept that most “risk measures” are flawed, because of the Black Swan, then your strategy is to be as hyperconservative and hyperaggressive as you can be instead of being mildly aggressive or conservative. (emphasis mine) In other words, you have to accept that the world is full of Black Swans. As a review, Black Swans are outlier events with extreme impact. We think we can explain Black Swans after the fact, but we really have no idea. They can be positive, or negative. Things like financial market crashes or mega-best-selling books. By being hyperconservative, you avoid the negative Black Swans. By being hyperagressive, you expose yourself to positive Black Swans. 85% hyperconservative investments, 15% hyperaggressive investments Most people go with the “safe” investment. I’m not a financial advisor, and nothing I’m saying is investment advice, but for most people, that’s the index fund: Keep putting money in an S&P 500 ETF. Expect to get a 7% return over your lifetime. The strategy Taleb espouses is to avoid so-called “medium risk” investments. Instead, put 85% of your portfolio in hyperconservative investments – places where you won’t lose money. Invest the other 15% of your portfolio in hyperaggressive investments – places where you might lose your money, but where there’s also no limit to how much money you could make. When you’re invested in the index fund, your entire portfolio is exposed to Black Swans. The stock market dropped nearly 90% during the Great Depression, and swift drops of 30 or 40% are not uncommon. If 85% of your portfolio is spread across hyperconservative investments, you’re unlikely to need to weather such storms. With 15% of your portfolio in hyperaggressive investments, you can only lose 15% of your money. Meanwhile, there’s no limit to how high those hyperaggressive investments can go. Imagine you put 1% of your net worth in Bitcoin five years ago. Multiply that by 100, and that’s your current return. Even if you lost all the other 14% of your net worth in hyperaggressive investments, you would have nearly doubled your money, with little downside risk. The Barbell Strategy in creative work As you learned in episode 253 about Mediocristan vs. Extremistan, creative success is unpredictable. As award-winning screenwriter William Goldman said, “Nobody knows anything.” Most creatives expect their success to go “up and to the right.” When someone suggests they take some chances, to justify not taking those chances they abuse survivorship bias – as I talked about on episode 251. So they stick to “the middle.” They do the thing they feel will get them a little success. For authors, this is the strategy of cranking out a formulaic novel every month that’s sure to sell some copies – but for which nobody is ever going to camp in line outside a bookstore to be the first to get. Maybe they make the graph go “up and to the right,” but they’ll never have a breakout success. Find some “sure bets” – protect your downside To play the Barbell Strategy in creative work, first, you need to find some sure bets. Protect your downside, so you can stay in the game. Remember on episode 251 when I told you about my poker-player friend who needs a certain “bankroll” to make $100 an hour? That’s what you need. You need some room to explore long enough to let ergodicity take over. That could be a literal bankroll. I personally invested a lot when I had a secure job, knowing that some day I’d use the bankroll as runway to start something on my own. Some creatives like to have a secure day job, and spend a little time creating before or after work. Anthony Trollope and Charles Bukowski worked at the post office. Octavia Butler’s many jobs included potato chip inspector. Comedian Mark Normand was a janitor, which allowed him to think about his bits while he worked. When I first started on my own, after I had gone through savings I had bookmarked for exploration, I spent ten hours a week freelancing – the rest of the time I spent building passive income streams. I told you on episode 214 how one passive income stream made me $150,000. I now live in Colombia, where my three-bedroom apartment costs less than $700 a month – which takes off a lot of financial pressure. To play the Barbell Strategy, you need to protect your downside. There are no guarantees in life, including life itself – so this means something different for everyone. Figure out what it is for you. Play some “wildcards” Now, play some “wildcards” (Note that “sure bets” and “wildcards” are my own terms. Taleb hates gambling analogies because in gambling the actual odds are known – but you get the idea.) Wildcards are things that – as Seth Godin would say – “might not work.” In fact, they probably won’t work – but they have unlimited upside potential. They’re the “asymmetric opportunities” Tynan talked about on episode 145. “Asymmetric” refers to the risk profile: The potential downsides are small, but the potential upside are huge. The profile is not symmetric, it’s asymmetric. For example, it costs little to write a blog post. You have little to lose, but you may gain a lot. I’ve written many hundreds of blog posts in seventeen years. Two of those have led to positive Black Swans: One got me my first book deal, and catapulted my status online from nobody to somebody. Another got me an advisory position with a company that sold to Google, and became the subject of my latest book. Numerous others brought smaller benefits, but I can’t think of any I regret. Your wildcards have a chance to become positive Black Swans. You can’t predict what will work, so make lots of small bets with unlimited upside. Avoid “the middle” Finally, avoid “the middle.” There’s a few reasons for this. One, the middle is crowded. As restauranteur Nick Kokonas said on episode 213, most people aren’t as afraid of failure as they are of success. They want to do okay, but they don’t want to do great. At the same time, we have a loss-aversion bias. We hate losing an investment twice as much as we enjoy gaining from an investment. So, everyone goes for the middle. And there’s more competition in the middle. Two, the middle is where the negative Black Swans happen. You’re only investing a little in the wildcards, so you can afford to lose it all. We tend to go all-in on the middle, so when an unexpected catastrophe happens, we lose a lot. Three, the middle has little chance of bringing positive Black Swans. Your index fund is supposed to return 7% a year. It could lose 40% of its value in a day or two. Meanwhile, does it have any chance of gaining 1,000% just as fast? Very unlikely. What’s hot is usually “the middle” Look at what is hot in your field, and you’ll probably find “the middle.” In writing, it’s churning out formulaic fiction series for Kindle Unlimited. In blogging, it’s making sure you’re sharing every blog post to every social media channel. In SEO, it’s manufacturing mediocre articles on high-volume keywords you have little chance of ranking for. In SaaS entrepreneurship, it’s A/B testing to make minuscule gains in conversion rate. Some of these things might bring a little progress, which is why people do them, but they have no chance of big upside. Avoiding the middle protects your downside, and gives you a chance for more upside. With less invested in the middle, you can invest more in the wildcards. The Barbell Strategy in other areas The Barbell Strategy is useful in investing, and it’s useful in creative work. If you look around, you can also apply the Barbell Strategy to other areas. The Barbell Strategy for exercise “The middle” for exercise is steady-state, medium-intensity, training. Taleb himself is an advocate of doing power lifts, as heavy as you can. This certainly exposes you to upside, but I think it also exposes you to the downside of injury. I think the true Barbell Strategy for exercise is Body by Science, which I summarized on episode 160. It’s a very intense and short protocol, with little chance of injury. Other than that, go for long walks or do physical activities you enjoy. The Barbell Strategy for technology use You can apply the Barbell Strategy to your technology use. Some technology exposes you to potential serendipity. Surfing around on Reddit or social media is fun, and you never know when you’ll happen across a breakthrough idea. But like a risky investment, it’s risky to spend all your attention in these areas. The “sure bets” in technology are to use specific tools for the job you’re trying to get done. I talked about “grippy” and “slippy” tools on episode 230. If you’re a writer, get an AlphaSmart, or a typewriter for the initial brainstorming phases of your work. High-powered technology such as smartphones and laptops can be sure bets, too. But just use them for short bursts for specific tasks. What you want to avoid is the always-on use of the highest-power technology available. If you’re always glued to your smartphone or laptop, you’re connected to the internet, but you’re disconnected from your own mind. You can’t use technology without technology using some part of you. Marshall McLuhan, whose book, Understanding Media, I talked about on episode 248, would say that as technology extends, it also “amputates.” Another “wildcard” for technology is to not use technology at all. When I took Naval Ravikant’s meditation challenge, which I talked about on episode 246, I found that during meditation I thought more about asymmetric ideas, which I later implemented when I was using technology. The Barbell Strategy for time management You can apply the Barbell Strategy to time management. “The middle” is trying to get the most done in the shortest time. It’s being on clock time instead of event time, like I talked about on episode 235. The “sure bets” for time management are to have clear priorities, build habits, document processes, and automate what you can. These tactics help you use time and energy more effectively, without stressing you out and disrupting your creativity. The “wildcards” for time management are mostly the opposite of the sure bets. Meditate, daydream, go for walks, take naps, tinker, play, and discuss. As Taleb says, “Go to parties!” Instead of having clear priorities, spend time on “anti-priorities”: Things that don’t seem important, but that you want to do anyway. What you want to avoid is the stuff most people try to do to “save time”: full schedules, tight deadlines, last-minute crises, mindless outsourcing, and complexity creep. These tactics lead to negative time Black Swans: When one thing goes wrong, everything collapses, you lose time, and stress yourself out. Live the barbell life Let’s close with a quote from Nassim Taleb: I will never get to know the unknown since, by definition, it is unknown. However, I can always guess how it might affect me, and I should base my decisions around that. To apply the Barbell Strategy to any area of your life and work, avoid the middle, find sure bets, and play some wildcards. It’s the best way to stay in the game long enough to get lucky. Last chance to join the True Fan Patreon tier I'm offering the special "True Fan" Patreon tier through May. Join today and get lots of benefits at a discounted price. Learn more here » About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/barbell-strategy/

If you want to succeed in anything creative – whether that’s writing, art, or entrepreneurship – you’re navigating unfamiliar territory. Everyone else is living in Mediocristan, but you’re living in Extremistan. You need a different approach for deciding how you define success. “Extremistan” is a term introduced by Nicholas Nassim Taleb in his book, The Black Swan, which I summarized on episode 244. We tend to think we’re living in the opposite of Extremistan: Mediocristan. When we as creatives measure success and make our decisions as if we are in Mediocristan, we ruin any chance we have of succeeding in the world we’re actually in: Extremistan. Extremistan defined Extremistan is an imaginary place where events are random and unpredictable, and the impact of those events are extreme. It’s a world full of “Black Swans.” Extremistan vs. Mediocristan Mediocristan is a place that’s the opposite of Extremistan. Extremistan is unstable. Mediocristan is stable. Extremistan is the world of the unpredictable and unexpected. Mediocristan is the world of the predictable and expected. Extremistan is full of singular events (“Black Swans”). In Mediocristan, the same things happen over and over. Extremistan is full of variables that scale infinitely. In Mediocristan, all variables fall within a range. We’re used to Mediocristan Our modern world is built to be Mediocristan. We think we can predict what will happen. Some of this may be that our mental hard-wiring makes it difficult for us to think in terms of the unpredictable and unstable. Some of it is definitely because we’ve spread, across the collective, risks that face the individual. An hourly-wage job is in Mediocristan Imagine you have an hourly-wage job serving coffee at Starbucks. You’re working in Mediocristan. There are plenty of unpredictable things Starbucks has to deal with serving millions of customers across tens of thousands of locations. Employees will call in sick or stop showing up. There can be a coffee bean shortage, causing prices to suddenly spike. Someone might slip and fall in the bathroom and sue for millions of dollars. All these things affect Starbucks’ profits. One month, they may make a big profit. The next month, they may lose money and need to take out a loan to stay in business. But all the while, you know exactly how much you’re getting paid each hour you work. Starbucks can handle these shocks and pay you a steady wage because they spread risk across the entire organization. You don’t even notice if a water main breaks, flooding another location, or if the Director of Operations gets in a car wreck and ends up in the hospital for seven weeks. Your hourly-wage job at Starbucks is mind-numbing, it’s boring, you’re living on rice and beans from Aldi. But, it’s impressively predictable. It beats the heck out of foraging in the jungle and hoping you don’t get pounced on by a puma. Creative work happens in Extremistan A Mediocristan job is a pretty sweet deal if the wage is livable. Though, stable, well-paying Mediocristan jobs are more and more scarce. That’s not the thing I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is how important it is to understand that when you’re doing creative work, you’re not in Mediocristan, rather you’re in Extremistan. An author works in Extremistan Imagine if when you get off your shift at Starbucks, you sit down and write each day. After you build a writing habit and keep it for several years, you finish your first novel. You upload your novel to Amazon, and: nothing. You get a few sales a month. Then one day, you log into your Amazon dashboard, and see a huge spike. You’ve sold 3,000 books, and it’s not even 10 a.m. Turns out an influencer shared your book on TikTok. 3,000 books is just the beginning. Your book becomes a massive best-seller. You sell millions. A big publisher picks it up and distributes it around the world. You’re getting six-figure checks for foreign rights deals, then you get a seven-figure check for the movie rights. You quit the Starbucks job. Your life is forever changed. Extremistan is a world of extremes Your job at Starbucks is in Mediocristan. Your work as an author is in Extremistan. Remember, Extremistan is unstable, unpredictable, with singular events and variables that scale infinitely. You wrote every day after work, with no financial returns – suddenly you had more money than you knew what to do with. That’s unstable. It looked as if your book was a failure, until it wasn’t. That’s unpredictable. By some fluke, the influencer shared your book. That was a singular event (a “Black Swan”). There’s virtually no limit to the number of books you could sell. Your book sales are a variable that could scale infinitely. As the name would imply, Extremistan is a world of extremes. In Mediocristan, variables fall within a range In Mediocristan, variables fall within a range. The height of humans is a good example. The height of humans is distributed on a bell curve. There are a lot of people who are about average height. There are far fewer people on the tails of the bell curve whether extremely tall, or extremely short. There are no adults nine inches tall, nor ninety feet tall. No one has even been nine feet tall. In Extremistan, variables scale infinitely In Extremistan, variables scale infinitely. The “average” net worth of a U.S. family is about $700,000. But while there are a lot of people who are average height, there aren’t so many with average wealth. To be richer than half of all Americans, you need “only” $100,000. Why are so many Americans below “average” wealth? Because if Bill Gates walks into a bar, on average, everyone there is a billionaire. The people on the high edge of wealth distribution are so wealthy, they skew the average. Jeff Bezos has 1 million times the wealth of the average American – over $100 billion. Human height has a predictable and limited range – it’s in Mediocristan. Wealth has an unpredictable and unlimited range – it’s in Extremistan. Be careful what you learn in Extremistan Because Extremistan is so unpredictable, with unlimited variables, you have to be careful not to draw conclusions too soon from what you see in Extremistan. A quote from Taleb: In Extremistan, one unit can easily affect the total in a disproportionate way. In this world, you should always be suspicious of the knowledge you derive from data. In other words, the individual can skew the collective – Bill Gates walks into a bar and on average everyone there is a billionaire. So be careful what conclusions you draw from the data, when you’re working in Extremistan. It wouldn’t matter how long you worked at that hourly-wage job at Starbucks – you wouldn’t get rich. If the wage were livable, and you enjoyed the work, that could be fine. Don’t measure Extremistan success on Mediocristan terms But you’re in trouble if, while writing your novel, you measure success on the same terms as you measure success at your hourly-wage job at Starbucks. You’d be measuring Extremistan work on Mediocristan terms. You could do something well at work, and get a dollar-an-hour raise. You’re seeing progress. You could write an incredible chapter in your book, and not see no immediate benefit. Yet the impact of that dollar-an-hour raise, stretched out over your entire Starbucks career, may be tiny when compared to the lifetime benefit of the incredible, climactic, chapter in your novel. If you only looked at the data you immediately received, you’d quickly conclude there was no point in working on your novel. You might as well stick to serving coffee. Another quote from Taleb: What you can know from data in Mediocristan augments very rapidly with the supply of information. But knowledge in Extremistan grows slowly and erratically... In other words, in Mediocristan, the more data you collect, the more you know. In Extremistan, the more data you collect, the more you think you know – if you’re not careful. In reality, new data in Extremistan tells you very little. Success in Extremistan is explosive Like wealth, success in creative work scales infinitely. Art De Vany studied the box-office performance of 350 movies that came out during the course of nine months. The top four of those 350 movies made 20% of the total revenue. The bottom four: 0.0036%. The top movie made almost $50 million. The bottom movie, about $5,000. Success in Extremistan is random Nobody spends millions making a movie to only make $5,000. If the movie industry knew how to make $50 million instead, they would only make the movies that made $50 million. William Goldman wrote a lot of screenplays, including the cult classic, The Princess Bride. He won two Academy Awards for other screenplays. Still, he said, Nobody knows anything.... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one. —William Goldman This applies to movies, books, scientific discoveries, and entrepreneurship. You can learn and apply skill, but ultimately success in Extremistan is random. Success in Extremistan is delayed Success in Extremistan can also be delayed. Vincent van Gogh, after only two years of painting, wrote his brother Theo saying that maybe he had made a mistake investing so much in painting. It wasn’t until after ten years of painting that Van Gogh’s work was recognized – just before his early death at 37. It took Leonardo three years to paint The Last Supper. It took Marie Curie four years to isolate radium. It took James Cameron fifteen years to produce Avatar. Don’t use Mediocristan terms to measure Extremistan success When you’re measuring success in Mediocristan, you expect to see the graph go “up and to the right.” But success in Extremistan looks more like a poorly-shaved porcupine. The more you measure success in Extremistan on Mediocristan terms, the less you’ll invest in doing the kinds of things that will bring you success in Extremistan. If you focus all your energy on A/B testing, you’ll only ever see incremental gains. Misleading A/B test data aside, you’ll never take chances that lead to explosive growth. If you dismiss advice or don’t try something based upon a flawed interpretation of survivorship bias – as I talked about on episode 251, you won’t have the perseverance to stick around long enough for randomness to give you a boost (remember, The Queen’s Gambit took 37 years to become a bestseller). Creative work is about riding randomness in Extremistan If you want to make it in creative work, you need to recognize that you’re riding randomness. That’s a tough thing to get comfortable with – we like to have sure bets. A good strategy is “The Barbell Strategy,” which I talked about in The Black Swan book summary on episode 244: Go ahead and take the sure bets, but leave some room for the wildcards. Work the Starbucks job, but spend your evenings writing the boldest novel you can. We think of our world as predictable. We want to see steady growth. But the predicable and steady is from Mediocristan. Finding your way to success in creative work is a journey through Extremistan. Mind Management, Not Time Management now available! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management is now available! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Buy it now! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/mediocristan-vs-extremistan/

There’s an important bias to avoid: Survivorship bias. Unfortunately, people who might otherwise do something with their lives hide behind survivorship bias. Just as important as knowing when survivorship bias matters is knowing when survivorship bias does not matter. Survivorship bias has a fatal flaw. Example: Abraham Wald avoided survivorship bias to bring back more survivors In WWII the US military was trying to improve their planes. Each time a plane came back from a mission, they made a record of the bullet holes. Since most bullet holes were on the wings and tails of the planes, the military concluded they needed to add more armor in the wings and tails. But statistician Abraham Wald said, No – that’s not where you want to add more armor. You want more armor around the engine. That seemed weird. Their map of bullet holes showed very little damage to the engine compartment.   What Wald noticed that the military hadn’t noticed is they were only seeing bullet holes on planes that returned from missions. The bullet holes they weren’t seeing were the bullet holes on planes that did not return. And the bullet holes on planes that did not return were the ones bringing the planes down. Abraham Wald was cleverly taking into account what would become known as survivorship bias. Example: How survivorship bias can be used by an investing con artist In his book, Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Taleb tells a story of a con artist. He’d send out 10,000 letters. Half the letters predicted the stock market would go up in the next month. Half the letters, down. The next month, the con artist would send not 10,000 letters, but only 5,000. The following month, 2,500. Then 1,250, and on and on. Why did he keep sending fewer and fewer letters? Because he only sent follow-up letters to those who had received correct predictions. After enough letters, he had 150 or so victims hanging on his every word, eager to have this mystery genius invest money for them. Of course once the con artist received their money, they never heard from him again. They had been “fooled by randomness.” They had been fooled by survivorship bias. Survivorship bias doesn’t account for ergodicity Both these stories are useful examples of survivorship bias. In the first case, Abraham Wald used an awareness of survivorship bias to avoid getting a false signal from the data. In the second example, the recipients of the letters didn’t realize they could be getting a false signal from the letters. Survivorship bias is an important phenomenon to understand, but survivorship bias has a fatal flaw: Survivorship bias doesn’t account for ergodicity. What is ergodicity? What is ergodicity? Imagine you enter a dimly-lit bar just as it opens. A table of patrons across the room light up cigarettes. You can see the cascading trails of smoke rising. When they’re done with their cigarettes, they don’t smoke anymore the rest of the night. When you get home, you realize your clothes smell like smoke. How could this be? You were nowhere near the trails of smoke. Well, after the trails of smoke rose from the cigarettes, they dissipated around the room, until a faint haze of smoke filled the entire room. Randomness eventually touches everything That’s ergodicity. The smoke was rising from the cigarettes in a random pattern. But when a random pattern continues for long enough, that random pattern eventually fills the entire space it could have filled. The smoke spread randomly, until it filled the whole room. Ergodicity is why it’s not only 1% of Americans who are in the top 1% of income. As time passes, people enter and leave the top 1% of income. In a lifetime, 10% of Americans spend a year in the top 1%. More than half will spend a year in the top 10%. Ergodicity is why – even though life expectancy is about 76 – a 76-year-old only has a 4% chance of dying. The small risks of dying each year of life accumulate over time. Not every game is do-or-die Next time some entrepreneur or creative gives advice, or is profiled in an article, look at the comments or responses. You’ll probably see something like this: Don’t forget about survivorship bias! You didn’t hear from the thousands of others who followed that same advice, but didn’t succeed! Sometimes this is useful. More often than not, this is as damaging as survivorship bias itself. Example: Survivorship bias in Russian Roulette Imagine Russian Roulette was a spectator sport (thank God it’s not, but imagine). Chances are, there would be some “Michael Jordan” of Russian Roulette. Through mere chance, this person has survived hundreds of Russian Roulette matches. It just so happens that of the thousands of times this “champion” has spun the cylinder on the revolver, pointed the gun at their temple, and pulled the trigger, the chamber hasn’t had a bullet in it once. If there were millions of Russian Roulette players in the world – playing college Russian Roulette and little league Russian Roulette, hoping to make it to the Russian Roulette big leagues – a person like this would probably exist. Just like there is today in entrepreneurship and creativity, there would be an entire cottage industry of journalists and courses and Russian Roulette podcasts, all touting the advice from this Russian Roulette champion. How to spin the chamber, what thoughts to think while pulling the trigger, how much pressure to use, what gear like like gloves and jerseys to wear, and exercise programs for strength and conditioning. That would be survivorship bias at its finest – or worst. It’s all random. This “champion” has no skill. All their advice is useless. The Queen’s Gambit was not a “survivor” – then it was In 1983, Walter Tevis published a novel. He soon after optioned the screenplay rights to Jesse Kornbluth. Then Tevis died, and the project was cancelled. Nine years later, in 1992, Kornbluth could no longer afford to keep the option. Allan Scott bought the screen rights. Fifteen years later, in 2007, plans were underway to make a feature film out of this novel. Then the director died. (That director, Heath Ledger.) Finally, in 2020, the story from this novel was released as a Netflix series. At least 60 million people watched it. It’s Netflix’s most popular limited series ever. That series: The Queen’s Gambit. For the first time, the novel, The Queen’s Gambit, became a New York Times bestseller. This overnight success was almost 40 years in the making. For 37 years, The Queen’s Gambit was one of the “thousands of others who never made it.” In 2011, Kornbluth – who had the screenplay option before Scott had rights – said the rights had been bought by “people who will never get the film made.” The Queen’s Gambit was not a “survivor.” In fact, it went out of print. Not to mention at least two people literally did not survive to see it on the screen. Creative work is not Russian Roulette When you play Russian Roulette and lose, you are out of the game forever. Fortunately, as creatives, we are not playing Russian Roulette. If you build a company that fails, you can try again. If you write a blog post that falls flat, you can try hundreds or thousands more times. Creative work happens in Extremistan When someone says “Don’t forget survivorship bias,” what they’re really saying is, “Show me the exact steps to follow that guarantee success.” In creative work, there are no exact steps that guarantee success. Those only exist in Mediocristan. Even The Queen’s Gambit, which was wildly successful, wasn’t guaranteed success. It could have just as easily stayed out of print. Creative work happens not in Mediocristan, but Extremistan. No failure will come from pure lack of skill. No success will come from pure good luck. Creatives are like poker champions I have a friend who is a professional poker player. He knows if he plays poker online eight hours a day, he’ll average 100 dollars an hour. But he also knows for long stretches of time he’ll be losing money. It will look as if his career is over. On the contrary, he’ll also sometimes be flush with cash. It will look like he’s making way more than 100 dollars an hour. His career only works if he has one critical thing: “bankroll.” He needs a certain amount of money – a certain amount of padding – to help him weather losing streaks. If he goes bust, he’s out of the game entirely – he’s lost Russian Roulette. He has tremendous skill. That’s how he can survive as a professional poker player. But there’s no fighting randomness. His bankroll allows him to let randomness run its course long enough for ergodicity to even things out. The creative career is riding randomness Your results in creative work are not a direct reflection of your skill. Even if you’re “So good they can’t ignore you,” you could be toiling in obscurity for a while as you wait for your big break. If you aren’t cut out for that, fine. But admit it to yourself and don’t use survivorship bias as your scapegoat. Stay in the game long enough to survive But if you’re willing to try something that, as Seth Godin says, “might not work,” go ahead and try that advice. Maybe it will improve your odds a little. What’s important is you stay in the game long enough to let ergodicity give you more shots at a win. That could be literally having the bankroll to stay in the game. That could be making sure you make small enough bets – with high enough potential upside – that you don’t go bust, but have a chance to hit the jackpot. You have to watch your eggs long enough for a Black Swan to hatch. My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/survivorship-bias/

Extremistan V. Mediocristan One of the best takeaways from the Incerto & a fantastic way to think about the markets (outsized returns) and a fantastic way to measure broken beauracracy who think their processes are the cause of their success. These are two imaginative lands Nassim introduces us too in the Black Swan.My Writing Online: https://atlasgeographica.com/the-black-swan-nassim-taleb/Also my interview podcasts -

I recently saw a tweet storm by entrepreneur/investor/philosopher Naval Ravikant. He was challenging people to meditate sixty minutes a day for sixty consecutive days. The view from the location of my 60th hour-long meditation session. Here’s a quote from Naval about his meditation challenge, from The Naval Almanack: Meditation isn’t hard. All you have to do is sit there and do nothing. Just sit down. Close your eyes and say, “I’m just going to give myself a break for an hour. This is my hour off from life. This is the hour I’m not going to do anything. If thoughts come, thoughts come. I’m not going to fight them. I’m not going to embrace them. I’m not going to think harder about them. I’m not going to reject them. I’m just going to sit here for an hour with my eyes closed, and I’m going to do nothing.” An hour a day of doing nothing? I thought, “That’s crazy!” So, I did it. It changed the way I think about productivity. Who can give up an hour a day? Giving up an hour a day for two months seemed impossible. But I knew if I didn’t at least try it, I’d be a hypocrite. I had just finished writing a book called Mind Management, Not Time Management, after all. Taking on this challenge meant I’d be giving up an hour a day in the midst of launching a new book – which is always a busy time. But it also looked like the best possible test of my belief that time management is dead. I’d give up an hour a day of “doing” to just sit. I’d place less emphasis on time, and more emphasis on my mind. Here’s how it went. Meditation killed my motivation (in a good way) The first couple weeks were the strangest. My mind was blank. I felt numb. I lost all motivation. But probably not in the way you think. Usually, when people say they’ve lost motivation, they feel bad about it. They feel they should be motivated, but they are not. Instead, I lost motivation in a good way. I didn’t feel bad about my loss of motivation. I didn’t think, “Oh no, I want to do things but can’t find the motivation!” But I sensed my brain needed to discover new routes to motivation. What would that be like? I wanted to find out. So I kept going. Do it, Delegate it, Defer it. How about Forget it!? My lack of motivation didn’t manifest itself as a lack of motivation to do things I otherwise wanted to get done. Instead, when I thought of something I might do, I’d say to myself, “Nah! That’s not important!” I’ve long been a practitioner of Getting Things Done (which I summarized on episode 242). One of the keys to making GTD work is to write down everything you think of doing – big, small, unimportant, important – even things you might do, “Someday/Maybe.” After you write something down, you either do it, delegate it, or defer it. Thanks to meditation, I discovered a fourth option: forget it. In other words, don’t even write it down. Just let the thought pass. This is easier said than done. GTD works because it closes “open loops” in your mind. If you don’t write the thing down – GTD wisdom states – you’ll keep thinking about it. By meditating an hour a day, suddenly I was able to think of something I might do, decide it was unimportant, then forget about it completely! But as I decided not to do the things I would otherwise do, the things I wasn’t going to do started bubbling to the surface. Meditation sharpened focus on the things I did do Setting aside an hour a day where I couldn’t do anything but let thoughts flow had two effects. It reduced the time I had to “do” the things I intended to do. It increased the time I had to think about things I would do, “if only I had the time.” These effects had a symbiotic relationship: I didn’t have as much time to “do” things I intended to do, so I had to be more efficient with things I did do. Doing begets more doing. Each time you do something, it reminds you of other things you could be doing. The more you do, the more entropy sets in and you make bad decisions. By meditating an hour a day, I had less time to do things, and more time to think about how I would do those things once I did them. So the things I did, I did better. It is more productive to delete from the to-do list than to mark done. Meditation made room for “wildcards” Setting aside an hour a day also gave me more time to think about things I would do, “if only I had the time” – those crazy ideas you normally let pass through your mind. You say to yourself, “I wish,” “wouldn’t that be nice,” or “that would never work, anyway.” By thinking more about the crazy ideas I wasn’t likely to follow, those ideas started to take on more importance in my mind. As I thought more about these ideas, they started to seem doable. Things like taking a solo retreat to a cabin in the Colombian countryside. I still wasn’t sure my crazy ideas were going to work, but I came to a realization about that, too. We’re bad at using our conscious attention anyway I realized we’re bad at consciously using our attention. Scientists have known this for a long time. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky coined it “the planning fallacy.” You see the planning fallacy in action when you try to log into your bank account to pay a bill. You think it’s going to take two minutes. But then your password manager malfunctions. Then you have to complete three pages of CAPTCHAs. Then you have to do two-factor authentication, so you grab your phone. But your phone has a text message on it. You know the drill. The planning fallacy compounds as complexity creep takes over (which I talked about on episode 237). This is why fewer than half of students complete their papers in less time than their worst-case projection This is why the Sydney Opera House took ten years longer and fifteen times the budget to build as expected. So if we’re bad at using our conscious attention anyway, maybe we shouldn’t put much trust in ourselves to use all our conscious attention getting things done? We don’t know what will work We spend all our waking attention trying to do things. We think, If only we could do all the things we intend to do, we would finally achieve the success we deserve. The things we intend to do don’t just take more time than expected. Nassim Taleb demonstrates in The Black Swan (which I summarized on episode 244) we also have no idea whether things we’ve decided to do are worth doing in the first place. In the “Extremistan” world of creative work, our biggest successes often come from trying to do one thing, then stumbling upon another. Europeans discovered the New World while searching for a route to India. The microwave was discovered when a radar experiment accidentally melted a chocolate bar. Penicillin was discovered when experimental samples got contaminated. I got my first book deal while trying to land a slot to speak at a conference. As William Goldman said, “Nobody knows anything.” Goldman’s not knowing anything didn’t keep him from winning two Academy Awards for screenwriting. Meditation is the “Barbell Strategy” for attention If great discoveries come at random, what can you do? You have to be doing things that might not work, and you have to be ready when a great idea comes. As Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” To give yourself a chance at making great discoveries, Nassim Taleb recommends “the Barbell Strategy.” Invest 85% of your resources on sure bets. Invest the remaining 15% of your resources on wildcards – those crazy ideas that probably won’t lead to anything, but that have unlimited upside. (You can learn more about the Barbell Strategy in my The Black Swan book summary on episode 244). Meditating 60 hours in 60 days had more benefits than I could list. I slept better, I had more intense dreams, I became more patient. But here’s the biggest thing I learned about productivity meditating 60 hours in 60 days: Meditation is the Barbell Strategy for your waking attention. If we’re no good at using our conscious attention anyway, and if our best discoveries come at random, it makes perfect sense to surrender a portion of your conscious attention to randomness. If you invest one hour of your working day in meditation, you invest 12.5% of your working day in mental serendipity. That’s enough time not only to think about the crazy ideas you otherwise wouldn’t pursue, but also to think about the great discoveries happening right under your nose. What about results? When you’re working in “Extremistan,” you have to be weary of “results.” Big wins are rare, and positive Black Swans take time to grow. In the more than 500 blog posts I’ve written in the past 16 years, I’ve had two that led to Black Swans (one, a book deal, the other, working with a company that sold to Google). But, I did have one big win during my meditation experiment. On the day I launched my new book, I had a winning tweet storm. The first tweet in the storm, alone, has over 100,000 organic impressions. I had over 150,000 impressions in one day. Previously, on a really good day, I might get 25,000 impressions. The end of that tweet storm brought 500 organic clicks to my book’s Amazon page. This tweet storm took me several hours – over the course of weeks – to write, edit, and publish. Would I ever in a million years have bothered spending that much time on a tweet storm? No way, that’s a crazy idea. But thanks to my hour a day of meditation, I couldn’t let the idea go. And now? Meditating 60 hours in 60 days changed the way I think about productivity. So what did I do once I was done? I meditated the next day, and the next day, and the day after that. At this point, I’ve meditated an hour a day for more than 80 days in a row. It’s a crazy idea, but this is just something I do now. Mind Management, Not Time Management now available! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management is now available! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Buy it now! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/naval-ravikant-meditation/

Nassim Taleb los llama Mediocristán y Extremistán y toda persona que analiza lo social necesita comprender cuáles son sus diferencias. Espero que esta introducción te sea util y te parezca interesante. P.d. Entra a jmgr.com.mx para leer el transcript del episodio, habrá links para profundizar y gráficas para comprender los ejemplos. JM

It’s hard to predict the future, but you can be better at predicting the future. All you need is a few delicious avocados. Even the “experts” are bad at predicting the future Wharton professor Phillip Tetlock wanted to make the future easier to predict. So he held “forecasting tournaments,” in which experts from a variety of fields made millions of predictions about global events. Tetlock found that experts are no better at predicting the future than dart-throwing chimps. In fact, the more high-profile experts – the ones who get invited onto news shows – were the worst at making predictions. But, Tetlock found that some people are really great at telling the future. He calls them “Superforecasters”, and regardless of their area of expertise, they consistently beat the field with their predictions. Tetlock also found that with a little training, people can improve their forecasting skills. The superforecasters in Tetlock’s Good Judgement Project – people from all backgrounds working with publicly-available information – make forecasts 30% better than intelligence officers with access to classified information. Creative work is uncertain. Does it have to be? As someone working in the “Extremistan” world of creative work, I’m always trying to improve my forecasting skills. If I publish a tweet, how many likes will it get? If I write a book, how many copies will it sell? The chances of getting any of these predictions exactly right are so slim, it doesn’t feel worth it to try to predict these things. But that doesn’t mean I can’t rate my predictions and make those predictions better. Introducing the Avocado Challenge If you would like to be better at predicting the future, I have a challenge for you. I call it the Avocado Challenge. Elon Musk recently asked on Twitter “What can’t we predict?” I answered “whether or not an avocado is ready to open.” 12 likes. People agree with me. https://twitter.com/kadavy/status/1309643017599569920  Here’s how the Avocado Challenge works. The next time you’re about to open an avocado, make a prediction: How confident are you the avocado is ripe? Choose a percentage of confidence, such as 50% or 20% – or if you’re feeling lucky, 100%. To make it simple, you can rate your confidence on a scale of 0 to 10. State your prediction out loud or write it down. Now, open the avocado. Is it ripe? Yes or no? Scoring your avocado predictions You now have two variables: Your prediction as stated in percentage confidence, and the outcome of avocado ripeness. With these two variables, you can calculate what’s called a Brier score. This tells you just how good your forecast was. The Brier score is what Phillip Tetlock uses to score his forecasting tournaments. Two variables: confidence and outcome It works like this: Translate your percentage confidence into a decimal between 0 and 1. So 50% would be 0.5, 20% would be 0.2, and 100% would just be 1. Now, translate the avocado ripeness outcome into a binary number. If the avocado was not ripe, your outcome value is “0.” If the avocado was ripe, your outcome value is “1.” (You may wonder: How do I determine whether or not an avocado is ripe? I’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s pretend for a second it’s easy.) Calculating your Brier score Once you have those two variables, there are two steps to follow to find out your Brier score: Subtract the outcome value from your confidence value. If I was 50% confident the avocado would be ripe that confidence value is 0.5. If the avocado was in fact ripe I subtract the outcome value of 1 from 0.5 to get -0.5. Square that number, or multiply it by itself. -0.5² = 0.25. Our Brier score is 0.25. Is that good or bad? The lower your Brier score, the better your prediction was. If you were 100% confident the avocado would be ripe and it was not, your Brier score would be 1 – the worst score possible. If you were 100% confident the avocado would be ripe and it was ripe, your Brier score would be 0 – the best score possible. So, 0.25 is pretty solid. Predict your next 30 avocados This is a fun exercise to try one time, but it doesn’t tell you a whole lot about your forecasting skills overall, and it doesn’t help you improve your forecasting skills. Where it gets interesting and useful is when you make a habit of the Avocado Challenge. After you’ve tried the Avocado Challenge a couple times, make a habit out of it. For 30 consecutive avocados, tally your results. Calculate your Brier score, and find the average of your 30 predictions. If you regularly open avocados with a roommate or partner, make a competition out of it. My partner and I predicted the ripeness of, then opened, 36 avocados over the course of several weeks. We recorded our predictions and outcomes on a notepad on the fridge – then tallied our results in a spreadsheet. Our findings: 28% of avocados were ripe. Her Brier score was 0.22 – mine was 0.19. (I win!)   The Avocado Challenge teaches you to define your predictions Most of us don’t make predictions according to our percentage confidence. We say, “I think so and so is going to win the election,” or “I think it might rain.” Phillip Tetlock even found this with political pundits – the ones who get lots of airtime on news shows. They’ll say things like “there’s a distinct possibility.” That’s not a forecast. If so and so wins the election, you can say, “ha! I knew it!” If it didn’t rain, you can remind your friend you said you thought it might rain. And what does a “distinct possibility” mean? You can be “right” either way. And when it comes to getting airtime on news shows, the news show doesn’t care if the political pundit gets their prediction right. All that matters is they can be exciting on camera, speak in sound bites, argue a clear point, and hold the viewer’s attention a little longer so it can be sold to advertisers during the commercial break. We normally don’t make our predictions with a percentage confidence, because we aren’t used to it. The Avocado Challenge gets you in the habit of rating the confidence of your predictions. The Avocado Challenge helps you define reality The Avocado Challenge also helps you define reality. This is something we’re also bad at. If you’re on a walk with your friend and you say you think it’s going to rain, how much rain equals rain? By what time is it going to rain? You’re traveling on foot – is it going to rain where the walk started, or the place you’ll be a half hour from now? To rate your predictions and become a better forecaster, you need to make falsifiable claims. It’s hard to tell if an avocado is ripe before you open the avocado, but it’s also hard to tell if an avocado is ripe after you open the avocado. You’ll have to come up with criteria for determining whether or not an avocado should be defined as “ripe.” When we did the Avocado Challenge, we defined a “ripe” avocado as a “perfect” avocado: uniform green color, with the meat of the avocado sticking to no more than 5% of the pit.     The Avocado Challenge can improve your real-life predictions A few weeks after we did the Avocado Challenge, my partner and I were at her family’s finca – a rustic cabin in the Colombian countryside. It was Sunday afternoon, and we were getting ready to head back to Medellín. I was eager to get home and get ready for my week. I asked my partner what time we would leave. She said about 3 p.m. As I mentioned on episode 235, the Colombian sense of time takes some getting used to for me as an American. Even though my partner is a very prompt person, I’m also aware of “the planning fallacy.” I know the Sydney Opera House opened ten years late and cost 15 times the projected budget to build. So when I looked at the Mitsubishi Montero parked in the grass, and thought about how long it might take to pack in eight people, three dogs, and a little white rabbit, the chances of us leaving right at 3 p.m. seemed slim.     Fortunately, we had done the Avocado Challenge. I asked my partner, in Spanish, “what’s your percentage confidence we’ll leave before an hour after 3 p.m. – 4 p.m.?” She shifted into Avocado mode, thought a bit, and said sesenta por ciento. She was 60% sure we’d leave before 4 p.m. That didn’t seem super confident, so I asked for another forecast. I asked what her percentage confidence was that we’d leave before 5 p.m. – two hours after the target time. She said cien por ciento. She was 100% sure we’d leave before 5 p.m. Now, instead of choosing between expecting to leave at exactly 3 p.m. – or leaving “whenever” – I now had a range. It was a range I could trust from someone with experience with similar situations – and training in forecasting. The time we did leave: 3:30 p.m. My partner’s Brier score for that first prediction: 0.16. Average Brier score for the two predictions: 0.08. Not bad. Mind Management, Not Time Management now available! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management is now available! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Buy it now! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays. Listener Showcase Abby Stoddard makes the Dunnit app – the "have-done list." It’s a minimalist tool designed to motivate action and build healthy habits. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/avocado-challenge  

If you want to write a book, don’t ask, “How much money does the average book make?” In this context, “average” is meaningless. You’re in the world of Black Swans. The Black Swan is a book by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, and I have found the ideas in it critical to navigating my career as an author. Here – in my own words – is my summary of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. These are the ideas I think about when I’m considering writing a new book.   Where does the term “Black Swan” come from? Imagine a world where you’ve only ever seen white swans. If someone asked you whether or not black swans existed, you might say no. You’ve seen thousands of swans, and they’ve all been white. Therefore, black swans don’t exist. You’ve mistaken an absence of evidence for evidence of absence. Just because you haven’t seen evidence of black swans, does not prove they don’t exist. What is a Black Swan? A positive Black Swan: In 2010, I wrote a blog post. That blog post prompted a publisher to reach out to me. I got a book deal. A negative Black Swan: A Las Vegas casino had an insurance policy. They protected against every cheating scenario they could imagine. They had the most popular show in Vegas, where magicians worked with giant live tigers. So they protected against the scenario of a tiger jumping into the audience. But they never imagined the tiger would maim one of the performers – Roy of Siegfried and Roy. Siegfried and Roy lost their careers. The casino lost $100 million. Both of these incidents are Black Swans: Black Swans are outliers: They’re not what we expect. Nothing in the past predicts a Black Swan. Black Swans have extreme impact: The impact could be positive, such as my book deal, or negative, such as the tiger attack, or the terrorist attacks of 9/11. We backwards-rationalize Black Swans: After a Black Swan happens, it seems obvious. We look back and come up with explanations for how it happened. This gives us the illusion that Black Swans are explainable and predictable. Note: COVID-19 is not a Black Swan. As Taleb has explained, global pandemics happen regularly. They’re uncommon, but they’re inevitable, and we know that. The Black Swan Turkey Imagine you’re a Turkey. Every day, humans come and feed you. You think humans are pretty good and nice. Each day you get new information to confirm this belief. A graph of your opinion of humans might look like this:     Notice the sharp drop-off at the end. That’s the day before Thanksgiving. Things seemed good, until they weren’t. History does not always predict the future. Events come along that shatter all assumptions we’ve made based upon past information. Mediocristan vs. Extremistan Black Swans happen in a place Taleb calls “Extremistan.” Extremistan is the opposite of “Mediocristan.” There’s a joke I like, “Bill Gates walks into a bar. On average, everyone there is a millionaire.” We’re attracted to the “average” and the predictable. But oftentimes the concept of “average” is misleading. Some things happen in Mediocristan and are predictable. The “average” is meaningful in Mediocristan. Other things happen in Extremistan and are unpredictable and extreme. The “average” is meaningless in Extremistan. Mediocristan is about “the collective, the routine, the obvious, and the predicted.” Mediocristan is about risk spread out amongst many, to avoid surprises. An hourly-wage job at Starbucks is possible only in Mediocristan. Extremistan is about “the singular, the accidental, the unseen and the unpredicted.” It’s where the Black Swans happen: random events you never expected, caused by forces you’ll never understand. Such as I experienced suddenly getting a book deal or working with a company that sold to Google. Mediocristan is about variables that fall within a predictable range. In the history of humanity, there’s never been a man 100 feet tall, or a woman 2,000 years old. Nobody has even come close to these extremes. Height and life expectancy follow a bell curve.   A bell curve. (Source: D Wells, Wikimedia Commons)   Distribution of height. (Source: Our World in Data)[/caption]     Extremistan is about variables that scale indefinitely. There’s no known limit to how rich a person can be. The “average” net worth of a U.S. family is about $700,000. But to be richer than half of all Americans you need only $100,000. Still, Jeff Bezos has more than $100,000,000,000.   Wealth distribution, by percentile, in the U.S. Jeff Bezos is 10x as wealthy as the highest point in this chart. (Wikipedia)[/caption] Why are Black Swans important? Understanding Black Swans can prepare you for the unexpected. If you learn about the impact that unexpected and extreme events can have, you can avoid foolish choices that expose you to negative Black Swans. Exposing yourself to Black Swans can make you successful. As we’ll talk about later, when you behave as if you’re in Mediocristan, you miss out on the positive Black Swans you’d find Extremistan. Businesses that thrive on Black Swans include venture capital, scientific research, and publishing. (Note: Another reason Black Swans are important is – as I talked about in Mind Management, Not Time Management – if it’s predictable, it can be automated. Your edge as a human is not in Mediocristan where the robots are taking over. It’s in Extremistan – in doing something nobody could expect.) Black Swan barrier: Platonicity One way we blind ourselves from Black Swans is through what Taleb calls “Platonicity.” Named after the philosopher, Plato, “Platonicity” is our desire to define things, and to pay more attention to things that have been defined. We create names for objects, we create terms (yes, such as “Platonicity”), and we invent nationalities. Because we’re so focused on things we define, we miss all the messier stuff that also matters. Taleb describes it as “[mistaking] the map for the territory.” (I once wrote about a similar concept, and called it Stuff and Things.) It’s helpful to categorize things, but it becomes a problem when we see a category as definitive, and don’t see the fuzzy boundaries between categories or revise them when we see new information that doesn’t fit how we categorize things. We’ve seen this in the gendered bathroom debate. We broke gender down into two categories. Based on that we made two bathrooms. But we’re realizing it’s not so simple. To be Platonic is to be top-down, formulaic, and close-minded. To be a-Platonic is to be bottom-up, open-minded, skeptical, and empirical. The Platonification of breast milk Doctors in the 1960s replicated breast milk in a laboratory, by replicating the components they could see in the milk (the things they had “Platonified”). It seemed to make no practical sense for women to go through the inconvenience of breast feeding when you could just use bottles and lab-made formula. There was an absence of evidence of what the benefits of breast milk were, and that was taken as evidence of absence of benefits. We didn’t know the full benefits of breast milk, but we assumed the components we could see were the only important parts. It turned out children who were not breast fed were later at an increased risk of some cancers. If the mothers themselves had breast fed, they would have had a reduced risk of breast cancer. Black Swan barrier: The Triplet of Opacity Another way we blind ourselves from Black Swans is through what Taleb calls “The Triplet of Opacity.” Those are: The Illusion of understanding. We think we understand what’s going on, but the world is more complicated and random than we know. The retrospective distortion. We assess things after the fact, so we backwards rationalize and come up with reasons why things happened. The overvaluation of information. We place too much emphasis on facts – the things we can “Platonify” – which blinds us from stuff that isn’t so easy to Platonify. How to make Black Swans happen? Since Platonification blinds us to Black Swans, and we suffer from the illusion of understanding and the retrospective distortion, it may seem silly to try to make Black Swans happen. You can’t engineer a Black Swan, but you can create the conditions for positive Black Swans to happen, as I talked about on episode 146. Tinker Top-down planning gives us the illusion of control, and keeps us in Mediocristan. Instead, tinker as much as possible, and learn to recognize opportunities when they present themselves. Taleb says the reason free markets work is not because they give rewards or drive incentives. Rather, free markets work because they let people get lucky through trial and error. (Then we explain away the brilliant things we did to arrive at this wonderful discovery.) Many discoveries come from searching for what you know, and finding what you didn’t expect. Europeans first learned of the American continent while searching for a route to India. I got my first book deal when I was trying to get votes for my speech proposal for a conference. Be patient Negative Black Swans happen suddenly, but positive Black Swans happen slowly. “It is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build.” Black Swan discoveries take time to have an impact. The computer, the internet, and the laser all had a huge impacts, but were underappreciated after initial discovery. Charles H. Townes was teased by his colleagues for inventing the laser, because they thought it was useless. It turned out to be important to eyesight correction, surgery, and data storage and retrieval. Denarrate The triplet of opacity feeds into the “narrative fallacy.” We’re wired to come up with stories of why things happen, but Black Swans happen for unknown reasons. Taleb realized that as a stock trader, there was no way for him to get an informational edge. He realized any piece of news that came out would quickly be worked into the market price of any security. So, he stopped reading the news. He recognized that reading the news as a stock trader would just support the narrative fallacy. Taleb describes a study where sports bookmakers were given ten variables to predict horse races. When they were later given double the information, these bookmakers were no more accurate in their predictions – yet they were much more confident. So Taleb decided that by reading the news he wouldn’t get an edge and he would become overconfident. The Barbell Strategy The main method Taleb recommends for protecting against negative Black Swans while exposing oneself to positive Black Swans is what he calls the Barbell Strategy.   Think of a barbell, with weights on either side. On one side of the barbell is your sure bets – things where you have little chance of losing. On the other side of the barbell is your wildcards – things with unlimited upside. The Barbell Strategy in investing (Note: I’m not a finance expert and nothing I’m about to say is investment advice.) In investing, the sure bets would be treasury bills, cash, and gold. Obviously Black Swans could come along and make these bets not so sure bets, but they’re as sure as you can get. The wildcards would be highly-leveraged option trading, angel investments, or cryptocurrency. You have a decent chance of losing your money, but there’s almost no limit to how much you can gain. In an investing context, Taleb recommends putting 85–90% of your assets into the safe investments, and the remaining 10–15% in the speculative investments. What you’re avoiding is the stuff in the middle. People think index funds are safe because they historically gain about 7% a year, but the entire stock market has lost up to 30% of its value very quickly. Since we’re living in an increasingly complex world, there’s no telling what kind of Black Swan could come in the future and cause an even bigger drop. The Barbell Strategy in creative work I hadn’t realized before reading The Black Swan that I had used the Barbell Strategy to build my creative career. When I was first starting out, I made sure to get just enough freelance work to pay my bills. I also spent a portion of my time building passive income streams. The rest of the time, I spent tinkering and exploring my own ideas. After three years, I randomly landed a book deal to write Design for Hackers. Dan Ariely mentioned a Barbell Strategy in my latest podcast conversation with him. He says he “gambles with his time.” He spends some portion of his time on things that don’t make sense, such as collaborating with a mentalist on-stage in one of his speeches, or working with a cartoonist. My own Barbell Strategy has benefitted from Dan’s Barbell Strategy. A blog post I wrote as a “wildcard” – during one of my Weeks of Want – prompted Dan to reach out to me. I collaborated with him on a productivity app. We sold it to Google. That blog post also led to my third book, Mind Management, Not Time Management. There’s your The Black Swan summary! I hope you’ve found this The Black Swan summary useful and clear. Taleb’s writing can be confusing and even off-putting at first, but if you take the time to understand his ideas, they can help you navigate an uncertain world and find breakthrough opportunities. I highly recommend The Black Swan. It’s one of my favorite books.   Mind Management, Not Time Management now available! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management is now available! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Buy it now! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays. Listener Showcase Abby Stoddard makes the Dunnit app – the "have-done lilst." It’s a minimalist tool designed to motivate action and build healthy habits. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/black-swan-summary 

Each November, writers around the world make a commitment. They commit to writing a novel within a month. It’s called NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writer’s Month. Since 2013, software developers have also been making a commitment. They’ve committed to generating a novel within a month. It’s called NaNoGenMo – National Novel Generation Month. The novels these programmers create – if you can call them novels – can tell us a lot about the future of work. How well can AI write a novel? (Not at all, really.) The novels that programmers generate are all over the board. One “novel” was just Moby Dick, written backwards. Another “novel” was called Paradissssse Lossssst. It was a reproduction of John Milton’s epic poem, but with each “s” in the poem replaced with a varying number of other s’s. But, some programmers take the task a little more seriously. They train AI models and see what they come up with. One such model is called GPT-2. GPT-2 was once considered too dangerous to release to the public, because you could supposedly generate subversive content en-masse, and do some pretty nefarious things. Kind of like [Russia did with a farm of human-generated content around the 2016 election]. And what is this advanced AI model able to generate? So far, nothing impressive. Programmer and author of [aiweirdness.com] Janelle Shane tweeted, “Struggling with crafting the first sentence of your novel? Be comforted by the fact that AI is struggling even more.” The sentence this AI model generated for Janelle: “I was playing with my dog, Mark the brown Labrador, and I had forgotten that I was also playing with a dead man.” Not exactly Tolstoy. The follow up to GPT-2 is now out, so we’ll see this year what kind of novel GPT-3 can generate, but if Janelle Shane’s experiments so far are any indication, humans will still have the edge. She asked GPT-3 how many eyes a horse had. It kept telling her: [four]. Your edge as a human lies in your creativity According to Kai-Fu Lee, author of AI Superpowers, forty- to fifty-percent of jobs will be replaced by AI and automation within the next couple of decades. But humans won’t be replaced across the board. It’s the creativity- and strategy-based jobs that will be the most secure. If your job is an “optimization-based” job, you might want to start reinventing yourself. If your primary work is maximizing a tax refund, calculating an insurance premium, or even diagnosing an illness, your job involves so-called “narrow tasks.” These tasks are already being automated, or soon will be automated. You could type out 50,000 nonsense words in about a day. A computer can generate 50,000 words faster than you can blink. But, you could write a novel in a month. A computer can’t write a novel at all. Which means your edge as a human is not in typing the words faster. Your edge as a human is in thinking the thoughts behind the words. This doesn’t just apply to writing novels. If you’re an entrepreneur building a world-changing startup or a social worker helping a family navigate taking care of a sick loved-one, your creativity matters. No AI will be able to do what you do for a very long time – if ever. So when a computer can do in the blink of an eye something that would take us all day, and when our creativity is the one thing keeping us relevant, that has powerful implications on how we get things done. Time management isn’t built for creative work Remember from episode 226 when we learned about [Frederick Taylor]? How he stood next to a worker with a stopwatch and timed every action and broke down all of those actions into a series of steps? He optimized time as a “production unit.” But creativity doesn’t work like stacking bricks or moving chunks of iron. Remember there are three big realities about creativity that make it incompatible with the “time management” paradigm: Great ideas come in an instant One idea can be infinitely more valuable than another idea You can’t connect inputs directly to outputs In a world where creativity not only matters, it’s arguably the only thing that matters, the ways that time management is incompatible with creativity are big problems. They’re especially big problems because the more you’re watching the clock – the more you’re a [“clock-time” person], like we talked about on episode 235, the less creative you’re going to be. So the things that used to make us more productive, now make us less productive. We can’t try to do more things in less time. We can’t multitask. We can’t skip out on sleep or otherwise neglect our health. If you want to kill creativity: Get five hours of sleep a night, fight traffic for two hours a day, and start each day with a piping hot thermos of a psychoactive drug. This is the unfortunate and inescapable reality of most Americans today. Don’t expect technology to be creative for you, use technology for you to be creative Will an unassisted AI be winning the Nobel Prize in literature in the next ten years? Some might think so. I’m no AI expert, but I’m skeptical. Remember from Episode 237 that [the birthday problem] shows us how hard it is for us humans to understand how complex some things are. GPT-3 is one-hundred times more powerful than GPT-2. But is it one-hundred times better at writing a novel? We’ll see – I doubt it. Does that make AI and other technologies useless in creative work? Far from it. We can use technology not only to lift us out of drudgery, but to assist us in being creative. Here’s just some of the ways I use technology to be more creative: I live in a cheaper country, where I can have more flexibility to do work with unpredictable success ([Extremistan] like we talked about in the previous episode). When I moved to South America, I mourned the loss of easy access to paper books. But now, five years later, I have many thousands of highlights of the most important ideas I’ve come across in my reading. This is because I’ve been forced to read almost everything on Kindle. I can quickly and easily search through those highlights. This makes writing new books much easier than it would be otherwise. I’m able to live in South America because of cheap air travel, access to massive amounts of knowledge through the internet, and global publishing power, communication, and electronic banking. Not to mention easy Spanish translation in the palm of my hand. Aside from those Kindle highlights, I can store, organize, and quickly retrieve relevant information I’ve previously consumed or taken notes on. I can quickly reference old ideas and connect them to make new ideas. I’m able to test out my ideas and get instant feedback on what’s working or not through Twitter, and email, website, and podcast stats. Amazon’s algorithms help relevant readers find my books, which earns me money so I can write more. There are starting to be some glimmers of AI assisting us in creativity in some more direct ways. A new service called [Sudowrite] won’t write a novel for you, but it uses GPT-3 to suggest characters or plot twists for your novel. If you combine advances in AI models with the trends there are in studying the structure of stories, it’s not hard to see a future where AI plays a big role in assisting writers in coming up with stories. But for now, don’t expect technology to be creative for you. Instead, use technology to help you be more creative. New times call for new measures. When we’re trying to define what it means to be more productive, we can’t apply thinking from the industrial age when we’re in the midst of the creative age. Image: [Traverse Beams, by Patrick Henry Bruce] Mind Management, Not Time Management available for pre-order! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management debuts October 27th! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Pre-order it today! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/the-creative-age/

Subject: “IMMEDIATE Action Reqeusted [sic]” They misspelled “requested,” which had the unintended effect of highlighting that this email was urgent. There were some documents attached to the email. They wanted me to review the documents and sign them. Then, I would get a wire of money to my bank account – from Google, Inc. I had no idea this email was coming. It was a nice surprise, since it was my birthday. It was all thanks to a decision I made three years prior. Three years prior, I cleared my schedule and declared what I call a “Week of Want.” I gave myself an entire week to work on whatever I wanted. I had no plan at the time – that was the point of my Week of Want. Three years later, here I was getting a surprise paycheck, thanks to that Week of Want. Creative work happens in “Extremistan” What was happening was a [Black Swan]. A rare and unpredictable event – in this case, a positive one. If you made several copies of the universe, and repeated my decision from three years prior, in most of those parallel universes, I probably wouldn’t end up getting money wired to my bank account from Google. That’s because creative work happens in Extremistan. Nassim Taleb introduced Extremistan in his book, [The Black Swan]. Extremistan is a world of Black Swans – rare and unpredictable events. Creative work does not happen in “Mediocristan” Other kinds of work happens in the opposite of Extremistan – what Taleb calls Mediocristan. Mediocristan is a world that’s stable and predictable. Serving coffee is a good example of work that happens Mediocristan. There’s a steady supply of coffee, and a steady demand for coffee. If you get a job at Starbucks, they can more or less predict that supply and demand, as well as their overhead costs. So, they can pay you by the hour. When your line of work is thinking of ideas and bringing those ideas into the world, you can’t get paid by the hour. Beyoncé does not get paid by the hour to make her music, even though she’s Beyoncé, and her next record is guaranteed to sell. Much less is the world’s next Beyoncé getting paid by the hour. Nobody knows she’s the next Beyoncé. If you made copies of the universe, in many of those parallel universes, she wouldn’t even become the next Beyoncé. You need clear priorities in Extremistan When you’re working in a pure Mediocristan, you don’t even need priorities. You know exactly what needs to be done, and you do it. When you’re working in Extremistan, you do need clear priorities. There are a million things you could do – a million things that might work – so you have to be ruthless with your priorities. You have to be ruthless in what you say yes to and what you say no to, and in trying to find some way to objectively see what the results are so you can make better decisions in the future. Clear priorities have a dark side But clear priorities have a dark side. It’s that when you have clear priorities, you only put your money on the sure bets. And when all of your money is on sure bets, you aren’t even gambling anymore. You’ve moved yourself from Extremistan to Mediocristan. You can keep steady paychecks coming, but you’ll never hit the jackpot. So employ the Barbell Strategy So how do you give yourself the opportunity to hit it big, without going bust? You need to spend some time in Extremistan. Taleb calls it “The Barbell Strategy”: Imagine a barbell, with fat weights on the ends, and a thin bar in the middle. On one end of the barbell is your sure bets. If you’re investing, that’s treasury bills. On the other end of the barbell is your risky bets. If you’re investing, that might be options, or cryptocurrencies. What you’re avoiding is the stuff in the middle. Don’t make big bets where you can lose your shirt, and avoid the seemingly-conservative investments in which you can actually lose a lot. Give yourself a “Week of Want” One way I spend time in Extremistan is by giving myself a “Week of Want.” In a week of want, I clear as much as I can from my schedule for a whole week, and I let myself explore whatever is interesting to me. In 2012, after publishing my first book, I gave myself a Week of Want. I spent most of my week reflecting on the experience of writing that first book. Why did it seem nothing I had learned about productivity had prepared me to write that book? I reflected on the grab-bag of rituals and routines I eventually developed to keep my writing process moving forward. I shared my thoughts in a blog post, called [Mind Management (Not Time Management)]. Nothing happened right away. That’s the nature of creative work. There’s often a delay before your bets pay off. But another year and a half later, I got an email. The renowned behavioral scientist, Dan Ariely, had read my blog post, and wondered if I’d like to help him with a productivity app he was building. Another year and a half after that, I got a surprise payday from Google. Google bought that productivity app. The Week of Want is a way of “gambling with your time.” [Dan Ariely] himself talked about gambling with his own time back on episode 203. He’ll spend some amount of his time on things that don’t make sense, such as working with a cartoonist, or inviting a mentalist to perform at one of his speeches. The Week of Want exposes you to “asymmetric opportunities,” like [Tynan] talked about on episode 145. Oftentimes we hold ourselves back from pursuing a silly idea. There’s very little downside to pursuing the idea, but the potential upside is unlimited. Why “want?” The Week of Want is a great way to make sure you spend a little time in Extremistan. But it has another valuable purpose, and that purpose lies in the idea of “want.” When we’re spending all of our energy on what we feel we should do, we soon forget what we want to do. But remember that creative work is unpredictable. Even when we think really hard about what we should do, a lot of the time we’re going to be wrong. Additionally, the things we want to be doing are powerful. The things we want to be doing are the things we’re curious about. And curiosity is powerful in two ways. One: Curiosity is motivational fuel. You can work harder on something you’re curious about. Two: Curiosity is a path to originality. Your curiosity will lead you down multiple paths. When those paths converge, you’ll be where no one else has been. Why a week? You may recognize elements of the Week of Want in Google’s famous “twenty-percent time” strategy. When Google was first starting out, they allowed their engineers to spend twenty percent of their time on whatever project they wanted. The strategy worked great. Some of Google’s best products were created during twenty-percent time – including Gmail and AdSense. I’ve heard some people say that they spend one day a week on a side-project. Hey, that’s a good use of the barbell strategy, and it will expose you to positive Black Swans more than not working on a side project at all. But there’s something special about spending an entire week doing whatever you want. Working on what you want to work on, and doing so for an entire week, takes you further and further from the norm. It brings you deeper and deeper into the territory where you’ll discover truly original ideas. When I asked neuroscientist John Kounios – way back on [episode 8] – about the benefits of taking an entire week to do what I want, he said there were two potential ways that could improve creative thinking. One: Doing what you want improves your mood, which leads to better ideas. He explained, “It gives you pleasure, puts you in a positive mood, and it’s something you can sustain over the week – and then it can lead to creative insights.” Two: Taking a whole week puts you in a deeper state of creativity. Dr. Kounios said that the “insightful state of mind is very fragile.... It’s easier to get into an analytical state of mind than it is to get into a creative, insightful, state of mind. So if you can create this whole block of time for a week, it allows you to really sink into that state.” Week of Want rules To do your own week of want, clear away as much as you can for a week. Act like you’re going on vacation. Set up the out-of-office autoresponder on your email. Approach the Week of Want with no expectations as to what you’ll discover during that week. The goal of the Week of Want is much less about actually finding great ideas. It’s more about reconnecting with the feeling of wanting in the first place. We so regularly do the things we feel we should do, we soon forget what it feels like to want to do something at all. Image: [Insula Dulcamara, by Paul Klee] Mind Management, Not Time Management available for pre-order! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management debuts October 27th! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Pre-order it today! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/week-want/ 

This week Horace joins Oliver to talk about the work of Nassim Taleb - namely, antifragility and asymmetric risk - and what connections there are to disruptive innovation theory and Micromobility. Oliver has wanted to record this episode for a while and it doesn’t disappoint.Specifically we dig into:- Taleb’s work and background, explaining concepts such as Black Swans, antifragility, Fat Tony, Skin in the Game, Extremistan vs Mediocristan and intellectual-yet-idiots- The attraction and danger of polemical thinking- The importance of understanding if you’re dealing with bounded or unbounded risk probabilities- How traditional MBA education has increased fragility in enterprises, right at the same time that they’re increasingly trapped by the innovators dilemma, how these two concepts are tied and why Apple’s paranoia from it’s near death experience parallel the investment strategy outlined by Taleb.- The role of job-to-be-done and the anti-fragility of the restaurant space.- The connections between antifragility and disruptive innovation theory- How micromobility’s characteristics of having a clear and easy job-to-be-done, relative simplicity, light weight, low cost and flexible production make it suited to taking ‘hits’ to its business model and thus, more likely to be resilient as a phenomenon.

In this episode of the podcast, Matt, Tim, Mark and Christian are all here at various points throughout the show. During the market skyline, we discuss the upward fade and breakout in the S&P 500, relative strength and weakness across the major indexes, The recent actions out of Britain with their Brexit votes, and the implications of them leaving the EU as well as the expectation of earnings growth to improve through the year and whether or not that will be enough to propel the market higher. The Feature Presentation is an interview with Christian Sisson about his recent writings in the Trading Justice Newsletter about The Holy Trinity, and specifically Position Sizing.  Tim and Christian discuss ideas like drawdowns, Extremistan and some examples from the newsletter.  Finally, it’s March Madness, and the boys go through their bracket picks for the NCAA basketball tournament.  Who does Matt think will be in the final Four? Who does Mark have for upsets in the first round?  Did Tim spend more than 5 minutes researching before he picked?  Listen in and laugh along. 1:30 Market Skyline 31:20 Christian Sisson 47:40 NCAA Bracketology

I. Writing a review of The Black Swan is a nerve-wracking experience. First, because it forces me to reveal I am about ten years behind the times in my reading habits. But second, because its author Nassim Nicholas Taleb is infamous for angry Twitter rants against people who misunderstand his work. Much better men than I have read and reviewed Black Swan, messed it up, and ended up the victim of Taleb’s acerbic tongue. One might ask: what’s the worst that could happen? A famous intellectual yells at me on Twitter for a few minutes? Isn’t that normal these days? Sure, occasionally Taleb will go further and write an entire enraged Medium article about some particularly egregious flub, but only occasionally. And even that isn’t so bad, is it? But such an argument betrays the following underlying view:  It assumes that events can always be mapped onto a bell curve, with a peak at the average and dropping off quickly as one moves towards extremes. Most reviews of Black Swan will get an angry Twitter rant. A few will get only a snarky Facebook post or an entire enraged Medium article. By the time we get to real extremes in either directions – a mere passive-aggressive Reddit comment, or a dramatic violent assault – the probabilities are so low that they can safely be ignored. Some distributions really do follow a bell curve. The classic example is height. The average person is about 5’7. The likelihood of anyone being a different height drops off dramatically with distance from the mean. Only about one in a million people should be taller than 7 feet; only one in a billion should be as tall as 7’5. Nobody is order-of-magnitude differences in height from anyone else. Taleb calls the world of bell curves and minor differences Mediocristan. If Taleb’s reaction to bad reviews dwells alongside height in Mediocristan, I am safe; nothing an order-of-magnitude difference from an angry Twitter rant is likely to happen in entire lifetimes of misinterpreting his work. But other distributions are nothing like a bell curve. Taleb cites power-law distributions as an example, and calls their world Extremistan. Wealth inequality lives in Extremistan. If wealth followed a bell curve around the median household income of $57,000, and a standard deviation scaled the same way as height, then a rich person earning $70,000 would be as remarkable as a tall person hitting 7 feet. Someone who earned $76,000 would be the same kind of prodigy of nature as the 7’6 Yao Ming. Instead, people earning $70,000 are dirt-common, some people earn millions, and the occasional tycoon can make hundreds of millions of dollars per year. In Mediocristan, the extremes don’t matter; in Extremistan, sometimes only the extremes matter. If you have a room full of 99 average-height people plus Yao Ming, Yao only has 1.3% of the total height in the room. If you have a room full of 99 average-income people plus Jeff Bezos, Bezos has 99.99% of the total wealth.

"The normal American did not graduate from college and doesn't have an associate's degree. He or she perhaps attended college for one year or graduated from high school. She or he has a net worth of approximately $36,000, about $6,000 excluding home and vehicle equity and lives paycheck to paycheck. She or he has less than $500 in flexible savings and minimal assets invested in the stock market. These are median statistics with 50% of Americans below these levels” In this episode of Made You Think, Neil and Nat discuss The War On Normal People By Andrew Yang. This book is a balanced and optimistic view on Universal Basic Income, the economic impact of the automation of jobs and our options for the future. "half of American households already rely on the government for direct income in some form." We cover a wide range of topics, including: Universal Basic Income and Government benefits Statistics on unemployment, labor and the changing workforce Technology, automation and robot dog walkers Centralization of certain jobs in certain cities Remote work, freelancers, the gig economy Taxes, Cryptocurrencies & Video Games Tangents on Fortnite, Rolex and ad revenue in sports And much more. Please enjoy, and be sure to grab a copy of The War On Normal People By Andrew Yang. You can also listen on Google Play Music, SoundCloud, YouTube, or in any other podcasting app by searching “Made You Think.” If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our episode on Sovereign Individual for opposing views. Along with our episode on The Elephant In The Brain for more on human nature and the desire for success. Be sure to join our mailing list to find out about what books are coming up, giveaways we're running, special events, and more. Links from the Episode Mentioned in the show Waking Up Podcast [01:08] Universal Basic Income [02:48] Mass Shooters [04:43] Social Revolution [04:46] Median Statistics [05:33] Labor Participation Rate [06:22] Manufacturing States [12:33] Detroit Riots [13:11] W-2 [13:43] Retraining Programs [15:12] Technology Industrial Wave [15:43] Amazon Warehouses [17:17] Walmart [17:25] Paralegals [19:33] The Sims [23:02] Hive Mind [23:27] UpWork [32:56] Slack [36:40] Esports [37:00] Twitch [37:09] Extremistan [37:12] Mediocristan [37:14] Gig Economy [40:44] Rover [40:52] Wag [40:52] Twilight Zone [42:10] Flywheel effect [45:35] Lincoln University [47:24] Biggest question Nat had have from reading @AndrewYangVFA's UBI book (on Twitter) [55:00] Unlimited Brewing [55:55] The world’s top economy: the US vs China in five charts [57:50] Cryptocurrencies [01:05:50] (Crypto episode) TransferWise [01:09:05] Blockchain [01:09:26] Winner-takes-all effect [01:09:54] Patreon Bonus Material [01:12:19] Fortnite [01:17:46] Call of Duty [01:18:03] Mad Max [01:21:11] ISIS [01:21:17] Social Credits [01:22:48] Million Dollar Bill [01:22:48] Vietnamese Dong [01:23:51] Trump’s Tax Plan [01:27:20] Totalitarianism Article [1:31:45] Yang2020.com [01:31:58] The New Deal [1:32:38] The Great Depression [01:33:40] Obamacare [01:35:22] Selection Bias [01:39:03] Books mentioned The War On Normal People by Andrew Yang Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson [03:17] (Nat’s notes) (book episode) Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama [01:12:47] Sapiens by Yuval Harari [01:18:47] (Nat’s Notes) (part 1) (part 2) Homo Deus by Yuval Harari [01:18:48] (Nat’s Notes) (book episode) Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb [01:31:47] (Nat’s Notes) (Neil’s Notes) (book episode) Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson [01:38:43] (book episode) People mentioned Andrew Yang Sam Harris [01:00] Winston Churchill [04:25] Nassim Nicholas Taleb [37:06] (Antifragile episode) (Skin in the Game episode) Donald Trump [01:03:10] Barack Obama [01:12:12] Youval Harari [01:19:04] Robin Hanson [01:38:05] Show Topics 01:42 – The book feels optimistic and fairly balanced and offers Universal Basic Income as a good solution to our current situation. Andrew sets the stage well with the magnitude of the problem. 03:04 – We have both come from a place of not thinking UBI was a good solution and our views have been changed several times on this, since reading Sovereign Individual and now this. 04:19 – It feels like this could the best of the option that we currently have if we want to maintain this current system and avoid social revolution. 05:10 – Yang starts the book off by emphasizing the scale of the problem using median statistics or labor participation rate, unemployment rate and number of disability claimants. 06:30 – There is a massive number of people who are working age but are no longer looking for work. This is not evident when viewing the unemployment rate as they are discounted. However the labor participation rate is 63% which is lower that all other industrialized economies. 06:58 – One in three people have left the job market entirely. They have self-selected to no longer participate in the search for work and are not counted as unemployed. 08:09 – "half of American households already rely on the government for direct income in some form.". The majority of these are on disability for muscular tissue issues, mood disorders, anxiety or depression. 09:09 – There is a whole industry of lawyers who help people get onto disability who then take a cut of the back dated payments. 10:26 – Similarities between the level of disability payments and the proposition of UBI. However with disability payments, you are dis-incentivized from trying to find work as payments would stop. This causes a large number of people to stay on disability for longer and find untraceable ways of earning additional income. 11:10 – Yang says that 94% of all jobs created within the last 10 years were temporary contractor jobs with no benefits. People are not going to risk their $12,000 disability payment for a job at $7 per hour. 11:35 – Disability has less than 1% churn rate, very few people get off it. It’s like the anti-SaaS startup. 11:59 – Increases in disability payments correlate to the areas with the biggest job losses. Highest in the old manufacturing states. Does the government recognize that these payments are just another type of welfare for those that have lost their jobs? 12:31 – In Michigan of the 310,000 who left the workforce between 2003 and 2013 half went on to take disability payments. They don’t have any other options available. 13:29 – The Government doesn’t seem to actively fight benefit fraud with more people joining but few leaving. Missing of checks to see who is health is improving enough to move back into work. 14:29 – Inefficiencies of job retraining programs and the lack of transferable skills between old industries losing jobs and new (mostly technical) industries with jobs available. "The test is not 'Will there be new jobs we haven't predicted yet that appear?' Of course there will be. The real test is 'Will there be millions of new jobs for middle-aged people with low skills and levels of education near the places they currently reside'. And the answer to that seems almost certainly no." 15:44 – In previous industrial waves people have been able to adapt due to similarities of skill. Automation is now removing low skilled jobs entirely. Automation in car factories, Amazon warehouses. 18:30 – Automation isn’t solely for low skilled, Blue Collar jobs. Anything repetitive and routine can be automated. This will impact White Collar workers too. “Routine jobs of all stripes are those most under threat from AI and Automation and in time more categories of jobs will be affected.” 19:21 – Automation in law, research and reduction in personnel. Repetition as a tool for learning. Loss of high-level expertise as no-one has the foundational knowledge that comes from early repetition. 20:42 – Tangent. A Science Fiction story to make you think! In a distant future, expertise on computers has been lost and no one knows how to resolve a computer bug. A future where humans are reliant on computers to retain the knowledge for them. 22:42 – Computers no longer needing humans. The Sims, the hive mind of the Internet. Memes, Russian hackers, and Wikipedia created by AI destroying humanity. 25:19 – Assumptions of UBI imply an increase of entrepreneurship. What happens when you pay people to not work? Current level of cash wealth for the average American is $500. The expense of Healthcare means that one ER visit can put people into long term financial difficulty. Defaulted medical bills are then just another form of welfare. 27:50 – Median salary in the US is $31,000. Cost of living in New York and San Francisco. Impact cost of living has on average job wages. Manhattan vs Brooklyn. 32:14 – The author criticizes the idea that those that lose their job can just start working remotely. Those in the US can’t compete due to cost of living with locations like the Philippines and Sri Lanka. Tech skills required are also a barrier to entry. 36:10 – Professional eSports players and the popularity of Twitch and the platform reinforcing the popular streamers causes them to be more popular. Extremistan vs Mediocristan. 39:11 – Lack of service jobs, the rise of the gig economy, dog walking apps. Robot dogs and cyborg owners. 42:39 – Hyper-concentration of money and talent in 6 cities: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and Washington DC. Reinforcing loop effect. Venture Capital money and secondary cities that are on the rise. The effects of anchor companies in smaller cities. 50:01 – Potential to see an exodus of people moving away from high cost of living areas due to remote work. The increase of remote working technologies which helps team collaboration. 52:32 – Geography is destiny. Jobs disappear where society falls apart and the smartest leave first. Reduction in families relocating across state lines. 54:14 – The ‘useless’ class being subsidized by the 1%. Will this cause talent to leave on a international level? Yang says inertia, lower taxes, standard of Education keep people in the U.S. 55:40 – VAT, international transactions, selling to the UK from the US. Micro economies and city-states. China GDP. Impact of taxes in lower cost of living regions. 01:01:50 – Moving abroad, spending in different economies. Moving to Canada because of Trump. Tipping point for people leaving their state or country because of high tax levels. 01:05:41 – Tangent. Cryptocurrencies as an alternative to being taxed. Adoption of Bitcoin and untraceable payment systems. Exchange rates and paying freelancers. TransferWise, PayPal. UBI as being a better option than the status quo. 01:10:20 – Yang doesn’t present UBI as a perfect solution but it’s an option to divert us from the direction we are already headed in. 1:12:00 – If you want to hear Neil’s comments about Obama’s book, support us on Patreon and listen to the bonus material for this episode. 01:13:14 – The explosion in popularity of video games for unemployed men. The average playing time went from 3 hours per week to 8 hours per week in just a few years. 01:14:32 – E-sports, ad revenue, disposable income of an unemployed audience. Comparisons with NBA, NFL, tennis, golf and other sports. Sponsorships vs engagement of an audience. 01:16:35 – Power of in-app purchases, revenue making game mechanics. Popularity of Fortnite, going to $318MM in monthly revenue in just eight months. Comparisons with Call of Duty, game play and enjoyment. 01:18:55 – Harari's comments on the ‘useless’ class moving to VR as a stimulus. Swapping religion for video games. Lack of creative outlets and sense of reward in modern life. People turning to games for the feeling of progress and adventure. 01:20:31 – Implications of having unemployed young men roam the streets are a recipe for disaster. Preventing social unrest of large group of unemployed people by videogames. 01:21:35 – Lack of stimulation causes unwanted behaviors. People don’t always direct their energy in productive ways. Social credit apps, psychology of spending millions in other currencies. 01:24:07 – UBI as an economic stimulus, makes new businesses more viable. Additional disposable income. Decreasing customers causes decreasing investment. Spending on subscriptions like Netflix causes income to flow back to those already rich cities. 01:26:55 – Trump’s tax plan, government waste. UBI puts money in the hands of the individual and reduces government control. Appealing to both political sides - as a safety net and as a way for individuals to have more control. 01:29:52 – Welfare increasing risk of totalitarianism. Government and citizens in harmony - taxes in exchange for infrastructure and protection. Does reducing taxes reduce how much the government listens to the people? 01:31:36 – Andrew Yang is a presidential candidate for 2020 against Trump. Danger of using UBI as a re-election tactic. An issue so powerful could lead to a potential dictatorship. The Great Depression, introduction of Social Security. Congress, altruistic presidents and Obamacare. 01:35:47 – If you want to hear more about some of our thoughts related to the book get the bonus material for this episode at Patreon. We got to say it a lot of times to make sure everyone remembers what it is. Patreon.com/madeyouthink 01:38:03 – You can also leave a review for this show on iTunes. That is probably one of the best ways to support the show, that helps us show up as a recommended podcast. It makes us feel good. It'll make our mother's proud of us. Keep tweeting about it. We love hearing from you guys and getting your questions and your thoughts. 01:40:23 – You can check out some deals from our wonderful sponsors at MadeYouThinkPodcast.com/Support. That's where you can find the mushroom coffee, the Perfect Keto ketones the Kettle and Fire bone broth, the Cup and Leaf tea and also you can click through to Amazon. Buy anything there and that helps support the show as well. This is a topic we're definitely interested in so if there are articles, other books, videos definitely send them our way on Twitter. I’m @TheRealNeilS and I’m @NatEliason. See you guys next week. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe at https://madeyouthinkpodcast.com

“Perhaps being deprived of poison makes us fragile and the road to robustification starts with a modicum of harm.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb Antifragile has completely changed how people think about work and life, and the concepts from it can be used daily. It’s not just a modern practical philosophy book, it’s a guide for smart investing, exercising, learning, working, and thinking. Neil and I tried to cover many of the major themes of the book and how to apply them. You’ll learn: Why you should build up your tangential skills to become more versatile with your work. The importance of incorporating small, positive lifestyle changes to become more robust in negative situations. Letting yourself feel negative emotions and experiences for personal growth. Why you should let your plans be more of a guide, instead of a restriction from other choices. How you can get luckier through positive luck exposure. Techniques for turning procrastination into productivity towards other things Enjoy! And if you want more on Antifragile, be sure to check out Nat’s notes on the book and pick up a copy yourself. If you enjoy this episode, be sure to check out our other launch episode on Letters from a Stoic, one of the ancient writers who was a big influence on Taleb’s thinking. Mentioned in the show: You Can’t Say That Because You’re White No, Soylent isn’t Healthy. Here’s Why Bitcoin Welcome to Extremistan. Don’t Be A Turkey Benefits of Fasting Mom Trusted Estee Lauder How to Plan Your Ideal Day Optimizing for Optionality No Shampoo Article No Soap Article Study on Glove Bacteria Transfer Books mentioned: Antifragile (Nat’s Notes) Black Swan (Nat’s Notes) Traction (Nat’s Notes) People mentioned: Nassim Nicholas Taleb Barbara Streisand Milo Yiannopoulos Charlie Hoehn Taylor Pearson Justin Mares Gabriel Weinberg 2:20 - Nat and Neil begin to explain the core concepts in Antifragile and discuss various examples of antifragility in today’s culture. 13:05 - Some thoughts on fragile and antifragile work environments. 15:38 - Various fragility contributing risks that you may be exposing yourself to and some lifestyle variables you can improve to promote personal antifragility. 20:40 - Nat and Neil speaking on recognizing potential vulnerabilities in your career. They are also discussing the importance of building up tangential skills to become more robust and versatile with your work. 23:08 -  How incorporating small stressors into your life can radically improve everything you do, and Nat touching some on a few of the health benefits from intermittent fasting. 35:24 - The importance of recognizing naive interventionism to allow you and others to experience possible, necessary life stressors to promote personal growth. 50:02 - Why you should try to let yourself feel your emotions naturally to learn and grow, instead of immediately turning towards artificial resolution. 54:57 - Benefiting from moments of procrastination and turning procrastination with one thing into productivity towards other things. 1:00:38 - Nat and Neil talking about Taleb’s barbell strategy; practicing extreme risk aversion or extreme risk loving in various situations, rather than taking consistent moderate risks. Also, going into detail on making wise investments with your wealth. 1:06:49 - Becoming more antifragile with your wealth and peer relationships by applying the barbell strategy to those areas. 1:09:43 - Letting your plans be more of a guide and not letting them restrict you from other opportunities. 1:16:40 - Spending more time experimenting with something and failing, rather than learning about it from a set of rules or someone else before experimenting. 1:21:15 - The importance of having a high optionality in various aspects of life to promote antifragility, especially with having time available for beneficial opportunities. 1:28:36 - Nat and Neil speaking on creating more optionality for yourself by removing the unnecessary and being aware of more naive interventions. 1:42:11 - Some closing thoughts from Nat and Neil on “Skin in the game”, which is making decisions based on if you have exposure to the downsides and upsides of those decisions. 1:45:47 - Wrap up and a quick overview of some healthy stressors you can incorporate into your own life. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe at https://madeyouthinkpodcast.com “Whenever there’s a problem, the first question shouldn’t be, ‘What do I add to fix it?’ but rather, ‘What can I remove to fix it?’”

“Perhaps being deprived of poison makes us fragile and the road to robustification starts with a modicum of harm.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb This is a new, experimental format for Nat Chat. Normally, I’m interviewing someone who broke out of the traditional college and post graduate career mold, but for this episode, I wanted to do something different. Neil Soni, who came on for Episode 7, rejoined me to do an in-depth breakdown of the book “Antifragile” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s a book that has come up repeatedly as having a huge impact on people’s thinking and is one of both of our favorite books. For me, Antifragile completely changed how I thought about work and life, and I use the concepts from it daily. It highlighted why the education system is so broken, how recent grads can get caught by “silent risks,” why we need to stop being so soft on ourselves and others, and a lot more. Neil and I tried to cover many of the major themes of the book and how to apply them. You’ll learn a lot from our discussion, including: Why you should build up your tangential skills to become more versatile with your work. The importance of incorporating small, positive lifestyle changes to become more robust in negative situations. Letting yourself feel negative emotions and experiences for personal growth. Why you should let your plans be more of a guide, instead of a restriction from other choices. How you can get luckier through positive luck exposure. Techniques for turning procrastination into productivity towards other things Enjoy! And if you want more on Antifragile, be sure to check out my notes on the book and pick up a copy yourself. Also, if you enjoy this episode format, please let me know on Twitter. Links from the Episode Mentioned in the show: You Can’t Say That Because You’re White No, Soylent isn’t Healthy. Here’s Why Bitcoin Welcome to Extremistan. Don’t Be A Turkey (Taylor Pearson) Benefits of Fasting Mom Trusted Estee Lauder How to Plan Your Ideal Day (Taylor Pearson) Optimizing for Optionality (Taylor Pearson) No Shampoo Article No Soap Article Study on Glove Bacteria Transfer Books mentioned: Antifragile (Nat’s Notes) Black Swan (Nat’s Notes) Traction (Nat’s Notes) People mentioned: Nassim Nicholas Taleb Neil Soni (Nat Chat episode with Neil) Barbara Streisand Milo Yiannopoulos Charlie Hoehn (Nat Chat episode with Charlie) Taylor Pearson (Nat Chat episode with Taylor) Justin Mares (Nat Chat episode with Justin) Gabriel Weinberg Show Topics 2:20 - Nat and Neil begin to explain the core concepts in Antifragile and discuss various examples of antifragility in today’s culture. 13:05 - Some thoughts on fragile and antifragile work environments. 15:38 - Various fragility contributing risks that you may be exposing yourself to and some lifestyle variables you can improve to promote personal antifragility. 20:40 - Nat and Neil speaking on recognizing potential vulnerabilities in your career. They are also discussing the importance of building up tangential skills to become more robust and versatile with your work. 23:08 -  How incorporating small stressors into your life can radically improve everything you do, and Nat touching some on a few of the health benefits from intermittent fasting. 35:24 - The importance of recognizing naive interventionism to allow you and others to experience possible, necessary life stressors to promote personal growth. 50:02 - Why you should try to let yourself feel your emotions naturally to learn and grow, instead of immediately turning towards artificial resolution. 54:57 - Benefiting from moments of procrastination and turning procrastination with one thing into productivity towards other things. 1:00:38 - Nat and Neil talking about Taleb’s barbell strategy; practicing extreme risk aversion or extreme risk loving in various situations, rather than taking consistent moderate risks. Also, going into detail on making wise investments with your wealth. 1:06:49 - Becoming more antifragile with your wealth and peer relationships by applying the barbell strategy to those areas. 1:09:43 - Letting your plans be more of a guide and not letting them restrict you from other opportunities. 1:16:40 - Spending more time experimenting with something and failing, rather than learning about it from a set of rules or someone else before experimenting. 1:21:15 - The importance of having a high optionality in various aspects of life to promote antifragility, especially with having time available for beneficial opportunities. 1:28:36 - Nat and Neil speaking on creating more optionality for yourself by removing the unnecessary and being aware of more naive interventions. 1:42:11 - Some closing thoughts from Nat and Neil on “Skin in the game”, which is making decisions based on if you have exposure to the downsides and upsides of those decisions. 1:45:47 - Wrap up and a quick overview of some healthy stressors you can incorporate into your own life. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe at https://nateliason.com/podcast “Whenever there’s a problem, the first question shouldn’t be, ‘What do I add to fix it?’ but rather, ‘What can I remove to fix it?’”

Evolution is scalable: the DNA that wins (whether by luck or survival advantage) will reproduce itself, like a bestselling book or a successful record, and become pervasive, widespread and general. Other DNA will vanish. Let me give you 3 practical examples that shows in a nutshell what I mean: First example, take google control more than 80% of traffic online Microsoft control more than 80% of PC, LAPTOPS and other device produce out there ,Facebook, twitter are the behemoth of social media with close to 90% of the lion share This by the way Is the reason why I always say – history is written by the winners, the visible, the salient Second example: Take a marketer or a consultant who launches an online course, with 100 000 people on his/her list as base line. At the end of the course the expert will take performance of the top 10 or 20   are now very successful which here is called the survivorship bias- the rest will end up in the graveyard.    Third Example: In the arts—say the cinema—things are far more vicious. What we call "talent" generally comes from success, rather than its opposite. A great deal of empiricism has been done on the subject, most notably by Art De Vany, an insightful and original thinker who single-mindedly studied wild uncertainty in the movies – wild uncertainty is also call the complex domain or the unpredictable domain. He showed that, sadly, much of what we ascribe to skills is an after-the-fact attribution. The movie makes the actor, he claims—and a large dose of nonlinear luck makes the movie. The success of movies depends severely on contagions. Such contagions do not just apply to the movies: they seem to affect a wide range of cultural products- such as books, online courses. It is hard for us to accept that people do not fall in love with works of art only for their own sake, but also in order to feel that they belong to a community. By imitating, we get closer to others—that is, Other imitators. It fights solitude in the meantime as we hate solitude and crave society, as nature draws men to each other, so in this matter also there is an attraction which makes us desirous of friendship. When you start buying a best seller in London because you heard it hits the New York bestseller list, you are no longer independent- you are subjected to interdependence.     First: The kernel point of my thoughts is – you cannot understand a group of persons, or a nation-party by from the observation of the behaviour of a single individual. Why because the market is not driven by the average- it is driven by people plus interaction- therefore you cannot really see how things aggregate by studying individual behaviour. This is the reason why I recommend those of you who haven’t listen or watch “When lightening hit, we do not change the laws of nature” and by the way Second, we are more likely to mistake skills with convex luck than convex luck with skills explain just as certain objects which are perfectly straight, when sunk in water appear to the watcher as bent or broken off.[15] It matters not only what you see, but with what eyes you see it; our minds are too dull of vision to perceive the truth.  By the way …………. not which is the title of the next episode   For more clarity : with skills in the Mediocrestan, you're going to be very successful, have a happy life, be upper middle class, probably, you know, you're going to definitely do very well with skills in Mediocrestan, because the link between action and reward is going to be very visible, and you know what to do. In Extremistan, skills are often necessary but highly insufficient, you see? So if you're a writer, you need to, you know, be able to compose sentences. You need - you can have all the ingredients, yet fail because "Harry Potter" is going to take the shelf space and you're going to be, you know, out of print and people are not even going to notice your existence, you see or someone like Tony Robbins,Rich Shefren Brendon Burchard? So because Extremistan, one person wins everything. There's a much higher dose of luck in Extremistan. Third: Clearly people may discuss a book because 1) they heard about it, 2) their friends like it, 3) they are genuinely impressed with it. The first two are extrinsic reasons and seem to partake of general social contagion effects. The latter is intrinsic

In this episode, Marc interviews Taylor Pearson, entrepreneur, and author of The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-to-5. Inc. Magazine just rated The End of Jobs as one of the Top Three ‘Start Your Own Business’ books of 2015, and a ‘Top 25 Business Book’ of 2015. It has sold tens of thousands of copies, and it has been translated into Chinese (simple and complex), Japanese, Korean, and Thai. A Wall Street Journal bestselling author and entrepreneur James Altucher, said of it, “Entrepreneurship is not a choice you can make at your leisure. You have to jump on the train, or lose your chance. Now is the time, and Taylor’s book describes exactly how to do it.” His work has been featured in media outlets, including Business Insider, Inc., and Entrepreneur. A former Brazilian Super Bowl Champion (It’s not what you think!), Taylor has lived in Tennessee, Alabama, Argentina, Brazil, Viet Nam, Thailand, San Diego, Texas, and currently, in New York. Marc and Taylor discuss how Taylor wrote an important book on online entrepreneurism, what he means by the end of jobs, and how your job will change. They discuss the vital importance of learning new skills — not by paying for them, but by earning them through experience. New skills bring new earning opportunities, and new markets to grow for your future.   Key Takeaways: [2:40] Taylor is from Memphis, Tenn. He attended a small college in Birmingham Ala., studying History and Spanish. He worked as a medical interpreter, and taught English in Brazil. He started listening to podcasts on entrepreneurship, and online businesses. He returned to Memphis, and started working at an online marketing agency. [4:00] At the agency, he did SEO and project management, managing fulfillment and clients. He moved to manage an e-commerce organization in San Diego, working with a web marketing team based in Southeast Asia. He moved there, to run the team. The owner also ran a community for online entrepreneurs. This was a new exposure for him. [5:40] Taylor published The End of Jobs about the new life script the Internet enabled. He borrowed the title from, "The End of History?" a 1989 essay by Francis Fukuyama, who proposed there were no remaining viable competitors to liberal democracy. Taylor proposes the institution of traditional jobs will end, much as communism will end. [7:48] Taylor had attended a conference of the community of entrepreneurs, held in Bangkok, Thailand. At a breakfast, the discussion was how to explain the new career path of online international entrepreneurism. Taylor moved the conversation into a book intended for Millennials. He is pleased to learn that Baby Boomers take to it as well. [9:34] Marc is working with a client now, looking for a problem for him to solve. The goal is to start a business. Some Boomers are, of necessity, entrepreneurs, with too little saved to retire, and no job offers. Two thirds of all small businesses are owned by Baby Boomers, and they’re ready to sell but not to retire. So, they start a new business. [11:16] Taylor’s book cites three reasons he believes we are at peak jobs: communications technology, the rise of machines, and the abundance of credentialization. As an example of tech, this podcast is held over free Skype, recorded inexpensively, and will be uploaded for anyone in the world to hear. Compare to radio. [12:34] There have been huge decreases in cost to talking with people around the world, creating global access to the labor market. Companies no longer need to hire locally. All that’s required is an Internet connection. Vietnamese programmers fluent in English are excited to work for $1K a month. Their grandparents worked in rice paddies. [15:11] We underestimate how quickly jobs are being outsourced or automated. Not only manufacturing jobs, but now knowledge work is being performed by AI. An AT&T study in the early 80’s proposed 100 thousand cell phone users in 2000, not the 100 million that really used cell phones in 2000. [17:58] We’ve stopped thinking of higher education as an investment, and started thinking of it as a must-have. But, for two decades, the salary value of the degree has been going down across every industry, while the cost of it has been going up. The lines have crossed for a lot of professions, such as JDs and MBAs. [20:33] Taylor discusses the concepts of Mediocristan, and Extremistan. Most people heightwise, financially, etc., live in Mediocristan. Outliers — the very short, the very tall, the very poor, the very wealthy — live in Extremistan. Most people work in Mediocristan, they don’t improve skills, don’t work on side projects, and get laid off — and it’s too late. [24:43] Costs and risks to entrepreneurism are much, much lower than they were five years ago. Playing it safe is the new risky. Taylor talks about stair-stepping to entrepreneurship. Chinese companies will take purchase orders for $5K, if you want to sell physical products. Start to experiment, and learn inexpensively. [27:13] Taylor talks about Rob Walling, who was in a C-level position at a construction company, and started side projects, like an ebook with plans for a duck boat. That taught him about SEO, Wordpress, and managing customer support. The more he learned, the bigger his ideas, and using cash flow, he bought a software firm and more.   Mentioned in This Episode: Careerpivot.com Contact Marc, and ask questions at: Careerpivot.com/contact-me Email: Taylor@TaylorPearson.me Website: TaylorPearson.me Twitter: @TaylorPearsonMe The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-to-5, by Taylor Pearson The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity, by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott Will It Fly? How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don't Waste Your Time and Money, by Pat Flynn For other episodes in the Experts Series, listen to Episode 2, Episode 6, and Episode 10.   Please take a moment — go to iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play. Give this podcast a review and subscribe! If you’re not sure how to leave a review, please go to CareerPivot.com/review, and read the detailed instructions there.

Have you ever ask yourself why are so few serial entrepreneurs – business people who start successful companies one after the other? Obviously we have Mark Cuban, Sir Richard Branson, the late Steve Jobs. But they account for a tiny fraction of serial entrepreneurs. Yes serial entrepreneur account for a tiny fraction of one percent who starts a successful company.    Well the sound question that comes to mind is, do they go o retirement after their first Blockbuster success- just as Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft? Not necessarily. Real and true Business people possess too much to get up and go than lying hours on the beach. Is it because they cannot let go and want to coddle and pamper their companies until they leave at their moment of choice for retirement? Surely not .Most founders sell their shares within ten years .By the way these self-starter who are blessed with talent, skills, good personal network and a solid reputation would be equipped to found many businesses .But why do they stop?    Well they didn’t stop – they failed at succeeding. Only one and unique answer explain their survivability. Luck and Luck plays a bigger role than skills does. No businessperson likes to hear or even listen to this. I myself is one of them. When I first heard about the illusion of skill, my natural reaction “my success was a coincidence”. Yes at first glance it sounds offensive especially when you worked hard to get there.    We’ll let take a look at business success, how much of it comes down to luck and how much is the fruit of hard work and distinct skills. This probe question is usually and easily confusing and misunderstood by the general public. Of course depending of area here Mediocirstan little is archived without skills and talent and from the same token; nothing is bring to fruition without hard due diligent work. But this is not the case when dealing with extremistan. The most important problem out there with experts is The Procrustean bed (by the way the next Episode The bed of Procrustes).         Why because we human simultaneously inhabit two worlds – namely the mediocristan and the extremistan- just as the turkey is feed for thousand by the butcher and the turkey believe that the butcher love it with increasing statistical confident until two days before thanks giving, the turkey is surprised and become a dead meat.my whole idea here is not to be turkey but be the butcher. The Turkey is someone facing unpredictability than it thinks and in the meantime it mistake absence of evidence for evidence of absence. Example: A subscription company or a paid memberships company, a person on salary. A person who is mildly ill who takes continuously medication (Drug).     Unfortunately, neither skills nor struggles, toil, and hardship are the key criteria of success. They are necessary but not sufficient.Kapish there is a simple and easy test to detect and discover if his/her success is highly link to skills and hard work. It is if the person enjoy the success for long time compare to the less qualify. But this is not the case of a lot of company founders – unless many would after the first successful company, they will launch a second, a third a fourth start-up. Meanwhile this is not the case.         Now let us jump on CEO of large company .Do they play a large role in the success of their company? Well researchers determined a set of attributes that characterize a strong CEO such as management procedure, strategic brilliance in the past and many others. The researchers measure the relationship between these behavioural traits and the company increase of value during the reign of the given Leader. So here is the result- if you randomly compare two companies, 60% of stronger CEO lead the stronger company and 40 % of weaker CEO lead the stronger company. This is only 10% more than no relationship. Here is what the Nobel prize winner in economic Daniel Kahneman said to the issue “it is hard to imagine that people enthusiastically buy books by business leaders who are, on average slightly better than the norm”. Seemingly warren Buffett thinks nothing of CEO glorification and idealization. Here is what he said “(…….)  a good managerial record (…..)  is far more a function of what business boat you get into than it is of how effectively you row”, hence skills and hard are necessary but not sufficient.           In the meantime in certain areas (Extremistan) skills play no role at all.in his book thinking fast and slow Daniel Kahneman describes his visit to an asset management company. To brief him they send him the spread showing the performance of each investment adviser over the past 8 years. From this a ranking was assign to each: number 1, 2, 3 and so on in descending order. Professor Kahneman quickly calculated the relationship between the years rankings. Between year 1 year and year 2, between year 1 and year 3, year 1 and year 4, year 1 and year 5 up until year 7 and year 8.The result was staggering and pure coincidence or if you want pure luck-namely sometimes the advisor was at the top and sometimes at the bottom .So if an advisor had a good year, this was neither bolstered by previous years nor carried the subsequent

    Hi and welcome dear friends Jerome here    How to become multimillionaire in seven steps   Scandal of Prediction Take a look at this finding from of Dunn and Bradstreet: “Of the small Businesses that fail 90% do so because of lack of skill and knowledge on the part of the owner". ---Well it raises the sound question; is Business building, investing all about what we know or what we don't know?     Further to really understand successes and analyse what caused them. We need to study the traits in failures     Consider the following experiment borrowed from the world renowned professional statistician Nassim Taleb:” Numerous studies of millionaires aimed at figuring out the skills required for hotshotness follow the following methodology. They take a population of hotshots, those with big titles and big jobs, and study their attributes. They look at what those big guns have in common: courage, risk taking, optimism, and so on, and infer that these traits, most notably risk taking, help you to become successful. You would also probably get the same impression if you read CEOs' ghost-written autobiographies or attended their presentations to fawning MBA students. Now take a look at the cemetery. It is quite difficult to do so because people who fail do not seem to write memoirs, and, if they did, those business publishers I know would not even consider giving them the courtesy of a returned phone call (as to returned e-mail, fuhgedit). Readers would not pay $26.95 for a story of failure, even if you convinced them that it had more useful tricks than a story of success.* The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now consider the cemetery. The graveyard of bankrupt failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, et cetera. Just like the population of millionaires. There may be some differences in skills, but what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck.          Why luck? Well because the large share of the successful winner is tie to matters that lie outside the winner himself- namely extrinsic attributes such as (social contagion, cumulative advantage, information cascade, collaboration), by the way I am not saying it’s all about Luck- skill are necessary and a lot people have a lot skills and few succeed wildly. So to succeed wildly, you need necessary skills and a lot of luck.           Why is luck invisible to us? Well because we humans have a propensity to analyse and explain success by focusing on the piece itself or the person himself and we forget the cemetery of silent evidence of losers or bankrupt people who have the same intrinsic attributes.   You do not need a lot of thought of experiment to figure this out. A simple thought experiment suffices to debunk the fallacy of scandal of prediction that pervade out there.      Let say we collect randomly or an assorted population (in term of less skill and highly skill ex ante ) of 1000 publishers then universal (writers, thinkers, Business owners, Investors etc.…) – and every year you fire the half of them who are losers, leaving the winners and thus end up with long-term steady winners. Since you do not observe the cemetery. Keep in the mind that it is a random thought experiment, after and year 5 you have roughly 31 spurious Multimillionaire winners – just by luck. Of course an explanation will be readily provided for the success of the lucky survivors “He works between 80 to 100 hours a week”, “He has passion for what he does” or “He takes a lot of risks” and so forth .Yes with By the mechanism of retrospective determinism we will find the “cause"—actually, we need to see the cause and the most surprising part is that we completely forget that it was random.      Well after the facts we always fit back explanation to random data. Be careful I am assuming this in a random world In the world that is not random, it doesn’t change to much the number of Multimillionaire. All this to say we are more likely to look back at the traits of those who have survive or the Rosier part. We are not looking at the cemetery of flops who have the same attributes that did lead not to success.          Yes we human have an inability to prospectively predict before the facts-and a strong propensity the ability to retrospectively predict after the facts. Which gives us the illusion of understanding success and therefore to be able to predict the next one, hence Steve Jobs quote “again you cannot connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backward; so you have to trust that the dots will connect somehow in the future- stay hungry, stay foolish” What I am talking about here is hindsight bias derive from the confirmation bias and use as foresight. Yes we tend to focus on what we know and we scorn what we don’t know- namely the unknown (except our enemy focus on what we don’t know), whereas the really value of a Library lies in the books you haven’t read than the ones you have read. The former is fragile, the later robust. And vastly important: above and beyond all the ability to Know, how you want to know what you don't know and are in the hurry to find out are the most crucial ingredient. By the way we think we understand is heavenly mark with psychological narrative and the confirmation bias        Seemingly most entrepreneurs, start up starters, discoverers - venture Capitalists, decision makers and those who advise them: executives, senior management, public administrators, management consultants, organizational development professionals and business educators. still act today upon a straight jacket plan- hence devoid to optionality. Most of them miss the point that the essence of research or investment lies in the Unknown unknowns.          By the way as I suspect the most successful businesses are precisely those that know how work around inherent unpredictability and ultimately even exploit it          As Dave McClure defined a start up as a company that is confused about 1) what its product is, 2) who its customers are, and 3) how to make money. As soon as it figures out all 3 things, it ceases to be a startup and then becomes a real business. Hence we have the aspect of randomness (uncertainty) link to any business to begin with.         This is what the legendary successful screen writer William Goldman shouted "Nobody knows anything" in relation to prediction. You may scratch your head and ask yourself how come could he be so successful? Well He knew that he could not predict individual events, but he was well aware that the unpredictable, namely a movie turning into a blockbuster, would benefit him immensely.          Moreover we human inhabit simultaneously two worlds, namely the Mediocristan and the Extremistan - The Mediocristan is characterised by the collection of the regular that count, Example: Frequent daily sales; The Extremistan is characterised by the Outlier or Exception(s) that dominate Example: Infrequent Huge sales.           Now the procrustean bed of modernity is squeezing the Extremistan (nonlinear) into Mediocristan world. This where comes the tragedy of most consultants- Business owners, investors, entrepreneurs and decisions makers. Yes we are fooled by randomness- because we tend to mistake the random with the non-random than the other way round - meaning we tend to see pattern where there is none, than to miss on the pattern. Prediction not narration is the real test of understanding the world. In this time of change, one day among the learner is than longer than the longest life of an ignorant. Who still lives after his life has been completed. By the way reason is not satisfied with obvious facts, its higher and nobler functions is to deal with hidden facts – hidden facts need prove. Three big ideas to take away To switch from predictive methods to non-predictive methods To stop trying to understand the world and focus on Robustness by avoiding some fragility To Shift from trying to understand the future to focus the present which is measurable if you have proper rule to assure absence of fragility and the only thing you have to worry about is random event. Here in optionality Profits, we help decisions makers, entrepreneurs, consultants, investors- how to make decision under incomplete information, incomplete understanding and how build a system that is robust to the unexpected and even benefits from it and more important how to create organizations that use volatility, variability, stress and disorder as information for making better decisions. You are a Dent maker (The creative spirits. The underdogs. The resolute. The determined. The indefatigable. The defiant. The outsiders. The independent thinkers. The sophisticated. The Convexed.The fighters. The true believers. Above all Risk loving).    I love friends to read your posted comments so we get to know better. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE at https://www.optionalityprofits.com/p/tres-bien for this daily episode and tour dates.                 

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.

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.