Nassim Taleb on Living a Good Life in an Age of Volatility
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello, Oddlots listeners. You are listening to another episode that was recorded live in New York City at our event on June 26th. This time it's with the one and only Nassim Nicholas Taleb, distinguished scientist and advisor at Universa Investments.
Yep, we talked to him about how to live a good life in a time of immense volatility. Take a listen. Nassim, what's your definition of a good life? What should we be aiming for?
Um I mean the the a lot of people think that we're programmed to be happy and stuff like that. In fact we're programmed to feel useful.
Mm.
That's a good life or I mean you don't have to be martyr to feel useful. As a matter of fact, martyrs Go too far and if you look. At their desk, typically in history, you realize it could have waited a decade. And the problem was to solve itself myself, right? So think of all the wars. And hey, but the Vietnam War if took care of the South. Or the rat so whatever. So So let's forget about martyrdom, except of course in narrow cases where you save someone. So the idea is to be useful to others. And then the idea is You know, to uh share your mistakes as you grow in age to share your mistakes with society so they can build on it. That's my idea of a good life. For a lot of people, good life is hedonic in the sense that they have a chef flown in from Europe
To eat some complicated food. Uh that our friend here, you know, just would not approve of beating, you know, not nonstakes, complicated things with long names. And uh so that that's a hedonic approach to things. Mine is you feel useful. So whether you have a family and you're providing for them, or if for a lot of people don't have a family yet or may not have a family, because In the past, most people didn't have a family. A lot of people are orphans, a lot of people were uh had uh didn't had children who didn't survive. So the idea is to be useful. To the community in general.
So we talked about this in the market context at the very beginning, but does you know, I feel this poll to basically always look at my phone to monitor the latest headlines. Sometimes I don't think like I'm the best parent because I'm looking at my phone when I should be with my family, as you mentioned.
What is the opening premise of the episode and who is the guest?
How do we be useful. We're better than the big thing. We're just being bombarded. We're just being bombarded with th events beyond our control.
Okay. Yeah, but but you're you we're better off than we were today. Um Forty years, fifty years ago, before many were born, maybe perhaps even you, all right? Yeah. So The y you don't realize that we spent about a century In front of a T V set.
Oh, that's right.
Or reading papers where you're on a receiving end. But not providing anything in return, so it was a centralized information. uh era that started, you know, uh with modernity. And and you realize you should see the families eating their dinner in front of the T V set. Basically you're receiving information. Whereas organically in the past, the way we dealt with information was by trading it. It's like Twitter, you you you give information, you receive information. So you go to the barber Someone gives you information and then you go to buy fish, you give the fish monger information, and then rumors start going.
How does Nassim Taleb define a “good life” in a volatile world?
So and now we're close to that period because you're not just receiving stuff, you're also tweeting, you know. So although your spouse, I'm sure, pro tells you not to tweet for that. Yeah, that's correct. Okay. But I It is
true when we're trying to get Joe's attention, we send a DM because he doesn't respond to anything.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–3:15
2
What is the opening premise of the episode and who is the guest?
3:15–4:23
3
How does Nassim Taleb define a “good life” in a volatile world?
4:23–4:52
4
Why does Taleb argue that feeling useful is more important than being happy?
4:52–10:03
5
What does Taleb say about how we consume news and information today?
10:03–25:10
Speakers
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