Antifragile

Things That Gain from Disorder

By: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Narrated by: Joe Ochman

Length: 16 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

From the best-selling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a book on how some things actually benefit from disorder.

In The Black Swan Taleb outlined a problem, and in Antifragile he offers a definitive solution: how to gain from disorder and chaos while being protected from fragilities and adverse events. For what Taleb calls the "antifragile" is actually beyond the robust, because it benefits from shocks, uncertainty, and stressors, just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension. The antifragile needs disorder in order to survive and flourish.

Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is immune to prediction errors. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is everything that is both modern and complicated bound to fail? The audiobook spans innovation by trial and error, health, biology, medicine, life decisions, politics, foreign policy, urban planning, war, personal finance, and economic systems. And throughout, in addition to the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are heard loud and clear.

Extremely ambitious and multidisciplinary, Antifragile provides a blueprint for how to behave - and thrive - in a world we don't understand, and which is too uncertain for us to even try to understand and predict. Erudite and witty, Taleb’s message is revolutionary: What is not antifragile will surely perish.

Please note: The bleeps in the audio are intentional and are as written by the author. No material is censored, and no audio content is missing.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2012 Nassim Nicholas Taleb (P)2012 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"[This] is the lesson of Taleb...and also the lesson of our volatile times. There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable." (Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point)

"[Taleb writes] in a style that owes as much to Stephen Colbert as it does to Michel de Montaigne." (The Wall Street Journal)

"The most prophetic voice of all.... [Taleb is] a genuinely significant philosopher...someone who is able to change the way we view the structure of the world through the strength, originality and veracity of his ideas alone." (GQ)

Important Ideas

Taleb's central ideas about fragility and antifragility are fascinating. This is worth the read. However, he expresses almost maniacal bias against academic research and instead of citing peer reviewed studies to back up his ideas, offers "wisdom from the ancients." While citing the classics is educational, it shouldn't be posited as a replacement to modern scientific research.

Fat Tony and Nero

I enjoyed the characters the most about this book. The concepts are great but hard to get a handle on and he does a great job using these characters to explain the concept of AntiFragile. Tony Deden was the reason why I picked up this book, so many thanks to Tony for sharing this little nugget of pure gold.

Coalescing

Coalescing for the unlived life in all of us. The depths of my mind thank Nassim for a bright sunshine on the skin of my soul.

Counter Point of Modernity and Conceptualism

Harsh and jaded the author jumps to conclusions with a wholier than thou attitude that's annoying but also worth reading and considering. End of the day, worth reading.

Interesting treatment of an issue not often raised

What did you love best about Antifragile?

I responded favorably to the decision not to bore general readers with the technical details of making statistical infrences about relationships when the underlying distributions are not assumed to be typical "normal" distributions. I would have liked to have seen more treatment of so-called cascade failure events and what engineering has come up with in their preventative strategies, but I suspect that is more about me than the book.

What did you like best about this story?

I appreciated the breadth of issues the author brought to bear.

Have you listened to any of Joe Ochman’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No opinion.

What’s the most interesting tidbit you’ve picked up from this book?

I'm going to need to listen to this book again to get the full benefits it may have to offer. I went through it the first time too fast, and I did not spend time looking at the .PDF file containing graphics which was made available in support of the text. The next time through I'm going to give the technical issues a much closer "read."

Any additional comments?

I agree with other reviewers that at times the author spends a little too much energy boosting his own ego, either consciously, or more likely simply as an unconscious manifestation of his life experiences and the battles he alluded to in his career. I may even take the time to dig up some of the more collaborative scholarly papers referenced in this book and track down related research in my field of social organization which focuses on organizational design and organizational structures.

Interesting, insightful, and thought-provoking

What made the experience of listening to Antifragile the most enjoyable?

The definition of Anti-fragility and consideration of this new concept in a wide range of contexts.

What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?

The logical definition of a vastly under-appreciated concept followed by persuasive examples of the many contexts in which it apples, including human physiology, biology more broadly, investment decisions, and macro-economics.

Have you listened to any of Joe Ochman’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No.

What’s the most interesting tidbit you’ve picked up from this book?

Robustness is not the opposite of fragility.

Look at it as a lens

Just wait til the last line of the story. Wow they want six more words

Enjoyable book as Taleb's books usually are.......

Great book, although sometimes Taleb is very harsh in his crítica about academia (but he is more right than wrong about the formal way Academia works).

The central concept is indispensable

This book is a long overdue exploration of how complex systems respond asymmetrically to volatility.

Maybe not so original

Three general thoughts about this book:

1. It was generally interesting (although not concise), and made me think about investments in new ways.

2. He claims that his "antifragile" idea is so original, there is no word for it in any of the major languages. The problem with this claim is that any serious student of the Bible will recognize his "new" idea as the old "refiner's fire." Difficulties and hardships help us to grow and improve.

3. It would be better to read this book. LIstening when driving in traffic makes it difficult to give it the level of concentration it deserves.

Finally, he must have been dropped on his head by an academic when he was a baby. He has a level of animosity towards them that makes me grin, but seems unjustified.