Taleb why i do all this walking

I mean walking without making any effort, except of course to kill boredom. What's more, consider the negative correlation between caloric expenditures and intake: we hunted in response of hunger; we did not eat breakfast to hunt, which had to accentuate the energy deficits.

If you deprive an organism of stressors, you affect its epigenetics and gene expression-- some genes are up-regulated or down-regulated by contact with the environment.

A person who does not face stressors will not survive should he encounters them. Just consider what happens to someone's strength after he spends a year in bed, or someone growing up in a sterilized environment who, one day, takes the Tokyo subway where riders are squeezed like sardines.

Why am I using evolutionary arguments? Not because of the optimality of evolution --but entirely for epistemological reasons, how we should deal with a complex system with opaque causal links and complicated interactions.

Mother Nature is not perfect, but has been so far proven smarter than humans, certainly much smarter than biologists. Taleb 28 So my approach is to combine evidence-based research stripped of biological theory , with an a priori that mother nature has more authority than anyone. After my Aha! I went to the weight lifting rooms in a random way for a completely stochastic workout --typically in a hotel when I was on the road.

Even the duration of the workouts remained random --but most often very short, less than fifteen minutes. I put myself through thermal variability as well, exposed, on the occasion, to extreme cold without a coat. Thanks to transcontinental travel and jet lag, I underwent periods of sleep deprivation followed by excessive rest.

When I went to places with good restaurants, like Italy, I ate in quantities that would have impressed Fat Tony himself, then skipped meals for a while without suffering. Then, after two and a half years of such apparently "unhealthy" regimen, I saw serious changes in my own physique on every possible criterion --the absence of unnecessary adipose tissue, the blood pressure of a 21 year old, etc.

I also have a clearer, much more acute mind. So the main idea is to trade duration for intensity --for a hedonic gain. Recall the reasoning I presented in Chapter 6 about hedonic effects. Taleb 29 experiences, like working out without external stimuli say in a gym , or spending time in New Jersey, need to be as concentrated and made as intense as possible. Another way to view the connection to the Black Swan ideas is as follows. Classical thermodynamics produce Gaussian variations, while informational variations are from Extremistan.

Let me explain. If you consider your diet and exercise as a simple energy deficits and excesses, with a straight calorie-in, calorie-burned equation, you will fall into the trap of misspecifying the system into simple causal and mechanical links.

I gave them my roadmap. Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged. People read 3m copies of The Black Swan. The bulk of them before the crisis.

And people love it. They agree with it. They invite me to dinner. And they don't do anything about it. That's Seneca's recommendation. He's the one who says that the sage should let the republic destroy itself. Now it doesn't. But if you continue talking about it I will get frustrated so let's switch. He means it too. There's a bit of an edge to the statement, so I ask him about David Cameron instead and he immediately relaxes.

There's some sort of mutual appreciation which goes on between the modern Conservative party and Taleb. He name-checks Steve Hilton Cameron's former head of strategy and Rohan Silva one of his special advisers and says they're "buddies". I never mention it in anything. Fraser Nelson, the editor of the Spectator , says that Taleb "is probably the closest thing Cameron has to a guru". Why does Taleb think that is?

And have they done anything about it? I don't read the papers… I provide intellectual backing for some principles, taking into account bigger risks with size and debt. With debt they have the arguments, they don't need me. For size, I have the arguments. The "arguments" are that size, in Taleb's view, matters. Bigger means more complex, means more prone to failure. Or, as he puts it, "fragile". It's what made — still makes — the banking system so vulnerable, in his view. It needs to be more "antifragile".

This isn't the same as robust, he explains, which means it can simply take the knocks. He gives all sorts of examples of this in the book. A clerk in a large company is fragile as he has only one source of income. A taxi driver is antifragile. A banker is fragile. A prostitute is antifragile. General Petraeus is fragile: a single indiscretion was enough to destroy his career. Boris Johnson is antifragile: a whole string of scandals has actually enhanced his reputation.

London, too, seems to be antifragile. The global financial crisis was just another boost: a safe haven for foreign real-estate cash. In Taleb's view, small is beautiful. Corporate mergers never work. After reading this section of the book I flick to the cover to check who printed it: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin.

Which has recently merged with Random House to create one big mega-publishing company. And anyway, there's really no evidence that they are smart enough.

There's no predicting what will be the next breakout success, or next year's 50 Shades of Grey , but when they take off, they fly off the charts, as The Black Swan did. The book itself was a Black Swan phenomenon.

As Taleb is fond of pointing out — and as the small print beneath advertisements for mutual funds states — past performance is no indicator of future growth. Anyway, the money was not, he says, "a major part of my income at the time". In he made a great deal of money shorting the financial crash, and millions more during the meltdown. It's his "fuck you" money that allows him to do exactly what he wants, when he wants, beholden to no one.

Most people would say, "It's all right for some," I point out. We'd all like that kind of independence. Walking too fast, instead of strolling at a leisurely pace, has proven deadly as we missed so much along the way, passing by too quickly, while the bubble was growing ready to burst.

But this latest financial crisis is not that unusual, and it is not just a repeat of the Great Depression, but rather something worse, as we are now less robust than we were back then, and more interconnected in ways that allow this lack of robustness to ripple around the world so quickly that the Ponzi schemes collapse all at once. Nobel prize-winning economists, hired by hedge funds and banks, were stamped with authority that allowed them to create his mess in the first place. Taleb even claims on his website, www.

Taleb has been criticized, but he tells it as he sees it, whether or not everyone agrees. Yet he falls somewhere between academic and finance guy, his approach to both is philosophical.

In the end, Taleb said, risks can indeed still be taken but they must only be taken by those financial groups robust enough to withstand heavy losses from Black Swan-type events. And we must protect those who are not able to protect themselves.

Society at large should not be paying for and saving too big to fail banks nor any financial groups that take risks for which they are not designed. Taleb and I said goodbye down Boulevard Saint Germain and I watched as he walked slowly back towards his hotel to take a nap. As he walked very slowly yet with a determined pace, back towards the heart of the Left Bank and St. Aron on Jan 12, prev next [—].

So let's setup a system whereby a customized email is sent to users every morning: "Today was a great day! You walked 25 miles before a thrilling and ultimately triumphant encounter with an aged caribou that took 30 minutes of fierce running.

Clean water was extremely scarce, but you managed also to find some grubs along the way.