This is one of those life-changers. It doesn’t work as a casual read, because it’s most likely going to challenge a lot of your deepest held assumptions about things- about how the world works, about economics as a profession, about concepts like “risk management”.

What I love is how Taleb manages to marry lofty philosophy with grimy decision-making, by dissecting the limitations of our knowledge and our predicting abilities.

He’s essentially a modern day Socrates, in an age of far more complexity. The map is not the territory. Predictive economics is fraud. He dissects human nature to reveal the fundamental problem of the narrative fallacy, which we are all guilty of.

There were many moments while reading this book where I found that I had to stop to really take it all in, and confront the inconsistencies and weaknesses in my own thinking. Awesome.