How Fragile Are Your Plans, Your Team And Your Career?

Antifragile Book Discussion

[00:00:00] 

Eduardo: This is a book I read long time back and I had to come back to catch up with my reading.

Eduardo: It’s close to 500 pages and I guess font size one and a half, right? So it’s dense. It’s actually very simple. I like one of the quotes he has somewhere there in the book that antifragile gains from disorder, right? For anyone that has read the Black Swan, then you can connect that immediately with the concept of the Black Swan.

Eduardo: Then you just think on different qualities of Black Swans, the negative ones. That can really disrupt you and take you down and the positive ones that can really uplift you and give you the opportunities of your life. Knowing that it can be the same one that is just perceived differently, depending on where you are in the lake and being anti fragile is about not being exposed to the negative effects of them and at the same time being exposed to the [00:01:00] positive effect of them. 

Eduardo: I like a table that he has in the prologue. I think for people that don’t want to read the entire book, you could just read that table in the prologue and that’s enough. 

Eduardo: You have an example around which he wants to develop his idea.

Eduardo: What would be fragile, what would be robust and what would be anti fragile. 

Eduardo: We develop a lot of businesses and even our own personal strategies aiming to be robust. But most times remaining fragile. 

Eduardo: He tries to bring some of the ideas that he believes are behind being anti fragile, which are ideas that we have been discussing in this book club for quite some time now. 

Eduardo: Things like being open for ideas, curious, questioning Everything. Having a mindset of experimentation.

Eduardo: It brought to my mind all that we have been discussing about portfolio careers. For example he installed this example several times through the book. A 9 to 5 [00:02:00] job is giving you this false sense of security. And so many of us have actually experienced that. What is the contrary of that?

Eduardo: What is an option to that? That is at the same time, natural and obvious so much as it’s actually the first thing that you would do. I like how he compares the different professions and how they see it in this fragility scale.. I took it, if there are two concepts that I like to put together with, with the concept of anti fragility, is First has an arch enemy, in my opinion, reading the book, and that’s naive interventionism.

Eduardo: I love how he framed it as naive and how he explains what is not naive to him. So he’s not trying to sell. We shouldn’t do risk management. He’s just saying, stop overdoing folks, stop or going the extra mile for whatever is in the median. Things are going to compensate themselves. And at the same time, what [00:03:00] is the best ally for that?

Eduardo: And that is exposure to positive risk to what we call opportunities. How do you look into your market, into your career, into your love life whatever it is, and think about it, about the possibilities for as little as they are, that are completely asymmetric in comparison with the results that you could get.

Eduardo: All in all I find it a wonderful book if you have the guts to read it, and if you can overcome a little bit is a sense of himself like there’s 

Rob: a lot of himself in it. Oh, yeah. 

Eduardo: From the 500 pages, like 450 are about himself. Then 30 about him accusing other people in 20. 

Neil: When I read the prologue, I was making notes quite a lot. I thought I’m really going to enjoy this. But actually, I found it quite high protein, quite hard to digest, and there was that sense [00:04:00] of, how do you call it? It’s almost self indulgent in the writing that I find hard to get through, to be honest, and the sort of balance between intellectual debate versus practical application for me, didn’t quite tip into the more practical end of the spectrum where I’m particularly interested, so it was a hard read for me.

Neil: That said, there were four things that, really leapt out and particularly early on in the prologue, but through the book. The book could have been a lot shorter and focused on those for me. I’ll just give you the headlines if you like, and we can explore this in a bit. 

Neil: The sense that we ought to prioritize adaptability over predictability.

Neil: Company called the adaptologist. So you may not be surprised to hear me say that, but that, that resonated with me quite a lot and just dealing with uncertainty, embracing small failures. So the need to experiment and learn through experience. That was a key thing that [00:05:00] resonated with me.

Neil: The sense that complex systems require you to understand through trial and error and not just being able to second guess. 

Neil: I like the idea of this sense of democratizing decision making versus centralizing. So pushing decisions to, frontline in particular, where people are seeing these activities every day, and better placed to make decisions around that.

Neil: Lastly, volatility is information. So seeing actually how people are responding to that volatility is an opportunity to learn from it. Now I talk about that a lot in change management. Change resistance to me is a signal in the system. It’s telling you to explore something so that you can improve your decision making.

Neil: Again, it’s related, to adaptability. Those were the sort of themes that ran through the book, not necessarily all explicit, but my takeaways. 

Rob: I hadn’t read the book, but I knew the [00:06:00] concept before and I thought the concept was probably enough. But it is definitely worth reading the book to, to flesh it out. The only other book of Taleb’s I’ve read is the fooled by randomness. So I haven’t read the black swans, but I have the idea of what black swan is.

Rob: I knew this book is really the, culmination and it’s got bits of all of the other books in it. When you look at the concept of anti fragility, which I’m actually questioning, is it a concept? Because can you frame something as a negative of fragility and say it’s a concept? Because I think it should have a different word.

Rob: I get his point about robust, but then antifragility is just the opposite of fragile and yes, that’s not robust. What is the actual concept? so I like to look at immunity and I think he used that, that idea. And I think immunity is anti fragile in that we get vaccinated.

Rob: So we get a small dose of a disease. We find a way of dealing with it and we become more resistant to that [00:07:00] disease.

Eduardo: May I interrupt you? I think that’s where he didn’t want to use immunity because he was not simply on being hormetic to whatever is happening around, but gaining from it, growing it. Yeah. And that’s different than just immunity, huh? 

Rob: Maybe it’s my, more my confusion on using that idea.

Rob: It was the hormetic response where your body overcompensates, because of it. If we take a pill, our body’s responding and becoming stronger. Then we’re misattributing it to the intervention, which does correlate quite well with, Kahneman’s. Idea, where we misunderstand data.

Rob: I suppose it’s more about the fitness side of it, that stressors make us stronger. Our body becomes stronger by the stress that we put it on ourselves. I liked Eduardo, you mentioned relationships. The way we connect is through when we have differences, we talk it through, we then connect and we know, [00:08:00] understand each other more. 

Rob: I remember a story, I used it in my book, to illustrate that concept. About a butterfly is in a cocoon crystallizing. It’s really struggling and someone’s watching it and they think, oh, poor thing, it can’t get out it’s too tight a gap.

Rob: They cut the thing so that and it comes out and it doesn’t ever become a butterfly. It’s because the struggle is what develops the strength, which is what develops it, the transformation.

Rob: Often we’re too quick as parents, as society, to intervene. When you look at the idea of black swans. These big events of volatility create change that define how our society unfolds. It makes us think that history is too short.

Rob: We have what, 2000 years of history and there isn’t probably long enough data that we haven’t been open enough to, reflect on how we organize and manage our society. 

Rob: A great lesson that this book gives that there’s a need in human nature for control and predictability. The more that we have that, or the more than reliant we are on that, [00:09:00] the more, the more fragile we become. I really liked the part when he went more into the investment, which made perfect sense of minimal downside, maximal upside with the difference between convexity and concaveness.

Neil: What I thought was quite a useful description was the sense of the parcel that’s marked fragile. So you’ve got a parcel that’s marked fragile. When you send that and you treat that carefully, it arrives in exactly the same condition you hope that you sent it.

Neil: Of course it is fragile. So if it’s thrown around and, damaged in some way it’s worse off, but it never improves. It never gets better when it arrives. It just survives the same state. That was quite useful for me to get my head around the distinction between, something that is robust or resilient versus something that can actually grow and improve through fragility or uncertainty or complexity. I like this concept. 

Neil: Where I think [00:10:00] it was harder for me in the book was to then draw the lessons around application. The sort of beyond the thing as I’ve described, what does that mean in terms of how we design our systems. 

Neil: What does it mean in terms of the skill sets that we actually need to build in organizations. There was some of that I thought was useful, but it lacked for me some practicality, where do you go to?

Neil: From the fact you can’t really predict the future. So that was the other point I was going to mention, Rob, actually. That, we can gather as much information as we like from past events, but how much does it really help us predict the future? And I think, I read the Black Swan, and my sort of sense, my key takeaway from that was we can’t really what we can do is we can prepare to adapt and be adaptive and to make better decisions, that naivety point, recognizing we can’t do that.

Neil: So more data, I’m not sure helps in that sense, does it? That’s a question. 

Eduardo: That, that’s much of [00:11:00] what he’s saying, right? You cannot predict, and Until the moment that you’re building because you’re capable of predicting you are either introducing more fragility in the system or eventually you may get in it to be robust, but you’re still not doing anything different than what everybody else is doing, which means that if the black swan is impacting everyone you were included in that everyone.

Eduardo: That’s not what you want. 

Eduardo: And I remember a post from some time ago where he was talking about long term and short term planning, strategic planning, how companies have this. Dichotomy in the sense that they have to provide immediate results for eager shareholders that want to get just their dividends from their investments, and at the same time keep the business running and in the industry and relevant for the many years to come.

Eduardo: What I feel that the lab is trying to say with his book is, everybody has been looking too much on just one side of this coin. [00:12:00] Yeah. So let’s provide the results. Let’s work on the next thing. Let’s make sure that you gather all the data so you can create all your predicted models and do your forecasting so that your next quarters is running okay. 

Eduardo: But the moment we are hit by COVID then everything goes through the wall. I think he’s also saying it’s going to happen more often. 

Rob: Because there’s more volatility. I think. Kahneman talks a lot about how futile forecasting is, and how we like to fool ourselves that it’s effective. And I think that’s the lesson that we can learn from history is that data is filtered through our biases. 

Rob: I remember growing up in the Thatcher years. 

Rob: And I remember them talking about this time we’ve got rid of inflation. We’re managing the economy. I was a teenager. I heard this without having much interest. And then there was a big crash. It was the massive crash, 87.

Rob: It sparked my interest. And I read about a whole cycles of booms and busts. It was predictable, in the cycle that it [00:13:00] happened. and I continued hearing in the nineties and different governments saying we’ve managed this now.

Rob: I thought I’ve seen about two or three cycles of this. How can they be so blind? 

Rob: I’d read a book about booms and bustles of the Dutch tulip and how people believe in something. It’s a different thing every time, but people still do the same thing.

Rob: In that sense, there’s a predictability that we’re going to get it wrong. Yet we like to think and politicians like to tell us that they’re solving everything, Trump’s making lots of changes now. And he’s Oh, this is the problem. 

Rob: Part of the problem is that we’re too much ideological. Politically we’re run on ideology and we’re either Trump or we’re either this. 

Rob: Why can’t we just be for all of us? And I know there’s different opinions, but why can’t we look without the ideological bias? And I think that is the great message of this is that our ideology is immediately fragile and that works in organizations, countries and for us personally. 

Eduardo: Rob I read this book again many [00:14:00] years ago, and I remember because I was working in the industry that he was hitting very hard the pharma industry every few pages and, that’s how these people are getting rich.

Eduardo: That’s how they have used the system and this and that. And it sounded to me a little ideological or political, back then, but I decided to give the guy the benefit of the doubt and just continue to connect and then it came forward and I got really curious when the whole vaccine thing came up to understand what was his position.

Eduardo: For that, and I would invite you guys to watch some of the YouTube videos that he has on that, because they are really good. He goes completely mathematical, rolls away all his beliefs that Pharma is evil and is trying to make a profit and this and that, and he looks into the problem, and he tries to extrapolate what’s going to happen next, and then what is the best course of action, and then he’s rather in favor.

Eduardo: Of the vaccination and again, not making any kind of statement here is good or bad, [00:15:00] but just that he demonstrates to his own life that he’s intellectually open to challenge himself to see what is the problem at hand, not to be detained, but by his own biases and then work that problem out. And I find that this is what he’s trying to teach or share with us through this book.

Neil: There’s a couple of things that kept coming back to my mind in reading it, and actually Rob, what you were just describing brought that home again. I think there’s something for me about when we look to leaders, Or when leaders think about their own roles, actually, is that image of a leader right?

Neil: Because we look to leaders for the answers, we look to leaders for the direction, to set the sort of plan in place that we can follow. And of course that’s not at all realistic in this sort of complex world. And part of that is about what leaders feel they should do and perhaps some ego [00:16:00] associated with that.

Neil: But I think part of it is what our expectation is of them. And I think we could apply the same thinking to government. What do we want government to do? Is that really actually realistic? And so you get these policies and these, announcements and statements that probably are just there to comfort us, to make us feel better that somebody’s Got a grip.

Neil: The reality is that just isn’t the case. The naivety point. The other aspect I think is this sense of linear thinking. If we only did this, then that, and I think that it just completely misunderstands how complex systems work. So the, if it wasn’t for our DEI policies, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.

Neil: I just find that kind of linear thinking extraordinary in the world that we have. The more we think in those linear approaches, the more naive we are, I think. 

Eduardo: I feel it comes back to diversity, right? Because as a single human being we are going to be limited.

Eduardo: I love that [00:17:00] he gives the example of Switzerland or at points he’s a little less, nice to, to the country, but he says that it’s one of the most anti fragile states in the world. And I live here. I can tell you that much of what he’s saying in the book is really true. You would ask around people and they don’t even know the names of the president here because it even doesn’t really work exactly that way.

Eduardo: It’s rather a very small central system that is supported by a very large communal system. That makes it Anti fragile, more than resilient. And when you look at other systems for example I like the idea from Trump of reducing the size of the government. That is the same idea of Milei, for example, in Argentina.

Eduardo: That’s very good. But he does that at the same time that he tries to centralize all decision within himself. Which then, achieves the exact opposite effect of what he was trying to do [00:18:00] in the first place. I think that’s where we can learn. That’s where, to the practical aspect of it, maybe that’s the key message.

Eduardo: These are the kind of systems we want to build. 

Neil: That was really interesting, wasn’t it, that section? I was thinking about, There is, there’s a, actually, there’s a pharma company, and I forget now, the name of the company that, that operates in a kind of teal, no, it’s not pharma, it’s health care that operates in this sort of decentralized approach. 

Neil: Quite a big health care company that just, defers all decision making to the local community. The people that are going to visit. The people in need are best placed to make decisions about what they should do at any one time. And I got that sense through the, at a country level where decentralised decision making through, communities rather than a central government.

Neil: I thought it was really interesting. 

Rob: just on that, I’ve had some experience with the NHS of, with elderly parents. For example, recently my dad had a UTI infection. So all he needed was [00:19:00] antibiotics. So I tried to go through to the GPs, but the GPs were closed until Monday because they have a thing where you put on a form and once they, as soon as enough people have put that in, you can’t.

Rob: It was a Friday morning. So I’ve been through that. Then I had to go to 111, which is like you can get solutions for non emergencies. So I went through that spoke for about 20 minutes, 20 minutes to someone on there, who then put me through to or said someone else would call and about three hours later, someone else called.

Rob: I went through about another half hour conversation with them. Then they said, okay, we’ll see if your GP has a slot. And then they called back and said, your GP has a slot. They will call. so about two hours later someone from the GP’s called. I had about a 10 minute conversation going over it.

Rob: Then said, okay we’ll get a doctor out. And then half six, like their last call towards their last call of the day, the doctor came out. And then he called and spoke to his colleague back at the GP’s to write out a [00:20:00] prescription, which was about another 10 minutes going through. And this was all for what needed five minutes.

Rob: NHS here is, I don’t know what it’s like in Switzerland, but here it’s under resourced, it’s hard to get appointments and things like that. They wasted all that time because there’s so many layers of rules that there’s no flexibility.

Rob: I’ve been in a hospital. Where again, we’ve had to wait eight hours where they keep coming and give him blood pressure things where it’s not needed where I know what he needs because it’s predictable.

Rob: He’s been for so many times before and it’s 15 minutes with a specialist and eventually after six to eight hours, they then get a specialist down because there’s literally no one you can talk to. There is no one that is allowed to take any responsibility. 

Rob: And that is the definition of fragile. The more bureaucratic organizations get, they make these rules that make sense in one scenario, but they don’t make sense in another scenario. And no one can change them. And so we waste resources and that’s where we become fragile to things like a COVID pandemic.

Eduardo: And then [00:21:00] you lost complete sense of the outcome that you’re aiming for, right? Because the right mind would be to help your dad. That’s why they’re there. the managing of resources is a side business that is part of it. Something that you have to do to make sure that it’s reasonable for everyone and accessible to everyone.

Eduardo: But that’s not the goal. That’s not the outcome that you’re aiming for. 

Neil: I’ve always thought that in terms of the data protection, which of course is important in particularly in healthcare. but when it becomes an obstacle to effective treatment, you really, you’ve really got to question whether there are better solutions.

Neil: So there was a thing, not emailing, for example, on which you understand at one level, but actually a better solution might be to find ways in which you can encrypt data that makes it secure as opposed to not emailing and therefore losing a lot of the data that needs to pass around the different organizations or people.

Neil: You create problems by fixing the wrong [00:22:00] things sometimes, or losing sight of the outcome. 

Eduardo: Yeah. You try to control so much. Yeah. And it’s a little bit like that, right? You can put it inside the safe and with monitoring devices and stuff like that. And still whoever is really intending to steal it is going to find a way to steal it.

Eduardo: That happens the same with data. How many scandals there have been of data leaking here and there, despite all these protections and what good is it serving that we have all this data and we can connect it. For the good of mankind. Oh, but it would be abused. Yeah, and it will be abused no matter the devices and the controls.

Eduardo: It’s still going to be abused. Can we also take something positive out of it? 

Eduardo: Meanwhile, it’s what he’s saying about protecting or overprotecting on the contingent side of things. Minimizing, trying hard to minimize the negative effects and never looking into the opportunities with the same degree of intensity.

Rob: Immigration is a hot [00:23:00] topic in a lot of countries now Trump it’s been here, and like Trump’s issued a raft of tariffs, then there’s retaliatory measures. I remember reading a number of different books of show the example of how, when you try to protect your country against tariffs or against immigration about how much it harms your own economy, and how a freer economy has in terms of immigration, you have more diversity, you have more people that, come in and bring different attributes. How it helps and strengthens the economy.

Rob: And it seems that we’re not learning the lesson, even though, when you look at Kahneman, when you look at Taleb, all of these books, all of these academics and professionals must know this. I guess that goes back to your point, Neil, that, I think the problem with politics is us as the voter.

Rob: We want to believe, which again comes down in capitalism, people fall for scams because of their own greed, that we want things, we want to believe things are true when they’re not. And we need to [00:24:00] be accepting of paying more taxes and if we want more services, and until we do that, we’re not going to have the politicians that we want or we can trust.

Neil: Yeah, you see it a lot, don’t you? When coffee prices start to escalate in the States, I just wonder whether people think it’s such a great idea to have this, robust policy. The approach has been taken and what are the implications of Canada responding in the way they do into, is it a crude oil or something like that?

Neil: To me, this comes to this sort of linear thinking in complex systems and in particular in the financial markets, just how unpredictable they really are. And yet we say, if we do this, then we get this result. It’s back to that naivety point about whether you can really predict actually what the market response 

Rob: will be.

Rob: Daniel Kahneman in his book was quite clear that fund managers aren’t making any difference. And he said, why are you paying the bonus but the director or whoever he was just wouldn’t take the point. and we [00:25:00] can have data, but we filter it through our bias.

Rob: That’s the real issue. I suppose it all comes down to that. It’s about ego. It’s about bias. It’s about our need to control and our, and it’s separating logic from the emotion again. 

Eduardo: Rob, you get all this extremely intelligent CEOs out there. We are talking about people with the very best education that went through top five consulting firms here and there that got access to the most brilliant minds and to these books that we read and so many more, right?

Eduardo: And then they come to the boardroom and they say they want to be data driven. And we should start collecting data. And now we have systems and this and that, and let’s do it. And then you start in that journey and you start collecting data, but they decide that is a better strategy. That is a better alternative.

Eduardo: Somebody told them that it would be wise to go left or right. Storytelling wins 100 percent of the [00:26:00] time over data. 

Rob: And sometimes I think like the example of Mark Zuckerberg. Someone, allegedly brought him all the damage, that Facebook was doing. And he said, I never want to see this again.

Rob: I never want to see anything like this again. and yeah, if it doesn’t fit into your narrative it takes a very brave CEO to, to walk away, or to say, we need to scale back or something. 

Eduardo: You want to be data driven as long as the data support in your point of view. 

Neil: When we look at DeepSeek over the last few weeks, it’s an absolutely fascinating case study into this whole fragility thing for me and the unpredictability.

Neil: So DeepSeek, obviously the Chinese, large language model in about 10 days or two weeks or something, there was 1. 6 million downloads. Share prices in, NVIDIA just plummeted with this sort of idea that there’s a way of being able to build these things that’s really cheap and easy. And of course, the market responds to this idea that there’s a [00:27:00] completely new solution on the streets that’s coming out of China.

Neil: Everyone rushes to get it. It becomes the highest downloaded app on, the app store in no time at all. And in the space of what is it a week or two weeks, we start to say hang on a minute, what’s happening with our data? Is this really secure? I’m not sure. Oh, actually these privacy statements.

Neil: Then european countries starting to ban because it’s contrary to EU, AI act and so on. And all of a sudden this gets exposed in terms of, is it really safe and do we really want to be using it? This is in the space of three weeks. We’ve gone from new kid on the block with shares absolutely plummeting to people saying, yeah, we’re not going to allow that the use of that app in our country.

Neil: Who could have predicted this on the 9th of January, the day before it launched? 

Eduardo: And then the extensions of it, right? If they could do that, what else is that they can do that we still don’t know? 

Rob: Yeah.

Rob: One other area that I think is [00:28:00] really interesting and maybe it might be worth playing around with to, to think, to dimensionalize it with more experience to make it more practical. Is that the difference between the, what was it, the minimal downside, maximal upside. So when you think of investing, that’s really been the model, isn’t it?

Rob: Value investing that you only buy for what the raw materials and the assets of the business are worth. Never overpay for that. And then everything from there is upside. I’m wondering for organizations, maybe for their tech use, maybe for teams, or whatever else they do, how can we dimensionalize that?

Rob: How can we use that principle?

Eduardo: I’m just thinking here as it comes back to relationships Rob, it’s like when we were single, right? 

Eduardo: And then you go to the bar and then that is this pretty lady on the next table and hell, you just go and try to talk to her. Maybe you’re going to get a no. That’s okay.

Eduardo: You can tolerate that, but maybe you’re going to get a yes. That’s big stuff.

Eduardo: It changes then when you’re married you’re going to the [00:29:00] same bar And that is another pretty lady on the table next to you, but you’re not going to talk to her not anymore Because now the downside can be really bad not a very good idea and the upside is not really better than whatever you got.

Rob: I hadn’t thought of that but that’s like in dating so often it’s not asking and then in relationships and marriages, it’s asking when you shouldn’t. so yeah, that’s a great example. 

Neil: There was something it may be a bit that I skipped through quite quickly, struggling to get through the book, but This sort of concept of if you’re going to play it safe.

Neil: Don’t operate in the middle ground. 

Neil: If you’re going to take a risk, take a big risk and then hedge your bets. So you’ve got a number of big risks and some safety mechanisms in place, but you’re not playing the middle ground. You’re not hedging your bets, neither fish nor fowl in a sense of safety and risk.

Neil: That sort of resonates, I got a sense that you can win big on some risks, [00:30:00] you can lose out on some risks, but actually if you cater for that in your approach, you’re probably more likely to win overall. 

Rob: I’m not sure if it’s in the book or if I saw it somewhere else.

Rob: It’s like the hedge fund that has 80 percent in stable and 20 percent in speculative because they can make the money speculative and then they haven’t lost the capital. 

Eduardo: I think this is partially what many companies got wrong when they start hearing about creativity and innovation, and they decided that they wanted to invest on that.

Eduardo: They wanted to bank on that because then they started making this a big corporate thing that you had to have everywhere. And then it brought everybody to the middle, right? Because then everybody’s doing it, but not really doing it. So where does that fit, which is different from what some more innovative companies do that is to have a serious focused investment.

Eduardo: On the 10%, 15 percent that are supposed to blow up the market and [00:31:00] create the new trends and all of that. So instead of trying to spread creativity and innovation throughout the entire company. Why wouldn’t you make sure that the robust side of the business is robust? And that you’re making a conscious investment on what is supposed to be disrupted.

Eduardo: And then granted that innovation can come from everywhere. And maybe you’re trying to be open for serendipity, but you try so hard that it just brings everything to the mean again.

Rob: It’s important to keep, like you say, about 80 percent to robust so that you’re able to cope with random events, but at the same time, you’re not gambling the whole house on speculation. but you’re responding in a way that you’re able to capitalize on gains and changes.

Eduardo: Name of the house, Rob. I’m not a big fan of him, but that’s a little bit what Musk did with his SpaceX business. But then you see how disproportional it is, what he’s trying [00:32:00] to achieve, right? So I would say if you are to put in your own house. Then make it for something really big.

Eduardo: Don’t risk everything just to get another house, just like the one you have. 

Rob: When you were on that scale, yeah, it is everything like, Musk and Bezos with Amazon it’s all or nothing, isn’t it? 

Rob: That’s how you get the win like that, isn’t it?

Neil: One of the things that struck me about SpaceX in particular was their willingness to learn as well. When they’re doing launches that fail and all the press is saying, oh, it hasn’t worked. 

Neil: They’re really excited because it’s like, this is data we can learn from to improve next time.

Neil: Culturally, that’s just a great attitude and comes back to, the anti fragile thing, doesn’t it really? 

Rob: On one level, it’s a simple concept. I can see it in financial markets, those kinds of things.

Rob: I struggle to think of a physical example Because like I heard an example of, a phone is fragile because you drop it and break it. The anti fragile [00:33:00] phone would be one that we, you would drop and it would multiply or it would have other features and physical things don’t actually have that delay.

Rob: One of the criticisms is that it’s not universal. So it’s an idea that applies. in some places or it’s difficult for us to get our head around, for me anyway, the places where it does apply. But I think the idea of the minimal risk, maximum leverage is something that we can take in our personal decisions.

Rob: And awareness, but I’m not sure if you can fit can see more universality to it or applications. 

Eduardo: he used the example on body building to the book, right? 

Eduardo: That’s an example of anti fragility. When you think about it, yeah that’s how it works. You’re actually breaking fibers in order for them to grow stronger.

Neil: There was also something about the wider ecosystem. The thing I think about with that Rob is when you’re thinking systemically. One of the things you’re doing through these [00:34:00] feedback mechanisms is looking for areas that you can intervene. That’s gonna be easy, but have the biggest effect.

Neil: That sense of thinking about it in terms of almost like a living system, because I think he gave the example of evolution, didn’t he? 

Neil: Death needs to occur in some areas in order for the wider population to survive. A sort of sense that survival of the fittest thing.

Neil: Actually means that’s the death of the unfit and through that process, actually what you’re doing through that systemic ecosystem thing is your, it’s defaulting to that evolution through fitness, where actually in that system, there’s also depth, isn’t 

Eduardo: there?

Eduardo: Let me go back to your example, Rob, because Neil just inspired me here. To your point, you dropped. Mobile phone and then it breaks and that helps you to come up with a new version of it that won’t break next time it falls. You buy a case. You buy a case. It’s not the same entity [00:35:00] because it’s debatable whenever we are the same entity that we were a minute ago anyways.

Eduardo: But that’s how the development happened. That’s how it grew. There 

Rob: was one point I, which was interesting. I listened to his Google talk.

Rob: Where there was some questions and there’s one point someone raised that it’s not that it actually makes it stronger, but, for example, in the example that you use, Neil, that when you filter out survival of the fittest. You haven’t as an individual become stronger, but the mean has become stronger.

Rob: The average. And so there’s a little bit, that’s a nuance of the detail. It’s not that the thing actually becomes necessarily become stronger, but the average of them becomes stronger. Like he used the example of, I think it was hairdressing to loans or restaurants or something that as they filter out, the average becomes better.

Neil: Yeah. The system improves. 

Rob: If we summarize, our takeaways, the bit I think about is the, which I’ve said a few times is the minimize your downside, maximize your upside.

Rob: And I think that outlook is such a [00:36:00] great. way of thinking and not to be blinded by things, but it’s a good operating principle to work from. 

Rob: I think it’s, a reminder not to over control. Nature and life is always unpredictable. We can never forecast. We can’t predict, I see in social media now that we used to have a you might remember Neil, tomorrow’s world.

Rob: We used to have a program here that would talk about what life’s going to be like 30 years ago. It was on when I was a child and we can look back and they go, people are going to be flying around and all of our ideas, we extrapolate what’s here into the future.. The future never works like that.

Rob: So it’s a reminder to be humble and not try to control, I’ve always thought you want to surf life rather than try and control life.

Neil: I think Eduardo’s point in his opening statement around naivety that really resonates with me. It’s that sense that, recognize what you can control and what you can’t. And the things that you can control in this sense are around building [00:37:00] capability that allows you to adapt and to learn from smaller experiments or the feedback of the system, if you like. And I think that flips our traditional thinking about leaders or politicians or everything else on its head and starts to drive this need to learn from, where things are happening across your system in a way that allows you to take that feedback, learn from it and adapt.

Neil: The downside is that naivety of thinking you have some control or predictability about what, what happens in the future. So I think for me, that’s a key point. 

Eduardo: I just echo you guys. Maybe the addition is that I believe diversity can solve many of these problems not diversity in any strict sense but a diversity of thought.

Eduardo: overall decentralized collaborative systems rather than centralized, oversized systems that then are capable of focusing on what needs to [00:38:00] be protected and what can be leveraged rather than just serving the purpose of any specific individual or group of individuals.

Rob: it sounds like Switzerland has a great model of governing. 

Eduardo: I’m happy here and I’ve never been really happy with the government. 

Rob: That’s a strong endorsement because, anywhere you go, you should talk to people and they’ll moan about their leaders. you 

Eduardo: will find that here too. but I would say it’s.

Eduardo: It’s way less than other places. I think in the end, as human beings, we like to moan about somebody else that’s in charge anyways, because it’s not our responsibility, but it’s way different as an experience than living in us or living in Brazil. Okay. You guys are invited. Come by.