013: Gerald Ashley on decision making cycles, Knightian uncertainty & bird food

Fellow BSers,

If you're in the mood for listening to the sharpest minds talking absolute BS, you're in the right place.

Which naturally brings me to my guest Gerald Ashley, and as we've done in the past, today is part 1 of 2. I think bitesize is more digestible and there's no harm in a gentle pause between this week's very savoury smack in the face of beef wellington before indulging next time in the palette cleansing ice cream finale.

Gerald has years of experience in financial markets, from Baring Brothers to Dow Jones to the Bank for International Settlements. So he's been exposed to a fair share of BS in his time. He is now a speaker, advisor, broadcaster and writer on change, risk and decision making. Indeed, Gerald is one of the doyens on these subjects.

He is insightful, warm and entertaining with a keen ear and eye for our delusions and dogma; both of which he is quick to quash in this conversation. 

Why not take a second and share the interview on social media. This is the best decision you’ll make all week; and there’s no risk, only upside.

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Today, we're talking about:

• Birds foraging for food and what that teaches us about dramatic change and decision making cycles
• We talk about our model mania - we want to model everything and assign it a risk probability. Quick spoiler folks, you can't do it
• We discuss the difference between risk and uncertainty and Gerald explains Knightian uncertainty and how credit card data is so very different from terrorist attack data
• And as always, there's a book recommendation or two

Books referenced in the conversation:

• The Origin Of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics, by Eric D. Beinhocker

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• Podcast music: Tamsin Waley-Cohen's Mendelssohn's violin concerto