Festival of Ideas 31 May 2013 Double Bill

Event information

Please note this is a special Double Bill Ticket for both of the Festival of Ideas sessions on the 31st May 2013.

This ticket includes both sessions on the night.
All events take place in At-Bristol. A ticket for the two events is £12 (full) £10 (concessions).

31st May 2013, 6:15pm - 7:15pm.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder

31st May 2013, 7:45pm - 8:45pm.
Michael Pollan: Cooking as a Political Act


31st May 2013.
6:15pm - 7:15pm.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of the bestselling The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world. Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls antifragile are things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. Here Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. What’s more, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call ‘efficient’ not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write your resignation letter before starting on the job? How did the sinking of the Titanic save lives?
Antifragile spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems and medicine, drawing on modern street wisdom and ancient sources. Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb’s message is revolutionary: the antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it.


31st May 2013.
7:45pm - 8:45pm.
Michael Pollan: Cooking as a Political Act

Many people now spend a lot more time watching other people cook on TV than doing it themselves. But the outsourcing of this work to corporations has had disastrous effects on our health, our family life, and even on our agriculture. To reverse the trend in his own life, Pollan apprenticed himself to a series of gifted chefs, pitmasters, bakers, brewers, cheesemakers and picklers. Using his own kitchen adventures as the thread, Pollan makes a compelling case that cooking is one of the simplest and most important steps people can take to improve their family’s health and well-being, build community, help fix our broken food system, and break our growing dependence on corporations. Approached in the proper spirit, Pollan suggests, cooking becomes a political act.