It was back in May 2024 when I bought my first MasterClass subscription. I remember I was listening to a conversation between Shaan Puri and David Perell (on the How I Write podcast), and Shaan was explaining all the amazing things he learned from taking Aaron Sorkin’s Screenwriting Class — which mostly focuses on storytelling.

So I became curious and took the class.

I loved it!

But my journey with MasterClass didn’t end there.

I discovered they have a huge catalog of classes (over 200) taught by some of the “world’s best” across many different fields.

So I got hooked on learning with MasterClass. I’d watch the classes on my laptop, listen to them on the mobile app while commuting or doing other things, and even stream them on my TV when I wanted a more relaxed vibe.

But enough of my life story with MasterClass.

Let’s now get into the actual review 🤓

MasterClass Review (Structure)

I’ve divided this review into four parts:

1. Class Experience

2. App Experience

3. MasterClass Price & Subscriptions

4. Conclusion: Is MasterClass Worth It in 2026?

1. Class Experience

After using MasterClass for almost two years, I’d say there’s one thing that truly sets it apart from any other learning platform: the teachers.

The teachers on MasterClass aren’t just teachers… They’re first and foremost doers — and extremely successful ones. They earned their success “in the arena” (as Theodore Roosevelt would say) — by actually doing the thing. So their knowledge is vastly more practical (hence, more useful) than that of an academic teacher — whose main activity is teaching.

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”

— Yogi Berra

So for instance, I’d much rather learn about investing from a successful investor — with a proven track record — than from an academic finance professor. And I’d much rather learn about writing from a successful novelist (or nonfiction author) than from a writing teacher at some university — even a prominent one.

“The doers are the major thinkers.”

— Steve Jobs

(Note: The quotes from Yogi Berra and Steve Jobs are not part of the MasterClass platform.)

Now let’s get into the actual experience of a class…

Besides writing and storytelling, I’m super interested in entrepreneurship, investing, philosophy, and food/nutrition. So, to illustrate, I’ll use my favorite class on investing: Mastering The Markets — which gave me a solid foundation for investing in stocks.

This is how it looks on the mobile app…

(Note: MasterClass also has a TV app. So if you wanna make it “cinema-style”, you can watch the classes on your TV! It’s available on Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Roku streaming media players.)

The class is divided into four episodes, each taught by an extremely successful investor (with decades of experience)…

If you’re curious about this particular class, click here to watch the trailer 🎬 (once you open the link, just scroll down a bit to find it).

Now let’s see all the features available for the class.

1.1 Bookmarks

You can bookmark any class episode, and you can also bookmark any chapter within a specific class episode.

So in the case of the episode Find Hidden Value in Lesser-Known Places, I can bookmark the entire thing, and I can also bookmark any of its 6 Chapters (or “Moments”, as MasterClass calls it).

These bookmarks are then automatically saved in the list “My Bookmarks” — which you can find in “My Progress” tab.

1.2 Note-taking

🖥️ Only available on desktop

As you watch any class, you can jot down notes on the side 📝

This is great for reflecting on the ideas you’re learning.

Your notes are automatically organized by class (and episode), and saved in the list “My Notes” — which you can find in “My Progress” tab.

1.3 Class Guide (PDF)

Most Classes come with a “Class Guide”, which is a PDF where you can find valuable information to follow along the class or complement your knowledge.

To make things concrete, let’s take the example of Episode four: “Win the Long Game by Managing Risk.” In its Class Guide, you’ll find:

• A short description about the instructor Seth Klarman.

• A Glossary of words for “how to speak as an investor” (e.g. Cashflow, “Buy and hold”, Capital Gains, etc.)

• Graphs and visuals to explain ideas (this is the bulk of the PDF).

• An assignment quiz.

• Seth Klarman’s Reading List.

1.4 Class TA (The AI Assistant)

🖥️ Only available on desktop

If you have any questions while watching a class, you can simply ask the AI assistant “Class TA”…

It feels like it has a solid understanding of the class context. And (almost) every time I’ve used it, it’s been useful!

1.5 Audio-only Mode

📱 Only available on mobile

If you wanna listen to a class on your phone — and you just want to listen (not watch) — you can switch to audio-only mode. This is ideal for whenever you’re on the go or doing other things.

The main benefit of switching to audio-only mode (if you only want to listen) is that, besides the instructor, there’s also an external narrator who mentions the title of each episode and its chapters — so you always know where you are in the class.

Also, if you have a poor internet connection, the audio-only mode will likely load much faster.

And yes… you can listen to the audio even when the phone screen is off (both for video and audio-only mode).

1.6 Downloads

📱 Only available on mobile

You can download any class episode on the mobile app…

This is a feature I truly appreciate because I frequently lose internet on my routinely commutes, and I can’t think of something worse than staring at the phone for minutes waiting for the content to load 😂.

1.7 Other Features: Speed/Subtitles/Quality

You can control the playback speed, select subtitles in many different languages, and choose the video quality…

2. App Experience

MasterClass has a beautiful, easy-to-navigate app on both desktop and mobile.

Let’s go through each of the three sections (Home - My Progress - Library) and see what’s inside them…

2.1 Home

On the Home page, you’ll find the most recent classes, along with a selection of classes picked “for you” based on what you’ve been watching. But if you’re interested in a specific category (such as “Business” or “Writing”), you can also filter by it!

2.2 My Progress

In this section, you’ll see all the classes you’ve interacted with, organized into three different lists:

• Continue Watching → Classes you started but haven’t finished.

  

• My List → Every Class comes with the button “Add to My List”, which means that it’s added to the playlist “My List.” Think of it as a watch later type of list.

  

• Classes You’ve Mastered → These are the classes you’ve finished.

  

Finally, you can also find your bookmarks, your notes (available only on desktop), and all your downloaded classes (available only on the mobile app).

Here’s how “My Progress” looks on the mobile app…

2.3 Library

As the name suggests, this is where you’ll find the full library of classes.

It’s similar to the Home page in that you can filter classes by category (Food, Arts & Entertainment, Music…). But you can also filter by:

• Format — Classes / Playlists / Series / Sessions (please don’t ask me the difference 😅 😂 )

• My Content — It includes the three lists we just saw in the “My Progress” section.

• Duration — Useful when you have limited time to watch something.

3. MasterClass Price & Subscriptions

Their pricing is super transparent. You can see it directly on their website.

So… How much does MasterClass cost?

They offer three annual subscriptions (which they call “memberships”):

• The Standard Membership costs $120 per year (equivalent to $10 per month). You can only watch on 1 device at a time (so it’s hard to share with friends / household), and you can’t download classes.

• The Plus Membership goes for $180 per year (equivalent to $15 per month). You can watch on 2 devices at the same time, and you get unlimited downloads.

• The Premium Membership costs $240 per year (equivalent to $20 per month). You can watch on 6 devices at the same time, and you get unlimited downloads.

There’s no free trial, but all membership plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee (terms apply — see more information here).

You can also give any MasterClass subscription as a gift 🎁

4. Conclusion: Is MasterClass Worth It in 2026?

Based on my personal experience and research, MasterClass is definitely worth your time and money. And with a catalog of 200+ classes, you’ll likely find plenty that interest you — plus, new classes are added every month.

(Note: If you’re curious to explore all the categories, subcategories, and classes… click here to browse the entire catalog — then just hit “Browse” at the top of the page.)

As I mentioned earlier, the most unique thing about MasterClass is the instructors — who are not academics but actually successful doers in the arena. So their knowledge is experience-tested, and therefore extremely practical and useful.

On top of that, the class (and overall app) experience on laptop, mobile, and TV is amazing! And you get many features to support your learning — my two favorites: Note-taking (to reflect on the ideas) and the Audio-only Mode (for whenever I’m on the go and just wanna listen).

Finally, a quick summary of this review:

And thank you for reading my blog post :)

👋 Hey friend,

I’m currently reading The Book of Elon (by Eric Jorgenson) and I’m finding so many nuggets.

One of my favorite (and which I’m sharing with you in today’s letter) is Elon Musk’s “Algorithm” to build a great product. And it’s in Elon’s own words, so there’s no loss in translation.

(New → I just launched my latest 📙 ebook: 14 Short Stories From The World’s Best Founders: Lessons You Don't Have To Learn The Hard Way. 👉 Click here to check it out!)

👤 Doers

💡Nugget

🟠 Elon Musk:

I have everyone at my companies rigorously implement a five-step process for engineering.

I call it The Algorithm.

I’ll list the steps, then explain.

The order is very important.

1. Make your requirements less dumb.

2. Try very hard to delete the part or process.

3. Simplify or optimize.

4. Accelerate.

5. Automate.

STEP 1: Make your requirements less dumb.

🟠 Elon Musk:

The first step is to question the requirements, and make your requirements less dumb. You have to start there, because otherwise you could get the perfect answer to the wrong question. This step makes the question the least wrong possible.

Reminded me these words from Einstein:

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

It shows how important it is to first think deeply about the problem before jumping to solutions, because if you’re solving the wrong question then it doesn’t matter how good your solution is or how fast you go.

And I think that’s what Jeff Bezos meant — at least partly — when he said:

“Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Everything I have ever succeeded at in life is because of that philosophy.” [Source]

STEP 2: Try very hard to delete the part or process.

🟠 Elon Musk:

Step two: Try very hard to delete the part or process. It sounds obvious, but people often forget to try deleting something entirely.

If you’re not adding deleted things back in 10 percent of the time, you’re clearly not deleting enough. Somewhat illogically, people often feel they’ve succeeded if they are not forced to put anything back in. But actually they have failed in a different way, because they’ve been overly conservative and have left things in there that shouldn’t be.

I tell them this in advance: “Look, we’re deliberately going to delete more than we should. Some of the things we delete, we’re going to put back in. At least one in ten things, we’re going to add back in.” People get a little shook by that. But if you’re so conservative in deleting that you never have to put anything back in, you obviously have a lot of stuff that isn’t needed.

STEP 3: Simplify or optimize.

🟠 Elon Musk:

Then, once you have deleted as much as you can, the third step is to simplify or optimize.

The third step. The third step. Not the first step. Why?

Everyone was trained in high school and college to answer the question in front of them. It’s convergent logic. You can’t tell the professor, “Your question is dumb.” You have to answer the question. Without knowing it, almost everyone has this mental straightjacket on. They’ll work on optimizing a thing that should simply not exist.

Alan Kay talked about this too…

🟠 Alan Kay:

Most people are rewarded in school for solving problems…

When was the last time your child or you were rewarded for finding a problem?

“You found a new problem? We’ve got too many already!”

Whereas in fact, finding what the real problem is is the big deal…

And people fight you every step of the way, they’ll fight your kids in school every step of the way if they’re a “problem-finder” type.

Don’t let the teachers hurt them.

Most problems are bogus — because they come out of the current context. We’re trying to get beyond the current context.

So forget about “problem-solving”. It’s just a bad heuristic. It’s the last thing you do…

Source: Alan Kay, 2015: Power of Simplicity

STEP 4: Accelerate.

🟠 Elon Musk:

Then, and only then, step four: accelerate cycle time. Once you’re moving in the right direction, and moving efficiently… you’re moving too slow. Go faster. You can always make things go faster.

STEP 5: Automate.

🟠 Elon Musk:

Step five, the final step, is to automate.

Always wait until the end of designing a process—after you have questioned all the requirements and deleted unnecessary parts—before you introduce automation.

📙 I just launched my latest ebook: 14 Short Stories From The World’s Best Founders: Lessons You Don’t Have To Learn The Hard Way (click here to check it out)

It’s a collection of 14 personal stories told by some of the world’s best founders (such as Steve Jobs and Patrick Collison), and each conveys an important lesson for entrepreneurs.

check out the ebook!

This quote from Jensen Huang (founder of Nvidia) accurately captures my motivation for making this book:

Learning from mistakes, other people’s mistakes, is the best way to learn.

Why learn from your own mistakes? You know, why learn from your own embarrassment?

You got to learn from other people’s embarrassment. That’s why we have case studies, and isn’t that right?

We’re trying to read from other people’s disasters, other people’s tragedies. Nothing makes us happier than that.

- Jensen Huang [Source: A conversation with NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang]

💥 Stuff I Loved

👉 Highlight resurfaced using Readwise (click here to check it out)

I hope you enjoyed today’s letter!

Talk you soon,

Your nuggets friend Julio :)

It was back in 2022 when I first heard of Blinkist and became interested in book summary apps.

And, after days of research and comparing with the other two popular players in the book summary space: Headway and Shortform, I ended up going with Shortform — because I found their summaries to be more in-depth.

Buuut. It’s now 2026. So, I think it is time for me to make a new research and find out if Blinkist is really worth it, and more specifically if it’s actually the best book summary app on the market. And this time I’m gonna document all my research here! So if you are in a similar situation like me, I guarantee this will save you a ton of research time.

Before the Research

It’s a shame they don’t have a free trial (or even a monthly subscription). So I had to “commit” (at least financially) for a whole year in order to try the app and make the research.

(Note: Alternative apps such as Headway or Shortform are more flexible in their pricing: Headway starts with a monthly subscription, and Shortform offers a 5-day free trial on their monthly and annual subscriptions.)

Below is my full 5-day research — organized by day:

1. Research Day #1: Book Summaries

2. Research Day #2: Beyond Book Summaries

3. Research Day #3: User Interface

4. Research Day #4: Price

5. Research Day #5: Best Blinkist Alternatives

And at the end, I share my conclusion on whether Blinkist is worth it in 2026, and if it’s truly the best book summary app on the market.

1. Research Day #1: Book Summaries

Blinkist summaries are called “blinks”, and after reading a few blinks it’s clear to me they are super high quality, easy to understand, and well structured. Plus, with a library of over 7,000 summaries, you’ll likely never run out of interesting reads!

To illustrate my research, I’ll take the self-improvement bestseller (and a book I personally loved reading) The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, written by Mark Manson.

A summary is structured in chapters. The first chapter is always an introduction, the next chapters are the “Key Ideas”, and the last chapter is a “Final Summary” (sort of a short conclusion).

In their summary of the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, they have 10 chapters and 8 “key ideas.”

1.1 Downloads

You can also download any summary. And these are automatically saved in the “Downloads” section…

This is a feature I truly appreciate because I frequently lose internet on my routinely commutes, and I can’t think of something worse than staring at the phone for minutes waiting for the content to load 😂.

1.2 Highlights

Another useful feature is that you can create highlights on the summaries, which are then automatically tagged (to the book summary where it belongs) and saved in your Highlights Library.

This feature has an important glitch though… When you make a highlight, it is saved but it misses a few letters at the start and it adds letters (which weren’t part of the highlight) at the end.

Personally, this makes the highlights tool unusable to me — because I can’t clearly read what it says… And by the way, this glitch was also present when I tried the app in previous years, so I don’t think they’ll solve it any time soon!

If you care about making highlights, I recommend you checking out other alternatives such as Headway or Shortform — they both have a flawless highlighting tool! And Shortform even comes with note-taking and bookmarks. (I cover both apps — Headway and Shortform — in Research Day #5: Best Blinkist Alternatives).

1.3 Audio Version

All Blinkist summaries come with an audio version, and I like how it sounds. I wouldn’t say it’s amazing, but I think it is very decent.

Here’s a sample from their book summary of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, so you can also hear it for yourself…

1.4 Other Languages

Blinkist’s summaries are also available in Spanish, German, and Portuguese. I think that’s very cool if you’re learning any of these languages, or (of course) if you’re a native in any of them. Although I couldn’t find their summary of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck in Portuguese.

2. Research Day #2: Beyond Book Summaries

Beyond book summaries, Blinkist offers 6 features:

• Collections

• Guides

• Shortcasts

• Blinkist AI

• Shorts

• Live Events (& Infographics)

2.1 Collections

A Collection is a curated list of book summaries that help you improve a specific skill or learn about a particular topic.

2.2 Guides

These are like mini-courses on many different topics and areas. It’s all audio-based and it’s really cool!

2.3 Shortcasts

Playing with the word Podcasts, Blinkist created Shortcasts — podcast shows that you can only find on Blinkist. There are 16 different shortcasts, each focused on delivering key ideas within a specific area (which is also why episodes are super short — typically around 10–15 minutes).

2.4 Blinkist AI

📱 Only available on mobile

You can share any article or video with this AI tool, and it will generate a summary using AI! These summaries are then saved within the Blinkist app.

2.5 Shorts

📱 Only available on mobile

These are super short insights from their book summaries, podcast shows, and external articles. They are useful for when you have some (very) short time to kill, and also to discover new book summaries, Blinkist podcast shows, and interesting articles (these are linked at the end of the shorts). And I noticed they have three types:

• Text Shorts → These are displayed in a carousel-style format, and they link to a book summary at the end.

  

  

• Audio Shorts → These are audio clips (taken from Blinkist’s Shortcasts) with a synced transcription on-screen. And they link to the respective Shortcast source at the end. (Tip → Expand the video to watch at full size!)

• Video Shorts → It features a person explaining you an insight from a book summary or an article. (Tip → Expand the video to watch at full size!)

The feature is nice, but I don’t like that there’s a cap of 5 shorts per day. After you watch all five, the feed stops and you see this:

2.6 Live Events (& Infographics)

🖥️ Only available on desktop

I think live events are a great complement to the learning experience.

But I see two problems with this feature:

1. There is not a wide offer of events. Today is March 16th, and I see there are four events scheduled for the rest of the month — out of which I’m only interested in one…

2. It’s only offered in their “Platinum” plan (costs €239.99 or $285.85), which is 70% more expensive than the “Pro” plan (which costs €139.98 or $166.72). The only special extra that the Platinum gives you are these live events (and infographics — which are given as “pre-session reading” for the live event). Honestly, I’d rather pick a different subscription plan and save the money, and if I’m interested in an educational streaming platform I would just signed up to Skillshare or MasterClass — their catalogue of classes is much wider, and the instructors are top-notch… For instance, Aaron Sorkin teaches Screenwriting and Story-telling on MasterClass — I watched it and it’s sooo good!

For the example of the live event “Learn Like a Pro: Master Skills Faster & Better”, this is the pre-session infographic:

3. Research Day #3: User Interface

3.1 Mobile Interface

Blinkist has a stunning mobile app and it’s quite easy to use! It looks especially sexy in dark mode 🔥

3.2 Desktop Interface

Blinkist’s desktop interface is great, and it’s almost as feature-rich as the mobile app (it’s just missing Blinkist AI and Shorts).

4. Research Day #4: Price

If you were wondering whether Blinkist is free or not — or if it has a “freemium” or free version — let me tell you right away it is not free (and there’s no free version). And you have to fill out a questionnaire and enter your email in order to see the pricing… so it’s not very transparent. But I did it and finally got to the meat.

How Much Does Blinkist Cost?

Blinkist offers three Subscription Plans:

• The Premium Subscription goes for $95.27 (or €79.99) per year — equivalent to $7.94 (or €6.67). It doesn’t include Blinkist AI or live events.

• The Pro Subscription costs $166.72 (or €139.98) per year — equivalent to $13.89 (or €11.67) per month. It includes Blinkist AI but not live events.

• The Platinum Subscription goes for $285.84 (or €239.99) per year — equivalent to $23.82 (or €20) per month. It includes Blinkist AI and live events (with access to infographics).

They also gave me a 20% discount on my first payment, if I paid in less than 20 minutes.

The Blinkist Platinum paywall only shows up after you become a Premium or Pro subscriber…

As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, there’s no free trial or even a monthly subscription. So you have to (financially) commit for a whole year without first trying the app :(

In contrast, alternative apps such as Headway and Shortform are much better in this regard. Headway offers a monthly subscription (best choice to try the app), and Shortform a 5-day free trial on all their subscriptions (so you can try the app without any commitment!).

And now it’s time to actually explore these alternative apps…

5. Research Day #5: Best Blinkist Alternatives

I think a Blinkist review wouldn’t be complete if I just talked about Blinkist. Because to figure out if Blinkist is worth it or not, we need to also look at the other top alternatives in the book summary space: Headway and Shortform.

5.1 Headway

I talked to the team at Headway and they agreed to give us a 60% discount by taking the 5-minute quiz and signing up with this link! (If you prefer skipping the quiz, you can go directly to this page and get the same 60% off).

5.1.1 Headway — Book Summaries

• To illustrate my research, we’re going back to the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. This is how the cover of the summary looks on Headway:

  

• In the Headway App, a summary consists of a list of “key points”, which are sort of the key ideas of the book. And they also have a list of “insights”, which are basically one-liners that kind of summarizes the key points themselves (exactly… the summary of the summary!).

  

  This is how the summary looks on desktop…

  

• You can download any book summary to read offline.

• You can make highlights — and then these highlights are automatically tagged (to the book summary where it belongs) and saved in your Highlights Library.

  

• You can switch between dark mode / light mode, and adjust the text size.

  

• You can also switch from English to Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Polish.

  

• Finally, all Headway summaries come with an audio version — and you can choose between Paul (male voice), Grace (female voice), and Orion (“bedtime” voice).

  

  This is our friend Paul:

  Now our British friend Grace:

  And finally our mystic (and extremely relaxed) buddy Orion:

  Personally, I think the audio quality is quite good!

5.1.2 Headway — Beyond Book Summaries

Beyond book summaries, the Headway App offers three services. Let’s explore each of them:

• Collections → Similar to Blinkist, Headway offers Collections — curated lists of book summaries to make you more knowledgable on a topic or help you improve a skill, typically containing 8-10 summaries.

  

  

• Growth Plans (mobile-only feature) → These are like Collections on steroids. Similar to a Collection, a Growth Plan gives you a curated list of summaries. But Growth Plans go beyond that — by also offering interactive plans to go through these summaries.

  

  An interactive plan expands on the summaries by offering quizzes, and recaps (which contains highlights and action points)…

  

• Shorts (mobile-only feature) → These are super fun introductions to the book summaries (featuring insights, interesting facts, and stories). They have text shorts and infographic shorts (similar to Instagram posts), and video shorts (similar to Instagram reels). And you swipe vertically to move through them.

  • Text Shorts → These typically feature an interesting fact or an insight from a book summary. And you can check out the book summary source at the end.

    

  • Infographic Shorts…

    

  • Video Shorts → I noticed three different styles: (1) Visual Explanations, (2) Stories (these have a Pixar vibe), and (3) Podcast style. It’s also cool that they are interactive. Here’s an example for the Visual Explanation style…

    (Tip → Expand the video to watch at full size!)

  I think the shorts feature is great for when you have some (very short) time to kill, or as a fun way to discover new book summaries (each short links to related summaries at the end).

  Beyond the book summaries, it is my favorite feature! And now, instead of swiping IG reels, I swipe these Headway Shorts… aaand IG reels 😂 (but less now!)

I talked to the team at Headway and they agreed to give us a 60% discount by taking the 5-minute quiz and signing up with this link! (If you prefer skipping the quiz, you can go directly to this page and get the same 60% off).

5.1.3 Headway — User Interface

• Mobile Interface

  The Headway App has a sleek design (especially on dark mode, but honestly… What doesn’t look better on dark mode? 😂 ), and it’s super easy to navigate!

  

• Desktop Interface

  The design is nice, but it’s not as feature-rich as the mobile app. You can’t download summaries or highlight text, and you won’t find features like Growth Plans or Shorts (they’re mobile-only). But maybe my biggest disappointment: there’s no dark mode 💔

  

5.1.4 Headway — Price

Similar to Blinkist, you have to fill out a questionnaire and enter your email before you can see the pricing.

Headway has three subscription plans:

• Monthly Subscription for $38.86 (or €32.84) per month.

• Quarterly Subscription for $70.97 (or €59.97) per quarter — equivalent to $23.66 (or €19.99) per month.

• Yearly Subscription for $153.57 (or €129.77) per year — equivalent to $12.80 (or €10.81) per month.

None of the subscription plans offer a free trial. But you get a 60% discount for being a Little Almanack reader! (If you prefer skipping the quiz, you can go directly to this page and get the same 60% off).

5.2 Shortform

As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, I’ve been a paid subscriber of Shortform since 2022 because I find their summaries to be extremely high-quality and in-depth.

I talked to the team at Shortform and they agreed to give us a 20% discount on the Annual Subscription by signing up with this link! (You also get a 5-day free trial).

5.2.1 Shortform — Book Summaries

• To illustrate my research, we’re (yet again) jumping back to the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.

  

• If I had to point at only one thing that makes Shortform truly special, it would be the depth of their summaries — they’re by far the most in-depth summaries you can find! They even have a chapter-by-chapter breakdown (for classics and bestsellers) — where they summarize each chapter of the book. So I think Shortform’s content feels more like study guides than traditional book summaries — which is fantastic to grasp a deeper understanding of the ideas in the books! And if you want to read something quick, they also have a “1-Page Summary” version.

• They add clarifications, counterpoints, or just helpful notes to the summary. I think this is a great addition because it expands our perspective, and also corrects for potential biases of the book authors. It’s aligned with one of my all-time favorite quotes: “One should not read like a dog obeying its master, but like an eagle hunting its prey.” - Dee Hock (founder of Visa)

  

  This is how it looks on desktop…

  

• They have interactive exercises across the summary (very helpful to reflect on how to apply the ideas into your own life context).

  

• They let you download any summary as a PDF (so you can read without internet and keep your favorite summaries always with you!).

• You can start discussions and connect with other users…

  

• You can easily switch between dark mode and light mode, and also adjust the text format of any summary.

  

• You can make highlights and write notes on your highlights. And you can also make bookmarks — so you always know where you left off in your reading.

  

• Shortform’s summaries are also available in Spanish, German, and Portuguese…

  

• Shortform also offers audio versions for all their book summaries. Here’s a sample from their book summary of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. (recorded at 1x speed):

  (By the way, you can listen to Shortform’s summaries even when the screen is off!)

  Personally, I liked the audio quality!

I talked to the team at Shortform and they agreed to give us a 20% discount on the Annual Subscription by signing up with this link! (You also get a 5-day free trial).

5.2.2 Shortform — Beyond Book Summaries

Shortform offers a wide variety of services beyond their book summaries. Let’s explore each of them:

• Collections → Similar to Blinkist and Headway, Shortform offers Collections — curated lists of book summaries to make you more knowledgeable on a specific topic.

  

  

• Master Guides → A Master Guide is a compilation of ideas from different books to give you a comprehensive guide on a specific topic for a deeper understanding.

  

  

• Articles → Shortform creates Articles on the latest news and trends. I really like these because each article is based off many sources (like a research paper), which makes it way less biased than an article from any news outlet.

  

  

• Podcast Summaries → They offer summaries on episodes of many different Podcasts.

  

  

• Shortform AI (desktop-only feature) → It’s a browser extension that summarizes everything on the internet, from articles and emails to YouTube videos, at a click of a button. And you can even install it for free! But if you want the premium version (for unlimited summaries) you would need a Shortform subscription.

  

5.2.3 Shortform — User Interface

• Mobile Interface

  Shortform’s mobile app is beautiful and easy to navigate!

  

• Desktop Interface

  Shortform offers a great desktop interface — it’s easy to use and as feature-rich as their mobile app!

  

5.2.4 Shortform — Price

Their pricing is super transparent. You can see it directly on their website. This is different from Headway and Blinkist, which only show you the price after taking a quiz.

Plus, they offer a 5-day free trial, so you can try it without any commitment. That also contrasts with Headway (which requires at least a one-month commitment) and Blinkist (which requires at least a one-year commitment!! 😟).

So… How much does Shortform costs?

• The Monthly Subscription goes for $24 per month.

• The Yearly Subscription costs $197 per year (equivalent to $16.42 per month). But I talked to the team at Shortform and they agreed to give us a 20% off! (just click here to get the discount).

Conclusion: Is Blinkist Worth it in 2026?

Based on my 5-day research, I can say that Blinkist is a great app for learning ideas from popular non-fiction books.

But… Is it really worth it when we have other alternatives such as Headway or Shortform?

Personally, Shortform is still my favorite book summary app. Mainly because their summaries feel more like study guides: they are (by far) the most in-depth, they have chapter-by-chapter breakdowns, helpful notes, exercises, and it also comes with a note-taking feature (which is great for personal reflection). All of this is incredibly helpful for gaining a deeper understanding of the books’ ideas. Plus, authors like Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck), James Clear (Atomic Habits), and Sahil Bloom (The 5 Types of Wealth) have all recommended Shortform.

Having said that, I also think Headway can be a valuable complement to the learning experience.

In my own “learning funnel” I’ve started to use Headway’s Shorts as a fun way to micro-learn (which is also nice for reducing Social Media time) and discover new books. I also use Headway’s book summaries to get a quick overview of a book’s ideas. Then, if I find a book interesting, I move to the Shortform study guide for a deeper analysis of the ideas and how to put them into practice. And finally, if I’m still hooked, I buy the book!

(Even after reading the book, I occasionally revisit the Shortform study guide to refresh the main ideas and takeaways).

I picked Headway over Blinkist because their Shorts are unlimited (Blinkist caps you at 5 per day) and I found them more interesting/fun. Also, I really enjoy Headway’s user interface — I think it has the sleekest design and it just feels fun to use it.

Here’s a complete list of all the features so you can decide which is the best app for you!

(Note: The green color represents the features of the book summaries, whereas the yellow represents the services beyond the book summaries…)

My Final Verdict…

As I mentioned earlier, Shortform is still my favorite book summary app in 2026. But I think that pairing it with Headway makes it even more powerful: Headway for micro-learning, discovery, and a quick introduction to a book’s ideas. And then Shortform for studying, practicing, and mastering the book’s ideas!

And thank you for reading my blog post :)

Discounts:

I talked to the team at Shortform and they agreed to give us a 20% discount on the Annual Subscription by signing up with this link! (You also get a 5-day free trial)

I also talked to the team at Headway and they agreed to give us a 60% discount by taking the 5-minute quiz and signing up with this link! (If you prefer skipping the quiz, you can go directly to this page and get the same 60% off).

👋 Hey friend,

Today’s insight comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

It’s a contrast to the prevailing idea that it’s a good thing to have some grand project or master plan in your life, where you know with precision what you’ll be doing tomorrow or a year from now. But even if this brings you comfort (since it removes uncertainty — which is a source of discomfort), it makes your life tasteless and boring.

Knowing with exact precision what you’ll be doing in the future (what Taleb calls “touristification”, since it resembles the tourist who strictly follows a travel itinerary) kills your soul. And it doesn’t even remove uncertainty in real life, it just gives you the illusion of certainty.

So let’s get into this fascinating perspective from Taleb!

👤 Doers

💡Nugget

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

What a tourist is in relation to an adventurer, touristification is to life; it consists in converting activities, and not just travel, into the equivalent of a script like those followed by actors. We will see how touristification castrates systems and organisms that like uncertainty by sucking randomness out of them to the last drop—while providing them with the illusion of benefit. The guilty parties are the education system, planning the funding of teleological scientific research, the French baccalaureate, gym machines, etc. And the electronic calendar. But the worse touristification is the life we moderns have to lead in captivity, during our leisure hours: Friday night opera, scheduled parties, scheduled laughs. Again, golden jail. This “goal-driven” attitude hurts deeply inside my existential self.

Which brings us to the existential aspect of randomness. If you are not a washing machine or a cuckoo clock—in other words, if you are alive—something deep in your soul likes a certain measure of randomness and disorder. There is a titillating feeling associated with randomness.

👉 Book: Antifragile

This is well captured in this aphorism from Taleb’s Bed of Procrustes…

“You have a calibrated life when most of what you fear has the titillating prospect of adventure.”

When I read this idea from Taleb, it immediately came to mind something I heard from the famous novelist Lee Child — which I think is an excellent analogy to this idea of “touristification”…

🟠 Lee Child:

A lot of people assume that a book needs planning. They assume that you write out an outline or at least a hit list of plot points — some kind of a synopsis or outline or plan. And I’ve never ever done that. Because writing per se (making it with words) is not really the issue for me. [The issue] is the story that I want. And if I were to plan a story — and I’ve got friends who do huge outlines, you know, 300-page outlines. Even if I did a two-page outline with two lines per proposed chapter, then I’ve told myself the story, and I’m bored with it at that point. I want the next story. So I can’t afford to tell myself the story ahead of time. I have to just improvise it as I go along. So, it’s about starting somewhere which is defined by location and then see what happens. It really is that simple.

👉 Video: How to Write Strikingly Well — Lee Child

So Lee Child doesn’t plan his writing in advance, instead he picks a location and then the location sets the motion of the story…

🟠 Lee Child:

Do you want it to be the West of Texas where it is baking hot and arid? Do you want it to be on the Atlantic coast of Maine in April, where it’s gray and cold and misty? So, that’s how I start with the sense of place, and then it’s just constructing it around that. In a way, the place and the temperature kind of dictates the story in a way.

👉 Video: How to Write Strikingly Well — Lee Child

This is also very similar to how Stephen King writes his novels. I confess I’ve never read any of his novels, but I read his first and only non-fiction book where he talks about his process of writing…

🟠 Stephen King:

I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible. It’s best that I be as clear about this as I can – I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course). If you can see things this way (or at least try to), we can work together comfortably. If, on the other hand, you decide I’m crazy, that’s fine. You won’t be the first.

…

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice. The story which results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored.

👉 Book - On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

So just like Lee Child and Stephen King don’t follow a plot for writing their novels, maybe we should also free ourselves from the slavery of following some grand project or masterplan in our lives. Maybe we should make our lives more open to adventure and randomness, while less predictable and boring.

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

If I could predict what my day would exactly look like, I would feel a little bit dead.

…

There exist the kind of people for whom life is some kind of project. After talking to them, you stop feeling good for a few hours; life starts tasting like food cooked without salt. I, a thrill-seeking human, have a b***t detector that seems to match my boredom detector, as if we were equipped with a naturalistic filter, dullness-aversion. Ancestral life had no homework, no boss, no civil servants, no academic grades, no conversation with the dean, no consultant with an MBA, no table of procedure, no application form, no trip to New Jersey, no grammatical stickler, no conversation with someone boring you: all life was random stimuli and nothing, good or bad, ever felt like work. Dangerous, yes, but boring, never.

👉 Book: Antifragile

📝 This is How I Take Notes on Podcasts (from my phone)…

How I take notes on Podcasts using the tool Reader/Readwise — this tool boosted my learning from podcasts/interviews, and it absolutely changed my life! If you watch the video below, you’ll understand why (I show you how I saved the previous insight from Lee Child).

(expand the video to watch at full screen)

I typically listen to podcasts on Spotify, but when I want to take notes I simply search it on YouTube (you can always find it there) and then start the process I show in the video above.

If there’s only one tool I recommend to boost your learning from podcasts/interviews, it’s this one! It’s been my favorite learning tool (by far) over the past three years I’ve been using it.

I also talked to the team at Readwise and they agreed to give a 60-day free trial (double the usual trial length) to readers of Little Almanack…

Just go to 👉 https://readwise.io/pickingnuggets-reader

💥 Stuff I Loved

I hope you enjoyed today’s letter!

Talk you soon,

Your nuggets friend Julio :)

It was back in 2022 when I first heard of the Headway App (from a post on Instagram) and became interested in book summary apps.

And, after days of research and comparing with the other two popular players in the book summary space: Shortform and Blinkist, I ended up going with Shortform — because I found their summaries to be more in-depth.

Buuut. It’s now 2026. So, I think it is time for me to make a new research and find out if the Headway App is really worth it, and more specifically if it’s actually the best book summary app on the market. And this time I’m gonna document all my research here! So if you are in a similar situation like me, I guarantee this will save you a ton of research time.

I talked to the team at Headway and they agreed to give us a 60% discount by taking the 3-minute quiz and signing up with this link!

I also talked to the team at Shortform and they agreed to give us a 20% discount on the Annual Subscription by signing up with this link! (You also get a 5-day free trial)

Before the Research

I signed up to the Headway App on their website and chose the monthly subscription (their shortest subscription plan) to try out the app for my research.

Below is my full 5-day research — organized by day:

1. Research Day #1: Book Summaries

2. Research Day #2: Beyond Book Summaries

3. Research Day #3: User Interface

4. Research Day #4: Price

5. Research Day #5: Best Headway App Alternatives

And at the end, I share my conclusion on whether the Headway App is worth it in 2026, and if it’s truly the best book summary app on the market.

1. Research Day #1: Book Summaries

After reading a few book summaries, it’s clear to me that the content is very high-quality. The summaries are easy to understand and I like how they’re structured. Plus, with a library of over a thousand summaries, you’ll likely never run out of interesting reads!

To illustrate my research, I will take the bestselling book (and one of my all-time favorite books) Principles, written by Ray Dalio.

In the Headway App, a summary consists of a list of “key points”, which are sort of the key ideas of the book.

And they also have a list of “insights”, which are basically one-liners that kind of summarizes the key points themselves (exactly… the summary of the summary!).

So, for the book Principles, they have a list of 9 key points (the last key point is usually a Conclusion or a list of practical tips) and 9 insights.

Now, I’ll go through the 3 main features of Headway’s book summaries:

• Downloads

• Highlights

• Remember & Repetition

1.1 Downloads

In the Headway App you can download any book summary. And this is a feature I truly appreciate because I frequently lose internet on my routinely commutes, and I can’t think of something worse than staring at the phone for minutes waiting for the content to load 😂.

1.2 Highlights

Another interesting feature is that you can highlight any text in the summaries. And these highlights are then automatically tagged (to the book summary where it belongs) and saved in your Highlights Library.

I’m personally a big fan of highlighting because it allows me to save the stuff that resonates with me, which I can then revisit in the future — with the ultimate goal that these ideas eventually become second nature to me! (I think an idea becoming second nature is the mark of ultimate learning).

1.3 Remember & Repetition

As I mentioned earlier, every book summary comes with a list of “Insights” that are sort of one-liners that summarize the book summary itself.

These insights come as a list (within the Contents tab), but they are also spread across the summary.

And the interesting thing is that these insights have a “Remember” button, and when you click on that button the insight is automatically saved to both your Repetition library and your Highlights library.

Honestly, having two libraries (Repetition and Highlights) feels a bit redundant, since they pretty much do the same job. I’d probably just stick to the Highlights library and see all my highlights and saved insights from there.

1.4 Style & Size

If you haven’t noticed by now, I’m a sucker for dark mode. But don’t worry if you prefer light mode… Below you can see the difference between both and how you can easily switch between them.

As you can see in the image, you can also adjust the text size.

1.5 Audio

The Headway App has audio versions for all the book summaries in its library.

As you can see, there are two types of voice: Jordan and Claire.

Here’s how Jordan’s voice sounds (at 1x speed)…

And this is how Claire’s voice sounds…

(By the way, you can listen to Headway’s summaries even when the screen is off!)

Personally, the audio sounded decent to me!

1.6 Other Languages

Beyond English, The Headway App offers five other languages: Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Portuguese.

These languages apply to both the User Interface and the book summaries. And after testing for each language, I found that they have a large catalog of summaries in Spanish, German, French, and Italian. However, their Portuguese catalog is much more limited — and I couldn’t find the summary of Principles in Portuguese.

I think this is a great feature if you’re learning — or thinking about learning — any of these languages, and it’s obviously useful if you’re a native speaker too.

1.7 Desktop Version

Headway is definitely a mobile-first app. As their desktop site is quite basic — it lacks features such as downloads, highlights, and “remember and repetition”, and you can’t even switch to dark mode! (if you’re as light-sensitive as I am, good luck reading at night 🫠 ).

Here’s how Headway’s summary of Principles looks on the desktop site…

Personally, I typically read book summaries on my phone, so this is not an issue for me. But if you plan to read frequently on your laptop, you might wanna check out alternative book summary apps such as Shortform or Blinkist — they both have a fully functional desktop interface. In the section Research Day #5: Headway App Alternatives we will dive deep into these alternative apps!

I talked to the team at Headway and they agreed to give us a 60% discount by taking the 3-minute quiz and signing up with this link! (Or if you’d rather skip the quiz, you can claim the same discount here!)

2. Research Day #2: Beyond Book Summaries

Beyond book summaries, the Headway App offers four services:

• Collections

• Growth Plans

• Listen (Audiocasts & Instrumental Music)

• Shorts

2.1 Collections

A Collection is a curated list of book summaries that help you improve a specific skill or learn about a particular topic, typically containing 8-10 summaries.

2.2 Growth Plans

📱 Only available on mobile

These are like Collections on steroids. Similar to a Collection, a Growth Plan gives you a curated list of 8-10 summaries to improve a specific skill. But Growth Plans go beyond that — by also offering interactive plans to go through these summaries.

An interactive plan expands on the summaries by offering quizzes, and recaps (which contains highlights and action points)…

2.3 Listen

📱 Only available on mobile

The Listen feature is basically a big audio playlist with two types of audio: (1) Audiocasts, and (2) Instrumental Music.

1. Audiocasts → An Audiocast is similar to the audio version of a book summary, but the Audiocast seems to be longer and it sounds a bit more conversational-style. Below you can see the Audiocast of the book Principles…

   

   And here’s how it sounds…

2. Instrumental Music → These audios are designed to help you relax, sleep, or focus. They play continuously — there’s no fixed duration — but you can set a specific duration using the “sleep timer” feature…

   

   For the example “Gentle Dreamscape”, this is how it sounds:

(Update — 29th March 2026: Headway changed the location of Audiocasts & Instrumental Music — they are now in the Home tab)

2.4 Shorts

📱 Only available on mobile

This is the newest feature from Headway. Shorts are super fun introductions to the book summaries. They have text shorts and infographic shorts (similar to Instagram posts), and video shorts (similar to Instagram reels). And you swipe vertically to move through them.

• Each Text Short is displayed in a carousel-style format, so you swipe horizontally to move through any specific text short…

  

  

• Infographic Shorts are also displayed in a carousel-style format…

  

• In the case of Video Shorts, I noticed three different styles: (1) Visual Explanations, (2) Stories (these have a Pixar vibe), and (3) Podcast style. It’s also cool that they are interactive. Here’s an example for the Visual Explanation style…

  (Tip → Expand the video to watch at full size!)

I think the shorts feature is great for when you have some (very short) time to kill, or as a fun way to discover new book summaries (each short links to related summaries at the end).

Beyond the book summaries, it is my favorite feature! And now, instead of swiping IG reels, I swipe these Headway Shorts… aaand IG reels 😂 (but less now!)

3. Research Day #3: User Interface

3.1 Mobile Interface

The Headway App has a sleek design (especially on dark mode, but honestly… What doesn’t look better on dark mode? 😂 ), and it’s super easy to navigate!

3.2 Desktop Interface

The design is nice, but it’s not as feature-rich as the mobile app. You can’t download summaries or highlight text, and you won’t find features like Growth Plans, Listen, or Shorts (they’re mobile-only). But maybe my biggest disappointment: there’s no dark mode 💔

4. Research Day #4: Price

It was annoying that I had to fill out a quiz and enter my email in order to see their pricing. But I did just that and finally got to the meat.

How Much Does The Headway App Cost?

• Monthly Subscription for $38.86 (or €32.84) per month.

• Quarterly Subscription for $70.97 (or €59.97) per quarter — equivalent to $23.66 (or €19.99) per month.

• Yearly Subscription for $153.57 (or €129.77) per year — equivalent to $12.80 (or €10.81) per month.

None of the subscription plans offer a free trial. But they are always running time-limited discounts on their website.

I talked to the team at Headway and they agreed to give us a 60% discount by taking the 3-minute quiz and signing up with this link! (Or if you’d rather skip the quiz, you can claim the same discount here!)

5. Research Day #5: Best Headway App Alternatives

I think a Headway review wouldn’t be complete if I just talked about Headway. Because to figure out if the Headway App is worth it or not, we need to also look at the other top alternatives in the book summary space: Shortform and Blinkist.

5.1 Shortform

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I’ve been a Shortform subscriber since 2022. And I really love the app!

Here’s my research on Shortform…

By the way, I talked to the team at Shortform and they agreed to give us a 20% discount on the Annual Subscription by signing up with this link! (You also get a 5-day free trial)

5.1.1 Shortform — Book Summaries

I think what makes Shortform truly special is their summaries…

• They offer the most in-depth summaries. And for the classics or bestsellers (such as Principles), they even have a chapter-by-chapter breakdown — where they summarize each chapter of the book. So I think Shortform’s content feels more like study guides than traditional book summaries — which is fantastic to grasp a deeper understanding of the ideas in the books! And if you want to read something quick, they also have a “1-Page Summary” version.

• They add clarifications, counterpoints, or just helpful notes to the summary. I think this is a great addition because it expands our perspective, and also corrects for potential biases of the book authors. It’s aligned with one of my all-time favorite quotes: “One should not read like a dog obeying its master, but like an eagle hunting its prey.” - Dee Hock (founder of Visa)

  

  This is how the summary looks on desktop…

  

• They have exercises across the summary (very helpful to reflect on how to apply the ideas into your own life context).

• They let you download any summary as a PDF (so you can read without internet).

• You can easily switch between dark mode and light mode, and also adjust the text format of any summary.

  

• You can make highlights and write notes on your highlights. And you can also make bookmarks — so you always know where you left off in your reading.

  

• Shortform’s summaries are also available in Spanish, German, and Portuguese…

  

Shortform also offers audio versions for all their book summaries…

Here’s a sample from their book summary of Principles (recorded at 1x speed):

(By the way, you can listen to Shortform’s summaries even when the screen is off!)

Personally, I liked the audio quality!

5.1.2 Shortform — Beyond Book Summaries

Shortform offers a wide variety of services beyond their book summaries.

Let’s explore each of them:

• Collections → Similar to Headway, Shortform offers Collections — curated lists of book summaries that help you improve at a particular skill, or make you more knowledgable on a topic.

  

  

• Master Guides → These are compilations of ideas from different books to give you a comprehensive guide (with differing viewpoints) on a single subject for a deeper understanding.

  

  

• Articles → Shortform creates Articles on the latest news and trends. I really like these because each article is based off many sources (like a research paper), which makes it way less biased than an article from any news outlet.

  

  

• Podcast Summaries → They offer summaries on episodes of many different Podcasts.

  

  

• Shortform AI (desktop-only feature) → It’s a browser extension that summarizes everything on the internet, from articles and emails to YouTube videos, at a click of a button. And you can even install it for free! But if you want the premium version (for unlimited summaries) you would need a Shortform subscription.

  

5.1.3 Shortform — User Interface

• Mobile Interface

  Shortform’s mobile app is beautiful and easy to use!

  

• Desktop Interface

  Shortform offers a great desktop interface. It’s as feature-rich as their mobile app, and it’s very easy to navigate!

  

5.1.4 Shortform — Price

It was nice that they have a direct price page on their website.

Shortform offers two Subscription Plans:

• The Monthly Subscription goes for $24 per month.

• The Yearly Subscription costs $197 per year (equivalent to $16.42 per month).

Both of these plans offer a 5-day free trial!

I talked to the team at Shortform and they agreed to give us a 20% discount on the Annual Subscription by signing up with this link!

5.2 Blinkist

Blinkist is another great alternative! Sadly they don’t have a free trial (or even a monthly subscription), so I had to pay right away for a yearly plan to get access.

Here’s my research on Blinkist…

5.2.1 Blinkist — Book Summaries

• Blinkist summaries, which they call “blinks”, are structured in Chapters. The first chapter is always an introduction, the following chapters are what they call “key ideas”, and the last chapter is a “Final Summary”. In their summary of Principles, they have 8 chapters and 6 “key ideas”…

  

  

• Blinkist lets you download their summaries inside the app.

• You can make highlights, although it’s not possible to write notes or make bookmarks :(

  

  (Note: There’s a glitch with the highlighting feature… When the highlight is saved, it misses the first letter. That makes it hard to read. This glitch was also present when I tried the app in previous years, so I don’t think they are solving it any time soon.)

• You can also change the language to German, Spanish, and Portuguese… (although I couldn’t find the summary of Principles in Portuguese).

  

Blinkist also has audio versions for all their book summaries, and honestly they sound really good!

Here’s a sample from their book summary of Principles (recorded at 1x speed):

(By the way, you can listen to Blinkist’s summaries even when the screen is off!)

Personally, I think Blinkist’s audio sounds the most natural and I liked it more than the audio versions of Shortform and Headway (at least for the summary of Principles).

5.2.2 Blinkist — Beyond Book Summaries

Just like Shortform and Headway, Blinkist offers much more than just book summaries. They have many extra services, and all of them are available on both the mobile app and the desktop version (except their Live Events — which is only offered in desktop).

Let’s explore each of these services…

• Collections → Similar to Shortform and Headway, Blinkist also offers curated lists of book summaries.

  

  

• Guides → Blinkist offers Guides to help you improve at a particular skill. It’s all audio-based and honestly… it’s really cool!

  

  

• Shortcasts → Playing with the word Podcasts, Blinkist created Shortcasts — podcast shows exclusive to Blinkist. There are 16 different shortcasts, each focused on delivering key ideas within a specific area (which is also why episodes are super short — typically around 10–15 minutes).

  

  

• Blinkist AI (mobile-only feature) → You can share any article or video with this AI tool, and it will generate a summary using AI! These summaries are then saved within the Blinkist app.

  

• Shorts (mobile-only feature) → Like Headway, Blinkist also has Shorts. I noticed 3 types of shorts:

  1. Text shorts → These are very similar to Headway’s text shorts, and they link to a book summary at the end.

     

     

  2. Audio shorts → These are audio clips (taken from Blinkist’s Shortcasts) with a synced transcription on-screen. And they link to the respective Shortcast source at the end. (Tip → Expand the video to watch at full size!)

  3. Video shorts → It features a person explaining you an insight from a book summary or an external article. At the end of the short, you can check out the respective book summary or article. (Tip → Expand the video to watch at full size!)

     The feature is nice, but I found a major limitation: You only get five shorts per day. After you watch all five, the feed stops and you see this:

     

     This is different from Headway’s Shorts, which doesn’t cap how many you can watch in a day.

• Live Events (desktop-only feature) → This is Blinkist’s newest feature, and I think it’s a useful add-on to complement the learning experience.

  

  But I see two big issues with this feature:

  1. There is not a wide offer of events. I literally just saw 5 events available for this whole month! — out of which I’m only mildly interested in two of them.

  2. It’s only offered in their “Platinum” plan (costs €239.99 or $285.85), which is 70% more expensive than the “Pro” plan (which costs €139.98 or $166.72). The only special extra that the Platinum gives you are these live events (and infographics — which are given as “pre-session reading” for the live event). Honestly, I’d much rather pick a different subscription plan and save me the cost, and if I’m interested in an educational streaming platform I would just signed up to Skillshare or MasterClass — their catalogue of classes is much wider, and the instructors are top-notch… For instance, Aaron Sorkin teaches Screenwriting and Story-telling on MasterClass — I watched it and it’s sooo good!

5.2.3 Blinkist — User Interface

• Mobile Interface

  Blinkist has a stunning mobile app and it’s quite easy to use!

  

• Desktop Interface

  Blinkist’s desktop interface is great, and it’s almost as feature-rich as the mobile app (it’s just missing Blinkist AI and Shorts).

  

5.2.4 Blinkist — Price

Similar to Headway, you first have to fill out a questionnaire and enter your email in order to see their pricing. Again… pretty annoying!

So I did just that and got to their pricing…

Blinkist offers three Subscription Plans:

• The Premium Subscription goes for $95.27 (or €79.99) per year — equivalent to $7.94 (or €6.67). It doesn’t include Blinkist AI or live events.

• The Pro Subscription costs $166.72 (or €139.98) per year — equivalent to $13.89 (or €11.67) per month. It includes Blinkist AI but not live events.

• The Platinum Subscription goes for $285.84 (or €239.99) per year — equivalent to $23.82 (or €20) per month. It includes Blinkist AI and live events (with access to infographics).

They also gave me a 20% discount on my first payment, if I paid in less than 20 mins.

They used to offer a 7-day free trial, but as of March 2026 they have removed it :(

The Blinkist Platinum paywall only shows up after you become a Premium or Pro subscriber…

Conclusion: Is The Headway App Worth it in 2026?

Based on my 5-day research, I can say that the Headway App is great for learning key ideas from popular non-fiction books.

But… Is it really worth it when we have other alternatives such as Shortform or Blinkist?

Personally, Shortform is still my favorite book summary app. Mainly because their summaries are more like study guides: they are the most in-depth, they have chapter-by-chapter breakdowns, helpful notes, exercises, and it also comes with a note-taking feature (which is great for personal reflection). All of this is incredibly helpful for gaining a deeper understanding of the books’ ideas. Plus, authors like Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck), James Clear (Atomic Habits), and Sahil Bloom (The 5 Types of Wealth) have all recommended Shortform.

Having said that, I also think Headway can be a valuable complement to the learning experience.

In my own “learning funnel” I’ve started to use Headway’s Shorts as a fun way to micro-learn (which is also nice for reducing Social Media time) and discover new books. I’m also using Headway’s book summaries to get a quick overview of a book’s ideas. Then, if I find a book interesting, I move to the Shortform study guide for a deeper analysis of the ideas and how to put them into practice. And finally, if I’m still hooked, I buy the book!

(Even after reading the book, I occasionally revisit the Shortform study guide to refresh the main ideas and takeaways).

I picked Headway over Blinkist because their Shorts are unlimited (Blinkist caps you at 5 per day) and I found them much more interesting/fun. Plus, I really enjoy Headway’s user interface — I think it has the sleekest design and it just feels fun to use it.

Here’s a complete list of all the features so you can decide which is the best app for you!

(Note: The green color represents the features of the book summaries, whereas the yellow represents the services beyond the book summaries…)

My Final Verdict…

As I mentioned earlier, Shortform is still my favorite book summary app in 2026. But I think that pairing it with Headway makes it even more powerful: Headway for micro-learning, discovery, and a quick introduction to a book’s ideas. And then Shortform for studying, practicing, and mastering the book’s ideas!

I talked to the team at Shortform and they agreed to give us a 20% discount on the Annual Subscription by signing up with this link! (You also get a 5-day free trial)

I also talked to the team at Headway and they agreed to give us a 60% discount by taking the 3-minute quiz and signing up with this link! (Or if you’d rather skip the quiz, you can claim the same discount here!)

Thank you for reading this far ❤️

If you would like to get more frequent content from me, I recommend subscribing to my newsletter The Little Almanack → Most Fridays, I send out an email featuring an insightful passage from a book I’m reading or a thought-provoking snippet from an interview or podcast I’m listening to. Plus, I always include a hand-drawn visual to make it more memorable, along with some personal reflections.

Subscribe now

👋 Hey friend,

Today’s letter is a bit different.

It’s an aggregation of some ideas (non-obvious and not mainstream) on the topic of intelligence, in the words of influential founders/thinkers.

My inspiration for making this letter? I think there’s a common (yet mistaken) belief that intelligence can be measured in academic performance or “IQ tests”, but in this letter you’ll discover that this couldn’t be further from the truth. And, while intelligence matters, other traits matter even more.

If you’re in a hurry, here’s the quick version:

• IQ tests don’t tell you anything about intelligence. It only works at low levels because any test would work there (you don’t need an IQ test for that).

• Intelligence is multi-dimensional. There are a thousand ways to be smart!

• Intelligence matters, but independent thinking, agency, and determination matters even more.

Now let’s get into the letter! I divided it into three parts:

(1) The IQ Test

(2) Intelligence in Real Life

(3) Intelligence for Entrepreneurship.

📊 The IQ Test

If you think the IQ test tells you anything about intelligence, think again!

The IQ Test is BS…

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Writer, Co-founder of Universa Investments):

IQ doesn't measure “intelligence” because the test is made by idiots who don't know how intelligence works, & limit it to a narrow class of mental operations…
It works for low levels because ANY test would work there.

Source: Tweet by Nassim Taleb

As Taleb says, the IQ Test limits intelligence to a narrow class of mental operations, but there are a thousand ways to be smart!

🟠 Jeff Bezos (Founder of Amazon):

There are a thousand ways to be smart, by the way. And when I go around and I meet people I'm always looking for the way that they're smart. And that's one of the things that makes the world so interesting and fun is that it is not like IQ is a single dimension. There are people who are smart in such unique ways.

Source: Jeff Bezos - Amazon and Blue Origin | Lex Fridman Podcast #405

And when Taleb says “the test is made by idiots who don’t know how intelligence works”, he’s talking about the academic psychologists who made the test…

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

The “intelligence” in IQ is determined by academic psychologists (no geniuses)…

…

Psychometrics peddlers looking for suckers (military, large corporations) buying the “this is the best measure in psychology” argument when it is not even technically a measure — it explains at best between 2 and 13% of the performance in some tasks (those tasks that are similar to the test itself), minus the data massaging and statistical cherrypicking by psychologists; it doesn’t satisfy the monotonicity and transitivity required to have a measure (at best it is a concave measure). No measure that fails 80–95% of the time should be part of “science” (nor should psychology — owing to its sinister track record — be part of science (rather scientism), but that’s another discussion).

Source: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (Argument Closed)

There’s also a moral implication to these tests…

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

[The IQ test] is at the bottom an immoral measure that, while not working, can put people (and, worse, groups) in boxes for the rest of their lives.

Source: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (Argument Closed)

🧠 Intelligence in Real Life

In the book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb makes an excellent (and quite funny) comparison between two types of persons to illustrate how intelligence in real life actually looks like…

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

I found the perfect non-Brooklyn in someone I will call Dr. John. He is a former engineer currently working as an actuary for an insurance company. He is thin, wiry, and wears glasses and a dark suit. He lives in New Jersey not far from Fat Tony but certainly they rarely run into each other. Tony never takes the train, and, actually, never commutes (he drives a Cadillac, and sometimes his wife’s Italian convertible, and jokes that he is more visible than the rest of the car).

Dr. John is a master of the schedule; he is as predictable as a clock. He quietly and efficiently reads the newspaper on the train to Manhattan, then neatly folds it for the lunchtime continuation. While Tony makes restaurant owners rich (they beam when they see him coming and exchange noisy hugs with him), John meticulously packs his sandwich every morning, fruit salad in a plastic container. As for his clothing, he also wears a suit that looks like it came from a Web catalog, except that it is quite likely that it actually did. Dr. John is a painstaking, reasoned, and gentle fellow. He takes his work seriously, so seriously that, unlike Tony, you can see a line in the sand between his working time and his leisure activities. He has a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Since he knows both computers and statistics, he was hired by an insurance company to do computer simulations; he enjoys the business. Much of what he does consists of running computer programs for “risk management.”

I know that it is rare for Fat Tony and Dr. John to breathe the same air, let alone find themselves at the same bar, so consider this a pure thought exercise. I will ask each of them a question and compare their answers.

NNT (that is, me): Assume that a coin is fair, i.e., has an equal probability of coming up heads or tails when flipped. I flip it ninety-nine times and get heads each time. What are the odds of my getting tails on my next throw?

Dr. John: Trivial question. One half, of course, since you are assuming 50 percent odds for each and independence between draws.

NNT: What do you say, Tony?

Fat Tony: I’d say no more than 1 percent, of course.

NNT: Why so? I gave you the initial assumption of a fair coin, meaning that it was 50 percent either way.

Fat Tony: You are either full of crap or a pure sucker to buy that “50 pehcent” business. The coin gotta be loaded. It can’t be a fair game. (Translation: It is far more likely that your assumptions about the fairness are wrong than the coin delivering ninety-nine heads in ninety-nine throws.)

NNT: But Dr. John said 50 percent.

Fat Tony (whispering in my ear): I know these guys with the nerd examples from the bank days. They think way too slow. And they are too commoditized. You can take them for a ride.

Now, of the two of them, which would you favor for the position of mayor of New York City (or Ulan Bator, Mongolia)? Dr. John thinks entirely within the box, the box that was given to him; Fat Tony, almost entirely outside the box.

To set the terminology straight, what I call “a nerd” here doesn’t have to look sloppy, unaesthetic, and sallow, and wear glasses and a portable computer on his belt as if it were an ostensible weapon. A nerd is simply someone who thinks exceedingly inside the box.

Have you ever wondered why so many of these straight-A students end up going nowhere in life while someone who lagged behind is now getting the shekels, buying the diamonds, and getting his phone calls returned? Or even getting the Nobel Prize in a real discipline (say, medicine)? Some of this may have something to do with luck in outcomes, but there is this sterile and obscurantist quality that is often associated with classroom knowledge that may get in the way of understanding what’s going on in real life. In an IQ test, as well as in any academic setting (including sports), Dr. John would vastly outperform Fat Tony. But Fat Tony would outperform Dr. John in any other possible ecological, real-life situation. In fact, Tony, in spite of his lack of culture, has an enormous curiosity about the texture of reality, and his own erudition—to me, he is more scientific in the literal, though not in the social, sense than Dr. John.

Book: The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

And from Taleb’s Bed of Proscrustes:

“I suspect that IQ, SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent.”

“Never hire an A student unless it is to take exams.”

You might wonder now: what’s the source of thinking outside the box? And the answer is: independent thinking…

🟠 Tim Urban (Creator of the blog Wait but Why):

People believe thinking outside the box takes intelligence and creativity, but it’s mostly about independence. When you simply ignore the box and build your reasoning from scratch, whether you’re brilliant or not, you end up with a unique conclusion—one that may or may not fall within the box. When you’re in a foreign country and you decide to ditch the guidebook and start wandering aimlessly and talking to people, unique things always end up happening.

When people hear about those things, they think of you as a pro traveler and a bold adventurer—when all you really did is ditch the guidebook. Likewise, when an artist or scientist or businessperson “chef” reasons independently instead of by analogy, and their puzzling happens to both A) turn out well and B) end up outside the box, people call it innovation and marvel at the chef’s ingenuity. When it turns out really well, all the “cooks” do what they do best—copy—and now it’s called a revolution.

Simply by refraining from reasoning by analogy, the chef opens up the possibility of making a huge splash with every project. When Steve Jobs and Apple turned their attention to phones, they didn’t start by saying, “Okay well people seem to like this kind of keyboard more than that kind, and everyone seems unhappy with the difficulty of hitting the numbers on their keyboards—so let’s get creative and make the best phone keyboard yet!” They simply asked, “What should a mobile device be?” and in their from-scratch reasoning, a physical keyboard didn’t end up as part of the plan at all. It didn’t take genius to come up with the design of the iPhone—it’s actually pretty logical—it just took the ability to not copy.

Book: The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait But Why, by Tim Urban.

Let’s recap with a list of 6 points for why IQ tests are useless in real life…

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Real Life: In academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world there is.

1) When someone asks you a question in the real world, you focus first on “why is he/she asking me that?”, which shifts you to the environment (see Fat Tony vs Dr John in The Black Swan) and detracts you from the problem at hand. Philosophers have known about that problem forever. Only suckers don’t have that instinct. Further, take the sequence {1,2,3,4,x}. What should x be? Only someone who is clueless about induction would answer 5 as if it were the only answer (see Goodman’s problem in a philosophy textbook or ask your closest Fat Tony) [Note: We can also apply here Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem, which states that any of an infinite number of functions is compatible with any finite sequence. Source: Paul Bogossian]. Not only clueless, but obedient enough to want to think in a certain way.

2) Real life never never offers crisp questions with crisp answers (most questions don’t have answers; perhaps the worst problem with IQ is that it seem to select for people who don’t like to say “there is no answer, don’t waste time, find something else”.)

3) It takes a certain type of person to waste intelligent concentration on classroom/academic problems. These are lifeless bureaucrats who can muster sterile motivation. Some people can only focus on problems that are real, not fictional textbook ones (see the note below where I explain that I can only concentrate with real not fictional problems).

4) IQ doesn’t detect convexity of mistakes (by an argument similar to bias-variance you need to make a lot of small inconsequential mistake in order to avoid a large consequential one. See Antifragile and how any measure of “intelligence” w/o convexity is sterile edge.org/conversation/n…). To do well you must survive; survival requires some mental biases directing to some errors.

5) Fooled by Randomness: seeing shallow patterns in not a virtue — it leads to naive interventionism. Some psychologist wrote back to me: “IQ selects for pattern recognition, essential for functioning in modern society”. No. Not seeing patterns except when they are significant is a virtue in real life.

6) To do well in life you need depth and ability to select your own problems and to think independently. And one has to be a lunatic (or a psychologist) to believe that a standardized test will reveal independent thinking.

Source: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (Argument Closed)

🚀 Intelligence for Entrepreneurship

Beyond independent thinking… agency and determination are also traits that beat intelligence…

🟠 Andrej Karpathy (Co-founder of OpenAI):

Agency > Intelligence

I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc.

Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce.

• Are you hiring for agency?

• Are we educating for agency?

• Are you acting as if you had 10X agency?

Grok explanation is ~close:

“Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual’s capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path.

People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They’re the type to say, “I’ll figure it out,” and then actually do it. On the flip side, someone low in agency might feel more like a passenger in their own life, waiting for external forces—like luck, other people, or circumstances—to dictate what happens next.

It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”

Source: Tweet by Andrej Karpathy

🟠 Paul Graham (founder of YC):

It turns out is not that important to be smart. Is much much more important to be determined.

If you imagine this hypothetical person who’s like a hundred out of a hundred for smart, and a hundred out of a hundred for determination. And then you start taking away determination, it doesn’t take very long before you have this sort of ineffectual but brilliant person.

Whereas if you take someone who’s like super, super determined, and you start taking away smartness bit by bit, eventually you get to some guy who owns a lot of taxi medallions. But he’s still rich, right? Or like a trash hauling business or something like that.

[So] you can take away a lot of smart.

Source Video

🟠 Estée Lauder:

What makes a successful businesswoman? Is it talent? Well, perhaps, although l’ve known many enormously successful people who were not gifted in any outstanding way, not blessed with particular talent. Is it, then, intelligence? Certainly, intelligence helps, but it’s not necessarily education or the kind of intellectual reasoning needed to graduate from the Wharton School of Business that are essential. How many of your grandfathers came here from one or another “old country” and made a mark in America without the language, money, or contacts? What, then, is the mystical ingredient?

It’s persistence. It’s that certain little spirit that compels you to stick it out just when you’re at your most tired. It’s that quality that forces you to persevere, find the route around the stone wall. It’s the immovable stubbornness that will not allow you to cave in when everyone says give up.

Book - Estée: A Success Story, by Estée Lauder.

🟠 Steve Jobs:

I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.

Source Video

🟠Felix Dennis:

I believe that almost anyone of reasonable intelligence can become rich, given sufficient motivation and application.

Book - How to Get Rich, by Felix Dennis.

🟠 Marc Randolph (Co-founder of Netflix):

Everyone thinks success comes from being smart, but I’m living proof it doesn’t. What matters is being pathologically optimistic and having the guts to test ideas instead of just planning them in your head.

Source: Tweet by Marc Randolph

As Andrej Karpathy pointed out, there’s a “pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence.” And, beyond the fact that Agency is much more important, having this mindset of venerating intelligence is actually dangerous… because if you care about “looking smart” and being smarter than others, you’re not gonna get very far…

🟠 Naval Ravikant (Co-founder of AngelList):

The smartest people aren’t interested in appearing smart and don’t care what you think.

Source: Tweet by Naval Ravikant

🟠 Syed Balkhi:

Common trait I’ve noticed among my smart friends:

They’re not afraid of looking dumb over and over and over again.

Source: Tweet by Syed Balkhi

Doers Notebook

All the nuggets I’ve picked for the past 5 years are saved and classified in a searchable database, which (as of February 2026) contains over 5,000 timeless ideas (sourced directly from the most influential doers and entrepreneurs — captured on books, interviews/podcasts, tweets, and articles).

I call this database Doers Notebook.

🤔 Why did I build this?

Well, as the Latin motto goes, “A chief part of learning is simply knowing where you can find a thing.” And since it’s all 🔎 searchable, we only need to type a keyword to immediately get a list of insights related to it!

For instance, if I’m unsure about how to get more sales in my business, I can simply type the word “sales” and immediately get 126 insights relevant to sales! In this case from Jim Edwards, Peter Thiel, Naval Ravikant, Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Balaji Srinivasan, Nassim Taleb, and many other remarkable individuals.

It’s like having a second brain 🧠 from which we can pull wisdom on demand, to help us significantly decrease the error rate in our judgment and also get new perspectives on how to solve problems.

In an age of infinite leverage [code and media], judgment is the most important skill.

- Naval Ravikant

A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

- Alan Kay

Plus, I built a feed (similar to X / Twitter) where you can read these nuggets whenever you have some time to kill (instead of scrolling Social Media).

If you want to see Doers Notebook in action, I made a screen record!

You can also go directly to DoersNotebook.com

✍️ New Essay

I recently wrote an essay (with my friend Brian David Crane) exploring the topic of Perfection vs. Excellence.

It’s grounded in the ideas of Brian Chesky (co-founder of Airbnb), Matthew McConaughey, Brad Jacobs, John D. Rockefeller, and Isadore Sharp (founder of Four Seasons).

👉 If you are curious, click here to read the full piece (for free)

💥 Stuff I Loved

👉 Highlight resurfaced using Readwise

I hope you enjoyed today’s letter!

Talk you soon,

Your nuggets friend Julio :)

This is the decision I faced back in 2022, when I wanted to start learning from the ideas of the best non-fiction books: “Should I go with Shortform, Headway or Blinkist?”

And, after days of research and testing, I ended up going with Shortform—which I’m still using to this date! The main reason I went with Shortform back in 2022 is that they offered more in-depth summaries.

Buuut. It’s now 2026. So, I think it is time for me to make a new research and find out which is the best book summary app overall this year. And this time I’m gonna document all my research here! So if you are in a similar situation like me, I guarantee this will save you a ton of research time.

Before the Research…

In order to make an accurate and complete comparison, I’ve signed up to Headway and Blinkist (I’m already a subscriber of Shortform) to experience everything for myself, rather than just comparing their marketing brochures.

Sadly, neither Blinkist nor Headway offer free trials on any of their subscription plans, so I had to pay right away to get access. Blinkist used to offer a free trial, but as of February 2026 they have removed it :(

Below is my full 5-day research — organized by day:

1. Research Day #1: Book Summaries

2. Research Day #2: Beyond Book Summaries

3. Research Day #3: User Interface

4. Research Day #4: Audio Version

5. Research Day #5: Price

And at the end, I share my conclusion on which is the best book summary app in 2026!

Research Day #1: Book Summaries

After comparing a few summaries, it’s clear to me that the information in all these apps is extremely high-quality, and they all have a significant breadth of content (with 1,000+ book summaries).

So, my research here won’t be on these aspects, but rather on the depth and structure of the summaries (which I found to be the key differentiation between these apps).

To illustrate my research, I will take the bestselling book (and one of my all-time favorite books) Antifragile, written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. And I will compare the summaries of this book.

Shortform Summary

Shortform summaries have a “1-Page Summary”—which is sort of like a quick overview of the whole book. And for the classics and bestsellers (such as Antifragile) they have a chapter-by-chapter breakdown—where they summarize each chapter of the book. But even the “1-Page Summary” is pretty deep—the audio typically ranges from 25 to 50 minutes. So I think Shortform’s content feels more like study guides than traditional book summaries—which is fantastic for gaining a deeper understanding of the book’s ideas!

They also frequently add clarifications and counterpoints to the summary…

And they always have exercises across the summary…

Here’s how Shortform’s summary of Antifragile appears on the mobile app…

You can also download the summary as a PDF (so you can read without internet). Plus, Shortform keeps all your downloads organized in one place—in the section “Download History.”

Another useful feature is that you can make highlights on the summaries (and even write notes on your highlights), and these are automatically tagged (to the book source) and saved…

And you can make bookmarks too! So you always know where you left off in your reading…

For any book summary, you can also start discussions and connect with other readers…

Finally, if you speak Spanish, German, or Portuguese (or want to learn any of these languages), you can switch from English to any of them…

Headway Summary

In the case of Headway, a summary is a list of “key points”, which are sort of the key ideas of the book.

And they also have a list of “insights”, which are basically one-liners that kind of summarizes the key points themselves (exactly… the summary of the summary!).

So, for the book Antifragile, they have a list of 7 key points (with a conclusion at the end) and 8 insights.

Their app allows you to download any book summary so you can read offline (but the downloads stay within the app, so it’s different from Shortform’s feature to download as PDFs).

Similar to Shortform, you can also make highlights! And these are tagged and saved in your library. Although there’s no possibility to write notes or make bookmarks :(

You can also switch from English to Spanish, German, Portuguese, French, or Italian. Although I couldn’t find the summary of Antifragile in neither French nor Italian…

Headway is definitely a mobile-first app. As their desktop site is quite basic—it lacks features such as downloads and highlights, and you can’t even switch to dark mode! (if you’re as light-sensitive as I am, good luck reading at night 🫠 ).

Here’s how Headway’s summary of Antifragile looks on the desktop site…

Blinkist Summary

Blinkist summaries, which they call “blinks”, are structured in Chapters. The first chapter is always an introduction, the following chapters are what they call “key ideas”, and the last chapter is a “Final Summary”.

Here’s how it looks on the mobile app…

Similar to Headway, Blinkist also lets you download (in-app only) any book summary. And like Shortform, they have a section where you can find all of your downloads.

You can also create highlights on Blinkist. But (unlike Shortform) you can’t write notes or make bookmarks…

If you look at my list of highlights, you’ll notice there’s an important glitch in their highlighting feature. When you make a highlight, it is saved but it misses the first letter of the highlight. That makes it hard to read. And by the way, this glitch was also present when I tried the app in previous years, so I don’t think they are solving it any time soon.

Finally, Blinkist is also available in Spanish, German, and Portuguese. Although I couldn’t find the summary of Antifragile in Portuguese…

🥁 And the Winner for the “Book Summaries” Category is…

Shortform is the clear winner for book summaries, since they go way beyond just offering a list of overall ideas (as Headway and Blinkist do).

Shortform has (1) Summary per Chapters, (2) Clarifications and Counterpoints, and (3) Exercises.

• (1) Their Summary per Chapter is great because it preserves the original structure of the book, which makes the summary closer to the actual book experience. And this also makes Shortform summaries much richer than the others—which means that it will give you a deeper understanding of the ideas of the book.

• (2) Their Clarifications and Counterpoints are a useful addition because authors might be biased or ignore the nuances of a specific issue (or simply make mistakes). It fosters a scientific approach on the summaries (the Scientific Method is based on a culture of criticism and testability) and it follows perfectly on one of my all-time favorite quotes: “One should not read like a dog obeying its master, but like an eagle hunting its prey.” - Dee Hock (founder of Visa)

• (3) Their Exercises across the summary are also a great way to reflect on these ideas and see how they can apply to your own life context.

All three apps let you download their summaries (Shortform in PDF, while Headway and Blinkist in the app itself). Personally, I appreciate this feature because I frequently lose internet connection on my routinely commutes, and I can’t think of something worse than staring at the phone for minutes while the app is trying to load the content 😂.

Finally, all three apps allow you to make highlights on the book summaries—although Blinkist’s highlighting feature doesn’t work well. And Shortform goes beyond that... by also offering the capability to write notes on your highlights, and even make bookmarks (so you always know where you left off).

I’ve actually talked to the team at Shortform and they agreed to give us a 20% discount on the Annual Subscription by signing up with this link! (You also get a 5-day free trial).

Research Day #2: Beyond Book Summaries

Shortform, Headway and Blinkist all offer more than just book summaries.

Let’s explore the additional services they provide and see how they compare to each other.

Shortform (Beyond Book Summaries)

• Collections → A Collection is a curated list of book summaries that help you improve at a particular skill, or make you more knowledgable on a topic.

• Master Guides → These are compilations of ideas from several books to give a comprehensive guide (with differing viewpoints) on a single subject for a deeper understanding.

• Articles → Articles on the latest trends and news, which you can also filter by topic.

• Podcasts → Here you can find a list of Podcasts, and for each Podcast they have summaries of the episodes. This is a recent feature and it’s still under development. In the pictures below I selected Acquired—one of my all-time favorite podcasts!

• Shortform AI (desktop-only feature) → It’s a browser extension that summarizes everything on the internet, from articles and emails to YouTube videos, at a click of a button.

Headway (Beyond Book Summaries)

• Collections → Similar to Shortform, Headway also offers curated lists of book summaries, either to improve a specific skill or to get better at a particular area.

  

  

• Growth Plans (mobile-only feature) → These are like Collections on steroids. Similar to a Collection, a Growth Plan gives you a curated list of summaries to improve at a specific area. But Growth Plans go beyond that—by also offering interactive plans to go through these summaries.

  

  An interactive plan expands on the summaries by offering quizzes, recaps (which contains highlights and action points), and “quick facts”. Here’s how it looks…

  

  

• Shorts (mobile-only feature) → These are super fun introductions to the book summaries (featuring insights, interesting facts, and stories). They have text shorts and infographic shorts (similar to Instagram posts), and video shorts (similar to Instagram reels). And you swipe vertically to move through them.

  • Text Shorts → These typically feature an interesting fact or an insight from a book summary. And you can check out the book summary source at the end.

    

  • Infographic Shorts…

    

    

  • Video Shorts → I noticed three different styles: (1) Visual Explanations, (2) Stories (these have a Pixar vibe), and (3) Podcast style. It’s also cool that they are interactive. Here’s an example for the Visual Explanation style…

    (Tip → Expand the video to watch at full size!)

  I think the shorts feature is great for when you have some (very short) time to kill, or as a fun way to discover new book summaries (each short links to related summaries at the end).

  Beyond the book summaries, it is my favorite feature! And now, instead of swiping IG reels, I swipe these Headway Shorts… aaand IG reels 😂 (but less now!)

Blinkist (Beyond Book Summaries)

• Collections → Similar to Shortform and Headway, Blinkist also offers curated lists of book summaries.

  

  

• Guides → These are like mini-courses to help you improve at a particular skill or learn about a topic. It’s all audio-based and honestly… it’s really cool!

  

  

  The audio style is the same as their book summaries (we’ll explore this in Research Day #4: Audio Version).

• Shortcasts → Playing with the word Podcasts, Blinkist created Shortcasts—podcast shows exclusive to Blinkist. There are 16 different shortcasts, each focused on delivering key ideas within a specific area (which is also why episodes are super short—typically around 10–15 minutes).

  

  

• Blinkist AI (mobile-only feature) → Similar to Shortform AI, Blinkist AI is a tool that lets you paste any web link and then generates a summary using AI. The difference with Shortform is that this is not a browser extension, but a tool within Blinkist (it used to be available in both desktop and mobile, but now I can only find it in the mobile app).

  

• Shorts (mobile-only feature) → Like Headway, Blinkist also has Shorts. I noticed 3 types of shorts:

  1. Text shorts → These are very similar to Headway’s text shorts, and they link to a book summary at the end.

  

  

  2. Audio shorts → These are short audio clips (taken from Blinkist’s Shortcasts) with a synced transcription on-screen. And they link to the respective Shortcast source at the end. (Tip → Expand the video to watch at full size!)

  3. Video shorts → It features a person explaining you an insight from a book summary or an external article. At the end of the short, you can check out the respective book summary or article. (Tip → Expand the video to watch at full size!)

  This feature is nice, but I found a major limitation: You only get five shorts per day. After you watch all five, the feed stops and you see this:

  

  This is different from Headway’s Shorts, which doesn’t cap how many you can watch in a day.

• Live Events (desktop-only feature) → I think live events are a great complement to the learning experience, but this feature is exclusive to their most expensive plan—the “Platinum” plan—which is a yearly subscription of €239.99 (or $285.85) per year. As extra features, the Platinum plan offers these live events and also access to infographics. The Platinum plan costs about 70% more than the Pro plan (€139.98 or $166.72), which includes everything except live events and infographics (we’ll explore the category of Price on the 5th day of Research!).

  

  Honestly, I don’t think these live events (and infographics) justify that 70% price spike, especially when I see that there are only 4 live events scheduled for February 2026 (out of which I’m only mildly interested in half of them) and 5 live events scheduled for March 2026 (here I’m mildly interested in 2 of them). Plus, there are much better alternatives such as Skillshare, MasterClass, Khan Academy, Coursera, and even YouTube Premium (you can learn from interesting lectures without annoying ads). These platforms offer a much wider selection and have more domain-knowledgeable teachers (e.g. Aaron Sorkin teaches Screenwriting and Story-telling on MasterClass—I watched it and it’s sooo good!).

• Infographics (desktop-only feature) → A Blinkist infographic is basically a one-page visual snapshot of a book’s key takeaways. As of February 2026, I counted 82 infographics in total.

  

  This is a cool feature, but I think it would be more useful to have some version of these infographics within their Shorts feature (like Headway does). As mentioned earlier, infographics are exclusive to the Platinum plan.

🥁 And the Winner for the Category “Beyond Book Summaries” is…

This is a hard category for picking a winner—since there are so many different features and their value also depends on what you are looking for…

But personally, I really like Shortform’s Master Guides and Articles, and I also love Headway’s Shorts (I prefer them over Blinkist’s Shorts because they’re unlimited, include infographics, and I just found them more interesting/fun in general).

In the case of audio-based features (such as Blinkist’s Guides), I personally wouldn’t use them—because when I want to listen to something I prefer to put on a podcast (my three favorites: Acquired, Founders, and Philosophize This!). Same with the AI tools from Shortform and Blinkist… I rather just use Chat-GPT!

As I said, this is a highly subjective category. So below you can see a summary table with all these features so you can easily compare and pick the winner for you…

In my case, I’d say Headway is the winner here because I really love their Shorts feature and it’s been super useful for “micro-learning” (while reducing Social Media time) and discovering new books!

I talked to the team at Headway and they agreed to give us a 60% discount by taking the 5-minute quiz and signing up with this link! (If you prefer skipping the quiz, you can go directly to this page and get the same 60% off).

Research Day #3: User Interface

Shortform (User Interface)

• Mobile Interface

  Shortform’s mobile app is beautiful and easy to navigate!

  

• Desktop Interface

  Shortform offers a great desktop interface—it’s easy to use and as feature-rich as their mobile app!

Headway (User Interface)

• Mobile Interface

  Headway’s mobile app has a sleek design (especially on dark mode, but honestly… What doesn’t look better on dark mode? 😂 ), and it’s super easy to navigate!

  

  Note: When I started this review, the “Explore” tab (in the navigation bar) was called “Search”, so if you see both… that’s why!

• Desktop Interface

  The design is nice, but it’s not as feature-rich as the mobile app. You can’t download summaries or highlight text, and you won’t find features like Growth Plans, Listen, or Shorts (they’re mobile-only). But maybe my biggest disappointment: there’s no dark mode 💔

  

Blinkist (User Interface)

• Mobile Interface

  Blinkist has a stunning mobile app and it’s quite easy to use!

  

• Desktop Interface

  Blinkist’s desktop interface is great, and it’s almost as feature-rich as the mobile app (it’s just missing Blinkist AI and Shorts).

  

🥁 And the Winner for the Best User Interface is…

I will give the same winner spot to both Shortform and Blinkist, since they both have a flawless User Interface for both desktop (with their website) and mobile (with their phone app).

But of course, if you are only gonna use the mobile app, then Headway is also right up there!

Research Day #4: Audio Version

Shortform, Headway, and Blinkist all offer audio versions of their book summaries (available on mobile and desktop).

But… Which sounds the best?

In this area of research, you will also be the judge! Because I’ve recorded an audio sample of the summary of Antifragile (all samples were recorded at 1x speed).

Shortform Audio

Headway Audio

Blinkist Audio

And if you were wondering… You can listen to the book summaries even when the phone screen is off! (on all three apps).

🥁 And the Winner for the best Audio Version is…

I don’t know about you, but my favorite audio was from Blinkist. It just sounds the most natural and I liked the narrator style. Shortform’s audio was also pretty good. But in the case of Headway, I didn’t like the audio (I’ll say though that I tested other Headway summaries and it sounded much better).

As I mentioned earlier, I personally don’t really care about the audio… because when I want to listen to something I’d rather put on a podcast (typically an episode of Acquired, Founders, or Philosophize This!).

Research Day #5: Price

Shortform Pricing

It was very straightforward to find the pricing. They have a direct section on their website.

How much does Shortform cost?

• Monthly Subscription for $24 per month.

• Yearly Subscription for $197 per year (equivalent to $16.42 per month).

Both subscription plans offer a 5-day free trial.

Headway Pricing

It was annoying that I had to first fill out a quiz and enter my email in order to see their pricing. But I did just that and finally got to the meat.

How much does Headway cost?

• Monthly Subscription for $38.86 (or €32.84) per month.

• Quarterly Subscription for $70.97 (or €59.97) per quarter—equivalent to $23.66 (or €19.99) per month.

• Yearly Subscription for $153.57 (or €129.77) per year—equivalent to $12.80 (or €10.81) per month.

None of the subscription plans offer a free trial. But they are always running time-limited discounts on their website.

Blinkist Pricing

The experience here was the same as with Headway: if you want to know the cost, you first have to fill out a 5 - 10 min questionnaire and enter your email.

So, how much does Blinkist cost?

• The Premium Subscription goes for $95.27 (or €79.99) per year—equivalent to $7.94 (or €6.67). It doesn’t include Blinkist AI, live events, or infographics.

• The Pro Subscription goes for $166.72 (or €139.98) per year—equivalent to $13.89 (or €11.67) per month. It includes Blinkist AI (but not live events or infographics).

• The Platinum Subscription goes for $285.84 (or €239.99) per year—equivalent to $23.82 (or €20) per month. It includes Blinkist AI, live events, and infographics.

It’s nice that they give you a 20% discount (for any plan) on your first payment—if you pay in less than 20 minutes. But it does feel a bit of a gamble since there’s no free trial and the lowest entry price (discount included) is $75.39 (or €63.99).

The Blinkist Platinum paywall only shows up after you become a Premium or Pro subscriber…

🥁 And the Winner for the Price Category is…

In this comparison, Blinkist offers the cheapest yearly subscription, while Shortform offers the cheapest monthly subscription.

And in terms of minimizing risk, Shortform is the best by offering a 5-day free trial. Next I’d put Headway, since the lowest entry price (discount included) is $15.67 (or €13.30). And finally Blinkist, where the lowest entry price (discount included) is $75.39 (or €69.99).

Still, the real question is: which app gives you the most value for what you pay? In other words, which is the app with the highest Value Proposition / Cost Ratio?

And that’s what I share in my final conclusion below…

Conclusion: Who is The Best in 2026?

Personally, Shortform is still my favorite book summary app. Mainly because their summaries feel more like study guides: they are (by far) the most in-depth, they have chapter-by-chapter breakdowns, helpful notes (with clarifications and counterpoints), exercises, and the note-taking feature is great for personal reflection. All of this is incredibly helpful for gaining a deeper understanding of the books’ ideas. Plus, authors like Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck), James Clear (Atomic Habits), and Sahil Bloom (The 5 Types of Wealth) have all recommended Shortform.

Having said that, I also think an app like Headway or Blinkist can be a great complement to the learning experience.

In my own “learning funnel” I’ve started to use Headway’s Shorts as a fun way to micro-learn (which is also nice for reducing Social Media time) and discover new books. I also use Headway’s book summaries to get a quick overview of a book’s ideas. Then, if I find a book interesting, I move to the Shortform study guide for a deeper analysis of the ideas and how to put them into practice. And finally, if I’m still hooked, I buy the book!

(Even after reading the book, I occasionally revisit the Shortform study guide to refresh the main ideas and takeaways).

I picked Headway over Blinkist because their Shorts are unlimited (Blinkist caps you at 5 per day) and I found them more interesting/fun. Plus, I really enjoy Headway’s user interface—I think it has the sleekest design and it just feels fun to use it. It’s true that Blinkist’s audio sounds better (at least for the summary of Antifragile), but personally:

• I’m only interested in the book summaries and Shorts.

• I don’t care about the audio—since I prefer listening to podcasts.

Here’s a complete list of all the features so you can decide which is the best app for you!

(Note: The green color represents the features of the book summaries, whereas the yellow represents the services beyond the book summaries…)

My Final Verdict…

As I mentioned earlier, Shortform is still my favorite book summary app in 2026. But I think that pairing it with Headway makes it even more powerful: Headway for micro-learning, discovery, and a quick introduction to a book’s ideas. And then Shortform for studying, practicing, and mastering the book’s ideas!

And thank you for reading my blog post :)

I talked to the team at Shortform and they agreed to give us a 20% discount on the Annual Subscription by signing up with this link! (You also get a 5-day free trial).

I also talked to the team at Headway and they agreed to give us a 60% discount by taking the 5-minute quiz and signing up with this link! (If you prefer skipping the quiz, you can go directly to this page and get the same 60% off).

In this blog post, I share the 16 key ideas — with direct quotes from the book — I picked from reading Skin In The Game, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Skin In The Game was an amazing read! And it’s full of timeless and practical insights that root back to the ancient wisdom of the greeks and the romans (Taleb illustrates his ideas with many of these mythical ancient stories and accounts from ancient kings and philosophers) — so the information is time-tested and very, very entertaining!

By the way, I also made it into a 🎧 podcast episode (with a manually written transcription on-screen). So if you prefer to listen, open any of the links below to listen on your favorite podcast app…

• YouTube (with perfect transcription on-screen):

• Spotify (with perfect transcription on-screen):

• Apple Podcasts:

👤 Nassim Nicholas Taleb

💡Idea #1: Never Lose Touch with Reality

The first idea is Never Lose Touch with Reality. This means you need to have skin in the game on everything that you do. As we will see, this has both an epistemological dimension and an ethical dimension. We will explore this ethical dimension a bit later, first let’s get into the epistemological one — which is the creation of knowledge.

Taleb argues that having skin in the game is necessary to generate knowledge, create inventions, and drive progress. And he illustrates this with the story of the mythical Antaeus:

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Antaeus was a giant, or rather a semi-giant of sorts, the literal son of Mother Earth, Gaea, and Poseidon, the god of the sea. He had a strange occupation, which consisted of forcing passersby in his country, (Greek) Libya, to wrestle; his thing was to pin his victims to the ground and crush them. This macabre hobby was apparently the expression of filial devotion; Antaeus aimed at building a temple to his father, Poseidon, using for raw material the skulls of his victims.

Antaeus was deemed to be invincible, but there was a trick. He derived his strength from contact with his mother, Earth. Physically separated from contact with Earth, he lost all his powers. Hercules, as part of his twelve labors (in one variation of the tale), had for homework to whack Antaeus. He managed to lift him off the ground and terminated him by crushing him as his feet remained out of contact with his mamma.

We retain from this first vignette that, just like Antaeus, you cannot separate knowledge from contact with the ground. Actually, you cannot separate anything from contact with the ground. And the contact with the real world is done via skin in the game—having an exposure to the real world, and paying a price for its consequences, good or bad. The abrasions of your skin guide your learning and discovery, a mechanism of organic signaling, what the Greeks called pathemata mathemata (“guide your learning through pain,” something mothers of young children know rather well). I have shown in Antifragile that most things that we believe were “invented” by universities were actually discovered by tinkering and later legitimized by some type of formalization. The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.

So we need a feedback loop with reality if we want to improve at anything. Naval Ravikant said that the gold standard for feedback loops are nature, physics, and free markets. And the worse way to get feedback is anything that is social — such as friends, academic peers, or peers in a big firm.

The reason is that nature, physics, and free markets will give you the absolute truth, and you need the truth — no matter how harsh it is — in order to make progress.

On the other hand, friends and peers have an incentive to hide the truth, either because they don’t wanna hurt your feelings or maybe because they have some feelings of envy towards you. But nature, physics and free markets don’t have any feelings about you, so they will show you the truth. As Richard Feynman said: “Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.” And in the case of free markets, you get the truth on whether your product is good or not by looking at how much is selling and what the customers are saying about your product.

And this connection between skin in the game and knowledge has another aspect. Which is that it can make boring things less boring, and even interesting and fun.

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Skin in the game can make boring things less boring. When you have skin in the game, dull things like checking the safety of the aircraft because you may be forced to be a passenger in it cease to be boring. If you are an investor in a company, doing ultra-boring things like reading the footnotes of a financial statement (where the real information is to be found) becomes, well, almost not boring.

But there is an even more vital dimension. Many addicts who normally have a dull intellect and the mental nimbleness of a cauliflower—or a foreign policy expert—are capable of the most ingenious tricks to procure their drugs. When they undergo rehab, they are often told that should they spend half the mental energy trying to make money as they did procuring drugs, they are guaranteed to become millionaires. But, to no avail. Without the addiction, their miraculous powers go away. It was like a magical potion that gave remarkable powers to those seeking it, but not those drinking it.

A confession. When I don’t have skin in the game, I am usually dumb. My knowledge of technical matters, such as risk and probability, did not initially come from books. It did not come from lofty philosophizing and scientific hunger. It did not even come from curiosity. It came from the thrills and hormonal flush one gets while taking risks in the markets. I never thought mathematics was something interesting to me until, when I was at Wharton, a friend told me about financial options and complex derivatives.

I immediately decided to make a career in them. It was a combination of financial trading and complicated probability. The field was new and uncharted. I knew in my guts there were mistakes in the theories that used the conventional bell curve and ignored the impact of extreme events. I knew in my guts that academics had not the slightest clue about the risks. So, to find errors in the estimation of these probabilistic securities, I had to study probability, which mysteriously and instantly became fun, even gripping. When there was risk on the line, suddenly a second brain in me manifested itself, and the probabilities of intricate sequences became suddenly effortless to analyze and map.

When there is fire, you will run faster than in any competition. When you ski downhill some movements become effortless.

…

Many kids would learn to love mathematics if they had some investment in it, and, more crucially, they would build an instinct to spot its misapplications.

Now, a personal experience related to this idea:

I found interesting subjects during my Chemical Engineering degree. But it wasn’t until I read a book about investing and started buying stocks that a compulsive need for learning about investing and business took hold on me. That made me go for a Master’s degree in Business Management, and I confess that I’ve never — in my whole life — being so deep into my studies. I devoured all the material, I would raise my hand on every class and ask challenging questions to the teachers, and for the first time I would naturally excel at the subjects.

Now, I want to clarify that, in hindsight, I don’t think the Master’s degree was very useful for learning about investing or learning how to start a business. It was more focused on how to become a manager employee at a mid or large size business — also with academic models for finance and economics that don’t work in real life.

Similar to this idea, just having a vision for a real-world project that you care about can make learning much more interesting. Robert Pirsig, the author of the bestseller book The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, gives the example of two students in a class of Mechanical Engineering. The first student has a genuine interest in machines and also some experience as a mechanic. The other student is just concerned about his grades. Who do you think is gonna find the lessons more interesting? Obviously the first student, because he sees his learning as a means to get better at something that he deeply cares about, and can also see all the practical implications of the things he is studying. This same principle was applied at the experimental school that Elon Musk funded for his children and SpaceX employees, where learning happened as a byproduct of working on ambitious real-world projects.

Now let’s get into the ethical dimension of skin in the game.

💡Idea #2: Skin In The Game Is About Honor

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Finally and centrally, skin in the game is about honor as an existential commitment, and risk taking (a certain class of risks) as a separation between man and machine and (some may hate it) a ranking of humans.

If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.

And I will keep mentioning that I have no other definition of success than leading an honorable life. We intimated that it is dishonorable to let others die in your stead.

Honor implies that there are some actions you would categorically never do, regardless of the material rewards. She accepts no Faustian bargain, would not sell her body for $500; it also means she wouldn’t do it for a million, nor a billion, nor a trillion. And it is not just a via negativa stance, honor means that there are things you would do unconditionally, regardless of the consequences. Consider duels, which have robbed us of the great Russian poet Pushkin, the French mathematician Galois, and, of course, many more, at a young age: people incurred a significant probability of death just to save face. Living as a coward was simply no option, and death was vastly preferable, even if, as in the case of Galois, one invented a new and momentous branch of mathematics while still a teenager. As a Spartan mother tells her departing son: “With it or on it,” meaning either return with your shield or don’t come back alive (the custom was to carry the dead body flat on it); only cowards throw away their shields to run faster.

If you want to consider how modernity has destroyed some of the foundations of human values, contrast the above unconditionals with modernistic accommodations: people who, say, work for disgusting lobbies (representing the interests of, say, Saudi Arabia in Washington) or knowingly play the usual unethical academic game, come to grips with their condition by producing arguments such as “I have children to put through college.” People who are not morally independent tend to fit ethics to their profession, rather than find a profession that fits their ethics.

This last line from Taleb reminded me a great quote from George Santayana: “A man is morally free when he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.”

Now back to the passage…

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

There is another dimension of honor: engaging in actions going beyond mere skin in the game to put oneself at risk for others, have your skin in other people’s game; sacrifice something significant for the sake of the collective.

I think the writer Ernest Hemingway captured this perfectly…

🟠 Ernest Hemingway:

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.

But as I think Taleb would argue, is better to be destroyed than to live without honor.

💡Idea #3: Soul In The Game

A great example of individuals with soul in the game is the artisans…

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Artisans do things for existential reasons first, financial and commercial ones later. Their decision making is never fully financial, but it remains financial.

Secondly, they have some type of “art” in their profession; they stay away from most aspects of industrialization; they combine art and business. And third, they put some soul in their work: they would not sell something defective or even of compromised quality because it hurts their pride. Finally, they have sacred taboos, things they would not do even if it markedly increased profitability.

This idea of the artisans being unconditional on their willingness to not compromise on the quality of their products reminded me what David Senra calls “The Anti-business billionaires.” He mentions James Dyson, Steve Jobs, and Yvon Chouinard as perfect examples, as they have always been obsessed with the quality of their products and they would never compromise on that to increase short-term profitability. And the ironic thing is that, in the long-run, they end up with the money anyways because they build insanely great products. That greatness is eventually transmitted to customers — who then become loyal recurrent buyers of these brands.

In the case of Steve Jobs, this was an early lesson that he got from his adoptive father. Walter Isaacson talks about it on the Steve Jobs biography:

🟠 Walter Isaacson:

The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a tract house in the suburbs. The finance company where Paul worked as a repo man, CIT, had transferred him down to its Palo Alto office, but he could not afford to live there, so they landed in a subdivision in Mountain View, a less expensive town just to the south.

There Paul tried to pass along his love of mechanics and cars. “Steve, this is your workbench now,” he said as he marked off a section of the table in their garage. Jobs remembered being impressed by his father’s focus on craftsmanship. “I thought my dad’s sense of design was pretty good,” he said, “because he knew how to build anything. If we needed a cabinet, he would build it. When he built our fence, he gave me a hammer so I could work with him.”

Fifty years later the fence still surrounds the back and side yards of the house in Mountain View. As Jobs showed it off to me, he caressed the stockade panels and recalled a lesson that his father implanted deeply in him. It was important, his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. “He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.”

👉 Book: Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson.

I’m also reminded of a beautiful quote from Steve Jobs where he says that when you build something truly great — without cutting corners — that is a form of appreciation to other people.

🟠 Steve Jobs:

There’s lots of ways to be, as a person. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there. And you never meet the people. You never shake their hands. You never hear their story or tell yours. But somehow, in the act of making something with a great deal of care and love, something’s transmitted there. And it’s a way of expressing to the rest of our species our deep appreciation. So we need to be true to who we are and remember what’s really important to us.

👉 Book: Make Something Wonderful, by Steve Jobs.

Another great reference to this idea of working with soul in the game comes from Leonardo da Vinci when he painted the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci…

🟠 Paul Graham:

This sounds like a paradox, but a great painting has to be better than it has to be. For example, when Leonardo painted the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci in the National Gallery, he put a juniper bush behind her head. In it he carefully painted each individual leaf. Many painters might have thought, this is just something to put in the background to frame her head. No one will look that closely at it. Not Leonardo. How hard he worked on a part of a painting didn’t depend at all on how closely he expected anyone to look at it. He was like Michael Jordan. Relentless.

Relentlessness wins because, in the aggregate, unseen details become visible. When people walk by the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, their attention is often immediately arrested by it, even before they look at the label and notice that it says Leonardo da Vinci. All those unseen details combine to produce something that’s just stunning, like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune.

👉 Book: Hackers and Painters, by Paul Graham.

💡Idea #4: Heroes Were Not Library Rats

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

If you want to study classical values such as courage or learn about stoicism, don’t necessarily look for classicists. One is never a career academic without a reason. Read the texts themselves: Seneca, Caesar, or Marcus Aurelius, when possible. Or read commentators on the classics who were doers themselves, such as Montaigne—people who at some point had some skin in the game, then retired to write books. Avoid the intermediary, when possible. Or forget about the texts, just engage in acts of courage.

For studying courage in textbooks doesn’t make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine.

By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor—and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker. So remember that the heroes of history were not classicists and library rats, those people who live vicariously in their texts. They were people of deeds and had to be endowed with the spirit of risk taking. To get into their psyches, you will need someone other than a career professor teaching stoicism. They almost always don’t get it (actually, they never get it). In my experience, from a series of personal fights, many of these “classicists,” who know in intimate detail what people of courage such as Alexander, Cleopatra, Caesar, Hannibal, Julian, Leonidas, Zenobia ate for breakfast, can’t produce a shade of intellectual valor. Is it that academia (and journalism) is fundamentally the refuge of the stochastophobe tawker? That is, the voyeur who wants to watch but not take risks? It appears so.

So the big difference between the doer and the academic thinker is that the doer has skin in the game. And Steve Jobs argues that over time, it is the doer that becomes the major thinker, because he accumulates a type of knowledge that is much more robust and practical than the theoretical knowledge of the academic thinker — which is much more fragile and less useful…

🟠 Steve Jobs:

It is very easy to take credit for the thinking. The doing is more concrete. And when you dig a little deeper usually you find that the people who did it were also the people who worked through the hard intellectual problems as well.

…

The doers are the major thinkers.

A great example in the (mostly theoretical) world of philosophy, is the philosopher of the early 20th century Simone Weil — who had the opportunity to just write and produce philosophy from the comfort of a desk. But she was more compelled to act rather than just theorize. So she actually lived her philosophy and stood up for her ideas. Taleb also mentioned Simone Weil in the book, he called her a secular saint and wrote: “While coming from the French Jewish upper class, [Simone Weil] spent a year in a car factory so the working class could be something other than an abstract construct for her.”

Here’s a great line from Elon Musk to remind ourselves to have a bias to action:

🟠 Elon Musk:

You could either be a spectator or a participant. And so, I guess I’d rather be a participant than a spectator.

👉 Source: Elon Musk on YC

I’m actually fascinated by the wisdom of the doers and I’ve spent the last 5 years capturing their insights in their own words. This is all saved and classified in a searchable database which currently contains over 5,000 timeless ideas.

I call this database Doers Notebook.

So if I’m unsure about how to get more sales in my business, I can simply type the word “sales” and immediately get 126 insights relevant to sales! In this case from Jim Edwards, Peter Thiel, Naval Ravikant, and many other remarkable individuals.

It’s like having a second brain 🧠 from which we can pull wisdom on demand, to help us significantly decrease the error rate in our judgment and also get new perspectives on how to solve problems.

“In an age of infinite leverage [through code and media], judgment is the most important skill.” - Naval Ravikant

“A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points.” - Alan Kay

Plus, it also comes with an app that looks just like X, but the posts are insights from the database — which are reshuffled every 15 minutes so that the feed is always fresh. That way, you can replace doomscrolling with micro-learning.

So if all this sounds interesting, just go to doersnotebook.com

💡Idea #5: The Public and The Private

The next idea is kind of the logical conclusion of the previous one. It’s about how living your ideas — in other words having skin in the game for what you believe in — is the moral thing to do. So what a person does in private should align with what he or she says in public. Taleb gives two examples to illustrate…

Example 1:

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

I was recently told that a famous Canadian socialist environmentalist, with whom I was part of a lecture series, abused waiters in restaurants, between lectures on equity, diversity, and fairness.

So here we have a mismatch between the public life of this person and his private life — resulting in a clear unethical behavior.

Example 2:

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Kids with rich parents talk about “class privilege” at privileged colleges such as Amherst—but in one instance, one of them could not answer Dinesh D’Souza’s simple and logical suggestion: Why don’t you go to the registrar’s office and give your privileged spot to the minority student next in line?

Clearly the defense given by people under such a situation is that they want others to do so as well—they require a systemic solution to every local perceived problem of injustice. I find that immoral. I know of no ethical system that allows you to let someone drown without helping him because other people are not helping, no system that says, “I will save people from drowning only if others too save other people from drowning.”

Which brings us to the principle:

[1] If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.

[2] If your private actions do not generalize, then you cannot have general ideas.

💡Idea #6: Unpopular Virtue

The next idea, still on the dimension of morality, is that a true virtuous behavior must bear a personal cost. In other words, virtue is inseparable from risk-taking and sacrifice.

So if you do or say something good which is also popular and well seen by others, then you cannot tell if it’s a genuine virtuous act — because you could be doing it to elevate your status, be liked by others, or get some kind of reward. Whereas if you do or say something good which is unpopular in your social circle, then you can say that’s a virtuous act — because it came at a personal cost to you.

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Sticking up for truth when it is unpopular is far more of a virtue, because it costs you something—your reputation. If you are a journalist and act in a way that risks ostracism, you are virtuous. Some people only express their opinions as part of mob shaming, when it is safe to do so, and, in the bargain, think that they are displaying virtue. This is not virtue but vice, a mixture of bullying and cowardice.

And of course this personal cost can take other forms. For instance in the context of religion, Taleb gives this example…

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

In the Eastern Mediterranean pagan world (Greco-Semitic), no worship was done without sacrifice. The gods did not accept cheap talk. It was all about revealed preferences. Also, burnt offerings were precisely burnt so no human would consume them. Actually, not quite: the high priest got his share; priesthood was quite a lucrative position since in the pre-Christian, Greek-speaking Eastern Mediterranean, the offices of high priests were often auctioned off.

…

Love without sacrifice is theft. This applies to any form of love, particularly the love of God.

Finally, Taleb says that courage (risk taking) is the highest virtue, and it’s the only one you cannot fake.

And when Taleb talks about courage he is not referring to selfish courage — like the kind displayed by a gambler. The courage he talks about is never a selfish action: Courage is when you sacrifice your own well-being for the sake of the survival of a layer higher than yours. And this layer — he says —can be family, friends, humanity, and even the preservation of the planet. This connects to the concept of self-transcendence proposed by Viktor Frankl…

🟠 Viktor Frankl:

By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic “the self-transcendence of human existence.” It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.

👉 Book: Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl.

I found another perspective on the book The Courage To Be Disliked…

🟠 Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga:

PHILOSOPHER: … So, the issue that arises at this point is, how on earth can one become able to feel one has worth?

YOUTH: Yes, that’s it exactly! I need you to explain that very clearly, please.

PHILOSOPHER: It’s quite simple. It is when one is able to feel I am beneficial to the community that one can have a true sense of one’s worth. This is the answer that would be offered in Adlerian psychology.

YOUTH: That I am beneficial to the community?

PHILOSOPHER: That one can act on the community; that is to say, on other people, and that one can feel I am of use to someone. Instead of feeling judged by another person as ‘good’, being able to feel, by way of one’s own subjective viewpoint, that I can make contributions to other people. It is at that point that, at last, we can have a true sense of our own worth.

👉 Book: The Courage To Be Disliked, by Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga.

💡Idea #7: Beware of Advice that Benefits the Advice-giver (And Never Harms Him)

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

I have learned a lesson from my own naive experiences:

Beware of the person who gives advice, telling you that a certain action on your part is “good for you” while it is also good for him, while the harm to you doesn’t directly affect him.

Of course such advice is usually unsolicited. The asymmetry is when said advice applies to you but not to him—he may be selling you something, or trying to get you to marry his daughter or hire his son-in-law.

…

Indeed, in the dozen or so cases I can pull from memory, it always turns out that what is presented as good for you is not really good for you but certainly good for the other party.

After reading this passage from Taleb I recalled how many times I go to the bank I get unsolicited advice from a bank employee on how I should invest in one of their funds. And then he proceeds to show me charts of how well these funds have performed in the past and how much money I could make. And if it wasn’t because I had already learned a lot from Charlie Munger and other remarkable investors, I might have fallen under the impression that this bank employee actually wanted to help me — but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The truth is that banks just cherry-pick their best-performing funds and show those to you, never mentioning the majority of their funds that performed badly. And of course if the bank starts 20 funds in year 1, they are sure to have a few funds that end up performing well — but this is due to chance rather than skill. Indeed, the survivorship bias is the secret weapon in the mutual fund industry.

🟠 Charlie Munger:

What they do in creating new funds is create 10 or 12 of them, and then pick one that happens to win, and then they show the historical record forever showing this big return. And of course the big return happens where they have practically no assets, and the return per dollar year in those investment funds is terrible, but it looks great when you look at it in an historical record. And it’s really fraudulent what they do. And what’s interesting about the modern culture, is that nobody in the mutual fund world seems to find that as crooked and detestable — but of course it is crooked.

👉 Source: Conversation between Charlie Munger and Steven Pinker

And on top of this problem they have a fee structure where they make money regardless of whether you make or lose money, so they have only upside in this business — they cannot lose. But the investor in the fund can definitely lose money.

So we can generalize this particular example to any situation where the advice-giver has something to gain, and no skin in the game — meaning that he won’t get harm if the advice ends up harming you.

💡Idea #8: Talking One’s Book & Revealed Preferences

Taleb argues that if you are going to give advice, you should have skin in the game on that advice. And if you are going to listen to someone else’s advice, make sure he or she has skin in the game on it. In other words, look at what people do, not what they say. Focus on actions, not words.

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

I went on television once to announce a newly published book and got stuck in the studio, drafted to become part of a roundtable with two journalists plus the anchor. The topic of the day was Microsoft, a company that was in existence at the time. Everyone, including the anchor, chipped in. My turn came: “I own no Microsoft stock, I am short no Microsoft stock — meaning I would benefit from its decline, hence I can’t talk about it.”

I repeated my dictum of Prologue 1: Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio.

There was immeasurable confusion in the faces: a journalist is typically not supposed to talk about stocks he owns—and, what is worse, is supposed to always, always make pronouncements about stuff he can barely find on a map. A journalist is meant to be an impartial “judge”…

[But] in the absence of skin in the game, journalists will imitate, to be safe, the opinion of other journalists, thus creating monoculture and collective mirages.

Another problem stemming from this lack of skin in the game is that people will say things that are aligned with the idealized version of themselves — and how they want to be perceived by other people. So this can be very different from what they actually do, because what they do is an expression of who they actually are — rather than who they are trying to be. So one should never make the mistake of conflating stated preferences (what people say) with revealed preferences (what people do).

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

The axiom of revelation of preferences (originating with Paul Samuelson, or possibly the Semitic gods), as you recall, states the following: you will not have an idea about what people really think, what predicts people’s actions, merely by asking them—they themselves don’t necessarily know. What matters, in the end, is what they pay for goods, not what they say they “think” about them, or the various possible reasons they give you or themselves for that. If you think about it, you will see that this is a reformulation of skin in the game. Even psychologists get it; in their experiments, their procedures require that actual dollars be spent for a test to be “scientific.” The subjects are given a monetary amount, and they watch how the subject formulates choices by examining how they spend the money.

My favorite illustration on this issue of stated preferences and revealed preferences comes from Gary Halbert — who is one of the greatest copywriters in history. In his book The Boron Letters (which is a collection of letters that he wrote to his son Bond Halbert) he wrote:

🟠 Gary Halbert:

Here’s another little glimpse into one of the vagaries of human behavior: Once I asked at class at USC [University of Southern California] how many of them preferred to go to plays more than movies.

Lots of people raised their hands.

“Bull!” I said to them. “You are all fooling yourselves, and I’m going to prove it.” I then asked for a show of hands of those people who had seen a play in the last week or so.

No hands.

I then asked to see the hands of people who had seen a movie in the last week or so.

Many hands.

Bond, this phenomenon is common. All of us, including thee and me, have a slightly shrewd idea of ourselves. We often try to convince others and ourselves that we are something we are not, something we have an idea we “should” be.

Therefore, truth, my good son, can be determined NOT by how people use their mouths, but rather, how they use their wallets.

I want to burn this message into your mind. Be skeptical of what people say. Be skeptical of surveys. Of questionnaires. Instead, believe in numbers. For example, if everybody you talk with says they like plays more than movies, and yet the numbers say that 10,000 times more people buy movie tickets, then you believe the numbers!

👉 Book: The Boron Letters, by Gary Halbert.

💡Idea #9: The Minority Rule

Now let’s move to one of the core ideas of the book — which is the Minority Rule.

When I first learned about this idea it blew my mind. It’s one of these things that once you see it, you can’t unsee it — and actually you start seeing it almost everywhere in the real world. Naval Ravikant also said in an interview with Nassim Taleb that this was one of his favorite ideas from Skin in the Game.

But before getting into the minority rule, we first need to understand complex systems…

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble [or the group] behaves in ways not predicted by its components. The interactions matter more than the nature of the units. Studying individual ants will almost never give us a clear indication of how the ant colony operates. For that, one needs to understand an ant colony as an ant colony, no less, no more, not a collection of ants. This is called an “emergent” property of the whole, by which parts and whole differ because what matters are the interactions between such parts.

Taleb also gives the example of the entire field of neuroscience, where scientists are trying to understand how the brain works by just analyzing the individual neuron. They are not considering that a group of neurons is a completely different beast than the sum of the average neuron — because of all the trillions of interactions between the neurons. It is a complex system. And you can’t explain the behavior of a complex system by just looking at the behavior of the individual parts.

🟠 Robert Greene:

The great European charlatans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mastered the art of cultmaking. They lived, as we do now, in a time of transformation: Organized religion was on the wane, science on the rise. People were desperate to rally around a new cause or faith. The charlatans had begun by peddling health elixirs and alchemic shortcuts to wealth. Moving quickly from town to town, they originally focused on small groups—until, by accident, they stumbled on a truth of human nature: The larger the group they gathered around themselves, the easier it was to deceive.

The charlatan would station himself on a high wooden platform (hence the term “mountebank”) and crowds would swarm around him. In a group setting, people were more emotional, less able to reason. Had the charlatan spoken to them individually, they might have found him ridiculous, but lost in a crowd they got caught up in a communal mood of rapt attention. It became impossible for them to find the distance to be skeptical. Any deficiencies in the charlatan’s ideas were hidden by the zeal of the mass. Passion and enthusiasm swept through the crowd like a contagion, and they reacted violently to anyone who dared to spread a seed of doubt.

👉 Book: The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene.

🟠 Mark Twain:

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

Now, let’s get into the Minority Rule.

Imagine a group of people, with all these interactions between them, and also imagine that there is a minority who believes in something or has a preference towards something, and a majority who believe in something different. The Minority Rule establishes that if this minority is intransigent (in other words: intolerant) — towards their belief or preference, and the majority don’t mind compromising, then the result is that the ideas or preferences of the minority will be imposed over the majority. So the majority will submit to the minority (Taleb calls it “The Tyranny of the Minority”).

The real world is full of examples of this rule. For instance there’s a very small minority of Kosher drinkers in America, but if you look at almost any beverage industrially produced (e.g. Coca-Cola) you can always find a little stamp that certifies the drink is kosher. This happens because this jewish minority deeply cares about this dietary law — they have soul in the game, and they will never compromise on it. Whereas there is a flexible majority who are indeed flexible because most of them probably don’t even know what kosher means… or even if they know, they don’t really care at all. And for the producer, let’s say Coca-Cola, is much easier and cheaper to just make one type of product for everybody — so they just make it all kosher.

A similar story happens with halal meat, where the muslim community is intolerant to non-halal meat — because it’s haram or illegal in their religion — but the majority of people don’t mind eating halal. So the production of halal meat for western countries is significantly overrepresented because of this dynamic of the minority rule. Again, it’s the tyranny of the minority.

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Alexander said that it was preferable to have an army of sheep led by a lion than an army of lions led by a sheep. Alexander (or whoever produced this probably apocryphal saying) understood the value of the active, intolerant, and courageous minority. Hannibal terrorized Rome for a decade and a half with a tiny army of mercenaries, winning twenty-two battles against the Romans, battles in which he was outnumbered each time. He was inspired by a version of this maxim. For, at the battle of Cannae, he remarked to Gisco, who was concerned that the Carthaginians were outnumbered by the Romans: “There is one thing that’s more wonderful than their numbers…in all that vast number there is not one man called Gisgo.”

This large payoff from stubborn courage is not limited to the military. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has,” wrote Margaret Mead. Revolutions are unarguably driven by an obsessive minority. And the entire growth of society, whether economic or moral, comes from a small number of people.

…

Society doesn’t evolve by consensus, voting, majority, committees, verbose meetings, academic conferences, tea and cucumber sandwiches, or polling; only a few people suffice to disproportionately move the needle. All one needs is an asymmetric rule somewhere—and someone with soul in the game. And asymmetry is present in about everything.

So in this context I think it’s easier to understand why Heraclitus wrote “One man is worth thousand if he is extraordinary”, or why Einstein said: “It is important to foster individuality, for only the individual can produce the new ideas.” And if you look at the genesis of the most successful companies you’ll find clear examples of the power of the individual, where the founder has soul in the game and is able to inspire others to follow him on his mission. But if you remove the founder, the whole thing collapses — or at least it collapses in the formation stage of the company.

💡Idea #10: Employee vs. Contractor

Many people believe that running a company with contractors (instead of employees) is much more efficient. Sometimes there is no work to do and if you have employees you still have to pay them. But if you had contractors instead, then you can efficiently meet the demand by only hiring them when it’s necessary.

But there is a problem: contractors behave much more opportunistically than employees. They might get a better offer from a different company and then call you — just 5 hours before the expected time of the service — to let you know that he won’t be able to do his job, which might be catastrophic to your firm.

On the other hand, an employee would almost never let you down. And the reason for this is that the employee has more skin in the game than the contractor. He has much more to lose. An employee is terrified of being fired, whereas a contractor doesn’t mind that much losing one of his clients. And it’s from this fear and potential downside that an employee is significantly more reliable than a contractor.

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Employees exist because they have significant skin in the game—and the risk is shared with them, enough risk for it to be a deterrent and a penalty for acts of undependability, such as failing to show up on time. [With an employee] You are buying dependability. And dependability is a driver behind many transactions.

Taleb argues that this is also the reason for why families in Ancient Rome had a slave as the treasurer — the person responsible for the finances of the household. You can inflict a much higher punishment on a slave than a free person, so it’s significantly less likely that the slave would steal from the family or commit errors.

And beyond the employee’s skin in the game in the company, he also has skin in the game in the whole industry…

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

People are no longer owned by a company but by something worse: the idea that they need to be employable. The employable person is embedded in an industry, with fear of upsetting not just their employer, but other potential employers.

On this chapter I found one of my favorite lines from the book:

“What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing. The more you have to lose, the more fragile you are.”

So one takeaway I got from this idea is that the more perks, money, or status you derive from someone else or from some organization or company, the easier it is to be controlled or owned by others. Because one becomes attached to all these things and then you’ll compromise your personal freedom (and even your moral freedom) to avoid losing those things. In essence, you become a slave — someone who is owned by others.

In my personal case I’m a contractor and an independent content creator, but even if I was an employee (which I was, in the past) I guess my strategy would be to try not to become so attached to these things as to be owned by others. Im reminded of a story of Socrates that I read on a book written by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, where he wrote: “Socrates saw various articles of luxury spread out for sale, he exclaimed: How much there is in the world I do not want.” So I think this attitude helps a lot to not being owned by others. Naval Ravikant also wrote “People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom.”

And finally, the decisive trait that will tip the balance to being free or being owned by others is courage. As Seneca wrote: “He who is brave is free.”

💡Idea #11: The Origin of Envy

This idea is not directly related to the theme of skin in the game, but it gave an insightful new perspective on the topic of envy and jealousy and I want to share it with you.

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

As with all communist movements, it is often the bourgeois or clerical classes who are the early adopters of revolutionary theories. So class envy doesn’t originate from a truck driver in South Alabama, but from a New York or Washington, D.C., Ivy League–educated IYI (say Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz) with a sense of entitlement, upset some “less smart” persons are much richer.

…

Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, postulated that envy is something you are more likely to encounter in your own kin: lower classes are more likely to experience envy toward their cousins or the middle class than toward the very rich. And the expression Nobody is a prophet in his own land, making envy a geographical thing (mistakenly thought to originate with Jesus), originates from that passage in the Rhetoric. Aristotle himself was building on Hesiod: cobbler envies cobbler, carpenter envies carpenter. Later, Jean de La Bruyère wrote that jealousy is to be found within the same art, talent, and condition.

Another perspective from the book The 48 Laws of Power…

🟠 Robert Greene:

Only a minority can succeed at the game of life, and that minority inevitably arouses the envy of those around them. Once success happens your way, however, the people to fear the most are those in your own circle, the friends and acquaintances you have left behind. Feelings of inferiority gnaw at them; the thought of your success only heightens their feelings of stagnation. Envy, which the philosopher Kierkegaard calls “unhappy admiration,” takes hold. You may not see it but you will feel it someday—unless, that is, you learn strategies of deflection, little sacrifices to the gods of success. Either dampen your brilliance occasionally, purposefully revealing a defect, weakness, or anxiety, or attributing your success to luck; or simply find yourself new friends. Never underestimate the power of envy.

👉 Book: The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene.

One of the best remarks I’ve heard on envy also comes from Charlie Munger, where he said that the world is not driven by greed, it’s driven by envy. And he also mentions that envy is the worst of all sins from Christianity because it’s the only one you can’t even have fun.

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

So I doubt Piketty [and here Taleb is referring to the french economist Thomas Piketty, who wrote a famous book on Inequality] bothered to ask blue-collar Frenchmen what they want. I am certain that they would ask for better beer, a new dishwasher, or faster trains for their commute, not to bring down some rich businessman invisible to them. But, again, people can frame questions and portray enrichment as theft, as was done before the French Revolution, in which case the blue-collar class would ask, once again, for heads to roll.

On that line where Taleb says that people can portray enrichment as theft, I was reminded of something that Paul Graham wrote on his book Hackers and Painters…

🟠 Paul Graham:

With the rise of the middle class, wealth stopped being a zero sum game. Jobs and Wozniak didn’t have to make us poor to make themselves rich. Quite the opposite: they created things that made our lives materially richer. They had to, or we wouldn’t have paid for them. But since for most of the world’s history the main route to wealth was to steal it, we tend to be suspicious of rich people.

Idealistic undergraduates find their unconsciously preserved child’s model of wealth [and this model he says it’s a zero sum game model where the money seems to flow from parents and authorities] confirmed by eminent writers of the past. It is a case of the mistaken meeting the outdated. “Behind every great fortune, there is a crime,” Balzac wrote. Except he didn’t. What he actually said was that a great fortune with no apparent cause was probably due to a crime well enough executed that it had been forgotten. If we were talking about Europe in 1000, or most of the third world today, the standard misquotation would be spot on. But Balzac lived in nineteenth-century France, where the Industrial Revolution was well advanced. He knew you could make a fortune without stealing it. After all, he did himself, as a popular novelist.

👉 Book: Hackers and Painters, by Paul Graham.

💡Idea #12: The Lindy Effect

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Lindy is the name of a deli in New York, where actors who hung out there discovered that Broadway shows that lasted for, say one hundred days, had a future life expectancy of a hundred more. For those that lasted two hundred days, two hundred more. The heuristic became known as the Lindy effect.

…

Time is equivalent to disorder, and resistance to the ravages of time, that is, what we gloriously call survival, is the ability to handle disorder… the only effective judge of things is time—by things we mean ideas, people, intellectual productions, car models, scientific theories, books, etc. You can’t fool Lindy: books of the type written by the current hotshot Op-Ed writer at The New York Times may get some hype at publication time, manufactured or spontaneous, but their five-year survival rate is generally less than that of pancreatic cancer.

…

For time operates through skin in the game. Things that have survived are hinting to us ex post that they have some robustness—conditional on their being exposed to harm.

So the key idea of the Lindy effect is that the longer something has survived, the more robust it likely is, and the longer is expected to survive in the future. So as an example, an advice given by a grandmother is much more likely to be true than the latest discovery by a department of Social Sciences.

And even in business it’s extremely valuable to pay attention to the timeless. This is what Jeff Bezos said on this in an interview with Werner Vogels back in 2012:

🟠 Jeff Bezos:

I very frequently get the question: “What’s gonna change in the next 10 years?” And that is an interesting question, it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: “What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?” And I submit to you that that second question it’s actually the more important of the two… Because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.

And so as you pointed out in our retail business we know the customers want: Low prices—and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery, they want vast selection—it’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up to me and says: “Jeff I love Amazon I just wish the prices were a little higher”, “I love Amazon I just wish you’d delivered a little more slowly”… Impossible!

And so the effort that we put into those things—spinning those things up—we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying dividends for our customers 10 years from now.

And so when you have something that you know is true… even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.

On AWS, the big ideas are also pretty straightforward. It’s impossible for me to imagine that 10 years from now somebody is going to say: “I love AWS I just wish it were a little less reliable” or “I love AWS I just wish you would raise prices… it should be a little more expensive” or “I love AWS and I wish you would innovate and improve the API at a slightly slower rate.” None of those things you can imagine.

And so the big ideas in business are often very obvious but it’s very hard to maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times.

But if you can do that and continue to spin up those flywheels and put energy into those things—as we’re doing with AWS—over time you build a better and better service for your customers on the things that genuinely matter to them.

👉 Source: Fireside Chat with Jeff Bezos & Werner Vogels

Balaji Srinivasan (CTO of Coinbase and founder of the Network State) also has an interesting take on this. He likes to spend time either in the very old, or in the very new. He argues this is a great source of business opportunities and finding things that are true but that most people don’t know about…

🟠 Balaji Srinivasan:

The newest technical papers and the oldest books are the best sources of arbitrage. They contain the least popular facts and the most monetizable truths. What do you know to be true that others cannot or will not bring themselves to admit? There is your competitive advantage.

I read a lot of old books and new technical journals. I’m less focused on the contemporaneous and more focused on finding things that are true but that most people don’t know. Brian Chesky, founder of Airbnb, learned from a bunch of articles written in the late 1800s about rooming houses. Room sharing was much more popular around 1900 than in 1950. He saw solutions in a sharing economy from a hundred years ago. Then he modernized, transplanted, and used those ideas today. Reading books about societal arrangements at other times and places is a very useful thing.

Technical journals are another source of underappreciated truths. In biomedical papers, you will see that life extension and youth extension for mice is much more advanced than people think. Brain-machine interfaces are also much more advanced than the general public realizes. We have mice telepathically controlling devices. We can do fantastic things with tissue regeneration as well. The technology is here, being held back by the FDA or a lack of distribution.

Technical journals and old books are what I read with intent, as opposed to tech news, which I get in my peripheral vision.

👉 Book: The Anthology of Balaji, by Eric Jorgenson.

♡ An App I’m Loving (not sponsored)

All the way back to 24th December of 2023, I learned about an app that completely changed how I pick insights from YouTube.

It’s called Reader, and (among other features) it lets me seemingly connect any YouTube video to it and watch it on the Reader website (and mobile app).

But… Why would I watch YouTube videos on Reader instead of YouTube?? The answer is simple:

(1) It has a more easy-to-follow transcript of the video.

(2) You can make highlights right inside the transcript! (both in the website or the mobile app). And you can also write notes on those highlights.

Then, the Reader app will create a notebook with all your highlights and notes (from that video), and even connect automatically to Readwise (an app that aggregates highlights from Reader, Kindle, etc.).

This is how I’m building my own personal library of ideas that have resonated with me, which I can revisit at any time.

“A chief part of learning is simply knowing where you can find a thing.”

- Latin Motto

(3) Another benefit is that there are no distractions! You can focus exclusively on the information of the video. This has expanded my attention span…

“I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span.”

- Charlie Munger

There is a free trial of 30 days (after that it’s $9.99 per month), but I reached out to the team at Reader and they made a special offer for us! If you use my special link you will get a 60-day free trial (after that it’s $9.99 per month) 👉 https://readwise.io/pickingnuggets-reader

💡Idea #13: Skin In The Game Breeds Simplicity

Taleb argues that professionals without skin in the game — such as consultants, academics, and economists — tend to overcomplicate things because they are rewarded for perception. Whereas professionals with skin in the game — such as traders, entrepreneurs, and surgeons — seek simplicity because they are rewarded for results…

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

People who have always operated without skin in the game (or without their skin in the right game) seek the complicated and centralized, and avoid the simple like the plague. Practitioners, on the other hand, have opposite instincts, looking for the simplest heuristics.

People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.

…

Many problems in society come from the interventions of people who sell complicated solutions because that’s what their position and training invite them to do. There is absolutely no gain for someone in such a position to propose something simple: you are rewarded for perception, not results. Meanwhile, they pay no price for the side effects that grow nonlinearly with such complications.

The mathematician (and ex hedge fund manager) Edward Thorp also shares a similar take on this…

🟠 Edward Thorp:

For an academic judged by his colleagues, rather than the bank manager of his local branch (or his tax accountant), a mountain giving birth to a mouse, after huge labor, is not a very good thing. They prefer the mouse to give birth to a mountain; it is the perception of sophistication that matters. The more complicated, the better; the simple doesn’t get you citations, H-values, or some such metric du jour that brings the respect of the university administrators, as they can understand that stuff but not the substance of the real work. The only academics who escape the burden of complication-for-complication’s sake are the great mathematicians and physicists.

👉 Book: A Man for All Markets, by Edward Thorp.

The other interesting thing here is that this idea stems from another idea — which is that people will naturally follow their incentives. Probably the best account I’ve read on this comes from Charlie Munger, he calls it the Reward—and punishment—superresponse tendency…

🟠 Charlie Munger:

I place this tendency first in my discussion because almost everyone thinks he fully recognizes how important incentives and disincentives are in changing cognition and behavior. But this is not often so. For instance, I think I’ve been in the top 5 percent of my age cohort almost all my adult life in understanding the power of incentives, yet I’ve always underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive superpower.

One of my favorite cases about the power of incentives is the Federal Express case. The integrity of the Federal Express system requires that all packages be shifted rapidly among airplanes in one central airport each night. The system has no integrity for the customers if the night work shift can’t accomplish its assignment fast. And Federal Express had one hell of a time getting the night shift to do the right thing. They tried moral suasion. They tried everything in the world without luck. And finally, somebody got the happy thought that it was foolish to pay the night shift by the hour when what the employer wanted was not maximized billable hours of employee service but fault-free, rapid performance of a particular task. Maybe, this person thought, if they paid the employees per shift and let all night shift employees go home when all the planes were loaded, the system would work better. And, lo and behold, that solution worked.

👉 Book: Poor Charlie’s Almanack, by Peter Kaufman and Charlie Munger.

As a summary (and to tie these two ideas together): we should always think about the super power of incentives, and whether the person you are dealing with has skin in the game or not. So if the person doesn’t have skin in the game, you know that he or she has an incentive to overcomplicate things — and therefore he will overcomplicate things. And if the person does have skin in the game, you know that he has an incentive to get to the right solution — and therefore he is not gonna overcomplicate things for the sake of giving you a good impression, he is just interested in the outcome rather than the cosmetic appearance of how he gets to the outcome.

A known phenomenon that occurs at the level of incentives, as a result of a lack of skin in the game, is the Agency Problem — which is the next idea.

💡Idea #14: The Agency Problem

The agency problem happens when the agent — for instance the CEO of a company — has a different incentive than the people he is representing — which for the CEO it would be the shareholders of the company.

Taleb illustrates this concept with an experience he had in a conversation with James Cameron when he was running for Prime Minister of the UK. In a short part of the one-hour conversation they had, Nassim explained his Precautionary Principle applied to climate change…

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

One does not need complex models as a justification to avoid a certain action. If we don’t understand something and it has a systemic effect, just avoid it. Models are error-prone, something I knew well with finance; most risks only appear in analyses after harm is done. As far as I know, we only have one planet. So the burden is on those who pollute—or who introduce new substances in larger than usual quantities—to show a lack of tail risk. In fact, the more uncertainty about the models, the more conservative one should be.

This is very different to how london newspapers portrayed it. They made it look like Taleb was anti-climate and even called him a “climate denier”. This misrepresentation was due to the fact that they wanted to tarnish the reputation of David Cameron. So in this case the media had a political incentive, and an incentive to not diverge from the narratives of other newspapers — because if you diverge too much you might get fired…

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

The divergence is evident in that journos worry considerably more about the opinion of other journalists than the judgment of their readers. Compare this to a healthy system, say, that of restaurants. Restaurant owners worry about the opinion of their customers, not those of other restaurant owners, which keeps them in check and prevents the business from straying collectively away from its interests. Further, skin in the game creates diversity, not monoculture. Economic insecurity worsens the condition. Journalists are currently in the most insecure profession you can find: the majority live hand to mouth, and ostracism by their friends would be terminal. Thus they become easily prone to manipulation by lobbyists, as we saw with GMOs, the Syrian wars, etc. You say something unpopular in that profession about Brexit, GMOs, or Putin, and you become history. This is the opposite of business where me-tooism is penalized.

This last part (where Taleb says that undifferentiation is penalized in business) reminded me a line from Jeff Bezos: “Differentiation is survival.” And James Dyson even goes as far as to say “Difference for the sake of it in everything” — which I think is a fantastic line to bias ourselves towards differentiation.

In the business context, the opposite of the entrepreneur who is concerned about the customer, would be an employee in a big corporation who is mainly concerned about his reputation in the firm and on not losing his job — so again here we have the agency problem and a focus on the cosmetic in order to give a good impression to peers and managers. This can also be captured in that popular line about IBM computers, the line goes: ‘No one ever got fired for buying IBM’.

Rory Sutherland (vice-chairman of Ogilvy & Mather and also a good friend of Nassim Taleb) would later comment on this line on his book Alchemy…

🟠 Rory Sutherland:

‘No one ever got fired for buying IBM’ was never the company’s official slogan – but when it gained currency among corporate buyers of IT systems, it became what several commentators have called ‘the most valuable marketing mantra in existence’. The strongest marketing approach in a business-to-business context comes not from explaining that your product is good, but from sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt around the available alternatives. The desire to make good decisions and the urge not to get fired or blamed may at first seem to be similar motivations, but they are, in fact, never quite the same thing, and may sometimes be diametrically different.

👉 Book: Alchemy, by Rory Sutherland.

So in this example from Rory we can see how the employee will pick the suboptimal but conventional choice over the optimal but unpopular one, because if the choice turns out to be bad, he will not get fired if he followed the conventional practice — whereas he might get fired if he picked the uncommon alternative.

💡Idea #15: How To Make (True) Friends

Taleb says that if you wanna build genuine friendships, the relationship can never be hierarchical. Instead, the relationship should be as equals — in what the psychologist Alfred Adler would call a horizontal relationship. And although wealth is an obvious generator of a hierarchical structure, Taleb also talks about a much less obvious generator: your level of erudition…

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Being rich you need to hide your money if you want to have what I call friends. This may be known; what is less obvious is that you may also need to hide your erudition and learning. People can only be social friends if they don’t try to upstage or outsmart one another. Indeed, the classical art of conversation is to avoid any imbalance, as in Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier: people need to be equal, at least for the purpose of the conversation, otherwise it fails. It has to be hierarchy-free and equal in contribution. You’d rather have dinner with your friends than with your professor, unless of course your professor understands “the art” of conversation.

Indeed, one can generalize and define a community as a space within which many rules of competition and hierarchy are lifted, where the collective prevails over one’s interest. Of course there will be tension with the outside, but that’s another discussion.

As I mentioned earlier, the psychologist Alfred Adler also talked about the importance of avoiding all sorts of hierarchical relationships — which he calls vertical relationships. And instead build hierarchical-free relationships — which he calls horizontal relationships. Adler argues that one of the big problems with hierarchical relationships is that it creates a feeling of competition, a feeling that the other person is a rival, and this feeling creates loneliness because you cannot fully trust a rival or root for a rival. In contrast, if you are in hierarchical-free relationships, you will see others as comrades, which creates a feeling of community, which ultimately leads to happiness and peace. If you wanna learn more about Adlerian psychology, I recommend you checking out the book The Courage To Be Disliked.

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend.”

- Albert Camus

💡Idea #16: Rationality is About Survival

I found this idea really interesting because it challenges the conventional view on Rationality. The conventional view is to examine a belief in and of itself, and then conclude that it’s rational if it makes sense and is scientifically true, or conclude that it’s irrational if it doesn’t make sense and is false. So what Nassim proposes is that we shouldn’t just examine a belief in and of itself — but go beyond that, and examine also it’s consequence on our survival — and the consequence on our survival should be the only judge as to whether the belief is rational or irrational. Therefore, we cannot say that a belief is rational or irrational in and of itself, instead we can say that it’s rational if the belief helps you survive, or irrational if the belief hinders your survival.

So rationality is also about skin in the game, since we are looking at the real life consequences of beliefs — rather than the pure intellectual domain of the beliefs — to decide whether it’s rational or not.

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

The only definition of rationality that I’ve found that is practically, empirically, and mathematically rigorous is the following: what is rational is that which allows for survival. Unlike modern theories by psychosophasters, it maps to the classical way of thinking. Anything that hinders one’s survival at an individual, collective, tribal, or general level is, to me, irrational.

…

Superstitions can be vectors for risk management rules. We have as potent information that people who have them have survived; to repeat, never discount anything that allows you to survive. For instance, Jared Diamond discusses the “constructive paranoia” of residents of Papua New Guinea, whose superstitions prevent them from sleeping under dead trees. Whether it is superstition or something else, some deep scientific understanding of probability that is stopping you, it doesn’t matter, so long as you don’t sleep under dead trees. And if you dream of making people use probability in order to make decisions, I have some news: more than ninety percent of psychologists dealing with decision making (which includes such regulators and researchers as Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler) have no clue about probability, and try to disrupt our efficient organic paranoias.

Taleb’s proposition of rationality reminded me of something I read in the book The Lessons of History written by Will and Ariel Durant…

Will Durant & Ariel Durant:

History remains at bottom a natural selection of the fittest individuals and groups in a struggle wherein goodness receives no favors, misfortunes abound, and the final test is the ability to survive.

Nature and history do not agree with our conceptions of good and bad; they define good as that which survives, and bad as that which goes under.

👉 Book: The Lessons of History, by Will Durant & Ariel Durant.

A few days ago I was listening to a conversation between David Senra (host of the Founders podcast) and Tobi Lutke (founder of Shopify). And I heard Tobi explain the power of Affirmation and how helpful it’s been in his career. So seen from this frame of survival, it is absolutely rational to believe in affirmation because it helps you survive — in this case to survive in business.

Another example is Marc Benioff, who after attending a few of Tony Robins motivational seminars was deeply moved to start his own business. That business is Salesforce and as of today is worth over 200 billion dollars.

“Rationality is avoidance of systematic ruin.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

And that’s where I’ll leave it.

I highly recommend buying the book.

And if you prefer something shorter with all the key ideas I recommend you checking out Shortform. I’ve been using Shortform for years and it’s part of my learning funnel: So first I would read many book summaries on Shortform — this is what I call the discovery phase — and when I find one that hooks me, I then buy the book and read it — this is the exploitation phase. But even after reading the book, I would go back to the summary on Shortform to remind myself of the key ideas from time to time — and I do this because repetition is how we learn.

They have a library of over a thousand book summaries — including the whole collection from Taleb — and for each summary they have exercises, an audio version, you can make notes and highlights, and you can even download the book summary as a PDF (so you can read offline and keep it with you). It also comes with an AI browser extension to summarize any article or video on the web.

And by the way Shortform is not sponsoring this blog post, but I do have an affiliate link that can get you a 5-day free trial and an exclusive 20% discount. Just go to shortform.com/almanackbooks

Also, don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss future book reviews!

And thank you for reading :)

👋 Hey friend,

Today’s insight is one of my favorite human fallacies from Taleb.

I heard it a few years back on a talk he gave at Google, and now I heard it again to refresh it — but to my surprise, I realized I haven’t shared it on Little Almanack !! So here it is.

👤 Doers

💡Nugget

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

There is a story in both Antifragile and Skin in the Game, of a fellow who lost a million dollars trading green lumber.

He knew everything about green lumber. Everything! The economics, the mathematics, the statistics, collected data, everything…

And [yet] lost a million dollars.

And [he] wrote an account: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars. And he reports that there's a fellow, a pit trader — I don't know if you've met pit traders, but they look like pit traders and they act like pit traders. And the fellow is making tons of money with green lumber and had been doing so consistently. Now, the narrator discovers that the fellow [who] made a lot of money on green lumber thought it was lumber painted green. He didn't know it was freshly cut lumber.

So, is it that that person knew nothing about lumber?

No. He knew a lot of stuff, but not necessarily what you think from the outside is valuable.

So, when you have skin in the game, you tend to know a lot of stuff about business, about things, that you wouldn't guess you need to know from the outside. And this is very hard to explain. This is why machine learning is successful, because machine learning has no ideas. It learns from the inside, not from the outside.

👉 Nassim Taleb’s Talk at Google

There's another illustration on his book Antifragile. It's a personal experience from Taleb, during the period when he was transitioning from his academic studies to becoming a derivatives professional — focusing on exchange rates (where he had to cohabit with foreign exchange traders).

You can read his account below...

🟠 Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

My first conversation with an expert was with a fellow called B. Something-that-ends-with-a-vowel dressed in a handmade Brioni suit. I was told that he was the biggest Swiss franc trader in the world, a legend in his day—he had predicted the big dollar collapse in the 1980s and controlled huge positions. But a short conversation with him revealed that he could not place Switzerland on the map—foolish as I was, I thought he was Swiss Italian, yet he did not know there were Italian-speaking people in Switzerland. He had never been there. When I saw that he was not the exception, I started freaking out watching all these years of education evaporating in front of my eyes. That very same day I stopped reading economic reports. I felt nauseous for a while during this enterprise of “deintellectualization”—in fact I may not have recovered yet.

👉 Book: Antifragile