Try free for 30 days
-
An Economist Walks into a Brothel
- And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk
- Narrated by: Holly Palance
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from Wish List failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for $21.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also picked
-
Thinking in Bets
- Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
- By: Annie Duke
- Narrated by: Annie Duke
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Super Bowl XLIX, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll made one of the most controversial calls in football history: With 26 seconds remaining, and trailing by four at the Patriots' one-yard line, he called for a pass instead of a handing off to his star running back. The pass was intercepted, and the Seahawks lost. Critics called it the dumbest play in history. But was the call really that bad? Or did Carroll actually make a great move that was ruined by bad luck? Even the best decision doesn't yield the best outcome every time.
-
-
Unbelievable map for structuring thinking. Very useful.
- By X on 28-02-2024
-
Optimal Illusions
- The False Promise of Optimization
- By: Coco Krumme
- Narrated by: Coco Krumme
- Length: 6 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Optimization is the driving principle of our modern world. We now can manufacture, transport, and organize things more cheaply and faster than ever. Optimized models underlie everything from airline schedules to dating site matches. We strive for efficiency in our daily lives, obsessed with productivity and optimal performance. How did a mathematical concept take on such outsize cultural shape? And what is lost when efficiency is gained? Optimal Illusions traces the fascinating history of optimization from its roots in America’s founding principles to its modern manifestations.
-
The Loom of Time
- Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China
- By: Robert D. Kaplan
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 14 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Greater Middle East, which Robert D. Kaplan defines as the vast region between the Mediterranean and China, encompassing much of the Arab world, parts of northern Africa, and Asia, existed for millennia as the crossroads of empire: Macedonian, Roman, Persian, Mongol, Ottoman, British, Soviet, American.
-
My Journeys in Economic Theory
- By: Edmund Phelps
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Edmund Phelps is among the most important economists of his generation. He developed a new understanding of unemployment and inflation and went on to rethink the roots of innovation.
-
American Rascal
- How Jay Gould Built Wall Street's Biggest Fortune
- By: Greg Steinmetz
- Narrated by: Feodor Chin
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Had Jay Gould put his name on a university or concert hall, he would undoubtedly have been a household name today. The son of a poor farmer whose early life was marked by tragedy, Gould saw money as the means to give his family a better life…even if, to do so, he had to pull a fast one on everyone else.
-
Madoff Talks
- Uncovering the Untold Story Behind the Most Notorious Ponzi Scheme in History
- By: Jim Campbell
- Narrated by: Matt Godfrey
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
No name is more synonymous with the evils of Wall Street than Bernie Madoff. Arrested for fraud in 2008 - during the depths of the global financial crisis - the 70-year-old market maker, investment advisor, and former chairman of the NASDAQ had orchestrated the largest Ponzi scheme in world history, fleecing thousands of investors across the globe to the tune of $65 billion. To this day, questions remain: Why did he do it? How did he get away with it for so long? What did his family know? Who is the elusive Bernie Madoff?
-
-
Great audiobook
- By Eduardo Batres on 26-03-2023
-
Thinking in Bets
- Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
- By: Annie Duke
- Narrated by: Annie Duke
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Super Bowl XLIX, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll made one of the most controversial calls in football history: With 26 seconds remaining, and trailing by four at the Patriots' one-yard line, he called for a pass instead of a handing off to his star running back. The pass was intercepted, and the Seahawks lost. Critics called it the dumbest play in history. But was the call really that bad? Or did Carroll actually make a great move that was ruined by bad luck? Even the best decision doesn't yield the best outcome every time.
-
-
Unbelievable map for structuring thinking. Very useful.
- By X on 28-02-2024
-
Optimal Illusions
- The False Promise of Optimization
- By: Coco Krumme
- Narrated by: Coco Krumme
- Length: 6 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Optimization is the driving principle of our modern world. We now can manufacture, transport, and organize things more cheaply and faster than ever. Optimized models underlie everything from airline schedules to dating site matches. We strive for efficiency in our daily lives, obsessed with productivity and optimal performance. How did a mathematical concept take on such outsize cultural shape? And what is lost when efficiency is gained? Optimal Illusions traces the fascinating history of optimization from its roots in America’s founding principles to its modern manifestations.
-
The Loom of Time
- Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China
- By: Robert D. Kaplan
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 14 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Greater Middle East, which Robert D. Kaplan defines as the vast region between the Mediterranean and China, encompassing much of the Arab world, parts of northern Africa, and Asia, existed for millennia as the crossroads of empire: Macedonian, Roman, Persian, Mongol, Ottoman, British, Soviet, American.
-
My Journeys in Economic Theory
- By: Edmund Phelps
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Edmund Phelps is among the most important economists of his generation. He developed a new understanding of unemployment and inflation and went on to rethink the roots of innovation.
-
American Rascal
- How Jay Gould Built Wall Street's Biggest Fortune
- By: Greg Steinmetz
- Narrated by: Feodor Chin
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Had Jay Gould put his name on a university or concert hall, he would undoubtedly have been a household name today. The son of a poor farmer whose early life was marked by tragedy, Gould saw money as the means to give his family a better life…even if, to do so, he had to pull a fast one on everyone else.
-
Madoff Talks
- Uncovering the Untold Story Behind the Most Notorious Ponzi Scheme in History
- By: Jim Campbell
- Narrated by: Matt Godfrey
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
No name is more synonymous with the evils of Wall Street than Bernie Madoff. Arrested for fraud in 2008 - during the depths of the global financial crisis - the 70-year-old market maker, investment advisor, and former chairman of the NASDAQ had orchestrated the largest Ponzi scheme in world history, fleecing thousands of investors across the globe to the tune of $65 billion. To this day, questions remain: Why did he do it? How did he get away with it for so long? What did his family know? Who is the elusive Bernie Madoff?
-
-
Great audiobook
- By Eduardo Batres on 26-03-2023
-
Capital Without Borders
- Wealth Managers and the One Percent
- By: Brooke Harrington
- Narrated by: Christina Delaine
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Capital Without Borders tackles this tantalizing question through a groundbreaking multi-year investigation of the men and women who specialize in protecting the fortunes of the world's richest people. Brooke Harrington followed the money to the 18 most popular tax havens in the world, interviewing wealth managers to understand how they help their high-net-worth clients dodge taxes, creditors, and disgruntled heirs - all while staying just within the letter of the law.
-
Fooled by Randomness
- The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
- By: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This audiobook is about luck, or more precisely, how we perceive and deal with luck in life and business. It is already a landmark work, and its title has entered our vocabulary. In its second edition, Fooled by Randomness is now a cornerstone for anyone interested in random outcomes.
-
-
Great book BUT...
- By James on 18-10-2018
-
The Fifth Domain
- Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats
- By: Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake
- Narrated by: Marc Cashman
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Clarke and Knake take us inside quantum-computing labs racing to develop cyber superweapons; bring us into the boardrooms of the many firms that have been hacked and the few that have not; and walk us through the corridors of the US intelligence community with officials working to defend America's elections from foreign malice. With a focus on solutions over scaremongering, they make a compelling case for "cyber resilience" - building systems that can resist most attacks, raising the costs on cyber criminals and the autocrats who often lurk behind them, and avoiding...overreaction.
-
-
wish I read it when it was released
- By JayZee on 21-12-2022
-
A Splendid Exchange
- How Trade Shaped the World
- By: William J. Bernstein
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 17 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In A Splendid Exchange, William J. Bernstein tells the extraordinary story of global commerce from its prehistoric origins to the myriad controversies surrounding it today. He transports listeners from ancient sailing ships that brought the silk trade from China to Rome in the second century to the rise and fall of the Portuguese monopoly in spices in the 16th.
-
How to Decide
- Simple Tools for Making Better Choices
- By: Annie Duke
- Narrated by: Annie Duke
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What do you do when you're faced with a big decision? If you're like most people, you probably make a pro and con list, spend a lot of time obsessing about decisions that didn't work out, get caught in analysis paralysis, endlessly seek other people's opinions to find just that little bit of extra information that might make you sure, and finally go with your gut.
-
-
Waste of my time
- By Anonymous User on 27-01-2021
-
Life After Google
- The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
- By: George Gilder
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
You can say goodbye to today's Internet, New York Times best-selling author George Gilder says. Soon the current model of aggregated free content populated with "value-subtracted" advertising will die a natural deat. In Life After Google, Gilder takes listeners on a brilliant, rocketing journey into the very near-future, into an Internet with a new "bitcoin-bitgold" transaction layer that will replace spam with seamless micro-payments and provide an all-new standard for global money.
-
-
If you like high tech commentary then you’ll love this but.....
- By careful_buyer on 28-09-2020
Publisher's Summary
A Financial Times Book of the Month pick for April!
Is it worth swimming in shark-infested waters to surf a 50-foot, career-record wave?
Is it riskier to make an action movie or a horror movie?
Should sex workers forfeit 50 percent of their income for added security or take a chance and keep the extra money?
Most people wouldn't expect an economist to have an answer to these questions - or to other questions of daily life, such as who to date or how early to leave for the airport. But those people haven't met Allison Schrager, an economist and award-winning journalist who has spent her career examining how people manage risk in their lives and careers.
Whether we realize it or not, we all take risks large and small every day. Even the most cautious among us cannot opt out - the question is always which risks to take, not whether to take them at all. What most of us don't know is how to measure those risks and maximize the chances of getting what we want out of life.
In An Economist Walks into a Brothel, Schrager equips listeners with five principles for dealing with risk, principles used by some of the world's most interesting risk takers. For instance, she interviews a professional poker player about how to stay rational when the stakes are high, a paparazzo in Manhattan about how to spot different kinds of risk, horse breeders in Kentucky about how to diversify risk and minimize losses, and a war general who led troops in Iraq about how to prepare for what we don't see coming.
When you start to look at risky decisions through Schrager's new framework, you can increase the upside to any situation and better mitigate the downside.
Critic Reviews
"In this delightful book, financial economist and risk expert Allison Schrager shows us that the same principles employed by multi-billion dollar pension funds can help us improve risk management in our own lives. She teaches these principles while entertaining us with a series of off-the-beaten-path case studies. By creating distance from our own experiences, she allows us to better understand the principles of risk. It works! Whether a complete novice or a seasoned risk professional, the reader is in for a treat: Bon Appetit!" (Robert C Merton, distinguished professor of finance, MIT Sloan School and Nobel Laureate)
“Prostitution seems like a long stretch from the risks most of us deal with, such as outliving our retirement funds, but Schrager inventively extracts five life lessons from her interviews with practitioners of the so-called oldest profession, as well as others who’ve chosen unusual career paths.” (Bloomberg Businessweek)
“If you want to understand risk better, you have to go into some unconventional settings. In the tradition of Freakonomics, that’s what Allison Schrager does as an economist, and her book is not just informative - it’s an entertaining read too.” (Adam Grant, New York Times best-selling author of Originals and Give and Take)