Nassim Taleb on EconTalk

"Crisis of 2008 was uninteresting to you--puts you in a small group. Most think it is landmark, negative. 
Learned more from stock market crash of 1987 than anything else. Outlier then, world more robust at the time, "it was still a much more significant event than the last crisis." We've had a lot more shocks in history, except it happens that memory is short, for reasons related to education. Professors don't have the incentive to focus on the techne; they focus on the epistome. They don't focus on the "know how"--they focus on the "know what." History is an accumulation of small stories and tricks you can't compress into an equation. This crisis taught me nothing except as a simple test case: built the argument, but we've known about fragility. The new essay is called "On Robustness and Fragility"--we've known the topic since the Babylonians. Slightly long time. Debt fragilizes systems. We've known since the Babylonians; forgotten; the Romans had to relearn it, waging wars to satisfy debt obligations. Entire package of things you don't do and have negative advice, categorical; because heuristics. Anyone who has a grandmother knows about the ills of debt--makes you fragile, makes you a slave, debt is not healthy for an economic system. You need to have the opposite, redundance, to make your life more stable. Any grandmother would have taught you that from experiences of crisis of 1929."

Rest of Interview Here