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Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the #1 NYT Best Selling author of Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, predicted the current banking crisis 12 years ago.

As a trader for 18 years, and an intelligent critical thinker his entire life, Mr. Taleb knows of that which he speaks.  If the current and latest crisis has caught you by surprise I highly recommend reading both of his books to prevent you from being blind-sighted again.

So why didn’t anyone listen to him?  It won’t be a shock to consider selfish greed on the part of those in a position to do something about it as the main cause.  We all know now that trillions of dollars in profit were made by the people with an investment in propping up the house of cards.

Greed leads to neglect and collapse…again.  To gain an understanding beyond the obvious fact that a deregulated industry of sharks couldn’t be trusted to do the right thing, lets look at three quotes from The Black Swan which was written between 2003-2007.

Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one fails, they all fall.  The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crises less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ….I shiver at the thought.

Banks hire dull people and train them to be even more dull. If they look conservative, it’s only because their loans go bust on rare, very rare occasions. But (…)bankers are not conservative at all. They are just phenomenally skilled at self-deception by burying the possibility of a large, devastating loss under the rug.

The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events “unlikely”.

Hindsight is always 20/20.  Foresight takes a little effort to develop.  By recognizing that Mr. Taleb, and surely some others in the banking and finance industries, did see this train wreck coming down the tracks we can pay more attention to future signs of obvious insanity.

Our biggest major surprise was that invading and occupying Iraq was a bad idea.  Honestly, it didn’t take a foreign policy expert to see that.  Sunni and Shiite factions had been covertly and overtly warring with each other for centuries and no one treats invaders and occupiers as liberators.

Then there was Hurricane Katrina.  Not really a surprise after weather forecasters warned of it’s possibilities years before it happened, but it never the less shocked the nation.  A hurricane in Kansas would be a surprise.  A little critical thinking can go a long way to waking up from the cartoon media trance most of America lives in today.

There will be other crises down the road in many industries.  Some can be predicted and some cannot. Priests and other crusaders of morality will be caught doing the things they condemn, politicians will lie to get what they want, lobbyists will choose personal profit over public interests, and on and on.  Stopped being shocked when these things happen for the hundredth time.

By expecting the unexpected to randomly happen and questioning every time you hear the words, “No one could have predicted this” like it was a fire alarm, you’ll enjoy more peace and sanity.  Or at least you won’t be a blind sheep believing everything the “experts” tell you.

Researchers at the University of Texas did a study in 2007 with 2,000 participants that revealed 237 reasons why people have sex.  (Really, they couldn’t stretch it to 250 to get a good round number?)  But, you won’t find much published information on when people have sex …unless you’re a marketer.

We all know that sex sells and subliminal advertising sells.  Therefore one would expect marketers and advertisers to be all over research on sex, and they are.  If you’d like to know when people have sex it’s very easy to find the answer.  Just open a magazine.

If you choose any magazine randomly and flip through the pages you will notice that most, if not all, of the ads for watches feature prominent watch faces set to 10:10.  Why?  Because statistically most people have sex at 10 pm.

Some of us are morning sex people, and some of us prefer sex earlier or later than 10 pm, but the research in marketing circles says that most of us like our sexy time when we turn the lights out at 10 pm.

The question is, “Does it work?”  Well, I’ve never looked at an ad for a watch and become aroused or felt compelled to buy a watch much less look at the one on my wrist.  But maybe I’m the exception.  What happens to you when you see a big, handsome bold-faced watch set to 10:10?

I bet you didn’t know you could learn so much from a watch ad in a magazine.  When they pay that much attention to try make a watch sexy just imagine what goes into trying to sell you a pair of sexy shoes or a brand new car.

Tonight is the night of the second presidential debate.  This seems like as good a day as any to launch a blog on how you are marketed to by advertisers, politicians, experts, media, and sometimes even your friends. If you think you might hear at least one lie, fabrication or stretching of the truth by Barack Obama or John McCain tonight raise your hand.  (Wow!  That’s a lot of hands!)

Even better, we’ll sometimes cover ways you influence, sell to and market to your friends and sometimes even to yourself.

You are blindly influenced many times a day and you blindly influence others at least a few times a day.  Have you been told an interesting “fact” from a friend today that fit into your beliefs?  Maybe it was about Barack Obama, or John McCain, or Wall Street or any number of newsworthy topics.  Chances are that the “facts” you heard were somewhat truthful and somewhat dubious.

This isn’t a slam on you or your friends.  It’s simply a result of how the human brain works and how our marketing-saturated culture operates in 2008.

Blind patrotism is an obvious example of this.  The first few years after 9/11 we witnessed blind patriotism on steroids.  Emotions ran high which concurrently made critical thinking run low.  This resulted in Americans swallowing gallons of lies that fortunately became obvious in only a few years instead of a few decades.

Again, this is nothing personal, it’s how the human brain operates. Why do you think Tony Robbins and others using NLP (Neurolinguistic programming) have done so well?

As this blog grows we’ll explore how our minds deceive us and how others can use this against us.  By realizing how this happens you’ll be one of the few who isn’t going to fall for the B.S. – well, at least not as much of it as your neighbors.

So as you watch the debate tonight, and politicians speaking on any night, keep your critical thinking hat on and put on your glasses to see through the blind influence.