More than 200 people who somehow didn't have to go to work at 10am on Sept. 24, 2014, attended the 90-minute public lecture by Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan and Antifragile.

Held at The Plaza at National Library Building, the philosopher, belletrist and occasional prophet talked briefly about his technical text Silent Risk, which is available online for free, before taking questions from the audience.

In his usual aphoristic approach, this is what he had to say in response to a question about Singapore:

Success leads to comfort, which is not good

"I am certain that your generation in Singapore is probably not as strong as your parents simply because you've had a comfortable life. I'm sure your parents complain about it. I'm sure I'm not the first person to say it because that's what parents always say, generation to generation. My parents were told by their parents that 'You had it too easy'."

"With success comes some kind of comfort and comfort is not always good. You need some stressors, you need to take your body to the gym."

Singapore's small size is its advantage

"Something people don't realise: The success of all city-states is wonderful for several reasons. Because of the acceleration of harm, an elephant is vastly more fragile than a mouse. The elephant is vastly more efficient than the mouse. When you take something large, like plumbing, if you double the size of the animal, we don't need to double the number of arteries. It scales, you only need 70 percent more arteries to satisfy. Which is why an elephant needs only few hours sleep, whereas a mouse needs to sleep all the time."

"As you get large, you get more efficient but you get more fragile to random shocks. The small has some properties that work very well. So, Singapore has size, pretty much the optimal size. And people don't realise that instead of comparing political systems across the globe, there is something in physics called 'scaling'. Scale is vastly more important than anything else. Scale is more important than political regime."

"You can compare countries, like Lebanon and Syria, they eat the same food, have the same bad jokes, have the same good jokes, the same ethnicity, but Lebanon is a fifth of the size of Syria, but have the same GDP."

Why maritime cities thrive

"Why do maritime city-states, why do they do so well? It turns out that a country that has difficulties eating -- I don't think you've had farm land here or ever had a lot of farm land here. The Phoenicians -- Byblos -- right across from Cyprus, had very little resources. So they had to import everything. So they needed to go to Cyprus to get copper. To go to Cyprus what do you need to import copper? You need boats. Now, if you figured out if you had a boat that brings copper from Cyprus, what are you going to do with it? Use it for other stuff when you're not using it for copper. That's a mechanism of overcompensation where effectively you're turning the waters around you into work."

"And that's the story behind Venice, Genoa all the maritime city-states and you don't need that much state for that. You don't need infrastructure. The ocean is right here so it is perfect. You don't need to be large, you don't need big train systems. You don't need all that stuff. Let the Europeans build it."

"City-states have flourished around coastal areas, mostly as self-sufficient ports. Another attribute is that they love commerce, they don't like war, war is something that more men want and peasants tend to do, not city-states that are more sophisticated. And this is one port that you already have, so you'd always be okay from that standpoint."

It's a good thing Singapore doesn't have oil

"The minute you stop being super competitive, you die. Whereas other countries can afford to be complacent. You don't have oil, if you discovered oil in Singapore then you'd be in trouble. But until then, you're okay. You're not Qatar. Basically, if they lose their oil in Qatar, you can't do anything. You can't even drive your car. The level of skills in these countries are very, very low."

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Singapore is, overall, ideal

"So, I have to say, if you look at different levels, Singapore is probably the ideal state in size, the ideal state in stability, the ideal state in governance because the maturity is very, very high. The ideal state, Switzerland, here, small states have that maturity. And if you have been rich because of that, okay maybe you need to put you through summer camp to toughen you up a little bit. Maybe they should create mandatory summer camps where you have no electricity, they wake you up randomly at night... You have that? You have military service? Oh great, so there we go. You even thought of that."

Top photo via SURE Singapore