Nassim Taleb | Why You Should Embrace Uncertainty

25:57Sorry? It's a huge group. It's a much bigger group than the anti-fragile. But whatever doesn't like one won't like the others. This is the interesting thing. What doesn't like time doesn't like unpredictability and doesn't like stressors and doesn't like randomness and doesn't like uncertainty and doesn't like an increased scale of distribution and doesn't like all these things. I feel like you're describing all my emotional relationships with people. Okay, no, but up to a point, of course, some are open-ended, some. So this is what doesn't like time. So this is the fragile, all right? A coffee cup is fragile, okay?

26:28But with respect, you're always fragile with respect to one, all right, what I call source of variation or source of randomness or source of stress. For example, the elderly person is probably extremely fragile with respect to the changes in temperature. But she may not be fragile with respect to, you know, I don't know, emotional stuff. Because she has experience. Oh, whatever it is. People have died. Some people are very domain-dependent in what they're fragile about. Someone could be a weightlifter and he's dumped by his girlfriend and go jump from a cliff. Okay, so you can't really transfer from one domain to the other.

27:10So now we have an idea. Humans can do that, and it's interesting. So humans have an ability to adapt to multiple, let's say, social hierarchies. So I can be in one domain, like handle things emotionally, but not be able to handle extreme changes in temperature, whereas other mammals or other animals almost can't adapt to anything. Humans are more adaptable. Yeah, we are. But that's the thing that's very important to understand that humans are – the reason we're successful is because we are, again, not adaptable, but we have a broader – we depend from – we have – we can make it through different environments thermally, right?

27:56And also, it's very important, we are omnivorous. We can eat everything. Right. And omnivores are rare. It means we can eat like a lion and eat like a cow, you see, and do fine in both cases. And the problem is people don't understand that we are not omnivores by choice. Hence, we need variability in the food supply and we need some deprivation of some food groups once in a while because that's how we became omnivores. Ah, that's a stressor to the system to make us antifragile. Exactly, particularly protein. And I said that if we part lion, part cow, the cow has no randomness in the way it eats, but the lion has more randomness.

28:46So you have to have protein less steadily than other food groups. So I see. So in the areas where you're antifragile, you want to encourage variability. Exactly. So let's put some structure. So we said the fragile doesn't like variation and variability, all right? And we're always fragile with respect to something. The robust doesn't really care, you see? And, of course, the anti-fragile on the right wants, needs variability. And as a matter of fact, it dies if it doesn't have that variability. So if you just eat protein? If you just eat protein, you probably would have no kidneys in no time, all right?

29:25We're made for variability among food groups. If you just eat carbs, you also have a problem. But the thing is what people didn't understand when they started following the paleo diet is that to follow our ancestors' methods, to follow our ancestors' what they did, you need to match not the food composition so much as the food frequency. and I posted the other day I was again I was in some airport and I did the fractal thing about how often we should fast to be consistent with the environment you should also have the stressor of fasting interesting because you mentioned briefly in anti-fragile there's no proof that breakfast really gives you energy for the day exactly, the most important thing is to follow the following guidelines All right.

30:19Science is great. It should give us proofs. But if there's a habit that is not part of our tradition and has not been tested for its benefits, then you should be suspicious. And breakfast is one of them. Does a lion eat to hunt or do you hunt to eat? All right. So you don't need energy visibly. And if you supply yourself too much energy, then you dull your system. And we are a metabolic system. Now, strangely, this idea that I wrote about an antifragile, I thought nobody would get it. People independently, okay, of course, have been doing research on fasting, on if you're keto-adapted, that fasting is important.

30:59And someone, there have been a few bestsellers on that 7-2 diet after antifragile repeating the exact same ideas. But to do it right, you don't follow a regimen of fasting one day a week or, you see, once every two weeks. You need to randomize. In other words, you should fast. If you fast one day every week, you should also fast three days every month and a half and a whole week every two years. I love this idea. No, but if you're made for a statistical environment that has variability, like thermal variability or food group variability or frequency of feeding variability, and you don't have that in your life, you are not human.

31:45You're becoming something else. Unfortunately, we have too much control of our environment. So we are made just for an environment that has variability, but risk came with variability because it's the same thing. Just like we had preferences for sugar because it came with nutrition, right? But it also comes with heart problems, but we need nutrition. but the environment didn't give us the granularity to differentiate between small quantities and large quantities, you see, because we didn't have that chance. The same thing with variability. We could not control our environment. So we disliked variability and randomness.

32:24And now we live in an environment where we can control that small randomness and it's killing us, you see. So you can kill someone literally by feeding them too steadily, and effectively that's how diabetes comes from. And how was the evidence? I read the papers, cited many of them in antifragile, but many came out later, that effectively all these fasting stuff that have been experimented up to four days by Walter Longo, by Mattson, by all these people, realize that there are some benefits, but also especially the absence of other diseases have come with it. So, for example, epileptic seizures for children.

33:06We know that drugs are good, but the first, the most effective thing to start with is avoidance of sugar, avoidance of carbs. And another thing is diabetes. Diabetes is the first thing should be to starve someone for a while, to teach the stressor and see if – and you can figure out how often they have diabetes. by the frequency of famine. You can back from the disease, you can get the statistical properties of famine and our habitat from that. And this is mathematically very easy to do. Nobody has done it, but I mean, I have a sketch of how it's been done. For example, if you starve yourself for a day, once in a while, you have some benefits with asthma.

33:52So you know asthma comes from this. It doesn't come from this, but you can make a statistical link and then you can say, okay, diabetes has this link. So you're not saying where asthma comes from, you're saying how asthma can be avoided. I'm saying there's a mismatch between us and the environment, you see. And it looks like because we have a spate of diseases that we had to have at least one starvation day every fortnight, you see. You had to have a week every year or something. You can back out from the environment what the shape of that statistical curve should be, you see, with some comfortable precision.

34:34So to go back to the structure that we have, we have the fragile, the robust, and the anti-fragile. What makes the anti-fragile very powerful is that you can measure if something is anti-fragile from local sensitivity. And that is what is interesting for us. For example, why am I making statements that fasting is good for you, like the stress or deprivation? You have to have some acceleration of gain locally. Just like you have to have some acceleration of harm locally for something to be fragile. And let me explain it. I can see with fasting you could have both. But let me go back to the definition of fragile to see how we can go from there, from one to the other.

35:15Because it's always easier to explain the fragile than the anti-fragile, mostly because our brains are risk averse. You see? So let me explain the fragile first. The first thing you know when you're short volatility in the markets is that a 10 % drop in the market harms you a lot more than twice a 5 % drop. You see? Okay. Likewise, if you jump 10 meters, you're harmed a lot more than twice if you jump 5 meters. Actually, 10 meters, you'd go. All right? and 5 meters again in turn is a lot better, a lot worse once 5 meters and two times the risk of 2.5 meters and so on. And things have to be that way because if the curve are linear, you see, then you would die just walking.

36:05So you have to have, you know, if I smash my car against a wall at 50 kilometers per hour, I'm harmed a lot more than 50 times if I smash it at 1 kilometer per hour, you see. So, and this is a property of everything that has survived. Why? Because things that are linear to harm are already gone. So the fragile, you can detect acceleration. If you have acceleration of harm, you see, if you start having acceleration of harm locally, then you can detect fragility. So fragility is almost related to almost a survival of the fittest because we created the, we control the environment of our fragile. No, no, let me, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, let me, I'm talking about something technical here, but I'll get to that.

36:49In other words, the way fragility has to show acceleration of harm. You see? It has to come with it. You have to have acceleration of harm, some kind of, I call it a concavity argument. Likewise, antifragility has to show some acceleration of benefits somewhere. And if you detect that, then you have a local antifragility. And maybe I'll give you a MOOC. Many MOOC I gave the students, five minutes, where I explained that with curves. And let me explain why acceleration of benefits.

37:22Is it better for you to have, for example, if you're convex, to have, say you have lung ventilator, all right? If it's better for you to have 100 % of the dose all the time or 50 % one time, 150 % the other time? That would be probably much worse. No, much better. Oh, yeah. Exactly. And then I mentioned an antifragile, that lung ventilators, people made the mistake of thinking you need steadiness. If you have that convexity effect, which means that 50 % one day, one minute, 150 % the other minute, is a lot better than 100 % of the dose all the time, then you're antifragile. And that shows an acceleration on a graph.

38:10You see? So it's the same thing with a coffee cup. You want to hit it with intensity of two per, say, intensity of two. You can hit it 100 times in the intensity of two. It won't break. But if you have the time intensity of one, half the time intensity of three, it would break. You see? So if the linear combination of two different numbers is worse, you're fragile. And if the linear combination is better, you're anti-fragile. Let's apply it to feeding, right? Or to the temperature. Is it better to spend the whole day at 70 degrees for your health or spend some time at 50 degrees and some time at 90 degrees?

38:54Well, obviously it's better for your health to spend, to have that variation. So a linear combination of 50 degrees and 90 degrees is better for your health than just 70 degrees. It means you're anti-fragile. And you can keep varying that interval to see up to what point because visibly we're fragile if you, instead of having 10 degrees variation or 20 degrees variation, you go to 100 degree variation. You would die in both cases. So you're fragile when it starts harming you, the interval, and narrowing the interval for keeping the same average. It seems like anti-fragility in that case is almost like a donut.

39:29Exactly. Fragility in the middle and fragility on the outside. So if the variability is too much, I'm fragile again. Some things are, yeah, something like randomness. Now you're talking about evolution. Let me talk about evolution. Without randomness, you don't have evolution because you don't have the fitness. Say there are a lot of mechanisms of evolution. One of them is noise in your DNA. If you have no noise and the DNA is transmitted without replicating error, because every time someone has a child, there's a replicating mistake. Not every time, but statistically, there are mistakes in replicating the DNA.

40:08So, if you try giving a DNA deterministically without mistakes, you don't have evolution. But if you have mistakes, you know, you're going to have 10 offspring. Some of them will benefit from the mistake, all right? Then you have evolution, all right? Those benefits get an advantage and keep going. So, replication error is good. So, something that likes an error, all right, has some advantages. The problem is that your error rate is too high. You will never conserve the benefit. So you have to have some error rate, not too high and not too low. And this is, yeah, this is, you know, why what I say is that antifragility is local.

40:45It's good, for example, to have 1 % error, not 1%, 1 per thousand error rate, for example, because it's good. But if you have 10 % error rate, then your offspring will not retain that advantage to transmit it to their own.

41:05So antifragile is local, except in finance, where it's sort of, you know, finance is always weird, where you can have things that benefit from volatility with no ceiling, contractually. Or some things may have a high ceiling.

41:32again use a concept of antifragile and convexity and I'll show you lift weight what's better to build muscle to lift a thousand times one kilo or one pound or one time 100 pound well I wouldn't be able to lift a thousand times one pound so I'd have to go with a hundred I wouldn't be able to lift a thousand kilos No, no, no. What I meant is 100 times one pound or one time 100 pounds? Oh, I would say one time 100 pounds. Okay, so there you go. So there you get the convexity. Is that every pound gives you more benefits, you see, for giving the same amount, total amount that you're going to lift. To a certain amount.

42:19Up to a certain point. But visibly, you're not going to have health benefits lifting 1 ,000 pounds because then you would break your... Give a repetitive stress disorder. No, no, no. or a thousand pounds will break your bones. Oh, right, right. Whatever it is. But if you lift a hundred times one pound, you just get repetitive stress disorder. You won't get that. Exactly. You won't build any muscle. Exactly. So the whole idea of antifragile is understanding what I call the convexity effect. The convexity effect, if a linear combination of two things, all right, is better, you know, than one thing of the same average.

42:54But what I like about that is you don't have to explain why something works because then you go into the realm of mythology. You just have to understand this, measuring this aspect of the type of job. Exactly. I'm very skeptical of people who try to understand the mechanism. Like why does a 100-pound weight build muscle? We don't really know. Exactly. And I said it here in the book. I said that when I started weightlifting, I was told, hey, there are micro tears that fill up, you know, and then you eat your protein and, okay, you have a protein shake and the micro tears that fill up with muscle and everybody's happy because of the tear.

43:35Okay, that's a very nice story. But then I came back and asked, yeah, but how come the lion has so much muscle without working out, all right? Well, they say, well, it's hormonal, all right? They say, ah, hormonal. And then discovered that people who take steroids grow in muscles, all right? So you realize that muscle growth is something informational that doesn't seem to have much to do with the way people used to interpret it. So the theory behind muscle growth will change maybe every generation and we'll never converge because science doesn't work. It doesn't have definitive answers. We'll never fully converge.

44:11But the fact that if I live 100 pounds, I will gain muscle will never change. So when you can observe – is robust, okay, theories, the explanation, are not. And people yet have more respect for theory than phenomenology. Phenomenology is cataloging things that have monstrous regularity without really understanding the reason. And I don't have to explain that to you what the mechanism by which if I hit someone on the head, okay, he's gonna, you know, not do well, right? You don't have to explain the blood vessel. I don't, you know, the fact is it won't change the story at all. So in my book, our methodology is very robust, right?

44:53Phenomenology is very robust, okay? It does catalog things that we know that if you overeat, you're going to gain weight. Now, what's a pathway that will store? Who cares, right? If we focus on these things that we know, we do a lot better, you see? I'm not against science. I'm against interpreting scientific theories as truth rather than focusing on robust phenomenologies. You see? And statistical regularities are part of that phenomenology. You see? The way we handle randomness is part of that phenomenology. And there are some things that are necessary, mathematically necessary, absolutely necessary mathematically.

45:34Like, for example, that if you are convex, in other words, if 80 % of it, then necessarily you like variability. Then necessarily you are antifragile, that thing. Then necessarily you benefit from random supply of that thing. If you like, if you do better, and you take those books on starvation now, many, many of them showing how cancer cells do. Okay, but if you look at it, you say people effectively do better after X days of starvation. and then they can eat all they want. So visibly, instead of eating 2 ,000 calories for eight days, they eat zero, and then they can eat the rest. They do a lot better, okay?

46:16But you don't have to go into the mechanism to understand that that's a regularity. You see, that you can... And from that, you can make mathematical statements without having to understand the process at all because it's necessary. Well, let me ask you a question. And because we've removed so far, let's say, from – because we have this controlled environment that we can control, do you have to now measure statistically to get us back to – Exactly. That's the problem. Okay. Let's go back to life, all right? We had no control over transportation, so we walked a lot, right? And now we got better.

46:54We have – we can make life comfortable with a car, okay? Now, what do you do? you drive your car to the gym to compensate for it, you see, and walk on a treadmill, you see. Normally that's completely absurd, but we do that. No, that's a compensating fact to fix it. But this is not something new. The Greek Orthodox religion forces us to have 200 vegan days. I didn't know that. Yeah, because in opulent societies, you know, you overeat on lab, you know, you're going to be harmed. So we have, including 40 days of Lent, we're entirely vegan. You go through 40 days of purely vegan stuff. We have Ramadan in Islam.

47:37If it's done properly, you should, you know, and Judaism has six days of fasting plus recommended a lot of rabbis, fast X number of days, just to have a clear mind. So if you look at, so these are compensators. There's no difference from going to the gym to compensate from the fact that we have too much control of our environment. And it's the same thing with the lack of coal. I was in, I mean, you have saunas, right, where you induce variation, okay, and you have reverse saunas. I was in Qatar, a place I hope, you know, not go back because I don't like their politics and they may force me to stay there.

48:18Anyway, so I was in Qatar and I noticed that they had a reverse sauna, which is a room where temperature is kept at something like minus 20 degrees centigrade, where you go for a minute, maximum a minute, to a reverse sauna, right? Now, all these things come from the fact that we have too much control of our environment, and thermal stability and mechanical stability and these things are effectively weakening us. But then you have to measure whether that's... Now we're in a position where we have to measure if that's good or not. We can guess pretty much. I mean, we can guess that if you don't walk too much, you're going to gain weight, you're going to do this, you're going to have this.

48:57You can guess that if you don't, you know, go lift weight in the gym, your bone density will do so. So you can pretty much calibrate your life to have enough. And most people do. They live healthy lives, you know, live in cities where they walk a lot. Now it's impossible. You know, at some point it was easy to drive in New York City. Now it's impossible. Somehow our environment also is forcing us to go back to more ancestral methods. Right, and you mentioned there's an anti-fragility there because people might complain, oh, I'm stuck in traffic, but, oh, I'm in a city where, or there is some anti-fragility there, where I'm in a city where everybody wants to go.

49:36So the fact that I'm in harm means I'm in a popular place where there might be money and opportunities and so on. Exactly, exactly. I mean, you don't complain about traffic. It means other people want to be there as well. Yeah. It's just that there's something very interesting, by the way, about traffic. Traffic is highly nonlinear. And people made mistakes of not predicting traffic based on local response of delays. Like the city of New York wasn't good at understanding nonlinearity with traffic. That if you shut off a bridge, for example, the 59th Street Bridge for a film on Saturday, don't predict that it's going to slow down traffic by 10 minutes.

50:19It took me four and a half hours. I was stuck in a car. So, I mean, of course, it's my mistake to drive to New York City, but that was for dinner. You see the idea, incidentally, talking about traffic. Now, it's very important to realize that risk is not variability, but our instinct mixes the two of them. Like in finance, people think that risk is something that moves. No, risk is something that makes you go bust, right? Because things that move aren't necessarily risky, but that's what people are afraid of. That's very interesting because variability you can measure, whether something moves or not, you can see.

50:57Exactly, exactly. But risk for me is different than risk for you. Risk for each person is different. Risk, it depends on the definition of risk. Risk of loss. Fragility, yeah. We define fragility as much easier to measure, right? You can say, okay, at what point will this break? There is some mapping of risk to fragility in some cases called ruin, total ruin. What's the probability of total ruin? But typically, risk is not what we think is risk because most people who try to control variability of portfolio blow up. I said that forests, if you try to control the fires and forests, You end up letting the bad material accumulate, and then the forest, you know, you know what happened to these forests when there's a fire.

51:45The same thing with emerging market governments. I remember controlling their currency. Like I saw Mexico in 1994 moving like 30-some percent, the currency, all right? I'm still talking like a trader. I'm saying the Mexican peso, we call it Mexico, all right? So I still remember, and what happened, if you control volatility, bring it to zero, The minute you have a small move, it's out of control. I've seen Argentina freezing the currency for a long time. And the minute you let it float or you're forced to let it float or it floats by itself, you know what happens. So controlling variability has never been a good idea in any domain.

52:33You have to have some element of variation for things that are alive. So other than, let's say, the financial markets, what are some clear areas where you see people trying to control variability? I mean, I wrote on the Black Swan that Syria was going to blow up because they had no political variability. You need maximum political variability because things blow up otherwise. Flammable material, as I said. And if you generalize it, you realize that you want a municipal system where you have maximum variability because it's more of a continuum rather than have a president at the top. So like a Switzerland type of...

53:10Like a Switzerland type in a municipal system with a lot of distributed decision-making, small mistakes made here and there. But Syria, the next one is Saudi Arabia, would be the next route to drop. They have had zero political variability. So the minute there's something, nobody knows how deep it can get or if it can control it. In a political domain, in a lot of domains, absence of variability is bad. Actually, something I discovered recently, if your heart has too steady a beat, the heartbeat is very steady, guess what? It's predictive mortality. That's interesting. It's very predictive. This is what I get worried about.

53:55I actually wrote you this in an email recently. I myself have never been to a hospital, have not gotten sick. I'm worried if I ever do get sick, my body will just blow up. It could be with age that you're getting sick. In fact, I'm getting over it. Maybe. It could be. I don't know. I didn't look at it. I mean, infectious diseases aren't so much my domain. I'm just worried that my mind won't be able to handle it once I get sick because I'll be so fragile about the concept of getting sick. Really? Maybe induce yourself. Go to some country or you can contract. Get malaria or something. Not malaria.

54:34something less chronic. I don't know. It is interesting. But you mentioned in the book, in Antifragile, that you do have an antifragile personal program for yourself. Like you like to, for instance, walk on uneven surfaces. Uneven surfaces. I like to walk on rocks, not walk on roads. And there's evidence, actually, that walking on rocks, for instance, increases lifespan. I broke a nose initially, but since then, I've been doing rather well, and I feel alive after I walk. And I think that we didn't understand sleep for a long time, people trying to reduce sleep and then having problems elsewhere.

55:16I think we also don't understand walking. I say statistically we've been walking so much in our history, I need a very convincing reason to stop doing so, and there's none. So I try to walk, pretty much what I try to do as main activity. is some 20 some hours a week minimum but I've noticed one thing to have a comfortable life I wake up in the morning I don't want to have any obligation except walking and if I walk on something like sleeping on something you walk and I try not to think of that thing at all say I have to write an article and the minute I'm stuck I don't try to make an effort I just walk and I come back All right?

56:01Sometimes come back and it pours out on its own. So in other words, never make an effort locally to try to solve a math problem or do something. So don't stay at a blank screen or a blank page? No, no, nothing. Make no effort. Life is too short. Okay? Just go take a walk and think of something else. And I think I'm sure some mechanism works better when I walk because my main activity since I've been full-time into scholarship and stuff like that I've been reading and walking, right? And the more I walk, the more, I mean, I don't spend a lot of time writing. It just comes out, right? If I don't walk, I have this blank screen business, and then you get in trouble.

56:45So walking is necessary. So walking increases the stress? I don't know the mechanism. I absolutely don't know. No statement, no explanation mechanism, But I look at statistically how much we've been doing it, and I apply it and it seems to work. So in other words, I don't have to come up with an explanation to follow Mother Nature, particularly if I have a hugely positive payoff from it. But then if I'm going against walking, then I want to see the evidence. You see the idea? If I'm going against the natural. And I don't walk on a treadmill. It's kind of nonsense. I just walk outside. So what else is part of your anti-fragile program, your personal one?

57:25My personal one is when I go to a country and drink local water, one for ethical reasons, I drink some water, but non-purified, a little bit. So that's the anti-fragile thing. Reduces surprises, right? So we have had so much control of our hygiene that people are forced now to take pills with bacteria. Isn't it absurd? So exactly like driving to the treadmill. It's always my theory that the peanut allergies this generation, which we never had before, is caused by too much antibacterial. It could be because people don't understand, plus overusing antibiotics. So what I do is I follow the principles that risk is what to worry about, not comfort.

58:11So take no medicine except if I have something very, very severe, in which case I don't see one doctor, I see four of them. Fourth opinion. For opinion. And if someone gives you one, you know, and I double the dose even if necessary. You see the idea? So medicine is very nonlinear to condition. And let me give you the rationale. If you have slightly above normal hypertension, all right, like slightly if you're above the normal intensive, and you take medicine, the number needed to treat is something like 1 in 100, at best 1 in 60. In other words, the number of people who benefit from the medication is very small.

58:57Is that usually true? It's one standard deviation away from normal. That's fascinating. But if you're four standard deviations away from normal or three standard deviation away from normal, something in that area, okay, and you can use standard deviation because Gaussian, a sort of Gaussian, then the numbers needed to treat are monstrously lower, something like 75 % benefit from the drug. So if you were told you had cancer, you wouldn't take any chemotherapy drugs? I would go for, I mean, I would not try, but if someone tells me I have a headache, take this medicine, I wouldn't take it. Plus there's some feedback.

59:38Like if I start taking medicine from headaches, then I'm not limiting the cause. It's just a symptom. But no, to go back. So it tells you, but the harm from medicine is the same. Whether you're high, you see that, it's the same. So the ratio of gain, all right, is not there for mild condition. But the problem is pharma has a difficulty finding people who are very sick. because there are 5 ,000 more people who are slightly hypertensive than very hypertensive, you see? And this is why we tend to overtreat people. And you have to let the variation and the stressors take care of themselves. They make you better.

1:00:21And make sure the extreme is taken care of. Okay, so this is a great field. So medicine, what's another area personally? What about like in relationships? I don't know. I don't have – I have a very boring – It seems like marriage is a fragile thing. I don't know. I've seen people who have – who don't know how to manage the social life, relationship, and overall with their friends, partners, and stuff like that. And I try to avoid these people completely. I cut losses very quickly as a trader. So if you see someone, a business person who had a problem with a partner, I cross the street. I don't get – I mean I may have coffee with them, but I will never do business.

1:01:13So this is something you learn is some people are troublemakers and to stay out of that. But in social relationships, can disruptive people be helpful? in other words, can have anti-fragility by having disruptive people socially. I don't know. I try to avoid disruptive people, but I myself try to be disruptive if I don't like something. Although it sounds like you selectively expose yourself to stressors like on Twitter or something. No, Twitter is not a stressor. Twitter is I aim to just start making, I'm enjoying the medium and it's calculated. This is much more calculated by picking on targets that I don't like, like a couple of economists and publicly.

1:02:03Right. But in private life, I haven't had many – I don't know if in private life I've had many fights except you see some person drunk at a party and I, you know, control the person and get them out. But you don't expose yourself to variability there. You stay around positive people. I haven't. No, I don't. I haven't had street fights in a long time. Haven't had no street fights, no actually shouting match, nothing. But, you know, it's funny, thinking of fighting, like gaming in general, like chess, it's good to study multiple openings so you understand chess better, to have variability in your knowledge.

1:02:51I don't know. All I thought about is that I remember... you know, figuring out that being good at chess doesn't make you necessarily good at other things. That's definitely true. It's very domain-specific. But is it also, how much transfers? I've had a lot of stories. I don't know how much transfers. So this is why I try to avoid analogies to game because life doesn't resemble games. And people think life resembles games tend to get in trouble. But I think that you have to have an element of surprise in your life. Now, let's talk about life. What I think is a great way to be non-fragile in your life.

1:03:36If you're an employee, you're fragile for life. Because even if you're promoted or demoted, it's unpleasant for you. It's fragile. Because if you're promoted, you've got a small increase in salary but a huge increase in responsibility. My point is if you're going to be employed, better be the lowest person, the night guard at the company or someone who… No responsibilities and you get income. And you get income and then you can write poetry at night or be a painter or do things. And in developed countries, you know, like Switzerland, if you want to be a writer, it's much better to be a – work at the minimum wage than – it's very comfortable rather than, you know, be a university English teacher or a German teacher or whatever it is to write books.

1:04:26So being an employee makes you very fragile because the way people start viewing the world prevents them from following their own ethical inclinations. So they'll choose to make an ethical exception to get a promotion, for instance. Or not. For example, you may work for a tobacco company. You may buy stock in a tobacco company because you have a budget to make. So these are ethical dilemmas that you cannot escape when you're employed. It's similar to make a budget. So owning a home makes you more fragile than renting. It depends. I mean, personally, I never borrowed a penny, right? And almost never.

1:05:07I had an arbitrage once on my first job. Trading doesn't count. No, not bankers trust. So I noticed that people who have a mortgage have, of course, are the prisoners of the system, and they underestimate the duration of their employment. And when they start fearing the boss, and if the boss calls them to their office, they're in trouble. If you have money on the side, you're much more robust. And money on the side is the opposite of debt. It's like having an extra reserve. You don't have to predict what's going to harm you. And you depend less on a boss getting rid of you. If the boss doesn't like you, can you imagine how miserable it is, how unnatural a life it is, being in an office for 30 years with someone you hate?

1:05:52And many people do it. And in nature, you've been killed or you would have killed within minutes. So many people, this is a stressor that's not good for you. The chronic stressor is not good for you. The varying stressor and the high intensity once in a while stressor is good for you. You see, and of course it maps to what Sapolsky have established about acute versus chronic stressor and stuff like that. But the stressor was a recovery, that is. But to go back to having a good life is I plot an antifragile. I compare a taxi driver in London who has high randomness visibly to his brother who is an employee of a – whatever, a cushy – has a cushy job making the exact same salary, very predictable.

1:06:38If his brother loses his job, he's gone. A taxi driver is protected by the variability because the variability forces them to adjust. So if you don't have business near Heathrow, you try to find another airport, you see? Or maybe, you know, you try to find nightclubs. You're adapted. If you're making a living as a taxi driver in London, you're adapted to the environment, you see? Because every trade is a new trade, as they say. And even if a disruptive company comes along like an Uber, you can just become an Uber driver. Well, you can move around. But his brother spent 30 years in a cushy company.

1:07:16The company has a financial problem. He's gone, and he's not going to land another job at age 53, right? Something quite important. Every system that's organic communicates with its environment via stressors. So you lift weight, it's a stressor. Your system will code for higher bone density and more muscle, you see. You go in the sun, you get a signal, and then you'll code for more protection from the sun. So you get, you know, suntanned, all right? I like your point in anti-fragile that we've been in the sun for millions of years and never got, like, skin cancer from it as far as we know. I didn't make that point so much that I was questioning the idea of avoiding radiation completely, except if you don't have the racial characteristics and racial, the skin tone characteristics of the area in which you live.

1:08:15Right. Like if you're, you know, an Irish person living in Australia, there's no, there's a problem, right? But if you're an Irish person living in Ireland, I don't know, you see. And effectively, it looks like, and now we have evidence that a little bit of radiation is very good for you to protect you from cancer. So elimination of radiation makes you fragile. Just like a little bit of bacteria is good for you to protect you from bacteria, you see. If you live in a sterilized room, you're not going to do very well when you come out of it. So it's among this class of things. So when you are professionally a consultant, okay, not an employee, a consultant, you're going to have variability in your income.

1:09:01But every morning, if you're still making a living, all right, You're fit for whatever environment there is. Okay, so there you're minimally resilient, but not yet anti-fragile. You have to get minimally robust to get in the right direction of anti-fragile. Something anti-fragile is effectively something that gains from stressors to the system and improve from it. We have also to avoid looking at humans as a unit. But you have to look at systems, you see. So sometimes the fragility of the person is necessary for the safety of the system. Take the restaurant business. If restaurant weren't fragile, wouldn't go bankrupt, you wouldn't have a healthy restaurant business where people can eat well.

1:09:53So how can the individual be? What can you do in that environment? You have to make sure that you're capable of starting a new restaurant very quickly. So it's almost like you have to build the sensibility that if this restaurant fails, at least I'll have the experience to build a better restaurant. Exactly. And then you have to integrate that failure in your learning curve. But to really be anti-fragile, you have to be in the business of trial and error where all your side effects are going to be beneficial. And there's no business – it used to be, no longer like that – that benefited from its own mistakes better than pharma.

1:10:30because if you're in that business, you make a mistake with your hypertension medicine has a side effect. Well, that side effect leads to Viagra, for example. Well, that's the good news, you see. And effectively, if you look at, I mean, I have a big bone with academic research, with everything, you know, trying to exactly map the environment, thinking we understand it, fooling ourselves,

1:10:58rather than focusing on payoff. Again, trying to predict rather than focus on exposure. Have a convex exposure, antifragile exposure. It's something like the best model is cooking. You cannot imagine what something tastes like just from writing down on a piece of paper the chemical composition. You cannot. No, you have to try. Well, that protects us from having too many theories in cooking. and then everything goes by trial and error. But why does trial and error work well? Where I'm trying to make the perfect hummus. I add an ingredient, all right? It doesn't taste good. I give it to my mother-in-law, you see?

1:11:38So your downside is small. But if I hit on something great, then I'll have my great hummus, you see? So pharma works that way. And the rate of growth of medical research and gains and finding drugs and cures and all that was much higher on the trial and error than today that we think we understand biology. You see? So, given that we make mistakes, we might as well be in an environment where we benefit from mistakes. You see? So, the restaurant industry benefit from the mistake of its members to improve. The airline, the transportation industry, every plane crash reduces the probability of the next plane crash.

1:12:19Benefits from its mistakes. So, that's a healthy system. But it's not necessarily always good news for the people at the bottom, but nevertheless, we can say that if they died, at least they saved more lives than the ones that perished. Do you think – so given like the current economy, which is sort of floating on top of these bailouts from 2009, what's your stance? Well, I mean bailouts are, of course, against my religion, against everything I believe in because you're disrupting the system, creating moral hazard. You didn't let the crash happen? I would – In the system. Yeah, but the counterfactual is wrong.

1:12:56My peers say, well, would you have saved the economy, let it fail then? If – you know, it's a wrong counterfactual. You would have opposed bailout since 1982 when Mr. Reagan started bailing out the banks. 83, you know, when they bailed out Cornell, Illinois, when it started having these systems. So the bailout situation is tricky. You cannot say well. You have to look at it as an ensemble. Build a system that doesn't require bailout. And we know how to build these systems. What's a system that doesn't require bailout? Well, the first thing is you force everyone in banks that require bailout to be, you know, why are we bailing out the bank?

1:13:37It's too big. We're not bailing out the restaurant, although the consequences locally on the person and the staff are the same. They're going to be unemployed Monday morning. And with financial losses. But we don't care. We care about protecting the system. So if someone is making$20 million bonuses and we're going to bail them out, take a mistake if he's wrong, that's wrong. So any business that's bailable out should not have these bonuses. And people tell me, well, we lose talent. I say the banking industry has proved only one talent that of getting paid individually because it's a business that never made money.

1:14:19You see? So this is how you structure a system to be robust from the inside. You structure a business, the banking business, to be like the restaurant industry. You don't structure it to be something like government. Another thing that's very central for a system to work well is to have what I call skin in the game. In other words, people bear direct consequences for action, not because it's a deterrent, but because it's a filter. Because if you go bust yourself, you're out of the pool. You see, if you're a bad driver, okay, that's fine. You're allowed to be a bad driver, but we don't want you to harm others.

1:14:56So if bad drivers tend to die because they get into accidents or kill other people, they would much more likely reduce the number of fatalities than if they didn't survive. Likely to kill those who kill other people driving. This is my idea of skin in the game as a symmetric risk thing that causes bad risk takers to be harmed. Or to at least learn. I don't believe in learning. I really don't believe in learning at the individual level. I believe systems learn through filters.

1:15:48What about entrepreneurship, though? So if somebody starts a business and fails, they might learn from that experience. Yeah, they learn from the experience. And also the business model of entrepreneurship is what I was in, out-of-the-money options. I bought out-of-the-money options. I always lost money. I was in business of, you know, people. It's very interesting. Entrepreneurship is like buying out-of-the-money options. Exactly. And you have people who kept telling me that I was doing the wrong thing, and they still work for a living. You see? And so you can only smile and say, okay, be polite to them.

1:16:20And they teach you how. Because my reason is that the tails, okay, is any error in model, all right, means the tails have to be more valuable. And it's a little complicated to do without a grasp. No, no, but that's interesting. So entrepreneurship is actually saying the tails have more value than anybody else thought before. And so you're going to develop your business and those tails. The world is built today by entrepreneurs. Everybody who short tails, there's no business that short tails. They're still in existence. Insurance companies are the only ones who do it because they do it with things that are thin-tailed and cap the tail.

1:16:56They don't have the exposure in the tail. Insurance companies, people don't understand that. Insurance companies, they don't sell tails. They sell the body distribution and they block you. For example, your house, they cap you. What interests me is beyond the cap. Right. So, I mean, I was in the business of buying tails, all right, or at least protecting people from not having the tails and stuff like that. So, it is when you're in a business like that, you start looking at the world of tails, and you see who understands tails, and you realize entrepreneurship. If the tails weren't mispriced by the world, we wouldn't be where we are today.

1:17:32You see? Look at the wealth generated. Where did the wealth come from? All right-tailed things, businesses, computers, entrepreneurship is a right-tailed proposition. All right? And the businesses that were short-tailed, there's three of them. All right? Banking is one, never made a penny. Another one is insurance, reinsurance. The ones that made even substandard stuff was because they were capping the tail. You see? So let's take someone like Warren Buffett, though, who does catastrophic insurance on states. stadiums. Well, cat insurance, the ones overwritten by these people are not tail events because they're capped.

1:18:15And my tail starts beyond. I had recently someone, I was waiting, I said, I'm not going to attack and print my ideas until I'm waiting for someone to publish something, criticizing my ideas and antifragile about the tails involved. Okay. In a journal, so I can publish it in a scientific journal. and some idiot who's a risk manager or whatever said, oh, Taleb is wrong. Look, there's no volatility. Tails are not volatility. Tail risk is how much of the volatility explained by the tail. You see? So it allowed me to make the point that a business that is fat-tailed, in other words, where the tail plays a large role, has usually less variation.

1:19:01You see? And more of the variation comes from jumps. Sort of like look at Argentina. Well, when you have a fat tail, you start to get into a power law. Sorry? When you have the fat tail, it could be a power law. No, no, no. The characteristic of a fat tail is not that there is a fat tail event, because often you don't see it. There's no volatility outside the fat tail event. And mathematically, you showed it mathematically in that paper, and published, of course, in the same journal, right, what I call elements of quantitative finance, what people don't understand about tail. It was four mistakes.

1:19:33But it was very interesting because then I caught a risk manager who didn't understand risk, that the risk isn't in variation. Effectively, when you shift to fat-tailed, in other words, it's not so much volatility. The VIX doesn't represent fat-tailedness. It represents variation. And usually to build, like I used to build fat-tailed trades, I would sell volatility and buy the tails and all be harmed by medium volatility, not very fat-tailed volatility, which is what people couldn't understand what my business was. Tell them, I don't want medium volatility. I want no volatility or maximal volatility, right?

1:20:06So to really map it into businesses that have typically, you can tell actually that businesses that are short the tail tend to have steady income. And businesses that are long the tail tend to have erratic, highly variable, and typically not good outside of tail events. And these are the businesses, effectively, that have produced what we have in the world. Now, scientific discovery is a fat-tailed event. It's hunting for out-of-the-money options. They're on cost. I mean, we spend a lot of money trying, right? Pharma. Pharma is the biggest fat-tailed of fat-tailed as an industry. You look how much money they're in.

1:20:46What's their business? Their business is keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. You have cost of trying. We have small losses. Out-of-the-money option, and you finance it. So, I see. So what's ruined it a little bit is that the FDA requires more and more money to get a drug through trial, so it's hard to do trial and error. The cost of trial and error increases, right, visibly under regulation and other environments and increases also under – okay, what happens is that if you're – what people don't realize is the return is much more linear to the number of trials than to total dollar spent. and people now go for blockbuster drugs so they spend a lot of money in one direction so more prone to error.

1:21:28When you hunt for fat tales, a business that understands fat tales very well is publishing, right? Like cinema. That's a fat tale business. We're not far from my publisher, Random House. Go to the lobby of Random House on Broadway. Go to the lobby and walk in. The first time I walked in, I was not yet published you know I wasn't a best-selling author so someone made me wait you know they make you wait if you're this and otherwise you're a best-selling author then you have a special elevator you see the thing so when you wait in the lobby I looked and I said oh my god this building likes publishers or publishers like this building because they're nothing but publishing houses guess what it turned out to we all belong to the same Bertelsmann right Because when you're in a fat-tailed business, you make your income off of a few blockbusters.

1:22:22You've got to have thousands of books. So again, so this is resilient. So they have like 70, 80 publishing houses, separate publishing houses in the same building. Right. In a random house, Crown, Knopf, this, that, things you've never heard of, all right? Yeah. And when you're in a fat-tailed business, you need a lot of small trials. You see, making bets on stuff. And once in a while, you get a Harry Potter. Publishers are essentially venture capitalists on books. Exactly. But now, so that's a resilient business. It's not necessarily anti-fragile. No, it is anti-fragile. They like, I mean, they're...

1:22:59Let's say a book fails. Sorry? If a book fails... It costs them$5 ,000. If they do it right, all right, it's like an option. You lost$5 ,000 if it fails, and you make$100 million if it's right. Right, but if it – so they don't mind failures, but do the failures make them stronger? I mean, no. My mapping of antifragile isn't so much in something makes you stronger and so on, so much in the system benefits from mistakes. Okay. So – or benefits from randomness, benefits from other things, all right? Yes. If you try to publish a book, and typically, let me tell you how the system benefits from mistakes.

1:23:38You're trying to have a hypertension drug and you end up with Viagra. Same thing. They tried to publish a book on some – like they did with the Black Swan. They tried to publish a book on – they thought a narrowly defined subject by an option trader, okay, whom you can probably rely on having a few – and it turned out from an option trading book into some global interpretation of history that made them – that sold X million. Well, you get the idea. So that was a mistake on their part, you see. That was a positive mistake. So they can publish a book like Umberto Eco, they think, is a scholarly book.

1:24:19And their mistake is that it's a hugely popular topic that sells 50 million copies. You see? It's pretty much like a drug. So you have side effects that you didn't predict. But whatever you don't predict, that typically helps you. And that's the idea. So the model itself is strong because sometimes these small losses could turn into huge. Sometimes the mistakes could turn into huge winners. Because no mistake will cost you. It makes your book cost you more than you spent for it. It's like a finite premium for an option. So all the mistakes are the upside. But if you spend a billion dollars for a book, all right, and some people have spent millions and millions on books, all right, the mistake is when you start spending a lot of money on publishing Al Gore, all right, and the thing flops so you have a big loss, you see, for no upside.

1:25:06that's typically when people go for small bets in highly unpredictable domains and in a field that nobody really understands very well, you have a huge upside. So you can look at the P &L of people who have done that, movies, pharma, real estate. Real estate. If I walked into the Black Swan, when I was writing it, thinking that most money was made in America by innovation and high tech and stuff like that. It turned out to be false. The big bucks were made in America, big fortunes. If you look at a time, I look at net worth of people, the big fortunes were made in real estate. And then I understood why it was a sucker game because real estate is long volatility for the owner of the house, so you can borrow, and short for the bank, which explained why the banks never made money.

1:26:07And individuals made tons of money on real estate. And real estate was a good business for these people because they have a free option. It's funny too, like the housing crisis began long before, or not the crisis, but housing was going down for a year and a half before the banks blew up. So housing was handling itself fine, but then the financial crisis happened as a result of that. Yeah, because of the way they package things. But typically banks are good at giving people free options. I remember manufacturers of Hanover went bust because Donald Trump made bad bets. And eventually Donald Trump got rich, right?

1:26:44But Hanover became part of Chemical Bank, became part of now J.P. Morgan, you see. So the mistakes, if a mistake can blow you up, you're not a good business. But what's worse is when someone has an asymmetry. My mistakes blow up the bank, not me, you see, or because the way they finance it. And what it did, even had they not done that, when I looked at the risk of Fannie Mae, even without these packages, banks were overexposed to downside of real estate. So right now in the economy, where do you see the biggest bubbles or risks? I don't know. I mean, I make bets, all right? So my bets are out of my bets.

1:27:31So it's not a predictive bet. I made, after the crisis, I initially made bets on gold. And then I was long gold, short S &P. And then I ended up long both. And then I ended up getting rid of my gold. And why did I have the S &P? Because I said, okay, flooding money in a system, going to either harm the bonds, help the stocks, or both. And then I started getting short bonds in and out. So I had S &P with a shortage bond position, and it paid off. So the quantitative easing was some long real estate that paid off. And then I – because I said, okay, the only way they're curing the system is by giving free money.

1:28:18So you got to – people, free money will go by. So it worked out fine. And so I'll tell you, because skin and game only look at my thing. And then I bought some euros, right, when Europe was – because people on TV would go and say, oh, Europe, as if it was a catastrophe. It was like Dresden, you know, with a big hole, with smoking, like Syria, pictures of Syria today. Then I bought some Europe or I bought European currency because they weren't engaged in the same thing. And then I got out of it. So now my exposures now are minimal to anything now. So, given that, it means I don't have a view of anything, but I'm trying to get out of trouble.

1:29:01It's good sometimes. It's, I would say, anti-fragile sometimes to minimize. You want to be in cash. My only risk of being in cash is you miss on – you can have inflation, okay, or you miss on something. So, there's risk to be in cash. What I call cash, I have two cash. I have cash, cash, cash that can be invested. And I have what I call numeraire to protect me from inflation. which is a basket and that basket contains some real estate, not much some stocks, not much you always have to have something that protects you because the big deal risk is I work all my life I have a good life things can be harmed by inflation or you can have asset price inflation but not inflation which is worse actually because you see all the things you wanted to buy running away from you and then the other things are not.

1:29:58So I have some hedge there, okay, some agricultural stuff like that, just to say this is hedge for inflation, okay. But I would say I'm monstrously underinvested now with the rest. Okay, also, I mean… To the point where you feel bad, like you're an investor at heart? No, no, no, to the point that I don't look at the screen. You don't know that you're underinvested when you can go for two days without looking at the screen. How many hours you can go without looking at the stock market screen? You see? That's a good formula. If I have to look at it with high frequency, it means I'm over-invested.

1:30:33Okay? And then you become victim to noise and stop losses. If I'm looking at it with, like now, I couldn't care less. And if I'm looking at it, you know, healthily,

1:30:49like I would like to be, healthily, it means good enough frequency,

1:30:57then I'm calibrated. But I've never really been calibrated. I typically go from total indifference to maximum interest. What about, given your ideas on pharma, what about, you know, big pharma has the risk of FDA regulations, but then you have like biotechs, you know, well-funded biotechs No, no, biotech is a very interesting domain, biotech, particularly that they're underestimated by the market because they can have a huge discovery that will change everything. It's a small probability. That's not part of the data. But I'm not involved. There's just too much headaches. I'm trying to figure it out.

1:31:36I mean, I have a comfortable life. I don't want to mess it up by having complicated stuff. but sometimes for entertainment I do trades and typically I go with the irrational which is strange someone who likes the irrational because it seems to me that if something is irrational it means there's a hidden reason behind it you see if something like for example when I went into Europe Europe was very very very very very very very very steady and everybody said it's bad news if the journalists say it's bad news and the stock market is not I go with the stock market you see or I go with the currency.

1:32:12I go with the element. But I'm not too much in the market. Plus, of course, I have a convex bet on the crash on the stock market. So, typically, I would say my position would be in the stock market, the way I do it is I belong in the stock market. I lose money if there's a 10 % drawdown. But if there's a 20 % drawdown, I make tons. Because you buy out of the money puts. Because I always have this kind of out of the money thing. I played with bonds, but now it's difficult with bonds. Even though there's most likely some sort of bubble in bonds at some point? I don't want to miss it. But to express it with a positive carry is hard.

1:32:54I don't want to think about it. Too complicated. But I have enough gold in my own thing and I have enough short bonds in my core what I call numeraire that I don't have to worry much about that. So Black Swan, you're saying sold very well. Fooled by Randomness is a great book as well that I highly recommend every trader reads. Fooled by Randomness was read by traders but not outside. The Black Swan was read outside trading. Right. A lot. And Anti-Fragile, I almost view it as a personal improvement book, like a way of thinking about life as opposed to trading. It's the one that satisfied me the most in this reaction because what I always tell people is that there is non-linearity.

1:33:40You don't want to sell a million copies. Because if you sell a million copies, you're going to have 800 ,000 people buying it who shouldn't be buying it. Well, it's still hard to execute on it. People like their fragile lives because that's the controlled environment. So it's hard for people to say, okay, I'm going to fast randomly like every other week. Yeah, that's true. No, but Antifragile is a kind of, no, I mean, I wrote Antifragile not as a book for, I wrote it as you put your soul into a book. Yeah. So it is, it's a forced volume of that inserto and I put my soul into it. But all the answers in the black swan.

1:34:16I also wrote it in a way to be less accessible than the black swan, to the common person. And why voluntarily? Why? because I don't want to have the readers. And I don't want to go to conferences where you have all these big names who have bestsellers and be one of them like in a cattle market. I want to just have my own. I pull back from public image. You know, when you have a big bestseller, you have trauma and you have, also you learn from stuff and you say, okay, you want to do it once, you don't want to do it all the time. So I did not want to have as big, and I don't want in the future to have any big...

1:34:56I'd rather have a steady, smart readership than crazy people citing it without understanding what it is. And anti-fragile is in that category. It's like fooled by randomness. Fooled by randomness was almost never bought by people who didn't understand it. I mean, almost never. The ratio is very low for fooled by randomness. And fooled by randomness over time did, I don't know, something in a million, some copies. I mean, something worldwide. It did, yeah, in a million something, some copies. And anti-fragile, you don't think will... No, anti-fragile is selling a lot more than full-bar animus. You know, at its stages.

1:35:39But full-bar animus, I want anti-fragile. You want books to follow the Lindy effect. I don't care about what they sell today. I care about what they sell in 10 years. You see? Ah, to your point of, yeah, if it's still selling in 10 years, it's going to be selling for another 10 years. For another 10 years. Fooled by Random today is 13 years old, 14 years old. 13 years old. Still sells. This week, 14 years old, 13 years old. And it's not that it still sells. It's still in print. It's still active. The black swan, of course, is too known as a metaphor that bothers me. Antifragile is similar to Fooled by Randomness, except that it's a different crowd.

1:36:18crowd is more difficult than food by animals. It's much more difficult. You know, but it got me thinking really just about every area of my life and what was fragile and what wasn't. And not only every area currently, but every area in the past and how the different parts where I made myself anti-fragile just by instinct because I didn't want to lose anymore. That's good. Now that I'm thinking about it, there's a test you can do for yourself, right? If you've had a little bit of disorder and you weren't harmed by it, it means you didn't have enough of it. if I wasn't harmed by it? If you weren't harmed by it.

1:36:51Right. And you weren't harmed by it. If you had something bad happen or something like that, you weren't harmed by it, it means you need more of it. Well, no, I was definitely harmed by it, and then I had to overcome. Yeah, overall. Overall, you weren't harmed by something, then you have... And let me tell you that a lot of people don't understand that something I mentioned just en passant and didn't focus too much on antifragile. It's post-traumatic growth. Growth comes from trauma. People talk about post-traumatic disorder. The real thing is post-traumatic growth. So if you do grow too much, let's say, from a failure, that might not be a good thing?

1:37:33No, no, no, no. What I meant is that most people think that people get trauma from wars, from stuff like that. I was a victim of war. It was horrible, right? And, you know, in the Near East, wars are not very pleasant. But I think that I benefited from it. I personally grew from it. So I had a psychologist, you know, just to bill X dollars, you know,$100 an hour, would have found the disease, you see. But a lot of people benefited from it. And a generation of friends, they all did very well. Personally, emotionally, all kind of stuff. So in a way, you grow from disorder. Right. But there's something important, you know, when you approach a topic like antifragile, something important.

1:38:17You don't want to ask too much from the topic. Try to apply it. Okay. But you should be demanding, but don't ask too much from the topic. In other words, don't try to apply the topic, you know, blindly to a lot of things. But it has enough application. In other words, if we... It's worth thinking about. it has enough application. In other words, in biology, in biological system, in stressors, in ecosystem, it has enough application. And it's a beginning, not an end. One thing that pleases me a lot is I'm telling you that I switched life with antifragile. You know, I try to, you know, just do enough of the markets for entertainment, not other things.

1:39:03I'm also advisor to my old friends who are continuing the business I was in in America. So just do enough activities. But I wanted to be just now become a scholar, you know, retire into pure scholarship. Clearly nine published papers this week, this year, a book, Silent Risk. Yeah, so I'm doing technical work. They're doing technical work. And I'm realizing that in a technical field, I mean, there are good disciplines and bad disciplines. There are disciplines like political science that are totally clueless. and the discipline like physics and complex systems are monstrously insightful. And to understand that, you have to know from the inside.

1:39:44But there is a huge appetite for ideas like the ones of antifragile. And I don't want, you know, this is no longer a book where it belongs to one person. You see the development of ideas and you want to be part of it, filling out, even without citing antifragile, without mentioning it once, you see, citing into this mission. And now what is that thing is really trying to understand how systems function without so we can live in a world in accordance with the way the world is, rather than in accordance with the way we'd like it to be. Like a distributed system like nature, how to handle nature, how to handle global warming, how to handle all of these.

1:40:33And I'm involved in this. So I'm very, very happy because I started an academic career. And academic doesn't mean teaching. It means writing paper, researching, interacting with researchers, doing things. Which is why I don't think I'm going to write books for the general public anymore after Antifragile. I don't think I will. I mean, people may have relapses. but I will be producing more scientific stuff that has theorems, proofs and it's actually so much easier to do science Where will you release that? Like Silent Risk here Silent Risk is for free on the web It's for free on the web, anybody can access it I don't feel like giving it to a publisher for now and the good thing is that if I find a mistake I'm going to Singapore It becomes open source in a sense because people can tell you.

1:41:26No, I change it. I change it. But in other words, I change it and I learn to write in text so it's formatted the way it is. It comes right instantly and probably it could be between cover but I want it to stabilize, you know, at the level, stabilize in the sense that I keep changing. You know, I wake up, I change, I introduce a topic and silent risk. Silent risk is really the backup of all my other books with the mathematical backing. And it's very strange. I noticed that there's something we're doing with this paper. I noticed this paper. We use a lot of English. And then at the end, we have math.

1:42:02Proof theorem. This proof. So I noticed nobody reads the math. Nobody reads the math. But if it's there, people feel comfortable. But they feel comfortable with what I'm saying here without harassing me. What do you mean by this? They feel comfortable. They leave you alone. I'm doing the same thing with the inserto by giving all this math. And I discovered, you know, and quite surprising that nobody knew, you see, nobody knew that I did math for a living. It says I did mathematical stuff. They must not have read dynamic hedging. I mean, people said, oh, the black swan. And it's very strange because there's the same idea I express in math.

1:42:41People take it seriously, although it's harder to understand. They complain that it's dense, but it's harder to understand. but then you express it in words, they don't take it seriously, although it's easier to understand. So this is what makes scientific writing easy because you don't have any inhibition about how deep you want to go. Nobody's going to complain. It's very strange, right? But the other thing that makes it also easy is because when I put a book out, I'm afraid of being misunderstood and having to explain stuff. When you put science out, it is self-standing in the sense that it's very hard to misunderstand an equation.

1:43:20You misunderstand the application and stuff. You're outside the verbalistic aspect. And it's quite liberating. And also what's even more interesting is that I know that if I make a mistake, it would be caught faster because the beauty of mathematics isn't that it helped us get, is that if someone expresses himself mathematically, he gave you a tool, right, to critique him. I made my statements clear on here, so you can see very clearly what I'm saying. If you find a mistake, you can spot it. So this is why it's more open to investigation for others to say, hey, you know, you made a mistake here.

1:44:03So silent risk has one part. One part is about risk and probability, and the second part is about how systems like disorder. and how city-states do better and stuff like that. And Silent Earth, part two. Make it second volume. And it's very interesting because once I put it mathematically there, now suddenly a lot of people started reading this, Antifragile, and without having the need to go to the mass. Because they've seen the mass, they've just glanced at it, they saw a couple of graphs, they come back, and now they're interested in Antifragile. This is why there have been no scientific criticism of Antifragile.

1:44:37100 % of the scientists who have looked at antifragile found it positive they wouldn't have done that if I didn't supply them with a mathematical backup well I definitely look forward to checking out Silent Risk and I know you say you don't want millions of people to read and understand antifragile but I really it's a life changing book I really think it's a great book oh thank you very much thanks a lot it was very pleasant yeah I'm glad you came came on the show and I wish I had followed up on my email with you in 2002. I think I had coffee with the wrong people. They blew up in 2008 or no, 7, 8?

1:45:18Yeah, both times, several times. Okay, that's fine. All right. That wouldn't have happened to you. All right. Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much. Great. Thanks a lot.

1:45:35Thank you.