The antidote for chaos! - Nassim Taleb Interview #PODCAST

hi there no this is not clickbait we actually have an interview with nasim nicolas taleb the guy that says he doesn't do media he takes pride in not talking too often to journalists he mostly talks to his scientific community peers taleb might seem rude or harsh but he's actually blunt and honest hi hello mr taleb and thank you for taking the time to talk to us thank you thank you it's an honor to talk to a person a guy that's been called the philosopher of the 21st century are you okay with that no because i'm not a philosopher i am i'm not i mean like labels i don't like labels and so so in my mind i i have actually an aphorism that explains it in my mind uh being a someone self-identified with something typically that person is a fraud and that was created by leagues before you identify with a problem you're currently working on and so you so i work on probability so my profession is to work with probabilities so i have technical skills and probability i also have cultural scales and probability and try to work with that and probability has a beautiful aspect that when covet came you can work with scientific papers and say you know statistically this is not uh converging or something and then therefore your sample size doesn't fit the claim you're making or you can use it so everything is based on statistics and probability anything with information based on that in your books you're talking against uh taking decisions simply based on statistics exactly so so so but but there's a symmetry sometimes you do take based on statistics so there is a fundamental symmetry if you use it right you know when not to use it you see like for example if you're an expert on hammers okay like a lot of people are telling me well you know what uh not liking the gaussian distribution is like saying i don't like hammers no i love hammers and i can be an expert on hammers and use hammers for nails but prefer not to use hammers for a brain surgery you see okay you have to find once you understand probability you find where it applies and where it does not apply and how the ancients had a sophisticated way to incorporate both probability and effect of an event and there's also popular wisdom europe sometimes turning to popular wisdom like the the taxi driver i'm turning uh more than nothing to my father he he's also very wise but very popular like a simple person that understands the way of the world so what are you missing there's a reason for that and we're gonna get hopefully to religion what happened is that whatever you learn at school and that was not much of my position if you read the ancient skeptics that what was their skeptical against pseudo experts you see so if you look at how we deal with uncertainty what we've survived hundreds of millions of years so we got to have the right reactions you see that's exactly probabilistically you have reactions and sometimes that understanding why because it's widened to us to have these reactions so we must have a fitness to the the risk environment through our intuition through our paranoia through our uh extreme risk aversion in some circumstances okay and and that mechanism is a mechanism that has been refined by by by of course hundreds of millions of years maybe so it has more scientific significance than some paper written by psychologists telling you this move is logical not logical uh rational not rational acceptable not acceptable and then therefore all these psychologists and i call them idiots put their names and hopefully you will you will i don't know what what term you use you would use in romania to call these guys okay idiots yes yeah it is i mean they come in and then they wrote they do some experiment and their experiments usually don't replicate half the time and when they replicate they replicate only under some weird conditions and then to tell you that you know what this is wrong so you're saying this is wrong and you've been going through this uh in your books telling that this is wrong but on the other hand the world's been changing so fast for the past 200 years that um popular wisdom is not it's not enough to go from one point a to point b not really to the contrary the fact is you think that things have changed and i tell you that the underlying structure of the world had changed uh maybe uh uh quantitatively but not qualitatively and and then we know pretty much precisely for that reason that all these studies in psychology and all of that they're like baby science not even science economics baby science so to explain again engineering we understand engineering very well okay and i keep explaining the difference between an engineering framework in antifragile for example you know if you bang on your computer it breaks and and the attributes of engineering is that for example take a watch okay it doesn't there's no partial watch if something breaks it stops if the computer breaks it stops whereas in nature human body we have things that that a lot of auxiliary mechanism it's a lot richer and the complex system is based on interaction so once you do more advanced mathematics than the ones used by the let's call them idiots okay then you realize from the more advanced mathematics that uh you uh effectively your grandmother or grandfather or great grandfather or great great great great great great aunt or actually had the right okay decision making framework you see and particularly for for for tail risks if you use complex systems okay you understand that that all these analogies don't really work and a lot of the things we were uh living in all these structures were designed not for humans usually by top down and then there's another attributes of complex systems and which is why it clashes with the idea of an expert look at an ant colony was it designed by anyone or at least is there a regulator is there right okay look at a flock of birds these are spontaneous formations coming bottom up with some basins and same thing for human society so if you want to do science do it the right way and if you do it the right way you realize a lot of things you don't know and it brings you back to the ancients now granted there are things mistakes we make today that are uh mistakes because the environment has changed okay uh but i i would tell you that typically if you're making mistakes in an environment say like for example uh you go to a casino and you tend to make a mistake by by assuming there's something called uh the gambling fallacy by assuming there's a sequence you figured out the sequence if you make a mistake in today's environment like say the casino it may be a mistake all right but overall overall they're not costly depends on how much money you're bringing to the table typically they're not costly because plus there's a correcting mechanism those who make these mistakes if they're really mistakes they exit the system that's the last idea of skin in the game so and and my point the skin in the game is that if those who make decisions okay have a uh risk of exiting the gene pool then you have a a continuous recalibration of the system and that's evolutionary when it comes to religion and this is why uh you know i have a problem with what people call scientific atheism and stuff like that and and you guys have tried it you've had your trashes go years and and you've had communism and you have things and we're i'm now in a 12th century monastery uh built in 10 50 11 57 why why are you there it's a university it's based here and i feel comfortable in social structures anyway so and let me tell you why what i take from religion there is no way you can transmit intergenerational experiences with ideas you transmit them with with the customs interdicts and uh and habits and so there is a literary aspect to it and risk management for example there are things you do not do you see and so religion had that aspect you know that functional aspect that cannot be replaced okay by by other forms of taboos because it's harder to connect that's the first one the second one is most of these modernistic approaches to things how we behave read things literally so to give you an idea something i think i address in skin in the game you know i don't know my books very well because i don't read them right okay so i think in one of the books i address the problem as follows you remember there was a tsunami in one of the in the south pacific south in in south south east asia in like 2004 2005 i don't remember the details now uh the the people who were on the coast who sleeps on the coast who sleep on were were affected and died many of them died now there were tribes and sexual tribes they would never sleep on the coast for some weird reason they would only sleep on thailand and and they say and the reason could be that their ancestor you're saying that religion is a store of wisdom it's a darwinistic idea those who have the right ideas survive not necessarily because the idea is because using it let me give you another example i use from scanner game it makes absolutely no logical possible sense okay to subscribe to the kashrut of the jewish grassroot okay but it has but once you get into it it's beautiful with a lot of rules and and i myself try to subscribe by the uh by the orthodox uh calendar you know food wise so i i follow it okay so you're you're fasting i fast on uh on uh on on fast days [Music] days 40 days for four days here but anyway but let's say why is it that um it's functional to have followed a casual jewish gas root and our orthodontist root has some other functional reasons every every religion has some sort of fast exactly exactly so let's take the jewish culture okay they discovered that those who eat together you see band together so if you could you have to eat you know with other jewish people so it creates networks of communities what it created throughout the mediterranean and europe where you can have trade and and i explain it with scaling what's better to meet a hundred people once or one person a hundred times okay you see this is where you start having a network of communities who know one another therefore there's trust to conduct commerce exactly yeah so it helped them build networks of commerce okay so you go from a town to new town you have to eat you have to go follow find the community where you eat and then you do business and they ask where you come from that's the first thing and the second one that allows them to concentrate therefore to survive when there's a big attack on it if they're dispersed you know you attack them separately here they eat together so for example that's one benefit of religion so the problem of uh treating religion as something what i call epistemic by saying well that story it means you're taking the story literally science is literal and epistemic religion is aesthetic belief based peace now for example what does the word credo mean in romanian i believe not really either it means i trust i trus okay uh you if you see the the cradle the criteria it means i trust okay now when you go to movies to the movie okay you know and you're watching a say a movie with a thing and there's blood you know it's tomato juice whatever it is or some synthetic product you know but for the sake okay of the movie you believe the story of course okay because otherwise you're spoiling your afternoon by not believing you're not going to stop the movie and say i can't believe it they're making fun of me it's tomato juice yeah but did you hear about the next christopher nolan the movie uh it's gonna it's called tenet and they try to do a movie without visual effects even the plane uh on that's crashing in the movie it's a real plane so they're trying to make it real without video effects and now we when we are at the peak of the technology for video effects so it's coming back to no no we try to do it without stunts without any graphics it's just pure cinematography whatever that is so in some way we are trying to find the back trust you know what you think it is a blowback because theater is organic and natural cinema is not because you go too much into uh whenever it's like painting it used to be the details which you paint your expression of skills how good you are at very similitude and doing replicating something and then you can get inventive now you just you know uh you know you can have your your dog wag you know the the tail yeah the thing and then you can sell it so there's no longer the signaling so so you take something to it's complete to the this complete natural uh uh conclusion and the thing breaks down but no to go back i'm having these questions here i didn't get any chance to go through them i'm using paper for this interview because i really want to ask you a few things and i know your time is very limited so please bear with me i i want to ask you some some things so you've been talking about the pandemic of since the beginning of of the year and you've been letting people know that this is real once you go past the first thousand of cases there's no statistics everything is becoming very let's say improbable i don't know how how should we approach uh the time that comes after this because we've been going through this for the past nine months already and it's getting worse yes okay so the the look at china radical move first what i think in the west we should be knowing is what we suggested first of all you don't understand anything you shut down you have no idea how it transmitted as we gain an information we get a little more precise in reaction now what's happening is the exact opposite governments in the beginning assumed some precise uh mechanism and then they were wrong and then another one so from the beginning masks current times and stuff now going forward we think solution is dual over active testing and masks and do business as usual to come here to the balaman monastery the 12th century monster i will i took a pcr before flying and upon arrival they took my pcr so i know i am negative okay and people around me know i am negative so therefore you know they can invite me to a dinner party you see so but if you every time you want to have a classroom uh filled with students or something you had tests we computed them even as a test imprecise it would collapse the pandemic because what is central about a pandemic is what i call the extremist noun comes from multiplicative effects so you you don't want to eliminate you want to demultiply and anything helps masks help enormously so masks and tests everywhere there are an auxiliary thing that we mentioned is eliminate super spreaders because things like this absolutely so for example your uh uh conference or how many people are physically you know that confidence they should have had uh in the hundreds and thousands of people uh attending physically attending yes okay so do they have masks well we are not going to have a physical event it's going to be only online so okay so therefore so there's not a super spreadsheet there you go this is the explanation but do you believe that stupidity is a super spreader nowadays because we've seen people denying uh that the covet exists and they say we even have teachers telling to their children you shouldn't wear a mask you're not an animal the government shouldn't control your faith but but let me let me tell you that what happened is that there's a mechanism called minority rules i for example if i see people that are not wearing a mask i zap them off my personal life okay like in america if you show up in costco without a mask you have people taking your picture and goes online okay so there's a publicly which in fact may be unfair for the person but at the same time all we need to do is build a culture to to bring down the pandemics it's not going to be perfect a lot of people are you know let me tell you particularly in an environment like the united states where people value freedom you're going to have a lot of psychopaths of course you see them as an excuse and and because even libertarian libertarianism they start citing you i mean it's very simple they have on their bookshelves anti-fragile my book not understanding what anti-fragile is about they have an iran and then they have hayek and and and when some guy was arguing look i told him listen open hayek and on this page he explains to you the government are necessary for pandemics and wars and natural catastrophes we need government that's that's a function of the government or an anti-fragile i say i get anti-fragile i get better if i jump one meter but i die if i drop six meters so make sure you take all right it's you know it's not making this if you die you're not anti-fragile so and then there is also one mechanism that you don't understand about the the libertarianism is that you have to avoid harming others it's called the principle by not marrying a mask i am harming others so uh if you were to write uh black swan again it would definitely have at least a big part of it covering the covet no george it is already covered in black swan i don't i would not add one sentence okay you wouldn't add not not a word why because it's already i mean in 2005 when i wrote it uh i spoke to the great environmental brought and then we told them what is you think is very fat-tailed and we mentioned pandemics there was no study of the pandemics but could figure it out i mean all you need is one thing sometimes n of one to figure out that a single disease killed a third of the population of the mediterranean and what's now europe okay that number is sufficient to establish some properties later uh with uh my collaborator with pasquale cherilo we did the formal study for nature physics and of course that was exactly we didn't need it all right but we did it you know to be formal and play the game and we did some techniques called extreme value theory and then basically it's a biggest risk we have pandemics but still you're arguing that a pandemic like this it's not a black swan because we knew about it that it would eventually complex once you don't expect them so this is actually something we should have prepared for it's consistent with statistical properties and i warned we should prepare for more than our ancestors you see for one central reason is that we're more connected when you asked me early on i said the world is different we're more even more connected so being paranoid today your grandfather and grandmother are more right today than they were then so so the the problem is that we have these idiots and let me call them idiots because they are idiots in january kovet had killed maybe uh by february a thousand people yes a thousand people and they they give you numbers of people who drown in their swimming pool okay you know the number of the people that have swimming pool in the past is very representative of how many people will die will drown in a swimming pool in the future is very stable because that's what i call mediocre stand statistics that's where the bell curve works and because if you if you drown in your swimming pool i'm sure it won't happen to you because if someone is foolish enough to drown in her or his swimming pool it doesn't cause a neighbor to drown in her people but if i have covet i'll give it to the neighbor so there's a multiplicative effect that doesn't exist with car accidents all these sources of risk it only exists for pandemics all right and we have only 72 and recorded history exactly so that that brings me to my next question you're arguing also that this kind of events also produce by consequence other events and those might become the real blacks ones so what should we expect from a pandemic like this in the next few years because most people are waiting to get back the old normal that that's not coming back i'm sure of them bureaucratic uh establishment to destroy the administrative bureaucratic establishment could destroy the bureaucratic establishment that's a very very bold statement what do you mean by that i mean like something like world health organization that more harm with a pandemic than than than help in the beginning it says there's no reason to wear masks where you tell them okay what do you got a loose orange mask i mean look at we know pictures in history people wearing masks okay of course and we've had lazaretos in history so they were there to because again they're not gonna they're not scanning again type bureaucrats and to discredit them and favor localism because the mayors of small towns not have these intellectuals trying to mess with their lives they say you gotta remember one thing intellectuals have always been wrong okay about uh risky things always i mean they're wrong about communism they're wrong about this they're wrong about the religions why do we go to school mr taleb why do we go to school why do we learn things well i mean there are things you learn in school that are valuable under classify them in class a for example if you're learning physics the physics is fine but what these uh uh uh do is they tell you because the physicist is an expert at physics an economist is an expert on an economy no you say yes okay because an expert we should classify schools in two categories schools that are schools where you learn things okay medicine medicine is messy but medicine is still and medicine has has a very very very strong connection to reality okay it's empirical at first you need to know how to cut and sew and micro is micro also okay i said as a it's much easier to macro vs and micro bs because you see the results if you have an incompetent dentist you will see it if you have a competent mathematician you will see it if you have an incompetent epidemiologist you won't see it it's macro yeah but we we now have incompetent governments and we see it and nothing happens because we choose democracy and we choose to go to vote and we choose for the lesser evil and in the end everything happens back again this is not democracy democracy is if you are uh you know in control you you know of the environment in which you live you don't have coercion by certain class it's not democracy it's it's much more vicious than democracy there's no democratic process when unelected bureaucrats start running your life poorly like like as you also have elected idiots that do the thing that's okay the way things best work best is bottom up how do you do that well uh localism localism have a stronger municipal base okay and you pay taxes to your municipality okay switzerland or to some extent the united states and this is why we're turning to city mayors for rapid response in case of anything happens city mayors or small towns even better okay so you go back to how italy was throughout this history through how the world was what the the the roman empire and and both of us were in both the roman empire and the ottoman empire and during the government empire there was no nation states there was you know local administration of towns and people manage themselves okay managed within that that environment and that was the same with the habsburg and it was the same pretty much throughout history and also at the time the state was like places like france that try to be centralized they were not centralized because the government was had no reach there was no telephone there was no uh internet there was no so and the government represented five percent of the gdp five to eight percent but now in china you have total control they have micro control they see everything they have uh tens and hundreds of millions of cameras and they can't control everything is it gonna work no because because things break down very quickly in that kind of environment it has broken down in china once before and i thought in the ming dynasty what happened in china uh had a big rise okay because of you know decentralized you know the mechanism and then they had the mandarin trying to run it a bunch of people the government the same thing is happening now in europe and same thing happened in upper egypt the nation-state centralized nation state is way inferior to a system of empire empire with collection of city states like you're talking about uh switzerland that's um coming together all the cantons and germany and also germany the lands i'll go to the next question i i know your time is limited but you're a trader by trade yes so you understand money you understand the commodity you understand the volatility and all that and these are times of great volatility so are you seeing opportunity these days or are you seeing danger ahead no there's i mean the volatility doesn't change that's my whole stance that's always there it's like saying the risk of pandemic is not greater today than it was before it's just part of the system um if anything they've been what they call the fed the the fed put federal reserve put it's like this injection of money into the system by buying directly commercial paper notes and then even beyond by bonds of corporations so the 23 000 bonds different different categories of bonds that the federal reserve owns today so and that that puts the floor on the market so seemingly it lowers volatility i i don't i think maybe long run maybe it will work short short term until the the mechanisms over the world adapt and then long run is gonna be volatile but i think the response to the pandemic is uh gonna cost us a lot of problems later but let me make one statement about a pandemic that uh economics there are idiots who are bureaucratic in this fourth central state and there's also our libertarian psychopaths passing for let's talk about the second category all these people tell you what the shutdown is costing the economy as if the virus was not going to cost the economy you see the viruses the virus is dangerous for the economy and and what's happening is a lot of these contractions that we're seeing in the gdp of a lot of countries come from a natural risk aversion of people and that's cultural to our day times let me give you an example you know how much we spend for office safety in no america amount of gdp goes to office safety why because nobody wants to be swimming because totally yes okay so you have a huge office thing and then they make sure nobody's gonna trip okay although you know trip you break something you get stronger maybe but still the mentality is to spend huge amount of money for safety okay huge amount of money for that thing nobody wants to be so the burden on restaurants okay in new york city you have these inspectors who come in test the check counter cockroaches all the burden is monstrous okay so there's a lot of cost of gdp that goes into this naturally not not necessarily from government and likewise um people whenever a plane crashes people switch to driving yes and then you have more people dying on the roads exactly but there's a huge cost on airlines to avoid crashes so so we're spending the trillions to prevent crashes to have in the lowest possible error rate on the airline it's great to be able i'd like to fly but it is not as burdensome so it's therefore completely illogical to say how much we're spending against a pandemic under these circumstances you see particularly that we're spending trillions on warheads nuclear warheads and now enough on testing but let me tell you one thing about the behavior of consumers the minute a firm is tainted you see or there's they discover mcdonald's or something this small little defect people don't go anymore the minute they hear about it with most of the contraction and economic activity came from companies that did not want to be sued by their employees and restaurants think about it you you you can eat the meal at home you can order it or whatever or if you cook you put you know great romanian food so you want to do it or you go to a restaurant okay so if enough people avoided going to the restaurant that 95 percent of russians in new york were bust okay so this is this is anti-fragile for the big system that should work to let's say contain what is anti-fragile for a big system we need something like that for the for the times coming because many people are afraid their money is going to go um it's going to lose value and how the economy is reacting the whole system is built when a plane crashes the probability of next plane crashing is lower no because we learned from the plane branch that's a healthy system uh so a system learns from the the air so what's happening with this pandemic the pandemic is rather mild i mean the virus doesn't kill as much as or doesn't harm people as much as polio although we still don't know the side effects and it doesn't resemble anything we know anyway what is central here is that we are now prepared for the big pandemic okay we are prepared because now we know how to close borders and how to do this that we don't have to recreate a new narrative okay and and at the level of the individual and there is a risk consciousness and same thing happened in history we had justinian's plague and it prepared people for a long time for about seven eight centuries whatever okay and then the great plague came supposedly at 14th century people forget that it continued for five centuries so uh and then things don't die down in some places it took 150 years to reach the town and so so what happened is that we are learning our system now is built so we are using zoom now yes that's an anti-fragile adaptation to the system try to make the best out of it and effectively and now we're going to have long-term alteration from that because we're going to have more meetings on zoom and and i don't have to fly to uh arkansas you know for a lecture okay i will only go to venice nice place or bucharest which i like so the idea is that uh you have adaptations of saints and whatever is fragile will collapse so what are you expecting to collapse because i'm seeing money is a big issue today there's too much money in the wrong place yeah okay new york city is collapsing okay let's just say goodbye because new york city new york city is collapsing it has collapsed i mean you drive again you're they're operating at such a narrow margin i know from restaurant owners and some documents that a drop of 15 in revenues means you have to shut down okay that's very that's okay and the other thing is um uh uh office work in new york city new york city is based on people coming like a couple million people coming from manhattan that is coming from the outside stores and people from texas coming you know to shop in stores so we have changed the habits of the consumers enough that the small difference it was new york was super leveraged on its success story and even then not financially uh sound but it's the same with all big cities after all pandemic so big cities contract for uh some years not necessarily for some i mean it could be permanent because think about if if as i know law firms or the firm firms i'm associated with they say okay we're going to do things remote but we'll have the office you know for you know you're in the monastery now so you don't need to go to the big city that exactly i would go to the big city but no it's not i'm not forced you see so i have that extra optionality for me in my own life that it will that you don't have the same structure of uh so so this is so you gotta look at what happened from close it okay so our time is running out i have so many questions so i'm gonna i'm gonna take the last one and i i i'm sure you're not gonna like it this is why it's the last one what about uh some people in the blockchain uh industry and the cryptocurrency ecosystem uh talk about uh uh try and quote you uh as a to leverage their technologies and say that their blockchain technologies are anti-fragile do you do how do you look at the blockchain and bitcoin and cryptocurrencies i mean i think uh the concept of recrypting transparency with potent and blockchain is something or ancient it's a modernization of leather credit which you know creates a transaction financial transaction automatically upon delivery of goods for example so there are good things in it the problem is don't get too excited because it may every good idea doesn't necessarily work we need bitcoin as a replacement or we need a currency that's not owned by government and it's handy but uh i have to separate the bitcoin as a good idea that may work from these uh weirdos you know cluster around bitcoin anti-fragile thing it's a solution to the world's uh problem and they only eat meat only this they read the hayek and they don't understand so there's a crowd of people you have to separate bitcoins from the pointers the bitcoiners are like some cracks and lunatics and conspiracy theorists which is nice to have in society but once they keep them far away from from your landscape so i think it's a good idea and i wrote this a good idea and i owned the point and i've used bitcoin okay and so far it's not a good reserve of money it will take years for it to stabilize because unless the price stabilizes it's not good to invest put your money in something with fat tails so we looked at the dynamics of it it will take years before you can think of putting your money in it okay as a store it's still early yeah i mean the fact that people may tell me well it may triple i tell them listen that's not cash cash is not supposed to triple cash is supposed to stay the same okay so where do we put our money for the next recession i'm seeing recession after the pandemic you've been talking about this but you put where you should put your money and tell what i've been doing all right i don't think that the problem is not so much a recession you have to worry about the problem you have to worry about is the measures of taking now maybe hyperinflation in the long run so so you need to own some gold because it remains that as much as these bitcoiners think they have a solution for problems and the bitcoin has reminded me of as are using kindle who say oh i'm not ever going to buy a book ever again right but now the book survived and i don't know if people are reading too much electronically i see from my book sales that they zoomed in the beginning and then it stabilized at low level electronics saying it's the same thing with gold is a real thing all right uh silver is already saying copper is the real thing uh farmland uh real estate so there are a bunch of things but there's also gold in the blockchain you can buy gold through the blockchain yeah okay i i can also buy gold and store it in a vault and switzerland blockchain or i can buy a paper the gld on listed down on a decent exchange and audited so so the whole thing is that the idea is blockchain is not going to work in your head if it's good in your head it has to lead to a chain of practice that that meant to it and and also the final thing i'm going to tell you that you're going to like blockchain and and uh bitcoin are too traceable yes okay so you're losing the segment of the prime user user of these things and maybe gold is traceable but not as much and there are techniques so so you realize now that that there's a dark segment of society that doesn't like it for that reason and it's not exactly yes mr taleb thank you so very much i would be so honored to have you in bucharest hopefully in the next few years after the pandemic yeah i definitely i like i was there once i hang around cafes for two three days and there's a mass athlete plus you still drink uh uh guess what turkish coffee oh yeah of course yeah of course most of the romanian food is turkish food with which we reinvented we are all the we are all balkan we are our patriots we spent 500 years in the open empire and you guys spend about 400 yeah i'm looking at you and i'm seeing the very familiar face so your face is very familiar to me from my peers in my country so when i when i go to romania right and i talk to people i feel i'm talking to people my culture there's something that clicks in former ottoman particularly when they're orthodox exactly and anyway i have some genetics from uh from from your parts okay yeah the northern macedonia so so that may explain also the familiarity but that's not coming to me not to the people around anyone so thank you thank you so very much for taking the time it it was an honor and i think i'm i'm blessed to have talked to you because after reading your books i really really believe you should be uh named the philosopher of the 21st century but that's my opinion it's not you you cannot you cannot argue with this because this is my show okay thank you very much thanks thank you thank you talib i want to take a moment and thank the people at bran minds for the opportunity to talk to nassim taleb and moderate him on stage and i want to thank you for hanging on till the end of the video you must be converted by now so go ahead and read his books they're like a cold shower or an antidote to chaos and anxiety during difficult times thanks for watching don't forget to like share and subscribe and we'll see you for the next video

Channel: Cavaleria Com

Views: 28,304

Rating: 4.9022317 out of 5

Keywords: nassim taleb, black swan, books, self books, podcast, george buhnici, interview nassim taleb, nassim taleb books, nassim taleb black swan, nassim taleb podcast

Id: 57wRZCaetY0

Length: 42min 46sec (2566 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/dEBRUYNE_1]

Given that there's only a handful of actual private (opaque) blockchains, I assume Nassim Taleb is referring to transparent chains (especially since Bitcoin is used as example).

P.S. The crypto segment starts at ~36:30.

[u/avobitcoin]

That’s why every country really wants a CBDC, 100% traceability

[u/XMR2020]

I have to separate bitcoin as a good idea that may work, from these weirdos you know cluster around bitcoin anti-fragile think it's a solution to the world's problem, and they only eat meat, they read Hayek and they don't understand Hayek. So there's a crowd of people you have to seperate bitcoin from bitcoiners. The bitcoiners are like some cranks and lunatics and conspiracy theorists.

Nice to see Nassim shares my views on Bitcoin maxamalism and bitcoin twitter.

[u/FuzzDog525]

Didn't know Nassim had Romanian genes. Always thought he was Arab.