The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025


#395: Skin in the Game


Episode Stats

Hate Speech Sentences

13


Summary

In a world where some people have certain advantages that others do not, how do you navigate the landscape while still acting ethically? I guess they argue that we all need to put some more skin in the game. In his new book, Skin in the Game, Hidden in Asymmetries in Daily Life, Nassim Talib explores the ethics of living in a complex and uneven world.


Transcript

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00:01:43.620 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. In a world
00:01:47.620 where some people have certain advantages that others do not, how do you navigate the landscape
00:01:51.280 while still acting ethically? I guess they argue that we all need to put some more skin
00:01:55.180 in the game. His name is Nassim Talib. If you read the AOM site, you've likely seen our articles
00:01:58.940 about his anti-fragility concept. In his latest book, Skin in the Game, Hidden in Asymmetries
00:02:03.200 in Daily Life, he explores the ethics of living in a complex and uneven world. We begin our conversation
00:02:07.800 discussing what Talib means by skin in the game and how it's similar to traditional notions
00:02:11.920 of honor. Nassim then explains what he means by asymmetries, how people exploit them unethically,
00:02:16.480 and how skin in the game can reduce that exploitation. Talib then explains why ethics
00:02:20.340 is hard to scale, why minorities end up ruling, and what it means to not only put skin in the
00:02:24.380 game, but soul in the game. After the show's over, check out the show notes at aom.is
00:02:28.420 slash skin in the game. All one word.
00:02:42.020 Nassim Nicholas Talib, welcome to the show.
00:02:43.720 Thank you for inviting me. As a follower and a visitor to your site, I'm very honored.
00:02:49.620 Well, we've been a longtime fan of your work. In fact, your books have inspired several articles
00:02:53.960 on our site, and I know a lot of our listeners are familiar with your work. But for those who
00:02:58.220 aren't, what's the big picture problem that you've been tackling with your life's work and
00:03:03.700 writing?
00:03:03.980 The encircle is, so far, a five-volume investigation of luck, randomness, and decision-making under
00:03:15.560 opacity. You don't understand the world. How can you be rigorous about things? Because science
00:03:22.020 doesn't cover and doesn't claim to cover many areas of decision-making. Science is about certainties
00:03:28.680 and sometimes statistical significance. But there's a lot of stuff not covered by science,
00:03:34.300 maybe 99% of what we do. So I'm addressing these points in sort of like as rigorous a way as one
00:03:41.620 can be. And skin in the game is the last volume. And skin in the game is sort of like it's sort of
00:03:49.240 the idea culminated from statistical significance into ethics and honor, somehow in a weird way.
00:03:56.780 Yeah. So you introduced this concept of skin in the game in Antifragile. This book fleshes it out
00:04:01.500 even more.
00:04:02.680 Yes. In Antifragile, I was surprised. Like I said, every book grows out of the ribs of the previous book.
00:04:08.960 So Antifragile was about asymmetry in a sense that you can make money without having losses,
00:04:16.340 or you have more upside than downside, whether it's emotional, financial, or more generally
00:04:23.160 economic. But the point at the end of the book, I realized there was a class of people who have the
00:04:30.040 upside and transfer the downside to others. So in other words, they are antifragile. They benefit
00:04:35.880 from uncertainty because heads, they win, tails, someone else loses. So you want variance, you want
00:04:44.480 uncertainty. So that class of people, I discovered I absolutely had to talk about them at the end of
00:04:51.020 Antifragile. But progressively, I realized that the discussion was not about asymmetry and economic
00:04:58.120 incentives or disincentives. It was beyond and at two levels. The first one, it was about what life
00:05:06.700 was about, what being a human meant, what risks one had to take to become real. And it became, so it went
00:05:15.540 into a much, unpredictably, into much more fundamental territory. What is it that we need to do to be
00:05:22.820 humans? And also, what's the boundary? For example, my unit is not me. My unit is a collective. What can I do for
00:05:29.760 the collective? Because that's me continuing? So these things, of course, are covered in areas like
00:05:35.460 group selection, by scale, multi-scale, and stuff like that. But then I merged all these ideas into
00:05:41.820 one book by having a very simple structure. The first 50, 60 pages are about asymmetry in a sense that
00:05:51.480 if you have more upside than downside, you make sure that you're not transferring it to others. Like,
00:05:58.600 for example, what I call the Bob Rubin trade, a fellow who made a lot of money, you know,
00:06:03.700 stuffing Citibank with risks. But when he went bust, when Citibank went bust, of course, it was you,
00:06:10.720 myself, the Uber driver, everybody collectively was funding them. But you don't see it in the flow.
00:06:17.720 So that's a hidden risk, the transfer of hidden risk. And of course, I went into other notions,
00:06:23.080 the central one being selection. Academics love to talk about selection and evolution,
00:06:30.180 except when it comes to themselves. So anything that's not subjected to selection pressures,
00:06:36.480 basically will rot. So academics are judged by other academics, not by some mechanism of survival.
00:06:43.760 So that field will rot. Restaurants, when they're judged by other restaurants,
00:06:48.240 they, of course, develop horrible food. But when they're judged by their clients,
00:06:53.640 they're going to be judged by survival and subjected to that survival mechanism.
00:06:59.280 And this is, so these are the first 50, 60 pages. I explained that asymmetry,
00:07:04.100 that traditionally, when people think of skin in the game, they think of incentives.
00:07:09.880 Sometimes the more interesting people think of disincentive, like thou shall not make money
00:07:14.860 without, you know, bearing your own risk. And then the third level of that asymmetry is
00:07:21.800 effectively a mechanism of removing risky people from society. Because if warmongers didn't die in
00:07:30.020 battle, then you would have, you know, a very dangerously built society. So that's the first idea.
00:07:37.980 But most of the book then is about ramification that are very counterintuitive,
00:07:45.000 that flow from that asymmetry. From theology to honor, to risk, everything together, build it together.
00:07:51.380 So it sounds like you're saying is skin in the game became more of a work of ethics and how we
00:07:56.800 interact with each other and how those asymmetries that we, that show up in life happen on the personal,
00:08:02.740 societal level.
00:08:04.000 Exactly. But there's one thing where you cannot separate ethics from competence. And it's in a
00:08:10.520 footnote. I think it's the first page. And if you say to your accountant, I trust you, are you trusting
00:08:18.900 his or her skills? Or are you trusting that she will not transfer money to Panama? You see, to her own
00:08:28.940 checking account in Panama, what are you, what do you mean by trusting? So this idea actually is rather
00:08:35.660 theological, that perfection is like offending God, but not doing a perfect action yourself. But that
00:08:42.700 idea that you cannot separate competence from ethics is not part of this course. These boundaries
00:08:48.860 between epistemology, ethics, decision making, and all these things are not well known.
00:08:54.360 As I was reading how you were describing skin in the game in the first couple pages of the book,
00:09:00.080 it made me think about traditional notions of honor and something we've written about extensively
00:09:04.960 on our, on our site. Do you feel like that, that this, this traditional sense of honor
00:09:11.180 really kind of captures what you're trying to get at with skin in the game?
00:09:14.960 Exactly. For example, I think it's dishonorable for me to talk about things if I don't bear my own
00:09:20.240 risk. I explained how traditionally in societies, the person who rose, with very few exceptions,
00:09:29.140 and the exceptions are quite telling and quite revealing, the person who rose to the top was a
00:09:34.060 person who took the maximum amount of risk. So I show that only a third of Roman emperors died in their
00:09:40.900 bed. And even then, we don't even know if they didn't die of poisoning. And of course, you have to be,
00:09:47.580 to become an emperor, first of all, to become a consul, you had to have had a military career.
00:09:53.940 And to have a military career, you have to take more risks than soldiers. And you see in England,
00:10:00.080 where's the lord? The lord is simply someone, a lord is someone who protects you like a mafia don
00:10:07.600 in return for rank. That's it. So you cannot have rank without risk taking. So that is in traditional
00:10:13.480 societies. In modern society, I discovered there's a class of people, what I call the BS vendors.
00:10:19.460 And this is a rant against BS vendors. And not only they don't understand the world because they
00:10:24.640 have no compact, no skin in the game, so they can't figure out what's going on. But on top of that,
00:10:30.220 they don't take personal risks. So you have a class of people who are cowards in positions of power
00:10:35.240 in bureaucracies, in government, in academia, in a lot of places. And I despise these people.
00:10:43.520 And I say it, whenever I see a public figure, I have a trick to figure out if the person is a
00:10:50.320 charlatan or not. What's the trick? The trick is, is that person taking risks or not for his or her
00:10:58.500 opinion? Every time I open my mouth to reflect anything, like virtue signaling, that does not
00:11:05.360 entail risk taking, has no virtue in it. If you don't take risks, you're nothing.
00:11:10.860 What's an example of virtue signaling without risk taking?
00:11:13.960 Like you walk into a hotel and they tell you, well, save the environment, and they're ripping
00:11:19.760 you off by saving on washing your towels, for example. Or someone who stands up and starts
00:11:26.120 delivering, you know, like university officials, oh, this is diversity, this is fairness, this is
00:11:32.220 this, this is that. That's a virtual signal because they're not taking risks for their
00:11:36.080 statement. But someone who stands up and says, for example, it is not true that the Syrian
00:11:41.780 government is fighting, you know, is fighting Mother Teresa, the Syrian government is fighting
00:11:48.480 the headcutters. Someone who goes against monoculture, for example, and reveals things that are not
00:11:54.400 held to be true, but are effectively true. Or take in academia, if you come up with an idea that's
00:12:00.500 not, you know, in the discourse, then automatically they, in academia, they can, they can really
00:12:06.380 destroy your life by labeling you as a crank. So the, having an unpopular position within academia
00:12:13.440 is very rare. And those who do that usually are the big people.
00:12:17.880 So skin in the game isn't just about incentives. It's about getting the upside without, you know,
00:12:23.040 I guess, exporting the downside to others. But, yes. But I mean, to me, when you look at that,
00:12:28.920 people are like, well, of course, why would I, I would take the upside and not, I mean, why wouldn't
00:12:32.460 I just export the downside? How do you incentivize people to not export?
00:12:35.940 Well, you don't want to invest, the whole idea of honors, you do, of honor is you don't do it
00:12:41.320 for any incentive. And that's fundamental to humans. If you don't have humans like that, you
00:12:46.540 wouldn't have, you wouldn't have the world. You're helping others, not because you're going to be
00:12:51.240 paid back, but you're helping ours to help, to help others because they're part of you.
00:12:55.460 You see, this modern, modernity brought this artificial boundary between humans.
00:13:00.900 Like you think that, you know, that you're, your death at the end of the world. No, your
00:13:05.400 death is not the end of the world. The death of you, plus whatever family members you have,
00:13:09.700 plus descendants, if you have, plus your pets, plus humanity, plus your, plus your tribe,
00:13:15.300 plus humanity, plus of course the environment, planet earth, other, you know, living organism
00:13:21.540 on planet earth. These, this is your, the worst case scenario, not just your death. So if you
00:13:26.560 look at it with a death perspective, then you have an obligation to protect the, these things
00:13:33.280 outside of you that have longer life expectancy than you. And that's my idea of, of, of scaling
00:13:39.640 and scalability of skin and gain. Right. And that sounds like a traditional notion of honor,
00:13:44.080 because it's not just about you. It's about your group as well. Family. It's especially about your
00:13:50.080 group, especially about your group. And actually we solve the problem in classics and the, the,
00:13:55.980 the virtues in Greeks, two main virtues are prudence. And you would think that, that it's a good
00:14:03.920 virtue of prudence, but courage at the same time. Now, how can you solve that contradiction that both
00:14:09.580 are virtues? And on top of that, you cannot have one virtue. If you have one virtue and not all of
00:14:14.740 them, then you've got a problem. So how can you solve? Well, effectively courage isn't going gambling
00:14:20.360 in a casino for selfish reasons. Courage is about taking risks for something bigger than you,
00:14:28.660 like saving kids from drowning. You see, that is you, you, you have your transfer of risk from you
00:14:36.180 to the collective that is in the positive, not like Bob Rubin trained in a negative direction.
00:14:40.840 So it sounds like this is a, it's an ethical code. So it, I got what, as I was reading it, that you
00:14:45.620 don't think that, or correct me if I'm wrong, that laws and regulations can reduce asymmetries. We need
00:14:51.140 to rely more on this traditional notion of honor to do so.
00:14:54.300 Yeah. Tort laws, tort laws could do that. Tort laws can reduce some asymmetry, but there are things
00:15:00.340 you can't, of course, address with torts. Plus my whole idea about, about being human is to do
00:15:07.520 things beyond you. And I, but I have no problem with people with, with, with, with incentive and
00:15:12.440 rewards. My point is if you're not taking any risk, you're nothing, but people detect that. I mean,
00:15:18.060 I wrote early on, I wrote about the Christ. Okay. Why is it that Christian theology kept insisting
00:15:27.720 that the Christ was not God? He was man, not, not, you know, and, and of course you had a lot of
00:15:34.880 debates. A lot of people died in, in, in, in riots over that. Okay. Why is it that the Christ has to be,
00:15:42.560 had to be man? Well, think about it, skin in the game, a God who doesn't suffer, you see,
00:15:48.060 doesn't have skin in the game. And, and the whole idea is to bridge you between, create a bridge
00:15:54.280 between you and God with Christ in between. He suffered, you see, and then it invites you to
00:15:59.320 become, that's what, what, what we Greek Orthodox call theosis, to come closer to God by doing some
00:16:05.740 actions. Now, now that idea of skin in the game, that the fact that he has skin in the game is, is not
00:16:10.760 just unique to Christianity. It, I mean, if you go to circus and you have acrobats walking on these
00:16:16.540 tight ropes, if they have a parachute and, and, and protection and, and all these things,
00:16:21.760 they, it wouldn't be as appealing. So I noticed that effectively people's rank depended on how
00:16:28.540 many scars they have and, and having scars was a big thing. Although scars would be, you know,
00:16:35.480 considered by economists or modernists, a sign of failure. No, scars meant skin in the game.
00:16:42.380 So when I was watching, and that's in my, I think in my early chapters, Donald Trump, you know, he was
00:16:48.820 running against a collection of, at the time it was the primaries, collection of people who looked
00:16:54.600 lifeless and he looked full of, like he was full of life. And I was wondering what was the difference?
00:17:00.900 Well, the difference is that, that's a huge, huge difference that Trump was, it was reported,
00:17:12.100 had been reported that Trump lost a billion dollars of his own money. Now, someone who loses a billion
00:17:19.180 dollars is real. It's not a video game.
00:17:22.560 And people are attracted to that. And so that's why it went.
00:17:25.460 So this idea of scaling, scaling, scaling ethics, scaling skin in the game, where you start with
00:17:30.540 yourself, but then you also think beyond yourself.
00:17:33.260 Okay. But the scaling is not trivial. We know, and I invoke a lot of the ideas of Eleanor Ostrom,
00:17:41.900 who shows how fishermen, you know, they work as a group that works very well when the group is not
00:17:48.980 very large. So, but when the group becomes large, the dynamics change and becomes a fierce competition
00:17:56.600 and to deplete resources. Whereas before that, they protect resources. So, so a lot of that scaling
00:18:04.160 is effectively, you've got to think at a level of a scale, that you are a scale, your family is at a
00:18:10.560 scale and there's behavior within and behavior between that group and the outside and so on. And that
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00:20:22.420 Right. So we can't, it's pretty much impossible to have a coherent ethical code that everyone
00:20:28.140 is on board with after a certain point. The group gets too large.
00:20:32.260 Exactly. Think about it. You can't say you're discriminating against strangers because you
00:20:36.820 don't have your door open for Thanksgiving. You want to limit it to your family. So I
00:20:41.500 use the concept that the Jewish ethics is called thick blood versus thin blood. You're obligated
00:20:47.700 to be ethical towards everyone, but you got to be, even some are more equal than others
00:20:53.720 to you in that sense. So for example, if you see children drowning, it's probably your obligation
00:21:00.400 is to, I mean, in that sense, to save your kids. Provided, of course, you're not endangering
00:21:06.840 others. Save your kids first. Now that's, you wonder why would that be so? Because the other
00:21:14.300 parents also have to save their kids first.
00:21:17.260 So how do we, how do you interact? So we're a homogenous society in America. There's over 350
00:21:22.280 million people, I think. How do different groups that have different ethical codes?
00:21:28.520 No, it's a multi-scale. In other words, you behave within your whatever community, local
00:21:35.240 community, and you can define your community however you want in a certain way. And of
00:21:40.340 course, a little, you can behave a little differently with the outside and progressively. To give you
00:21:45.220 an example, in a book, I explain why it's perfectly compatible with this logic to be libertarian at
00:21:52.700 the national level, which is the federation level, to be a republican at the state level,
00:21:59.420 to be a democrat at the county level, or at the town level, and to be socialist at the family and
00:22:06.620 friends level, you see? Or maybe even a communist at the nuclear family level. So it is not, I mean,
00:22:12.800 you have, the dynamics can vary with the scale, and the scale matters a lot. That was already an
00:22:18.400 anti-fragile, but here I put some ethical dimension to it. But let's think about it. I love, I don't
00:22:24.020 want to hurt animals, okay? So I'm very nice to dogs and cats and other mammals. But at some point,
00:22:31.960 I prefer, but I treat, there's a preferential treatment, okay? I favor dogs over cockroaches. A pure
00:22:40.500 universalist would have no boundaries. You'd have to go all the way to microbes. So it becomes absurd.
00:22:46.080 Unless you put some gradation, it becomes completely absurd.
00:22:49.740 That makes sense. It's the idea of like, if you say you love everybody, it means you love no one.
00:22:53.800 That's exactly what Nietzsche said. You cannot have, it becomes too promiscuous. But you have to be ethical
00:23:00.980 with everybody. Treat everybody fairly. Right. When you, you, you, you also highlight in the book,
00:23:06.760 even in these ancient cultures where tribe was, you know, one of the most important things,
00:23:12.100 even amongst different tribes, there was a very stringent code of hospitality where you treated
00:23:17.160 strangers a certain way. Yes. I mean, the, and that's based on a reciprocal altruism. Like,
00:23:23.140 for example, if you have a desert, desert condition, like Arab tribes would be very hostile to one
00:23:28.040 another in war. But if a wandering person shows up, they treat them as a, like a king because they
00:23:35.600 also like to be treated like that and harsh desert conditions. And so the person is fed and treated very
00:23:41.840 nicely. But, but when you encounter it, when it's tribe versus tribe, then you have war, warfare.
00:23:48.480 You also talk about, there's not just skin in the game. There's also soul and soul in the game. What
00:23:52.780 does, what does that mean? Well, I mean, so what I'm saying is that the, the category of the people,
00:23:56.520 99% of Americans are very well calibrated. You see, they, they, you, you take and you give,
00:24:03.040 you, you don't take more than you give. That's 99% of the population. Then you have the remaining
00:24:08.420 1%, these bureaucrats, all these university administrators, all the, these, these people,
00:24:14.440 okay, these, I treat, I treat them like the evil of modern society. Those who want to run your
00:24:21.100 lives, the nudge people like Taylor, this guy, Cass Sunstein, all these people who are both clueless
00:24:27.020 and evil at the same time. So you have that, that, that category of people, they take more than they
00:24:33.660 give. You see, they derive, they derive a salary and stuff like that. And then you have a category of
00:24:38.560 people, the saints, who give more than they take. And, and because they, they, they feel that their
00:24:43.420 mission is to do that. Like people who die for the sake of a collective, revolutionaries, saints,
00:24:50.180 Joan of Arc, and people like that. It's just like, that's their mission. And that's how they,
00:24:55.680 and they feel that's their sense of honor. That's, there's something about it, about them that is,
00:25:02.340 makes them derive. In other words, they don't care, but they're selfless. And, and, and of course,
00:25:07.840 they take risk for the collective, for the improvement of life on, on, on earth. So now these people are
00:25:12.820 very, very rare and you would expect to see them in, among people who claim to be a revolutionary.
00:25:18.140 It's not true. You don't find them there.
00:25:20.100 Where do you usually find them at?
00:25:21.120 You find them in, in, in all walks of life. You find them, whether you find them in, I mean,
00:25:25.620 whether you have an aunt who is completely selfless, she cares about, as she has, she doesn't have
00:25:31.720 children and she cares about everyone in the community, or whether you have, or you can have
00:25:36.980 prophets, you have, uh, you know, authors, people who basically expose some, some risks and end up
00:25:44.680 in jail. One concept, you also talk in antifragile and you, you flesh out even more in skin in the
00:25:51.080 game and something that a concept that I've been thinking about a lot since I learned about it was
00:25:54.260 the Lindy effect. What is that? And how does that reduce asymmetries in life?
00:26:00.340 Yeah, that's interesting. I've discussed that and effectively, even in the black swan,
00:26:04.860 when I started discovering the process, there are some things, humans have life expectancy
00:26:09.540 decreasing with time. So if you're a hundred, you have a couple of years to go and life expectancy,
00:26:14.840 if you're at zero, you have 80 years to go, you see? And if you're at 80, you have five years to go
00:26:19.920 or no, no, you have 12 years to go. So, or maybe more. So the, the life expectancy decreases with age,
00:26:26.340 but for, for technologies, for some, a class of things connected to some kind of, uh, uh, survival
00:26:33.920 pressures, you have the opposite effect. Like technology is a hundred years old, has another
00:26:40.700 hundred years to go, but it's statistical. It's not certain. So like life, life expectancy, you see,
00:26:46.240 you have children dying, yet life expectancy is 80, you see? And that came from, the idea came from
00:26:52.300 a restaurant. Now that went bust between, uh, the delivery of the manuscript to the publisher
00:26:58.440 and the day of publication, sometimes in between, particularly that is very interesting because
00:27:04.680 the publisher is like within two blocks of my publisher. And they usually, when I go there,
00:27:09.320 I walk by Lindy. That's where actors used to meet. And they discovered that, uh, Broadway shows
00:27:15.540 that had 500 days under the belt have 500, at least 500 days more to go. So they would pick a show
00:27:23.900 that had a longer track record. Now, how does it link to skin in a game? Without skin in a game,
00:27:30.300 you don't get Lindy. And it's also very important. It tells you how time judges think.
00:27:35.680 See, so that's people fail to realize that the bit, the only experts are on this time.
00:27:40.080 That people think that the expert should be, you know, someone who went to Harvard. No,
00:27:45.560 the expert is time. So the way you put skin in the game is, I guess, one way to take advantage
00:27:51.240 of the Lindy effect is you, you don't write for now, you write for posterity, for example.
00:27:55.580 Okay. No, the way, no, actually the trick is you don't have to think of posterity in terms
00:28:00.620 of posterity. That's my via negativa. To predict the future, remove from today anything that,
00:28:06.340 that is 20 years old or younger, and whatever is left will be there in the future.
00:28:13.500 So, because technologies displace technologies, like the laptop displace the desktop, and the,
00:28:19.640 the, whatever is displacing the tablet is displacing the laptop. So, so you have to think in terms
00:28:26.920 of what is, what has survived the test of time and effectively, you know, we're converging.
00:28:32.160 I don't think technology is converging to what we, you know, have, have used for a long time since
00:28:37.740 the tablet is 6,000 years old, or maybe more. So when I write, I write something that is valid
00:28:46.640 today, understandable today, then I'm lucky to be old enough to think, you know, to project it in the
00:28:55.520 past. Would that made, have made sense to someone 30 years ago? Would it have been as interesting 30
00:29:01.720 years ago? Ah, therefore this is more likely to survive an extra 20 or 30 years. And, and interestingly,
00:29:10.080 I started doing that 20 years ago. It was my first book. And 20 years later, it's still selling.
00:29:16.440 I thought it was an interesting point you raised about, you mentioned earlier in our conversation,
00:29:21.760 how some of the stuff you're talking about in Skin in the Game is theological. And towards the end of
00:29:26.520 the book, you talk about how religion makes people or communities of people anti-fragile. How, how so?
00:29:34.300 Okay. Now one, one thing about the idea of rationality, I spent a lot of time in the book and outside the
00:29:40.200 book, studying, examining, and trying to figure out what rationality means. And they have a lot of
00:29:46.000 academic representation of rationality, but, but they all sort of make sense and they don't make
00:29:50.800 sense. The central one is the idea of rationality in survival. You see, you don't know ex ante what
00:29:59.980 is rational. It's not by reasoning. And the world is too complex. It assumes you understand more than
00:30:05.880 you do. And it's highly unscientific. So what is rational for me is what has survived. And as a statistician,
00:30:14.760 I tell you something that has survived, uh, or an instinct we've had like paranoia that has survived,
00:30:19.740 uh, you know, uh, millions of years, you know, before even we were humans. So it has to have some
00:30:25.480 kind of rationale to it. Otherwise it wouldn't be here. So if you judge thing based on using this
00:30:31.920 argument of rationality, you should not, then, then there are a lot of things that make sense.
00:30:37.660 Like religion makes sense if it allows people to survive and odds are it has allowed many people
00:30:44.540 to survive. And that's the idea. So I started examining the Kashrut, the dietary habits of
00:30:52.000 Hebraic people. And I noticed that they have some attributes that probably help them survive. Who am I
00:30:57.480 to judge something? I don't understand the world enough. So that's the idea of rules that don't seem
00:31:04.880 to have make sense to me, but may make sense from a ruin standpoint. And the notion of ruin
00:31:11.960 is lack of extinction. It's very different. Okay. That just says something interesting there. So
00:31:17.400 earlier we talked about the laws and regulations aren't besides tort laws aren't an effective way
00:31:22.680 to reduce asymmetries, uh, an ethical overarching ethical code. But in the book, you also talk about
00:31:29.120 there, there are, there are rules if they stem from an ethical code that can help guide people
00:31:34.160 to make rational or decisions that'll help them survive. Yeah. But there, okay. There's another
00:31:40.100 thing here about ethics that I mentioned in the second chapter about the minority law that we have the
00:31:46.960 illusion and that's a misunderstanding complexity that society is the arithmetic sum of the preferences
00:31:54.640 of its members. And then therefore a collective ethic would emerge because each one of us is quite
00:32:03.080 ethical. That's not true. It comes from the intolerance of a very small number of people who are
00:32:08.980 monstrously ethical and impose sort of like the virtue on society because the other guy, the other people
00:32:15.700 chicken out. That's the minority rule. And I showed it the same example. Minority rule is a dietary law.
00:32:22.600 Someone coming from Mars and observing the US population would notice that, would think that
00:32:27.720 there are orthodox rules because almost all drinks, uh, soft drinks in the US are kosher.
00:32:34.600 Why is it so? Because a kosher person will never drink non-kosher, but a non-kosher will drink kosher.
00:32:40.760 Well, it's the same thing with, with, with ethics. An ethical person will never buy a non, you know,
00:32:46.760 an unethical, a stolen merchandise, but a less ethical person, you know, doesn't mind having
00:32:52.520 ethical behaviors that you see. So that asymmetry is what determines ethics in society.
00:32:58.440 But with this asymmetry, this minority rule, I was reading that, what do you do if there's a minority
00:33:04.360 group who are trying to impose their ethics, but like, you don't like them, right? Like,
00:33:09.640 for example, I thought of like, you know, Islamic terrorists.
00:33:12.840 Yeah. Okay. The, the, that's a big problem, but, but the, the, the, in the past, people didn't
00:33:18.280 understand the reason for the growth of Salafi Islam and Salafi Islam is something to be treated
00:33:26.040 from within Islam. Forget about in the West. You see there are people, if you put one Salami, Salafi
00:33:32.760 Muslim with 10 Sunnis non-Salafis, the 11 will behave like a Salafi. You see, because of their asymmetry
00:33:44.920 and rules. So the, the idea is to find, to fight Salafi Islam where it was born and, and also stop
00:33:53.240 funding Saudi barbaria because they're the one who have created this Salafi nonsense.
00:33:58.920 Well, Nassim, this has been a good conversation, a great intro to, to the book. Where can people go
00:34:04.120 to learn more about your work? I think from within the book, the book, the book, you know,
00:34:08.360 let me tell you one thing as an author, if I can explain my book, then I should be, I shouldn't,
00:34:14.200 I shouldn't be writing books. You shouldn't read the book. No, no. I shouldn't be writing a newspaper
00:34:18.600 articles and the idea. So a book has to be something bigger than my explanations of it. Oh,
00:34:24.440 it's true. I think we, we just, I think literally scratched the surface of what's there.
00:34:29.160 Well, Nassim, thank you so much for your time. It's been an absolute pleasure.
00:34:32.360 Thank you. Huge honor, particularly that you're one of the very, very few sites on the web that I
00:34:37.080 visit. Well, thank you so much. That means a lot. Thank you. Thanks.
00:34:40.040 My guest here was Nassim Talib. His latest book is called Skin in the Game. It's available on
00:34:43.640 amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more information about his work at fooledbyrandomness.com.
00:34:49.080 Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash skin in the game, where you find links to resources,
00:34:53.480 where you delve deeper into this topic.
00:34:58.920 Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,
00:35:11.480 make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. If you enjoy the
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00:35:21.960 show with a friend or family member who would think get something out of it. As always, thank you for your
00:35:25.880 continued support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.