The Art of Manliness - #395： Skin in the Game

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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 0.73

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 0.88

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 0.95

00:10:35.240 in bureaucracies, in government, in academia, in a lot of places. And I despise these people. 0.99

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 0.98

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 0.98

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

00:18:16.620 goes against universalism. We're going to take a quick break for you, Ward, from our sponsors.

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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 0.97

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 1.00

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. 0.56

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. 0.96

00:32:40.760 Well, it's the same thing with, with, with ethics. An ethical person will never buy a non, you know, 1.00

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. 0.92

00:33:12.840 Yeah. Okay. The, the, that's a big problem, but, but the, the, the, in the past, people didn't 0.85

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 0.98

00:33:32.760 Muslim with 10 Sunnis non-Salafis, the 11 will behave like a Salafi. You see, because of their asymmetry 1.00

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 1.00

00:33:53.240 funding Saudi barbaria because they're the one who have created this Salafi nonsense. 1.00

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

00:35:14.920 podcast, I've got something out of it. I'd appreciate it if you give us a review on iTunes or

00:35:18.440 Stitcher. It helps out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the

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.

The Art of Manliness - April 11, 2018

#395： Skin in the Game

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