Breaking the Cultural Barrier with Julio Ricardo Varela

Transcript

The nation's favorite car buying site, Dundeele Motors, is home to the largest range of new and premium used cars from all of Ireland's trusted car dealerships. That's why you'll find Spirit Volvo on Dundeele. Visit the Spirit Volvo showroom on Dundeele to find your next car. Dundeele Motors, for confident car buying and deals to feel great about from all of Ireland's trusted car dealerships. Visit dundeale.ie today. This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher show on the Stansbury radio network. Very excited to have author Nassim Taleb come on my podcast. He just told me it's his only the second interview he's given this year, author of Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, and my favorite, Antifragile. Lots of great ideas that come up in our conversation, so I hope you listen. Thanks. Here's Nasim. Let's look at, technology. Technology works beautifully when it destroys bad technology. In in in antifragile, I discussed the Lindy effect, which tells you pretty much the following. If something has been around for 20 years, odds are it has 20 more years to go. So if something's been around, the technology, an idea, that's not perishable. For a human, you don't have that effect. For a technology, you have that effect because there's no upper bound on the life of technology. So if I see an old man and his grandson, I can say statistically that bearing some problem with some disease, some whatever, problem, that the grandson will survive the the the the grandfather, or whereas with technology, it's exactly the opposite. If you see very young technology and old one, all that young technology is not going to survive. And the old one simply is a concept it's application straight application of the measurement of fragility, the the techniques to measure fragility that time is either breaks, you know, what is fragile, alright, Or, gives, what has some properties, some hidden properties of survival, gives it some edge. Okay? So when when we look now at technologies, you realize that technology tend to stick are technologies that are destructive of other technologies because the book has not really been replaced. Okay? But but, some things have been replaced. So let's talk about, television. Alright? Where people say, well, there are a lot of social networks, but think about, what we had before. You you sit in in in in a nuclear family or whatever it's called, used to be called, watching, someone, give you a propaganda on screen. Alright? That's not social life. Whereas now, at least, you can communicate with other people. That's social networks. So then sometimes we're going back to, having a social life because of social media. Exactly. And and then the other thing, think of computers. Alright? Computers are technology that have been displaced by what? Laptops. But laptop been displaced by what? Tablets. Yeah. How did we start writing? Yeah. Tablets. Alright. So, look at, and look at, what what food we have on the table today. Someone in 1960 would have predicted that that for dinner, tonight, you're gonna have pill and some flying saucer or whatever it is. You get the idea. Alright? And and and, effectively, you're gonna be eating closer in the presentation, you see, something closer to how your grandparents ate. Right. And when you mentioned the the glass, that we we still use a glass, and that was invented, like, 36100 years ago. Exactly. Glass was invented I mean, it was marketed by by, at at you know, at least 3,000 plus years ago. And and glass has, and all we've done is improve gla*s. So how can you how what about things that are truly disruptive though, like a car versus a horse, email versus mail? Yeah. Car versus a horse, but the the the the car has been disrupted by the bicycle, which is older. Right. So you have the point is it's statistical. Someone when I when I talk about life expectancy, I'm talking about your life expectancy. I I look at an insurance table, and I have a number. Okay? That number is statistical. It's not deterministic. Okay? There'd be mistakes, and and I'm sure you're gonna live your your life expectancy probably is, you know, as of today, maybe 84, 85, but I'm sure you're gonna, you know, you're gonna live a 100. Right? Well, that's, you know, that's not in the table. You can live longer, but people live a 100. And some people, unfortunately, have an early termination. So this is statistical. Same thing for technology. Statistically, new technology doesn't stick. And statistically, it's not gonna be replaced by old technology so much as by something newer. You see? And, typically, the newer will resemble old technology. And if you see, the bicycle resembles a horse. I see. So in some sense, email is is actually being replaced. Right? I see in my daughter's, email is being replaced by texting. My daughter doesn't even look at her email anymore. Oh, there we go. And it started before email. Yeah. And texting started before email. Before email. So so you have, so but but you can't look at it, my you know, in a microscopic level. You gotta look at it at a global, you know, something more global. Well, global and personal because individuals wanna be that we strive for antifragility. Yeah. Wissam but but another comment I'm gonna make about how the world, will look like in the future is gonna project the world is exactly the opposite way someone in 1960, you know, still with their mind full of modernity, would have imagined it. They're gonna imagine imagine a table, how we're gonna eat in in 50 years or 20 years. We're gonna be even closer to our ancestors in presentation, probably, but be more efficient. Yeah. You see? The the the the we will I was talking about walking. You see, our ancestors walked barefoot, which is very good for your back and stuff like that. And when I, you know, when when I go to the park, I see people using 5 fingers. You see? Right. So you use technology to protect yourself from the the elements while at the same time replicating the natural gait. Well, this is how you can generalize that to how we we actually would like to live. We live in small communities, and, effectively, you know, you can build small communities. And the web, in a way, is not alienating us, contrary, you know, to what I myself and and everyone I know used to think in the beginning that this social network is no. Social network would bring us back to, you know, what we were, people communicating with each other. You see? Going down to an agora and and just trading information. We that's what we want. We wanna give information because somehow information wants to leave your, it doesn't wanna stay in you. You know, it wants to leave you. Right? That's an interesting way to look at it. So, you know, I I have a story to tell you. In in 2002, I was, down on my luck because I had done everything wrong. You know, I was I was very fragile. I made some money in the nineties, lost it in 2,000, 2,001. 2002, I wrote out about 40 emails out to people saying, hey. Can I grab coffee for you? And 3 people responded, and I responded to 2 of the 3, and I didn't I so so Jim Cramer responded, Victor Niederhofer responded, and you responded. And, unfortunately, I made the wrong I had the wrong policy. I don't remember because No. No. No. It's okay. But I had no. I had at the time, and and I'm trying to implement But I wish I had responded. No. No. But I had I had a, I had a golden rule written in stone is that you always reply to emails. What do you do if you get, like you must get, like, 5,000 emails a day. I get maybe 8 or 9 a day. Oh, I'm sorry. Verify. This is I'm gonna give you my cell phone. You can verify. Always reply except when you set the boundaries. So now I have no to reply, no documentary, no this, no that, no finance discussion, no this, this, this. So someone has a genuine otherwise request. And and usually, when I I take a day off to reply and and during that day, I I cover most of the year, backlog in one day, no more than a day. Typically, when I'm in some hotel room, you know, there's jet lag. And, and I replied to a very insightful professor who wrote me a letter in 3 years ago, end up replying. Those are the best when you can reply after 3 years? Reply no. Because I put it in my I put a star. It's a longer one, and elicited more than a quick, thanks, John, for the nice words. Yeah. It required some kind of, reply. So but, please, I mean, I don't wanna get be flooded with mails, but that at the time, I had a dogma, and and, of course, things went out of control after, the black swan. Yeah. And and now I have a filter. In other words, if if you meet some requirements, you know, I'm obligated to answer. You see, if someone is trying to sell me something or trying to invite me to a TED conference, of course, I don't have to reply. It's part of the please don't invite, you know. Or journalists, I don't reply to. I don't want journalists in my life, which is the reason, you know, I'm on Twitter. Yeah. Or or I want minimum amount of journalists in my in my, you know, there's something about about the atmosphere when you have journalism in it. It's sort of debases it. Well, I think I think in general, there it's it's what you say. There's not skin in the game. So journalism has to respond to a news cycle where by almost by definition, they're trying to scare you. Is it There's something about it that about the system. Okay? Because, the I mean, I I believe in journalists, the thoughtful ones, the ones who, you know, go to Iraq, you know, to to report from there and and get kidnapped. That's a different class from people sitting in in their garage working for whatever it is and making comments for Bloomberg on the markets. Okay? I'm telling you market went down a point because and and inventing a reason and filling. And in fact, it can be very damaging because the journalist caused the the the Iraq war. So you're you're you're, providing noise that causes people to take risks under the illusion of certainty. This is why but there are other things also with journalism. The way I have had my ideas treated by journalists told me why why I don't need the middleman. I can go straight. Right. You see? So I I've been using social media in a very satisfactory way because I go straight. You know, cut the middleman. You know, cut cutting the middleman, which has been happening across every industry, is a form of anti fragility now. It is definitely because because okay. When when you wake up in the morning, alright, and you check your mail, if you're scared of getting mail from anyone, this is what I say, son of robustness, at least. To become anti fragile, first, you have to be robust. If you're scared of getting if you see an email and you're scared or or if you're scared of getting an email, it means you don't have the right life. Yeah. That's true. If you're scared of someone saying something about you on Twitter or something, it means you don't have the right profession, if you're scared. Because eventually, if you're fragile, it's gonna break. Right. You see? So and people notice it. So, you have to build your put yourself in a situation where you're no longer scared of that. Now let let me ask you about that because my technique for dealing with that is I don't respond at all to anybody saying something negative. No. I don't get no idea. If you really don't care, you don't respond at all. But sometimes you like to mess with the guy. Right. Right? Sometimes you like to mess with people. I no. Not always. When I like to mess with someone. So I have my, I wanna recently, I've had, because I'm a Christian from the Near East, so I'm waiting to find some some of these, what I call them, Arab intellectuals. Right? Which is they are sort of like ambivalent. Yes. We should be this and then it should be that. And I wanted to to dump on someone. Alright? And and, of course, I find a couple of a couple of people, and that was fun. Okay? But, I I don't no. I don't really once in a while okay. For example, if someone, bothers me, I I have a forum to go and state and and, and and keep going at him. And and if, he doesn't like it, if he doesn't like to be bullied, he shouldn't bully. Right? So but it happens to me I do it as a form of entertainment more than necessity. Right. You see that? That's different. If you do it as a necessity if you do it out of necessity, you're dead. If you do anything out of necessity, you're dead. Exactly. Anything out of if you have to respond to something, you're dead. You see? If you do it just because there's a certain class of people, political scientists, these people bother me intellectually. And and and I like to have some form of that to me because I'm human. Okay? So that's a hobby. And usually, I reserve these episodes to when I'm in a restaurant waiting for someone. Uh-huh. You see, and you get in a bad mood if someone's late and you're hungry. You see the idea. So it's a perfect time to be aggressive with, those people. But I had recently, you know, I had this paper that that you have in your hand on precautionary principle. Mostly is that, people talk about GMOs. They, oh, we have no evidence that they're harming. Yeah. But you don't have evidence they're not harming. That kind of stuff. So some lobbyists from some groups, okay, have gone on the web and tried to mess with me, but they didn't realize that I enjoy it. I enjoy humiliating, fraudsters or, what is it, charlatan. I enjoy it. So it's just, you know, it's not a good use of my time, I know, but I'm human, you know. So if you don't have an hour a week to play with, with people you don't like, what do you do with that time? Alright? So So let's so let's talk about let's let's let's, for the listeners, take a step back and talk about what is fragility versus antifragility? This this whole episode of antifragility can only be explained, and and and this whole episode is, like, when I went through my own how did I get to the idea, can only be explained by, by the quest to figure out risk. Okay. And and risk, again, at a personal level and a global level? Global, every economic level. Everything. Risk doesn't have actually a definition. This is a stranger thing. And risk requires you, you know, to look at events and assign probability to to them and see if they're gonna occur. What's the risk of an earthquake? Right? And if you look at a dug down, I spent 20 years trying to define risk I couldn't nobody has. Alright? The only definition of risk we have is risk averse people don't like. Alright? And probabilities are very hard to compute, particularly small probabilities. Like risk of ruin is is very hard to compute. You don't Well, particularly, we don't even know what what curve or what law to apply to the risk of the product. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, do you have a risk in some domains, what I call them thin tail domains where the Gaussian curve works and some other distribution, we can figure out the risk. Like for example, I know that the risks are falling from ladders, alright, people killed falling from ladders, is not going to double, alright, next year. You see? So we know that there's a that rate is well captured by common statistics. What about actual areas? Yeah. So the actual risk work for these, but you cannot use that for for for terrorism. Right. How many you can't use it for wars. You can't use Can't use it in the stock market. You can't use it for stock market. You can't use it And this is a problem. Many traders, this is why I mentioned the Viktor Niederhofer, tends to apply a normal curve to whatever curve. It's not it doesn't if it's not it's not the fact that it's normal, not normal. It's whether it's computable. The normal curve or that class of things assign such a small probability to rare events that make them to make things computable. Right. Because, average events are sort of predictable. Right? But who cares? Because they have no impact. So anyway, so I realized that we didn't know much about risk. I don't know what is the probability of an earthquake tomorrow, you know, here. What is the odds of stock market tripling or these I can. But on the other hand, what I can understand very well is how events affect me. So this is what I and and I went to the literature and and figured out something that that very often people conflate. I call it the conflation of events and exposure. Conflates how events, right, the probability of events and the risk of events occurring and the risk to them from these events. So let's take an example. If you have the stock market can crash tomorrow, that's a big risk. But if your own out of money puts on the stock market, okay, and and you're pretty comfortable with the seller, you know, the seller of those puts would be a business, then you don't care about the stock market crashes. You see? Or if you express your views of stock you know, in the stock market just with calls. So who understood that very well? Chapter 1 of my technical, document called silent risk, chapter 1. The lawyers. They still understand it very well. The lawyer doesn't make a statistical gives you statistical predictions of events. He hedges you against them by by showing by by reducing your liability and constructing your liability. So either it hit me that I, when I was an option trader, and I was an option trader for 21 years, largely an exotic and complex derivative. And all I worked on is try to understand the payoff. And and all I did wasn't try to understand the world as people think traders try to do, is try to figure out, alright, a way to reduce liability from certain class of events. And you would ignore that outlier Contractually, yeah. Because contractually, you could eliminate that. Alright. Contractually, by defining your contract, you know, that the contract doesn't cover this, you know, cancels if that so happens or something like that. So I realized, you know, okay. So the first thing is that we don't understand risk, but we understand exposure. And and we had 2000 year more than 2000 years probability was born with lawyers. But don't you think we also ignore exposure? Sorry? Don't you think we ignore exposure in general? Like, because we assume that the the worst is not gonna happen. No. No. We're people people yeah. But we we ignore exposure. Sometimes we overestimate exposure, but at least we understand exposure, and you can construct exposure. But so I so I figured out, the the divorce. And then one day, it hit me looking at a coffee cup, alright, that I could define fragility. While looking at a coffee cup? Looking at a coffee cup, as I said. Was it one of the Greek coffee cups? Yeah. Yeah. It was a coffee cup on a table, and and I I was looking I looked at it. I say, oh, boy. I can and and antifragile started that day. Alright? I started writing it. I started doing the math behind it. I said, for 20 some years, I've been an option trader, and we have a definition of things that don't like volatility. You see? The things you know, think of coffee cup. If there's any random event in a room, not one of them will help it. It'll be or it'll be either neutral or negative. So you have an asymmetry. Right. Things suffer from they have more downside than upside. I looked at it. I said, this coffee cup is short. In my option language, we call it short gamma or short volatility. I looked at it. I said, oh, we have a definition of fragility. Can I generalize to everything, okay, fragile being negatively affected by volatility? Ah, yes, I can. If I can do that, then I can do something, because I spent my time as an option trader, and also, I did my PhD. So I did everything on some specific, you know, properties, alright, of option complex option packages. So I just said, okay. Everything that doesn't like volatility is fragile, and everything fragile likes volatility. So and everything flew from there. So you can construct the you can you can construct a a a sort of a prism, alright, to view the world in 3 categories. The the fragile, like like shorten option, is there's volatility is exposed to it. It can blow up. It can suffer, whatever, the various degrees. So let's give some examples of fragile. So, like, you give one example, which I thought was great. An an old woman who likes everything to be 70 degrees, well, okay, an average of 70 degrees is bad because if it's a 140 degrees, she's dead, and if it's 0 degrees, she's dead. Exactly. To explain this, we need one point to explain it, which is, to explain the link between a coffee cup and the old lady, or or, sorry, an elderly person who doesn't like thermal variability, which is as follows, is that the whatever you can show mathematically, and and and this, I think, is important, okay, because it generalizes to so many things. And now I'm working with physicists and on on on the thing about, GMOs and global warming on risk. What is important is that what doesn't like volatility doesn't like variation, doesn't like stressors, doesn't like time. You remember we started the conversation talking about time. What doesn't like volatility doesn't like time. Why? Time is volatility. It's more events happening. Right. You see? And, it doesn't like entropy, doesn't like stressors. And you can you can very easily establish and make a table of what other things that what does like volatility doesn't like and put them all in the same group, the fragile. So the fragile doesn't like time. Sorry? It's a huge group. It's a much bigger group than antifragile. But whatever doesn't like one will won't like the others. This is what the interesting thing. What doesn't like what doesn't like time, doesn't like unpredictability, and doesn't like stressors, and doesn't like randomness, and doesn't like uncertainty, and doesn't like an increase of scale of distribution, doesn't like all these things. I feel like you're describing all my, emotional relationships with people. Okay. No. But up to a point, of course. Some are open ended up. So this is what does like time. So this is the the the fragile. Alright? A coffee cup is fragile. Okay? But with respect, you're always fragile with respect to 1, alright, what I call source of variation or source of randomness or source of stress. For example, the the, elderly person is probably extremely fragile with respect to to the changes in temperature, but she may not be fragile with respect to, you know, I don't know, emotional, stuff. Right. Because she has experience. Or whatever it is. You can you can decide. Some people are very domain dependent in what they're fragile about. Someone could be a weightlifter and and he's dumped by his girlfriend and go jump, from a cliff. Okay? So you can't really transfer from one domain to the other. So now we have an idea how fragile. Do that, and it's interestingly. So humans have an ability to adapt to multiple, let's say, social hierarchies. So I can be in one domain, like, handle things emotionally, but, not be able to handle, extreme changes in temperature, whereas other mammals or other animals almost can't adapt to anything. Humans are more adaptable. Yeah. We are. But, yeah, that's that's the the thing that's very important to understand that humans are the reason we're successful is because we are, again, not adaptable, but we have a broader we depend from we we have we have, we can make it through different environments thermally. Right? And and and also, it's very important. We are omnivorous. We can eat everything. Right. And omnivores omnivores. We're omnivores. And omnivores are rare. It means we can eat like a lion and eat like a cow. You see, and and and do fine in both cases. And, and and the problem is people don't understand that we we are not omnivores by choice. Hence, we need variability in the food supply, and we need some deprivation of some food groups once in a while because that's how we became omnivores. Ah, that's the stressor to the system. Stressor. Exactly. Particularly, protein. And and I said that, if we're part lion, part cow, the cow has no randomness in the way it eats, but the lion has more randomness. So you have to have protein, less steadily than, than, other food groups. So I see. So in the in the areas where you're antifragile, you want to encourage variability. Exactly. So so so so let let's put some the the structure. We said the fragile doesn't like variation and variability. Alright? And we're always fragile with respect to something. The robust doesn't really care. You see? And, of course, the antifragile on the right wants needs variability. And as a matter of fact, it dies if it doesn't have that variability. So if you just eat protein? If you, if you just eat protein, you probably would have, no kidneys in no time. Right? The you need, very we're not made we're made for variability among food groups. And if you just eat carbs, you also have problem. But the the thing is what people didn't understand when when they, started following the paleo diet is that to follow our ancestors' methods, to follow our ancestors, what they did, you you need to match not the food composition so much as the food frequency. And I was supposed to the other day, I was I was again, I was in some airport, and I did the fractal thing about how often we should fast to be consistent with with some with the environment. You should you should also have the stressor of fasting. Interesting. Because you mentioned briefly an antifragile, there's no proof that breakfast really gives you energy for the day. This is the most important thing is to follow the following guidelines. Alright? Science is great. It should give us proofs. But if there's a habit that is not part of our tradition and has not been tested for its benefits, then you should be suspicious, and breakfast is one of them. Does a lion eat, to hunt, or do you hunt to eat? Alright. So that's so you don't need energy visibly. And if you supply yourself too much energy, then you you dull your system, and and we are a metabolic system. Now now strangely, this idea that I wrote about in antifragile, I thought nobody would get it. People independently, okay, of course, have been doing research on fasting, on if you're keto adapted, that fasting is important. And and and, the the someone there have been some few bestsellers on that 72 diet after antifragile, repeating the exact same ideas. But to do it right, you don't, you know, follow a regimen of fasting one day a week or, you say, once every 2 weeks. So you you need to randomize. In other words, you should fast. If you fast one day every week, you should also fast 3 days every, month and a half and a whole week every 2 years. You you see that? This, idea. But no. But if you're you're made for a statistical environment that has variability, like thermal variability or food group variability or frequency of feeding variability, and you don't have that in your life, you are not human. You're becoming something else. Unfortunately, we have too much control of our environment. So we are made just for an environment that has, you know, variability. But risk came with variability because it's the same thing. Just like, you know, we had preferences for sugar because it came with nutrition. Alright? But, you know, it also comes with heart problems, but, you know, but we need nutrition. But the environment didn't give us the granularity to differentiate between small quantities and large quantities, you see, because we didn't have that chance. The same thing with variability. We could not control our environment, so we disliked variability and and and randomness. And now we live in an environment where we can control that small randomness and skilling us. You see? So you can kill someone literally by feeding them too steadily, and effectively, that's how diabetes comes from. And how was the evidence? I read the papers, cited many of them in antifragile, but many came out later. That effectively, all these fasting stuff that have been experimented up to 4 days by Walter Longo, by Matson, by all these people, realize that that there are some benefits, but there's also especially absence of other diseases that come with it. You see? So so, for example, epileptic seizures for children. We know that, you know, drugs are are good, but the first the most effective thing to start with is avoidance of sugar. Alright? Avoidance of carbs. Okay? And, and other things, diabetes. Diabetes is the first thing should be to starve someone for a while to teach, you know, to the stressor and and and see if and you can figure out how often they have diabetes. Okay, by the frequency of famine and our you can back back from the disease, you can get the statistical properties of famine and our habitat from that. And this is mathematically very easy to do. Nobody has done it, but I I mean, I have a sketch of how it's been done. For example, if you starve yourself for a day once in a while, you have some benefits with asthma. Okay? So you know asthma comes from this. Okay? It doesn't come from this, but you can make a statistical link, and then you can say, okay. Diabetes has this link. So you're not saying where asthma comes from. You're saying how asthma could be avoided. You're doing that saying there's a mismatch between us and the environment. You see? And and it looks like, because we have spate of diseases, that we had to have at least one starvation day every fortnight. You see? Right. You had to have a week every year or so. You can back up from the environment how what the shape of that statistical curve should be, you see, with with, with some comfortable precision. So anyway. So to go back to the structure that we have, we have the fragile, the the robust, and the antifragile. Right? What makes the antifragile very, powerful is that you can measure if something's antifragile from local sensitivity, and that is what is interesting for us. Like, for example, why am I making statements that fasting is good for you, like the stressor deprivation? You have to have some acceleration of gain locally, just like you have to have some acceleration of harm locally for something to be fragile. And let me explain it. Alright? Oh, I can see with fasting, you could have both. But let me go back to the definition of fragile to see how we can go from there, from one to the other, because it's always easier to explain the fragile than the antifragile, mostly because our brains are risk averse. You see? So let me explain the fragile, averse. You see? So let me explain the fragile, first. The the first thing you know when you're short volatility in the markets is that a 10% drop in the market harms you a lot more, okay, than 2 than twice a 5% drop. You see? Okay. Likewise, if you're short volatility in the market, you 5% drop. You see? Okay. Likewise, if you jump 10 meters, you're harmed a lot more than if you jump than twice if you jump 5 meters. Actually, 10 meters, you may you you'll go. Alright? So and 5 meters again in in turn is a lot better, you know, a lot worse, 1 5 meters and 2 times the risk of 2 and a half meters and so on. And things have to be that way because if the curve are linear, you see, then you would you would die just walking. So you have to have you know, if I smash my car against a wall at 50 kilometers per hour, I'm harmed a lot more than 50 times if I smash it at 1 kilometer per hour. You see? So and and this is a property I ever seen that has survived. Why? Because things that are linear to harm already gone. So the fragile had you can detect acceleration. If you have acceleration of harm, you see, if you start having acceleration of harm locally, then you can detect fragility. So so fragility is almost related to, almost a survival of the fittest because we we created the we we control the environment of our No. No. Let me no. No. No. Let me no. No. Let me, I'm talking to something technical here, but I'll get I'll get to that. In other words, the way fragility has to show acceleration of harm. You see? Mhmm. It has to come with it. You have to have acceleration of harm, some kind of I call it the concavity argument. Likewise, antifragility has to show some acceleration of benefits somewhere. You see. And if you detect that, then you have a local local antifragility. And maybe I'll give you a MOOC, many MOOC. I gave the students 5 minutes where I explained that with curves. So if you have and let me explain why acceleration of benefits. What would is it better for you to have, for example, the the if you're convex, to have when, say, you have lung ventilator. Alright? If you if it's better for you to have a 100% of the dose all the time or 50% one time, 150 percent the other time. Yeah. It would be be probably much worse. No. Much better. Oh, yeah. Exactly. So and then I mentioned in antifragile, the lung ventilators, people made the mistake of thinking you need steadiness. If you have that convexity effect, which means that 50% one day, a 150 oh, one minute, a 150% the other minute, is a lot better than a 100% of the dose all the time, then you're antifragile. And that shows an acceleration on a graph. You see? So it's the same thing with a with a with a with a coffee cup where you wanna hit it to an intensity of 2 per, say, intensity of 2, you can hit it a 100 times the intensity of 2. It won't break. But if you have the time intensity of 1, half the time intensity of 3, it would break. You see? So if a linear combination of 2 different numbers is is worse, you're fragile. And if a linear combination is better, you're antifragile. Let's apply it to feeding. Right? Is or or to the temperature. Is it better to spend, the whole day at 70 degrees for your health or spend some time at 50 degrees and some time at 90 degrees. Well, obviously, it's better for your health to spend that variation. So linear combination of 50 degrees and 90 degrees is better for your health than just 70 degrees. It means you're antifragile. And you can keep varying the wind the the that that interval to see how to up to what point. Because, visibly, we're fragile if you instead of having 10 degrees variation or 20 degrees variation, you go to a 100 degree variation. You would die in both cases. So you're fragile when it starts harming you, the interval, and winding and narrowing the interval for the same keeping the same average. Seems like it seems like, antifragility in that case, like, almost like a doughnut. Exactly. Fragility in the middle and fragility on the outside. It's too much to some fragile. Some things are yeah. Something like randomness. Yeah. And let me now you're talking about evolution. Let me talk about evolution. It evolution without randomness, you don't have evolution because you don't have, you know, the fitness. Say, there there are a lot of mechanism in evolution. One of them is noise in your DNA. Okay? If you have no noise, okay, and the DNA transmitted without replicating error, because every time someone has a child, there's a replicating mistake or not every time, but statistically, there are mistakes in replicating the DNA. So if you try giving a DNA deterministically without mistakes, you don't have evolution. But if you have mistakes, you know, you're gonna have 10 offspring. Some of them will benefit from the mistake. Alright? Then you have evolution. Alright? Those benefit get in the advantage and keep going. So replication error is good. So something that likes an error, alright, has some advantages. The problem is if your error rate is too high, you will never conserve the benefit. So you have to have some error rate, not too high and not too low. And this is yeah. This is, you know, why what I what I say that antifragility is local. It's good, for example, to have 1% error not 1%. 1 per 1,000 error rate, for example, because it's good. But if you have 10% error rate, then your offspring will never will not retain that advantage to transmit it to their own. So antifragile is local, except in finance, where it's sort of you know, finance is always weird, where you can have things that benefit from volatility with no ceiling, contractually. Or some things may have a high ceiling. Let me, again, use the concept of of antifragile and convexity, and I'll show you where we're okay. Lift weight. What's better to build muscle? To lift a 1000 times 1111 kilo or 1 pound or, or one time a 100 pound? Well, I wouldn't be able to lift a 1,000 times 1 pound, so I'd have to go with a 100. I I I wouldn't be able to to lift a 1,000 kilos. No. No. No. What I meant is a 100 times 1 pound or or one time a £100. Oh, one, I would say one time a £100. Okay. So there you go. So there you get the complexity. Is that every pound gives gives you more benefits, you see, for given the same amount total amount that you're gonna To I'm sorry. To I'm sorry about that. Point point. But visibly, you're not gonna have health benefit lifting a £1,000 because then you would break your your You have a repetitive stress as well? No. No. No. £1,000 will will break your bones. Right. Right. Whatever it is. If you you the the someone who's like 100 times 1 pound, you just get repetitive stress disorder. You won't get that. Exactly. You won't build any muscle. Exactly. So so the whole idea of antifragile is understanding what I call the convexity effect. The convexity effect is a linear combination of 2 things, alright, is better, you know, than one thing of the same average. But what I like about that is you don't have to explain why something works because then you go into the realm of, you know, mythology. You you just have to understand this measuring this aspect of the I mean, I'm I'm very skeptical of, people who try to understand the mechanism, and and and we have to does a 100 pound weight build muscle? We don't really know. Exactly. So and I know and I said it here in the book. I said that, you know, when I started weightlifting, I was told, hey. There are microtears that fill up, you know, and then you eat your protein and and okay. Or you have protein shake and a microtears that fill up with muscle, and everybody's happy because of the tear. Okay. So it's a very nice story. But then I came back and asked, yeah, but how come the lion has so much muscle without working out? Alright? Well, they say, well, it's hormonal. Alright? They say, hormonal. And then discovered that people who take steroids grow on muscles. Alright? So you realize that muscle growth is something informational that doesn't seem to have much to do with the way people used to interpret it. But so you the theory behind muscle muscle growth will change maybe every generation or may you know, and we'll never converge because science doesn't work, you know, does have definitive answers. Will never fully converge. But the fact that if I live a £100, I will gain muscle will never change. Right. So when you can observe is robust. Okay? Theories, the explanation, are not. And people yet have more respect for theories and phenomenology. Phenomenology is cataloging things that have monstrous regularity without really understanding the reason. And you don't I don't have to explain that to you what the mechanism by which if I hit someone on the head, okay, he's gonna, you know, not do well. Alright? You don't have to explain the blood vessel. I don't you know, the fact is it won't change the story at all. So we have so in my book, the robust methodology is very robust. Right? Phenomenology is very robust. Okay? It does catalog things that we know that if you overeat, you're gonna gain weight. Now what's the pathway that will store the who cares? Right? If we focus on these things that we know, we do a lot better. You see? I'm not against science. I'm against interpreting scientific theories as truth rather than focusing on robust phenomenologies. You see? And and statistical regularities are part of that phenomenology. You see? The way we handle randomness is part of that phenomenology. And there are some things that are necessary, mathematically necessary, absolutely necessary mathematically. Like, for example, that if you, are convex, in other words, if 80% of it then, necessarily, you like variability. Then necessarily you are antifragile, the thing. Then necessarily you benefit from random supply of that thing. If you if you if you like if you do better and you take those books on starvation, now they have many, many of them showing how cancer cells do. Okay. But if you look at it, you say people effectively do better after x days of starvation, and then they can eat all they want. So visibly, instead of eating 2,000 calories for 8 days, they eat 0, and then they can eat the rest. They do a lot better. Okay? But you don't have to go into the mechanism to understand that that's a regularity. You see? That you can and and from that, the the the the you you can make mathematical statement without having to understand the process at all because it's necessary. Well, let me ask you a question. Because we've removed so far, let's say, from because we have this controlled environment that we can control, do you have to now measure statistically to get us back to Exact that's the problem. Okay. Let's go back to to life. Alright? We were had no control over, transportation, so we walked a lot. Alright? And now we got better. We have we can make life comfortable with a car. Okay? Now, what do you do? You drive your car to the gym to compensate for it, you see, and walk on a treadmill. You see, normally, that's completely absurd, but we do that. You know? That's a compensating fact to to fix it. But but this is not something new. The Greek Orthodox religion, forces us to have 200 vegan days. I didn't know that. Yeah. Because in in opulent societies, you know, you you overeat on lab, you know, you're you're gonna be harmed. So we have 2 including 40 days of lent or in. You go through 40 days of of purely, you know, stuff. We have Ramadan in in Islam. If if done properly, you should, you know and and Judaism has 6 days of fasting plus recommended a lot of rabbis fast x number of days, just to have a clear mind. So if you look at so these are compensators. There's no difference from going to the gym to compensate from the fact that we have too much control of our environment. And it's the same thing with, with, like, of coal. I was in, in I mean, you have saunas, alright, where where where you would you induce variation. Okay? And you have reverse saunas. I was in Qatar, a place I I hope, you know, not go back because I don't like their their their their politics, and and they may they may make me force me to stay there. Anyway, so I I was in Qatar, and I noticed that they had a reverse sauna, which is a room where temperature is kept at something like minus, 20 degrees centigrade, where you go for a minute, maximum minute to a reverse sauna. Alright? Now all these things come from the fact that we have too much control of our environment. And thermal stability and mechanical stability and these things are, you know, effectively weakening us. But then you have to measure whether that's now we have we're in a position where we have to measure if that's good or not. Well, we we we can we can guess pretty much. I mean, we can guess that if you don't walk too much, you're gonna gain weight. You're gonna do this. You're gonna have this. You can guess that if you don't, you know, go lift weight in the gym, that's your bone density will do will will do so. So you can pretty much calibrate your life to have enough, and most people do. We live healthy lives, you know, live in cities where they walk a lot. We're we're not it's impossible. You know? At some point, it was easy to drive in New York City. That was impossible. Somehow, our environment also is forcing us to go back to more ancestral, methods. Right. And you and you mentioned there's an antifragility there because people might complain, oh, I'm stuck in traffic, but, oh, I'm in a city where, or or there is some antifragility there where I'm in a city where everybody wants to go. So the fact that I'm in harm, means I'm in a popular place where there might be money and opportunities and so on. Exactly. It's not it's not I mean, they don't complain about traffic. It means other people wanna be there as well. Yeah. Right? It's just that there's something very interesting, by the way, about traffic is, traffic is highly nonlinear, and and you and and people made mistakes of not predicting traffic based on local response of delays like like, the the city of New York wasn't good at outstanding nonlinearity with traffic. Is that if you shut off a bridge, for example, the 59th Street Bridge for a film on Saturday, don't predict that it's gonna slow down traffic by 10 minutes. You know, it took me 4 and a half hours. I was stuck in a car. Right? So, I mean, of course, it's my mistake to be to to drive to New York City, but that was that was for dinner. You see the idea. Incidentally, it talks about traffic. Now it's very important to realize that risk is not variability, but our instinct mixes the 2 of them. Like in finance, people think that risk is something that moves. No. Risk is something that makes you go bust, right, Because things that move aren't necessarily risky, but that's what people are afraid of. That's very interesting because variability you can measure whether something moves or not, you can see. Exactly. Exactly. But risk for me is different than risk for you. The risk for each person is different. Risk I mean, depending on the definition of risk. Risk of loss? Fragility. Yeah. Fragility we define fragility as much easier to measure. Alright? You can say, okay. At what point will this break? There is some mapping of risk to fragility in in in some cases called Roan, total Roan. Right? What's the probability of total Roan? Okay. But but typically, risk is not what we think is risk because most people try to control variability of portfolio blow up. I I said that that forest if you try to control the the fires in forest, you end up letting the bad material accumulate, and then the forest you know, you know what happened to these forests when there's a fire. The same thing with emerging market governments. I remember controlling their currency. Like, I saw Mexico in 1994 moving, like, 37% of the currency. Alright? I'm still talking like a trader, like, as I've said, the Mexican peso, we call Mexico. Alright? So so I still remember, and and what happened is that if you control volatility, bring it to 0, then you have a small move. It's out of control. You see? I've seen we've seen we've often seen Argentina freezing the currency for a long time, and then the minute you let it float or you're forced to let it float or it floats by itself. You know what happens. So controlling variability has never been a good idea in in any domain. You have to have some element of variation for things that are alive. So so what other than, like, let's say, the financial markets, what are some clear areas where you see people trying to control very broadly? I mean, I I I wrote on the black swan that Syria was gonna blow up because they had no political variability. You know? You need maximum political variability because things blow up otherwise. Flammable material, as as as I said. And and if you generalize it, you realize that you want a municipal system where you have maximum variability because you have more it's more of a continuum rather than have a president at the top. So like a Switzerland type of, Like a Switzerland type in municipal system with a lot of, distributed decision making, you know, with small mistakes made here and there. So but Syria the next one is Saudi Arabia. Alright? Will will be next route to drop. They have had zero political variability. So the minute there's something, nobody knows how deep it can get or if it can control it. In the political domain in a lot of domains, absence of variability is bad. Actually, something I I discovered recently, if your heart has too steady a beat, the heartbeat is very steady, guess what? It predicts predicts mortality. That's interesting. Predictive. So This is what I get worried about. I I actually wrote you, this in an email recently. I, myself, have never been to a hospital, don't have not gotten sick. I'm worried if I ever do get sick, my body will just blow up. Could be, I mean, it could be with age that you're getting sick. In fact, I'm getting getting over it. Maybe. It could be. I I don't know. But I didn't look at I mean, infectious diseases aren't so much my domain. I'm just worried that my mind won't be able to handle it once I get sick because I'll I'll be so so fragile about the concept of getting sick. Really? Maybe induce yours. It goes to some country or you can contract Get malaria or something. Not malaria. Something less chronic. Yeah. I don't know. It's interesting. But but but you mentioned that in the book, in anti fragile, that you do have an anti fragile personal program for yourself. Like, you like to, for instance, walk on uneven surfaces. Uneven surfaces. I like to walk on rocks, not walk on roads. And there's evidence actually that that that walking on rocks, for instance, increases lifespan. They've done some I didn't and look. I mean, I broke a nose, initially, but since then, I've been doing rather well. And it it's you know, I feel alive after I walk. And and I I think that, we did not stand sleep for a long time. People trying to reduce sleep and then, you know, having problems elsewhere. I think we also don't understand walking. I say, statistically, we're made we've been walking so much in our history. Okay. I need a very convincing reason, alright, to stop doing so, and there's none. Okay? So I try to walk. It's pretty much what I try to do, as as main activity. Okay? My activity is some 20 some hours a week, minimum. But I've noticed one thing, is to have a comfortable life, I wake up in the morning, I don't wanna have any obligation except walking. And if I walk on something, like sleeping on something, you know, you walk and I try not to think of that thing at all. Say, I have to write an article. And the minute I'm stuck, I don't try to make an effort. I just walk. And I come back. Alright? Sometimes I come back and comes it it pours out on its own. So in other words, never make an effort locally to try to solve the math problem or do something. I walk So don't stay out of blanks at a blank screen or a blank page? No. No. Nothing. No. Make no effort. There's there's no life is too short. Okay? Just go take a walk and think of something else. And I think I'm sure it's a mechanism works better when I walk because, I'm I'm you know, my main activity since I've been, you know, full time into scholarship and stuff like that, I've been reading and walking. Right? And the more I walk, the more I mean, I I don't spend a lot of time writing. It just comes out. Right? If I don't walk, I have this blank screen business, and then you get in trouble. So the walking is no. No. It's it's necessary. So so walking, increases the the the stress takes I don't know the mechanism. I absolutely don't know. I don't make no statement, no explanation mechanism, but I look at statistically how much, you know, we've been doing it, and and and and and I apply it and it seems to work. So in other words, I don't have to have, to come up with a with a explanation to follow mother nature, particularly if I have usually positive payoff from it. Right. But but then if I'm going against walking, then I wanna see the evidence. Alright? You see the idea? Right. If I'm going against the natural. And I don't walk on a treadmill, kind of kind of nonsense. I just walk outside. So what what else is part of your antifragile program? Your personal one. My personal one is, when I go to a country, right, to drink local water, one for ethical reason. You gotta drink some water, but non purified a little bit. Mhmm. So just that's the antifragile thing. Reduces surprises. Alright? So we have had so much control of our our hygiene that people are forced now to take pills, can you imagine, with bacteria? Isn't it absurd? So exactly like driving to the to the treadmill. Well, so it's always my theory that the peanut allergies, this generation, which we never had before, is caused by too much anti bacterial. Yeah. Because people don't understand the plus overusing antibiotics. Okay. So what I do is I follow the principles that risk is what to worry about, not comfort. So take no medicine, except if I have something very, very severe, in which case I don't see one doctor. I see 4 of them. And I follow 4 opinion? Not 4 opinion. And some if someone gives you one one, you know, and I double the dose even if necessary. You see the idea? So so medicine is very nonlinear to to condition. And and and let me let me give you the rationale. If you have slightly above normal hypertension, alright, like slightly, if if you're above the normotensive, and you take medicine, the number needed to treat to treat is something like 1a100, between, at best, 160. In other words, the number of people who benefit from the medication is very small. Is that always is that usually true? If it's slightly one standard deviation away from, from, normal. Alright. So that is That's fascinating. If you're if you're 4 standard deviations away from normal, that or 3 standard deviations away from normal, something in that area, okay, and you can use standard deviation because it's Gaussian. It's sort of Gaussian. Then the numbers needed to treat are monstrously lower. Something like 75% benefit from from the drug. So if you were told you had cancer, you wouldn't take any chemotherapy drugs? I would I would go for this for I mean, I would be I'd not try. But if someone tells me I have a headache, take this medicine, I wouldn't take it. Plus, there's some feedback. If I start taking medicine from headaches, then I'm not limiting the cause cause, just a symptom. But no. To go to go back so it tells you but the harm from medicine is the same. Whether you're high you see that is the same. So the ratio of gain, alright, is not there for mild condition. But the problem is pharma has a difficulty finding people who are very sick. So because of 5,000 more people who are very, sorry, slightly hypertensive than very hypertensive. You see? And that's this is why we tend to overtreat people. And and so and and and you have to let the variation and the stressors take care of themselves. They make you better. And make sure the extreme is taken care of. Okay. So this is a great this is a great field. So so medicine, what's another area personally? What about what about, like, in relationships? In relation I don't know. I don't have I have a very boring, you know, I mean, I'm a very boring Seems like marriage is a fragile thing. I don't know. I I I see I've seen people, alright, who have who don't know how to manage, you know, the social life, okay, relationship, and overall with their friends, partners, and stuff like that. And I try to avoid these people, okay, completely. And for them, you know, I cut losses very quickly as a trader. So, like, I if you see someone, a business person who had a problem with a partner, I I cross the street. I I don't get I mean, I may have coffee with them, but I will never do business. So this is something you learn is, some people are troublemakers and to stay out of, you know, that. But in in in in social relationships, can disruptive people be helpful? In other words, can have anti fragility by having disruptive people social? I don't I don't I don't I don't know. I try to avoid, disruptive people, and also but I, myself, try to be disruptive if I don't like something. Although you it sounds like you selectively expose yourself to stressors, like, on Twitter or something. No. And Twitter is not a stressor. Twitter is I aim to it's just I'm making I'm enjoying the media medium, and, and it's calculated. This is much more calculated by picking on targets that, I don't like, like a couple of economists and publicly. So Right. But on in in private life, I haven't had many I don't know if in private life I've had many fights except, you see some person drunk at a party and and and I, you know, control the person and and and and and get him out. Or But but you don't expose yourself to variability there. You stay around positive people. No. I I don't. I haven't had street fights in a long time. Right? Haven't had, no no street fights. No no actually shouting match. Nothing. But, you know, it's funny, thinking of fighting, like gaming in general, like chess. It's good just to study multiple openings so you understand chess better, to have have variability in your knowledge. This I don't know. I mean, the the thing all I all I thought about is that, I remember, you know, figuring out that being good at chess doesn't make you necessarily good at at other things. That's definitely true. It's very domain domain specific. But but is it also does it how much transfers? I've had a lot of stories. I don't know how much transfers. But so this is why I try to avoid, analogies to game because life doesn't resemble games. And people think life resembles games tend to get in trouble. But I think that that you have to have an element of of surprise in your life. Okay. Now let's talk about life. Okay. What I think is a way gateway to be, you know, non fragile in your life. If you're an employee, you're fragile for life. Because even if you're promoted or demoted, it's unpleasant for you. It's fragile. Exactly. Because if you're promoted, you got a small increase in salary, but a huge increase in responsibility. My point is if you're gonna be, employed, better be the lowest person, the the the night guard of the company or someone who No responsibilities and you get No responsibilities. And you got income, and then you can write poetry at night or be a painter or do things. And and and and and and developed countries is, you know, like Switzerland. If you wanna be a writer, it's much better to be to be a work work at at the minimum wage, then we're very comfortable rather than, you know, be a university, English teacher or a German teacher or whatever it is to write books. So the the the being an employee makes you very fragile because the way people start viewing the world, okay, prevents them from following their own actual ethical, inclinations. Right. So they'll choose, to make an ethical exception to get a promotion, for instance. Or or no. For example, you may work for a tobacco company. Right? You may buy stock in the tobacco company because you have a budget to make. So so these are ethical, dilemmas that, you cannot escape when you're employed. It's it's similar then, you you know, you, to make a budget. So owning a home makes you more fragile than renting. Well, it depends. I mean, to be to be personally, I never borrowed a penny. Alright? And and, almost never. I I I had a, an arbitrage once when I on my first shot Trading this trust. No. No. Bankers trust. I'm trading them. But I I so I noticed that people who have a mortgage have, of course, are the prisoners of the system, and they underestimate the duration of their employment. And and and when they start fearing the boss and, and if the boss calls them to their office, they're in trouble. If you have money on the side, you're much more robust. Okay? And money on the side is the opposite of of debt. It's like having an extra reserve. You don't have to predict what's gonna harm you. And you depend less on a boss getting rid of you. If the boss doesn't like you, can you imagine how miserable it is, how unnatural a life it is being in an office for 30 years with someone you hate. Alright? And many people do it? And and and in nature, you you would have been killed or or or or or you would have killed within minutes. Right? So many people this is a stressor that's not good for you. The chronic stressor is not good for you. The the the varying stressor and the high intensity once in a while stressor is good for you. You see? And and, of course, it maps to what Sapolsky have established about acute versus chronic stressor and stuff like that. But the the to go stressor was a recovery, that is. But to go back to have a good life is, I I I plot an antifragile. I compare a taxi driver in London who has high randomness visibly to his brother who's an employee of a whatever. Cushy has a cushy job, making the exact same salary, very predictable. If his brother loses his job, he's gone. A taxi driver is protected by the variability because the variability forces him to adjust. So so if you don't have business near Heathrow, you try to find another airport. You see? Or maybe, you know, you try to find nightclubs. You're adapted. You're you're if you're making a living from as a taxi driver in London, you're adapted to the environment. You see? Because every trade is a new trade, as they say. And even if a disruptive, company comes along like an Uber, you can just become an Uber driver. Well, you can move around, but but his brother spent 30 years in a cushy within the company. The company has a financial problem. He's gone, and he's not gonna land another job at age 53. Alright? Something quite important. Every system that's organic communicates with its environment via stressors. So your your your lift weight, it's a stressor. Your system will will will code for higher, you know, higher bone density and then more muscle. You see? You go on the sun, you you're you're you you get the signal, and then you'll code for more protection from the sun. So you get you get, you know, sun tan. Alright? I I like your point in antifragile that, we've been in the sun for 1000000 of years and never got, like, skin cancer from it as far as we know that I didn't make that point so much that I was I was I was questioning the idea of of avoiding the nation completely, except if you don't have the racial characteristics and racial the the the skin tone characteristics of the area in which you live. Right. Like, if you're, you know, an an Irish person living in Australia, there's no no there's a problem. Right? But if you're an Irish person living in Ireland, I don't know. You see? Right. And and, effectively, it looks like and and now we have evidence that a little bit of radiation is very good for you to prevent protect you from cancer. So so so elimination of radiation makes you, fragile. Just like a little bit of bacteria is good for you to protect you from bacteria. You see? If you live in a sterilized room, you're not gonna do very well when you come out of it. So it's among these class of things. But so when you are in professionally, a consultant, okay, nonemployee, a consultant, you're gonna have variability in your income. But every morning, if you're still making a living, alright, you're fit for whatever environment there is. Right? So okay. So there, you're minimally resilient, but not yet antifragile. You oh, you have to get, minimally robust, okay, to get in the right direction of antifragile. You see? Something antifragile is effectively something that that gains from, stressors to the system and improve from it. You have to we have also to avoid looking at humans as a unit. You have to look at systems. You see? So sometimes, the fragility of the person is necessary for the fragile for the safety of the system. Take the restaurant business. If restaurant weren't fragile, wouldn't go bankrupt, you wouldn't have, a healthy restaurant business where people can eat well. So how can the individual, right, be what can you do in that in that environment? You have to make sure that you're capable of starting a new restaurant very quickly. So it's almost like you have to build the sensibility that if this restaurant fails, at least they'll have the experience to get a better one. Exactly. And then you have to integrate that failure in in in your learning curve. But to really be antifragile, you have to be in the business of trial and error where your your all your side effects are gonna be beneficial. And there's no business it used to be no longer like that, that benefited from its own mistakes better than pharma. Because if you're in that business, you make a mistake with, you know, your your your, hypertension medicine doesn't has a side effect. Well, that side effect leads to Viagra, for example. Well, that's a good news. You see? And and effectively, if you look at, what I mean, I have a big bone with academic research, with everything, you know, trying to exactly map the environment thinking we understand it and fooling ourselves rather than than focusing on payoff. Again, trying to predict rather than focus on exposure. Have a convex exposure, antifragile exposure. It's something like, the the best model is cooking. You cannot imagine, right, what something could taste like just from writing down on a piece of paper the chemical composition. You cannot. No. You have to try. Mhmm. Well, that protects us from having too many theories in cooking, and then everything goes by trial and error. So but why how the why does trial and error work well? Where I'm trying to make the perfect hummus. I add an ingredient. Alright? It doesn't taste good. I give it to my mother-in-law. You see? So you have your downside is small. But if if if I hit on something great, then I'll have my my, my my great hummus. You see? So pharma works that way. And the rate of growth of medical research and and gains and and finding drugs and cures and all that was much higher under trial and error than today that we think we understand biology. You see? So mistakes so given that we make mistake, we might as well be in an environment where we benefit from mistakes. You see? So the restaurant industry benefit from mistake of its members to improve. The the the airline, the transportation industry, every plane crash reduces the probability of next plane crash. Benefit from its mistakes. So that's a health healthy system, but it's not necessarily always good news for the people at the bottom. But nevertheless, we can say that if they died, alright, at least they saved more lives, alright, than the ones that perished. Do you do you think, so given, like, the current economy, which is sort of, floating on top of these bailouts from 2,009, what's your what's your stance? I mean, bailouts are, of course, against my my religion, against everything I believe in because you're disrupting the system, creating moral hazard. You didn't let the crash happen? I would I don't know. The yeah. But but but but the counterfactual is is is wrong. My peers say, well, would you have, saved the economy, let it fail then? If, you know, it's a wrong counterfact rule. You would have opposed bailout since 1982 when mister Reagan started bailing out the banks. 83, you know, when they bailed out Cornell, Illinois, when it started, you know, having these systems. So the the bailout situation is tricky. You cannot say well. You cannot look you have to look at it as an ensemble. Build a system that doesn't require bailout. And and we know, you know, how to build these systems. Once a system doesn't require bailout, well, the first thing is you force everyone in in banks that require bailout to be you know, why are we billing out the bank? We're billing. It's too big. We're not billing out the restaurant, although the consequences, locally on the person and the staff are the same. You know? They're gonna be unemployed, you know, Monday morning, and with financial losses. But we don't care. We care because we're protecting the system. So if someone is making, $20,000,000 bonuses and we're gonna bail them out, if take a mistake, if he's wrong, that's wrong. So any business that's bailable out should not have these bonuses. And people tell me, well, we lose talent. I said the bank the banking industry has proved only one talent that of getting paid, you know, individually because it's a business that never made money. You see? So this is how you structure a system to be robust from the inside. The structure of business, the banking business, to be like the restaurant industry. A Another another thing that's very central for a system to work well is to have what I call skin in the game. In other words, people bear direct consequences for action, not because it's a deterrent, but because it's a filter. Because if you go bust yourself, you're out of the pool. You see? If you, if you're a bad driver okay. That's fine. You're allowed to be a bad driver, but you're not we don't want you to harm others. So if bad drivers tend to die because they get into accidents or kill other people, they would much more likely, alright, reduce the number of fatalities, alright, than if they didn't survive. Likely to kill you know, those who kill other people driving. This is my idea of skin in the game as a symmetric, risk thing that causes bad risk takers, right, to be harmed. Or or at least learn if they're I don't believe in learning. I really don't believe in learning at the individual level. I believe systems learn through filters. What about entrepreneurship, though? So if somebody starts a business and fails, they might learn from that experience. Yeah. They learn from the experience. And also the business the the the business model of entrepreneurship is what I was in, out of money options. I bought out of money options. I always lost money. And I was in business of, you know, and and, you know, people Ah, it's very interesting. Entrepreneurship is like buying out of the money option. Exactly. And and and you have people who kept telling me that I was doing the wrong thing, and they still work for a living. You see? And so I I I mean, you can only smile and say, okay. People lie to them. And and they teach you what because the the the the and then my reason is that the tail and the tails, okay, is any error in model, alright, means the tails have to be more value. Yeah. More valuable. And and it's a little, complicated to do without a graph. No. No. That's interesting. So entrepreneurship is actually saying the tails have more value than anybody else thought before. And so you're gonna develop Yeah. I mean, the the world the world the world is built today by entrepreneur. Everybody with short tails. There's no business that short tails that's still in existence. Insurance companies are the only one who do it because they do it with things that aren't thin tailed and capped the tail. They don't have the exposure in the tail. Insurance companies, people don't understand that. Insurance companies, they don't sell tails. They sell the body distribution and they block you. For example, your house, they cap you. Alright? What interests me is beyond the cap. Right. So so I would I mean, I was in the business of buying tails. Alright? Or at least protecting people from not having the tails and stuff like that. So it is when you're in a business like that, you start looking at at the world's tails, and you see who understands tails. And you realize entrepreneurship if enter the tails weren't mispriced by the world, we wouldn't be where we are today. You see? Look at the wealth generated. Where did the wealth come from? All right tailed things, businesses, computers, entrepreneurship is a right tailed proposition. Alright? And the businesses that were short the tail, there's 3 of them. Alright? Banking is 1, never made a penny. Another one is insurance, reinsurance. The ones that that that made even substandard stuff was because they were capping the tail. You see? So let's take take someone like Warren Buffett, though, who buy who who does, catastrophic insurance on stadiums. Well, cat cat insurance, the ones overwritten by these people, are not tail events because they're capped. And my tail starts at Beyond. I I had, recently, someone I was waiting. I said, I'm not gonna attack and print my ideas until I'm waiting for someone to publish something criticizing my ideas and anti fragile about the tales and okay. In a journal so I can publish it in a scientific journal. And and some idiot who's a risk manager or whatever said, oh, Taleb is wrong. Look. There's no volatility. Tails are not volatility. Tail tail risk is how much is of the volatility explained by the tail. You see? So I, it allowed me to to make the point that a business that is fat tailed, in other words, where the tail played a larger role, had usually less variation. You see? And more more more the variation comes from jumps. So, like, look at When you have a fat tail, you start to get to do a power lock. Sorry? When you have the fat tail, it could be a power lock. No. No. No. But what is the characteristic of a fat tail is not that there is there there's a fat tail event because often you don't see it. That there's no volatility outside the fat tail event. You see? And mathematically, you showed it mathematically in that paper and and published, of course, in the same journal. Alright? What, I'd call it elements of quantitative finance, what people, you know, don't understand about tail. It was 4 mistakes. But it was very interesting because then I caught a a risk manager who didn't understand risk. That that the risk isn't a variation effectively when you shift to, you know, fat tailed in other words, it's not so much volatility. The VIX doesn't represent fat tailedness. It It represent variation. And, usually, to build like, I used to build, fat tail trade. I would sell volatility and buy the tails and all be harmed by medium volatility, not very fat tail volatility, which is what people couldn't understand what I what my business was. Tell them, I don't want medium volatility. I want no volatility or maximum volatility. Right? So so so to to really map it into businesses that have typically, you can you can tell actually that businesses that are short in the tail tend to have steady income. And businesses that are long the tail tend to have erratic, highly variable, and typically not good outside of tailwinds. These are the businesses effectively that have produced what we have in the world. Okay? Now now scientific discovery is a fat tail event. It's hunting for out of money options. They don't cost. I mean, we spend a lot of money trying. Right? Pharma. Pharma is the biggest fat tail fat tail as an industry. You look how much money is in. What's their business? Their business is keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. Cost of trying, we have small losses, out of the money option, and and you finance it. So I see. So so what what's ruined it a little bit is that the, FDA requires more and more money to get a drug through trial, so it's hard to do trial and error. The cost of trial and error, increases, right, visibly under regulation and other environments and increases also under okay. What happened is that if you're what people don't realize is the return is much more linear to number of trials than to total total dollar spent. So and people now go for blockbuster drugs. So they spend a lot of money in one direction. So more prone to error and Right. And they're not when you hunt for fat a business that understands fat tails very well is publishing. Right? Like cinema. And that's a fat tail business. We're not far from my publisher Random House. Go to the lobby of Random House on on Broadway. Go to the lobby and walk in. The first time I walked in, I was not yet published, you know. I was a best selling author, so someone made me wait. You know, they make you wait if you're this and otherwise, you're a best selling author, then you have special elevator used to the thing. So when you wait in the lobby, I looked, and I said, oh my god. This building likes publishers or publisher likes build like, like this building because there's nothing but publishing houses. Guess what? It turned out to be all belong to the same Bertelsmann. Right. Because when you're in a fat tail business, you make your income off of few blockbusters. You gotta have thousands of books. So, again, so this is So there's a lot of, like, 70, 80, 70, 80 publishing houses, separate publishing houses in the same building. Right? So It's a random house, Crown, Knopf, this, that, things you've never heard of. Alright? Yeah. And when you have a lot and and when you're in a fat tail business, you need a lot of small trials, you see, making bets on on stuff. And once in a while, you got a Harry Potter. Publishers are essentially venture capitalists on books. So Exactly. But now so that's a resilient business. It's not necessarily anti fragile. No. It is anti fragile. They're like I mean, they're Let's say a book fails. Sorry? If a book fails because it it cost them $5,000. If they do it right, alright, it it's like an option. You you lost $5,000 if it fails, and you make a 100,000,000 if it's right. Right. But if it it so so they don't mind failures, but do the failures make them stronger? I I mean, no. Usually, my mapping of antifragile isn't so much in something makes you stronger, so on so much that the system benefits from mistakes. Okay. So or or benefits from randomness and benefits from other things. Alright? Yes. The the the the if you try to publish a book, and typically, let me tell you how the system benefit from mistake. You're trying to have a hypertension drug, and you end up with Viagra. Same thing. They try to publish a book on some like, they did with the black swan. They tried to publish a book on they thought, a narrowly defined subject by an option trader, okay, whom you can, you know, probably rely on having a few and it turned out from an option trading book, alright, into some global interpretation of history that made them you know, that sold x million. Well, you get the idea. So that was a mistake on their part. You see? Right. That was a positive mistake. That was so so they they can publish a book like Humberto Eco, they think, is a scholarly book, and their mistake is that it's a hugely popular topic that sells 50,000,000 copies. You see? It's pretty much like a drug. So you have side effects that you didn't predict that but whatever you don't predict, that typically helps you. And that's the idea. So the the model itself is is strong because sometimes these could turn into huge. Sometimes the mistakes could turn into huge. Because no mistake will cost. It makes your book Right. Cost you more than you spent for it. It's like a finite premium for an option. So all the mistakes are the upside. Right. But if you spend $1,000,000,000 for a book, alright, and some people have spent 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 on books. Alright? The the mistake is when you start spending a lot of money on publishing Al Gore. Alright? And the thing flops, so you have a big loss, you see, for no upside. That that's typically when people go for small bets in in in highly, unpredictable domains and in a field that nobody really understands very well, you have a huge upside. Okay? And and that that's but so if you look at the P and L of people who've done that, movies, pharma Buyers then. Real estate real estate real if you if if I walked into, the Black Swan when I was writing it thinking that most money was made in America by innovation and high-tech and stuff like that, it turned out to be false. The the big bucks were made in America, big fortunes. Alright? If you look at, at at the time, I look at networks of people. The big fortunes were made in real estate, and then I understood why it was a soccer game. Because real estate is long volatility for the owner of the house so you can borrow and short for the bank, which explained why the banks never made money. And individuals made tons of money on real estate, and real estate was a good business, you know, for these people because they have a free option. And it's funny too. Like, the housing crisis began long before or not the crisis, but housing was going down for a year and a half before the banks blew up. So housing was handling itself fine, but then the bank the financial crisis happened as a result of that. Package things. But but but, typically, banks are good at giving people free options. I remember manufacturers Hanover went bust, because Donald Trump, made bad bets. And eventually, Donald Trump got rich. Alright? But my my friend Hanover became part of Chemical Bank, became part of, now JPMorgan. You see? So the the the the mistakes of if a mistake can blow you, you know, up, you're not a good business. But but what's worse is when someone has an asymmetry. My mistakes blow up the bank, not me. You see? Right. Or, because the way they finance it. And also and and what they did even had they not done that, when I looked at the risk of Fannie Mae, huge even without these packages, you know, banks were overexposed to downside of real estate. So right now in the economy, where do you see the biggest bubbles or risks or I I don't know. I mean, I make bets. Alright? So my bets are out of my bets. So it's not a predictive bet. I made after the crisis, I initially, made bets on gold. And then, I was long gold, short s and p, and then ended up long both. Right? And then I ended up getting rid of my gold. And why did I have the s and p? Because I said, okay. Flooding money in the system, gonna going to either, harm the bonds, help the stocks, or both. So and then I started getting short bond down in and out. Right? So I had S and P with a shortage bond position, and and it paid off. Alright? So the quantitative easing was some long real estate. Alright? That that paid off pay pay off. And and then I you know, because I said, okay. The the only way they're curing the system is by by giving free money. So you gotta what people free money will go by. So it worked out fine. And, so I'll tell you, of course, Skinny and Gama only look at my thing. And then, I bought some euros, right, when when Europe was, because people on TV would go and say, oh, Europe, as if it was a catastrophe. It was like Dresden, you know, with a big hole, was smoking like Syria. Pictures of Syria today. And I I then I bought some Europe. Right? But it was about European currency because they weren't engaged in the same thing, and then I got out of it. So now I've I've I my exposures now, I would say, are minimal to anything now. So so given that, it means I don't have a view of anything, but I'm I'm I'm trying to get out of trouble. But it's good sometimes. It's it's, I would say, anti fragile sometimes to minimize sometimes. Wanna be in cash. My only risk of being in cash is you miss on you can have inflation, okay, or you miss on something. So there's risk to being cash. What I call cash, I have 2 cash. I have cash cash. Cash can be invested. And I have some what I call numero air protect me from inflation, which is a basket. And that basket, contains some real estate, not much. Some stocks, not much. Some you always have to have something that protects you because the big tail risk is I work all my life. You know? I'm I'm have a good life too. Things can be harmed by inflation. Alright? Or we can have asset price inflation, but not inflation, which is what we have now. Alright? Is which is worse, actually, because you see all the things you wanted to buy running away from you, but and then the other things are not. So I have some hedge there, okay, some agricultural stuff like that, just to say this is hedged for inflation. Okay? But I would say I'm monstrously underinvested now with the rest. And, okay, also, I mean To the point where you feel bad? Like, you're you're an investor at heart? To the point that I don't look at a screen. You know that you're underinvested if when when, you can go for 2 days without looking at the screen. How many hours you can go without looking at the stock market screen? You see? If I had to formula. If I have to look at it, with high frequency, it means I'm I'm over invested. Okay? And then you become victim to noise and stop losses. If I look at it with, knock now, I couldn't care less. And if I'm looking at it, you know, healthily, like like, I would like to be healthily, it means it was it was a good enough frequency. Then then then I'm calibrated. But I I've never really been calibrated. I've been moved you know, I typically go from total indifference to maximum, interest. What about like, given given your ideas on pharma, what about, you know, far big pharma has the risk of FDA regulations, but then you have, like, biotechs, you know, well funded biotechnology can work out there. Biotech is a is a is a very interesting, domain. Biotech, particularly that they have, they're underestimated by the market because they can have a huge discovery that will change everything. You see, small probability. That's not part of the data. But I'm I'm, I'm I'm not involved. There's too much headaches trying to figure out. It's just I mean, I have a comfortable life. I don't wanna mess it up by having complicated stuff. But but sometimes I for entertainment, I do trades, and, typically, I go with the irrational, which is strange for someone who likes the irrational because it seems to me that something is irrational. It means to be hidden reason behind it. It. You see? If something like, for example, when I went into Europe, Europe was very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, steady. And everybody say that's bad news. If the journalists say it's bad news, and stock market is not, I go with stock market. You see? Or I go with the currency. I go with the element. But I'm not too much in the market. Plus plus, of course, I have a convex bet on the crash on the stock market. So so So, typically, I would say my position would be in the stock market. The way I do it is I'll be long the stock market. I lose money if there's a 10% drawdown. But if there's a 20% drawdown, I make tons. Did you buy out of the money puts? Because I'm always has this kind of, out of the money thing. I I played it with bonds, but now it's difficult with bonds. Oh, even though there's most likely some sort of bubble in bonds at some point. Yeah. I don't wanna miss the government. I don't wanna miss it. But, but to express it with a positive, carry is hard. So sometimes you're gonna I don't wanna think about it. So you go out. You're gonna Too complicated. Yeah. But I I have enough gold, you know, in my own thing, and I have enough short bonds in my core, you know, what I call luminaire, that I don't have to worry much about that. So Black Swan, you're saying, sold sold very well. I I Fooled by Fooled with by Randomness is a a great book as well that I highly recommend every trader Yeah. Fooled by Randomness. Yeah. Fooled by Randomness was read by traders, but not outside. The Black Swan was read outside trading Right. A lot. And Antifragile, I almost view it as a personal improvement book, like a way of thinking about life as opposed to trading. The the the it's the one that satisfied me the most in this reaction because it it what what I always tell people is that there's nonlinearity. You don't wanna sell a 1000000 copies. Because if you sell a 1000000 copies, you're gonna have 800,000 people reading it, buying it, who shouldn't be buying it. Well, it's still it's still hard to execute on it. People like their fragile lives because it's that's the controlled environment. So it's hard for people to say, okay. I'm gonna fast randomly like every No. No. Yeah. That's true. No. No. But antifragile is is a kind of no. I mean, I wrote antifragile not as, as a book for I wrote it as you put your soul into a book. Yeah. So it is I I it's a forced volume of that insert, and I put my my my soul into it. But all the answers in The Black Swan. I also wrote it in a way to be less accessible to to the than the black to the common person. And why voluntarily? Why? Because I don't want to have, to the readers. And, I don't wanna go to conferences where you have all these big names who have bestsellers and and be one of them, like, in the me you know, in a cattle market. I wanna just have my own. I pull back from public image. You know, when you have a big bestseller, you you have trauma and you have also, you learn from stuff and say, okay. You won't do it once. You don't wanna do it all the time. So I did not want to have as big, and I don't want in the future to have any big I'd rather have a steady smart readership than crazy, people signing it without understanding what it is. And antifragile is in that category. It did, it's like food by randomness. Food by randomness was almost never, bought by people who didn't understand it or didn't get I mean, not almost never. It was the ratio is very low for full by randomness. And full by randomness over time did, I don't know, something, 1,000,000 something I mean, something worldwide. It did, well, yeah, I mean, in a 1,000,000 something, some some copies. So Antifragile, you don't think well, Foo Bar no. It's fine if fragile selling a lot more than than than than Foo Bar Randomness, you know, at these stages. But Foo Bar Random I want antifragile. You want books to follow the Lindy effect. I don't care about what they sell today. I I care about what they sell in 10 years. You see? To your point of, yeah, the the the the if it's still selling in 10 years, it's gonna be selling for another 10 years. For another 10 years. Full by random today is 13 years old, 14 years old. 13 years old. Still sells. This week, 14 years old. 13 years old. And it's not that it still sells. It's still in print. It's still active. The black swan is is, of course, is too known as a metaphor. That bothers me. Antifragile is similar to fooled by randomness, except that it's a different, crowd. It's more difficult than fooled by randomness, much more difficult. You know, but it got me thinking really just about every area of my life and what was fragile and what wasn't. And not only every area currently, but every area in the past and how I've the different parts where I've made myself antifragile just by instinct What because I didn't wanna lose anymore. That's good. Now that I'm thinking about it, there's a test you can do for yourself. Alright? If, you've had a little bit of disorder and you weren't harmed by it, it means you didn't have enough of it. If I wasn't harmed by it. If you weren't harmed by it. But if you had and you weren't harmed by it, if you had something bad happen or something like that, you weren't harmed by it, it means you need more of it. Well, no. I was definitely harmed by it, and then I had to overcome. Yeah. We overall, if if as a overall, you weren't harmed by something, then then you have and let me tell you that a lot of people don't understand that something I I mentioned just, didn't didn't focus too much on antifragile, is post traumatic growth. That growth comes from trauma. People talk about post traumatic disorder. The the real thing is post traumatic, growth. So so if you do grow too much, let's say, from a failure, that might not be a good thing? No. No. No. No. What I meant is that most people think that people get trauma from wars and stuff like that. I was a victim of war. It was horrible. Right? And, you know, in the near east, they're not wars are not very pleasant. Okay? But, but I think that I benefit from it. I personally grew from it. So so had had a psychologist, you know, just to bill x doll you know, $100 an hour, would have found the disease, you see, and and but a lot of people benefited from it. And a generation, a friend, they all did very well. Personally, emotionally, all kind of stuff. So so in a way, you grow from this order. Right. The the, but it is something important, you know, to to when you approach a topic like, antifragile, it's something important. You don't wanna ask too much from the topic. Try to apply it. Okay? But it should be demanding, but don't ask too much from the topic. In other words, don't try to apply the topic, you know, blindly to to a lot of things. But it has enough application. In other words, if we have It's worth thinking about. It has enough application. In other words, in biology, in biological system, in stressors, in ecosystem, it has enough application. And and it's a beginning, not an end. One thing that pleases me a lot is, as I'm telling you, that I switched life with antifragile. You know? I tried to, you know, just do enough of the markets for entertainment, not other things. Yeah. I'm also adviser to my old, friends who are continuing the business I was in in America. So so just do enough activities. But I wanted to be just now become a scholar, you know, retire into pure scholarship. You know? You Clearly, 9 9 published papers this week. This year. This year. A book, silent risk. Yeah. So I'm I'm doing technical work. Then the technical work. And I'm realizing that in a technical field, I mean, there are good disciplines and bad disciplines. There are disciplines like, political science that are totally clueless, and the discipline like physics and complex systems are monstrously insightful. You see? And and to understand that, you have to know from the inside. And, but but there is a huge appetite for ideas like the ones of antifragile. And I don't want you know, this is not no longer a book where it belongs to one person. It's the like like, you see the the the development of ideas, and and you wanna be part of it filling out even without citing antifragile, without mentioning it once. You see, sliding into this this mission. And now what is that that thing is really trying to understand how systems function without so so we we can live in in in a world in accordance with with with the way the world is rather than accordance with the way you'd like it to be. Like distributed system, like nature, how to handle nature, how to handle global warming, how to handle all of these. And I'm I'm, you know, and I'm involved in this. So so I'm very, very happy because I started an academic career, and and academic doesn't mean teaching. It means writing paper, researching, interacting with researchers, doing things. And so so which is why I don't think I'm gonna write books for the general public anymore after antifragile. I don't think I will. I mean, you know, people may have relapses, but I will, be producing more, scientific stuff that has theorems, proofs, and it's actually so much easier to do science than When will you, release stuff? Like like Silent Risk here. There's Silent Risk is for free on the web. It's for free on the web. Anybody can access it. I don't feel like giving it to a publisher for now. And, the good thing is that if I find a mistake, I'm gonna send a change it. It becomes open source in a sense because people No. I I changed it. I changed. But in other words, I changed it, and and I learned to write in text. So it's formatted the way it is. It comes right right instantly. And and probably it could be between cover, but but I wanted to stabilize, you know, at the level stabilize in the sense that I keep changing. You know, I wake up. I change, introduce the topic in Silent Risk. Silent Risk is really the backup of all my other books with the mathematical backing. And it's very strange. I noticed that, there's something we're doing with this paper. Okay? I noticed this paper. We use a lot of English. Alright? And then at the end, we have math, proof theorem, this this this this proof. Okay. So I noticed nobody reads the math. Nobody reads the math. But if it's there, people feel comfortable. But they feel comfortable with what I'm saying here without harassing me. What do you mean by this? They feel comfortable. They leave you alone. I'm doing the same thing with the Incerto by giving all this math. And I discovered, you know, and quite, you know, quite surprising that nobody knew, you you see, nobody knew that it is math for a living. You know, so this is mathematical stuff. They must not have read, dynamic hedging. Or they I mean, people said, oh, the the black swan. And and it's very strange because there's the same idea expressed in in in math. People take it seriously, although it's harder to understand. Alright? They complain that it's dense, but it's harder to understand. But then you express it in words, they they they they don't take it seriously, although it's easier to understand. So if people but so this is what makes scientific writing easy because you don't have any inhibition about how deep you wanna go. Nobody's gonna complain. That's very strange. Right? That's but the other thing that makes it also easy is because when I put a book out, I'm afraid of being misunderstood and having to explain stuff. When you put science out, it is self stand in the sense that it's very hard to misunderstand an equation. Right? You may misunderstand the application stuff. You're outside the verbalistic aspect, and and and it's quite liberating. And also what's even more interesting is that I know that if I make a mistake, it would be caught faster because the beauty of mathematics isn't that it help us get is that if someone expressed himself mathematically, he gave you a a a tool, alright, to critique him. And as I've made it clear I made my statements clear on here so you can see very clearly what I'm saying. If you find a mistake, you can spot it. So this is why it's more open to investigation for others to say, hey. You know, you made a mistake here. So silent risk has one part. One part is about risk and probability, and the second part is about how systems like this order and how city states do better and stuff like that. And silent risk part 2, making making a second volume. And and it's very interesting because once I put it mathematically there, now suddenly, a lot of people started reading this, antifragile, and without having the need to go to the ma*s. Because they've seen the mass, they've just glanced at it. There's a couple of graphs. They come back, and now they they they're interested in antifragile. This is why there have been no scientific criticism of antifragile. The a 100%, like, of the p of the scientists who look at antifragile found it positive. They wouldn't have done that had if I didn't supply him with a with a mathematical backup. Well, I I definitely look forward to checking out Silent Risk. And I know you say you don't want millions of people to to read and understand antifragile, but I I really it's a life changing book. I really think it's a it's a great book. Oh, thank you very much. Thanks a lot. It was very pleasant. Yeah. I'm glad you came came on the show, and I wish I had, followed up on my email with you in 2002. I I think I had coffee with the wrong people. So Oh, it's they blew up in 2,008 or no? 7, 8? Yeah. Both times. Several times. Okay. That's fine. Alright. Yeah. Yeah. That one had happened to you. Alright. See. Okay. Alright. Well, thank you very much, miss C. Thanks a lot. Thanks. Thanks. For more from James, check out the James Altucher show on the Stansbury radio network at stansburyradio.com, and get yourself on the free insider's list today.