hey everyone a few announcements before the show first this episode featuring The SE Nicholas talb is immediately followed by a bonus segment the bonus segment features talb and Brian Kaplan talking about kaplan's latest book the case against education so that will play right after the conversation with Talib
and of course if you haven't checked out Brian kaplan's conversation with Tyler it's also right there in your podcast app second you Talib fans will know he wrote a book called antifragile which is about things that gain from disorder audio recording systems do not gain from disorder and ours failed for this live event that means you're going to be
hearing a backup audio recording which unfortunately is of lower quality if you're having trouble following along with the audio I'd encourage you to click in the show notes to the transcript and enjoy the conversation that way lastly this episode does contain contain some explicit language so if you're listening with kids around
you might want to pop in the earbuds for this one we'll be back in 2 weeks with Tyler's conversation with David Brooks it sounds much better I promise conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at marcus.org and for more conversations including videos
transcrip RTS and upcoming dates visit conversations withth tyler.com we're very honored today to have with us the great Asim Nicholas alib I'm reminded of the words of the Hall of Famer Ernie Banks from Chicago who used to always say let's play two when there was the possibility of a double header so Nicholas TB has been gracious enough
to agree to the school event where first he and I will convert and then he will talk with Brian Kaplan and just to be clear as always this is the conversation with nas Nicholas T I want to have not the one you want to have so to start with a very basic question on page seven of the Black Swan you mentioned the 1975 Lebanese Civil War as
having been a Black Swan of sorts and if we think back to the earlier history of the region the growing role of the PLO in the country the end of the Eisenhower Doctrine which meant maybe the US would not intervene the prior conflict in 1958 ongoing differences in birth rates with more Muslims being born wasn't it in a
sense actually fairly predictable and not a Black Swan have do you see the history of your own country in this way no it's what it's surprise everybody it might have been predictable but not at that scale for several reasons the first one is that nobody understood the effect of modern weapons because previous conflicts were more local since the
first you know and more confined you didn't have artillery and and then things di down quickly and then you have another thing that these idiots brought in the PLO and after 1973 to Lebanon as a way Lebanon wanted to stay neutral with Israel sort of like neutral but engaged to say okay you guys can fight from here but we're not going to fight
Israel so and and and they didn't realize that these guys the first thing know to do is R take over the place so the imbalance came not from within but came from a huge number of armed Palestinians in Lebanon that disrupted the balance and caused immediately as a reaction the Christians to go and you know get get on
what's the role of the Phoenicians in your thought well I mean the there was a recent me thing circulating that the Phan didn't exist and which is not true I think no I mean visibly of course they didn't call himself Phoenician but canonizes just like Greek exist then you have some kind of Confederation you had occasion confederations among them among the
states the small little state city states with their HL and um and then we know that uh they uh genetically the Phoenicians seem to have come from Anatolia largely and they you know Anatolia is the same place the Greek came from so there is a connection that was we just discovered a year ago and maybe in five years from now we have a
clearer view of rewriting history based on Ancient DNA and but now understand people why was it that Phoenicians really sort of like had some kind of great working relationship with the Greeks looks like they they were similar maybe the same they the same Grand this way and also some mysterious thing why is it that the only people who were in
Athens were not metics foreigners meic is basically H1B you can so the the the only one who were not meic the were people from C and so there there's some kind of so this why I I like to call these people G phenician modern modern version of The Phoenician cre Phoenicians and of course now we know from DNA that the DNA over the past
uh 3700 years hasn't changed much of the local population to the ancient one I was talking with Eric Weinstein recently and I suggested the following to him that the way I read your work on one hand it was trying to explain what happened to Lebanon it's you know very Regional concern but you also trying to put forward a vision of what an
alternative Lebanese history would look like a Phoenician one and that positive program was the underd discussed part of understanding your work that you're trying to lay out how Lebanon could be seen or could be a Phoenician culture in the future it is not yeah it is an Eastern Mediterranean culture and I have uh it's very easy to convince people
it's an Eastern Mediterranean culture in Lebanon as textbooks writing the opposite let me tell you really what happened in 1860 the Christians in Lebanon did not write in Arabic they wrote in Cal gashi the American University they came in and tried to recruit Muslim in Denmark at the time was called Syrian Protestant college and they couldn't
convert Muslim they decided to prefer Christians and they translated the first translation of the New Testament actually the Bible the whole thing into Arabic they thought was done by a surgeon the Boston surgeon called vanik in fact something an attempt has been done 500 years earlier and failed so this arabization that started in 1860s
in leanon when the Turks were around is in fact what has is a distortion of history of perception of habits he trying to bring that part of the the world away from the otoman Empire which was a Balkan Eastern Mediterranean World in which the place had been you know in 500 years and before that a thousand years under GRE Romans so trying to move
it closer to Arabia and people bought the narrative because the Christians wanted to be non-muslim yet have the same rights so they invented themselves some genetic story that they came from Yemen They Came From A Tribe Called benan so the Christian invent themselves some kind of story yeah the Phoenicians were here but
the Arabs kicked them out and these the Christians come from and about gentically bogus that the population hasn't mooved and effectively it's the same people and I see that you have Charles Korn Charles Korn was the opposite narrative the Western narrative that we are Greek or Roman we had the school of beit school of be that for 500
years made or break laws the only place where laws were made in the Roman Empire we are R rans by culture let's go back to the r Roman world away from the 150 years of arabization and if you look at if you go to Lebanon you realize that 150 years of Arab hasn't had no effect you're Greek Orthodox by background and if I were to ask how do
the maronites fit into your schema so there's a long-standing tension between these groups it seems to me often that the Greek Orthodox but actually side with the Muslims wanting a more stable Lebanon suspicious of the Crusades suspicious what's your take on this I'm glad you asked me mean because finally someone really understood the problem
they say a has Tiara of the they say the The Sultans you know when when a lot of people lot of faction in Constantinople and 1400s you know the Turks were already in the area surrounding Constantinople for 250 years before it fell and it was just a book entry before I mean book entry there was a battle but it was not so and lot of the initially
the Turks came in as a Byzantine Empire and they were very upset at the Russian when they call themselves Caesars what do you mean Cesar we are you know the sultan is the the continuation of the the Byzantine Empire and there that tension East West and this manifest itself through religion and let me explain what I saw the coastal lant was
monstrously heliz except for beut which was latinized because the language of beut I mean people were horrified to see that they use Latin and because it was school of law but the rest was Greek and the countryside spoke Aramaic so that's that's the fact and if you see the religion schisms they map to Aramaic speakers versus Greek speaker so the
marinite monothelites as the first kism but earlier of course you had the you know the historians as a Schism and you look at the line of how people had the Schism in Asia Minor and you see that these schisms were entirely driv by by ethnicity sort of like the English the Protestant versus Irish Catholic so if
if the Irish if the English were catholic I bet you the Irish would proant so so so that's sort of like what happened along these lines and of course the byzantines were very suspicious of the West I'm saying and they saw Islam as a effectively it was not really um unrealistic thought because if you look what happened 500 years under the the
the Ottomans Serbia is cor Albania part Orthodox Greece State Orthodox Romania Orthodox these parts are Orthodox so the idea what when you look at the world the division East West and Christianity non-ch Christianity it's at the time there was three blocks there were the French those westerners there were the East meds the room it's
called the room and then there there were the the the easterners Arabs perss and that that was how it was seen okay so so this is and and of course people identifi along these lines and then progressively when you had the heresy people would go to Rome because the Enemy by enemy so the marites and gibon tells the story beautifully how they
came down to Tripoli to do a deal with the France when with with the with the Crusaders to do a deal with Rome because of you know they wanted to move away from that so the tension is not a tension that is modern it is a tension one between the marites and the Greek orthod is a tension that has been there forever let me give you one more com
comment something since we're talking about first I know you know thison interested in s the the if you look at what happened also in people failed to understand a few things that you have historians basically the syrix the Orthodox are not caledonians you look at these people the the the syrix speakers who absolutely
hated the Greeks just like the cops hated the byzantines you for people forget that before the Arabs conquered the Levant well actually they didn't really conquer the Levant they just went through the Levant and it's not interesting other Bo nothing else so when they before they came by you had you had two generations
of Persians in Lebanon the Persians came and they bought with them historians historians are similar to marinite heresy and they brought them with them to zoroastrians and then they left the Persians were k out by the byzantines those who stayed were zoroastrians and historians right by some mysterious things you find Zoroastrianism as a shi
Islam born in Lebanon and converting the Persians the same place where these guys were brought in and and the the shites were in Lebanon so it seems to me that the of zans who came because the bantine hated zasan and and non cians and they stayed okay or at least a religion came in and and there's a high big connection between the ranis and Sh
sh so let me give you just a cly subjective impression I have reading your latest book skin in the game there's this long-standing tension with the marites you also have a very interesting discussion of why in terms of christology Christ must in some way be at least part of man for God to have skin in the game and I read that almost
as your part of intellectual reconciliation that the new element for your big vision of what Lebanon s of could have been and maybe will be that you finally found a way of integrating the maronites into your basic story that you yourself are willing to accept it indeed and praise okay yeah May right two things the first one is I was convinced
until about seven years ago that the marites were migrants who came to to Lebanon from from the East because effectively their language their Thal language is not Aramaic but Syria which is Eastern aric and and the brand that of course came but it turned out in fact it's only the religion the DNA is as local as it can be Mar are the the
descendants of the Phoenicians so are the [ __ ] in Lebanon we greet Orthodox and the sunnis have little more Greek or stuff like that so that seemed to when I realized that then I realized that there autous so so it was already something so second point now let's talk about SK again as I was watching to connect to
this as I was watching Donald Trump debate the the other the guys wearing suits it was I knew he was going to win I was certain he was going to win I couldn't figure out why I was so convinced he was going to win at least that stage the primary and it turned out I figured out and said yes people love and turn out that I had heard the day
before the news that were effectively not that correct that he lost more than a billion dollars of his own money I thought about it I said okay is there anything more human than showing the scar say you know at least I'm real and you guys are just like pencil pushers or whatever so I thought about it I said that the skin in the game exhibiting risk-taking
is effectively what makes you elevate you over the traditionally you exibit a scar or or like they have some kind of Scar or some kind of sign of incapacitation coming from war so effectively it didn't H har I was a practitioner coming from Trading the trader who lost a lot of money at least is real it's not like a bad thing so I
realized immediately that and then thought about it I couldn't had trouble figuring out why is it that the Christian religion we have that that Trinity which makes absolutely no sense to Muslims and makes no sense to anybody who's not Christian but it makes so much sense to you if you're Christian right so why is it that makes so much sense to
have a trinity and then okay then the Christ is he god well is sort of like God but he's not God right so you want to figure out then you figure it out if I go to the circus and I have a fellow walking on a tight rope with a parachute I've ask for my money back you see that's how it works right so the Christ was sufficiently meant to
have skin in a game and sufficiently God to be God so it worked and for that we had to concoct a story that appears to be absurd but is necessary because kep coming back to the Trinity no matter what they tried let me try comparing you to another best in Lebanese author are you the anti Khalil Jabron you're both you both have books
of sayings you're both in the sense offering sermons from Exile both moved to America but he was marinite his influences are maybe baj and the suies yes and you're in a sense doing everything in reverse and and rebelling against him is that true well not quite because when you grow up in Lebanon you don't have a lot
of I mean you think that Jabron is kind of stuff for the idea of Ja is not Ser plus the other thing is he comes from an area right above my Village like like 30 miles away 20 30 kilometers away above and and and they invaded us two three times so so versus imun my vtin last bantin outpost and they come and invad us so so maybe you want to do some ology
on that but really jabran has never been in high standing in my you know I mean a lot of people in high standing from the area of let me try a question a reader email to me and I quote what advice would you give to the timid and unconfident does one seeking conventional employability and respect out of lack of imagination or lack of
confidence deserve only contempt how do one be in the world meaningfully if you're not awesome okay the exact opposite the point is that we are imperfect and the way you can function best is accepting we're imperfect this is why we have theology want Perfection you can find it in theosis and find a lot of things in
Sally to go back to the idea of being Orthodox theosis is a way for us humans to to rise above our condition of human right it's given to us open it's equal opportunity for everyone so if you consider that we are imperfect and the way really you can arrive this through honor sense of Honor by doing duties for self- sacrifice then you alive this game
is having taking risks as a for the sake of becoming more human just like to Christ he took risk and he suffered of course it was a bad outcome but uh you don't have to go that far but so that that was the idea and sort of I didn't talk about theosis to I just mentioned one footnote but it's sort of like you understand that the the
way that we're not in here to to eat mozzarella and go to P right and we're not in here to accumulate we're in here to mostly to sacrifice to to to do something right that's and and and the way you do it by taking risk some people take risks and some people uh labor in fields but you have the option of doing either either one or the other but my
point is you should never have someone rise in society if he or she is not taking risk for the SA others period That's one rule and the second one you should never be public intellectual if any statement you make doesn't entailing which is which is a fact it comes with in other words you never should never have rewards without any risk that
that's the the thing and then you can accept inequality if the person who's unequal is taking risks because that would make things rotate for example if someone becomes a billionaire okay it's fine it's une equal but you got to keep taking risks can't be you cannot be locked into a frozen upper class condition and and you know then use your
situation to use the government you know to prop you up there and that's the good thing about America is a rotation that you have when it comes to childbearing decisions do men have enough skin in the game well I mean the the I don't know if we can divide things so narrowly because men have low life pregnancy so visibly
and have had in history lower life expectancy I don't know about today in Washington DC if not reverse but they and um and of course you have more criminals among men one ratio 10 to one incarceration so you have a high rate so maybe not in bearing the child but in doing something else that's dangerous let me ask you another
question about religion is volatility in floing exchange rates a big problem volatility floing Exchange so so when it comes to religion again I mean I wrote in in here we don't know what F star star we're talking about when we talk about religion because people start comparing religion the the thing is defined there's some religions
that are religions some religions are just B of laws like Judaism and Islam are not religions like Christianity is a religion the exact opposite and let me def explain the the foundation of of of of Judaism was law all right but it was Municipal I mean it was for a tribe it was La you not this okay and then and Islam the same word de in Arabic means
law in Hebrew okay but not in Syria which is atic Lang by Christian which okay when they use two different words one no law and one Dean for religion so why is it so because the Islam and Judaism are laws it's law there's no dis no distinction between holy and profane whereas Christianity is not law why is it law simple reason you the Christ said
well this is Caesar this is not Caesar because the Romans had the law So you you're not going to bring the law because they already have the law and very sophisticated law in that Romans so Christianity was with Christianity was born a separation of church to State see it's a secular so effectively a secular
religion said when you go home you do whatever you want so of course chrisan hicups we had theocracies a few but it was all cosmetic like for example when you have the codes whether Theos Justinian Justinian Code you look at it you see just cosmetically say we bless it by the grace of God two pages and the rest sorry the rest is intact the Roman
law so so when we talk about religion so when people are talking about salafi Islam it's not religion in the sense that Mormon Christianity is a religion it is a body of law it's a legal system it's a political system it's a legal system so when people so so people are very confused when they talk about religion the comparing things are not
the same and and effectively when when I say that I'm Christian very different from saying I am whatever something else and the thing mutates that I say sometimes it described ethnicity being Greek Orthodox is more ethnicity than something else and you're the the or saying or being Serbian versus Croatian okay so sometimes religion becomes an
identity sometimes law sometimes very Universal and so and sometimes the the hidden thing you have Pagan Tendencies hidden under some kind of Tak that you see in minorities and mastic religions like alawi the BRS other so so so comparing religion naively silly is verbalis and leads to things like saying well he has a right to exercise his face
some Fai should not have the rights to be exercised like salafis or extreme jihadis because because they're non relig they're leg system they're like political party that wants to ban all other political parties I me if you go with that you know you're repeating start mistakes how is the Aramaic language influenced or help structure your
thought zero I me I learn I pick it up later but I think but it's it's always interesting to I'm do some philology and I discovered two or three things when we that not skin the game I discovered there are two kind of people and hopefully we'll talk about it again with Brian people who come from practice and people who come from Theory
and we have on this planet doesn't have a third category people who have both so you have linguists who have absolutely don't know what the [ __ ] sorry religion and so I noticed that in in in the description of categorization of languages linguists are not flow in the languages they're categorizing and it makes a huge difference so uh and I
think the 11 is close to Aramaic but linguist don't accept it because they have their metrics that don't work but if if you use statistical methods then you realize that it's aric or if you use practice I'd like to toss out the names of just a few countries or regions and you tell me whether or not you think they're antifragile Singapore Singapore has
signs going for it so you so you're defining it's like Singapore you're talking about a city city state isn't it a vulnerable city state that relies on our protection and we don't always care who's going one thing I learned from uh history when you take the Phoenicians the Phoenicians didn't really have an
army or have Army at some point had some armies that CH mind say it's not economically viable why when you come to invad them unless you noser supposedly in history books say that it was very nasty but then fact tracking that take place and the genetics actually don't show but really may have happened and a guy comes in comes in very bloodthirsty
comes to you and you tell him listen what do you want you kill us all you get nothing right we land is not interesting what are you going to get just would give you 5% all right so what do you want 5% of something or 100% of nothing so that's what the how the phenicians operated so someone would come in I mean they had a hiccup with Alexander one
pound Tire had a hiccup with Alexander but they they had an e problem both on both sides but but other than that we haven't had so it worked very well as as a system the solution dider the Phoenicians right The Phoenician The Phoenician no the Sol came in they say okay the system and the time was patronage you come in you're a vessel
State and then you say what what is it so then you guys are libertarian here you understand if I live in New York City so I have two options one pay the state with all of this now it's going to go 50 some per taxes and you almost get nothing or you go the mafia you give them 2% and you get protection you get all the things that
you want done 2% right so so that's exactly what happened so think about the defense budget if it were by the mafia all right so the GU who come in so the system at a time was a system well you say conquer the Imperial methods everywhere including the Ottomans before them the Romans before them the celiz and the autonomies had more integration the
whole technique was it's very you come in and remember that government role in GDP was at the turn of the century in France 5% okay last century so having being you're not part of anything you're just paying taxes to someone you never see so that was the the the the thing the integration usually was through Commerce not through military Comm and
and so the idea of Singapore someone let's say Malaysia decides to take go to Singapore it's GNA do that they got nothing right so it's much better to go to Singapore tell them we want 2% all right only we want 10% and then he break it down to 3% Russia fragile or anti fragile I I did something I did a study on on
countries when we wanted uh to look at the using metrics in this town of predicting stability of countries based on P stability right which to me is this absurd for example if you take U because the that metric would tell you that Saudi Arabia when right Black Swan actually I came here and I told took set of countries same government for 40
years 40 government in 40 years which country is more stable two sets of countries on the on the right one on the left they said the one that has the same government same families actually people here in this town at the Woodson Center so I said these guys look at things backwards the countries on the right for Syria and Saudi Arabia now we so far
away for second Sho to drop and on the other one was Italy and last time I trick until he was still standing and uh mozzarella was excellent so so so so the idea of countries that are have a very uh too much stability become weaker okay if Sprout up sort of like companies if you take compan you want to see companies on
Rob bus look at companies that have zero vory compressed vory many of them really should have zero Vol some of them will have a would be sitting on on Dynamite you're smoothing to cover things up right or or or if you have or if you for example someone who has employ who has a very stable salary because he or she is employed as an anti fral by a but then
you laid off 55 3 years of employment and basically you can't do anything whereas someone has a little volatile income is more adapted so when I looked at countries we looked at countries uh in the Easter Easter block and these countries had effectively the two properties one they took a lot of heat during that that that period you
know post Soviet phase was very very very very very very rough and all of them Armenia Georgia Russia Romania all of them in fact improv through that phase so country that I mean so so this is makes me believe that they can take another economic crisis any crisis and survive they they have Pro the ability to survive I'm not sure France can manage
tomorrow they the same instruction turkey fragile or antifragile I'm going to Turkey and to East want to come back but but okay but but something but from my uh feeling that what you see on the Turks are very happy because they got washing machines they got stuff and they tributed toan so so the is associated with gross not so much with religion PLO
fragile or anti fragile PLO Palestine Liberation yeah I mean yeah they were antias nothing to lose when they were leanon they had nothing to lose so this is why had no skin in the game that the idea of a group that has nothing to lose always I mean have nothing to lose the engaging Civil War in Lebanon today uh
every time someone sneezes in downtown B people are afraid of the Civil War okay but they don't realize that everyone is down up to here in real estate so no nobody has any interest in theic war it's not like 1975 or 1973 what's it like housing six Syrian refugees they're very nice they're sunnes and they my mother hates Assad
and they love Assad fights between my mother and Assad and one of them went to Syria to vote for Assad and couldn't come back just to tell you how Dev voted he is so I I picked so what I do is I talk to him to know what's going on he calls his brothers siblings and the he's violently his violent why he said he's religious he said because at least you
get it so for Himes stability and and effectively for a lot of Syrian so if you got to look at Syria from Syria not Syria from Saudi barbaria Finance lobbies here okay you got a different story people want stability but but one one lesson I learned from Syria that he's complaining he said you know cell phones I go here in Lebanon this
guy sell it for $200 this guy 22040 Syria perfect same price everywhere so he you know the BS has indoctrinated people to the point of maybe no return but uh I mean the the they people understand that Assad is not a God but I bet you a lot of Iraqis like to come back after what they saw what they saw so the idea that they
all have guarded the same analis if you're on the ground you don't have this theoretical thing this guy's an [ __ ] okay fine you got to realize like scissors all right you look at both sides of scissors that when you have S find it so you have so you take the least becomes someone good in your eyes but you analyze only one portion so the
the the idea I meanw up his father my my my my my house my grandfather was Member of Parliament 1982 V for prois sh and they came in and up our house so I have a hatred for ass family but at the same time I just realized I have a bigger hatred for the jihadis and for the clients of Obama so so this is how you got to analyze it comparatively
not naively I have a series of quick questions to ask you about the topic of wisdom and I'll just Sho these out feel free to pass if you don't want to address them first what is the biggest mistake people make when they go to the gym is the exercise they exercise too much what's the best way to find and consume dark chocolate uh I think I
that's one thing is that this is you're 10 years behind on that somehow I lost of taste for chocolate but the best way to find and consume is not those labels you know the fancy thing made by Farm probably in Brooklyn I'm sorry if you were here today what would you Asko what he would think of trump what can we learn from Sufism how uh to have
a branch of Islam that effectively peaceful allows drinking if you know that and so that's very convenient but the the problem and how and problem that it was destroyed by uh Saudi Arabian fing revive we should revm now what can we learn from them is how the religion can be destroyed anybody knows the the number of sufis opan sufis ply Lebanon
it was Sufi okay why did it become uh non Sufi because of funding from Saudi Arabia you indoctrinate two generations and that's it how do you find the right mentors in life I I don't know but I know how to find inv mentors how you do that people uh you know to do something wrong and you'll figure out what made do something
wrong like there's a fellow I worked with and I knew that he was a complete failure but the last person so something wrong he was always got into details so I realize that details what you got only one set of details you cannot get into more than one set of detail so this one I learned so and then also like by inverse Role
Models people don't want to be like so you pick someone you know you have you have an instinct to know who look like look at what they've done what they do and then you come you do a reverse imitation and it works what's the best thing to do on an airplane TT fight I got I the problem is nobody fights with me anymore I try to fight with the
fellow you know the problem again is you know these the problem with the Pudo expert okay that microeconomist my worst microecon because you can macro [ __ ] more easily than micro [ __ ] so because nobody catches you there's no feedback so uh I try to get to fight with micro people and I try to fight with fellow and Indian fellow was repeating that
story that yeah just like that we're refusing expertise at all like people on that cartoon ENT cartoon in New Yorker that shows people who decide that they don't need the expertise of the pilot you cannot compare microeconomists to a pilot because so there are two classes of experts there's belly dancers are experts at belly dancing War I mean the
the people who steal radios from cars are expert at stealing radio from Cars cars the dentist ier at Dentistry but I'm not sure microeconomist know anything about anything so so so you can't because there's no feedback so we don't know maybe they know or policy makers or people in the state department I'm not sure they know anything all
right because there's no feedback or so that that's the the but we definitely know that a carpenter is an expert at carpentry you see so I try to have a Twitter fight with with a fellow because usually Twitter fights number one makes you look forward you know you know to opening your computer and and it K find like like like
nothing they don't Eng engage me anymore should we put our trust in cryptocurrencies I have no idea but one thing for sure that's working with cryptocurrencies is that it's forcing those [ __ ] here in Federal Reserve all right to understand that they don't have Monopoly over our lives all right so that's one thing okay so and they are
scar believe me so that's one sorry if I used Latin the blockchain worry you you know once it's written you cannot rewrite it or appeal to an external Authority I mean that's that or if enough miners in northern China somewhere decided to collude and hit 51% it seems in some ways a quite non-rust system maybe under small probabilities but okay the systems
get robust typically I mean we have had that equivalent of of BL chain was letter credit okay and we practicing letter credit at two level the first one you know the recent one since you know Commerce in 500 years and of course over time you find you debug so long you don't have a lot of transaction on one single mode and then you figure out if
it doesn't work that someone will bring something with the the counter uh you know trick that would have other flaws but so we PR but if and if you think earlier blockchain would resemble the Phan mod trading pH mod trading um I'll call your mother if you don't go live with the merchandise so the whole idea that the
minute the whole the concept of a a a a a currency that's triggered in other words you have now means of payment that are triggered by receipt of merchandise or coupled with the receip of merchandise is a brilliant idea so this is why I mean at some point we we we will uh discover the flaws of there are plenty of flaws of course but we don't
know all of them self-driving cars are they fragile or antifragile I I have a self-driving car I mean self driving semi self that's thing Drive I drive it the problem is locally it drives so long and they don't know how self-driving car react to other self driving cars you know the the sum it's like a flux of birds beh differently from the sum of
birds like markets be different from individuals so uh when you have a flux of drones typically it's one computer running all these drones If one computer R all the s dring cars that may work but then you know someone will take over the world that way you know you hack it own the world so but so I don't know I have no
idea I think it's a great idea to have self driving cars um if someone in a car is responsible if there's an accident so in other words you're someone is either someone I can sue or someone I can you know blame is something who is in a vehicle not sing on some computer not some Anonymous person and should we someday just all collectively turn our
back on social media no because social media is ly and let me tell you Lally means that there's things that are robust at time there like some Basin that are robust at time and you realize like for example this cup of coffee you know the okay I'm not going to go back to pH again no no okay the book is 500 years old
under this form and maybe several thousand years old different form uh so the me that that they robust to time and they come back after they disappear they time to come back now it so happened that the at no point in history except during the post you know War period that people receive news without being conveyor of news without you know that
that nulear family with people pop mom 2.2 kids one dog and watching TV all right receiving information and not transmitting all right the Solitude of big city blocks so that was the idea well let gone because traditionally you get the news and you convey the news so your recipient and a conveyor with a little bit of alteration in the process
so and then we get back to the social media so I and and you very quickly learn to identify like there was a false alert yesterday in Saudi Saudi Arabia there was a coup or something but you can figure out that there are some people you can trust other you can't trust and those you can't trust you quickly identify them like those who cry
wolf all the time and uh so social media is bringing us back to a naturalistic environment because say in in Ence where was the new what was the the The News Room The News Room was about shop you go in you give information and you take information or the fish market you go in you get fish you get information get
information and funerals where you go in you chat you know F like you cry and then you get all the gossip so that is with gossip machines see so it is so social media is great in that respect and I I love it because I didn't I don't know if you I told I did I refuse to have a book door I refus to give media interviews in the US at least I did one
in lond by accident send my book to newspapers random I said what I said okay find other authors so okay they they agree although they cheated I think by sending some people so there was no book review in the US my book all social media and it opened number 12 of a sell list that tells you that you don't need the New
York Times to exist as an author that Twitter is I Twitter and some Facebook that's it for our final segment I have a few questions on what I call the the Nicholas Talent production function so you've written a few times that you've described yourself as an aesthetic in some ways how did you become an aesthetic early in your life aesthetic a
c d i yeah you mean like up the mountain you mean yes so I'm not that aesthetic I'm it depends on what you're aesthetic about and I discovered okay so let me give you an anecdote as an a book one day I went with someone dinner and and U okay I wanted to go to a t we got go to a better restaurant so I ended up having the meal was like you
had realize the look at meal with with in a three star M Restaurant you sit down you have fny people this microscopic work work was like going to work right concentrate you're free biting too much and and you get all these sophistication from nothing then I realize that as people get rich they get controlled by the prefaces get controlled by the outside
and I and it was like I don't know $200 a person and I said okay I'd rather pay $200 for a pizza okay and wouldn't pay $6.95 for the same meal right except that by social pressure this is how you use preferences it's a game but you know you discover that your preferences are people are happier in small quarters you
have neighbors around you in a narrow streets uh people are happier having meals I'd rather eat with someone else a sandwich provided is good bread all right btis bread then then eat you know fancy restaurant so it's the same the things I discover little by little that even from a honic standpoint okay this sophistication in fact to burn but aside
from that there is something also that from the beginning you realize that that heathenism like Pursuit of pleasure for pleasure sake there's something about it that's gives me anxiety right so whereas on the other hand uh doing something productive not productive in a sense of virtual signaling with something that
I think like like fits a sense of Honor few good so yeah what books influenced you early in life say before you were 15 years old the the the book I kept reading is the desert the desert of the so even before year were 15 I was before 15 and and I read it many times I say I'd say before 15 I read Doki and again I mean I read the idiot and there's a
scene that marbe has 14 when I read it is the prince uh Michigan was was giving the story actually was autobiographical for he said he was going to be put to death and as they woke him up and were taking him to the execution place he decided to live the last few minutes of his life with intensity and he deared life so pleasurable and promised himself if he
survives to had enjoy every minute of Life the same way okay and he survived in fact it was C execution and and effectively that the guy survived and the lesson was he no longer than that it was like preferences that moment could carry on later he forgot about the episode and and that marked me from those re when I was a kid and then
obsess this and what was your favorite part of the Bible as a boy I'm GNA be honest Bible it's to C too many names in the Bible so final question yes what is it that you do in your moments of solitude math math and that that pleases you or that's a form of work anxiety no no I only develop anxiety when I go to fancy
restaurants with with when I'm not doing something right but I don't the math is I do I like it people tell me that people age they like math less and math as a Young Man G yes it's more more enjoyable so I I I I I I do math MTH mostly I I there's a Twitter math that I'm part of so there's always something to solve and usually the beauty of it is
that's totally unpredictable takes between one minute and one day solve one problem and and you don't know and it's and then this thing comes in and and then I stop So based on you know your own upbringing as a boy if you giving advice to someone raising a child up through the age of 18 yeah what would be the takeaway you would offer from your
own life experience up to that age become get a degree from school but becom open by that don't waste time trying to get an A because you're not we're gonna talk about with Brian you're not goingon to remember all that [ __ ] all right but you always remember what you tried to read by yourself I remember the the the stuff I read by myself okay
that I was driven I don't remember stuff was given to me at school so it's allocation of time that's but I discovered that I wanted to be a writer as a kid so I realized that to have an edge as a writer you can't really know what people know all right you got to know a lot of stuff that they don't know so started reading books like
voraciously and and effectively WR you know and and also read books that with some Instinct that would be helpful 20 years from now so therefore it's not the latest nonfiction bestseller so I read a lot of stuff and and I think that I would recommend the same read as much as you can and F try to get the lowest possible passing grade
you can in school and don't study stuff like history because it's GNA be revised geography history all these or like chemistry or stuff like that math is I think probably the only thing you can pick up at school that's useful see nichas thank you very much we now welcome to the stage Brian Kaplan of Barone George Mason University
Brian and Cal will Converse I simply will open it up by handing it over to Ryan to start Ryan thanks a lot uh so actually this whole event started with two tweets by talb my first tweet begins very promisingly excellent argument by Brian kapin and then comma but missed something Central convexity of trial trial and error and listic learning I
sort of wrote antifragile using Key's argument and transcending it would love a discussion debate Tyler C and then when I said I'd be happy to do this and I was willing to go to New York then Nim wrote back second tweet I will go to DC if you agree to read Andy fragile including the appendix so put our agreement I have read Andy fragile including the
appendix and now I can see several possible Central things I missed right but since I've actually got you here what specifically did you have in mind okay the first thing I wanted to discuss was something I called the green Lumber fallacy and let me tell you something what describe it there's a book uh called what I learn making losing a
million dollars which in fact is the only book I think that's not chanic with Finance tell you what how not to lose money because it's much more robust than how to make money and the fellow who wrote the book was giving his uh you know knew every was training green lber and he knew everything about green lber how was made chemistry this the weather
pattern this everything right and there was that fellow in a fit an old fellow who was very rich who made his money trading with green Lumber called seagull Jeremy seagull or Joey seagull or something like that and that fellow one day the narrator who lost all his money right that fellow who who discovered didn't know that the
green Lumber was not Lumber painted green it was freshly cut Lumber so the lesson is that from the outside it's not like the fellow seagull knew nothing about Lumber he knew a lot of stuff but not the stuff you're naively inclined to know that's the Le fallacy so that's the first thing antifa not revealing because
I was a traiter for a long time is that something I missed yeah because because the stuff that they the point is that they hidden hidden secrets with a profession can only be discovered within a profession that's not a profession But but so let introduction one the second one is a convexity argument is that in real life we operate not by top down
knowledge but by trial there and can have SE to describe the S experiment but experiment is if you went and rounded up every single chemist in town on one hand and and the other part would be to round up every single overweight uh person you can find wears a jacket or sort of well dressed so we have two groups of people and then
you want to engineer the best possible recipe uh what's your favorite dish very good Alfredo the chemist will have to work out the equations we got so many chemists here ni and all that Stu a lot of chemist so have five 600 chemist working on equations only and the other people the fat 12 Dr people would be has the following you take an existing recipe
you randomize okay if you have an improvement in a tast you add something right to the recipe you have an improvement you keep it you WR it up and if you have a degradation you just give the the food to the C won't notice the difference okay and then so one in one hand you're going to R It Up by trial and error convex trial and error because the
errors don't cost you anything it's like an option you have optionality on what to keep or not to keep optionality and then the other one is the top down thing now the difference between them is optionality well that's okay who's going to win who's going to get get you better F machine at the end all right so I feel pretty good because
that's close to my first guess about what you had in mind exactly yeah anyway so my first guess was actually you agree the origal acade academic curriculum isn't very useful and learning by doing is we are two things I said and then I missed the chance to explain why I learning by doing work so well that sounds I'm not
blaming your just to use your argument for society to improve by maybe changing the way we teach people okay and and and also put some historical backround since we have Tyler here for you know to put some GRE or Roman stuff around okay because the uh the you know the Romans despised uh Theory and the Greek despised practice which is that
why the first the blacks one is to mle Bro Greek among Romans and um the the next one is dedicated to Ron Paul a Roman among Greeks so so so the the the the Roman so so so understanding that the engine behind everything is convexity the chapter I think the comment I made was I'd rather be antifragile than smart and
said I'd because if you're and and and you can model it and I did a monardo by showing the population of people who actually are stupid but not very very stupid okay but they do a lot of trial and error and people are very smart like the chemists but they don't not they can't do a lot of trial and error and then realize those trial and error if
they have the intelligence to realizing when they got slightly better than the previous thing we get far ahead you need a thousand IQ points to match someone with aggressively doing trial ER that was that was the idea and then teaching people that okay is impossible unless you have practice and so so so the root I was suggesting
education is you send people you make people work as nurses and then they go to medical school and effectively I spoke to a lot of doctors and they think it's a good idea because they're afraid of medicine being now too theorized becoming too theorized you make people run a mafia small Mafia local uh or or whatever you want racting rering shop or
a casino or something like that for seven eight years and then you go study economics stuff like that so so the we're living longer so this idea of front loading education makes no sense and so just remind you so there are plenty of countries where you don't have to get an undergraduate degree to go to go to medical school right in the US first you
do an undergraduate degree then you go to medical school sounds like you're were saying better to be a practitioner for four years and then maybe go to medical school and just get being an undergraduate uh graduat St undergraduates later in life age 30 think about that model I know because I I started training right I had no idea
first of all I didn't like school I like to read books and my I had D so it was boring for me so I started training and then I discovered math I said oh this is interesting right so started discovering Ma so I got immersed into math and 15 years later I went back to school right so the the the the I went back to try to do math and
fact D classes and and I did my thesis and I was it but the the the idea and I start writing papers so the idea of having to start by Theory and ending up with practice doesn't work you should try practice that theory that's the wrong way so now what do you think about people who make the following argument which only you can decide whether it's a
true black Spa argument but people might put it forward as their their version of black Spa argument so for a lot of people say well sure virtually all of these subjects that you're learning in school are useless but there are Positive Black Swan once in your life an academic subject you studied is going to turn out to be absolutely crucial you
know like an example of this there was a guy who said look actually French was really important it was totally worth the time because one time I was at Charles ofal airport and if I hadn't spoken French I would have missed my flight and so you spent three years studying French to avoid one miss life that seems like pretty free but anyway
but you can imagine someone giving something like that saying sure almost all the subjects are no good but there's one you're going to get one positive spack swan out of your whole education that alone makes it all worth all that effort know the counter argument is V more potent you're spending how many hundreds of hours studying something
you're not going to remember later but you can spend that time uh learning a craft like how to uh break to safe right the time so so the for the payoff plus you know doesn't mean that the other one won't have an equivalent amount of tail events that are positive so you're ruling out that the other activities would have there's something
the problem with education now that it's a business so like any business institutionalized business it's become c a racket so so it's very hard now to to talk to to to argue against education when we know all the incredible data if you want to have a few minutes to explain it say to convince or we have allal data that at individual level
education that's put in antifas education it appears that it's good for you because it's kind of it's a great way to transmit wealth through generation because your children will are certain to stay in middle class if you uh if you educate them a great way but uh but at the level of a country it doesn't seem to work and effectively
it's the reverse of kind thing the the Alison wolves data and even more interesting that people think that by educating people they're actually transmitting knowledge instead of te because places like Germany and Switzerland and these places had very low level of education foral education had a huge amount of apprenticeship and a huge amount of
builtin so I was with Alison party and were saying that education didn't work and I was talking to her and exp what are you guys talking about how education doesn't work what education doesn't work you mean knowledge doesn't no this is knowledge this works and knowledge what we have party but education in terms of
something formatted to be taught in school doesn't seem to work so that's his argument and the one he's presenting now we're looking at either to go deeper into what's the reason or the other one is what is the alternative the alternative more apprenti isly how we going to destroy that uh state of education sort of like that that tries
to sell you something for quar million dollars that's worth nothing right effectively is negative because the time we spent there and why we should have effectively knowledge or education or the academy that formatted for something more optional and later later life what you learn in grad school is definitely something useful for you no yeah so me
what I usually tell people who say look the reason why school is great is that there's going to be something you learn there that's going to be invaluable so look I agree that it makes sense to expose people to a variety of subjects but it seems like it makes a lot more sense to expose them to 10 or 20 subjects that are actually likely to use
than 10 subjects that virtually no one on earth uses so you know rather than saying let's have let's make sure everyone studies poetry and art history and a foreign language in America and everyone everyone learns a bunch of sports and said like why not make sure everyone spends a few weeks learning some Plumbing a few weeks learning some
electricity few you know a few weeks going and just learning some customer service so I say yeah like you know you do want to have a diverse menu you don't want to lock a 12-y old into a career when he's well but still far better to go expose him to a tasting menu of realistic options rather than the tasting menu of pipe dreams which is
what seems to be mostly about yeah but the the the root of that my feeling particularly in the angex world is the desire why they call liberal arts education to Aristocrat aristocrat uh ties themselves because in again let's talk the about the great Roman world you had the pr r that absolutely nothing practical about rhetoric
grammar so so things liberal education was was what people learned to be U order to become Aristocrat and Idol upper class right and then you had the real professions how to become a baker how to become that will look down and the English when upper class of course they didn't want to be working class so they send their kids to learn
that stuff and this is what came to America so so education is put the to you have technical education like law technical the professional education law medicine what else engineering engineering engineering right all these things and then you have mathematics and if you look at the historically the engineers didn't really connect to the
other ones because the Roman Engineers did not use ukan geometry and and we only started using UC geometry late in life after the educational system start including mathematics for for for these people Engineers bu Cathedral like geometry and it was actually more geometry give you these ugly Corners before because they know where
the right angle is before it was it was more involved was rule of thumb and it was so it's different so they has a separation segregation so you want to do is if it's liberal education that's cont inting the rest or is it the technical contaminating the education have expectation from education we should be having so you say okay this is the kind
of thing you do like piano lessons all right you know on weekends right you read the Homer and stuff like that it's important to become civilized stuff you do to be civilized feel civilized and be able to have dinner with the vice president of the World Bank right these are the things you do and these are the things you do to get your ahead of life
so your problem has been old problem ever since you know we've had the the the the Roman Greece uh you know competing so what so my most controversial policy proposal is just less so I educational austerity spending Less on education I've noted that when I when when someone says we need more money for Education the reaction is
normally yay not what specifically who plann to spend the money on on the other hand when I say let's spend less on education the normal reaction is precisely what exactly do you propose to cut anyway so not something a lot of people are interested in but reading through I get the feeling that you might actually be willing to
countenance a a draining of the educational swamp through cutting off some of their money you bet I went to India once and I had no advice to do anyone don't understand something so I said better open thousand School than one University I open I said that okay and then sure enough a year later I see a headline mood and speech saying and actually I
said that to Modi right to the president mod saying rather open thousand schools sing University right and and the focus what's the problem with India India that they have a lot of educated people who are sociology okay it's nice but it's kind of thing for dinner with the VP on the World Bank it's not something right but the year
whereas if you want to know how electricity how how to to to to make batteries or something like that that's more useful so and now the trend is effectively to cure that problem of having theoretical education coupled with with complete misery with something in the middle is technical schools so mean like a standard critique of Indian
Elementary education that is that it's that is also terrible teachers don't even bother showing up very little learning going on there there again like like a normal American reaction to say we need to go and get the Indian schools in order so that teachers show up and do their job and my reaction is more of given this has gone on for these decades
why don't we cut them spending first and then say maybe you can have some of the money back if you actually start doing your jobs SK so kind better better SK teach people uh young very young spend three or four hours or something I mean just like you know if you're how did people learn medicine in the old days it
was generational thing and your father is a doctor and you walk around with your father or maybe mother a lot of actually there a lot of women in the lont in the health sector and then you learn and this you know professional state within within uh families and our secrets are transmitted they don't give the outside which unfortunately we don't
have because the problem is knowledge and education that it's always Broad and open whereas transmission of technical skills are worked by gills and secrecy like the masonry to the point that today the Romans had phenomenal concrete that we don't have the recipe so I mean I think you know I feel reading a book I like one thing we had
in common is things that we've seen with our own eyes way heavily upon upon both of us so I mean to me like a lot of my extreme negativity about education actually comes not only from remembering my own education when I go to back to school night when I go to parent teacher and I just think well if you were to go
and tell these people SP you teach your kids to go and learn how to do something would I trust these people to carry out that order and my AC is no way these are touchy feely people who do not want to think about anything in terms of practical results they don't like the idea of they're being like a test like did he learn it or not instead for so
many the teachers that I saw it really is all about the experience and you enjoy the experience where and I'm there saying no it's not about just about the experience about do you know something at the end can you do something can you show me and don't say that it can't be measured like if you really knew something you could come up with a test
to measur it you think I I think that the idea again if we go back to the Asians when you were learning a profession you learn a profession from a professional you didn't learn a skin in the game and I put in skin game what happens to Fields where the feedback is review not feedback from reality so in other words a carpenter has feedback
from his clients or her clients whereas a uh microeconomist has only feedback from Paul Krugman so it's basically close system so it's a close system and and they can give themselves Noels so so so there's a and when you want to learn something you learn and this is why I mean I have a section where for 280 years uh there's a fundamental
problem probability is so obvious and very G VI up every Traer knows but no nobody in decision science I no psychologist know because they not Risk Takers they not connected to reality so you had split into these two two things learn from a professional who has done the stuff you want to learn how to become a mafia Lord you learn from Mafia
Lord you don't go learn from Francis Fort CA right Le so you learn from the people who do it okay and if you want uh to so in the old days the other stuff you're supposed to be an autodidact under a tutor who supervises what books you're going to read but there's no none of this classroom high security prison environment that we have
today see so and and and that's the liberal education where you have a mentors and find mentors is still I mean the English off camera system still has where you're self directing your own learning so but if you apply to high school I think what I learned the most was from my years in high school but not from high school right and at some point
this great idea to be a Marxist for a few hours or cross because it makes you read a lot of interesting books and then you go through these phases so the the that's see the the so we have to reform education to turn people into Auto plus there's another thing you cannot possibly trust two classes of people when the game My Educators who
are better at explaining that understanding because the selective be better and science journalists are better at communicating than understanding because then you end up with things like scientism no practicing scientist okay would would would rule out skepticism we tell you the science is settled and stuff like that but these
people have a mindset that science science is scientism because they don't know enough science all they know is how to communicate and that is a problem so you're learning you realize that you're not learning from someone who does science you're learning from someone who transmits science and and and I tell you now I was lucky that I didn't have a
good math teacher when I was a kid I started zooming up because then I would become mathematician much earlier but but I'm self-taught almost everything that I really like but teaching the way they teach you mathematics is really to deter you from liking mathematics so so you probably don't get this a lot but when I was reading anti
fragile I often kept thinking my God he's such an optimist I can't believe that he thinks the world works this well yeah I know I'm an yes this is a greatest so like when you said look you can either learn from peers or reality I mean how about the thing that usually happens which is that you are learning from a person who doesn't even know the
subject they are are teaching which is what I see happening in so many classrooms you know like when I see history teachers who know less history than the better students in the class and these are the teachers and say look I mean again like I'd rather that they have someone that you know someone you're talking about someone who only
knows what they know in books but at least they know that so I'd rather have that person teach in the class and what H what's happening now more and more in in education that how do you become a professor ten year is about writing some kind of garbage about something which so so you think so for example I
was trying to read something about the Republican letters and it was all on Wikipedia and all the commentaries about gender study approach I don't want the theory I wanted the facts and you can't get the facts so he end up with a lot of people in fact today this generation because of the comp competitive environment and the closed circuit in
the humanities that basically don't know anything about Humanities all they know the theories beour about this this and the postc colonial approach this and that and they for example when you start arguing with people who studied about something called Middle Eastern study shouldn't exist as a this let's assume they start talking about
colonialism the French the French spent 21 and a half years in theant right and as as a United Nation mandate explain to me the colonialism they say well they don't even know the basic facts because the more you have a ratio of theories and B words isms you know and stuff like that and the Marxist so someone is good at Marxist interpretation of this and
this in the post chender world right but and they don't know the facts so this is why you can't rely on these instructors who teach you the humanities because you don't get tenure from knowing the facts you get tenure from inventing some post structural theory of of baking beans and and and in mint sanite Persia that's how
you get your your ten so so these guys are ignorant in other words would wouldn't it be a big step up if we replace current academics with equally Ivory Tower academics who just have a commanded facts yes how do you select for these well basic in Europe for example they have a separation between researchers and France for example so
instructors are supposed to know the curriculum actually they're tested not I can you they're tested on a subject so and the people who produce papers go produce papers that nobody reads and and put your energy there and we're going to give you a good lifestyle at some income that's lower middle class right for
researching and leave leave a salon so this is how the S works and and you get and you get so people who instruct tell you give you history lessons know actually some history you don't have that in in in in a more competitive environment yeah so one argument that I made is that almost every student has an intuitive understanding of the signaling
model that I'm defending in my book where I say the main thing you're trying to do is impress employers not actually learn the material and here's a passage you know out from an fragile that is very signal friendly so quote I wasn't exactly an autodidact since I did get degrees I was rather a barbell autodidact as I studied the exact
minimum necessary to pass any exam overshooting accidentally once in a while and only getting in trouble a few times by undershooting and quote so would you say that you had an intuitive understanding of the signaling model and really I know that you getting the stamp of your forehead exactly and decided to come to work s to come school in America
why this it was very difficult to B some okay let me try what you have to do you have to take this test so what do you do best G or something like that scores so you go in and you spend you you buy a lot of coffee you lock yourself up for a month taking these and then you go take the test right and and first of all you
forget right after once you taken the test and you go to business school where you realize that business school is mostly a way to to meet people who are going to give you a job the first job after to business school and everybody would forget you know phase two it doesn't count anymore and and then later on I became an employer when I was
employed and never had anybody to business school no signaling and plus they come an argue so you hire someone from uh for example you notice there something is if you went to business school unless you went to top 20 at the time it was a waste of money but then mathematic if you you can go to the top 25,000 School number 25,000 is still useful you see so you
realize that there's some things that can be taught in in that structur envirment like engineering mathematics or chemistry or I don't know py dancing or St like that so where at business school you have no skills this basically so so so there a signaling that you discover but I didn't need the signaling beyond my first shop right so
we all know you're Maverick but I but suppose that you had undershot very consistently in academics so you hadn't finished degrees do you think you would still be where you are today or really this is the problem of society because the way it was organized first of all I was Civil War Leon so if it weren't you know I would had a family of money been
writing by poetry and that's it maybe a fail novel or something okay so so that would have been my that was in F the product the reaction against War the anxiety displacement you know the the the moving from so you have anxiety plus being Christian from the area you don't know you know and it's very scary to be Christian from the area
particularly at a time so so this is why so I want to make it so you want to get the degrees you want to do this you that you want to buy a nice suit you so all the signaling you have to cover the signaling and on top of that have the skills so so this is that was what what pushed and effectively I am certain that I discovered another thing that
the effec learn from uh from antifas sorry from Les book I I have an interest in addiction I'm not myself but had family when I was a kid so discover how smart addicts are at procuring money for their addiction but they're incapable of making money outside of that right so like some skills some kind of gland that comes in
and start producing IQ all right when they want their the drugs and then they can find the E ways to to make money for the drug but not elsewhere so I'm thinking about it and I and I explain that when I started trading effectively under the pressure you're so much in trouble you have to think you learn a lot of stuff by probability right and
you start high dimensional matricies got inverted tomorrow morning and you end up ining it and you don't know how you got the result and you show to mathematicians they don't believe you did it and then you did it in verying on sloke at the time computer time so you push to do a lot of stuff under necessity necessity another invention
and but the stuff you do then that you learn under these pressures you stay with you it's not like a drug addict who loses back these faculties elsewhere so that what I was explaining how basically war was a way for people to learn stuff and effectively a lot of the the inventions we had came during war during you know
your War episode and of course the preparation for war so got to replace that model of course we're not going to waste war and and and figure out how to force people to learn by getting them in trouble see and and another mode of learning to activate up regulate something in them that makes them uh so definitely not by making them uh putting
them in a classroom and giving them credentials got to be something else plus there's another thing about you that I disagree with you on one point minor is that you have your metric to gauge if education is good is performance on the job but but good metric anyway yeah it's a good metric for people who want to become employees
but they're not the world is not you know doesn't you know needs people who create things say the the The Artisans or people who invent things because I had this idea that the Bill Gates as much as I hate him you know he got created something or the Steve Jobs you know these are the people who make the engine work and the other people are
just around so for for these people again I mean we got to look at these people as a disproportionate part of the sample not miral thing that's what I disagree and then my idea I and I remember when want to hire a Traer you would not wiiz them on something because you know they all have probably very high IQ to get there first of all
we only hire people from math or physics or engineering so you have some kind of ability so they all you give them an SAT tests have done it right G have done it so what are you get you start I mean the best test is you tell someone listen I want a french suit and you have an hour to get this this size this bottle this size and you have an hour to go get it
New York City for example that's the kind of test we give people to see if they can go find that suit right or you give them you give them projects you tell I want you to get me this this this and and you have an hour to do it or two hours right and to see how first of all how people get confused at you request and but this these are the real IQ
vests possibly tested Common Sense psychologist actually do have a whole separate set of Common Sense tests which are interesting because common sense is something where people keep keep improving into their 50s unlike IQ where actually at least some kinds are getting worse um like so these tests are actually pretty interesting you like you
know there's tests like your car breaks down on a Mountain Road in the middle of on a snowy night what do you do and like smart 18y olds give answers to get them killed whereas like normal 50 year olds give answers where they survive and it's like wow right so there is actually something this idea I think of getting the suit as as
as part part A lot of that is actually testing sense which isn't important but actually a different kind of skill but that's a central skill you need in there's a skill you need is how do you make it through an airport and get me in Aunty hand I like aun butter right 25 minutes to get one and then no internet at a time you know
time to be SE so so you these are the tests that that read would tell you the person going succeed in as starting entrepreneurship well what do we do when the car breaks down yeah that's that's a good question so the the original tests were actually before their cell phon so then it then it normally involved getting on the
other side of the barrier and then walking carefully to a call box um ra you know it's windy Mountain Road so again like a lot of people say try to wave down a car but it's windy Mountain Road so get hit by the car so again on the other side of the barricade and then very holding holding the barricade walk to the call box and then call for help
is a pretty good answer to that uh so totally different question so it seem seems like you you and I are very much on the same page on you know valueing vocational education there are a lot of academics who say no no no no uh vocational education is no good because you never know if any vocation is gonna
be wiped out so like one of the referees said oh should we send them to go to typew rer repair school that's sound and no you shouldn't send a type rer repair school now my answer answer here is look it's better to go and train people for things that seem likely to be useful like Plumbing than to train them for things we know are not going to be
useful like poetry so if we know anything about the book the economy in 40 years is that poetry will not be a big part of the economy so me what do you think about this again there's a separation of things you do to become civilized is things you do to make money later on and people conflate one for the other and to come back reiterate for the woman
geometry was not something was like poetry it was something you do to as an intellectual exercise that was not required because it actually degrades the way they made and conflating the two has actually led to a lot of problems so the first thing we got to establish that we have another bigger problem the bigger problem is say where is the
propaganda that we're getting it looks like the ratio of theories and the uh what do you call indoctrination to facts is very high in Humanities and it's effectively stays low in mathematics because you can't really have although you know we have proposal to have you know to remove square sare ofus one because it was to fic or
something I think it was so H but it was mathematic stuff like that so you separate these two by institutions that completely insulated from one another okay the things you do to become civilized like know in the history of Scotland and uh things you do uh uh for skills if we bring that back computer science accounting I tell you in
business school I know there are two classes that were useful for me uh law business law and accounting but then these are the need business school for them you can go get them from so and actually I'm doing something on the side as risk people who are in the risk business myself and a former Renaissance partner train and a third person the
three of us mathematically inclin mathematici the three of us and we're teaching people risk risk take standpoint and the the demand is is huge okay but but people who want to learn for professional so you may have a model of accountant teaching accountants this person teaching that one as certificate that you can get
throughout your life rather than have a blocked education and then you go uh to the job market so to me like the risk business I treat it like Plumbing it's like being a plumber it has a lot of stuff and you can only learn to be a plumber from PL you can have an English teacher also teaching pling see so these professions should be
insulated from the humanities that think we do to become civilized but it doesn't mean that we should eliminate poetry from school we should have people do that like to do piano they take piano lessons I can just interject with the question I'd like a sentence from each of you what you see is the biggest difference between you is you agree on a
lot but let me give you my one sentence tape and what I've heard is the biggest difference the extent to which you take a kind of shaped civilization for granted is different so Brian you take it for granted you don't think formal education is so much needed to produce it and th see you're taking it less for granted in a particular way and you
still see some room for poetry the humanities and so on provided they're treated the proper way and segregated from the actual doing of stuff exactly each of you give your take that was my take away that exactly my take I I I I want to separate things you do to be civilize the liberal arts from things you do to be effective and this is why I
mean I do a lot of mathematics but I know the mathematic Pur for pleasure not for anything practical and of course I do other things technical stuff that are practical statistics stuff like that and some mathematics appli math when I when I play with geometry absolutely no practical thing and I do it like I would with poetry and so long as you separate
these two you have a barbell this is this and this is that and that's that and you separate the two of them then you will avoid the the problems we have and also you should have the professional stuff okay taught to Children Along by Professionals of that field and you should have the the humanity or stuff T by people who like
that stuff yeah and I would say so I don't take civilization for Grant at all what I say is that it can't possibly be the case that the that education in Liberal Arts Humanities is causing civilization or sustaining it because virtually no one acquires this knowledge so given that almost no adult can answer even basic questions about this stuff I
don't see how you could say that schools are saving civilization because they aren't achieving the goal that allegedly is required to save it I actually agree with him I think the schol on one point the destroying civilization and they're destroying civilization the the classics I think we should separate the holy and the profane
other words and and you should keep things in the whole in the profane and I think the the they destroyed the Latin language as well as the Catholic Church one comment again from theology when they translated the text from Latin or from V Latin into into vernaculars okay because then what did you do you tried to to market now religion as something useful
whereas before it was something woly it's whole thing and and you notice and then the reason the pope presented he said it's to uh make increase the number of Catholics all right in fact the church contracted at a time but look compar it to Islam where you have one and half billi muslims praying and EV don't understand
okay so visibly and so so you have exactly the same thing is that has separate the holy and the profane don't make don't translate to vernacular uh the the the beautiful land Saints likewise do not try to make poetry or or literature or history do not make it practical just make that people study it for their own sake just
like you go to church it's not for anything practical you don't go to church because you're going to meet an employer you go to church we go to church all right and and likewise so he has to separate these two closing statement from you ran so I've just got one question left I really desperately want to signal that I did read the
appendix so I have a question about the appendix yes corre best question and answer all right yes so you wrote it is often easier to modify f ofx than to get better knowledge of X now when I was reading this you know seems like even the phrasing suggests that we should be weighing the relative ease of modifying f and learning about X case by case so
suppose we're talking about the possibility that something on your that one day you're going to eat something lethally poisoned all right now one thing you could do is take a lot of precautions against using poison you could hire a poison taster or you go and read up about what kinds of foods are hard to poison on the other hand you
could just go and say hardly anyone today gets poisoned by Leal poison but on their food so low probability and I'm not worried about it the lad reaction is actually my reaction Am I Wrong uh should I worried about being poison or not uh let me rephrase the f of x and x and then you'll see that it was right and wrong so what I say is that there's
a fundamental problem I noticed in probability statistics is that people you take x x with what will stock market do tomorrow and you study the properties of X instead of study F ofx that it affects you you can have a payoff you change the payoff and and so X is knowledge which is exactly the left side that is one thing
but don't conflate the conflation of X how it affects you f ofx so for example if you take random events if f ofx is convex you have optionality you see some people have optionality from Rel X some people have negative optionality it's technical but uh you know we don't have time to explain it but but just the point is one of them is
knowledge the other one is how it affects you what do with it you can change it like for example one of them is what would happen if there's war and the second one is the insurance contract F ofx when insurance company puts a clause Clause my so it doesn't affect them anymore they put it in a clause so one of them needs a statistician the
second one is a lawyer the contract so you mitigate your risk either by understanding the risk very hard or by having a lawyer who puts a clause to protect you from that event if it happens that's St EV so the idea is that there's a conflation between the two I'm not saying that I should ignore X or ignore f of x I'm saying that we should
know whether you're dealing with X or F ofx whether are we dealing with a food composition or are we dealing how it affects us so that's the F ofx so this is how this is my answer and put it in context of poetry is X whatever it is f ofx are effectus f ofx is a de and X is the epist see and the ancient always separated the epist from te the problem
is as Society got rich everybody wanted to reach education imitating the aristocrats with the illusion that it's going to help them get rich where in fact it's the kind of thing you do when you're already rich and this is where uh where Allison wolf and brard come in to discover that these educational things are effectively the product of society that our rich and
definitely not positive to wealth thank you both very much [Music] thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show