Those who sent people to war were those who fought with them in the front lines. No longer. Statistician, bestselling author, legendary investor Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells us how neocons (and many others) have no skin in the game.
Q2 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc
"Skin In The Game" - Nassim Nicholas Taleb Speech At RPI's Media & War Conference
Transcript
This seemed Nicholas Taleb does not need much of an introduction I'm sure everyone in this room has read The Black Swan. If you haven't read skin in the game you need to get your copy and read it right away. You won't be able to put it down. You've not seenMr. Taleb on the Liberty report we've had him on twice. I think it it's been a delight. I watch it over and over again and we all laugh and enjoy it. I think one of the greatest thinkers of our time I didn't know until yesterday I'm ashamed to say or hadn't remembered also professor of engineering at New York University. Well one of the exciting and most original thinkers of our time Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Yes I said to speak was sitting down one because it relaxes me. But but mostly because it relaxes the audience. As a physicist I discovered that become more of a conversation.
To have a conversation with a waiter in a restaurant you stress out the person sitting across from you. It's easier.
So my history.
I was a trader for a lot of years and then I retired from trading and I don't know what to do with my life.
And I was very poor at chess and then this year I lose concentration and both start daydreaming. So I decided to become a professor. So.
And then given that I get bored.
Usually topics fit out mathematics is one of the easiest because you know you can falsely so and books are short and the concentration is read and so on. So out of laziness. So I started working on systems how they can handle disorder. And so I was a trader at a sort of probability. So I work in that field and I don't embark on a project called in Sardo let them for certain the five five volume and skin in the game is a less volume dedicated tool you know. All right. Our friend here whom I called a Greek among Romans. Sorry I at Marseilles enrollment among Greeks why Roman Greeks because Greeks like theory Romans despised theory. They wanted practice and they wanted a system that was designed flexible enough to bridge and they dealt with that theory. They're still standing. The last they had were flexible it was and they had in fact a common law was already built into the system they did. They did everything like engineering nothing should be final and always meant to be improved. And also somehow the Roman understood something I go Scali about which later was tells you that property of a system that you can be a libertarian at a state level and a communist at the community level is not compatible because an elephant and a mouse don't have the same properties. And you can see the difference between political system reside vastly more in the scale Singapore versus China. They have exactly the same population of almost the same population the same culture and the same system. OK but it works in sort of happened toward Singapore better than most systems China right. So that's what I call Scali. What works in Norway. OK with the size of I don't know the size of New York of New York.
So it's in Norway doesn't work. And that's 100 billion you know countries that have people are.
