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Antifragility (Episode 119)
1.2k Plays8 months ago
“A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude”
How do you not just survive in chaos, but benefit from it?
In this podcast, Caleb and Michael review Nassim Taleb’s book “Antifragile.” In it, Taleb describes a Stoic philosophy grounded in the realities of randomness and practice.
They talk about how ideas from this book have impacted them – and the questions of theory and practice that remain.
(06:43) Antifragility
(25:55) The Barbell Strategy
(37:22) Skin In The Game
(45:40) Stoic Skin In The Game
(47:04) How Stoic Is This Book?
(53:23) Different Kinds Of Lives
(01:01:41) The Greek vs Roman Stoics
(01:06:47) The Philosopher King
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Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Three Philosophies
00:00:00
Speaker
So you might have three kinds of people, right? You've got the hedonist who lives or dies by the random chance. If there's a banquet, they're happy. If there's not, they're suffering. There's the ascetic who shrinks from the world, seeks robustness, says, I will never eat or drink the wine because I will be sad when the wine is gone. And then there's the stoic who is not sad if the wine's gone because they don't need it. But if they find themselves in a banquet, don't mind if I do.
Hosts and Topic Introduction
00:00:29
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. My name is Caleb Ottiveros. And I'm Michael Trombley. And today we're going to be talking about the book Anti-Fragile by Nassim Taleb. Do you want to kick us off, Michael? Yeah, I mean...
00:00:48
Speaker
This was a fun one to talk about. This is both one that Caleb, you and I have both read before. And I would say, I mean, I'll just open with this. I would say it's kind of a life-changingly positive read. I think this is one of those books that I left with multiple paradigm-shifting ideas and really changed the way that I think about the world.
Impact of 'Anti-Fragile'
00:01:10
Speaker
And I think I've never really had that experience
00:01:15
Speaker
with many popular non-fiction works. I've had that experience with philosophy. That's part of the reason why I love philosophy. But I would say philosophy is usually a lot of hard work and maybe a bit more abstract or esoteric.
00:01:33
Speaker
Certainly one of the things we like about Stosium is that it's applied, but it can be that way. But this was not the case. This was not the case with this book. I found it. It had a huge impact on the way that I think about things. A couple of the concepts I'm sure we'll be talking about today, antifagility, but other things on top of that are things that influence the way that I live my life, the way that I really structure my day to day. Yeah, just excited to talk about it with you because I think it's a great book. For those that don't know, it seems
00:02:03
Speaker
I would say he's definitely a character. He's a retired distinguished professor at NYU, a practitioner of mathematical finance, a former hedge fund manager, and I would say a generally grumpy reply guy on Twitter. If you've ever seen him on Twitter, he will say mean things to people and be very snarky and very quick to block quite a force of personality and will on there.
00:02:31
Speaker
Um, but I would say, I mean, to summarize his thought and Caleb, maybe you have a take on this. I would say somebody that's really good at identifying, you know, we, we talk a lot about stoicism about being disciplined, thinking about how changing the way you think changes the way you live. Someone who's really good at identifying mistakes and the way people think first thing, perhaps an economic or financial context.
00:02:57
Speaker
But then applying those or abstracting out those more generally to the way people live their lives or people's decision making processes and identify, well, look, people make these kinds of mistakes. That's why they fail in the market. If you can avoid those kinds of mistakes, you know, or recognize them.
00:03:18
Speaker
And you recognize humans inevitability to make those kinds of mistakes. You can change your behavior accordingly and then, you know, just, just do better in whatever sphere you're looking at, whether that's investing or, you know, any sort of, any sort of goal or pursuit.
Taleb's Influence and Stoicism
00:03:34
Speaker
Um, I first read the book in 2017 had a really profound impact on me, as I said, probably my most influential nonfiction read other than, um, you know, keeping that category separate from philosophy. And yeah, looking forward to digging into it with you.
00:03:50
Speaker
Yeah, I love this book. I probably read it around 2015, and it was the book that reintroduced me to stoicism, I suppose, is one way to put it. I had read some of the stoics beforehand, read a little bit of Epictetus, some Marcus Aurelius, for whatever reason, they hadn't stuck out to me, but not seem to lab.
00:04:12
Speaker
does talk about the Stoics in this book and shows what's practical about them, what's distinct, especially about Seneca. And this book was one of the main reasons I dove back into Stoicism while I was at grad school. So it's also a very influential book to me.
00:04:36
Speaker
And on one level, it's an entirely enjoyable, almost like an airport book read. But on another level, I think it is a very deep book and there's so many good ideas that are worth toying with in different practical and political or theoretical contexts. There's so much to talk about it.
00:05:01
Speaker
I'm excited to dive into some of those key ideas, what's good, what we don't like about it, and some of these other provocative remaining thoughts.
Podcast Structure Overview: Likes, Critiques, Thoughts
00:05:10
Speaker
That was something I forgot to mention, Caleb. There's that question of why are we talking about this on stoicism podcasts. I think part of what we do is discuss different ways of living, different ways of thinking well and performing well in whatever you set out for yourself, whatever task you choose.
00:05:29
Speaker
But there's a, you know, there's a whole chapter on stoicism in this book. There's like an explicit, and I really love somebody who's making a contemporary theory of life, a contemporary argument for how to live, and then brings in the Stoics and engages with the Stoics peers.
00:05:46
Speaker
That is that's a real kind of I really like that kind of content. The scene does a great job of that here, as you mentioned, turned you back on to stoicism. And so part of our discussion will be the discussion of the key ideas of the books, the book. And then part of that will be also how it engages with stoicism, how it represents stoicism or how the scene argues the stoics were in some ways the originators of some of the ideas he argues for here.
00:06:16
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So let's, let's dive into it. Great. And we'll use our, we have, we've got kind of a tried and true method here. We'll kick off with some things we like about the book. Talk about some things that we think are bad or more questionable. And then some things that are just kind of intro interesting or provocative that are leftover that we didn't get a chance to dig into. Cool. If I kick things off. Let's do it.
00:06:43
Speaker
Sweet. So the first thing I want to take a swing at and Caleb interested in your take. I mean, this is something, this is really cool because besides stoicism, I think this is something that you and I are both really into that we haven't talked much about before. So feel free to, you know, I'm interested to see if you feel the same way or if you interpret these ideas a little bit differently.
Understanding Antifragility
00:07:01
Speaker
So the first.
00:07:02
Speaker
I said it was a really influential book to me. And so what I think is good about it is that it has really great ideas that have changed the way that I've lived. And I've pulled out three of those. But I want to start with the first one, which is antifragility. This concept of being antifragile with the book is named after.
00:07:20
Speaker
So Nassim presents this idea that when we're introduced to the idea of fragility, you put something in the box in a box, and then you introduce randomness. You shake the box. And something that's fragile, when you take it out, it's been broken, or the piece of glass you put inside has shattered, or in some way it's gotten worse. That's something that's fragile. If you shake the box, it gets worse. And we often think of the opposite of fragility as robustness. I shake the box and nothing happens.
00:07:50
Speaker
Um, but actually the opposite of fragility is antifragility, antifragility, which would be if I shook the box and I pulled out my, my glass vase or something like this, it's actually stronger. It's actually a better vase than it was before. That's what it means to be antifragile. So part one is just introducing this idea.
00:08:09
Speaker
Um, this idea of, well, look, what we want to cultivate is not actually being, um, insulating ourselves for protecting ourselves from randomness, from chance, from harm. We want to cultivate antifragility, which is this idea to actually, um, benefit from this chaos, randomness, harm, hardships, things like this.
00:08:36
Speaker
So it's another key idea that we'll get into later that Nissing talks about is this idea of unpredictability of certain events and how robustness I think is a bit of a fool's game because
00:08:51
Speaker
You can only make yourself robust to things that you can anticipate. You know, you think, well, it's going to, it's going to flood here so I can build up a, can build up a wall. But then when a hurricane comes and knocks down the wall and you go, okay, well, I'm going to build something up that will prevent against floods and hurricanes. And then an earthquake happens and you know, so.
00:09:12
Speaker
If you try to be robust, it's always kind of backwards looking, it's always kind of responsive, and then it always runs the risk of an unpredictable event actually breaking that robustness. But instead, I look at antifragility as almost kind of a virtue ethics. It's kind of an internal cultivation to develop a kind of a disposition to be forward looking.
00:09:35
Speaker
instead of being defensive, reactive, backwards looking, okay, well, if X happens again, I'm going to do Y, if it floods again, I'm going to do this. You develop the kind of disposition to be forward looking. So I'm the kind of person that can turn no matter what happens to my advantage. I'm the kind of person that can become stronger, better from these unpredictable events.
00:10:00
Speaker
Um, and so for me, that was a huge part of them shift. I was, that was just a wonderful idea. There's a nice glossary at the end of anti-fragile at the end of the book, where he defines what he calls the fundamental asymmetry that in the abstract captures the idea well.
00:10:17
Speaker
because it follows. When someone has more upside than downside in a certain situation, he is anti-fragile and tends to gain from volatility, randomness, errors, uncertainty, stressors, time.
00:10:34
Speaker
which is a good abstract encapsulation of the idea. And I agree that if you're thinking about, I want to become more resilient, that word is almost ambiguous. Does that mean that you want to withstand
00:10:52
Speaker
stressors, randomness, what have you or does it mean that you want to be able to thrive in the face of stress and it's important to make that distinction and that distinction can be action, guiding in a useful way.
00:11:08
Speaker
I think about certain kinds of social conflict. If someone gets cancelled or strongly critiqued in a group, the fragile person is the person who loses their status, is completely removed from that group. The robust person is able to withstand it. And sometimes you see both in the public sphere and probably also in private examples as well, people who are able to come into conflict
00:11:37
Speaker
with others and that they're able to emerge in a better position, either socially or perhaps even ethically from that conflict. And being able to be the kind of person who's anti-fragile in this way is often a good thing.
00:11:57
Speaker
I think one thing that's so good about this idea is that it's less of a focus on thinking about how do I withstand negative events, but it has this positive side to it. How do I not just limit my downside, but also capture any upside from
00:12:19
Speaker
these uh from stressors randomness and so on which i think is just much more as an idea that has more energy to it than uh robustness as it were which i think is one reason why the the style of thought caught on so much and became such a successful book yeah it's inspiring right it's motivating um you said energy
00:12:45
Speaker
Yeah, there's something defensive about robustness. And I thought you put it really well with this idea of resilience. What does resilience mean? We talk about that a lot. And how do you define it?
Black Swans and Their Impact
00:12:55
Speaker
And it is ambiguous. It could be this kind of defensive, this kind of negative. It's like when things happen to me, it's as if nothing happened at all.
00:13:04
Speaker
Um, or it can be this exciting, energetic, empowering notion of, you know, when things happen to me. Great. What an opportunity, you know, what a wonderful, what a wonderful time to be alive. And there's something, there's something, yeah. Really inspiring about that, as you put it really motivating. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think so.
00:13:26
Speaker
So the second one, again, I had never been exposed to this before reading this book. The second idea that I took from this book was the idea of Black Swans. That's the name of a previous book by Nassim Taleb, which I haven't actually read, which I think focuses more on this concept, and then he pulls it into this one, which is the idea that unpredictable things happen.
00:13:50
Speaker
It's just the kind of descriptive fact about the world, that the world is the kind of world where we will never be able to predict with certainty what will happen, but there is this kind of meta-condition, this meta-fact, that unpredictable things happen, and that's predictable, and we can be certain of that.
00:14:11
Speaker
So the fact that black swan, those unpredictable things are the black swan. You would not expect there to be a swan that is black, but then you're confronted with that fact, you didn't predict it, and now what do you do with it?
00:14:26
Speaker
And, um, so, so the fact that there will be black swans, something you can anticipate, but the nature of what will happen and how it will happen is, is obscured. And I think the important idea with black swans is it's not the idea of like, I will not know when it will happen.
00:14:43
Speaker
So it's not like, oh, there will be a stock market crash. I'm not sure when it will happen. It's this idea of something that kind of actually breaks the mold or the paradigm. And so I tried to write down some examples. There's like, uh, terrorist attacks, stock market crashes, the invention of a new technology, the asteroid hitting the earth.
00:14:59
Speaker
And I think there can be some ambiguity because there's ways like, well, insofar as you can anticipate it, you can develop robustness to it. But the Black Swan is the thing that you cannot develop robustness to because you can't anticipate it. So I don't even know how well those examples work. And so my interpretation of the book was that the best way to deal with Black Swans and cultivate anti-fragility is to adopt a kind of Socratic humility, to recognize that you don't know everything, or in other words, to know what you don't know.
00:15:29
Speaker
And so those that attempt to over-prepare or over-control or construct what they think they know will happen, they're caught most vulnerable because instead of, I don't know, maybe distributing the resources or their time and attention to the unpredictable,
00:15:50
Speaker
They say, well, I, I'm going to focus my energy on being robust. I'm trying to think of a metaphor, but you know, if you, you put a shield in front of yourself, cause you think the blow is going to come from the front and then it comes from the side and all your attention is focused towards, I'm going to be as robust as possible from this blow to the front. And then it comes to the side where you're actually, you're actually more affected by that blow.
00:16:12
Speaker
than somebody who maybe says, well, I don't know where it's going to come from, or I'm going to prepare a little bit in the front because that's likely not skepticism, but I'm aware of the fact that I might not be, I might not know what's going to happen next. Um, and so that's the kind of, it's, it's a, it's a, you know, Socratic humility is kind of a, uh, maybe a fact about the world. We, we.
00:16:37
Speaker
So I think the right way to say this, we don't know, we don't know. And that kind of can sound like a platitude. It can sound like, oh, obviously, or it can sound like a necessary condition. The Black Swan is kind of this external reminder or manifestation of, look, it's not the fact that we don't know what you don't know. It's that we're vulnerable to these things that can happen.
00:16:55
Speaker
And so, um, we want to adopt the Socratic humility to not just limit that vulnerability, but maybe put ourselves in the position to turn, uh, turn it to our advantage as well.
00:17:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think one point he makes it in this book and one of his earlier books, Fooled by Randomness, which I think is excellent. He also has this book as you say, Black Swan, which I personally didn't get as much out of that book as some of his other ones. But I think one
00:17:29
Speaker
framing on this is that, as you were saying, you know, what are Black swans? Key examples people often give is the housing crisis in the late 2000s. But on one hand, you might say, was that really unpredictable? Even people like Taleb
00:17:45
Speaker
ended up profiting from it. And I think one of his insights here is that these events hijack our brains in a way. We have this narrative approach to the world. We feel like we almost predicted them. Some people maybe predicted them retrospectively.
00:18:06
Speaker
much more obvious, but there's this general illusion that these kinds of events are predictable and that we should realize that we live in a world that's governed by randomness, whether the Stoics might say governed by fate and fortune. At one point, I do like about Santa because he's always talking about fate on one hand and then fortune on the other, and I think that includes
00:18:36
Speaker
these ideas that not only are so many events not up to us, they're determined by fate, but they are a matter of fortune, which we might say today as random, unpredictable, if we're looking forward. And any sense of predictability is often an illusion.
00:18:57
Speaker
To me, the upshot of that and something that I think is core to Taleb's project or way of thought, I guess, to his worldview is that you might think, okay, there's so much uncertainty. What should we do with that fact? Let's try to make it predictable. Let's come up with models, frameworks for saying, you know, there's this amount of probability of a
00:19:27
Speaker
huge crash over the next decade. That means we should allocate this amount of capital in these assets and so on. It's actually easy to think about this in the financial context. But that's one approach. But to have things a better approach is instead of going through these different scenarios, trying to assign quantify them, thinking about
00:19:56
Speaker
how can you build a system that's anti-fragile? And doing this exercise of trying to assign values to different outcomes and so on, perhaps useful, but is ultimately an illusion. And in the personal case, I think this is why he advocates virtue ethics. You want to be the kind of person who will exemplify virtues in whatever circumstance you end up
00:20:25
Speaker
finding yourself in instead of taking a more utilitarian approach where you think about if I do this and there's this probability this will happen, if I do this and there's this chance of this outcome, and so on. Of course, that kind of thought can be useful, but often
00:20:41
Speaker
it's rigid and fragile to being, you know, just having assumptions that are undercut and ruin the entire framework and the entire model. So that's how I see black swans playing an important role in its thought.
00:20:59
Speaker
Well, I like that idea of those fragile, fragile utilitarians.
Via Negativa Concept
00:21:04
Speaker
They don't know what's coming. Um, but that idea, if you, if you, if you develop a model based on probability, you leave yourself vulnerable and fragile. If you instead virtue ethics, focus on yourself.
00:21:19
Speaker
Again, not this kind of skepticism, even the ancient skeptics, we have an episode on that. Even they didn't walk off cliffs and say, a 50% chance I'm in the matrix and this can't kill me, and a 50% chance that this is a real cliff edge. Even the skeptics made decisions based on probability.
00:21:39
Speaker
But there's this idea of if you focus on virtue ethics, personal cultivation, you'll be in a better position to deal with randomness as it comes rather than, and I think we didn't talk about that. Maybe there's a kind of an edge case where you, because you have a model of how to explain the world and then this, this random event occurs and then you try to shove it into the model.
00:21:59
Speaker
And you're probably in that case, slower to adapt, right? Slower to adapt to the black swan, because you're trying to explain it in a, in, explain it in a method that doesn't capture it or trying to fit into a model. So you don't even notice it while it's happening. Um, whereas, you know, hopefully the, there's somebody who's working on their anti-fagility, their kind of, uh, virtue ethic position wouldn't have that kind of vulnerability.
00:22:25
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, one other aspect I want to add to this is that another key idea he has is that often it's more important to pursue what he calls knowledge via negativa. Instead of thinking about what is the correct model that captures the way the world is, that would be positive
00:22:50
Speaker
knowledge. Instead, can you at least eliminate and ensure that you don't make disastrous mistakes? So that's why it has its negativa as a focus on ensuring that at least you're not representing the world
00:23:06
Speaker
the way it's not and making, say, exceptionally risky bets that ensure your ruin if you make enough of them. So having this approach towards focusing on subtraction as opposed to always adding new things to your picture.
00:23:29
Speaker
I mean, I love that. There's so many good, so many great nuggets of wisdom in this. Um, I love that. That's something that I should work on doing a bit more in my own life. But like you think about that in any domain, you know, what should I eat? Well, I'm not an exercise scientist. I'm not a, uh, well, you probably have a sense that, you know, eating candy and burgers every day.
00:23:47
Speaker
If you eat a bit more salads, if you drank a bit more water, if you kind of cut out some of the junk food, you'd probably be doing better. Or we talk a lot about contemplation of the sage, and I think there's something motivating about imagining the perfect person, what they would do.
00:24:06
Speaker
There's something motivating about that, but sometimes people can be paralyzed too and say, I'm not the perfect person, I don't know everything to do. Well, if you can just get through a complicated situation, not doing some of the worst things or cutting out some of the worst behaviors, and maybe you don't know what your life is going to look like in five years or what kind of person you want to become, but you know now you want to be a bit less angry.
00:24:28
Speaker
You know, now you want to be a bit more disciplined, a bit less procrastinating, unable to follow through on your goals. And if you can kind of trim the bad away bit by bit, maybe you're going to need some direction to really focus in for that last 20%. But it's really that the trimming is 80% of it, right? So the via negativa is such an important idea.
00:24:51
Speaker
It's such having a way to cut through procrastination around improvement. You don't need to be able to write the book on the subject before you can get better at it, right?
00:25:01
Speaker
One nice example of this that I see sometimes at Silicon Valley is this focus on biohacking and trying to improve your productivity. I think sometimes you'll see people who are testing out, taking different stimulants in order to be more productive during microdosing, what have you, and that's sort of that positive.
00:25:21
Speaker
approach whereas many of these people I think if they had better sleep habits or better really basic diet habits would likely get more of that that gain and I think that's something that's an easy case to pick on maybe but a general illusion or temptation is looking for that positive fix instead of thinking about what are some potential changes or interventions I can make that at least reduce mistakes I'm already making in this domain and whatever problem it is.
00:25:52
Speaker
Cool, cool, what else you got? So, quick summary, we've got anti-fragility, we've got black swans, we've got learning from via negativa.
The Barbell Strategy
00:26:01
Speaker
Another idea in this book is benefiting from asymmetry or the barbell principle.
00:26:06
Speaker
So really, I mean, you, you summarize it really well, the star killer antifragility about being the kind of person that benefits from chaos, from, um, um, chaos has been extreme, but from randomness, from time, from asymmetry. Um, so another way to bend it. So, well, how can I be, how can I be that is the question? How can I become antifragile?
00:26:26
Speaker
Um, well, one way to do that and become the kind of person that benefits from randomness is to live an asymmetrical life. Like an uneven barbell, you know, one of those things that you squat or deadlift and a lot of weight on one side and very little weight on the other.
00:26:39
Speaker
So instead of living, instead of 50-50, it's kind of 80-20, 90-10 life. And one of the, I still remember this example, or the kind of paradigm he provides, one part of life. So one way to do this is not the only way. One way to do this is to live a life where one part of life is stable, constant, is sheltered from chance.
00:26:57
Speaker
That's your 90% and then another smaller part is responsive to chance volatile agile Able to respond to black swans positively and fluidly so for example, you know if you invest 90% of your money into something stable and 10% into something with huge potential upside let's say, you know a thousand percent return potential like Bitcoin at the back in the late 2000s
00:27:25
Speaker
Or you know you have a steady office job and then you dedicate your side time to writing a book that has a small chance of being successful, but a very large potential upside if it is. And so this is this idea of, I think it's very practical very actionable because it's a, it's a framework that you can fit in many different kinds of life into. But if we.
00:27:49
Speaker
Because a lot about stoicism is dealing with this anxiety that comes from feeling like you're not in control of things, feeling like life is out of control. And one of the tools of stoicism is the dichotomy of control, which is to say, look, recognize that there's some things that you have a lot of control over, and then there's something that you don't. And so a lot of stoicism is about developing a positive relationship, I would say, with chance, with lacking control, with the randomness of the world, and the kind of anxiety that that brings.
00:28:16
Speaker
And this is another way to develop a positive relationship with it, which is to say, put yourself in a position where you can benefit from some of it.
00:28:24
Speaker
But if you put yourself in a position where your entire life is based around chance, you go all in, you know, I don't know, on your DJing gig without any evidence that you have a talent in it. And with a lot of people that depend on you for financial support, it's going to be an incredibly stressful life because you've gone all in on a random chance or, you know, you put all your money in, into the lottery or the jackpot. You've got all the different chance, huge upside if you win.
00:28:50
Speaker
huge risk, huge, um, I don't know, anxiety that comes with that. And so how can I have, how can I expose myself to the upsides of risk and chance and randomness so that I actually like it. I have a positive relationship with it while being pretty, um, secure, pretty stable. And that's with adopting this barbell principle, um, which is something I try to do all the time, put myself in positions to benefit from randomness without feeling dependent upon randomness, without feeling vulnerable to it, I would say.
00:29:22
Speaker
How does he define the barbell? I think it's, yeah, I suppose it's that there's the idea of anti-fragile that's putting, you want to be anti-fragile, that's putting yourself in a position where you can benefit from stressors. And then one way to do that is to take a barbell strategy where you're
00:29:42
Speaker
safe. You have sort of a dual strategy. You make exceptionally safe decisions on one hand and then on another. You take some more speculative risks. So he says in employment,
00:30:00
Speaker
For a writer, this would look like getting a stable Cinecure payment and writing without the pressures of the market during the spare time. That would be the idea of you have a set and stable gig. You know, maybe you're supported. If you think about some of these ancient patron models, you have other supported by a patron. Get yourself a patron, everybody. If you're listening to this, get yourself a patron.
00:30:26
Speaker
while being able to take more speculative bets on other projects. So I think that's one way to think about the barbell strategy. I think in a way this is
00:30:51
Speaker
This is, I think Naseem Taleb does an excellent job describing the Stoic approach to indifference in a way that
00:31:05
Speaker
probably is better than a lot of academic commentators, which is that, especially if you, if anything, you see this, especially in Seneca and Seneca talking about wealth, where the approach to wealth is to see it as an indifferent, not something that's
00:31:21
Speaker
ultimately valuable. And as such, you want to ensure that you're the kind of person who can live well in poverty or riches, you know, not make the moral mistakes that both might tempt you towards. But also, you know, it has this practical approach, narcissism is not all things considered.
00:31:49
Speaker
anti-wealth, especially in the Seneca example, such that I think this is a nice way for thinking about the aesthetic approach to wealth and other indifference is to ensure that you're protected from
00:32:04
Speaker
downside mistakes about indifference, whether that's on the moral side, attaining wealth by ruining your character, or on the practical side having such an attachment to wealth that you're unable to survive the loss of it, or you are anxious about losing it.
00:32:28
Speaker
And then ultimately, I think those are both the same. Of course, the ancients think about the practical and the moral in the same way, and I think Talaam probably does as well. So you're able to protect yourself from that downside, but also appreciate wealth when it comes by, or if not wealth, other kinds of pleasures, art, whatever comes with the goods of social reputation and so on.
00:33:00
Speaker
Yeah, so the idea there is that, again, for that, how do we expose ourselves to the plus sides while diminishing the downsides? And so how do we have a kind of asymmetrical relationship with those indifference? And how is that connecting back to the barbell?
00:33:22
Speaker
Well, I think how is it connected to the barbell? I'm not sure if it is. I guess the barbell, that's that dual strategy. So you want to be safe and make safe decisions on one hand and then just take maybe more speculative bets on another.
00:33:43
Speaker
But I think it is related to at least the kind of thinking that generated the barbell strategy, which is this focus on ensuring you're protected from making exceptionally terrible mistakes, but also able to benefit from the randomness of the world.
00:34:07
Speaker
And I think it's captured in the anecdote of treating life as a banquet, being able to enjoy the food when it comes by, but not suffering the kind of attachment or craving that could ruin either yourself or the experience. Yeah, so you might have three kinds of people, right?
00:34:30
Speaker
Um, the hedonist who lives or dies by the random, by the random chance, you know, if there's a banquet, they're happy. If there's not, they're suffering. There's the ascetic who shrinks from the worlds, seeks robustness, says, I will never, I will never eat or drink the wine because I will be sad when the wine is gone. And then there's the stoic who is, uh, not sad if the wine's gone because they don't need it. But if they find themselves in a banquet, you know, don't mind if I do.
00:34:58
Speaker
Um, and that's that kind of, that's that third option, um, where you're exposed to the upsides, but protected from the downsides and the barbell strategy is one way to do that. But they're, but stoicism has a different kind of strategy or hits on the similar things about achieving that in life, which sounds really appealing to me. Yeah.
00:35:18
Speaker
Yeah, I think the barbell comes up in so many different ways. And I think Taleb has a style of thought where he'll see a pattern and then apply it to different dimensions, different domains, so you can have a barbell approaching your career and your life plan, maybe even your personality.
00:35:44
Speaker
and perhaps also in your philosophy. And that's interesting to think about what is an ethical system that takes a barbell approach look like. And something I've thought about before is I think it looks like
00:35:59
Speaker
virtue ethics with strong absolute prohibitions against doing things that compromise your character, but put you in a position to improve the world, which if that's the way fortune turns out, which I think is an interesting framing. I'm not sure if I've ever been able to capture to my satisfaction, but I think it is an interesting framing to thinking about. How do you think about
00:36:26
Speaker
these ideas in the context of, you know, being a good citizen, coming up with a life plan that is a good one. Yeah. I mean, that's, I think that's a project worth pursuing. I think it's, I think it's a great framework. This framework of asymmetries, literally 90% of the weights on one side, 10% of the weight on the other. It's asymmetrical in that sense. That leads to an exposure to upside with a decrease in downside.
00:36:57
Speaker
But now there's the question of, yeah, you were, you were explaining that to the moral game or just like the moral, the moral life. As in, instead of just the investment life or something like this, right? Like instead of a portfolio returns, it's like the, the life worth living. Um, yeah, I don't think I have an answer for it or something to add, but I think it's a, it's an interesting example of how you can apply that concept in different settings, as you said.
Skin in the Game: Learning and Advice
00:37:22
Speaker
So another core idea from anti-fragile that is really influential to me is this idea of skin in the game. And the way that I think of skin in the game is this idea of like, look, we want to think the right way about the world. And so we want to have a thought process that adapts when we adapt effectively.
00:37:45
Speaker
I mean, I can think of this in like an athlete analogy. You want to become an effective basketball player. So when you play basketball, you should get information that makes you a better basketball player. You should learn from your playing. And so what ensures that you learn from your playing? Well, it's by having skin in the game, which means having some exposure to downside. So we've been talking a lot about protecting from downside.
00:38:12
Speaker
But we want to actually have some exposure to downside or recognize when exposure to downside is actually beneficial. In this case, adjusting our thinking or adjusting the way we approach things. So the easy example is like if you put a child in competitive basketball and you make it, you teach them the way in losing matters, they're presumably going to improve their technique or care about their technique because if they don't do that, they have exposure to losing. They have exposure to letting their teammates down.
00:38:40
Speaker
They have exposure to, um, the consequences of their actions and, or their decisions or the decisions of those around them. And so they'll, they'll practice, but they'll also, they'll study the game. They'll try to improve if they get committed to that. You can always be apathetic and say, well, I don't care if I win or lose, you can step outside of it. But if you have skin in the game, you're more likely to succeed.
00:39:02
Speaker
The, that's the idea of skin in the game. The flip side of this or Nassim's important point as I took it was that actually recognizing how many people don't have skin in the game and using that as a helpful heuristic to understand who you should and shouldn't take advice from.
00:39:17
Speaker
So, you know, if somebody is giving you investment advice, check their portfolio. If they say, if they say, you know, you really should invest in Bitcoins, they will show me how much of your portfolio is invested in Bitcoin or Apple and it, or whatever they recommend. And if it's a lot, well, then they have skin in the game. That doesn't mean they're right.
00:39:36
Speaker
They can have skin in the game be wrong. You can lose the basketball game and be very upset that you lost, but it's a, it is a helpful heuristic to know who you should be listening to generally. Um, the, the, the other, I would say the third issue of skin in the game.
00:39:52
Speaker
is that there can be kinds of people that insulate themselves from skin in the game over their entire lives or over their entire careers. So, I mean, there certainly is a strain of this book that I would say is anti-academic or anti, I won't say anti-intellectual, it seems certainly intellectual, but anti-people that comment on things without having exposure to the consequences of their ideas being good or bad.
00:40:21
Speaker
And Nassim, I think, points out sometimes academia can fall into that trap. And so, I mean, I'll try to think of it. I try to think of another example, but somebody who has had no skin in the game for such a long period of time that they're not even noticing that that's occurring or the skin in their game, the skin they have in the game becomes the game of prestige.
00:40:44
Speaker
So I don't know, you're an academic who writes on city planning or writes on some sort of practical policy issue. Your skin in the game becomes getting your publication, getting your next promotion, getting your prestige to increase. That's the kind of game that you care about and the downside you're exposed to if you publish something that's not well liked by your community.
00:41:10
Speaker
you're not actually participating in the game of, well, are these ideas working on us at a city level? Are they working with the populations that this policy becomes implemented in? You know, like something like welfare policy, for example, the professor is not receiving welfare, right? So they might make bad policy and not really care about that because they don't have exposure to the downside of doing that.
00:41:36
Speaker
Um, that's my, that's my run at it. But so again, to summarize this idea that, look, if you want to get better at something, you need to have skin in the game. And if you're trying to learn from other people, um, be cautious of and observe whether or not they have skin in the game. Not that it means that they're right, but it's a, it's kind of a general heuristic of who to take seriously or not when they're providing advice.
00:42:02
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's connected to this. Another strain that's running through the book is a focus on tinkering or allowing yourself to make trials and errors because these errors should be enough to motivate you, push you in the right direction. If you're learning a new skill, always useful to say, if you're learning a language,
00:42:29
Speaker
make an error, have that fixed, and move on. Well, of course, avoiding errors that might be ruinous for you. You know, you don't want to put yourself in a spot where you might say be completely unmotivated to take on, learn the language or something that that's for.
00:42:45
Speaker
But you do want to be able to tinker, explore, actually speaking the language and so on, as opposed to maybe insulating yourself from doing that when that's your ultimate goal, when instead you spend your time on Duolingo doing quizzes, which is not the same thing as speaking a language or exposing yourself to what it's actually like in any real sense. So yeah, there's that point on learning, which is great.
00:43:14
Speaker
And one other point to add to yours is that one thing I like about this book is that it's so fractal. So you can think about anti-fragility in a person, anti-fragility in a social system, and so on. So there's a lot on entrepreneurship, which works well if people are able to
00:43:40
Speaker
have enough skin in the game to fail. You know, particular individuals are going to be fragile, even if the system as a whole can survive a given business failing, a given entrepreneur failing.
00:43:56
Speaker
And that's, you know, skin of the game is sort of a systemic property in that sense. It has a selective force to it. And that's what drives, in many cases, improvements, as opposed to some system that didn't allow people to fail, didn't have any kind of selection, you know, so evolutionary in that sense.
00:44:22
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think you were, I think you did hit it on, I was focusing a lot on, you know, don't listen to people if they don't scan the game. One of the things you were talking about was that idea of like, you got to get skin in the game. If you're learning to write, but to be an entrepreneur, um, you want to learn a language, you've got to get into a state of having skin in the game as soon as possible.
00:44:42
Speaker
And so, you know, that's the kind of fear of participation trophies, right? You're reducing the skin in the game out of competition. You're reducing the downside to competition, which is not going to teach kids who are participating in it the benefits of it or the, you know, the motivation not to lose. Um, and that makes me think of that Epictetus line about if you want to be a runner run, you know, if you want to be.
00:45:04
Speaker
a carpenter build. And part of that is like doing the craft, but part of it is putting it out into the world, getting skin in the game, receiving feedback for your mistakes that is not ruinous, but is instructive. And you want to get to that point as soon as possible, where I think what happens today is people will ruminate
00:45:24
Speaker
As you said that they have an end goal of being a great writer and they won't ever try to put their things out for publication. They won't let anybody read what they write. And so you end up in this point with having no skin in the game for so long that you delay your progress, even if your long-term goal is to be a great writer.
00:45:40
Speaker
I think part of Stoicism too, trying to connect us to Stoicism wherever possible, because I do think they have a lot of connections. I think part of Stoicism is learning how to get maximum skin in the game with maximum resiliency to having that skin in the game.
Stoicism and Skin in the Game
00:45:58
Speaker
So, okay, I have the skin in the game. I'm going to go and play a competitive game of basketball and I might lose and I have that skin in the game, but I'm not going to quit because I think my life is over because I lost or I'm going to let someone be, somebody read my short story.
00:46:14
Speaker
but I'm not going to be destroyed by what they've read or I'm not going to not let them read it because I'm so afraid of criticism. Stoicism, reconceptualizing what happens when we fail, putting it in perspective, giving it the appropriate value judgment, I think helps us do this, right? Helps us overcome the hurdle for skin in the game, which is really just fear, right? Anxiety, fear about your own fragility.
00:46:41
Speaker
about your own vulnerability to what happens if you do fail. Right, right. Yeah, that's well put. So we should touch on some things that we think are less than ideal about this book. And then I think move to some more provocative type questions or some interesting, outstanding questions for us. I'm going to nitpick for my less than ideal, I'm going to nitpick and it seems treatment of stoicism.
00:47:11
Speaker
So he has a passage on stoicism, which I think is good. Um, and I just want to say, like, you know, I think it misses the mark and I think he does a good job as a non-specialist. Um, but I don't, and I don't want to be like, Oh, you have to only study stoicism to write about it because that's silly. I think people should write about it, wrestle with it, engage with it, but I think he gets it wrong. Um, and so he talks about stoicism being about anti-fragility.
00:47:35
Speaker
not about robustness, that he thinks people get this confused. And I just want to add a clarification. I do think a lot of stoicism is about antifragility. It's about cultivating the kind of obstacles of the way, becoming the kind of person that can respond properly to new situations, learn from them, grow from them. But I do think that stoicism
00:47:58
Speaker
Sosun's ultimate goal is robustness, I should say, sorry. And you might disagree with that or think that that's the wrong final goal, but that's what the sage is. The sage is robust.
00:48:08
Speaker
The sage does not learn from things. The sage is secure, undisturbed, peaceful. That's what the perfect person is for stoicism. But the progressor is anti-fragile. The way to get there is by getting skin in the game, by focusing on learning from your mistakes, focusing on learning from hardship, adopting an anti-fragile perspective.
00:48:33
Speaker
So, um, that was just the distinction that I thought was important to make. Um, again, nitpicky, but this is a stoicism podcast. How is the sage not anti-fragile? I would say they're not anti anti-fragile because they don't have anything to improve on, right? They are perfect. Um, they have knowledge, so they don't learn anything. Um, they don't improve their emotions.
00:49:03
Speaker
They don't become a better person when randomness happens to them. They are already a 10 out of 10. So they are, they are robust in that sense. They can't get worse. Uh, or sorry, they, they, they, they're, yeah, they're robust in that they can't get worse, but they're not anti-fragile because they can't get better. Yeah. Yeah. This might be one of the places where no celebs, not that precise.
00:49:31
Speaker
about anti-fragile and there probably is a way to make it work where I would say the sage is anti-fragile because they are able to use indifference well without ever
00:49:54
Speaker
you know, making severe mistakes without corrupting their character. And in a real sense, you know, sages can benefit from particular sages. Or in some sense, sages can benefit and then someone might come across and be like, well, sage really benefit in a fundamental ultimate sense? No.
00:50:16
Speaker
But who cares? For our purposes, Sage can be richer, they can have a nicer meal, and so on. Is that what ultimately matters? No, of course not. That's why they're protected against the downside. But they're able to be fragile because they put themselves in situations where they might learn new things or they might... There's a famous example of Thales making
00:50:45
Speaker
a bet on wine presses that ends up paying off the philosopher Thales winning a bet and so on. Which is, you know, is that a technical benefit in the Stoic sense? No, but in an ordinary sense, that seems good enough for anti-fragility.
00:51:03
Speaker
Well, I mean, I'm happy to, again, I, I, this is, this is, this is a nitpick, but I'm happy to say that the stoics antifragile in the world of indifference, because indifference can always be better or worse. Uh, you can always get more than you prefer and lose the thing, the ones that you prefer and get the ones that you don't prefer.
00:51:20
Speaker
So they would be anti-fragile, they would not adopt practices that make them overly fragile. Because often the things that come with being overly fragile are things that happen with us being anxious, trying to control, trying to predict. And because the sage treats them like proper indifference, they'd probably be pretty good at not making those kind of foolish mistakes that come from overvaluing indifference.
00:51:46
Speaker
But I think, I'm happy to draw a line in the sand between difference and character. Their character is robust. Whereas I think the progressives' character is anti-fragile. I think the progressives' character is one that is
00:52:00
Speaker
or the good progressor, the poor progressor's character is just fragile, let's say, but the good progressor is the kind of person where they go to a party and they see people doing kind of bad things. I mean, parties like the hedonist example, but they see people being angry or violent and they go, they use that as an opportunity to exercise virtue or they say, wow, I don't want to be like that. They use it as a lesson and that they benefit from this randomness, this volatility, or they fail and they say, wow, it's a good reminder for me that I have a problem with my temper.
00:52:29
Speaker
So the progressor is morally anti-fragile, but the saint is morally robust. That's my point. Yeah, I agree with that.
00:52:38
Speaker
Taleb has this other notion of soul in the game, which is somewhat esoteric, but I think does capture the characteristic of being so invested in a project, whether it's moral perfection or
00:53:00
Speaker
Uh, something more specific that, you know, who you are does not change whatever the circumstances is, uh, which I think captures more of what, what a sage would be like. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. Yep. Um, so what about you? What are, what are some of the things you didn't like about the book or thought could be improved?
Influence of Taleb's Preferences
00:53:23
Speaker
Well, I don't think anything, I wouldn't want to edit this book. I think it's pretty good. But in terms of the...
00:53:35
Speaker
I think ideas that Taleb promotes that might be mistaken or on the margin, one could move in the opposite direction. I think there is a sense in which he promotes systems, lives that are
00:53:54
Speaker
closer to the ones you would prefer, closer to the one his personality would prefer, such that not everyone should take his advice or adopt his moral preferences. For example, he rightly points out that having a system that's bureaucratic, say a company that's based around
00:54:18
Speaker
calendars, you know, he'll pick on executives who are in some sense hostage to their calendar. That life is, in a sense, in some sense is more fragile than not. It is less autonomous. But I think Taleb values autonomy being individualistic
00:54:41
Speaker
more than other people. And in fact, certain social systems do work well when they have these strict processes and so on, especially larger ones. Now, you know, he rightly pushes against
00:55:00
Speaker
systems being too rigid. But I would say that in terms of his advice around removing a calendar, almost having this lifestyle of a aristocratic Mediterranean man who uses their leisure well is ideal in some respects. But there is something to say for people who don't find that
00:55:29
Speaker
either want more structure in their life, want more interventions, whatever. I think that's one complaint about celeb. I mean, what I was thinking, what you were saying is like, look, we praise the barbell earlier for being a kind of a
00:55:48
Speaker
a paradigm that you could fit a lot of different lives, a lot of different ways to live a good life that you could put into the barbell thing system, this asymmetrical system. And what you're pointing out is that at some points he seems to be criticizing just a layer lower, just like the kind of content of lives that he wouldn't want to live.
00:56:08
Speaker
Like the kind of life where you have to be responsive to your calendar constantly or the kind of life where your autonomy is limited. And it's like, well, that doesn't really speak to necessarily a problem. Having the content not be the one you want to live is not.
00:56:25
Speaker
It's not the same thing as having it be a bad kind of life. Just the contrary, there's plenty of kinds of lives that limit autonomy in certain senses that are meaningful, productive, good, offer something more than ones that are predominantly autonomous. That's what I was thinking from, and I think that's compelling. I think part of what makes him a great writer is having such a strong personality.
00:56:51
Speaker
But I think maybe the downside of that personality is maybe overestimating how much other people are like him or should be like him. Right, right. Yeah. Here's this idea of, you know, touristification sort of contrasted against the adventurer or what he calls the flanour. And he says it consists in converting activities into the equivalent of a script, like those followed by actors. And, you know, sucks the randomness out of life. You pass up.
00:57:20
Speaker
amazing serendipity because you've scheduled some social event in the evening and so on. You make these kinds of mistakes in your life. But I think there's something to the idea that autonomy is realized when you recognize the limits or the scripts that you're going to adopt in your life in a sort of rational way and
00:57:49
Speaker
I think that's going to be different. People are going to have different personalities, different life plans, different roles, such that what he calls a tourist may in fact be an appropriate life for many people, even if maybe on the margin, many people should move closer to the adventure. Yeah, I like my calendar. Leave me alone. I'm trying to learn about it. I'm trying to learn things. Don't be coming for me.
00:58:19
Speaker
Um, all right. What else do you got in terms of bad? I mean, it's, it's, it's, this is like an exercise and, um, I have a lot of respect for the thinking. I think one thing I'm going to seem as a person that I.
00:58:33
Speaker
One of the things that I like about Stoicism is that it's very, very deep. It's something I keep coming back to and I keep learning more from. And to be fair, Nassim is one person versus Stoicism, which is like a school of thought, spanning, you know, 500 years of popularity. But I've only read one other book by him, which was Skin in the Game. And one of my disappointments about it was that I found it to be a lot of the same ideas, kind of, um,
00:59:00
Speaker
maybe played upon, like themes that were returned to. I didn't find his second book to be as great of a paradigm shift. And I think about this idea of the Fox versus the Hedgehog, which is the idea that some thinkers have many small, interesting thoughts, and some thinkers have just one big one.
00:59:23
Speaker
And I wonder if Nassim is somebody that has one big one and has spent all of his works, kind of someone who hasn't read them all yet, but a lot of his works kind of ruminating on them, clarifying them. You referred to it earlier in this podcast as like, you know, kind of a way of thinking or like an approach to life. And there's something really distinctive about it. But maybe it's not the kind of thing that shifts or changes. That's not a criticism of the book, but maybe something that, you know,
00:59:51
Speaker
I wish the other one was as good as this one. And I think it's maybe, I had a sense after I read Skin of the Game, like, oh, the first book is maybe this real inspirational moment. And then the next one is, okay, we're kind of back where we were, just talking about them in a different way. Yeah, yeah. There's something to the idea that he has had a few key ideas in his life. And then
01:00:18
Speaker
applies those to different domains. There is something to that. I like Skin of the Game. I think the book Fooled by Randomness is first popular book, I suppose, is very good. But they do have a declining marginal utility. That's certainly true. Oh, I should also say I like the Bed of Procrustes. I think that's also a list of aphorisms that is also fun to leaf through.
01:00:49
Speaker
He's not a hedgehog in the sense that someone who's a Marxist or a conservative who has this rigid framework and applies it to different problems. Not a hedgehog in that sense, but he certainly does have
01:01:10
Speaker
And when you're reading his works, it does have a few core ideas and then he's applying to different fields. What makes this same less like a hedgehog, I think, is that many of his thinking is what he calls heuristic base or rules of thumb.
01:01:26
Speaker
Based, which means there is, I think if you try to pull it together, like the way a systematic philosopher would, whether it's Chrysopis or Leibniz or Kant, he's not a thinker like that who has a full, thought-out, precise system.
01:01:43
Speaker
which is both, I think, pro and con. And if I move to some provocative questions that I'm left with, there is a sense in which his work is a critique of the early Greek Stoics who were more systematic.
Stoicism vs. Taleb's Practicality
01:02:03
Speaker
in an argument for someone like Seneca, who yes, Seneca has a system in the background, he is a Stoic, but he doesn't spend as much time on some of these more theoretical matters as some of these other philosophers. He is more, one gets the sense that he is more
01:02:23
Speaker
practical. He has this rhetorical flair that sometimes seems like he's just letting his talent run and saying things that aren't even that stoic, but are witty or something like this.
01:02:37
Speaker
And I think that's sort of an open question is, do you in fact need that precision of the early Greek stoa or something like Seneca that's grounded in this framework but less tight or even Marcus Aurelius for that matter? Is that enough or perhaps even better, not as fragile? It doesn't depend on a specific view of logic, physics, what have you.
01:03:07
Speaker
I mean, I love that. I never thought of that before. That's really interesting. Because one of the things that stoicism is proud about, at least the early stoa, is this idea of, well, we've got a system. And then our system, there's this option famous quoted line about how if you can prove one part of our system falls, the whole thing falls down. That's how interlocked our system is.
01:03:35
Speaker
Maybe you look at that before Nassim and you say, well, that's really robust. It's really strong. It's really secure. And Nassim actually looks at that. Maybe it says it's fragile because it's the kind of thing where if you knock down one piece, the whole thing falls apart as opposed to maybe Seneca is not following a perfect system. Seneca is sometimes a hypocrite, sometimes goes wavers on some sort of ideas, but there's a kind of
01:04:03
Speaker
There is then an antifragility to that way of living. I think about people with their diets. If you have this really hardcore diet and you break it and you go, well, what's the point? Your attempt to make this secure, robust diet has actually lended itself to fragility and said, oh, well, this is a bad day. I'll make it up with some good days. I'll have some fluidity to it. I've never thought about that between the Roman Stoics and the early Stoics, that kind of rejection of the framework before.
01:04:30
Speaker
Which again, I think comes down to this this focus on skin in the game practice and the Roman Stoics on like Practicing and reflecting on students who are practicing it Yeah, yeah, and I think that also comes down to that this this thought on It's related to
01:04:54
Speaker
It was really an epistemic approach that's more pragmatic and practical where
01:05:02
Speaker
a theorist is focused perhaps on, in epistemology, the true and the false always. But that's potentially fragile, right? If you have an entire system that's built up, that's sort of serially built up on its foundations, well, given if it depends on so many assumptions, one assumption being false breaks the whole thing.
01:05:31
Speaker
But if you're instead of trying to always aim for the true, avoid the false, you have some dichotomy like sucker versus non-sucker is what he says. Or you could think of it as maybe winning or losing in whatever domain that
01:05:46
Speaker
that's not as fragile. It's not the sort of thing that's going to be upset if you just have a single assumption. You're not focused on winning arguments. You're focused on winning as such, and you're okay. You have the perfect picture. You just need to have one that's good enough to make good decisions and not be taken by terrible mistakes and so on.
01:06:08
Speaker
It makes me think of Kant with that famous line of Kant, where it's immoral the line, like, yeah, well, if a serial killer came to your door and asked you where your family was because he was going to kill them, would you tell the truth? And Kant's like, yes, yes, I would tell the truth. And it's like, well, in terms of the liar-non-liar distinction or the truth and the falsity,
01:06:28
Speaker
You don't really know how to explain it through that, but sucker-non-sucker will constantly be a bit of a sucker there. If he tells the serial killer where the people he's trying to kill are, so there's that kind of fluidity that comes in that concept, right? Right, right. What else do you have in terms of provocative?
01:06:47
Speaker
Yeah, and one thing that I really liked about this book, we've already talked about anti-fragility being a kind of virtue ethics, but Nassim does what Plato does, which is he extends virtue beyond the individual. So there's virtuous government, there's virtuous business, if you think of that as being kind of anti-fragile, right? So we look at, well, what is a good business like? What is a good government like?
01:07:14
Speaker
What is good policymaking like? And then we can apply that to the individual. Well, it has this idea of anti-fragility. It has this idea of the people making decisions, having skin in the game. It can have a minimization of exposure to downside with maximum exposure to upside. These are all the things we could say about good businesses, good government, and then we can apply those to the individual and we kind of go back and forth. So, I mean, you referred to it earlier as being fractal.
01:07:37
Speaker
But this fluidity of movement between what we can learn at the macro, we can apply to the micro. And that's exactly what Plato does in his Republic. But I've never seen someone do it so compellingly before, or not before, but since Plato really, in the modern era, making these lessons, I guess pulling these lessons out to a level that really does cross-apply. So yeah, kind of, I mean, it's
01:08:03
Speaker
It's it's it's undertaking Plato's projects a little bit there in a way that I think is cool.
01:08:08
Speaker
Yeah, I really appreciate this aspect of his thought as well. And it's interesting to see it play out in business and politics for Telev in particular. He has this focus on starting businesses, ensuring that you have that skin in the game, very specific investment views on how to invest well. And then also a collection of political ideas that don't map
01:08:35
Speaker
obviously, onto some of the existing ideologies. But you can see how they flow through this very same principles or heuristics he uses to come to his conclusions in investing in business. I think there can be a kind of
01:08:55
Speaker
There is always that risk that you're being too much like a hedgehog, as I were when you do that. But I think there's also an advantage to thinking in a consistent manner like that. And if you can judge the thinking by its fruits, I think he does relatively well when compared to other so-called public intellectuals or public philosopher types.
01:09:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, agreed there. I think he does do well, compared to other public intellectuals. I think that's something that he stands by. At least in that public persona, it can be abrasive. But it seems almost out of principle, in a way, or internally consistent, maybe.
01:09:48
Speaker
Yeah, he does have this provocative, this another idea, which is a part of his ethic, which is something like if I say something after, you know, three glasses of wine, then I should say it in.
01:10:00
Speaker
Imperson in writing otherwise, you know, I'm not it's it's cowardly to them to not do that. It's not either not authentic or Just Lame Which I think isn't I'm not sure if that's I'm not sure if that's true, but is at least worth thinking Thinking through and perhaps
01:10:24
Speaker
There is that thought if you wouldn't say something in public and you shouldn't say in private and maybe more people should move in that direction, but other people, some others should go in the opposite direction as well. I mean, that's something that I struggle with, like being, I guess, provocative, or maybe a bit of inspiration there.
01:10:44
Speaker
Um, one other thing that I wanted to point out, I mean, this kind of connects to the previous point about being provocative, saying what you think in stoicism, there's this idea of both theory and practice are necessary.
Balancing Theory and Practice
01:10:54
Speaker
And I, but, but you often there's this idea of first you learn the theory that you practice. And I think the scene inverts this, um,
01:11:05
Speaker
This idea, if you want a philosopher king, better to start with a king than a philosopher is something that he says, which I think is a great line. And so it's this idea of first practice, first do. Then you kind of codify and you solidify by thinking about what you've done, thinking about what you've learned through doing. And so he has these ideas about academics
01:11:32
Speaker
are often, or ethicists really, let's say if we keep it to the ethical part, there are people that just write about other people who have done. Good behavior isn't generated by the ethicist. The good behavior of the excellent person is then recorded and codified by the ethicist. And so there needs to be this idea of practice, action as the number one, theory is then the codification, or I guess maybe exploration once you have done
01:11:58
Speaker
And I also thought, just going back to that line, I never thought before about the philosopher king as being symbolic of the perfection of theory and practice. I always thought about the philosopher king as being this idea of an instrumental benefit, right? We want the kings to be philosophers because we want them to be good kings.
01:12:16
Speaker
But I never took a step back and thought, well, the philosopher king is that person who's figured out when is the time to quote, when is the time to do theory and when is the time to do practice? And that's maybe a different way of framing Marcus Aurelius that I think gives me something to think about.
01:12:36
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good point. I think something to aspire towards. And again, another place where the fractal nature of the thought appears, both in tele, but maybe even more deeply in Plato. Right, right. Another line, the only modern dictum I follow is one by George Santayana. A man is morally free when he judges the world and judges other men with uncompromising sincerity.
01:13:07
Speaker
All right, we can end it there. Don't need to keep reading until it lines. All right, thanks for listening, all. Hope you found this useful. And yeah, maybe we'll cover another book of his, or if there's not some other thinker, we should dive into a lot of snow. Awesome. Thanks, Gil.
01:13:27
Speaker
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01:13:46
Speaker
Stoic. And I'd also like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. You can find more of his work at ancientlyer.com. And finally, please get in touch with us. Send a message to stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next time.