Decoding the Gurus - Nassim N. Taleb: Everything these idiots, frauds, and assholes don't understand

Episode Date: February 9, 2021

Nassim Taleb, what a mensch. He's got the confidence of a bull in a china shop that has just bought a lycra muscle-shirt and knows it looks great on him.Our guru this week has surveyed the fields of statistics, economics, psychology, actually all of the social sciences, and finds them populated by a gaggle of pale, thin wristed, pocket-protector wearing wimps. Although, he's equally scathing towards COVID-sceptical libertarians, and Matt and Chris (in a totally unbiased manner) find him pretty funny and accurate there.More seriously, Taleb is a smart guy and quite fun to read and listen to. But he's also an infinite singularity of arrogance and hyperbole. Matt and Chris can't help but notice how convenient this pose is, when confronted with difficult-to-handle rebuttals. Taleb is a fun mixed bag of solid and dubious claims. But it's worth thinking about the degree to which those solid ideas were already well... solid. Many seem to have been known for decades even by all the 'morons, frauds and assholes' that Taleb hates. To what degree does Taleb's reputation rest on hyperbole and intuitive-sounding hot-takes? Will he ever un-block the co-hosts on twitter? Should Matt, a statistician and psychologist, re-train in a field where he can actually contribute something useful to the world?All of these questions, and more, will remain unanswered in this fresh new DTG episode!LinksThe Antidote to Chaos interview discussed in the episodeThe original Bloomberg interview that was deemed too reasonable for the episodeSam Harris' amusing take on Taleb

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try our very best to understand what they're talking about. I'm Professor Matt Brown, and with me is Dr. Chris Kavanagh. And I should say I'm also a doctor, but in addition to being a doctor, I'm also a professor, which Chris is not. Hi, Chris. Is that true? Aren't I a professor?

I'm like an associate professor. Oh, damn. All right. But just to be clear, which is better, professor or associate professor oh damn all right but just to be clear which is better professor or associate professor better matt it's all you don't need to be so competitive but yeah but like the whole academic hierarchy always confuses me because i shouldn't use the title prof like i should not do that uh it doctor. But somebody is using the title of prof. Yes, it is confusing.

I think you can call yourself anything you like on social media and in an email. I think that's the rule. I was abbreviated to ASPRO. That's how it gets abbreviated. ASPRO? Yeah, ASPRO. ASPRO. ASPRO.

Not ASPRO. Oh, ASPRO. Right. Assistant Professor. Got it. Yeah, that's how it gets abbreviated here which is you know anyway so um we're going to be uh reviewing a wonderful man and nasim nicholas taleb today but before we do um we're not going to do too much in terms of introductions we're going to get straight to the point but um chris i think you wanted to do a bit of a response to uh some feedback we got on the last episode that's right we're changing things

up a bit we're gonna try and avoid our lengthy 40r introduction segment cut it down a little bit um we'll stick in the patreon shout outs and any discussion of relevant reviews to the end. We appreciate all the nice and negative reviews that we've got, but we'll probably not cover them in every episode, just if there's something notable or funny. But despite saying that, we did get an extremely long review on iTunes that was all about the Murray episode. It would have been better as an email because it was like, I think it's over, you know, five, some words longer. So, but it raises a lot of issues with the way that we covered Douglas Murray. And I thought it might be good to talk about them because I think some points are legitimate, some not. So like kind of

a post-mortem of the Douglas Murray episode. And I'm not going to read the whole review, but one of the points that it made is by us focusing on his presentation style and his background, like upper-class English and the guffaws and those kinds of things, that essentially it's an ad hominem and that we aren't grappling with the substance of his arguments so start with you matt what do you think about that point i can understand why somebody would say that and it would probably feel irritating if you felt that the arguments getting put forward were good um we didn't think they were in that episode for the most part, but we did, it's true, focus on the presentation style because that's kind of what we do with Decoding the Gurus. When the style seems to be an important part of the product, then we tend to focus on it and we try to steer away from having a kind of debate with the person who's not present.

Really what we want to do is try to study the style and presentation of these guys as much as we can. So I think it's okay. What about you? I think it is the case that we respond to people's arguments often, like fairly often we are looking at the logic that they're presenting and saying where we think it holds up and doesn't. But alongside that is the style of presentation and the accoutrements of the person's character and identity, because that is often used by gurus to buttress their fairly mundane points. And I thought that we made clear on the episode that a lot of the arguments that Douglas Murray is making are made stronger simply because of the fact that he presents it with an upper class accent and

superficial references to the classic literature and so on. So focusing on those elements, it isn't an irrelevance because it's part of what adds to his gravitas. So to me, those are not irrelevant factors to consider. They're core to why he's given more attention than than others if he didn't have the accent if he didn't have the range of references that he does the points would not seem so important yeah and i think that particular episode is very light on arguments they generally give their opinions very much like they're self-evidently true. In other content we cover, they actually do provide some reasoning to sort of back up their

opinions. But in that particular one, it was heavy on sweeping opinions, but there really wasn't much argumentation to grapple with anyway. Yeah, I think the reviewer's point, though, is that there were arguments and we didn't address them clearly enough. But he also made the point that by finding the section where Murray can't remember a name for an extended period of time, that that's kind of mean. Everyone forgets names and that just shows that we dislike the person. But again, I think that misses the point that the whole reason we were highlighting that is that shortly before, Murray had waxed lyrical about how people looking up names using technology was a character flaw. And it was showing the decline of personal interactions.

showing the decline of personal interactions. And then almost immediately after, there was a circumstance where it highlighted how useful technology could be just to remind you of a name. So it was the contradiction rather than just, oh, Murray forgets things like every other human does. That made it amusing, really. Yeah, and I thought that was obvious from what we said in the context and i

think i even said explicitly that i'll be the last person to make fun of someone simply for having a bad memory because i have the absolute worst one um so anyway i just don't think that dealing with stylistic features and parts of the person's biography or the baggage that they bring along with them is irrelevant. The intellectual dark web often present this argument that it's ad hominem to consider anything beyond the pure argument that someone's presenting. But oftentimes the context around the argument, it is relevant when you're looking at somebody as a whole picture. Agreed.

Agreed. Now, I think the other thing, we're not going to do a full update on various gurus, but I think you did have a little bit of commentary on stuff that's been going on with Jordan Peterson at the moment. Yeah. So Jordan Peterson agreed to an extended interview with the Times and they published a quite critical article, but they also released the full unedited audio, which was three and a half hours. And Jordan Peterson posted to his website,

postmortem of his participation and how he felt he'd been unfairly treated and the content of the interview was not represented correctly. But the interview itself or the article about the interview, it was strongly focused on his daughter, Michaela, and her role in advocating for alternative treatments for his, what's the name of those drugs that benzos that he got addicted to and going through all of the various trials and tribulations that he'd been through. And yeah, to me, the interview spent quite a bit of time discussing the experience of dealing with Michaela. And she comes across in the description of the interviewer as very familiar, alternative health, pseudoscientific guru, really know of technical terms and stuff about drugs. And she advocates her own alternative diet system all meat diet and and attributes

things to a bad reaction to cider so the the whole thing is a bit i don't know a bit of a mess um but it does sound like he she is not doing him any real favors i think i haven't listened to the whole three and a half hour audio yet but even just listening to the first 20 minutes, Jordan Peterson breaks down and cries about twice in the first 20 minutes. And you know, he doesn't sound stable. The whole thing just seems like super messy. The reason I wanted to mention it in part was when I read his response article or his post on his website, there was this recurrent theme that we see amongst the guru set where they feel they're being unfairly represented and treated in the mainstream media, right? They're constantly feeling that they're being persecuted and claimed to be controversial

when they're not or associated with the alt-right or, you know, these kinds of things. But reading it, it struck me as painfully naive in a way, because he basically said, and he shared the email that the Times had sent to set up the interview, right. And they had wrote a nice email, you know, saying they want to cover his life and career and written in a sympathetic tone about his trials and tribulations. And he was saying, you know, he wasn't prepared for this venomous attack that could have been written by his worst enemy. But I'd imagine all journalists, when they reach out to you, do so in positive tones, try to frame what they're doing in a positive way. Even if they were going to write a hit piece, they would do that. And secondly, from what the journalists described, they had a lot of issues with the way McKayla was handling things and deflecting things outside of the actual recording of the interview. outside of the actual recording of the interview.

They just had a very unusual experience. And then, you know, him breaking down multiple times in the interview, references of a diagnosis of schizophrenia, which they disagreed with, and so on. It sounds like a circus. So it would be very strange, given those circumstances, if you didn't get an article at the end of it that mentioned them. Yeah, I hear what you're saying about it seems to be an instance of more of the grievance narrative that's so common amongst gurus. And the other thing too is that point that we discussed with T

about how the dynamic of gurus in terms of their engagement with the media and the attention and the spotlight is one that often seems to be an unhealthy one where they can be subject to things like audience capture or just be attracted to things that gain them ever more attention. So it seems like Jordan Peterson has succumbed. It seemed like he was succumbing to that before his breakdown and that seemed to have contributed to it. And it seems to be once again his engagement in the public eye is not particularly healthy for him.

No, and there was a lot of references both in the interview and even in his response about how many times his videos have been viewed and, and reframing like the Kathy Newman interview that he did was famously hostile, but, but he also did an interview with Helen Lewis for, uh, CQ or CQ, I think. And it was combative, but I remember at the time that a lot of his followers were saying it was one of the best like critical interviews of him because it gave him time to speak. And she raised counter arguments and they had a back and forth. But he frames that as also ridiculously hostile.

And it just seems there's a very low tolerance for pushback or criticism that isn't within a very narrow frame. Like he mentions Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan as media or friends that he can expect fair treatment from. But those are also people who are famed for being complete pushovers with the people that they agree with. pushovers with the people that they agree with. So yeah, it's just a dynamic that we see a lot of, and it's kind of surprising given how much he has been in the public eye and how combative he comes across in interviews or material. It instead seems that there is a real fragility uh in a lot of the gurus we look at for criticism yeah i mean well fairly or unfairly he's he's a controversial figure and we'd be quite naive to approach an interview without some expectation of pushback essentially there are interviews where they interview scientists, for instance,

who might be talking about discovering a black hole or some sort of thing where there's no political aspect to it. And you can expect a very friendly softball kind of interview. But for a politician or a public figure, when they're interviewed, they expect that the gloves are going to be off. And that's just how interviews normally go for them so Jordan Peterson is definitely in the second category and as you say it's would be quite naive for him to come to an interview unless it was a special friend uh without expecting that but anyway say lovey yeah yeah it's a it's an ongoing development in the guru sphere and speaking of ongoing developments in the guru sphere another just quick thing i want to mention matt is have

you heard about clubhouse no no i did like it rings a bell but i i can't remember what it's about tell me so this is a new social media outlet like a new, which is still in closed beta, I think, you know, it's invite only. So it's still like a walled garden. And basically it's hook is that it's audio based. So people set up rooms. I think, I don't know what they're called. Like maybe it's clubhouses and people can come in and talk and then other people can ask questions. It's a bit like a Discord server, but a social network version of it. And it's becoming popular. And I've noticed a lot of the gurus set displaying an interest in it.

And in particular, our favorite guru, Eric Weinstein, has embraced it heartily and gained a big following there already. And I was thinking that that platform might be the ideal platform for some of our gurus or gurus in general and pseudoscientists and conspiracy theorists, because we've already seen with long form podcasts that they give people the ability to speak for extended periods and with little oversight on topics, right? And there's an element of intimacy that the audio podcast format generates. And I think that will translate really well to Clubhouse and will potentially allow for various guru figures to do extended audio takes about topics

and build following, you know, for these audio lectures. I just think it's a platform that's going to be really potentially lucrative for gurus. Yeah, I think you're right about that. As soon as you said that it's an audio-based social network, I thought myself how it just seems like the perfect platform for gurus. I've said this to you before offline that in some ways these gurus are like the 21st century incarnation of the traditional shock jock or talk radio host who, you know, they've added some interesting layers to it. But in many respects, it's a similar kind of thing.

And this interactive audio would bring them even closer to a high-tech version of a shock jock. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so something to keep an eye on. Shall we turn to the man off the aisle? We're covering an Asim Taleb this week, and he's had a storied career, so we can't really do it justice

to stay on time. But suffice to say, he's an essayist and someone whose expertise lies in probability and statistics, arguably more probability. He's the author of some very well-selling books, including The Black Swan and Anti-Fragile. I bet many of our listeners have read one or more of those. And he was also quite famous for accounting

for the great financial crash. And he was one of those people who had hedged against it and did very well out of it. And that kind of behavior is very much in keeping with the sorts of philosophies he expounds in his books. Yes. And I would also just note that he's themed as well for being pugilistic on Twitter and before that in his public appearances and interactions as well. Like part of his theme is that he's famously combative and openly critical about the people he doesn't like. Like the number of people he has blocked on Twitter is astonishing. He's blocked me.

He's blocked me. Yeah, yeah. Full disclosure, everyone. We have been blocked by Telep. Yeah, it's not hard to achieve if you say something critical of item it's likely that you'll be blocked so yeah yeah so he has he has called me an idiot for sure um but that kind of thing is not going to uh affect our review in any way shape or form in some sense that endeared me to him a little bit more because he's like he's just very straightforward and he

gets criticism he blocks yes yeah i mean in a way it's refreshing and you know full credit to him to have such a strong following while being such an abrasive person yeah yeah although you know people like that in the modern era. So I've heard, so I've heard. Abrasive personalities do well. So as you mentioned, the content that we were looking at this week. So one thing to say is that we initially were going to look at a talk where he was mainly focusing on the coronavirus and also investment topics. That was one of the talks that popped up on YouTube. And it was Black Swan investor Nassim Taleb on COVID misconceptions, Fed policy and inflation. But that talk turned out to be actually pretty good, but more so to be not really very guru-ish. It was more finance-y focused. And yeah, and there wasn't a ton of stuff

to sink our teeth into. So we looked at another talk, which was more about his philosophy and view about wider topics. And that was the antidote for chaos. An interview he did with something called Cavalaria Com. And the interviewer was a Romanian presenter who's an expert in technology and cars. I forget his name, Matt. Do you have it handy there? The interview is with george bernichi bernichi yeah and look i got you to pronounce it so it's it's he's quite a good

interviewer so that's the content that we are focusing on mainly here so sorry if you watched the other one yeah apologies for that i uh i posted that announcement and prepared for that interview but uh chris uh um clipped this this one and a bit of a miscommunication and chris is very sorry yes hello we you did go through this interview and send me various uh like summaries of all the things that were annoying you so i know that you have watched this and uh being upset by it so yeah this this was our second choice right last thing i want to say is that i did like the other interview the one that we posted i found very little to object to and i thought the things that we're saying were really quite uh sensible so i have this interview is more irritating definitely is in more hot take

territory but just in all fairness to to tell that i think it's worth emphasizing that clearly not all of his material is like the thing that we are covering today he clearly can talk sensibly as well uh it's just that we're not going to be covering that. Yeah, no, but I actually think that's an important point to make. And it also shows up in the content for this material that we're covering because he is a mixture of very reasonable, sensible, and in some cases, quite insightful takes

alongside super hot takes and personal abrasiveness. So I think that's a good point to note that unlike some of the other gurus that we've dealt with who seem to be almost entirely self-aggrandizing and full of empty calories when it comes to their intellectual substance, I feel that Taleb is a bit of a mixed bag,

not just in each interview, but internally within interviews. And he does have things of substance to say, I feel. Yeah, no, I think, look, we're going to have fun with this. So, and I agree, it's always more interesting when it's a mixed bag and that it's not completely one thing or the other. So yeah, let's get into it.

Okay, so I think this was a nice starter of the interviewer warning his viewers in advance about Taleb. Taleb might seem rude or harsh, but he's actually blunt and honest. Yeah, so if you have to put that disclaimer at the very start of the interview, I think it speaks to the character and his reputation. That's right. So look, we're not going to try not to fixate too much on his bluntness, shall we say. But in some cases, it is relevant, I think, for instance, when he's talking about other experts but let's let's hear some more from him it's an honor to talk to a person a guy that's been called the philosopher

of the 21st century are you okay with that no because i'm not a philosopher i am i'm not i mean like labels i don't like labels yeah so hey uh i quite enjoyed the you know in it that's that's the first thing to get the interview off like how do you feel about that label like i don't like it yeah yeah so it can be it can be endearing yeah i mean he also he outlines why he doesn't like it. And it was quite interesting. So this is like the next bit after that where he explains his reasoning. It explains it. In my mind, being someone that self-identifies with something, typically that person is a fraud.

And that was created by leads before. You identify it was a problem you're currently working on. That seems a little bit sweeping, doesn't it? Anyone who identifies as anything is a fraud. I guess the other thing is that, we'll return to this, but I might dispute slightly his rejection of the philosopher label. He likes to think of himself as very much someone who was applying his technical skills. But yeah, we'll return to this question, I think, of whether or not he's a philosopher later on. Yeah. And I also think he says that anybody who identifies as anything is a fraud, right? Which again, like you say, you know, super sweeping.

But he's identified with a couple of concepts and he kind of separates that out, right? It's like, oh, it's okay to focus on your concept to be like associated with a given problem. But I'm not sure it's a huge difference. He's known as the black swan guy and the anti-fragile guy, right? And he identifies with those. That's valid, but somebody identifying

with a profession is not. Like it feels that there's some self-serving issues with you know what it's okay to identify with in play there yeah yeah that's right i think i think that's in keeping with his general theme which is that everybody is an idiot and a fraud except for him but uh we should let him speak a little bit more yeah and so there's a good part i think at the start which reflects an issue that I think comes up repeatedly. That when COVID came, you can work with scientific papers and say, you know, statistically, this is not converging or something,

and then therefore your sample size doesn't fit the claim you're making, or you can use it. So everything is based on statistics and probability. Everything was information based on that. Okay, so that was him saying that everything in the coronavirus is related to statistics and that gives his expertise relevance, right? That's why he was able to do it, just treat it as a statistics issue. But immediately after, the interviewer raises this.

In your books, you're talking against taking decisions simply based on statistics. Exactly. But there's an asymmetry. Sometimes you do take based on statistics. So there is a fundamental asymmetry. If you use it right, you know when not to use it. You see?

Yeah, so using statistics and data crunching is fine when he decides it's fine. And it is fine when he decides it's fine. And it's not when he decides it's not. Yeah, and I don't think there's much more to it than that, right? He is capable of recognizing the limitations of a statistical perspective, but others are not because they're idiots. And if it feels that we are being unfair to suggest that he is describing everyone else as idiots, it's not because he very often explicitly talks to them being idiots and

referencing them as idiots. So I can give some examples of that. So it has more scientific significance than some paper written by psychologists telling you this move is logical, not logical, rational, not rational, acceptable, not acceptable. And therefore, all these psychologists, I call them idiots to their names at face and hopefully you will you will uh i don't know what what term you use you would use in romania to call these guys it's okay idiots yes i'm a double idiot being a psychologist and a statistician so but uh in that of course he's he's referring to the advantage of ancient wisdom or tradition over some expert or technocrat doing some kind of technical analysis or number crunching coming up with recommendations so there's something there's

a lot to be said about that but let's um maybe we should hear some more from him so if you look at how we deal with uncertainty, what we've survived hundreds of millions of years, so we've got to have the right reactions. You see, that's exactly probabilistically. You have reactions and sometimes without understanding why because it's widened to us to have

these reactions. So we must have a fitness to the risk environment through our intuition, through our paranoia, through our extreme risk aversion in some circumstances. And that mechanism is a mechanism that has been refined by, of course, hundreds of millions of years, maybe. That's a pretty bad argument. years maybe that's a pretty bad argument what he's arguing for is that the sheer fact that people have survived and that we're still here as evolved organisms that have then created civilizations that have lasted for thousands of years and we're still here so that illustrates that intuitive

knowledge that's embedded within our culture the tradition or the wisdom of the ancients, as he says, is probably a good way to go. But I feel like his argument there is tremendously bad because it's certainly true that humanity as a whole has done things like survive the Black Death, but that doesn't mean that we did it well. You could point to limitless examples of how traditional approaches to crises or problems have just been absolutely terrible. So it comes back to this problem of deciding, well, when it's a bit like before when you say, oh, well, you know, sometimes you should use statistics and but other times you shouldn't. And he's the one who decides as to when is the right time to use it. Well, clearly there are many, many times where

taking a traditional response to a problem is not a good idea. Anyone who's read history knows that. So how do you tell when one should follow tradition or when one should not? I think we'll get to this a bit more when we talk about his take on religion, but he's echoing an argument, which is very familiar in the gurus that we've looked at, and also actually quite current in academic research on cultural evolution, which is that traditional systems and social taboos or informal norms can transmit information without it being explicitly encoded in the rationale, which is important. And that we, you know, Jordan Peterson is very clear on this point that we should be very careful before we discard institutions as outdated and irrelevant because we don't have a full picture of their value and

that they have centuries of knowledge built into them, which might have value that isn't immediately apparent to the naked eye. And there's Jordan Peterson arguing that, but there's also people within academia like Joseph Henrich, who has done very interesting work on these kind of adaptiveness of taboos related to food consumption in certain societies and so on. But I think there's definitely stuff there that's worth talking about. People can be too dismissive about traditions and norms and cultural systems in the past. There is a danger of simply regarding those as follies that we can do well without, that we've surpassed the need for any traditional system. But I would say that's a pretty extreme view. Most people do realize that traditions have elements of functional importance to societies. And also, I think that view runs the risk, though,

of falling into the naturalistic fallacy, where if something has existed for ages and is seen as a natural or evolved thing, that it necessarily is functional and good. And there's tons of counter examples, right? You talked about some of them, but another one which springs to mind is bleeding people when they're ill. Now, there are specific circumstances where taking blood out of someone could be helpful,

but the range of ailments that it was applied to throughout history for hundreds of centuries and millennia is the treatment does not help in most of those cases. In fact, it weakens people and makes them more likely to succumb. But it was a traditional treatment which reappeared in many cultures independently and was preserved for centuries. So there are clear cases where traditional knowledge is not necessarily beneficial to the people receiving or even the societies that preserve them. So like you say, we do have to come down to assessing things in individual cases and not just relying on the heuristic that something old is good or

something evolved is necessarily beneficial yeah yeah i agree 100 there's a bit where he elaborates on this if you bang on your computer it breaks and and the attributes of engineering is that for example take a watch okay it doesn't there's no partial watch. If something breaks, it stops. If the computer breaks, it stops. Whereas in nature, human body, we have things that love auxiliary mechanism. It's a lot richer. And the complex system is based on interaction. So once you do more advanced mathematics than the ones used by these,

let's call them idiots, okay, than the ones used by these, let's call them idiots, okay, then you realize from the more advanced mathematics that you effectively, your grandmother or grandfather or great-grandfather or great-great-great-great-great-great-aunt actually had the right decision-making framework. The thing that I might pull out here is the contradiction inherent in what he's saying. So once you do the advanced mathematics, you find out that the traditional ways of doing things were right all along. When he does it, it's advanced mathematics, but when other people do it, it's just the activity of fools.

The second point I'll make is that it does remind me of a guru-ish trope, which is to provide a highly technical or sophisticated rationalisation of something that people want to believe in the first place. Yeah, this is a common thread. And that just did jump out at me a little bit that people like traditional things, right? It's just in our nature to have a preference for them. And I suspect to some degree, his appeal is to providing a rationalization for those traditional conservative beliefs that people find intuitively resonates with them.

Yeah, it often feels like he's kind of justifying whichever take he wants to advocate for. And sometimes they are reasonable and sometimes they're not. But in all cases, it's that advanced mathematics and probability supports whatever he believes. supports whatever he believes. And that, I mean, he also has famously been very skeptical of the safety of GMOs and argued for it using his understanding of probability and mathematics and risk, which is counter to all mainstream scientific research on the topic. But like you say, the point I wanted to highlight there was a bit different because he focuses on this analogy that watches and computers are in a binary state. They're either working or they're broke. Whereas humans and traditions are more like complex systems that there's varying degrees of things that are right and not.

And there's auxiliary backup stuff. And I listened to that description and was just like, what? A watch can be running slow, but still basically functioning. A computer famously can be a system that, you know, has a virus which infects one part of it, but still functions or, and it just was like a really weird dichotomous comparison that he wanted to draw you know it reminded me of when creationists are like half a wing is not useful to anyone knows it is that the context here is that he wants to portray technocratic top-down systems as being inherently fragile and contrast them with a decentralized, more organic, traditional, conservative way of doing things. That's kind of an interesting thing to think about, contrasting these sort of more rigid bureaucratic systems with more organic ones. But I really do

feel like he's strawmanning the technocratic thing terribly. To stick to his topic, talking a lot about COVID at the moment, he would represent the governmental approaches to COVID as being highly rigid and fixated in their approach. Essentially having some prior idea about what should be the right way to do things and then just barreling through and not adjusting to handle changing circumstances or as new information comes to hand. Now, when I think about the array of different responses that are deployed in Australia, and there's a wide variety of them, and they have evolved and changed in response to the information that's come up, and they have, I really wouldn't describe it as rigid. Like, there's a whole

range of things from track and trace to stopping international travel temporary lockdowns uh on affected areas the list goes on and it is dynamic and changing so i think i think he's doing um a straw man argument here yeah i think that would be a good time to play one of the clips related to his views on localism which which highlight the motifs that you're pulling out because again they're not they're not going to gain five bureaucrats and to discredit them and favor localism because the mayors of small towns not have these intellectuals trying to mess with their lives you see you gotta remember have these intellectuals trying to mess with their lives, you see. You've got to remember one thing.

Intellectuals have always been wrong, okay, about risky things. Always. I mean, they're wrong about communism. They're wrong about this. They're wrong about religion. They're wrong. That's who's wrong. And as you heard, we should listen to mayors and

so on. Well, localism. Localism has a stronger municipal base. You pay taxes to your municipality. But it's Switzerland. Or, to some extent, the United States. And this is why we're turning to city mayors

for rapid response in case anything happens. City mayors for rapid response in case of anything happens? City mayors or small towns, even better. Okay. So you go back to how Italy was throughout its history, through how the world was throughout the Roman Empire, and both of us were in both the Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire. It seems very strange to pre as America's

federalist model in response to the coronavirus, given what's happened there. Like I haven't noticed that local authorities are much better at dealing with the crisis than national bodies. Like it seems there's been equal incompetence across wherever you look. So I'm not sure that localism is the answer. But the other point was just that the presentation that technocrats and presumably, you know, he's referencing Brussels and stuff that they don't have any skin in the game. They don't really care. They're just, you know, advising things. And whereas like people are actually affected. I, I'm not, I don't get that entirely because they're also living for a global pandemic, right? The World Health Organization and stuff,

they are affected by this. Yeah. Yeah, well, I guess if you talk about skin in the game, it would seem to me that, say, the Prime Minister of Australia, for instance, does have a lot of skin in the game because they are blamed, rightly or wrongly, for how well we do. I guess I have a natural sympathy for his preference for devolution and decentralization and network systems generally. On a conceptual level,

I'm quite sympathetic to it, and I'm sure there can be more sophisticated arguments put forward towards it. But I think that the sweeping way that he argues for it seems quite wrong to me. You simply don't always have better outcomes just because the decision-making is happening on a local level. An example that springs to mind is in our local, like we have three tiers of government here in Australia and in our town at a local level, some time ago, they stopped fluoridating the water because they thought it was poisoning people. And we have quite bad dental performance in the area as a result. And that wouldn't have happened at a national level.

That only happened because it's a backwater kind of town and the mayor was kind of crazy and not very well qualified. Whereas those people tend to get filtered out at higher levels. So maybe when big organizations fail or at the higher echelons, when they fail, it's more obvious, makes more of a splash. But I think they fail a hell of a lot at local levels as well, even if it's not so dramatic in terms of people's news feeds. Yeah, I think this gets to a dichotomy that we often come across, which is if you interpret the gurus very charitably and you don't pay that much attention to their hyperbolic statements,

right, and instead look at the underlying principles they're advocating for, there can often be reasonable points. And Taleb, like you say, is saying that reliance on local authorities that understand the circumstances in a given area better than international bodies. I think that's a perfectly legitimate point that few people would dispute. But that's not why he's famous. He's famous because he'll refer to everybody in the WHO as an idiot who got everything wrong and that we need to give up on these international idiots who are trying to run everything. And I'll give an illustration of that kind of rhetoric. To destroy the administrative bureaucratic establishment. To destroy the bureaucratic establishment. That's a very, very bold statement.

What do you mean by that? I mean something like World Health Organization. More harm with the pandemic than help. In the beginning, it says there's no reason to wear masks. Well, you tell them, okay, what do we got to lose wearing a mask? We know pictures in history of people wearing them, okay, what do we got to lose wearing a mask? And we look at, we know pictures in history of people wearing masks. Okay. So he joins the august procession of gurus who make a very big deal over the mask thing. Yeah.

Again, I mean, he's, he's much better on the coronavirus than any of the other people we've covered because we'll get to some of the clips later where he's advocating very reasonable points and he's making good arguments about the severity of coronavirus. He is not completely a hot take anti-establishment machine. But he still slips into these hyperbolic statements very easily. And the notion that the entirety of the World Health Organization's contribution to fighting the coronavirus pandemic is summed up by the delay and advocating widespread mask wearing for the public. That's, it strikes me as like extremely myopic and to not have a real grasp of what the World Health Organization is doing day in and day

out. The majority of their advice was good and remains good. And it is just stuff like, you know, social distancing, good hygiene practices, not gathering in large groups, stuff that, yes, you can take issue with how long it took them to switch to advocate widespread mask wearing for the public. in the grand scheme of things that's a criticism but it doesn't undo all of the messages that they've been pumping out constantly uh you know trying to make people aware that this is a serious event and that we should take it seriously and we should work together to try and coordinate responses to it yeah there's a i think what you're sensitive to is that motten bailey dynamic that many gurus seem to have which is that if you take the reasonable version of what they're saying it's perfectly fine but it's also rather platitudinous so for example if the reasonable version is that oh there is traditions exist for a reason and we should be cautious before throwing them away and replacing it with something new.

Now that's perfectly, I think it's a struggle to find anyone who wouldn't agree with that. It's perfectly fine. It's a platitude. But as you said, they don't get famous for that version of it. They get famous for the broad sweeping thing of all experts are idiots, don't bother with any statistics. You know, just refer to my books where I talk vaguely about fractal modeling and advanced mathematics of why the traditional way of doing things is always right.

That's the version that wins hearts and minds. And that's the silly version. Yeah. and minds and that's the silly version yeah and you know you mentioned the the masks echoing a common refrain we hear amongst our gurus i noticed another one which reminded me of one of our very favorite past gurus so i'll play it for you and let's see if you can identify which guru it's reminiscent of okay this is not democracy democracy is if you are in control of the environment in which you live. You don't have coercion by a certain class. It's not democracy.

It's much more vicious than democracy. There's no democratic process when unelected bureaucrats start running your life poorly. Oh, well, that's tricky because which one? I can think of three well i for me it just sounded like scott adams completely right well that that was going to be my first choice but then i was thinking about jpcs um and they're out there yeah like that's you know this is him talking about like again right the reasonable point that bureaucrats imposing on people's lives is something that we should have some issue with. But it almost strikes us like Brexiteer rhetoric.

Like, who's he referring to? And there is democracy. Even the US system is a representative democracy. Like it's the hyperbolic claims that it just, it rankles to me that that kind of go-to anti-institutionalism, turning everything up to 11 in a statement, it's, yeah, like I feel it's potentially poisonous to discourse. Yeah, I don't think, yeah, I think poisonous is the the right word because it's a bit like the criticisms of academia, that there's the crazy unreasonable ones, that it's all entirely corrupt and nothing means anything and it's all conditioning people to become woke Marxists or something. But then there's a bunch.

That's not to say there aren't good criticisms of academia. There are lots of them and we could rattle them off. But that kind of rhetoric is very satisfying, but it completely misses the point. So the same thing applies to corruption and bureaucracies and so on in democratic states. Yes, there are serious issues. For instance, the role that political financial donations and lobbyists play in influencing policy, like that's a serious thing. But the way it's framed by gurus, and in this case, it's Nassim Taleb doing it, is a poisonous way of framing it,

which leads people to do things like storm the Capitol building. Like that's kind of where it leads. So yeah, I think it is quite dangerous. Yeah. Although you're not placing that responsibility at this feet. No, no, no, no, no. I'm saying it's that kind of rhetoric. No, I'm not blaming ness in for that yeah and you know a point you've made as well in previous episodes is that there's this tendency for people to focus on the hits that they make right like when you introduce talib you mentioned that he's he's quite well known for at least being interpreted as warning about the financial collapse and making money from betting on that. But yeah, here is him making what I would consider a huge hot take about what's going to happen after the coronavirus.

And I'm curious to see, you know, are these the kind of things that also get remembered? Because it feels to me like this is the kind of stuff that someone can say and it just disappears under the carpet. Coming from the outside, stores and people from Texas coming to shop in stores. So we have changed the habits of the consumers enough that the small difference, New York was super leveraged on its success story, and even then, not financially sound. But it's the same with all big cities. After all the pandemics, big cities contract for some years.

Not necessarily for some years. I mean, it could be permanent. It might not have been super clear there, Matt, but what he was talking about was New York. And his take is that New York has completely collapsed in the coronavirus crisis and that it won't recover and that this will be the fiat of potentially all big cities. And, you know, this is in line with his view

about retreating into localism. And that because, you know, this is in line with his view about retreating into localism. And that because, you know, now we're shopping online and now that we know that teleworking is important, that the big cities are basically going to lose the role that they previously played. And that strikes me as like, on the weak version, I agree with, right, that telecommuting or teleworking kind of things, Zoom conferences are going to be more common, remote work in general. But the notion that New York, London, Paris are going to no longer be important centers after the coronavirus, it's just bad shit, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. You know, the reasonable version is kind of interesting.

It may be that we see more decentralization just because it may speed up a process that was already latent, which is the internet basically making geographic restrictions far less important. So there might be some truth in that and some of these changes being logged out. Matt, just on a note, I know you've done some work in global health and addiction patterns and so on. So you might have more insight into this than me, but is that true that there's a tendency in the modern era for decentralization,

moving away from urban centers and like because oh no no no no no i didn't mean to imply that i was just saying i was just saying that it's what he is predicting might possibly come to pass right you know just because we do have a very good internet you know so working from home, telecommuting, basing operations in smaller centres is more of a technical possibility now. So arguably we're all still living in big cities just because we're kind of used to it and there's this inertia. And it's possible that a shock like the COVID might prompt

or speed up slightly something like that. But no, to be clear, as far as I know, there is no decentralization. There is no exodus from the cities happening yet, quite the opposite. Well, I'm aware that there are people claiming that. There's articles saying the tech center is being abandoned as the elites in Silicon Valley, you know, rushed to leave buying up property in New Zealand and whatnot. But I always feel that a lot of that feels like they're looking at a very specific segment and a very small segment of the population and then extrapolating out hugely from there. And, you know, the notion that remote working will become more common as our technology develops and that there'll be new industries,

which are less focused on geographic location. Yeah, of course. But the harder take that major cities will feed and collapse, that's the part that I find people focus on the reasonable part and they kind of just glide over them predicting the collapse of major cities. And this is something which other gurus have said in their content. And I just feel that there's a failure to hold people account when they make huge swings. there's a failure to hold people account when they make huge swings but if they get a hit people very much fixate on well look you know they said that and it's it's just a frustration yeah no no i i completely agree with you there i think um you know playing these clips has really highlighted for me the the real contrast between this interview here with the other interview we listened to

and posted which um didn't have anything like this level of hot takery so it makes me think the talent's got two speeds so in the other episode he was having a much calmer and far more reasonable conversation where he was almost devoid of hot takes but in in this one he's in big hand-waving mode so yeah he's an interesting character because he does both he does both styles yeah and that's actually something that i've seen in response to his public lectures and articles and that when he's making sweeping claims about, like one of his major things is that statisticians rely on normal distributions and parametric tests,

and that these have unrealistic assumptions for many things which we would care about in the real world. Everything is not normally distributed. And like one, I think that's something that all statisticians already would agree with fundamentally. But when he is making the criticisms in a more measured way to say that

you shouldn't overly rely on parametric tests, you should acknowledge that there can be unexpected events that cannot be modeled well in systems if they're rare. Few people take issue with that. They take issue with his more extreme take and claim that everybody else is an idiot who's never thought about it. And he's the first person that's realizing this. And often the response I see when people see a talk and he's more measured, they're like, he makes very good points if you just ignore the rhetoric. And the other side of it is that he's making points that often aren't as revolutionary as he's portraying them.

They're points which actually have been widely acknowledged by people for, in some cases, like decades. Yeah, I mean, like a good example is, yeah, as you said, that criticizing the normal Gaussian distribution, which doesn't capture a lot of real world data. Now that's perfectly true. But the problem with that is it's not very interesting. It's something that's widely understood by statisticians and competent statisticians do not apply the Gaussian distribution where they shouldn't. You know, if he claims that relying on that and ignoring the tails will lead to major financial crashes or not accounting for that risk, then again, that's completely true.

But also, people do take into account those tails um and then he'll go on to talk about oh we should use advanced mathematics like using mandelbrot's ideas of fractal modeling in understanding these complex systems and it's all very vague and then he'll say well this is just a philosophy book so and so i don't have to present the details of that. So, you know, it's a mixture of pretty anodyne statements that are totally true, but well appreciated and well understood, combined with some hand-wavy speculative claims that are entirely unsubstantiated. Yeah. So, well, maybe this is a good time to focus a little bit on some of his better takes and illustrate that he can give reasonable points and is often arguing for reasonable positions. And a lot of his good them discussing why the coronavirus should be considered

a serious problem so so the the problem is that we have these idiots and let me call them idiots because they are idiots in january covid had killed maybe by february a thousand people yes a thousand people and this they give you numbers of people who drown in their swimming pool. Okay. Yeah. The number of the people who drown in a swimming pool in the past is very representative of how many people will drown in a swimming pool in the future. It's very stable because that's what I call mediocre stand statistics. That's where the bell curve works.

That's where the bell curve works. But if someone is foolish enough to drown in her or his swimming pool, it doesn't cause a neighbor to drown in her or his swimming pool. But if I have COVID, I'll give it to a neighbor. So there's a multiplicative effect that doesn't exist with car accidents, all these sources of risk. It only exists for pandemics, all right? And we have only 72 in recorded history.

So that's an excellent take there, that when you talk about epidemiology and you talk about responses to what may seem like a relatively small problem, because at the moment there may be relatively few people infected, you have to take into account the exponential nature of that threat. And this is something that I think was poorly understood by a lot of politicians early on with COVID, who I think it was their natural instinct to look for a compromise solution. But with some things, it's true of wildfires, and it's true of epidemics, there isn't really a middle ground, you have to stamp it out or let it run free. Yeah, and he discusses the trade-offs and how people are misunderstanding them in general and draws this analogy to the amount of money that companies invest in airline safety. And I thought it was a nice comparison

point so maybe we can hear that. Whenever a plane crashes people switch to driving. Yes, and then you have more people dying on the roads. Exactly, but there's a huge cost on airlines to avoid crashes. So we're spending trillions to prevent crashes to have the lowest possible air rate on the airlines. It's great to be able to fly, but it is not as burdensome. So it's completely illogical to say how much we're spending against the pandemic

under these circumstances. Yeah, thanks, Chris. So that's another good example of a good and reasonable take. Other people have said the same thing, that there's a false dichotomy between choosing between public health and the economy. Because the fact is, people are concerned about their parents or grandparents dying from this disease, just like they are scared about plane crashes.

So the government can say it's going to prioritize the economy all they like, but people will still do things like stay away from restaurants. So I'm happy to be finding points that are perfectly sane and rational things that he's saying. Yeah, and he echoes almost exactly the point that you're making quite nicely about the organic contraction of the economy that it isn't a trade-off because well let's hear him explain but let me tell you one thing about the behavior of consumers the minute a firm is painted you see or there's they discover and mcdonald's or something a small little defect people don't go anymore. The minute they hear about it. With COVID, most of the contraction and economic activity came from companies

that did not want to be sued by their employees and restaurants. And then he goes on to talk about restaurants trying to avoid being sued or being the source of an outbreak. So it's a good point. And it's valid that it's a false dichotomy to make so yeah i think it's just good to note that he isn't just a source of endless

terrible hot takes yeah yeah exactly and i mean you said this before we started recording that he really is quite different from some of these other gurus who just seem to be just purely about hot takes and seem to have no substance to them. I think Talib does have substance, but I think his substance is more in his, yes, it's informed by his technical fields, but he may not like this, but his ideas mainly are philosophical ideas.

It's more like a standpoint and an approach. And we may not agree with all of them, but it's quite legitimate, for instance, to be arguing for devolution and decentralization. Some of his takes about COVID are excellent, but it does seem like he's got two speeds he's got the really broad pugnacious you know i'm the smartest man in the world and i have the keys to the universe and everyone else is an idiot but he's certainly no fool and when he shows a little bit of restraint he can talk extremely sensibly about yeah and like there's a part where he basically says that if we are doing overactive testing lots of of tests, and everyone's wearing masks, we can just do business as usual. Now, going forward, the solution is dual.

Overactive testing and masks. And do business as usual. And that doesn't gel with what I've heard from virologists and other epidemiologists. Like I'm sure you would say it doesn't matter, but that strikes me as the kind of thing that is maybe stating things too strongly. But even still, those are both reasonable recommendations that we should be doing more testing and we should, mask wearing should be mandated and there should be a culture that's encouraging mask wearing. and there should be a culture that's encouraging mask wearing. And he specifically makes that point that we need to make use of traditional shame culture tendencies in order to help change the norms around mask wearing.

Like in America, if you show up in Costco without a mask, you have people taking your picture and it goes online. Okay. So there's a problem, which in fact may be unfair for the person but at the same time all we need to do is build a culture to bring down the pandemic yeah yeah so i guess the general drift that he's got there is about the traditional norms and things fostering collective action yes um which is obviously an important thing when it comes to managing an epidemic yeah and that actually that leads nicely to his take on religion but before

we get there i also have to mention that when he is attacking people that you don't like or not necessarily people you don't like but people that you might take issues with or want cut down to size. I can see why his style is enjoyable. Yes. This is him. And again, this sort of echoes Scott Adams, but in a more reasonable way. This is him talking about his views about Bitcoin.

I have to separate Bitcoin as a good idea that may work from these weirdos, you know, whole cluster around Bitcoin and the fragile thing as a solution to the world's problem. And they only eat meat, only this, they read Hayek, and they don't understand Hayek. So there's a crowd of people who have to separate Bitcoin from Bitcoiners. The Bitcoiners are like some cranks and lunatics and conspiracy theorists, which is nice to have in society, but you want to keep them far away from your landscape. Yeah, so it just reminiscent to me of a little bit Scott Adams dichotomy between scientists

and science, right? But in a much more legitimate version. and science, right? But in a much more legitimate version. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no. And look, I don't understand Bitcoin very well, but to the extent that I do, I certainly share skepticism. There's a lot of kooks and weirdo claims and huge overhyping in that arena. So yeah, I agree. And another target of his ire is libertarians. But let me make one statement about a pandemic that economic statement. There are Indians who are bureaucratic Indians for a central state. And there's also Indians who are

libertarian psychopaths passing through. And let's talk about a second category. All these people tell you, well, the shutdown is costing the economy. As if the virus was not going to cost the economy. As if the virus was not costing the economy. The virus is dangerous for the economy. And this refers I think to a point that we've called out in previous episodes

about this kind of hyper individualism in modern conservatism. And he makes some interesting points about it. So I've got two clips about that so maybe i'll play them both and then see what you think and and when some guy was arguing look at this an open hayek and on this page he explains to you the government unnecessary for pandemics and wars and natural catastrophes we need government that's that's a function of the government

okay so first of all he's got a reasonable recognition that there are some functions of which governments can be useful for. And then there is also one mechanism that I did not understand about the libertarianism, is that you have to avoid harming others. It's called a non-expressible. By not wearing a mask, I am harming others. it's called a non-expressible by not wearing a mask i am harming others yeah so it's interesting to think about nasim taleb's sort of general political outlook which is conservative but he's conservative in a way that's a little bit similar to jordan peterson in a way but he's probably a bit more down to earth i read somewhere that his intellectual godparents are people like Locke and Hume coming out of an English tradition of small government, that kind of ultra-skeptical ultra-libertarian american version so i don't mean to be mean to americans

but it seems to be a post-modern thing associated with the american right and he's not like that he's coming from somewhere that's different and um quite a bit older and I think this fits in with his take on religion, which I wanted to get to, because he talks about that here and he's talked about it in other talks and famously has argued on the side of religion against the new atheists, people like Sam Harris. His take on religion, it's similar to the traditionalisms of norms and values that he was talking about before. So maybe it's best to play him describing his views about

religion. There is no way you can transmit intergenerational experiences with ideas. You transmit them with customs, interdicts, and habits. You're saying that religion is a store of wisdom?

It's a Darwinistic idea. Those who have the right ideas survive. Not necessarily because of the ideas, but because using it. Okay. survive not necessarily because the idea is but because using it okay that's first of all the ground that he's providing right that it isn't enough to just have intellectual systems that won't be enough in order to transmit culture you need things like rituals and creeds and stuff which ascribes values to higher orders or supernatural beings even. And I think there's definitely something to that, that a purely rational secular worldview can often seem less compelling,

or at least fail to capture the various irrational aspects of society, which are often very important, like the inauguration ritual, which recently happened. And if you look at that in purely mechanistic terms, it's just a ceremony to signify that there's a change in government. But one, it has to happen. It has to follow these formalistic patterns, and it has to involve the stating of very specific words in order to be performed correctly. But secondly, when there was the issues with the transfer of power this time because of Trump and the various conspiracy theories he pushed, it took on a much more symbolic importance. And I think those kinds of things exist all throughout society, not just in religion, but in all aspects of culture.

if we think of the ultra-rationalist, ultra-progressive way of doing things, then we make policy decisions and we do things to maximise economic wealth, or we could be trying to maximise health and wellbeing, or maximise happiness in some way. But I take his point that the danger with that kind of approach is that it neglects the sort of need that people have for more than just the purely material things or for hedonism or maximizing pleasure. But people need to feel that life has some sort of meaning, some sort of goal. And I think that's true at a societal level as well as an individual level. So, you know, in ancient Egypt, they were building pyramids. You know, all cultures have had their grand projects.

And much more recently, we put people on the moon. We spend a lot of money to do things like study black holes. And I think those are wonderful enterprises. And, you know, we might set ourselves other enterprises such as restoring the ecology of the planet, not for any hedonistic or material benefit for people, but just because it's a good goal and something to strive towards. So I guess I'm with him in the sense that his point of view sort of overlaps a little bit with that, you know, society should be about providing something more than just technocratic optimization. Yeah. So there is a part when he's discussing religion where he's arguing that a lot of the, especially the kind of new atheist takes on

religion are too fixated on the doctrines and supernatural beliefs and ideologies that religions instantiate. And that to fixate on that feature just doesn't actually grasp what religions actually do for most people and what their function is. So here's him talking a little bit about what he sees the function of religion. about what he sees the function of religion. So the problem of treating religion as something, what I call epistemic, by saying, well, that story, it means you're taking the story literally. Science is literal and epistemic. Religion is apostatic. I'm sure you're familiar, Matt, with the concept of Noma,

non-overlapping magisteria, popularized by Stephen Jay Gould. And that sounded very reminiscent of that point to me. And like with Gould, I think it's like core point that simply focusing on theological, doctrinal beliefs doesn't tell you everything you need to understand about religion or what religious identity is about. But I think he's wrong. And in the same way that Jordan Peterson is wrong, when he acts as if religion is just about that, it isn't about positing reality, right?

About describing an actual alternative system of physical reality or what happens when you die. Because I think it is. It's both things. It can be metaphorical at times and to many people is treated as such, but it absolutely does in the world posit systems that conflict with modern interpretations or science. And to act as if that's a misinterpretation of what religion is, that relies on a version of religion that is highly metaphorical and which people don't take as a literal truth, is the default view of religion. I don't think that position holds up either. Yeah, no, I completely agree with you there. But let's just take that meaning providing component.

Now, I would agree with Talib as far as saying that that is something that's important on a social and civilizational level that that is provided for. But I personally disagree with him that it is a good idea to look to religion to provide that. I would advance an alternative, which is to look for secular projects and secular sources of meaning, sort of a Carl Sagan-esque kind of way of looking at the world. I'm just wondering what your take on that. I'm going to play one clip, then I'll get on to this point. But this is him talking about that he follows the Jewish orthodox system about meals and how to eat meals, which involves fasting on certain days and various restrictions. And this is part of his rationale for why that's a good idea. They discovered that those who eat together, you see, band together.

So if you could, you have to eat, you know, with other Jewish people. So it creates networks of communities. What it created is what the Mediterranean and Europe where you can have trade. Okay. where you can have trade. Okay, so that's taking that kind of very cultural evolutionary perspective on the functions of collective meals and religious prohibitions and taboos. But to return to your question, what he seems to discount there is that lots of things in the modern secular world have replaced those functions.

There are now systems that are not reliant on shared religious identity, which tie people in together to systems that enable trust. There are various mechanisms in societies which avoid the need for, say, supernatural punishment to be the thing that is compelling you not to cheat people, right? We have secular systems of law. We have various electronic mechanisms that prevent people being cheated and so on. And research looking about trust and religion and how these various things function psychologically tend to show that actually invoking secular institutions produce very similar results to invoking religious ones for modern people. I'm not discounting that there

are adaptive aspects to religious traditions, which maybe the new atheists have overlooked. But I agree with you that viewing religion as the sole source for those kind of trust networks, or even just traditions and norms, that we need to be looking back into the past in order to find those kinds of systems. I think that's fetishizing older systems as being better, which isn't necessarily true. Yeah, like you, I accept that many traditional or religious practices have some functional purpose. But when you actually look at them, you see that sure, they may have been functional, but that may have been in a clannish kind of society where that may have been helpful.

And they may well not fit the modern world very well. Furthermore, they may well be awfully suboptimal approaches to things. Just take one example of religious approaches to marriage and the prohibition of divorce, arranged marriages, all the rest. Now, it's pretty easy to see that there are a lot of downsides to the traditional approach to handling marriage and relationships. And it's not self-evidently true that it was even that wonderful for people then, even if it was functional, and certainly not preferable to the more secular approach that we do today. So, like you, I accept the very weak point that there's some method to the madness of religious practices, but I reject the idea that it's the only source of good practices, and

modernity has embraced the idea that we can have secular solutions to the same problems. When you are constructing these internal trust networks of based around religious identities, that's often good for the people who are part of those religious identities, often very bad for the people who are excluded. And it can also foster very impermeable in-group, out-group identities. And similarly, following the orthodox restrictions on diet, it's fine for Taleb to talk about how this is beneficial on communal meals and so on. But like you mentioned, as far as I'm aware,

there's a hell of a lot of restrictions in Orthodox Judaism about what women can do and what they're allowed to handle and who they're allowed to be with. And we're a Taliban woman. I wonder if he would voluntarily be following the restrictions and would find them beneficial for increasing his trust networks. restrictions and would find them you know beneficial for increasing his trust networks well well exactly and that goes to the point that i made at the beginning of the episode which is that it's all very well and good to say that there's ancient wisdom in these practices but it's self-evidently true that even if some of those practices are a good idea a hell of a lot of them are really quite bad ideas and and talib would have to admit that so you're left with the problem of well how do you tell which is which talib would probably

gesticulate towards some advanced mathematics which shows that the evidence-based approach actually confirms what he thought but it's really rather trite to say that it's it's a mixed bag because he doesn't give you a recipe for figuring out what's good and what's bad. Like you said, a lot of those religious practices might have been kind of okay if you were the priest and a guy, but maybe not so good if you're a young woman. So when he's trying to make this point about religion being about trust and not about belief, he talks to the Romanian interviewer about the word for religion in

Romanian. So I think it's fun to hear that little exchange. Now, for example, what does the word credo mean in Romanian? I believe. Credo. Not really. It means I trust. Okay. If you see the credo, it means I trust I trust okay if you see the credo the credere it means I trust yeah

so the answer the Romanian interviewer gave was the opposite of what he wanted so he's like no no no no it means trust

oh okay yeah no you could still have the confidence the self-confidence to correct a native speaker on their own language. But I don't know.

Who knows? He could be right. Maybe it's got a dual meaning and he just wanted it. Yeah, yeah. All right. So we're going to move off his localism, traditionalism stuff in a minute. But I will say it ties into a bit like Rutger Bregman's utopian view of pre-modern history he has. So let me just play a clip where he's highlighting the past versus the present.

What happened in China had a big rise because of a decentralized mechanism. And then they had the Mandarin try to run it. A bunch of people people the government the same thing is happening now in europe and same thing happened in upper egypt the nation state centralized nation state is way inferior to a system of empire empire with collection of city states yeah so like that just struck me as strange because what I know about Chinese history is that centralization was a huge process throughout Chinese history across the dynasties. something successful as, you know, he'll just expand the criteria to what suits his argument and anything that he doesn't like falls into the categories of things that are illegitimate and bad. And those categories often don't have that much resemblance to how people usually use the

words. He seems to be saying that things that are old are good because historically civilizations were more decentralized because of technological limitations. That doesn't necessarily seem to imply to me that they were better. that these ancient empires were good, right? Like the Habsburgs and the Roman Empire, whatever. But the EU is bad because it has centralized things, but it has countries that are completely independent, running on local laws and so on. So it just feels like whichever category he wants to put things in, he can. Okay, Matt. So for me, the last point I want to hit on is this recurrent feature he has of setting up these binaries of things which Taleb considers legitimate,

which are good, and things which he considers illegitimate, which are only pursued by idiots and morons. And that how there's a stark divide between these two things. So let me give an example of that. Physics is fine. But what these assholes do is they tell you, because a physicist is an expert at physics, an economist is an expert on economy. No. Yes.

Okay, because an expert, we should classify schools in two categories. Schools that are schools where you learn things. And you can guess that the second is like schools where you don't learn anything. And so economists are within the second school, but also are psychologists and basically anybody in social science

and also included are epidemiologists. So here's him talking about them. Because you see the results. If you have an incompetent dentist, you will see it. If you have an incompetent mathematician, you will see it. If you have an incompetent mathematician, you will see it. If you have an incompetent epidemiologist, you will. So I'm not sure that's completely accurate because I'm pretty sure there's been plenty of people that have revealed themselves as incompetent epidemiologists in the current

pandemic. But it's this really stark dichotomy. and it tends to be the hard science and mathematicians who are reasonable and everyone else who is not i'm possibly investors maybe investors people who make money yeah people are skin in the game yes yes this is telebeddy's most self-serving and irritating like he discounts the entire field of statistics, for instance. And that is just so absolutely absurd. He believes that because he has got training in mathematics and in probability, then he already knows everything he needs to know about statistics.

And we don't want to get into the technical details here, but I've seen the evidence that he is missing a fair bit of knowledge. But his ignorance is almost like a superpower because he can strawman what he's criticizing terribly. For instance, claiming that all statisticians just use the normal distribution for everything and don't have any understanding of open dispersion or strange distributions. When there's a whole, that's been studied since the 1920s. So he strawmands partly because he's just ignorant.

He's not aware of what modern statistics actually looks like. So he's criticizing a naive 1950s statistics and I think probably misbetraying even that. The other aspect of it too is assuming that because you've got training in the sort of more fundamental if you like discipline then that automatically qualifies you in the subsequent disciplines so we we see this in the over confidence of of physicists sometimes to believe that they're qualified to opine on on almost anything because it's all it's all downstream of physics right but actually no you know you have to to do chemistry you actually need to learn

extra things it's not just applied physics and if you want to do biology then you have to do extra things it's not just applied chemistry and the same is true in terms of the relationship between probability and statistics. I'll stop whinging now about him criticizing the field. I think you're right about it being a kind of superpower to be clearly intelligent, to know mathematics, and to be supremely arrogant. Because it means that when you think that you've spotted an error in reasoning, that it's hard not to question yourself because like would would somebody who's so competent in mathematics and knows such complex

mathematical formula really be able to make such basic mistakes right or over extrapolations and it's reasonable people should have doubt in you know when they're contradicting a mathematician about statistics or that kind of thing. That's right. And because he's got that background in mathematics, just like Eric Weinstein, he is able to reply to any criticism by throwing around some mathematical terms, just like Eric Weinstein might do with physics terms. And, you know, it's natural for people, even experts, to give the other person the benefit of the doubt and go, well, I don't see the connection between these abstract terms and what we were just talking about.

If you're willing to be disagreeable enough, then it's really quite an effective tactic for just basically winning any argument. But the thing that irritates me is that the problem is that he's always implying that he has a very mathematically rigorous solution that the statisticians don't see. But like Eric Weinstein, he fails to deliver. So for instance, he correctly describes financial markets as being chaotic and being a chaotic system. But then he talks about using fractal models for describing the unexpected drops and long tails in markets. But at no point does he ever provide any mathematical detail about how one would actually apply chaos theory and fractal theory to actually doing something useful with this kind of data.

So I don't mind his philosophical outlook. It's quite fine. And when he admits that he's talking politics or just talking sort of general principles of philosophy, then I can find lots of things to agree with him about. But I do find it really irritating when somebody is claiming the mantle of the ultra rigorous ultra mathematical approach and criticizing a field like computational statistics which is extremely

technical and actually does pony up the methods in terms of statistical toolbox and methods to apply and and there's a huge literature on on rigor evaluating that stuff. It is a bit irritating when somebody just dismisses all of that and points, gesticulates vaguely towards fractals and chaos theory, and then doesn't provide any details on it. Yeah. I also think he's failing to appreciate that some of the harshest critics of social science disciplines, including like psychology, the replication crisis has mostly been documented by psychologists and criticisms of overuse of parametric assumptions and whatnot have been discussed by statisticians for decades. So he seems to have a remarkable knack of presenting things which are actually

well known and are important with a catchy term like skin in the game or black swan event, and then presenting it as if he's discovered that, as opposed to that is a well-known thing, which most people acknowledge as like an important thing to factor into considerations. And to speak to your point about the overconfidence with which he speaks, I'll play one last clip of him talking about the difference between modern risks and historical risks. This is him applying his understanding of risks and probability to a specific problem. If you make a mistake in today's environment, like, say, the casino,

it may be a mistake, all right? But overall, overall, they're not costly. Depends on how much money you're bringing to the table. Typically, they're not costly because, Plus, there is a correcting mechanism. Those who make these mistakes, if they're really mistakes, they exit the system. This is such a terrible analogy. He's referring to a gambling fallacy. It is an extremely costly mistake to go to a casino armed with the gambling fallacy.

Although it's true that no strategy that you can reasonably implement is going to enable you to do any better, you'll make the crucial mistake of continuing to gamble more and more money under the false assumption that you have some approach that enables you to win. I just think that that's a good example of bespoke definitions and idiosyncratic interpretations, because the notion that people don't make costly mistakes in casinos. And I think in this case, he will be defining costly as in like lose their life. But people do lose their lives and their livelihoods and their marriage, right? So if you want to put it in evolutionary terms, they definitely cost themselves fitness advantages by making costly mistakes in gambling.

But I think he wants to contrast that with you misjudge a tiger being in the bush and you're eaten. But that seems way too simplistic. Basically strikes me as like, that's a bad argument. It doesn't matter how well versed you are in probability and mathematics. You're just making a bad argument by saying that mistakes in modern gambling are not costly. But I'm sure if I was there in the room, he would completely crush me with mathematical formula and deeply cutting insults to my manhood to show why I'm

just completely naive and wrong. But actually, no, he's just making a point which is too hyperbolic and too simplistic. And it's okay, even though he is much better than me at maths. The thing that he's arguing for is that our intuitions and gut feelings that come from our heuristics, that come from either an evolved culture or a biological evolution, what he wants to argue is that we can put our faith in that and that we shouldn't detach from that and try to adopt a very scientific, objective, statistical approach,

with some exceptions, whenever he says that you should, but they're not well specified. So that's his argument that he's pushing. And that's, I they're not well specified so that's that's his argument that he's pushing and that's i mean you can see why he's arguing for that because it fits very nicely with his political worldview traditional kind of worldview but it's it's really quite wrong you know it's very bad like the idea that you can rely on heuristics and intuitions to to deal with modern problems or for that matter matter, to make any decisions about gambling. It's just tremendously wrong-headed. Yeah.

Agreed. So with that tremendously wrong-headed bookend, shall we give our concluding thoughts on old Nassim? Good old Nassim. Yeah, I feel like we haven't done it justice because he's produced so much in terms of his books and his ideas and hot takes and good takes and bad takes and all the rest. So he's done so much and I feel like we've only covered

a very small percentage of it in this episode. But that's okay. That's our modus operandum. I mean, I think it too about a lot of the people that we cover. But I will say when I've watched like a couple other clips with Taleb after watching this one and kind of breaking it down, I noticed a lot of the same things cropping up. So he definitely does have other things that he can talk about. And I think he is not someone that should just be dismissed out of hand. But I do think that a lot of the things that we highlight here infect all of his other output.

As I said before, he's got these two modes. He's got quite an interesting, considered good take mode. And then he's got the really broad, hyperbolic, very bold and also abusive sort of style. And it's often when he's relating stuff back to gut feelings and intuitions and traditions and things, which I can appreciate people find appealing. So I could very much understand why he writes very popular books, because he does combine those things quite well. There's a substrate of accurate observations. For instance, the stock market doesn't behave nicely in a nice normal distribution of changes. But those bits sometimes are in danger of falling into the category of truisms and be pretty much standard stuff that

everyone knows. And then he lays on top of that some hyperbole and hot takery and when you combine the two then i can see you've got the makings of an excellent book so yeah i i think um if we'd reviewed a different interview for instance the one that we actually posted and told people we're going to cover i really wouldn't have anything to criticize him for because he was very measured and considered in that and made a bunch of very good takes but in this particular episode he's in hot take mode and it's uh it's very guru like so it'll be it'll be interesting to do the um gurometer with Taleb. Yeah, and I'll just add to that his tendency to be belligerent and insulting of people

and to talk about his weightlifting practices and so on. I think that is a significant part of his appeal and probably why he's more of a guru than other people who might also have economic, like their own hot takes on economics and statistics. His colorful personality is a big part of why he appeals and his tendency to get down and dirty with people on Twitter is a significant part of his appeal. And I think

it's actually to his detriment because that intends to inculcate amongst his followers, the ones that like that, you know, a kind of hero worship aspect of him. Whereas when he is being more reasonable and less insulting, he can be making anadine points but he thinks that are often worth talking about so part of it is just your preference for the type of character whatever but i think when he doesn't lean into the hyperbolic shit and when he isn't presenting himself as the smartest man in the room which he which almost constantly is, he comes across much better. And yeah, it's just a shame because I think those characteristics are fundamental to who he is. I think they are fundamental and as well as being appealing to the kind of person that's

attracted to that masculine, no-nonsense, muscular approach. It's also very convenient because he never is forced to deal with any criticism because he can't just uh call you an idiot and tell you to piss off that's quite convenient when you for all of his good points there are gaping holes in some of his more popular ideas so it is kind of convenient that you're able to um adopt that personality in order to avoid um any criticism so i think it's fair to say overall we have maybe um more mixed uh perspective on talib than some of the gurus that we've had very negative reactions to you know he didn't leave the bad taste in the mouth that like scott adams or jpc or even you know douglas murray to a certain extent did so uh i thank him for that good stuff

all right so that's enough of that big giant idiot i don't think he's okay that just you know just wanted to do that yeah he calls everyone else idiots so somebody somewhere should be calling him an idiot yeah okay so earlier matt you mentioned the garometer and given we've scored the other gurus on the patreon and we know that going through the 10 criteria takes some time you know we're usually very people, but it's just the nature of the garometer that makes it long winded. So what we're thinking of doing moving forward is on the Patreon, after the episodes release, we'll do a little breakdown of the scores for the garometer that we'll post up there, a relatively short video scoring them. And then once we have a collection of gurus, like we have now

10 of them, we'll do special episodes to discuss who's the champion in each of the categories that we have. So now that we have 10 gurus, you can look forward to that special episode coming soon in the future. But if you want to hear the nitty gritty of scoring Taleb, you can join the Patreon. And our next guru is... Ibrahim X. Kendi. What do you think of that, Chris? Yeah, well, this is something that people have been bothering us to do online. And I think we're due a kind of lefty guru type we haven't walked down that road

in a while so it'll be interesting to see how far uh he confirms to the stereotypical guru model or does not yeah it will be interesting i think he's um he's he's transitioned towards the the popular writing and and um achieved a level of fame, I suppose. And also a little bit of controversy, I suppose, is fair to say as well. So yeah, we'll see. I know very little about him, but we will look into it. I know he annoys people online and is prone to potential hot kicks. That's about the extent of my familiarity as well. And actually, when I looked up, you know, on YouTube before,

it doesn't really have that much talks and stuff available, but well, we'll find something out and have a look. So look forward to that. And we'll be burnishing our, our furnishing is the word, our credentials as not just an anti-IDidw podcast that's just our side gig okay absolutely well yeah we'll we'll see um watch out ibrahim we're coming for you you're gonna get yeah you're gonna get critiqued we're joining the quillettosphere now the final thing, Matt, is that we should give our shout outs to our lovely Patreons, who we have been inundating with long winded rants about gurus.

So we really should be apologizing to them. But yes. So first up is Jess Ables, who is a conspiracy hypothesizer. Every great idea starts with a minority of one. We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Excellent. Thank you very much,

Jess. Good to have you aboard. Yes, I should not have cut you off there. I just got ah instead. I see that Jess and I are mutuals on Twitter which is always that's always me too i believe um and next is andrej who is a revolutionary genius maybe you can spit out that hydrogenated thinking and let yourself feed off of your own thinking. What you really are is an unbelievable thinker and researcher, a thinker that the world doesn't know.

Yes. Very good. Thank you, Andres. The next, the name on this one is can't share name due to woke corporate culture. But they didn't request another shout out. So I think they deserve it because they are a galaxy breathing guru and dealing with woke corporate culture as well. So here we go. You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard. And you're so polite. And hey, minute am i an expert i kind of am

yeah i don't trust people at all oh so they got the special treatment with the chuckle and also though i'm kind of wondering like would being a patron for us make you anti-woke? Yeah. I was suspecting that could be ironic, but I'm not sure. I get irony. I understand, Matt. That's fine. No, no, I'm not saying it's not obviously ironic. I'm just suspecting it. It's obviously ironic.

I'm not sure. I got it, Matt, okay? We don't need to talk about it. I didn't miss anything. Okay. Next on the list and last for this week is Daniel Thompson, who is a conspiracy hypothesizer because of course he is. Every great idea starts with a minority of one.

We are not going to advance conspiracy theories. We will advance conspiracy hypotheses. Yes. And I mentioned to you, oh, sorry. And thank you, Daniel. By the way, sorry. I was about to launch into something else,

but thank you to Daniel and to everyone else that contributes to the Patreon. It is very helpful. And I wanted to say that I'm thinking, Matt, I might make little bumpers for each episode like new ones just clipping from the guru for that week we'll see how much work that involves but yeah just to mix things up just to get rid of the Scott Adams chuckle once in a while um and who knows I might bring it back on special occasions. The one thing, the one clip I really want in there is the,

let's fucking do it. Yeah, yeah. The Eric Weinstein special. Yes. Well, Matt, that's it for this week. Another job well done. Yeah, I feel you acquitted yourself well. It's been a delight and a pleasure, Chris.

Thank you so much. I can't even do the full polite thing so yeah thanks matt okay over and out and uh you can follow us on twitter at gurus pod for the show account or at r4cdent for Matt and I'm at c underscore Kavna or send us an email at decodingthegurus at gmail.com. Any reviews on iTunes or other podcasting software is greatly appreciated and yeah thank you all for listening. And I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.