Number of words: 739

But then, having read his latest book, I actually know an awful lot about his diet. How he doesn’t eat sugar, any fruits which “don’t have a Greek or Hebrew name” or any liquid which is less than 1,000 years old. Just as I know that he doesn’t like air-conditioning, soccer moms, sunscreen and copy editors. That he believes the “non-natural” has to prove its harmlessness. That America tranquillises its children with drugs and pathologises sadness. That he values honour above all things, banging on about it so much that at times he comes across as a medieval knight who’s got lost somewhere in the space-time continuum. And that several times a week he goes and lifts weights in a basement gym with a bunch of doormen.

He says that after the financial crisis he received “all manner of threats” and at one time was advised to “stock up on bodyguards”. Instead, “I found it more appealing to look like one”. Now, he writes, when he’s harassed by limo drivers in the arrival hall at JFK, “I calmly tell them to fuck off.”

Taleb started out as a trader, worked as a quantitative analyst and ran his own investment firm, but the more he studied statistics, the more he became convinced that the entire financial system was a keg of dynamite that was ready to blow. In The Black Swan he argued that modernity is too complex to understand, and “Black Swan” events – hitherto unknown and unpredicted shocks – will always occur. What’s more, because of the complexity of the system, if one bank went down, they all would. The book sold 3m copies. And months later, of course, this was more or less exactly what happened. Overnight, he went from lone-voice-in-the-wilderness, spouting off-the-wall theories, to the great seer of the modern age.

Antifragile, the follow-up, is his most important work so far, he says. It takes the central idea of The Black Swan and expands it to encompass almost every other aspect of life, from the 19th century rise of the nation state to what to eat for breakfast (fresh air, as a general rule). As you might suspect, it’s a great, baggy, idiosyncratic doorstopper of a book. Reading it, I spend the first 200 pages or so mildly confused. “I couldn’t figure out what genre it was,” I tell him. “Forget the genre!” he says. I’d been expecting a popular science-style read, a Freakonomics or a Nudge. And then I realised it’s actually a philosophical treatise.

“Exactly!” says Taleb. Once you get over the idea that you’re reading some sort of popular economics book and realise that it’s basically Nassim Taleb’s Rules for Life, it’s actually rather enjoyable. Highly eccentric, it’s true, but very readable and something like a chivalric code d’honneur for the 21st century. Modern life is akin to a chronic stress injury, he says. And the way to combat it is to embrace randomness in all its forms: live true to your principles, don’t sell your soul and watch out for the carbohydrates.

What’s more, for all the barmy passages involving an invented character called Fat Tony engaging in a Socratic dialogue with another invented character called Nero Tulip (a very thinly disguised Taleb), and the fact that at one point he does actually seem to compare himself to Jesus – they’re both prophets who came from the east – he does talk a lot of what I can only describe as sense.

His justification for all this is that “experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies”. More than anything else, he believes in having “skin in the game”. When, for example, he warned about the fragility of the banking system in The Black Swan, “I was betting on its collapse”. His point is that he’s always put his money where his mouth is, and it’s this principle – and the lack of it – that is still, he believes, the fundamental problem with the entire banking system.

In the book he calls this “Hammurabi’s Code”, a 3,800-year-old Babylonian law that stipulated that if a building collapses and kills someone, the builder should be put to death. Whereas, for bankers, “there is no downside”. The bonus system means that “they’re paid billions in compensation”. And if their bets lose, it’s the taxpayers who pay. He cites, not unadmiringly, the tradition in Catalonia where they would “behead bankers in front of their banks”.

Excerpted from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/nov/24/nassim-taleb-antifragile-finance-interview