I know why Taleb is being ignored by oligarchs

TALEB’S BLACK SWAN WAS A BLACK SWAN
ITSELF,  AND PROPHETIC, 3 MONTHS BEFORE
THE CRISIS.
Perhaps stockbrokers picked up his book and then
crapped themselves, thinking "it could happen any day",
like Chicken Little.
It's the equivalent of that butterfly in the Amazon that impudently
flapped its wings, causing a tsunami in London. 

Now Taleb is big in big circles. Polticians. Bankers. 
NOW PEOPLE WANT TO SUCK HIS ZEITGEIST,
THINKING IT WILL MAKE THEM BETTER or
AT LEAST GIVE THEM STH to TALK ABOUT OVER CANAPES.

But, they won't take his advice. David Cameron talks to him.
In fact, Cameron has had Taleb as a guru since 2009.
Now papers and CNBC and assorted other lazy journalists
are choosing what of Taleb's to believe and publicise.

So, we get "Taleb thinks Europe should become more like
Switzerland". Ya, more guns and more aggressive banker
mafia stifling dissent. I'm beginning to think that Hitler should
have ransacked Switzerland and forgotten about France.

Anyway, two things: David Cameron, and then the oligarchy

David Cameron, as a well-"educated" Oxford grad knows
how to behave towards a guru. He figured out quickly how
to ingratiate himself to Taleb, so Taleb now "likes" Just Dave.
He's blowing smoke up your ass, Nassim.
He's using you for everything you can give him. And because
you want to be heard and followed, he gives you the
impression that he's following you. Of course, he isn't.
The banks? What about them? Dave's never gonna
squash the banks. Did you hear Osborne, yesterday?

anti-fragile. 

their asses are fragile. 

Poke them, or their

asses, and they fart.

NOW, as for the oligarchs, like the ones who invite Taleb
to speak, and he "kicks their asses and then gets paid,"
and  yet they don't follow his ideas. Why?

Because of the black swan line of bull, Taleb's like
the lion that can bite your head off. To show that you're
brave, you rattle the lion's cage or make faces at it,
from a safe distance. No matter what Taleb says,
the banks keep going. So, actually they're mocking
Taleb. He's a trained circus lion with no fangs.

Secondly, and this is risky, they believe they've figured
out his logic, even if he didn't actually say it. Taleb says
that modernity is too complex, so black swans happen.
ok. What have central bankers been doing since 2008?
Every time they've found something that could cause
liquidity to stall, they've thrown money at it. Right?
Well, that's because they think they can check all
the variables, therefore, there will be no black swans.
I suppose they'll be proven wrong, but so far, they're
right. The parade is still going forward, on three wheels,
but forward.
It has required fascistic central planning, with dictats
from Washington. The Bernank and Geithner have
been orchestrating reverse-socialism and it appears
that nothing can stop them.
So, pre-2008, the only problem was that everybody
was too naive. Now they've got a stranglehold on the
economy. They decide who lives or dies.
That's they don't listen to Taleb. That, and the fact
that they all want their fat bonuses and bribes, so
they never , EeeeeVER considered choking the banks.

Here's the Observer article, with notes by me:

Checkit: Observer

Nassim Taleb: my rules for life

The controversial thinker who predicted the 2008 financial crisis hates bankers, academics and journalists. He's also a man of mystery – he eats like a caveman, and goes to bed at 8pm. We took the risk of meeting him

       Carole Cadwalladr

        Saturday 24 November 2012 12.30 GMT

How much does Nassim Taleb dislike journalists? Let me count the ways. "An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite." "This business of journalism is about pure entertainment, not the search for the truth." "Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say." He disliked them before, but after he predicted the financial crash in his 2007 book, The Black Swan, a book that became a global bestseller, his antipathy reached new heights. He has dozens and dozens of quotes on the subject, and if that's too obtuse for us non-erudites, his online home page puts it even plainer: "I beg journalists and members of the media to leave me alone."

    Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Don't Understand

    by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

He's not wildly keen on appointments either. In his new book, Antifragile, he writes that he never makes them because a date in the calendar "makes me feel like a prisoner".

So imagine, if you will, how keenly he must be looking forward to the prospect of a pre-arranged appointment to meet me, a journalist. I approach our lunch meeting, at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University where he's the "distinguished professor of risk engineering", as one might approach a sleeping bear: gingerly. And with a certain degree of fear. And yet there he is, striding into the faculty lobby in a jacket and Steve Jobs turtleneck ("I want you to write down that I started wearing them before he did. I want that to be known."), smiling and effusive.

...In print, the hating and despising is there for all to see: he's forever having spats and fights. When he's not slagging off the Nobel prize for economics (a "fraud"), [Amen- Costick67] bankers ("I have a physical allergy to them") and the academic establishment (he has it in for something he calls the "Soviet-Harvard illusion"), he's trading blows with Steven Pinker ("clueless")[Full marks- Costick67], and a random reviewer on Amazon, who he took to his Twitter stream to berate. And this is just in the last week.

And yet here he is, chatting away, surprisingly friendly and approachable. When I say as much as we walk to the restaurant, he asks, "What do you mean?"

"In your book, you're quite…" and I struggle to find the right word, "grumpy".

He shrugs. "When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters."

.... and a plate of "pasta without pasta" (though strictly speaking you could call it "mixed vegetables and chicken"), and attacks the bread basket "because it doesn't have any calories here in Brooklyn".

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 [OF HISTORY. no, he's not stashing 1000-year-old wine- Costick67] 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[Monsanto. full marks- Costick67]. 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."[LIMO DRIVERS HAVEN’T BEEN IN A WAR- Costick67]

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 [THE BOOK WAS THE BLACK SWAN. ONE FISH WHO SWAM AGAINST THE CURRENT- Costick67]. Overnight, he went from lone-voice-in-the-wilderness, spouting off-the-wall theories, to the great seer of the modern age.[STRANGE HOW SAYING THE OBVIOUS TO THE OBLIVIOUS OCCASIONALLY MAKES YOU FAMOUS- Costick67]

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 [and everything in his knicker drawer- Costick67].

"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". So, what's changed, I asked, since he wrote the book, and the system collapsed?

"Nothing. Nothing has changed. Zero. Now I switch to writing technical papers. There is some hope, the Bank of England wants to implement antifragility.[THEY’RE PULLING HIS DICK- Costick67] Mervyn King [the governor of the Bank of England] spoke about it at the LSE. And I've done work for the IMF…"

But nothing's changed?

"I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I've no idea what's going on. I'm disconnected. I'm totally disengaged. People read 3m copies of The Black Swan. The bulk of them before the crisis. And people love it. They agree with it. They invite me to dinner. And they don't do anything about it.[THEY’RE JUST INTO SUCKING THE ZEITGEIST, and they are listening, or so they think. They took his idea that modernity is too complex and cannot be controlled. Now they’re trying to control everything. That’s why they’ve become ever more fascistic. Ever more central planning- Costick67]

"You have to pull back and let the system destroy itself, and then come back. That's Seneca's recommendation. He's the one who says that the sage should let the republic destroy itself."

But doesn't that frustrate you? [awesome question to ask a big ego. Oscar! & Pulitzer. Next thing you'll ask him if his farts change the trade winds- Costick67]

"It did. Now it doesn't. But if you continue talking about it I will get frustrated so let's switch."

He means it too. There's a bit of an edge to the statement, so I ask him about David Cameron instead and he immediately relaxes. "He's a great guy," he says. There's some sort of mutual appreciation which goes on between the modern Conservative party and Taleb. He name-checks Steve Hilton (Cameron's former head of strategy) and Rohan Silva (one of his special advisers) and says they're "buddies".

"We had lunch once and realised we were talking the same language and it went from there. I never mention it in anything."

Well, actually, I say, you mention it in the book.

Fraser Nelson, the editor of the Spectator, says that Taleb "is probably the closest thing Cameron has to a guru". Why does Taleb think that is?

"Because they care about risk. Labour don't care." [THEY’RE LYING TO TALEB, & SUCKING UP TO HIM- Costick67]

...The "arguments" are that size, in Taleb's view, matters. Bigger means more complex, means more prone to failure [ESP. SINCE EVEN BIG COMPANIES ARE HAVING TROUBLE GETTING A LOAN. GOTTA HAVE SOMEONE ON THE INSIDE- Costick67]. Or, as he puts it, "fragile". It's what made – still makes – the banking system so vulnerable, in his view. It needs to be more "antifragile". This isn't the same as robust, he explains, which means it can simply take the knocks. "Antifragile" is when something is actually strengthened by the knocks.

He gives all sorts of examples of this in the book. A clerk in a large company is fragile as he has only one source of income. A taxi driver is antifragile. A banker is fragile. A prostitute is antifragile. General Petraeus is fragile: a single indiscretion was enough to destroy his career. Boris Johnson is antifragile: a whole string of scandals has actually enhanced his reputation. "He's smart enough to present himself as sort of 'This is how I am'," says Taleb. London, too, seems to be antifragile. The global financial crisis was just another boost: a safe haven for foreign real-estate cash.

In Taleb's view, small is beautiful. Corporate mergers never work. "It's not a good idea being large during difficult times." And, when companies think otherwise, it's the "hubris hypothesis". After reading this section of the book I flick to the cover to check who printed it: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin. Which has recently merged with Random House to create one big mega-publishing company.

"Your publishers haven't actually read your book, have they?" I say. "If they're smart enough they can keep the companies separate," he says, not very convincingly. And anyway, there's really no evidence that they are smart enough.

In The Black Swan, one of Taleb's great examples of "non-linearity", or Black Swan behaviour, was blockbusters. There's no predicting what will be the next breakout success, or next year's 50 Shades of Grey, but when they take off, they fly off the charts, as The Black Swan did. The book itself was a Black Swan phenomenon. As Taleb is fond of pointing out – and as the small print beneath advertisements for mutual funds states – past performance is no indicator of future growth. Penguin seemed to have overlooked this point too since they paid him an astonishing $4m advance for this book.

"They made a lot of money from Black Swan so to them it's not too bad a risk," he says, but I feel it's more a guest's politeness towards their host than anything else. Anyway, the money was not, he says, "a major part of my income at the time". In 1987 he made a great deal of money shorting the financial crash, and millions more during the 2008 meltdown. It's his "fuck you" money that allows him to do exactly what he wants, when he wants, beholden to no one.

... Taleb doesn't actually seem to be one of them. Most people, however wealthy, like to be paid for doing their job. But not Taleb. He doesn't actually take a salary from NYU. "Well, I keep the minimum. I give back the rest. So if, tomorrow morning, they say 'fuck you', I'm gone."

Then again this may be because as well as hating journalists and bankers, he's almost as damning about academics.

"But you are one!" I point out.

"Not really. I'm an independent scholar, practically speaking."

He's also largely an autodidact. He has higher degrees but most of his working life was spent outside academia, and much of his thinking is rooted not in 21st-century mathematics but the classics. He quotes them endlessly, hero-worships Seneca and refers to himself as a "stoic".[THAT’S HOW Classically-trained CAMERON GRABS HIM BY THE NOSE- Costick67]

Not everyone, it has to be said, is a fan of the high style. Jamie Whyte in Standpoint magazine reflects the criticism of many when he accuses Taleb of "inflating" the significance of his observations with "an absurdly combative and grandiose writing style", and points out that publishing a book of aphorisms, as Taleb did last year, is "usually completed by someone else after one's death".

But Taleb is not someone who lacks confidence. He was born and brought up in Lebanon, his family rich and influential Greek Orthodox believers, a minority religion even in a country of minority religions. His grandfather and great-grandfather were deputy prime ministers, and his great-great-great-great grandfather was the governor of Ottoman Mount Lebanon.

In Antifragile he tells a story about his father, a doctor, a scholar and man with "a large ego and immense dignity who commanded respect". At some point during the civil war, he stopped at a checkpoint where a militiaman treated him disrespectfully. "My father refused to comply and the gunman shot him in the back."

It's a pretty astonishing story, and when I ask Taleb about it, he says: "I have very similar stories, too, but I chose not to tell them." What do you mean? He prevaricates and then talks about "personal stories about taking a stand but I don't want to wander into near-eastern politics".

....It's too neat a formulation to ascribe Taleb's Lebanese upbringing and his war-scarred teenage years as the source for his theories on randomness and instability. Malcolm Gladwell profiled him in the New Yorker more than a decade ago, and attributed his belief in Black Swans to having experienced them (not just in the Lebanese war but also in a bout of non-smoking-related throat cancer).

But Taleb shakes his head. "That article was wrong about me," he says. "That's why you think I'm gloomy."

...When the financial journalist Michael Lewis profiled a collection of individuals who, like Taleb, saw the crash coming and shorted the market, he described them as "social misfits". It takes a certain sort of personality to stand apart from the herd. And Taleb's cantankerousness, his propensity for picking fights, and for taking stands does also seem to be the source of his greatest triumphs. It was horrible, though, he says.

"Really horrible. Between 2004 and 2008 were the worst years of my life. Everybody thought I was an idiot. And I knew that. But at the same time I couldn't change my mind to fit in. So you have this dilemma: my behaviour isn't impacted by what people think of me, but I have the pain of it.

"People made fun of me. I don't know if you can still find it on the web but you would not believe how much crap was written about me. The finance industry hates me with a passion."

You must have felt incredibly vindicated?

"Vindication doesn't pay back. Nobody likes you because you were right. This is why I'm glad I made the shekels."

Anyway, Taleb is a fighter. And like the Roman generals, he believes in going into battle, leading from the front. It's why he thinks Tony Blair is a coward and a knave: "He's a very dishonourable fellow [historically-important corruption- Costick67]. Gordon Brown is an idiot [Goal!- Costick67]. But Blair was dishonourable." He believes that people should be banned from making money from having been in public office. And he especially despises journalists who made the case for war on Iraq, like the New York Times's Thomas Friedman, "a serial criminal" who he says makes him feel physically sick.

It's back to his "skin in the game" beliefs. If you're going to make the case for war, you need to have at least one direct descendant who stands to lose his life from the decision[NOT THE PARADE OF ROYALS IN GRAND OCCUPATIONS. WILLY HAS HANDLERS BOTH WITH AND BACK HOME. MORE STRATEGY FOR HIS PLACEMENT THAN MOST OF THE WARS HE FINDS HIMSELF IN. NOTE THE SHOCK WHEN A BOMB WAS THROWN OVER THE WALL AT THE CAMP IN AFGHANISTAN, SOME DOZENS OF METRES FROM HARRY- Costick67]. And while some may wonder why they need a lecture on ethics from an ex-city trader, it's hard to argue with. Though it's easy enough to argue about more or less anything else. He won't confirm or deny the existence of a Mrs Taleb. And he has a son and daughter "who are exactly like me" – but that's all he'll say about them. "I'm a private intellectual, not a public one."

But you write about parenting at one point, I say. And you've written a book about how to live.

"Exactly. Here's how to live: keep your public life separate from your private life."

He makes me order tiramisu and then eats half of it, but then no food has passed his lips for about 17 hours, he says. Incorporating randomness into his life has led him to adopt the style of eating known as "paleo". Roughly speaking, this means that if a caveman wouldn't have eaten it, then you don't. Except tiramisu. And intermittent fasting is recommended as a way of mimicking the effects of, say, failing to catch a sabre-toothed tiger.

...But isn't it hypocritical to be so anti-artsy fartsy when you are artsy fartsy?

"I'm not. I'm mathematical not artsy."

"But you go on about your private library. You say you spend at least 30 hours a week reading. You love the classics."

"Yes, but it doesn't mean I'm artsy. I don't hang around with artsy people. I have zero literary friends."

I wouldn't want to get into a Twitter catfight with Nassim Taleb. Or be a banker in the audience when he gives one of his talks. "They pay me tens of thousands of dollars to come and rip them apart."[THAT’S BANKERS’ FEAR THERAPY. LION’S MOUTH, IF GOVERNMENTS LISTENED TO TALEB. BANKERS REALISE IT’S JUST WORDS AND THEY’RE STILL STANDING.-Costick67]