Transcription
There's a single definition of success: Look at yourself in a mirror in the evening and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18. Right before people get corrupted by life, let him or her be the only judge; not your reputation, not your wealth, not your standing in a community, not the decorations on your CV. If you do not feel ashamed, then you are successful. All other definitions of success are modern constructions, fragile modern constructions. The ancient Greeks' definition of success was to have had a heroic death. But as we live in a less martial society, we can adapt our definition of success as having taken a heroic route for the benefits of the collective, as narrowly or broadly defined as you want, so long as it's for someone else. For example, secret societies have the rule of *wo donori*: You're as good as what you do to other members. So virtue is inseparable from courage; so we had to take some risks—personal, financial, whatever—for the sake of others. That's success; that's honor. It can be helping the local municipality, for example—I'm giving a hint here—or the more micro, the less abstract, the better.
So success requires absence of fragility. I've seen billionaires terrified of journalists; wealthy people who felt crushed because their brother-in-law got very rich; academics with Nobel prizes who were scared of comments on the web. The higher you go, the worse the fall. For almost all people I have met, external, not internal, success came with an increase in fragility and a heightened state of insecurity. The worst are those former-something types with four-page CVs who, after leaving office and addicted to the attention of servile bureaucrats, find themselves discarded. It's as if you went home one evening to discover that someone suddenly emptied your house of all its furniture.
Self-respect, on the other hand, is robust. That's the approach of the Stoic school. So I've seen robust people in my village, immune to such things, who were proud of being, you know, local citizens, you know, liked by the community. They wake up happy and go to bed happy. Or Russian mathematicians who, during the difficult post-Soviet period, were proud of making $200 a month and did work that was appreciated by 20 people and considered that showing one's decorations or accepting awards was a sign of weakness and lack of confidence in one's own contribution. And believe it or not, some wealthy people are robust, but you just don't hear about them because they're not socialized. They live next door, and they drink bad wine, not very good wine. They do not read newspapers; they do not follow the news in any way or form. To be convinced, go to the library and try to read last year's newspaper. Okay, and that will convince you.
Second thing: If something is nonsense, you say it, and you say it out loud. You'll be harmed a little bit, but be antifragile in the long run. People who need to trust you will trust you. When I was still an obscure author, I walked out of a studio—um, Bloomberg Radio—because the interviewers were saying nonsense. So I just walked out. People told me, "You'll never have any coverage by Bloomberg ever again." I said, "Okay." Two years later, they had a cover story on me. Okay, so if you see nonsense, say it, and say it loud. Treat the doorman with a lot of respect, okay, more than if you were the boss. The boss can go down; not the doorman. If something is boring, avoid it, except, of course, taxes and visits to your mother-in-law. Okay, other than these, avoid everything boring.
Now, what was the idea of Hammurabi's Code? It was not "an eye for an eye," limiting damages, you know, and making things balanced. No, it was that you cannot walk away from risks you've created for others; you should own your risks. That's the idea of Hammurabi's Code. You cannot have a civilized society unless those who create risks are also bearers of risk. But let's first look at it from a moral standpoint, okay? You've heard of the Golden Rule: Do unto others what you want them to do to you, which I, in fact, find a little intrusive because, say, I like raw Lebanese meat—Lebanese *kibbeh*—I'm not going to force you to eat it, all right? So there's actually—and say I'm a bureaucrat and I like this kind of stuff—I'm not going to force you. There is a much more robust Silver Rule: Don't do to others what you don't want them to do to you. And, and, and effectively, you can't have civilization without the Silver Rule.
People ask me, uh, uh, "What should I be doing? Okay, I'm 20, and, uh, you know…" Go somewhere, start a business, take risks now, because everybody wants to work for NGOs to improve the world, and you end up like the UN offices, manufacturing problems, so you hire more staff who fly business class and have an apartment in Geneva, that kind of stuff. Start a business because we're tired of people who want to work for NGOs. Okay, start a business, create jobs for others, okay, and do not rent-seek; do not be in rent-seeking. I have some skin in the game, just like, you know, your, your, uh, grandparents, probably your grand—one of your grandfathers—was at age 18 disembarking in Normandy. They took a lot of risks, these kids, 18-year-olds. Okay, take some risks, starting a business. Thanks, because of you, I started, uh, doing deadlifting; that has been great. Skin in the game, yeah. So skin in the game. Let me tell you something about deadlifting. I was—no, I was—I have this motto, "skin in the game," that you should never tell people what they should be doing; you should tell them what you're doing. Okay, and I had a back injury when I was writing *Antifragile* about seven years ago, and I cured it by, by deadlifting. So, and then I start discovering the value of intense heavyweight on, on humans, like the bone stuff, like that. And the reason I talk about my own deadlifting is only to say that I have skin in the game. I'm telling you, I have the injuries of a deadlifter. I'm telling you, so I bear the risk of my advice.
I always like Nassim Taleb's framing on this, where he said, "With my family, I'm a communist; with my close friends, I'm a socialist; uh, you know, at my state-level politics, I'm a Democrat; at, you know, higher levels, I'm a, I'm a Republican; and at the federal level, I'm a Libertarian," right? So basically, the larger the group of people you have massed together who have different interests, the less trust there is, the more—in there is—the better the incentives have to be aligned, the better the system has to work. The more you go towards capitalism, the smaller the group you're in. You're in a kibbutz; you're in your commune; you're in your house; you're in your tribe. By all means, be a socialist with my aunts, with my brother, with my cousins, with my uncles, with my mom, with my family. I'm a socialist. That's the right way to live a loving, happy, integrated life. Yes, but when you're dealing with strangers, I mean, you want to be a real socialist? Great. Open all your doors and windows tomorrow; please everybody come take what you want; see how that works out.
And there are a lot of rules in my book, so I'm going to end up with no NGOs. The things to avoid completely: muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without risk, change without aesthetics, age without values, food without nourishment, power without fairness, facts without rigor, degrees without edition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, complication without depth, fluency without content, and most of all, religion without tolerance. Thank you.