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Lord can only be a lord if he takes risks on behalf of others because you are trading status for risk taking. You know you don't mind if someone who takes more risk has a higher rank in society, but you mind if someone who's, you know, doesn't take risk. And it's the same thing in economic life. People don't mind it if [snorts] a trader makes a lot of money, or someone makes a lot of money, an entrepreneur makes a lot of money. Steve Jobs gets billionaire. No, nobody's bothered that a chairperson of the company who basically doesn't have any downside risk and has a free option makes more than X number >> what the truck driver of the company makes. That upsets people >> right. So people detect it.
But then I think states are the ones also we have to worry about, okay? Because states have this, they're run by bureaucrats who don't pay for what happens when you raise debt. Skin in the game. And sure enough, uh, the population have to pay the price. And, uh, it's getting, it's getting bad out there.
And at the end of Antifragile, Antifragile is mostly about convexity, a lot to do with hormesis, how systems respond, but also about being long volatility. When you're long volatility, you have more upside than downside. Okay? I own an option. If you sell me an option, I'd be long volatility, but you'll be short volatility. So, there are a lot of transfers of that option between individuals. And typically, you have someone ripping off the system. Like, for example, bankers have the upside, and you know, they transfer the downside to others. Okay.
So in Antifragile, of course, the last chapter was Skin in the Game, about that idea that you should, you should have a symmetry between risk-takers and risk um receivers. Okay? That you should, people, some people own their own risk, some people transfer risk to others, and some people, the saints, take risks away from others. So that was the idea of Antifragile. But I noticed that some people couldn't, couldn't go through Antifragile, too complicated for them. Hit on that point and loved it, and they thought Antifragile was about that last chapter about risk transfer. So I started writing. And, you know, if you have no schedule, you don't have a publisher, you don't take advantage from a publisher, you don't, you just write a book, and when you're done, you're done. So this one came naturally as a footnote, as from the ribs of Antifragile. Okay. And about symmetry.
And then, but, but in the process of writing it, I started, I discovered a few things. For example, why was Donald Trump elected? >> Why Trump? >> No. No. The first, the things that actually I, I wrote down is why was he, why did he, uh, why did he get the nomination? So I was, you know, I watched CNBC with the sound off. Okay. So typically, and, and I was watching, and then I saw the scene um with Donald Trump debating 12 people or whatever. It was the sound, it was off. Not that it makes any difference, but still very important symbolically. I looked at it, I said, this guy's going to make it. I didn't know. >> When was that? Was that early in the campaign? >> It was during the nomination thing. And, and then I was wondering, so I started, I don't know why it hit me that this guy's going to make it. >> And I started telling everyone the door, everyone, you know, the Uber driver, so, so kind of thing, you know, so excited. It's like, piece of information. Why be? Then I realized because he was alive, and the others were sort of like dead and wondering. Why it turned out that there was a smear campaign against him in the New York Times. >> That he lost a billion dollars. But losing a billion dollars is makes you real. You see, have skin in the game. You, you're not, you know, playing with numbers, not some bureaucrat. [snorts] So losing a million dollars, particularly if it's your own money, makes you, you know, sort of like, you know, real person.
So I went into history and looked at a lot of things like with, you know, how people uh trumpeted the risk takingaking in [clears throat] society. How Roman emperors, for example, two-thirds of Roman emperors died, and how people did not give any respect to non-risk-takers, whether economic risk-takers or physical risk-takers. Two-thirds of Roman emperors, I said, died in battle, but largely, I mean, died by the battle, by the violent deaths. The rest, maybe poison, but largely, uh, that that violent thing was was a badge of honor. Like people, uh, you know, showing their scar, and it was, you know. >> So you need to have leaders who look as if they've actually taken risks in order to earn >> to earn the status. >> So status came with risk takingaking. >> To earn the respect of the people they lead. >> Exactly. So I, I had a feeling, I said, maybe he's not, he's a fake risk faker, but he faked it very well. >> Because, and, and all these attacks by the New York Times built him. And sure enough, I mean, that's, you know, we, we know the rest of the story. So, so that's, and, and that was, I didn't put it, you know, uh, I didn't add it as a footnote, you know, belated footnote to Antifragile, but I had the feeling that that's what what people want.
Lord can only be a lord if he takes risks on behalf of others because you are trading status for risk taking. Which is why during the Falcon Wars, they forced one of those princes to take more risk, which say, hey, what's the point of being a lord? Okay? And I suspect the French Revolution happened because you had a um, a cast of people who were lords and noble, uh, noble men without risk taking. And it doesn't work. Plus, uh, Louis the 14th created a new class of people, no bless people who were, uh, you know, magistrates who became, uh, something. Didn't work. I mean, you know, you don't mind if someone who takes more risk has a higher rank in society, but you mind if someone who's, you know, doesn't take risk. And it's the same thing in economic life. People don't mind that if a trader makes a lot of money, or someone makes a lot of money, an entrepreneur makes a lot of money, Steve Jobs gets billionaire. No, nobody's bothered that a chairperson of the company who basically doesn't have any downside risk and has a free option makes more than X number >> what the driver of the company makes. That upsets people >> right. So people detect it.
And but I think states are the ones also we have to worry about, okay? Because states have this, they're run by bureaucrats who don't pay for what happens when you raise debt. There's no skin in the game. And, and sure enough, the population have to pay the price. And, uh, it's getting, it's getting bad out there. Okay, with some states, without mentioning which state in particular. Scan again, it's mostly about reducing negative optionality. Like, for example, you're CEO of a company, they say, well, you know, uh, but look, you transfer your risk to the pension fund, to the share, to, to you transfer it to shareholders, and eventually to taxpayers, for example. Or if you, uh, or the big, the big, the vetir in here to me, the really person I focused on is the, uh, think tank person or bureaucrat as Washington causing wars. Okay. And, and of course, not being accountable for it. Was in the past, uh, Roman emperors, of course, were at the front of battle. And not just Roman emperors, Hannibal, Napoleon. They were, they were, they were in battle. Napoleon maybe less, but, but you take, uh, Hannibal, traditionally, the person wages, all the Byzantine emperors, her first in battle. I mean, for them, it's, they have to be more exposed than others, otherwise they're not. So, and now we have the reverse. So the first generation in history, George Bush, the father, remember, was was a prisoner of war. Okay? Just the father. So something happened in that gener, within a generation. Okay, to, uh, remove that skin in the game. With wars now being led like computer games. So this is what I worry about morally, and of course, risk-wise.
So, so this is, uh, my bet. Mo, the, the, the, my, the person I hate the most is, let's say, someone like, what's his name? I mention his, every time I mention his name, I get, I get, I got angry. And, but it's good for weightlifting, because, uh, uh, my, my, you know, when you want to lift, deadlifting, you know, you get angry, you lift, lift better. Thomas Friedman, for me, he is to me a horror of society. He causes wars, and then he's an air conditioning office, right? So every, every time I mention his name, I get angry. Time I see, when I've seen him. So, like, for example.
>> So when you look at the current environment today in America. You know, we had a remarkable statement by Ray Dalio who said that rising income inequality is going to leave people fighting each other and creating global instability. We have a lot of concern about whether the financial system as it's currently constituted is stable or not. Are you concerned or do you not concerned, but do you expect to see America >> see a sort of big upsurge in political upheaval, political >> I think it's the other way. There is a reaction against people without skin in the game. >> Without skin in the game. >> Without skin gain, uh, running your >> So by like bureaucrats or >> Bureaucrats have this. This is the reaction. Brexit is a reaction against bureaucrats.
The most important chapter here, I mean, the least interesting chapter for me, was sort of like a parody I put on a web that had that was immediately pirated in Russia. All right. After I posted it on on a web called IYI, Intellectual Yet Idiot. It's people who are very good at school, who are good at taking exams, hired by people who are good at taking exams and populating administration. And administrations are becoming very opaque. And, uh, to give you an idea, the ministers come and go. [clears throat] In the UK, a certain minister, after reading Skin in the Game, called me up. He said, "Listen, you're unfair to me." Why? I have no control of my ministry. He said, he said, it's opaque. You know, you don't even know who owns which decision. And I'm here, you know, for maybe a year, maximum three years. Okay? These people have been here for 30 years. Okay? And it's like Kafka's castle. Nobody knows. This is what's happening in Europe. All these opaque, large administrations. Uh, Washington, okay? [snorts] The, the deep state. It's not like the deep state. It's a deep administration. So this is what people are detecting, and they, they get it. People get it. You're an anthropologist, you know, people get it. People detect, they know when they're sort of like taken for a ride. I mean, maybe not immediately, but it doesn't take long. Maybe a century is long enough for people to figure it out.
So that III, Intellectually an Idiot, was um was published before before the election, before Trump's election. I say people are rioting in India everywhere. They, they sort of don't like bureaucrats. I mean, I can understand. I mean, they, you know, bureaucrats are not more entertaining people, but, but there is a reason. It's there's a, the government controls today 10 times more as a proportion of GDP what it controlled in 1900. Like I'm saying, France, between 50 and 75%, it was below 7%. >> [clears throat] >> Okay. Sweden, you take any country. The United States less, but still much more than we did 100 years ago. So when you see that governments are controlling more, more GDP [snorts] and the agents are the bureaucrats, then you, you know, it doesn't take people, uh, uh, too long to figure out. Okay. And then also they, they, they, they see that it's the same bureaucrat also running large corporations, S&P 500 corporation. And they're like what they call the empty suit. So that piece, page and a half or maybe two pages, IYI, the IYI >> the Intellectual Yet Idiot chapter, what it's called, that went >> Any of you, the book is page 123 >> Yeah, that spread a lot. You can find it if you Google it on the web. You can even find it in >> And you said earlier that that chapter when you posted it online had, was it how many downloads in Russian? >> It has, and posted >> It immediately translated into Russian. >> It translated now into so many pagas languages. At at some point, the Huffington Post posted it in Greek in, uh, Greece. So I wrote to, I wrote at the bottom, anybody can copy it and publish it, except the Huffington Post. >> I mean, one of the most >> So at the bottom, you can see Ste on this, anybody can publish it, any journal. The New York Observer, when it still existed, uh, wrote to me, you know, they wanted to to publish a copy of it. And of course, it translated three times in French. I think it had by now 8 million downloads. >> So [clears throat] >> 8 million downloads of >> IYI, Intellectually at Idiot. If you Google IYI, you, you see now it's a term, a a standard term on, uh, on the web to describe >> And it's basically it's a shriek of outrage against the bureaucracy and the bureaucratic elite. >> Exactly. >> If you like the elite that runs most of our lives, and the fact >> Without skin of the game. >> Without skin in the game. The fact you had 8 million downloads. >> Yes. >> And people translated it voluntarily into all these languages so fast >> is really quite striking. >> But um, we are very sadly at a time. >> Um, you've given us an amazing set of ideas for 25 years. All I'd say is >> Here's to the next 25, and I have no doubt that your next 25 years worth of ideas that are currently moving from your gut to your head are going to be just as influential. So, thank you. >> Great. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. [applause] Taste