“Skin in the Game” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb Speech At RPI's Media & War Conference
Those who sent people to war were those who fought with them in the front lines. No longer. Statistician, bestselling author, legendary investor Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells us how neocons (and many others) have no skin in the game.
Those who sent people to war were those who fought with them in the front lines. No longer. Statistician, bestselling author, legendary investor Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells us how neocons (and many others) have no skin in the game.
Those who sent people to war were those who fought with them in the front lines. No longer. Statistician, bestselling author, legendary investor Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells us how neocons (and many others) have no skin in the game.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb does not need much of an introduction.
I'm sure everyone in this room has read The Black Swan.
If you haven't read Skin in the Game, you need to get your copy and read it right away.
You won't be able to put it down.
If you've not seen Mr. Taleb on the Liberty Report, we've had him on twice, I think, and it's been a delight.
I watch it over and over again, and we all laugh and enjoy it.
I think one of the greatest thinkers of our time, I didn't know until yesterday, I'm ashamed to say, or hadn't remembered, also professor of engineering at New York University, but one of the exciting and most original thinkers of our time, Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Yes, I prefer to speak while sitting down.
One, because it relaxes me, but mostly because it relaxes the audience.
As an empiricist, I tested it and discovered that it becomes more of a conversation.
If you have a conversation with a waiter in a restaurant, you're stressed out.
If the person is sitting across from you, it's easier.
So, my history, I was a trader for a lot of, as you can see, the beer, a lot of years.
And then I retired from trading and didn't know what to do with my life.
And I was very poor at chess and tennis.
I lose concentration and both, start daydreaming.
So I decided to become a professor.
And then, given that I get bored with usually topics, I figured out mathematics is one of the easiest because I don't fall asleep.
And books are short and the concentration is brief and so on.
So I have laziness.
So I started working on systems, how they can handle disorder.
And so I was a trader.
I was sort of prepared with probability.
So I worked in that field.
And I embarked on a project called Incerto, Latin for uncertainty, five-volume.
And Skin in the Game is the last volume dedicated to, you know, whom, right?
Our friend here, whom I called a Greek among Romans.
Sorry, sorry, I apologize.
A Roman among Greeks.
Why a Roman among Greeks?
Because Greeks like theory.
Romans despised theory.
They wanted practice.
And they wanted a system that was designed, flexible enough.
Look at the bridges they built without theory.
They're still standing.
The laws they had were flexible.
And they had, in fact, the common law was already built into the system they did business.
They did everything like engineering.
Nothing should be final and it's always meant to be improved.
And also, somehow, the Roman understood something I call scaling, about which later, which in fact tells you that the property of a system, that you could be a libertarian at a state level and a communist at the commune level.
And it's not incompatible because an elephant and a mouse don't have the same properties.
And you can see the difference between political system resides vastly more in the scale.
Singapore versus China.
Societal Risk and Exposure00:08:08
They have exactly the same population, almost the same population, the same culture, and the same political system.
But it works and sort of happened to work in Singapore better than China.
So that's what I call scaling.
What works in Norway, The size of, I don't know, the size of Borrow of New York.
So what works in Norway doesn't work in 300 million countries, 300 million people.
And what works in Canada cannot work in the United States.
There's a scaling difference.
So this is sort of what I work on, how properties of disorder and stuff like that.
And of course, we're going to talk about now interventionistas.
Because this is, I have a war with interventionistas.
I'm Christian Lebanese, and I'm here because of, I mean, I had to, you know, to witness civil war, because of a certain class of people that I'll discuss.
But let me link it to trading to make it practical.
Before we talk about interventionistas, it's the same problem.
Let me talk about trading.
There's something I dubbed the Bob Rubin trade, and I heard earlier, and not without a reason, because a lot of people had perpetrated it, but he was too close to government.
And it's as follows.
You make a bonus as vice chairman of Citibank for 20 years, for 12 years, sorry, or 10 years, he made $124 million in compensation.
You know, based on policies benefiting from the system.
Now, of course, I don't know if you remember, but exactly 10 years ago, there were some headlines.
Now, what happened?
Citibank was insolvent.
The taxpayer, and of course Federal Reserve and Hidden Ways, rescued it.
$5.3 trillion banking losses, more than they ever made in history.
Who put the bill?
Did he show up with a negative paycheck to say, okay, I'm going to write back my compensation?
No.
Who paid for it?
Bus drivers, Spanish grammar instructors, specialists, sorry, science grammars, so one of the characters keep propping up in my book.
Yoga instructors who pay taxes.
All these people were chipping in to cover for him.
Now, this is what I call the Bob Rubin trade.
The Bob Rubin trade is when you transfer the downside to other and keep the upside.
That Bob Rubin trade cannot be remedied by regulation.
How do we know that?
3755 years ago, Hammurabi, Hammurabi, Babylon, that was before it was invaded by George Bush and stuff.
It was Babylon, exactly, that they had.
And they had, for those who could read, it was written, actually, for some reason, I go on pilgrimage, and skill in the game means you have to have an emotional thing.
So if you're reciting it, you've got to recite it in the original language.
So I go on a pilgrimage, and it's in Paris, where you see a lot of Korean tourists.
Nobody but Koreans for what, maybe it's non-tourist guides elsewhere, come on pilgrimage to that place where it's explained that if the architect builds a house and the house collapses, the architect shall be put to death.
In other words, you cannot hide risks and walk away from them.
You have to own your risk.
And that was the beginning of civilization.
The eye for eye isn't a symmetry argument.
It was initially the Hammurabi argument.
So he who shall benefit from something should own the risk.
That was Hammurabi's law.
You can't walk away from it.
And the Romans, of course, had a version of Hammurabi's law.
Practically every civilization had it until this generation.
So we started seeing people making, having benefits from the system without bearing the risk.
And let me explain.
You've heard of think tanks.
You've heard of warmongers, of course.
Thomas Friedman, I accuse him by name, skin in the game.
This idiot who wants Ciann, what's his name?
Zachariah, all these guys.
So all these people, they come in, and they like wars.
At no point in history did we have warmongers who were not warriors.
Think about it.
Hannibal, who was first in battle, he was first in battle.
Even Napoleon was more exposed than a regular soldier.
And if you take the whole hierarchy of societies, I only found four societies in history who at some point had a hierarchy, where the warrior, the person who take more risk, was not on top.
English society based around the Lord concept.
They still observe it.
They made sure that one of those princes during the Argentine fake war, whatever, I mean, it's not a fake war, but it was like that kind of whatever you want to call it, he was more exposed in his helicopter than other people on the ground.
So you can't be a Lord if you're not a Lord.
That's the whole thing.
So you take more risk than others, therefore you have privileges.
And the societies where people start having prominence without having a physical risk were rare.
The Roman Empire, Roman emperors, Emperor Julian, he died on the front, on the Persian front, like a soldier.
He was the emperor.
And of course he didn't have a shield, unlike other soldiers.
Not because he was too lazy, but because he was an emperor, right?
Bravado.
And of course, Valerian was captured and turned into a stool.
The emperor was used as a stool.
So about two-thirds of emperors died of violence in the Roman Empire.
And a third remaining, either, you know, had you waited longer, you know what would have happened, or and or they died at their bed.
Many, many of them we think are poisoned.
So that's the whole idea of skin in the game.
Why do you need warmongers to be warriors?
Let's think about the filtering mechanism.
If you're on a highway, it's very rare to see, say, someone with the stupidity of Thomas Friedman drive and cause 75 people to die.
Why?
These people are already dead.
So you have a balance in society where warmongers are more exposed than others.
As the French say, qui vit de la guerre mer de la guerre.
He who lives from the floor.
And that balance restores a balance, like we have a balance in driving.
This is why India doesn't have that balance, and they have a much higher mortality rate on the road than we do here.
So the idea of you own your own risk while you drive, you inflict risk on others, that's balance, that symmetry, that risk symmetry, existed in America until George Bush the father.
He was, as you remember, okay, in war and captured, or whatever, some like James Bond-like adventure involved in it.
And that was real.
So that was the last generation.
So, but the filtering is not just at the risk level, it's at the decision-making level.
So let me, you know, let's see how the mechanism works.
Bottom-Up Peace Process00:14:35
A friend of mine, who liked me as a trader, didn't know what to do with his life after, you know, leaving trading.
Actually, you never really leave trading, but when you say I'm no longer a trader, then people identify you differently.
So the day when you decide that you're not officially a trader, but you're still a closet trader.
You hide.
Anyway, so he decided, he left trading and decided he had a very, very bad idea of becoming an investor in restaurants.
Don't, if you already, and he noticed one thing about that business.
They have prizes.
Prizes, you know, the best sushi, you know, the best sushi roll without avocado, with avocado, the best vegas, whatever, the best thing in town, the best atmosphere, this, okay.
So they get all these awards, and there is a gala dinner where these awards are given at your end.
He noticed that very few restaurants made it to the gala dinner.
They were bankrupt before.
Why is it so?
Because you don't have a peer review mechanism in the restaurant business.
It's not the restaurateur who will judge if another restaurant is sound.
Who judges?
The client.
That's the mechanism.
And also another thing of scaling.
Name a restaurant that has real food and more than 400 tables.
Any location.
Okay, so there's a scaling effect.
Anyway, so you notice the restaurant is judged by the clients, not by a committee that decides.
So the idea of Skinena game, it hit me that any business where people are judged by peers and not by reality, reality have mortality from reality or something like that, are businesses that will eventually rot.
This is why the academia is rotting, because the peer review mechanism is causing them, like I know from finance, they know nothing, practically nothing.
Notice they don't miss.
They don't get.
And visibly, of course, you may have some input from your colleagues about whether you have talent or not, but ultimately it's a client and it's a business.
In other words, it's not Microsoft who will decide whether Apple should survive, but the accountants or whatever.
So you want to impress your accountant more than your peers.
But that idea of peer judgment is at odds with my trader life because as a trader, the first thing I was told is if people like you, you're doing something wrong.
You cannot be, and this is why a lot of traders are libertarians, because you've got to use your own head to think.
Because if you're a conformist, you're a Me Too person, you're going to arrive too late to the trade.
You're going to be what we call the turkey, you know, the last passenger on the bus, right, or something like that.
So that was on the wrong place.
So we have a class of people who have been determining and causing wars who really are not involved in these wars.
So therefore, the incentive is to be a right.
And they cannot learn.
I don't believe that humans learn intellectually.
I believe you learn, but that's evolution 101.
Those academics tell you there's no God, of course it's evolution, etc., but it doesn't apply to them because the whole mechanism of evolution is selection through survival and reproduction.
So the interventionistas did not learn from Vietnam.
They did not learn from the Iraq war.
They did not learn from Libya.
Libya, look at Libya.
I mean they have slave markets in Libya.
They did not learn.
So there is something fundamentally wrong in the way they work because if there's no feedback, so like academics and economics, because there's no feedback.
So I classify, so it's very simple.
Have you heard of the expert problem, the expert problem?
And people say there's right against experts.
I say, no, it's very simple.
That rule allows us to know who is the expert.
A plumber is going to be an expert at plumbing.
It's a dentist.
If you come back, if you return from a dentist's visit, look at your teeth in a mirror and you still have them, but visibly she or he knows something about dentistry.
So there are businesses where you cannot, what I call it, you can not micro bullshit.
So you cannot.
But you can micro bullshit because there's no skin in the game in these macro things.
So you classify.
99% of the people in America are calibrated in the sense that they are not fooling anyone.
They own their own risk.
They take, you know, whether you drive your car or they collect an honest paycheck or an honest dollar, you know, if they're self-employed.
That's 1% that call themselves elite.
They are immune to any kind of judgment from reality.
They don't have a P ⁇ L.
I mean, we know in trading, we had people with P ⁇ L and people without P ⁇ L.
And we'd call them openly the bullshitters and the P ⁇ L people, right?
That wasn't trading.
I mean, to your face.
In trading, of course, you can, so long as you're making money, you're okay.
They're going to fire you the minute you lose money.
So you might as well be rude to them.
So the bureaucrats of the firm.
So now I spoke about societies that had non-warmongers, namely the bureaucrat, rise up to the top and determine policies and decide.
The first one was ancient Egypt.
The minute scribes took over ancient Egypt, it fell apart.
The guys from up north came down, the Hyksos like the knife.
I mean, these guys couldn't figure out what was going on, they were so out of it.
That's the first time.
Another time is China had a phenomenal growth in knowledge.
It invented almost everything.
It dominated intellectual life.
It would have dominated if it was open borders, but we knew almost everything.
Then they had the great idea to have Harvard, what I call Soviet Harvard, to have the Soviet Harvard, you know, the scholars of the Imperial Palace run the place.
And they ran it to the ground.
The minute these people ran the place, boom, innovation disappeared in China.
It was built organically, bottom-up.
And just like the English, I mean, they had the Industrial Revolution.
I say English because it was in England, not UK.
Industrial Revolution coming out of illiterate adventures, building the whole place.
And then suddenly they say, oh, yeah, no, now they have committees at Cambridge, you know, a bunch of empty suits, we call them bureaucrats, trying to improve on a place.
Of course, they're going to be ran over by Silicon Valley.
So the now, a few more things.
If I have more time, you should stop me 10 minutes before.
I'm not a good speaker because I'm an author.
I don't want to be a good speaker, because there's something too smooth.
Skin in the game is not okay.
So don't be a talker.
So peace.
I have a few chapters here about the extension of skin in the game with respect to peace, the press, stuff like that.
The first thing I had to say that this is the most insulting.
Every page, if you're in the press, you get insulted.
There's a chapter on IYI, intellectually at idiot.
All people don't have like four million from India, four million downloads, including pirated versions in 23 languages, right?
Even with, you know, and of course translated now in 37 languages.
But when you're pirated, you know the idea is good.
They don't steal nothing.
So a lot of the intellectual yet idiot, because it seems to be a worldwide phenomenon of people, you know, you recognize them.
They're very good at taking grades, and it looked like the school system has been designed, all right?
It's like a circular thing, is you're you're to make people very good at taking exams, all right?
And at teaching people how to take exams.
So that's it's like a circular system.
And the contact with reality, of course, after a while is going to disappear.
Yet we're going to call these people very smart.
Again, that 1%.
And it's not everywhere.
And I'm a professor of engineering and engineering.
There's very little IYI.
But economics, there's nothing but that.
And then you end up sometimes, even within a field.
So I say there's a bunch of people here, Cass Sunstein and a guy called Richard Taylor.
They wanted to manipulate citizens.
And I showed in 12 points that these guys don't know the math that they're using.
It's like math 101, but then they can get away with it.
I call them intellectual yet idiot because they're not smart enough to understand the world.
But the problem is they're smart enough to be intellectual and take exams.
And that little bit that's missing is what makes it or breaks it.
So, and I attacked, of course, book reviewers because they don't have skin in the game.
In other words, you can write a book, a review of a book you haven't read, and nobody would know with impunity.
So I attacked these people and I made an embargo on my book in America.
No reviewer can get it.
You want it?
You wait.
It's going to be Barnes and Noble.
You go spend $17.63 on discount.
You get your book and you write whatever you want.
Okay, thanks, Bye.
So they disappeared.
It looks like they can't even spend the $20 on a book.
So they and then the book came out.
So the publisher said, yeah, it's not going to sell, of course.
It opened two on a bestseller list on a New York Times.
That New York Times that I'm attacking as a fraud.
Two on a bestseller list.
So I say, you know, the New York Times reader, typical IYI, New Yorker reader.
I switched from New York Times to New Yorker because New Yorkers, like you read an article enough to be able to talk about something you don't understand.
So you can understand the shallowness of it when you're from that discipline.
So victory that something is going on.
And let's continue the press.
So there was a chapter in here about peace.
Since the Congress of Vienna, people have the illusion that you do peace between states.
That a bunch of people well addressed or go negotiate and it worked.
Congress of Vienna, those states are represented as a unit.
We know libertarians here and a lot left, you know.
So that the peace is between people.
And the states are there is an agency problem because he who or she who represents the states may represent himself, herself with cronies and friends.
Like Tony Blair represents, you know, trying to make a peace treaty, you know, there's something in it.
So I have a chapter on peace and blood versus, you know, peace with commerce.
Peace and ink, peace and blood, and peace in commerce.
Peace in Oslo, the Oslo Accord of the Palestine, didn't work.
It was done a bunch of intellectuals in Oslo.
How has peace established itself between multi-ethnic history?
Commerce.
Bottom-up.
So peace from the top doesn't work.
It has not worked.
You have peace done by organically.
And think about it.
The Palestinian and the Jews had a the settlers, pre-Israel, they had a deal in 46.
Palestinian had they accepted in 46, they've been a lot better off than they are today.
But say, no, no, in a sp for people without skin in the game sitting in Saudi Arabia, you know, oil and then air conditioning and a lot of mango juice.
Or say, no, fermented yogurt juice, or yogurt drinks, right?
Because you can't have alcohol.
So and then they said, no, don't, right?
Why in the name of what?
Okay, in the name of poor people want to live somewhere, right?
48 had the Palestinian accepted.
I should let people, it's not a bottom-up.
It all came from atop by people who were away, sitting invariably near a fridge, was very, very, very cold, when hot weather needed fermented yogurt, okay?
Diluted fermented yogurt, all right?
When these people were, you know, homeless, okay, or living in camps, you know, up in the heat.
So continue.
So you cannot have peace.
Like the peace between Egypt and Israel.
It's a peace done at the top.
The populations don't trade with one another.
It's not working.
It's not going to be working in the long run.
You go to Egypt.
There were a lot more Jews before the peace in Egypt than they are today.
And really, and there's nothing more anti-Semitic than the Egyptian population today.
I mean, except for the cops.
Or even then, the cops, they keep their mouths closed because they want to stay out of trouble.
So you cannot have peace, it's a bottom-up process done through commerce between units that are small enough to decide what they want for themselves.
And within that, but the problem is all these institutions, UN all things, they want to be employed.
So they create agendas and then they have Tony Blair negotiating with some other person from Oslo.
It doesn't work that way.
So this is Skinny Game.
Institutions vs. Commerce00:11:58
Continuing, they have something in this book called the Lindy effect, named after a restaurant in New York.
And I recommended the reader to study the rule, but not to go to that restaurant.
And the restaurant actually went closed the week when the book was published.
It was inedible.
It's called the Lindy effect.
I mean, the restaurant was called Lindy.
And people used to meet, the actors used to meet there and discover the rule that a play that had been going on, been going running for 100 days, had 100 more days to go.
300 days, 300 more days to go.
So life expectancy of plays increased with time.
That's Lindy.
There are a lot of things that are Lindy.
The books in print, a book, we've been reading the Bible now for a couple of thousand years.
I mean, depending which one, the New Testament for a couple of thousand years and stuff like that.
So the so that that Lindy, something that is Lindy, tells you there are some patterns, okay, that we revert to.
We go back to that pattern, okay?
And and What is a naturalistic way for the news to be circulated?
Well, it turned out that we had the press, you know, in London, there was press and coffee shops coming out of coffee shops, but usually it was a tool to destroy the state or to attack the state.
But this idea of propaganda, to sit down and receive information in a family with 2.2 members, right?
I don't know in Washington, no, no, sorry, father, mother, and 2.2 children, but I don't know how many dogs, because I don't know the dogs or cat proportions, 0.6 dogs and 0.2 of a cat or something.
I don't know the preferences here.
So you have that family watching, getting that monoculture, watching and receiving this, or reading something, or something even more stupid, getting the New York Times.
So that phase in history has been very, very, very brief.
It ended with Donald Trump using Twitter.
How did we have the news before?
Well, you go to the barber shop, you bring your news, and you take news.
You go to the market, you buy fish.
Fishmonger would be rumor monger.
You go to funerals or wakes, you get the news.
So news were circulated organically when at no time in history a human could receive the news without being a transmitter.
So you had to skin the game in what you were conveying.
And of course, post-war with the television and stuff like that, that was interrupted.
And now it's Twitter, we're making it back.
And even Twitter bans, there's so much desire for people to convey information while receiving some, for markets for information, because that was part of any market.
You buy goods and you buy information.
So this is why they can't control.
Now they can't control it anymore.
We're back to an environment.
And censorship never worked before.
A little bit in Imperial Russia on some books, but you cannot censor a conversation.
You can't.
People sit down.
As a matter of fact, the more you try to censor, the more the news spread.
So we're back in that environment.
So I'm not worried about the media.
And we're seeing the destruction of the media.
And I'll give you an example of my book.
And I've seen other books as well.
You're only ignored by the media.
You can still do very well.
And the Lindy for the news is basically, you know, go back to forums like Twitter or the post-Twitter, because maybe Twitter will try to go just, you know, destroy its own reputation by not being a good broker, then you change broker.
I mean, the exchanges died.
You know, we had marketplaces like the option exchanges that disappeared.
They were replaced by other exchanges, like London Stock Exchange was replaced, Amsterdam replaced by London, London, replaced by the New York Stock Exchange in the beginning of the century, last century.
And another problem with the news is, and I see it in the story of Ron Paul, is that I wrote a chapter on charity.
And how do you represent the news?
The problem of taking something out of context, I'm a statistician, and the thing we hunt for is, we say, just like you say that the news, what do you say, the facts are right, the news is fake.
You can have fake news with the right facts if you hire central facts.
Or you can take a sentence and then out of context, make it look incriminating to anyone.
The same way you can with the news.
You have to represent the total reality And that's called the principle of charity.
And you observe it with a lot of great thinkers, those who survived.
They represent, like Karl Popper, very faithfully the position of the opponent, often better than the opponent.
And then they destroy it in two lines.
But the selection, oh, he said this.
He said this is meaningless, you have to say he meant this.
What you said is irrelevant.
What did you mean?
That's the principle of charity.
And that has disappeared.
Now, you could probably play that and destroy a couple of people.
Can't do it forever.
You see?
Like, for example, he made a comment, he made this racist comment.
It's irrelevant.
Does he have racist views?
Yes or no?
Is the racist view part of his program?
Yes or no?
A lot of people can make no racist comments, yet have a racist program.
And a lot of people have non-racist programs, make comments that may be perceived as racist.
So this is where the principle of charity, which is a very strong principle, in intellectual communication, once you break it, you've destroyed your own trade.
Because at some point, you've got to remember, some people now like the New York Times because it's attacking Trump, but at some point, they're going to realize it could be doing the same thing to them on a position that's not in agreement with that in the New York Times.
And then they will suffer.
So finally, and something very positive aside from the news, in this book, I discuss the minority rule.
And it's quite a big deal for Ron, for Dr. Paul, because minorities have made history, never majorities.
And let me explain how it came to me.
I discovered it.
I discovered this asymmetry.
I was organizing a cortel party at a complexity festival.
And people came from Jerusalem.
And I felt embarrassed that I had no kosher drinks for them.
But they told me, no, all the drinks here are kosher.
What?
Yeah, look at the bottles.
What?
They said, yeah.
Why?
Because Coca-Cola doesn't want to bother having kosher drinks, non-kosher drinks.
They made everything kosher.
So, how many people are kosher in America?
0.2%.
Yeah, yet almost all soft drinks are kosher, yes.
With a sign underneath, or on a need-to-know basis.
So you realize that you have minority rules, you know, playing a role in things.
So start thinking, same thing with LAM.
For Christmas, I opened a LAM thing package, and it was halal.
But you need to know what halal is to know it's halal.
But why is it?
What are you going to do?
Merchandising of halal meat here, here, a different truck, different thing, different, you get it mixed up, you get lawsuit.
No, you make it all halal.
So think about it, our minority rule.
Ethics follow minority rule.
And the formation of ethics, and there's evidence through the way it's done, it's not because a majority decide that theft is bad.
I'm intolerant.
I only eat non-stolen merchandise.
But my friend, the thief, can eat both.
Or go to a restaurant, we've got to go eat using my preferences.
Typically, at a table, if one person is organic and all the other ones except GMOs, you're going to have organic.
Just like in peanuts on planes, one person is allergic to peanuts on a plane, the whole plane is peanut-free.
Now, of course, this plays some vicious roles and sometimes you have distortions, but in general, it can lead to good things.
I am intolerant of journalists.
I have intolerant voters.
That's it.
I cannot, no, the New York Times doesn't exist for me.
Why?
Because I'm intolerant.
This is my erosion.
The religion is no New York Times citation in my class.
It doesn't exist.
So this is how movements develop to take, because if you're right and happen to be intolerant, and you have an ethical standard you abide by, and say there's violations of ethics that have been committed by this, by CNN, there's a violation of ethics that have been committed here.
And if you're impartial enough to have, to apply that rule across the board, then it works.
And effectively has worked for me.
I'm totally, I mean, I get insulted, say, they call me arrogant.
I explain to them, arrogant has no epistemological signification.
You have to be more precise.
And then they tell me you're narcissistic.
I tell them, again, I mean, it's like the pathologization using some kind of, they take the BSM and open it randomly and find the mental disease you had because you don't agree with them.
So aside from that, okay, it may work with some people, didn't work with me.
I'm too stubborn.
So after a while, they yield.
Like, I've applied it to academia where there are a lot of people use papers, non-papers.
So this is where I think that the libertarian movement can do very well.
There's one comment here I'm making about the libertarian movement.
The reason it didn't do well in history was for the following reason.
The Emperor Julian, the same one who died, you know, who had skin in the game, wanted to revert to paganism from Christianity.
And paganism was disorganized.
So freedom, you know, you have your gods, you share gods, you're very tolerant of other people's gods.
But, you know, Christianity replaced that.
So Julian, it was called Julian the Apostate, wanted to revert, wanted to have a clergy, a unified clergy for paganism.
Of course it failed, because by definition, you cannot have a party like a church of paganism.
It's the same thing.
You're craving the same thing with different gods.
It doesn't work.
We already have that.
We already have the Christianity has absorbed other gods anyway.
They did the job for you.
He didn't get it.
Likewise, libertarianism didn't do very well as a big party because it was fragmented among other parties.
Because there's no unified policy.
We're going to have a libertarian, unified policy with respect to this.
By definition, libertarian wants to be free to think using her or his head.
So this is why it didn't work.
Nevertheless, there are common things that libertarians believe.