Oh. Hell. Yes.
Just when you thought this might be a boring ass Friday, guess who agreed (probably begrudgingly) to sit down for an interview with a starstruck Erik Schatzker?
Nassim Taleb, that’s who. And he’s at SALT where I can only assume he might have spoken with Jeff Gundlach’s hologram-self.
This interview is overflowing with bullshit, but perhaps the best part comes right at the beginning when a gushing Schatzker says this:
I like to think of you as a trader turned philosopher. You’re a risk management guru, you’re a contrarian, you’re a lot of things.
Now first of all Taleb is not a “contrarian,” and if you know anything about Taleb you cringed as soon as Schatzker called him one because you knew what was coming next: a condescending Taleb rebuke. Sure enough.
But second, Taleb is not a “philosopher” either. He sure thinks he is and in fact, it’s pretty clear if you’ve read his books (which the vast majority of people who idolize him haven’t) that he thinks he’s the greatest philosopher of all time with the possible exception of Karl Popper. Any philosophy professor would fall in the floor laughing at that proposition.
So within the first 20 seconds of this fuckery that passes for an interview, Schatzker is wrong twice. But he’s right on one thing: Taleb is most assuredly “a lot of things.”
Specifically, he’s:
A risk-managin‘, mathematizin‘, philosophizin‘, stone-liftin‘, best-seller-writin‘, Spanish-gypsy-huntin‘, Third-World-country-polluted-water-drinkin‘, madman.
And a guy who likes to tweet about deadlifting.
And a narcissist.
And what “delusions of grandeur” would look like if “delusions of grandeur” were a person.
Basically, Taleb thinks of himself as Socrates, Karl Popper, Einstein, and Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy all rolled into one metahuman.
Read more here:
- 10 “Other” Things Nassim Taleb Can Teach Us
- Saturday Humor: Nassim Taleb Explains Why He Has A Beer Belly
- Wednesday Humor: Nassim Taleb “Doesn’t Trust” Your Estimate Of How Much He Can Shoulder Press
One of the other “things” Taleb is is an unwitting accomplice to Steve Bannon’s global agenda and, by extension, to the Trump administration.
Of course the idea of being “unwittingly” anything is anathema for Taleb, so for the past oh, I don’t know, call it two years, he’s been on a veritable quest to reverse engineer the narrative so he doesn’t have to admit to himself that Antifragile was in fact hijacked by racist lunatics with political ambition.
You can watch the Bloomberg interview by clicking on the picture below (I’m not going to embed it because I don’t want to glorify this idiot any further), but here are some hilarious excerpts:
I don’t see Donald Trump as a trainwreck.
I don’t see Donald Trump as any different from any other politician. Except for his language. And the way he does things. You have to translate what he says and focus on what he does and see the things he’s trying to do.
Trump is not an idiot.
There’s a logic to Trump that you can only get if you look at Trump as Trump.
Of course at the end of the day, it makes sense that Schatzker likes Taleb so much.
Because after all, they’re both cut from the cloth of Achilles…
