For him, contracts can be too costly to negotiate due to transaction costs; the solution is to incorporate your business and hire employees with clear job descriptions because you can’t afford legal and organizational bills for every transaction.

This idea of skin in the game is woven into history: historically, all warlords and warmongers were warriors themselves, and, with a few curious exceptions, societies were run by risk takers, not risk transferors.

So, “giving advice” as a sales pitch is fundamentally unethical—selling cannot be deemed advice. We can safely settle on that. You can give advice, or you can sell (by advertising the quality of the product), and the two need to be kept separate.

If your private actions do not generalize, then you cannot have general ideas.

Poison is drunk in golden cups (Venenum in auro bibitur).

It may seem absurd to brainwashed contemporaries, but Antifragile documents the outsized historical contributions of the nonprofessional, or, rather, the non-meretricious.

FIGURE 6.

If the company man is, sort of, gone, he has been replaced by the companies person. For people are no longer owned by a company but by something worse: the idea that they need to be employable. The employable person is embedded in an industry, with fear of upsetting not just their employer, but other potential employers.

Except that the long-term medical risks are hidden; they will play out in the long run, whereas the legal risk is immediate.