Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (31 page)

Before the economic crisis of 2008, the association between Nero Tulip and Tony DiBenedetto, also known as “Fat Tony” or the more politically acceptable “Tony Horizontal,” would have been hard to explain to an outsider.

Nero’s principal activity in life is reading books, with a few auxiliary activities in between. As to Fat Tony, he reads so little that, one day when he mentioned he wanted to write his memoirs, Nero joked that “Fat Tony would have written exactly one more book than he had read”—to which Fat Tony, always a few steps ahead of him, quoted Nero back: “You once said that if you felt like reading a novel, you would write one.” (Nero had one day cited the British prime minister and novelist Benjamin Disraeli, who wrote novels but didn’t like reading them.)

Tony grew up in Brooklyn and moved to New Jersey, and he has exactly the accent you would expect him to have. So, unburdened with time-consuming (and, to him, “useless”) reading activities, and highly allergic to structured office work, Fat Tony spent a lot of his time doing
nothing, with occasional commercial transactions in between. And, of course, a lot of eating.

While most people around them were running around fighting the different varieties of unsuccess, Nero and Fat Tony had this in common: they were terrified of boredom, particularly the prospect of waking up early with an empty day ahead. So the proximate reason for their getting together before that crisis was, as Fat Tony would say, “doing lunch.” If you live in an active city, say, New York, and have a friendly personality, you will have no trouble finding good dinner partners, people who can hold a conversation of some interest in an almost relaxed way. Lunch, however, is a severe difficulty, particularly during phases of high employment. It is easy to find lunch partners among resident office inmates but trust me, you don’t want to get near them. They will have liquefied stress hormones dripping from their pores, they will exhibit anxiety if they discuss anything that may divert them from what they think is in the course of their “work,” and when in the process of picking their brain you hit on a less uninteresting mine, they will cut you short with a “I have to run” or “I have a two-fifteen.”

Moreover, Fat Tony got respect in exactly the right places. Unlike Nero, whose ruminating philosophical episodes erased his social presence, making him invisible to waiters, Tony elicited warm and enthusiastic responses when he showed up in an Italian restaurant. His arrival triggered a small parade among the waiters and staff; he was theatrically hugged by the restaurant owner, and his departure after the meal was a long procedure with the owner and, sometimes, his mother seeing him outside, with some gift, like perhaps homemade grappa (or some strange liquid in an unmarked bottle), more hugs, and promises to come for the Wednesday special meal.

Accordingly, Nero, when he was in the New York area, could reduce his anxiety about lunchtime, as he could always count on Tony. He would meet Tony at the health club; there our horizontal hero did his triathlon (sauna, Jacuzzi, and steam bath), and from there they would go get some worship from restaurant owners. So Tony once explained to Nero that he had no use for him in the evenings—he could get better, more humorous, more Italian–New Jersey friends, who, unlike Nero, could give him ideas for “something useful.”

Nero lived a life of mixed (and transient) asceticism, going to bed as close to nine o’clock as he could, sometimes even earlier in the winter. He tried to leave parties when the effect of alcohol made people start talking to strangers about their personal lives or, worse, turn metaphysical. Nero preferred to conduct his activities by daylight, trying to wake up in the morning with the sun’s rays gently penetrating his bedroom, leaving stripes on the walls.

He spent his time ordering books from booksellers on the Web, and very often read them. Having terminated his turbulent, extremely turbulent, adventures, like Sindbad the sailor and Marco Polo the Venetian traveler, he ended up settling for a quiet and sedate life of post-adventure.

Nero was the victim of an aesthetic ailment that brings revulsion, even phobia, toward: people wearing flip-flops, television, bankers, politicians (right-wing, left-wing, centrists), New Jersey, rich persons from New Jersey (like Fat Tony), rich persons who take cruises (and stop in Venice wearing flip-flops), university administrators, grammatical sticklers, name droppers, elevator music, and well-dressed salespersons and businessmen. As for Fat Tony, he had different allergies: the
empty suit,
which we speculate is someone who has a command of all the superfluous and administrative details of things but misses the essential (and isn’t even aware of it), so his conversation becomes mere chitchat around the point, never getting to the central idea.

And Fat Tony was a smeller of fragility. Literally. He claimed that he could figure out a person from seeing him just walk into a restaurant, which was almost true. But Nero had noticed that Fat Tony, when talking to people for the first time, got very close to them and sniffed them, just like a dog, a habit of which Fat Tony wasn’t even aware.

Nero belonged to a society of sixty volunteer translators collaborating on previously unpublished ancient texts in Greek, Latin, or Aramaic (Syriac) for the French publishing house Les Belles Lettres. The group is organized along libertarian lines, and one of their rules is that university titles and prestige give no seniority in disputes. Another rule is mandatory attendance at two “dignified” commemorations in Paris, every November 7, the death of Plato, and every April 7, the birth of Apollo. His other membership is in a local club of weight lifters that meets on Saturdays in a converted garage. The club is mostly composed of New York
doormen, janitors, and mobster-looking fellows who walk around in the summer wearing sleeveless “wife-beater” shirts.

Alas, men of leisure become slaves to inner feelings of dissatisfaction and interests over which they have little control. The freer Nero’s time, the more compelled he felt to compensate for lost time in filling gaps in his natural interests, things that he wanted to know a bit deeper. And, as he discovered, the worst thing one can do to feel one knows things a bit deeper is to try to go into them a bit deeper.
The sea gets deeper as you go further into it,
according to a Venetian proverb.

Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it—books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well. Nero lived, at the time of writing, among fifteen thousand books, with the stress of how to discard the empty boxes and wrapping material after the arrival of his daily shipment from the bookstore. One subject Nero read for pleasure, rather than the strange duty-to-read-to-become-more-learned, was medical texts, for which he had a natural curiosity. The curiosity came from having had two brushes with death, the first from a cancer and the second from a helicopter crash that alerted him to both the fragility of technology and the self-healing powers of the human body. So he spent a bit of his time reading textbooks (not papers—textbooks) in medicine, or professional texts.

Nero’s formal training was in statistics and probability, which he approached as a special branch of philosophy. He had been spending all his adult life writing a philosophical-technical book called
Probability and Metaprobability
. His tendency was to abandon the project every two years and take it up again two years later. He felt that the concept of probability as used was too narrow and incomplete to express the true nature of decisions in the ecology of the real world.

Nero enjoyed taking long walks in old cities, without a map. He used the following method to detouristify his traveling: he tried to inject some randomness into his schedule by never deciding on the next destination until he had spent some time in the first one, driving his travel agent crazy—when he was in Zagreb, his next destination would be determined by his state of mind while in Zagreb. Largely, it was the smell of places that drew him to them; smell cannot be conveyed in a catalogue.

Mostly, when in New York, Nero sat in his study with his writing desk set against the window, occasionally looking dreamily at the New Jersey shore across the Hudson River and reminding himself how happy
he was to not live there. So he conveyed to Fat Tony that the “I have no use for you” was reciprocal (in equally nondiplomatic terms), which, as we will see, was not true.

After the crisis of 2008, it became clear what the two fellows had in common: they were predicting a sucker’s fragility crisis. What had gotten them together was that they had both been convinced that a crisis of such magnitude, with a snowballing destruction of the modern economic system in a way and on a scale never seen before, was bound to happen, simply because there were suckers. But our two characters came from two entirely different schools of thought.

Fat Tony believed that nerds, administrators, and, mostly, bankers were the ultimate suckers (that was when everyone still thought they were geniuses). And, what’s more, he believed that collectively they were even bigger suckers than they were individually. And he had a natural ability to detect these suckers before they fell apart. Fat Tony derived his income from that activity while leading, as we saw, a life of leisure.

Nero’s interests were similar to Tony’s, except dressed up in intellectual traditions. To Nero, a system built on illusions of understanding probability is bound to collapse.

By betting against fragility, they were antifragile.

So Tony made a bundle from the crisis, in the high eight to low nine figures—everything other than a bundle for Tony is “tawk.” Nero made a bit, though much less than Tony, but he was satisfied that he had won—as we said, he had already been financially independent and he saw money as a waste of time. To put it bluntly, Nero’s family’s wealth had peaked in 1804, so he did not have the social insecurity of other adventurers, and money to him could not possibly be a social statement—only erudition for now, and perhaps wisdom in old age. Excess wealth, if you don’t need it, is a heavy burden. Nothing was more hideous in his eyes than excessive refinement—in clothes, food, lifestyle, manners—and wealth was nonlinear. Beyond some level it forces people into endless complications of their lives, creating worries about whether the housekeeper in one of the country houses is scamming them while doing a poor job and similar headaches that multiply with money.

The ethics of betting against suckers will be discussed in
Book VII
, but there are two schools of thought. To Nero one should first warn
people that they are suckers, while Tony was against the very notion of warning. “You will be ridiculed,” he said; “words are for sissies.” A system based on verbal warnings will be dominated by non-risk-taking-babblers. These people won’t give you and your ideas respect unless you take their money.

Further, Fat Tony insisted that Nero take a ritual look at the physical embodiments of the spoils, such as a bank account statement—as we said, it had nothing to do with the financial value, nor even the purchasing power, of the items, just their symbolic value. He could understand why Julius Caesar needed to incur the cost of having Vercingetorix, the leader of the Gaul rebellion, brought to Rome and paraded in chains, just so he could exhibit victory in the flesh.

There is another dimension to the need to focus on actions and avoid words: the health-eroding dependence on external recognition. People are cruel and unfair in the way they confer recognition, so it is best to stay out of that game. Stay robust to how others treat you. Nero at some stage befriended a scientist of legendary status, a giant for whom he had immense respect. Although the fellow was about as prominent as one could get in his field (in the eyes of others), he spent his time focused on the status he had that week in the scientific community. He would become enraged at authors who did not cite him or at some committee granting a medal he had never received to someone he judged inferior, that impostor!

Nero learned that no matter how satisfied they could be with their work, these hotshots-who-depended-on-words were deprived of Tony’s serenity; they remained fragile to the emotional toll from the compliments they did
not
get, the ones others got, and from what someone of lower intellect stole from them. So Nero promised himself to escape all of this with his small ritual—just in case he should fall prone to the hotshot’s temptation. Nero’s spoils from what he called the “Fat Tony bet,” after deducting the cost of a new car (a Mini) and a new $60 Swatch watch, amounted to a dizzyingly large amount sitting in a portfolio, the summary of which was mailed to him monthly from (of all places) a New Jersey address, with three other statements from overseas countries. Again, it is not the amount but the tangibility of his action that counted—the quantities could have been a tenth, even a hundredth as much and the effect would remain the same. So he would cure himself of the game of recognition by opening the envelope containing the statement
and then going on with his day, oblivious to the presence of those cruel and unfair users of words.