Dr. Ron Paul, physician, author, former US Congressman, former Presidential Candidate, and father of the Liberty Movement was joined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb renowned author of ‘Fooled by Randomness,’ ‘The Black Swan,’ and the soon to be released ‘Skin in the Game’ to talk about the economic and political landscape today.

Nassim Taleb argues that one of the principal causes of the seemingly incompetent leadership that plagues the US and other countries today is leaders’ lack of ‘skin in the game:’ “I don’t think that at any time in history we have had as many people transferring risk to others. At no point in history. If you read the history of the Roman Empire you realize most emperors, less than a third of emperors died in their bed… had life expectancy been long even fewer would have… Many of them died in battle. Many of them were first in battle… We never had that before, what we have today. So many people who are sitting in the New York Times in the Washington office or sitting I don’t know where can dictate foreign policy at zero risk… of course in an air conditioned office with the comforts of life.”

“In medicine if the doctor kills too many patients, at some point he or she will have to stop. Whereas in the macro world you don’t quite identify the source of the problem. You cannot zero in really on who caused it, so things can continue for a long time. This is very dangerous. This is the best argument against interventionist by saying two things: number one that those who decide in favor of interventionism are usually never harmed by that and second point, in a complex system where you don’t understand cause and effect very well, you have to minimize things that cause chaos.”

“Systems become fragile because of government intervention… If you stabilize things artificially they will look smooth and they will give you an impression of some kind of solidity but in fact they will weaken progressively and collapse in one block. Sorta like what happened in Syria or what happened in Saudi Arabia, that smoothing out, or what happened in the US, with the smoothing out of the economic cycle, they smooth out the economy cycle because they think that things should be smooth, and they fragilize that. Of course if you put a government official in charge of nature they would try to eliminate the seasons because the seasons make no sense to them. You know they want perfect thermal stability and they would destroy nature.”

There is much more to the interview so please enjoy it below: