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Robert Rubin, a former US Treasury Secretary, was paid around 120 million dollars at the top of Citibank. When the bank nearly collapsed in 2008, he blamed an event nobody could have predicted, apologized, and kept every cent. Nassim Taleb has a name for that. He calls it the Bob Rubin trade: you keep the upside when you are right, and someone else pays when you are wrong. His whole philosophy, and this talk at Google, exists to kill it. His fix is almost four thousand years old. The first written law we have, Hammurabi's code, said that if a builder's house collapsed and killed the owner, the builder was put to death. Strip away the cruelty and one rule is left standing: you cannot walk away from a risk you created for someone else. Everything in the talk is that rule in disguise. A plumber is judged by the client whose pipe he fixed, so plumbing works. An economist is judged by other economists, which is how you can hand a Nobel to two men who say opposite things. Any job graded by your peers instead of by reality eventually rots. A pilot is the opposite, because he cannot fool the sky. Taleb asked the room what happens to pilots who only pretend to be experts. "They died and their passengers died." That is exactly why flying is safe. Here is the part worth keeping. Listen from about 22:50. The oldest law humans ever wrote down was not about gods or gold. It was one sentence forcing the people who build things to stand underneath them. "You should own your risks." Before you take anyone's advice, find out what happens to them if they are wrong. If the answer is nothing, it was never advice. It was a sales pitch.