Nassim Nicholas Taleb, scholar and risk analyst, sees the world through a different prism than most. The collapse of China’s stock markets and crude prices may not be a bad thing after all, he told ET’s MC Govardhana Rangan and Dinesh Narayanan in an interview. Edited excerpts:A year later, he didn’t disappoint. He seems to have delivered over the past year. Let’s look at the numbers. From what we saw, numbers seem to be healthy or not degrading. The zeitgeist continues so it doesn’t seem like a revolution but a systematic approach to reform. Maybe you do more here and less there but overall it is the trend that matters. Sometimes people under-deliver. You cannot control the environment but it is the effort that matters. And that fellow is ascetic. I usually trust people who are ascetic.You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs. India has suffered from a metastatic bureaucracy and also from an atmosphere of too much talk. History happens by collective and by individuals — it’s an interplay. Sometimes you need what I call a minority — a stubborn minority — to move things forward. Group think doesn’t always work (in a focused manner).India’s strength comes from its democratic structure. You know it’s not going to fall apart tomorrow because the noise and the tension is always there and the people who don’t like each other don’t like each other in the open. It shows more volatility than there actually is. But what comes through is that when you have such a large structure it’s like waging a war. Things need cleaning up. Yesterday in a meeting a fellow said that the process always starts to be very complex and then someone comes in and simplifies it. You need, once in a while, to reset the system, reboot it and simplify the procedures. Periodically, it is a switch between consensus and someone who is pushy.I don’t believe in the disruption story. For example, take the car. People don’t realise how much improvement has been done to the car over the past 15 years. It’s that invisible thing. So I don’t believe so muchin disruption as in marginal improvement. New technologies almost always fail. Almost always. The almost is what matters. A very small minority survives. All technologies almost never die. Almost. If you take it that way then you realise that the optimal strategy in anything is to take it and see if you can make it slightly better. And slightly cheaper, more affordable. Or better distributed. You are much more likely to make money by producing cheaper books than selling Kindles.Yes, but he is still not very disruptive. He is fixing things marginally by taking existing things and improving on them. It is a central strategy of taking something and improving on it but making sure that there is an effort and also creating some momentum there and impact. Let me tell you how Twitter has changed our world. In the past you guys — the newspaper business — could control information.All I had to do was take over your paper and then we can hide any information we want. Even in democracies and especially in the United States. Today, thanks to Twitter, citizen journalism is making the world much more transparent. What happened is (because of that) people have an illusion of the world becoming more corrupt when all we are getting is more reporting of crime. Today, bribery is actually dropping and corruption is dropping. We only have an illusion that corruption is rising. Maybe there is no link between economic growth and corruption but there is a huge perception of governance that comes with it.They deserve it. They deserve it.I’m writing now Volume 5 of the Incerto. It’s called Skin In The Game. You can regulate all you want (but) without forcing skin the game, you have done nothing. People always beat regulation. I was a derivatives trader for 21 years. A lot of the derivatives business is driven by regulation. You regulate the market, like Japan banning people from buying equities — they’re going to buy a derivative or fixed income that is correlated to equities. So regulations are not necessarily a solution to anything. But we know for sure that unless you put skin in the game, meaning force people to be accountable for a given harm done to others, you’ll never achieve anything.You should stick to the inflation target. You have an extremely risk-conscious and sophisticated governor. Go by what he thinks. The government should not be messing with the monetary policy. You mortgage for the sake of small-time gains. Leave it to central bankers who are working for stability. The central bank’s target should be stability, and not promoting speculative economic growth.The China crash is about… it is where it was three years ago. Crashes like that after a big bull market reduce the number of speculators. That is not necessarily bad for China. Crashes eliminate speculators. The crash of 1987 basically wiped out speculators and discouraged others. That is why volatility is good in financial markets. It makes them realise it is not free money, and it is not a casino. If something goes up all the time it is very bad.Last year, with crude 50% higher than now, Saudi Arabia lost $100 billion of reserves. This year, they would lose more. It seems to me there is a glut. Because it is very hard to store oil. Structurally, oil is a loser. Oil may eventually be demonised. Solar is starting to show, after years of talk, some potential. We are starting to see not a big top-down thing, but small, little things. Also, you can use oil as a back-up. You depend on it less and less. This marginal increase, if you reduce the market a little bit, the price can collapse big time. This is what happened with oil. Saudi Arabia had two big dips in oil in the past. This is a lot worse. But this is certainly not a bad news, because export of the Wahhabi doctrine around the world has not been very good for stability. The fact that it starts cutting that cost, nobody is going to complain.Yes, if you try to extrapolate religion from a country. Within religions, typically the most intolerant part dominates… always that is what happens like with the Wahhabis. The Saudi Arabian doctrine is not comparable with the rest of the world. The symptom of the disease is more than the disease. Other parts of Islam are working, like Sufi, and even regular Sunni doctrine worked well. It looks like the Iranian doctrine also works very well. It is only with the Wahhabi, there is an issue.The difference between Saudi Arabia and Iran is a difference between a medieval civilisation that is going backwards, and a modernised, post-renaissance one. Iran is a different class from Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has 95% of engineers imported and the 5% are more like a token. Iranians are technologically superior, and the society is sophisticated. Although oil prices are hurting Iran, the boom it is going to get from those contracts and all these things, they can be better.Don’t worry too much about ISIS. I am going to Lebanon tomorrow, and you won’t feel it. If you look at the physical world, it is intact. Terrorism acts are concentrated in Baghdad, Syria. They are not capable a lot of stuff in the West. People have adapted to it quickly.This time it is completely different. We are structurally more evolved than the 30s. The world can take it. Americans spend 7-8% on food, and that is less than in the 30s. The difference between this and before (2008) is we are not going to have credit problems because the ones who are taking the risks are hedge funds. Hedge funds have their skin in the game and they are a smaller ecology. And they are non-bailable. They are much better risk takers.