When Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks, you can almost hear his brain working and the first thing that comes across is the breadth of his intellect.

He survived the Lebanese civil war as a child, only to face the 1987 Wall Street crash as a trader (he survived this too). He is a polyglot and a polymath; and possesses a sense of humour that is sadly uncommon among college professors. Quite simply, he is perfect company for a long Sunday afternoon lunch.

In his book, The Black Swan, Taleb writes about the things that dominate your life. No, not the arguments about your favourite classical musician, but the really significant events — ones that leave aftershocks.

Amidst juggling plans for a trip to Brazil, Taleb spoke with BW’s Pierre Fitter about philosophy, pranks on boring speakers and the ideas in his book, over phone from New York.

Why did you write Black Swan?
Fooled By Randomness (Taleb’s previous book) was not personally satisfying although it is doing well. I felt that it did not go very deep into its subject. But I put my soul into Black Swan. I wanted to destroy the categorisation of the first book. Black Swan was not written for financial people or traders — but for social scientists and lay people.

Why are black swans important?
People say “Taleb wants us to worry about meteorites hitting Earth.” I want to help people navigate in a world where we don’t have a clear understanding of reality. Black Swan is essentially a map of how to deal with such a reality. The book distinguished between [two imaginary places] Mediocristan and Extremistan. In Mediocristan, variations in any sample do not result in large deviations from the average. The question, then, is which domains or areas have highly consequential variables? These places are Extremistan.

You use metaphors and fictional characters throughout the book….
I used them to satisfy my own aesthetic desires of writing and out of a sense of ethics. People find it easier to relate to parables and stories. Think about the tales that have survived history — the Bible, religious Hindu texts — they use parables to drive the philosophy. So, I created fictional characters that could carry the idea forward. Horizontally challenged Tony, Dr John and Yevgenia Krasnova are among them.

Throughout your book, you take on ‘intellectuals’. Even Nobel Economics Prize winners are not out of reach!
There is a big difference between the erudite and the knowledgeable. The erudite are deeply dissatisfied by their knowledge. Academics focus on what they know. I like to bring down the pseudo-gods and bring up the little guy. (Taleb then tells of how he has to constantly resist the urge to stuff rats down shirts of boring lecturers — just to see how they react).

What are some of the classic examples of black swan events?
A classic black swan event is the First War (World War I). It was not as predictable as people believe it was. Then you have all this technology — computers, lasers. Their future uses could never be predicted when they were invented.

You mention taking time off to do more thinking. Are there plans for another book?
I am letting the ideas run me rather than the other way around. I am now thinking about the boundaries between the holy and the empirical. We tend to be empirical with the holy (which includes religion and art) and platonic with the empirical.

What is a Black Swan?
Medieval Europeans had only ever seen white swans. In fact, any impossible event was termed a ‘black swan’. So, when the first settlers reached Australia, they were shocked to find black swans all over! Taleb's black swans are those events that were once thought impossible, but when they occur, hit hard. In this extract, he writes about how we create narratives after ‘black swan’ events; making them seem predictable after they occur.

Related Links :
The Black Swan