Emil Michael
U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering | Former Chief Business Officer at Uber | Tech Investor and Strategic Advisor
Author, the Incerto (The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, and Skin in the Game)
Former quantitative trader. Taleb is the author of a multivolume essay, the Incerto (The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, and Skin in the Game) covering broad facets of uncertainty. His work has been published into 49 languages.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent 21 years as a risk taker (quantitative trader) before becoming a researcher in philosophical, mathematical and (mostly) practical problems with probability.
Taleb is the author of a multivolume essay, the Incerto (The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, and Skin in the Game) covering broad facets of uncertainty. His work has been published into 49 languages.
In addition to his trader life, Taleb has also written, as a backup of the Incerto, more than 70 technical and scholarly papers in mathematical statistics, genetics, quantitative finance, statistical physics, medicine, philosophy, ethics, economics, & international affairs, around the notion of risk and probability (grouped in the Technical Incerto).
Taleb is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering (retired) and scientific advisor for Universa Investments. His current focus is on the properties of systems that can handle disorder (“antifragile”).
Taleb refuses all honors and anything that “turns knowledge into a spectator sport”.
Taleb traveled the conventional route of education to real-life and theory to practice in inverse sequence from the common one, moving from the practical to the philosophical to the mathematical. He started as a trader, then got a doctorate in mid-trading career; he wrote literary books before writing technical papers, and his work became progressively more technical and formal with time.
Rare and unpredictable events shape history, markets, and technological change. The central problem is not predicting them, but recognizing that most models ignore their possibility and that humans invent explanations after the fact. The talk focuses on how to think and make decisions in environments dominated by extreme events.
Some systems do not merely resist shocks, volatility, or errors but improve because of them. The talk explores how to distinguish fragile systems from antifragile ones in economics, organizations, and personal decision-making, and why many modern systems are designed in fragile ways.
Decisions should be made by people who share the risks of their consequences. When decision-makers do not bear the costs of failure, incentives become distorted and systems become fragile. The talk focuses on responsibility, risk distribution, and hidden asymmetries in politics, finance, and society.
Much of what we attribute to skill or success is in fact luck. Humans systematically mistake randomness for causality, learn from visible winners while ignoring unseen losers, and judge skill from outcomes. The talk examines how randomness distorts our perception of risk, success, and knowledge.
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