The whole mechanism of trial & error is undervalued | Nassim Nicholas Taleb x CROZ – Walk your Talk

·       Why outsourcing trials & errors to the past is called tradition, and what has it to do with olive oil?

·       It’s pretty clear to all of us that jumping 100 times from 1 m and one time from 100 meters is not the same. But why cannot we understand and use this logic in other aspects of life, both physical and mental? 

·       How to expose self to stressors, to challenging intellectual problems, not with the aim to solve the problems but to benefit from the process?

Those are just some of the questions answered by our keynote speaker Nassim Nicholas Taleb at QED Conference in Zadar, organized by CROZ, a German-Croatian BizTech consultancy, in May 2026. 

After learning so much about his master concepts of Antifragility, Skin in the Game and Black Swan, we decided to create this Walk your Talk special and share some Nassim’s thoughts from Zadar with you. 

For other materials and talks from the conference, subscribe to our channel. 

Host: Vedrana Miholić, Chief Revenue Officer of CROZ; Managing Director of DACH office

Walk Your Talk - podcast by CROZ

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Here we are at QED, and uh we are having a moment in which we are uh recording our podcast Walk Your Talk without Miri this time. Because uh yesterday during a really nice conversation with our dear keynote speaker here at QED, Nasim Talib, I kindly asked him to join for a few moments just to help us in our, I would say, personal quests to become anti-fragile fragile as people, because we had you you said so many things that moved us here, so I just wanted to share. Okay, okay, everybody's fragile a bit, but can you help me with how you see this personal anti-fragility and what stands in our point is is not uh forget about fragile uh fragility.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Look at what makes you fragile. Okay, what makes you fragile is anything steady, anything highly predictable, and anything that doesn't have uh acute occasional variations.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

So same thing.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

So you know when it will come and what it will do.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

Yeah, so for example, uh and and your your body needs some kind of stresses. You you don't subject yourself to stresses, of course, you age faster. Yeah. Then you gotta figure out even uh uh athletes they have the cyclists that like some stresses. So you gotta be exposed to all of these variations. Uh forget stressor doesn't have to be stressful. Stressor, what I meant is something, and I mean exposure to some variable, to a variable that is not constant.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

So uh but the same thing for a company. Uh I was at breakfast, uh said, okay, what's the best predictor of company's death? Oh, this will be recorded if I'm happy. Very similar to heart rate variability, the best predictor of uh a person's death. Steady earnings.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

For a country, steady exchange rates.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

See, you had a steady, steady, steady more likely to collapse. Argentina had a constant rate of dollar for something like 17 years. No variation, one to one. And profit and and and it took two days for the thing to unravel. So things that have authority are getting information from the environment.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Okay, for example, here I have a Mediterranean skin.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

I sit on the sun, it codes it codes, it reacts to the environment, so it predicts more sun.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

So you code to protect yourself for more sun. I lift ten kilos, predicts I'm gonna may have to lift eleven kilos. Okay. So you the you get signal from the environment, not from the brain. Every single and the same thing for companies. Okay. You see? So you get signal from the markets, not from your uh from your own brain from your own planning. Exactly. Right. Yeah, you get from from from the environment, and how you react to the environment is is builds muscles. Or in the city. And you react to PL. So if you have variation of PL, it gives you information about the environment. It gives you information uh about what you need. You see, for example, uh human beings, when you have you go through phases where you have a lot of f manual physical world, you build muscles. Yeah. But then you don't need them at other times. That's a reaction to the they go away, they wanna from the environment. The same thing for co uh corporations. So the idea is we are made to be scared of variability because it can harm you, it can harm you in large doses. You see, but we were never able to control the short-term environment. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:51

You you you y yesterday you mentioned this jumping from one meter or five meter. This is like easy to to to understand.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

So if uh anything fragile is when uh you have nonlinearity in in uh the harm, the harm function. So if I jump, one meter is actually good for my bones.

SPEAKER_01 4:14

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

A hundred meters is not a hundred times one meter.

SPEAKER_01 4:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

You see? Like uh I think I think if you jump from from uh uh the third floor and fourth floor, uh Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

I don't want to know. You don't want to try. I don't wanna know. So But we talked yesterday as well uh about uh carrying the weighted vests, how how that good is for for for for your back. But if you just go out and suddenly start wearing it, you will be after that just tired.

SPEAKER_00 4:54

Yeah, yeah, but still it it it it uh uh it it is it it's better than nothing. Yeah, right. But of course, uh you have to do it, uh you have to build yourself, otherwise you get injured. Yeah. Um and and actually what I say is you have to stress your whole body, but people didn't know. And I wrote an antifragile based on research that was just coming out of a guy called Carcenti, that your bone we thought that the bone was just some kind of idle structure.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 5:24

Uh in fact it's not idle because it has uh bone marrow, but uh but that it doesn't change so much. Yeah, we didn't realize that the bone is a an endocrine regulator and uh regulates your memory.

SPEAKER_01 5:37

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

So a healthy bone is just very uh m more.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

More important than anybody would think about.

SPEAKER_00 5:46

So and most people you see around who go to the gym, they don't stress their bone. So they have osteopenia.

SPEAKER_01 5:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 5:55

And it has consequences. Even your skin is affected by. In the old days, we used to carry babies, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, uh cousins.

SPEAKER_01 6:04

Yes. Until the like you said, until the very dead end you would carry it.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

And or water, uh, water jugs on your head. So we we don't have that anymore. And uh so we're deprived of that stressor. So you gotta look at the stresses we used to have, and we don't have anymore. But we can introduce them.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

We can carry our baggage on the airports, right? We talked about that as well. We can we can start avoiding those kinds of stresses.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

You you gotta you could do a little modification in your life to remedy uh mod modern uh life, but there's two things. For example, temperature. Yeah, every temperature is overregulated, so we have saunas. And um a few years ago I was in uh in Qatar where visibly they don't need saunas, they have the reverse, they have a room where you go and freeze for for a few seconds, uh okay, and minus ten degrees for a few, I don't know, 30 to 30, 40 seconds, and because your body needs that stressor. And the same thing the floor, look how smooth the floor is. That's not nature. If you walk in nature, you know no two steps will ever be the same. Whereas here your steps are practically identical.

SPEAKER_01 7:14

And when we talk now, when we move from physical to mental, which is maybe which we avoid, I would say, to to uh those variations on our mental mental is even uh more often, I would say. Uh how do you personally yourself expose yourself to math?

SPEAKER_00 7:34

I'm not I'm I'm not good at it, but I try uh to do something. Uh first of all, uh we are never made to really go study on our own. Uh my way and uh boring uh with boring people. Yeah. We're made to react to environments. Okay. So life was not boring. Even exercise now exercise has to make an effort to exercise. In the past, you see a line coming, it's natural. You run, you you don't have you don't have to make an effort to do that. It's the same, it should be the same thing. I I think my approach is languages and math. Okay. I became a uh full-time uh mathematical uh researcher when I was in my fifties. And people told me, listen, at twenty-five, a mathematician is a geriatric. What are you doing? And since then I have eighty-three papers. Wow. Okay. Wow. The average person who gets a good job has three or four good papers. I have eighty-three, all right. I mean eighty-three of like fifty. It's really amazing that you start the papers. So starting, in fact.

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:42

But but I mean I was lucky, like I wasn't doing it for any career or money, I was just doing it because I was bored. Okay. But uh but it it uh so so stressing yourself was either um some kind of challenging intellectual problem, not because to do not to solve a problem, but because you feel like you live in it. Okay. Being immersed in yours, then becomes yeah, it becomes like almost a necessity. You want to go almost like a lie. Yeah, like for example, anti-fragility came out of that uh research uh uh uh project. And another thing is languages. You're lucky in uh in Croatia that you learn uh to read Cyrillic and different alphabet, and yeah, but the better stressor is if you learn to read right to left.

SPEAKER_01 9:30

Okay. So many homeworks for me, but you said something over the breakfast which helped me to continue with my German, and that making mistakes, especially small mistakes, is as well very welcomed.

SPEAKER_00 9:43

Yeah, it's cool. The school system penalizes you for making mistakes. In real life you learn from mistakes.

SPEAKER_01 9:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:50

I mean the whole mechanism of trial and error is is undervalued, and I showed uh you know, in Antifragile and and elsewhere that for example they have 120,000 drugs on the market today. Depending on, you know, worldwide. Of these, maybe a dozen were are used for the initial purpose for which they were designed. Everything else is accidental.

SPEAKER_01 10:21

Okay. It's a side product.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

It happened like uh like uh uh Viagra, I'm sure nobody has heard of it, but uh Viagra is a was uh blood pressure medicine.

SPEAKER_01 10:31

Okay, and then they realized, okay.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

And then people were too happy with the experiment, so the doctor found it suspicious. Um uh today we take aspirin. Today is a blood thinner. It used to be a fever reducer, and and of course the side effect was a painkiller, all right? And no, nobody uses as a painkiller, it's just uh so so but aspirin has been uh been around, it had its third iteration and may have another one. So trial and error is because we cannot predict the environment. But so it's the the the idea of fragility, anti-fragility is you have the effect of a random variable is the negative effect is small and the positive is bigger. Trial and error, you have a small loss or a small expenditure for a big payoff. And and everything is seems to be driven by trial and error, but we think we rationalize it and we think that we intellectualize it. I mean the entire I mean we just ate breakfast.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:35

Every single cheese you have, nothing was designed. Yes, yes, trial and except in Michelin stars and avoid Michelin restaurant. It was cooking is a trial and error thing. But you you can't really sit down and write down on a piece of paper, uh, okay, I'm gonna make uh uh squid ink risotto or new technique. No, you do it and then it's trial and error.

SPEAKER_01 11:58

And you really need to be immersed, as you said, in order. Which brings me to your, I hope, uh dear topic and back to your country, which is Lebanon, and your olive oil first. How many trials or error errors were there when you were when you started with your production?

SPEAKER_00 12:15

No, it was not it was not because I used accumulated uh wisdom which is uh comes from trial and error.

SPEAKER_01 12:21

Okay, so you outsource trials and errors to the past.

SPEAKER_00 12:24

Yeah, to the to the past, yeah. This is this is called tradition. Yeah. You see, this is when you take a cooking recipe, yeah, it's not invented by chemists, it's invented by uh series of uh cooks and grandmothers and grandparents and and granduncles cooking and and modifying it. This is why every region has plus it's typically adapted to what grows in a region.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

And it's amazing how our energy and our spirits change when we talk about those times and our homelands and all of that. So, first of all, thank you really so much, but not only for this conversation, but for coming here in Croatia.

SPEAKER_00 13:01

I love this place. This is very strange. I mean, I will I'm shocked to hear people speak a lot Slavic language because you think you're Ukrainian. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

Yeah, but what I really wanted to emphasize uh at the end that we learned so much from you and about you since you arrived. And one of the things uh it really amazed me is how much you are doing for Lebanon. Not only that you are donating so much and uh all the fees and all of that, but you go like every month still.

SPEAKER_00 13:29

No, and in season I go, but I go for the food. I'm going to go for the food.

SPEAKER_01 13:33

You go for students, come on.

SPEAKER_00 13:34

Yeah, but I go for the food.

SPEAKER_01 13:36

Yeah, so thank you once more. This was thank you. Thanks.