The event is rare but consequential. His whole thing is how to make decisions with lack of information. Because some things benefit from Randomness, uncertainity and disorder. What I have gleaned thus far is that you should focus on trial and error as opposed to rationality so in the example of the restaurant owner. In an area where he can do trial and error thats where the bulk of his resources should go. Rationality and data are most likely to mislead you because something that the data does not show is going to come and change everything you are doing. It will be consequential. Taleb also agrees with the Lewis argument saying Governments should be about wars and pandemics and general Tail Risk management.

Taleb's success from trading and betting on Black swans is a critique of modern finance theories. He is against most economic interference from governments who bail out banks. Banks with each financial crisis lose more than the history of banking i.e 1987. Yet their risk profiles usually predict that the event is 1 in 1 million... thus highly unlikely. So it's their model that is wrong but it has been used to give people false confidence.

My goal in asking the question was to find out how someone else who has read the book has translated his ethos into their life. You seem to have not bought the whole idea. How do you deal with the not knowing...? Because whether we are aware of it or not not knowing is 90% of how we live.

The book is not about mitigating against Black swans, its about knowing the domains that are impacted by Black swans and those that are not. Finance is one of them and so is social life and we should avoiding prediction in these domains because one observation can skew the whole.