Nassim Taleb on the importance of embracing unpredictable events

Few intellectuals are as outspoken and controversial as Nassim Taleb. The author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan believes that we underestimate the effects of randomness, making us vulnerable to bad predictions. Not afraid to characterise everyone from economists to academics to government planners as charlatans, he even came close to predicting the financial crisis - but then he hates predictions anyway, preferring to focus on the often unforeseen or even unforeseeable consequences, and how to deal with their effects. On the publication of his new book, Antifragile , in which he recommends building a world that benefits from randomness, shocks and volatility rather than being damaged by them, he spoke to

The most damaging group are economists; probably the most damaging individual is [former chairman of the US Federal Reserve] Alan Greenspan, and maybe also [current Fed chairman] Ben Bernanke and [US treasury secretary] Timothy Geithner. The reason I'm against the top-down state isn't so much theoretical, but because of what I call having skin in the game - bureaucrats have no personal stake in their decisions. I don't tell you what I predict; I tell you what's in my portfolio. So economics-wise, I don't want people to tell me what to do; I want to know what they're doing.

-
In 2008 I was under direct threats. It wasn't just me having hallucinations: I was in a restaurant, went to the bathroom, came back and there was a note on my plate. I actually read about it in The Wall Street Journal - that people from [defunct investment bank] Lehman [Brothers] wanted to beat me up. I was flattered but also frustrated at not knowing who they were. At conferences, when someone says insulting things to you in person, I can deal with that.

It seems this time that I'm not misunderstood as much as last time. When I wrote The Black Swan, a lot of attacks came from economists. What bothered me was that book reviewers hadn't even read the book. About a week before the publication of Antifragile, I put a short op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, just listing about five main points, and all the reviews written after that were anchored on it, not on other reviews.