![]() ![]() "And what'll you have?" asks the waitress. We go to his regular restaurant, a no-nonsense, Italian-run, canteen-like place, a few yards from his faculty in central Brooklyn, and he insists that I order a glass of wine. Social constraints, it turns out, have their uses. "When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters." "In your book, you're quite…" and I struggle to find the right word, "grumpy". ![]() When I say as much as we walk to the restaurant, he asks, "What do you mean?" And this is just in the last week.Īnd yet here he is, chatting away, surprisingly friendly and approachable. When he's not slagging off the Nobel prize for economics (a "fraud"), bankers ("I have a physical allergy to them") and the academic establishment (he has it in for something he calls the "Soviet-Harvard illusion"), he's trading blows with Steven Pinker ("clueless"), and a random reviewer on Amazon, who he took to his Twitter stream to berate. ![]() In print, the hating and despising is there for all to see: he's forever having spats and fights. But then, being contradictory about what one hates and despises and loves and admires is actually another key Nassim Taleb trait. "You're OK."īeing artsy fartsy, I will learn, is even lower down the scale of Nassim Taleb pet hates than journalists. He wanted to be artsy fartsy," he tells the photographer, Mike McGregor. He claims it's the first time he's allowed it in three years, and has allotted just 10 minutes for it, though in the end it's more like five. I want that to be known."), smiling and effusive.įirst, though, he has to have his photo taken. And yet there he is, striding into the faculty lobby in a jacket and Steve Jobs turtleneck ("I want you to write down that I started wearing them before he did. I approach our lunch meeting, at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University where he's the "distinguished professor of risk engineering", as one might approach a sleeping bear: gingerly. So imagine, if you will, how keenly he must be looking forward to the prospect of a pre-arranged appointment to meet me, a journalist. ![]()
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