I had lunch with Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It didn’t go well.

We met at a French cafe in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side, not far from Columbia University. It was a meeting more than a year in the making. I first e-mailed him when his book of aphorisms, The Bed of Procrustes, was published to see if he might submit to an interview. This, I realized, was a long shot. Taleb, best known as the author of The Black Swan, a book about how we underestimate the improbable, isn’t much for interviews and regards most journalists as fools and phonies, right alongside professional academics and bureaucrats. I didn’t expect to hear back.

via This Is Not a Profile of Nassim Taleb – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.