Dr. Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a leading essayist, philosopher of randomness, researcher, and practitioner of financial mathematics. He is one of the most important public intellectuals currently writing. Fortune Magazine called his previous book, ‘Fooled by Randomness’, one of the "smartest books of all time". He is currently the Dean’s Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

As a pioneer of complex financial derivatives, he had a lengthy and successful career as a senior Wall Street trader, before he began his philosophical career as an epistemologist of chance, and focused on the development of his “black swan theory” of unexpected rare events. Taleb's literary approach is to provide a modern-day brand of philosophical tale by mixing narrative fiction, often semi-autobiographical, with scientific commentary in a style similar to Milan Kundera, Ismail Kadare, and Alain de Botton.

Nassim calls himself a "skeptical empiricist", and believes that scientists, economists, historians, policymakers, businessmen, and financiers overestimate the value of rational explanations of past data, and underestimate the prevalence of unexplainable randomness in that data. He follows a long lineage of skeptical philosophers in believing that we know much less than we think we do, and that the past should not be used naively to predict the future.

A natural inspirational orator, Nassim gets amongst his audiences around the world to motivate and personally inspire them.

He presents in English and French.