Before The Black Swan was published, Taleb had been a prophet without honour in the United States. “I knew before the crash that the system was going to blow up. In 2003, I went to the New York Times and said, ‘Fannie Mae [the Federal National Mortgage Association] is sitting on dynamite with taxpayers’ money. These guys are going to blow up with my money because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing risk-wise.’” But the “Gray Lady” didn’t listen. “I just had smear campaign after smear campaign.”

Taleb is currently engaged in a feud with the Times’s star columnist Thomas Friedman “He’s after me now”, whom he lambasts in the book for being a cheerleader for the Iraq war. Like the senior executives at the bailed-out banks, Friedman “paid no price for his mistakes”.

via Nassim Nicholas Taleb: A thinker with an antifragile ego.