Taleb has made a career out of popularizing common financial statistics with historical flavor. He usually presents himself as a polymath/oracle in this writing

Taleb has made a career out of popularizing common financial statistics with historical flavor. He usually presents himself as a polymath/oracle in this writing although he has never developed any interesting ideas in the area. His work is mostly a pop-sci rehash of non-gaussian wikipedia stats formatted in Mathematica with a helping of cringey memes. For an especially embarrassing example see https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488 https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10488. All of this serves the purpose of juicing Universa, a fund which charges a generous incentive fee for holding a rolling SPX put, something which I think a dog could do. Since people don't read books much anymore he picks fights with people on twitter to raise his profile. He targets people who he thinks are likely to engage him (Nate Silver, Elon Musk etc), although most are too smart to take the bait. He fancies himself a powerlifter although he has physique of Homer Simpson. The man is generally a sad caricature of someone who traded volatility once. I personally mathematically model volatility for a living, and although I wouldn't pretend to have done as much as Bergomi I still feel I have the right to find Taleb grotesque. I agree that a mathematical history of non-Gaussian mathematics would be a fascinating thing, especially the recent past. I also would agree that just following links from "alpha Levy-stable" might not be as digestible as Taleb. But his pretensions and self-importance, in the face of completely superficial understanding and achievement, is gross. If history records his name and not Gatheral's it would be a crime.