Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival audiences inevitably contain a handful of academics who make a living drawing lessons from the past and predicting the future: those present on Tuesday April 1 deserve awards for enduring Nassim Taleb’s fabulously rude talk about the pointlessness of their lives’ works.

Taleb, a charismatic Lebanese-American, whose beard gives him the air of a prophet, is famous for his Black Swan theory. This holds that the most important moments in history are unpredicted, unpredictable and utterly life-changing: and that humans tend to gloss over this because we can’t bear randomness. We are wired to seek causes and effects, to find intelligible narratives where none exist. Hindsight is our speciality. He cited as examples the outbreak of the first world war, but 9/11 or the recent implosion of Societe Generale came up too.

Taleb – trader turned academic turned businessman turned essayist – has every reason to crow: since The Black Swan was published last year, many of his Cassandra-like cries have proved right. (Credit crunch, anyone? Who saw that coming round the corner? Certainly not those highly paid city experts Taleb calls "empty suits".) He had, he said, been called in by the Bank of England some time before the current crisis, and had told them firmly: “Make sure you don’t take risks which involve decisions made by people in suits.” This went down (predictably) badly: he wasn’t invited back. Bank forecasts – the work of those empty suits - are meaningless because they don’t take the possibility of extreme random rare events into account. The moral? “You should not give people forecasts. We are incompetent at forecasting.”

By the end, he’d kicked away all our crutches and we were begging for mercy and enlightenment. How then, o master, should we understand the world? Taleb shrugged: “So we are not good at understanding the future, but that’s not a big deal, as long as we know we are not good at it.” Then, his masterstroke: he showed a lovely slide of some elephants and announced: “Elephants are smart. They keep old elephants around because they remember rare events. So we, too, should keep the old around.” A huge wave of relief washed through the room: the octogenarians, in particular, elbowed the young out of the way to buy Taleb’s book and press his hand. He may, by his own admission, know nothing about the future, this fellow, but he sure knows a lot about marketing.

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