If insurance companies are the great business claimed by the reviewer to contradict Taleb, then why did reinsurance companies lose money on their underwriting activities for 19 of the last 20 years!? The reviewer is obviously out of contact with reality.

Moreover, a Katrina sized risk is now pretty close to falling into the realm of normally distributed risks, estimated by some insurers as having a probability of ~3% a year. A truly long tail risk today would be on the order of $100B, a triple Katrina, and it can be easily contemplated, had Katrina or another Category 5 storm chosen Miami or other more heavily developed area than NOLA to make landfall. The point being: having already mispriced their exposure by "selling puts" too cheaply, it can be fairly argued that insurance companies still got lucky that their losses weren't even higher.

Having LOST A LOT OF MONEY on underwriting, insurance companies only managed to climb back into the land of respectable returns thanks to their investment returns which are surely NOT sourced in a material way from selling puts or otherwise trying to collar the wildness that Taleb writes about.