The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

What if the most transformative events that shape our lives and our world are the ones we can't see coming? In this short, Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that rare, unpredictable, and high-impact "Black Swan" events explain almost everything about how our world works, yet we often blind ourselves to their significance. From the success of ideas and religions to the dynamics of history, Black Swans lie outside our field of expectation but in hindsight appear less random than inevitable. Taleb exposes how our cognitive biases, hunger for patterns and causality, and desire for clean narratives set us up for devastating misjudgments when the next unforeseeable event inevitably occurs. By accepting the limits of our predictive powers and embracing ignorance as a strength, Taleb shows how we can position ourselves to survive and even benefit from an uncertain world.