Black Swans: Interconnected, Nonlinear, and Ready to Ruin Your Day

“My name’s Swan.” – The Warriors

When getting coffee in Denmark they don’t allow sugar.  They don’t want it to be sweetish.

I’ve read enough history to know that the world doesn’t change in smooth straight lines.  When change hits, it lurches.  One day everything seems stable and the peasants are happily tilling the fields, and the next they’re communists busy storming the Bastille.

That’s the Black Swan.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb laid the definition out in his book The Black Swan.  A real Black Swan isn’t just a surprise.  It has three traits.

First, it’s an outlier, so far outside what most expected that the past gives zero warning.
Second, it carries an extreme impact, the kind that reshapes economies, governments, or entire ways of life.
Third, after it hits, we humans can’t help ourselves: we retroactively “explain” it like it was obvious all along.

“Of course, a fight about ethics in video game journalism would lead to the Strait of Hormuz being closed.”

A restaurant owner offered me free calamari for a good Internet review.  It was squid pro quo.

We’ve had plenty of Black Swans, but I’ll run through some of the greatest hits reel to show the pattern.

1914.
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo looked like a local Balkan thing. A couple of pistol shots, right? By the end of summer, however, the Guns of August had turned Europe into a meat grinder.  Twenty million ended up dead due to the war.  Empires dismantled.  The map of Europe was redrawn and communism popped up yet again, this time in war-devastated Russia, being just another proof of the Russian national motto:  “And then it got worse”.

1929.
Stock prices had climbed a mountain of margin debt. Thankfully we’ve learned our lesson and now have only twice the margin debt piled into the market here in 2026. But back then?  One bad week in October and the market collapsed like Will Smith’s career.  The Great Depression followed.

1992.
The Soviet Union looked like it would last forever: nukes, tanks, gulags, that guy that Rocky had to box, the works. Then, overnight, it imploded.  Gorbachev’s reforms, economic rot, and a failed coup turned the world’s other superpower into fifteen broke republics.  The Cold War ended not with a bang but with a shrug and empty shelves in Moscow.  This was a positive Black Swan.  Unless you were Gorby.

What’s the difference between a ruble and a dollar?  Roughly a dollar.

2000.
The Dot-Com Bubble in 2000 was next.  Internet stocks were going to change everything. Pets.com.  Webvan.  Internet pizza by the slice, but you had to go pick it up.  Stock valuations that made tulip mania look rational.  When the music stopped, trillions evaporated.  NASDAQ dropped 78%.  One of my friends sold a company for $50 million.  In Alta-Vista® stock.  That he couldn’t sell for two years.

2001.
September 11. Nineteen illiterate savages with box cutters rewrote global security, launched two endless wars, and shifted trillions in spending.  Air travel changed forever.  Civil liberties got waterboarded.  They made The Mrs. take off her sandals going through security, and then ran a metal detector wand over her bare feet after the shoe bomber.

2008.
The Great Recession came from a housing market no one thought could fail.  The cause?  Subprime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, and banks playing Jenga™ with other people’s money.  Lehman Brothers folded, credit froze, and the government printed enough money to wallpaper the Moon.

“Can we fix it?”  Bob’s wife’s attorney, “Not this time, Bob.  Just sign the papers.”

2020.
COVID-19, a virus from a wet market (or a lab, pick your conspiracy) shut down the planet.  Just-in-time supply chains snapped like dry twigs.  Governments printed trillions while telling you to stay home and order DoorDash™ because no one working for DoorDash© could spread the disease.  Inflation roared back like a thing roaring back.

Every single one of these events looked impossible right up until it wasn’t.  And every single one was explained afterward like the smart people had been warning us that these events were going to happen all along.

We are living in the most interconnected, nonlinear system humanity has ever built.  The whole mess is dependent upon global supply chains, instant financial markets, AI-driven trading, just-in-time inventory, and central banks playing God with interest rates.  A hiccup in one node doesn’t stay local anymore.

It cascades.

Nonlinear means small inputs can produce gigantic, unpredictable outputs, like a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing, causing Nic Cage to say “no” when offered a part in a movie.

A Tesla® driver crashed into a semi while watching a Nic Cage movie.  Guess he should have just watched the trailer.

We are in a world where I think more Black Swans are imminent, because there are groups that are actively shaking the foundations of the way the world words.

Like China.  China’s economic ascendency isn’t some slow rise.  It’s unrestricted economic warfare, exactly like the Chinese generals described in their book.  They’ve gutted our manufacturing base while we cheered “free trade.”  They control rare earths, solar panels, pharmaceuticals, and now a big chunk of silver production and refining.  One policy tweak in Beijing and entire U.S. industries seize up.

That’s not theory.  It’s happening.

At the same time, Trump is busy recasting the entire post-World War II alliance structure.  In his defense, it was going to happen anyway, so might as well try to recast it in a way that works for the United States.  The old Cold War playbook:  NATO, endless commitments, sending our treasure overseas while our own borders leak is getting rewritten.

New deals based on new priorities, while old partners are suddenly on notice. When you yank the scaffolding out from under a 75-year-old global order, things get wobbly.

Add in the debt bomb.

Interest payments alone are bigger than defense budgets used to be.  Bond vigilantes haven’t shown up yet, but they’re circling.  One bad auction, one loss of faith, and the bond market revolts.

Rates spike.  Stocks crater.  Pensions and 401(k)s take a hit that makes 2008 look like a warm-up.

Then there’s AI and automation.

We’re likely on the edge of having AGI (artificial general intelligence) that could rewrite every job category.  Or we could get an AI stock crash first: valuations are moonshot, hype is everywhere, and conflicting AI agents trading against each other at light speed could trigger a flash crash that makes 1987 look quaint.  Massive unemployment follows as advanced automation eats white-collar work the way robots ate factory jobs.

What happens when millions of college-educated professionals suddenly have nowhere to go?

Geopolitical Black Swans are lining up too.

Civil unrest in the UK that looks more like low-grade civil war every year:  mass migration, cultural collapse, and the elites are disconnected.  Could Saudi Arabia fracture internally while oil markets hang in the balance?  What about a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake that could drop bridges, snap pipelines, and isolate the Pacific Northwest for weeks?

Any one of these hits an already-fragile, hyper-connected world and the dominoes don’t stop falling.

Any pizza can be a personal pizza.

The point is to recognize the pattern:  complexity plus nonlinearity plus rapid systemic change equals Black Swan habitat.  We’ve never had more of all three at once.

So what to do?

Stop pretending the experts have it under control.  They clearly don’t.

The good news is resilience looks the same for many cases.  Skills beat degrees when the power goes out.  A garden and a stocked pantry beats a grocery store when shelves empty.  Cash, metals, and productive land beat IOUs from a government that prints money like it’s confetti.

The Black Swan doesn’t care about fear, but it does respect preparation.

The next one is coming.  It always does.

And if you’re off to storm the Bastille, well, remember to wear clean underwear.  I’d usually tell a more complicated joke at the end, but the best underwear jokes are brief.