- Define a Black Swan by its three marks, and explain why it is relative to the observer: a surprise for the turkey is a plan for the butcher.
- Sort any domain into Mediocristan or Extremistan by asking one question: can a single observation move the total disproportionately?
- Recognize the turkey problem in a long, calm track record, and check which kind of randomness produced it before you trust it.
- Tell “no evidence of Black Swans” apart from “evidence of no Black Swans”, and know where confusing the two gets expensive.
- Catch the narrative fallacy, memory's rewrites and the pull of anecdotes, and counter them with deliberate habits like a diary and a written base rate.
- Ask who never made it into the sample before you trust a track record, a success story or a dataset.
- Judge when a game, an exam or a clean model is a fair stand-in for a real decision, and where it stops fitting.
- Calibrate your own forecasts with honest ranges, and trust experts by whether their field is learnable, not by their credentials.
- Read a plan's range before its average, because the surprises in projects push cost and time in one direction.
- Explain Taleb's barbell, a truly safe majority plus a small speculative part and nothing in the middle, and why it fails if the safe leg is not safe.
- Explain where the bell curve is legitimate, and why fractal models turn some Black Swans gray but never all of them.
- Find the fourth quadrant in your own decisions, and change the exposure instead of modeling the risk harder.
The Black Swan
Based on The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb · Live
The Course
The Black Swan: Critical Thinking about the Unpredictable
What You’ll Learn
Course Structure
12 modules · 34 lectures · a quiz for each module · a downloadable reference guide
Module 1 — The Event
Module 2 — The Two Countries
Module 3 — The Narrative Machine
Module 4 — The Unseen
Module 5 — The Sterile Game
Module 6 — The Scandal of Prediction
Module 7 — The Limits of Knowledge
Module 8 — Acting Without Prediction
Module 9 — Extremistan’s Economy
Module 10 — The Bell Curve Fraud
Module 11 — Living with Black Swans
Module 12 — The Robust Life
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence. The narration is my own recorded voice, the visuals are programmatically rendered from code, with licensed photographs and stock footage; none of the imagery is AI-generated. The scripts were written with AI assistance from my own reading notes.
The Black Swan: Critical Thinking about the Unpredictable
Nassim Taleb's book, taught concept by concept: rare events, cognitive bias, and acting without a forecast. The full course is 34 lectures across 12 modules — just over two hours of animated explainers, a quiz for each of the 12 modules, and a downloadable reference guide.
Take the course on Udemy →These ideas are the engine behind Ungambled
Drew Tabor applied these principles to build a system that converts sportsbook promotions into cash profit — no gambling required. 23 modules, 111 lectures. Every technique broken into short, concrete steps.
Take the Ungambled course on Udemy →Ungambled, the book — now on Amazon →
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