Today, October 4th, at about 2:20 pm EDT, the U.S. government is conducting a test of the Nationwide Emergency Alert System (NEAS). Here is a list of the communication methods the system will use to communicate to everyone about a national threat. The first is … electronic…. Okay, that completes the list of all the communications methods for the Emergency Alert System. In this episode, we’ll be looking at the effectiveness of the NEAS in warning us of two specific catastrophic Black Swan events. 

This morning, at 8:52 am, Mountain Daylight Time, 250-grams of Asteroid Bennu struck Earth in the Great Salt Lake Desert … at a speed of approximately 11 miles per hour. No crater was formed by its impact. In this SPECIAL episode, we’ll go deeper into asteroids as potential Black Swans. 

As part of my situational awareness practice, I was scanning the news headlines early this morning and got hooked by a headline about how NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission “will stop the Asteroid Bennu from shattering Earth" … in 160 years. Sometimes scanning the news is like walking the floor of a gambling casino. I should have kept walking this morning, but I stopped and put a quarter in the Asteroid Bennu machine.

I’m thrilled to introduce the topic of Positive Black Swans, also known as Black Swan Opportunities.  Given that Black Swans are rare, unexpected, and unpredictable, we benefit by having a so-called healthy fear of the negative ones to help break us out of our usual daydream bubble of a mostly calm and predictable daily life.  

We commonly refer to positive unexpected events and situations as opportunities. In fact, Taleb talks quite a bit about such opportunities, what he calls Positive Black Swans. 

He writes, "Seize any opportunity or anything that looks like opportunity. They are rare, much rarer than you think."

Now, Nassim Taleb is not the only smart and wealthy guy who believes and advocates this strategy.  Warren Buffett developed 7 rules of investing. Rule Number 7 is: “Big opportunities have to be seized. You have to grab them when they come because you’re not going to get 500 great opportunities.”

It’s been a rough summer. As we count down the waning days of summer post-Labor Day, perhaps what we need is a relaxing day at the beach. The rhythm of the waves breaking, the cry of gulls overhead, children laughing as they run in the surf. Who knows, perhaps we’ll even spot some petite, gorgeous, to-die-for creature relaxing on the sand.

In this episode, we’ll turn our eyes and thoughts to such rare and exquisite beauties. And the rare and exotic creatures I’m talking about are Black Swans — of course! Only they don’t look like a swan at all. And that can be a BIG problem. 

We discuss "Black Swan Event Cygnets" and how to create your own BSO Cygnet Watch List. In nature, a "cygnet" is a swan hatchling. The term Black Swan Cygnet is a good name for a Black Swan Event hatchling, a potential Black Swan Event in the making. Cygnet here seems appropos because it sounds a bit like “signal,” and that’s a good way to think of it.

Monitoring such cygnets can be very useful for the same reasons meteorologists monitor a tropical depression or tropical storm forming in the Eastern Atlantic Ocean — which has some probability of developing into a dangerous hurricane, like the recent Hurricane Hilary. 

In this episode, we’ll start building the BSO Watch List to help us stay informed and aware. 

First on our watch list, we’ll look at a well-publicized threat: wildfire smoke. We’ll consider both the nature of the threat and the resources that can help us avoid or mitigate the threat’s harmful effects.

Wildfire smoke is a growing problem worldwide. Just this morning, I grabbed my first coffee and went through my news feed. I read this apocalyptic headline from The Washington Post: "Raging Wildfires in Hawaii Force People into the Ocean."

For hazardous wildfire smoke, awareness starts with educating ourselves about the near and intermediate-term probabilities and forecasts.

In this episode, we'll explore a framework for staying in truth and reality so that we can make more effective decisions when faced with any situation. This framework sometimes is referred to as the 3 A’s, or awareness, acceptance, and action.  It refers to the  ability to perceive and comprehend your surroundings, assess and understand what’s going on around you, and make the best decisions based on your understanding in light of your needs and goals 

This episode defines Black Swan Events and introduces how we can explore various strategies, skills and tools that can help us achieve a state of personal readiness for the unknown, to face and potentially engage with an unpredictable event or situation beyond what’s normally expected that produces potentially severe consequences.