Taleb grew up in Lebanon. His childhood was shaped by the civil war occurring in this formerly peaceful place.

The civil war was a black swan. It was history.

Taleb says this about history...

• History is a black box. We see what happens on the outside, but not the inner processes.

• History does not proceed smoothly, but in jumps as black swan events occur.

• Human problems with history result from a "triplet of opacity":

We think we understand present history (when we don't - imagine historians sitting in front of a TV camera doing the "aw shucks" thing trying to explain the historical significance of some current event).

Past history viewed from the present seems a lot clearer now than it was then (imagine the same historians explaining the inevitability of 9/11).

Learned people (the historians above) create overvalued facts and bogus platonic categories.

Regarding the opinions of learned people (and the categories they devise)...

• Humans tend to cluster around fashionable or accepted opinions. We look for patterns that reinforce the patterns we already perceive.

• Categorizing is what we do and as always, it is at the expense of the real complexity in the world around us. Stuff is always more complicated than it seems.

Realizing all this, Taleb became a QUANT (someone who works in quantitative finance). But unlike other QUANTS, he places calculated bets on the Platonic Fold - the place where our understanding breaks down and black swans arise.