Here’s what happened today: Matt Lauer and Garrison Keillor were fired from their respective employers for various levels of sexual impropriety. North Korea fired a missile capable of reaching anywhere in the USA. Bitcoin briefly hit $11k. Weird huh? And these are just the top of the top headlines. What do all these headlines have in common? None of them were supposed to happen. Lauer and Keillor were both icons within their media domain…. where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average. I’m sure we knew that Kim Jong Un could eventually blow us all up, still, it defies the imagination how a country where people eat grass to survive could either avoid a coup for this long or divert so much of a nations resources to such a senseless end. Bitcoin, on fire, formerly used by geeks to order a pizza that would now be valued at $72 million dollars, is suddenly on track to supplant the worlds fiat currencies if it keeps up at the same pace as the past week. Go figure.
If you feel dizzy, go ahead and indulge yourself. This is just one day and tomorrow will be even crazier. We may be headed for time when men are just considered too risky for a lot of high profile public positions, or we may see a huge backlash where king-makers make a new system capable of covering up even worse transgressions. No one can predict a nuclear war but there will be a loser in the North Korean threat and when that happens, the world, especially Asia, will be much different. Hopefully that doesn’t include hundreds of thousands being incinerated. What will happen when a billion or so people suddenly rush from one side of the boat, traditional currency, to the other side, to embrace non-state sponsored coin? Not saying that will happen exactly like that but let’s consider the possibilities.
Time is a critical factor in situations like this. What once took a century gets reduced to a generation, then a year, and then a news cycle. This is not all necessarily doom and gloom; in fact, there are certainly positives to consider. The critical takeaway here is that we’re now in a time where major institutions that we considered in-volatile are routinely now crashing inside of a news cycle. Maybe your institution was not touched today. Buckle your seatbelt, you may wake up to an entirely different reality. This is accelerating.