In this talk I will explain how certain aspects of black hole physics can be understood using ideas from effective field theory. Many of the familiar notions from particle physics will play a role, including the renormalization group, universality and naturalness. In particular, I will explain why black holes naively seem like fine-tuned systems, but they are ultimately not. I will also explain how their effective description reveals a degree of universality that can be used to resum certain features of the gravitational waveform for binary mergers observed by LIGO/Virgo/Kagra.
