Podcast
The Tenth Man Podcast
Case studies in failed consensus and high-stakes decisions.
Every high-stakes domain has a version of institutionalized dissent.
Military intelligence formalized it after the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Aviation built it into accident investigation after disaster.
Medicine invented controlled trials to question doctors’ judgment.
Finance rewards contrarian funds that find reasons not to invest.
This show documents that pattern and explores what happens when everyone agrees and what that can cost.
Each episode takes one moment where consensus failed, then traces how that domain responded.
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Episodes
Recent episodes (newest first). Open an episode for show notes and listening options.
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The Laboratory
April 29, 2026
Theranos assembled what Fortune called "the most illustrious board in U.S. corporate history." Two former Secretaries of State. A former Secretary of Defense. A retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A former…
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The Obligation to Disagree
April 22, 2026
In June 2004, Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint from executive meetings at Amazon. The replacement: six-page narrative memos, read in silence for thirty minutes before anyone spoke. His reasoning was structural. Bullet points…
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The Room Where It Happened Twice
April 15, 2026
In April 1961, fifty of the most experienced foreign policy minds in America sat in a room and agreed to invade Cuba. The Bay of Pigs was over in three days. Afterward, President Kennedy asked the question that still…
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The Most Expensive Opinion in the World
April 8, 2026
In 2005, a failed analyst with a last-chance desk job built a chart from decades of housing price data. The chart showed a bubble. His boss bet everything on it. Two years later, the firm made $15 billion. In between…
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The Industry That Learned to Fail
April 1, 2026
In 1968, your odds of dying on a commercial flight were roughly 1 in 350,000. By 2022, that number was 1 in 13.7 million. Aviation didn't get there by building better planes. It got there by building a system that treats…
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The Doctor Who Was Wrong on Purpose
March 25, 2026
On December 14th, 1799, George Washington's physicians did what medicine had done for two thousand years. They bled him. Three times. He was dead by evening. They were not reckless. They were following the most…
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The Engineers Who Were Right
March 18, 2026
On the night of January 27th, 1986, a group of engineers in Utah tried to stop the Challenger launch. They had the data. They had a documented history of a known design flaw. They had a teleconference with NASA that…
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The Original Tenth Man | The Intelligence Failure That Nearly Broke Israel
March 11, 2026
On October 6th, 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel. The intelligence wasn't missing. It was dismissed. For six months, Israeli military intelligence had been receiving warnings, and none of it…
Why this show exists
The Tenth Man Podcast studies moments when institutions, teams, markets, and leaders failed to challenge the obvious answer. Each episode looks at the assumptions, incentives, blind spots, and dissent that shaped the decision.
From case studies to decision systems
The same patterns that appear in historic failures also show up in business, hiring, product strategy, procurement, and go-to-market decisions. Tenth Man applies structured dissent to modern decision-making through an auditable AI decision workflow.