In this episode of The Banker’s Bookshelf, host Paolo Sironi welcomes Tony Fish, author of Decision Making in Uncertain Times, for a wide-ranging conversation on navigating fundamental uncertainty in finance, technology, and leadership.

Tony explains that the book stems from his experience as a severely dyslexic and autistic thinker. Written primarily for neurotypical readers, it shows how people who see the world differently approach uncertainty, so that boardrooms can better understand and use those perspectives. Rather than offering a single framework or model, the book presents ten distinct ways of viewing the same situation. Central to this is the idea of paradox: the same data can support two valid but opposing interpretations. Fish argues that every important decision should contain a paradox; without it, decisionmakers remain trapped inside an existing frame. The final chapter explores “Peak Paradox.”

He contends that many foundations of modern decision-making—money, law, time, and especially counting—are human inventions that do not exist in nature. Counting does not equal truth, yet metrics and trend lines are routinely treated as truth. KPIs often begin for narrow reasons (incentives, bonuses) and then persist as “ghosts in the system,” even after the original purpose disappears and the underlying data changes.

On AI and geopolitics, Fish describes sovereignty as Schrödinger’s cat: simultaneously alive and dead. What once meant freedom from asking permission now means interdependence. Claims of AI sovereignty, he says, are “unbelievable levels of madness.” Companies are becoming more sovereign than states, while limited-liability structures are failing. He points to the need to rethink what companies are for.

Fish distinguishes choices, decisions, and judgment. Children are typically offered A or B and asked to decide but rarely taught to ask whether the right choices were even presented. Dyslexic thinkers often see the missing options. Judgment—reflection on whether the available choices were adequate—should begin early and be central to leadership, not reserved for later life.

Finally, he introduces “consurgence,” an old English word meaning “rising together.” Trust, leadership, and success cannot simply be built; they may emerge from conditions, or they may not. There are no guarantees. The constructionist mindset that tries to engineer the perfect outcome (the best teams, the best pitch, the best game) fails to account for this. Banking, he notes, often claims to “build” trust, yet trust cannot be constructed on command.

In this episode of Banker’s Bookshelf, Paolo Sironi sits with Eric So, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Global Economics and Behavioral Science, to discuss his new book “The Collision”.

The conversation opens on a distinction most AI talk skips. The industry asks what the technology can do for us. So asks what it is doing to us: to the skills we still bother to build, to our tolerance for difficulty, to what we remember, and to the way we judge the world. He treats AI less as a tool upgrade than as an invasive form of intelligence already reshaping the people who use it. The frame is Steve Jobs’s 1980 line that a computer is a bicycle for the mind, the most efficient mover on the chart. So’s revision is blunt. In the age of AI, the bicycle has become a motorcycle. It offers speed and self-propulsion, and it multiplies the cost of a bad decision. The title is chosen for the same reason. “Adoption” and “shift” sound orderly. “Collision” names a rapid force that is changing human intelligence and machine intelligence at the same time.

From the research, he draws four rules. Value the struggle: products sell the removal of friction, but struggle is how knowledge becomes yours. Students who outsource essays look strong at home and collapse in the exam room. Value who you are without AI: a polished deck you cannot defend is not your work, and the same failure shows up in a client pitch. Reinvest the surplus: history’s transformative tools did not merely speed the old task; they let people reach harder problems. Saved time spent scrolling is a wasted surplus. Make AI a cognitive trainer: personalized tutoring has long delivered a two-sigma learning gain, and AI can approximate it only if it walks you to the answer instead of handing it over.

Banking sits in the middle of the argument. The sector’s instinct is to strip friction and automate cost. So’s warning is cognitive short-termism: fewer juniors, less mentoring, and a thinner bench of people who can still trace a problem when the model is wrong. Efficiency that deskills the institution is not a saving. It is a debt.

The episode is a call to treat AI as a behavioral problem, not only a productivity one.

In this episode, Paolo Sironi welcomes Chris Skinner for an unconventional episode: not the presentation of a business manual, but a financial thriller. In Diary of a Ponzi Scheme — the first novel in Skinner’s Pulp Finction series — a broke operator launches a fund invested in stablecoins, crypto, and digital currencies, then pulls his wealthy circle into a scam that only works as long as new money keeps arriving. Skinner explains why he moved into fiction: to smuggle how finance works into a story, so readers learn tokenization, CBDCs, and crypto without being lectured. The conversation ranges across the wider series like fintech fundraising, a last branch in town, climate activism, and an AI attack that stops payments to return, again and again, to the same question: how do you scale trust?