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?

In this episode, Paolo Sironi speaks with Ritavan, author of the new book The System Gambit—a rigorous guide to the one strategic move that most investors and operators never make. They say companies get disrupted because they miss the signals. This is technically true, but many are not missing the signals. They are reading them correctly and responding rationally, and the rational response is the trap. Every benchmark they hit is proof that they are excellent at a game whose rules have already changed. Nobody is going to tell them this. Their metrics cannot see it, and their board is scoring the old game. Finding it is your job, and it is worth doing properly. The move is a system crossing rather than a reallocation of resources, because the logic that wins in your current system is the same logic that blocks the position that compounds in the next one, and you cannot run both at once. This book conversation maps the eight system crossings, the sacrifice each one demands, and how to defend that sacrifice to people keeping score the old way.

In this episode, Paolo Sironi speaks with Driss Temsamani, author of the new book The Agentic Bank—a practitioner’s roadmap that shows how finance is shifting from platforms to intelligence. Temsamani, a three-decade banking leader and advisor to central banks and regulators, explains how AI-powered agents are bringing autonomy, reasoning, and collaboration into the heart of modern institutions, creating the AI-native financial institution where humans and intelligent agents work side by side. Through the living example of Lisa, a corporate treasurer, he shows how real-time cash-flow forecasting, liquidity optimization, risk management, and compliance adaptation become possible today. The conversation moves from visionary insight to practical execution, covering the agentic transformation of liquidity, payments, risk, and client engagement, as well as the fusion of AI with blockchain for tokenization and modern market infrastructure. Join this episode to gain the keys to building, deploying, and governing agentic systems so that the institutions that act now will not merely survive the AI era—they will define it.

In this episode, Paolo Sironi speaks with Pal Krogdahl, author of Rip Out the Core—an essential guide for anyone wrestling with the stubborn realities of banking core modernization. Despite massive investments, many institutions still face overruns, delays, and outcomes that leave them no stronger than before. Sparked by a flooded kitchen that perfectly mirrored the chaos of real-world banking transformation programs, Pal’s book shifts the lens from pure technology to organization, showing that lasting change is impossible without adapting the way people work. He speaks to banking executives and transformation leaders tired of endless patching, converting hard-won industry experience into precise, actionable steps that finally deliver meaningful business value. Join us as we unpack why core modernization so often fails, how organizational design must evolve alongside systems, and the practical path to progress that stops the cycle of frustration once and for all.

In this episode, Paolo Sironi speaks with Prof. Dr. Ingird Vasiliu-Feltes, author of the new book The Art of Quantum: Statecraft, Sovereignty, Strategy—a timely strategic manifesto that reimagines classical principles of foresight and power (inspired by The Art of War) for the quantum age. As demographic shifts concentrate workforce and economic power in emerging economies by 2030, and technology giants increasingly rival nation-states, the very meaning of sovereignty is being rewritten. Ingird makes a compelling dual case: nations must urgently build quantum sovereignty frameworks to safeguard security, economic stability, and strategic autonomy, while enterprises must engineer quantum resilience to stay competitive in a technology-dominated landscape. We unpack Ingird’s call for integrated quantum governance, orchestration across legal, regulatory, diplomatic, and cyber-ethical domains, and the practical steps required to create regenerative, quantum-resilient ecosystems. Listeners will gain frameworks for quantum literacy, leadership recalibration, and the high-stakes race that will define competitive advantage, national power, and enterprise survival in the decades ahead. Those who master the “art of quantum” will shape the future—join us as we examine why this is no longer optional.

In this episode, Paolo Sironi speaks with Jean-Philippe Desbiolles author of the updated book AI Will Be What You Make of It (originally published in 2019). Desbiolles argues that AI’s impact on banking and society will ultimately be determined by human choices, not technology. He introduces the concept of a “co-era,” in which AI functions as a collaborative co-worker rather than a simple tool, requiring humans to develop “let-go” behaviors while staying in control.The discussion explores how banks can move beyond pilots by adopting a “cognitive factory” operating model to scale AI across business lines and processes. Desbiolles also examines the rise of agentic AI, which creates complex four-way relationships between customers, bankers, and their respective intelligent agents, fundamentally reshaping customer relationship management. Central to the conversation is the need to build trust through operational ethics frameworks, transparency, and responsible adoption to achieve real ROI. Desbiolles emphasizes that AI is driving a holistic transformation of organizations and society, and that success depends on placing humans at the center to create a virtuous cycle rather than a vicious one.