The Logic of Risk Taking

A central chapter that crystallizes all my work. In forth. Skin in the Game

Surgeons Should Not Look Like Surgeons

CHAPTER from SKIN IN THE GAME

Literature doesn’t look like literature –Business plans are for suckers — Donaldo Hiring practitioners –the glory of bureaucracy–teach a professor how to deadlift –looking the part

How to be Rational about Rationality

[One of the more technical (and optional) chapters, at the end of Skin of the Game]

Rory Sutherland claims that the real function for swimming pools is allowing the middle class to sit around in bathing suits without looking ridiculous…

An Expert Called Lindy

Don’t eat their cheesecake– Meta-experts judged by meta-meta-experts– Prostitutes, nonprostitutes, and amateurs — Popper compatibility

(Background. The Black Swan explains the domain-dependence of expertise: why the electrician, dentist, are experts, while the…

The Facts are True, the News is Fake

(Chapter from Skin in the Game)

How to Disagree with Yourself

In the summer of 2009, I partook of a an hour long discussion with David Cameron, who was in the running for, and later became, the…

The Merchandising of Virtue

(Excerpts from Skin in the Game) Sontag is about Sontag — Virtue is precisely what you don’t show

I will always remember my encounter with the writer and cultural icon Susan Sontag, largely because it was on the same day that I met the great Benoit…

Peace: Neither Ink nor Blood

Peace: Neither Ink nor Blood (Chapter in SITG)

Arabs fighting to the last Palestinian –Where are the lions? –Italians don’t die easily– Make historians build rockets –Commerce makes people equal (or unequal but that’s…

Facta non Verba: How to Own Your Enemies

(Chapter in Skin in the Game)

Dead horse in your bed — Friendship via poisoned cake –Roman Emperors and U.S. presidents –A living enemy is worth ten dead ones

Only The Rich Are Poisoned: The Preference of Others

[Chapter from Skin in the Game] The salesman is the boss — How to drink poison — Advertising and manipulation

When people get rich, they shed their skin-in-the game driven experiential mechanism. They lose control…

The Skin of Others in your Game

How to be a whistleblower –Delenda Monsanto — James Bond isn’t a Jesuit priest, but he is a bachelor –so are both Professor Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes –Collective intelligence in P.R. firm Ketchum (hired by Monsanto)–Putting the skin on terrorists