The Tenth Man Podcast
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 Challenger. Medicine invented controlled trials to distrust the doctor's own judgment. Finance rewards the contrarian fund manager who is structurally required to find reasons not to invest.
This show documents that pattern and tells a human story about what happens when everyone agrees and what that can cost.
Each episode takes one domain and one moment where consensus failed catastrophically, then traces how that domain responded by building opposition into its structure.
Episodes
10 episodes
The Council of Nine
In the 1952 television pilot of The Adventures of Superman, the planet Krypton's leading scientist presents evidence to a council of nine that the planet is going to be destroyed. His data is sound. His methods are not in dispute. The ...
The Test That Wasn't
In July 2002, the United States military conducted the most expensive war game in its history. The Red team commander, retired Marine Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper, sank sixteen ships including an aircraft carrier in the opening days using ...
The Laboratory
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 U.S. Senator. Between them,...
The Obligation to Disagree
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 let the presenter hide ...
The Room Where It Happened Twice
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 haunts every organization t...
The Most Expensive Opinion in the World
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: daily losses, inves...
The Industry That Learned to Fail
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 every failure as inform...
The Doctor Who Was Wrong on Purpose
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 credentialed, most consensus-supp...
The Engineers Who Were Right
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 lasted hours.They did...
The Original Tenth Man | The Intelligence Failure That Nearly Broke Israel
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 changed the outcome.
