Some ideas are better out loud.
I write about the moment a room decides before anyone has finished thinking. Sometimes I’m invited to say it to a room that’s about to.
The short version
I’ve spent my life in rooms full of people who are very, very sure. Test pilots. Founders. Investors. The occasional dinner guest.
I’m interested in what those rooms do to the rest of us, and in the person who feels a small tap on the shoulder, thinks wait, and lets the meeting move on anyway.
That’s what I talk about. It tends to be funny, a little uncomfortable, and specific to whoever is sitting in front of me. I don’t have a twelve-step framework. I do have stories.
Featured on Freakonomics Radio. My fourth book is forthcoming from Greenleaf Book Group in 2027.
Before the Room Decides
How to think clearly before you align
Consensus forms fast. Certainty spreads faster. And somewhere in the middle of the meeting, someone feels a small tap on the shoulder that says wait, and lets it go.
This one is about that tap. Why we override our own judgment, the rooms that teach us to, and how to know what you think before you agree. Not louder. Not more contrarian. Clearer.
Before You Feel Ready
What flight test teaches about deciding without certainty
I grew up in Mojave, where the neighbors built airplanes in their garages and “impossible” was treated as a first draft. Most of aerospace said Voyager couldn’t be done. I watched it get done anyway.
What I took from it wasn’t bravado. It was flight-test discipline: widen the envelope one step at a time, read the data after every flight, and don’t wait to feel certain before you commit.