The Tenth Man Podcast

Chris Pordon
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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.

  1. 3d ago

    Medical Reversal - The courage to Question: Adam Cifu

    Medicine has the tools to prove itself wrong. Yet treatments later shown to be ineffective or harmful can remain standard practice for years. Why is it so difficult for medicine to change its mind? In this episode of The Tenth Man, host Chris Pordon speaks with Dr. Adam Cifu, Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago and co-author of Ending Medical Reversal, about medical reversals, the difficulty of challenging established treatments, and why institutions are slow to act on new evidence. They also examine whether artificial intelligence could reinforce flawed medical consensus rather than challenge it, and what happens when the tools designed to support medical decisions inherit the assumptions they're supposed to question. Dr. Adam Cifu's work: Ending Medical Reversal: Improving Outcomes, Saving Lives (2015), co-authored with Vinay Prasad. Sensible Medicine: https://sensible-med.com/ #TheTenthMan #AdamCifu #MedicalReversal #InstitutionalDissent #MedicalResearch www.tenthman.ai

  2. Oct 20

    The Performance of Dissent: Dr. Hannah Gurman

    The State Department created its dissent channel in 1971. Any Foreign Service officer can use it, the message has to reach the Secretary of State, the policy planning staff has to respond, and retaliation for using it is prohibited by the Foreign Affairs Manual. It is the most formal mechanism of internal dissent in the United States government. It was also created the same year Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, by an administration preoccupied with leaks. Hannah Gurman wrote the history of that channel. Her conclusion is that it works as a steam valve: officers are heard, policy rarely moves, and the serious dissenters eventually resign and go public. Last week’s guest, Brady Kiesling, did exactly that in 2003. Her new book turns to the opposite case. The Opportunists profiles the intellectuals of the New Right, who present themselves as dissidents against a stifling liberal consensus while holding endowed chairs at Harvard and Notre Dame, advising sitting senators, and shaping a vice president’s thinking. One kind of dissenter pays with a twenty-year career. The other kind gets promoted. This conversation is about how to tell them apart: what a dissent channel would need to be more than a release valve, how a mechanism of challenge gets captured by the people it was built to constrain, what internal dissent looks like inside an institution being dismantled, and whether personal cost is the only reliable test of whether dissent is real. Hannah Gurman is a clinical associate professor at NYU’s Gallatin School, where she works on the history of dissent and whistleblowing in the US national security establishment. Hannah Gurman’s work: The Opportunists: The Post-Liberals and the Reinvention of Reactionary Politics (The New Press, 2026): https://thenewpress.org/books/the-opportunists/ The Dissent Papers: The Voices of Diplomats in the Cold War and Beyond (Columbia University Press, 2012) Whistleblowing Nation: Disclosing US National Security and the Challenge of Dissent, co-edited with Kaeten Mistry (Columbia University Press, 2020) Hearts and Minds: A People’s History of Counterinsurgency, editor (The New Press, 2013) Faculty page, NYU Gallatin: https://gallatin.nyu.edu/people/faculty/hrg2.html www.tenthman.ai

  3. Oct 14

    Dissent Inside Diplomacy: John Brady Kiesling

    What happens when an institution claims to give its people a voice, but those in power refuse to listen? In February 2003, John Brady Kiesling resigned from the U.S. Foreign Service after two decades as a diplomat, publicly opposing the Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq. His resignation raised a fundamental question: What responsibility do public servants have when they believe their government is making a disastrous decision? In the Season 2 premiere of The Tenth Man, host Chris Pordon, who himself deployed to Iraq as a young Marine infantryman in 2008, sits down with Kiesling to explore the challenges of dissent within government institutions, the effectiveness of the State Department’s formal dissent channel, and the difficult balance between professional duty, personal conviction, and loyalty to an institution. Drawing on his experience in the Foreign Service, Kiesling reflects on the limitations of internal disagreement, the consequences of challenging established policy, and why institutions often struggle to recognize their own mistakes. The conversation also examines a broader question: How can organizations create meaningful opportunities for dissent when the people raising concerns may be challenging the very leadership responsible for hearing them? Season 2, Episode 1 of The Tenth Man is out now. More from John Brady Kiesling: Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower (Potomac Books, 2006). Written in the years after his resignation, it’s an insider’s account of how American diplomacy actually works, why dissent so rarely reaches the top intact, and what a superpower loses when it stops listening. ToposText (topostext.org). Kiesling’s current project: a free app and website linking more than 5,000 sites of the ancient Greek world to the classical texts that mention them. A digital library and map for travelers, students, and anyone curious about antiquity, built with the support of the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation. Free on iOS and Android. #TheTenthMan #JohnBradyKiesling #DissentChannel #Diplomacy #InstitutionalDissent #IraqWar #ForeignPolicy #Leadership #DecisionMaking www.tenthman.ai

  4. May 13

    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 council finds his conclusions unsupportable. The vote is nine to one. The planet is destroyed. The fictional case is the cleanest statement of a structural failure this series has documented across nine real institutions: military intelligence, engineering, medicine, aviation, finance, diplomacy, corporate governance, epistemic authority, and military simulation. The information was present. The voice was present. The structure that would have carried the voice from the one to the nine was missing, or weak, or starved, or overridden. Episode 10 is the season finale of The Tenth Man. It names the pattern, states the argument the series has been building toward, and acknowledges what the show can and cannot do. Season 2 begins later this year with a new format: each episode a conversation with someone inside an institution where the question this series has documented is being lived. Sources Referenced: The Adventures of Superman, "Superman on Earth" (CBS, syndication; September 19, 1952). The Council of Nine staging in the Temple of Wisdom. Confirmed by direct review of the broadcast: nine council members visible in the chamber scene, in semicircle formation, robed and uniformed.Superman (Donner, 1978). The Vond-Ah line: "It isn't that we question your data. The facts are undeniable. It's your conclusions we find unsupportable." Verified through IMDb's quotes archive and multiple secondary sources citing the screenplay.Action Comics #1 (June 1938) and the Superman newspaper comic strip (January 1939). The original published versions of the Krypton origin. Jor-El first appears as "Jor-L" in the strip; named "Jor-el" in the 1942 novel The Adventures of Superman by George Lowther.Superman: The Animated Series, "The Last Son of Krypton" (1996). The Brainiac variant, in which the council trusts the planet's AI over Jor-El.Man of Steel (Snyder, 2013). The version where Jor-El's data is rejected as politically inconvenient by a council in active political crisis.Wikipedia, "Krypton (comics)" for the cross-canon comparison of council scenes.Wikipedia, "Jor-El" for the publication history and the stability of the rejection-by-council structure.Superman Wiki / Fandom, "Episode 101: Superman on Earth" for the Temple of Wisdom naming and the genealogy from the 1940 radio episode.Sanford Allen, "Forgotten Films: Adventures of Superman: Superman on Earth" (2017) for the supplementary description of the council scene.www.tenthman.ai

    The Council of Nine

  5. May 6

    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 low-technology asymmetric tactics the doctrine had not anticipated. The exercise was halted. The fleet was refloated. The end state was scripted until the doctrine was validated. Eight months later, the doctrine was used to execute the invasion of Iraq. Episode 9 of The Tenth Man examines the Millennium Challenge 2002: what it was designed to test, what it actually found, and why the institution's response to a functioning mechanism was to stop it. This episode introduces the distinction between a testing mechanism and a validation exercise, and traces the difference to its consequences. Sources Referenced: -Wikipedia, "Millennium Challenge 2002" -- for the exercise timeline, cost, participant count, ship breakdown (one carrier, ten cruisers, five amphibious), the JFCOM after-action report language ("constrained to the point where the end state was scripted"), the official responses from Mayer and Carman, and the reset constraints imposed on Van Riper -Micah Zenko, "Millennium Challenge: The Real Story of a Corrupted Military Exercise and its Legacy," War on the Rocks (November 5, 2015) -- adapted from Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy (Basic Books, 2015); based on interviews with senior officials and the declassified after-action report; primary source for Bell's "watershed" characterization, the Kernan selection rationale, the complexity flag argument, and the Van Riper skepticism about JFCOM's track record -Naval Gazing, "Millennium Challenge 2002" (May 2018) -- primary source for the simulation malfunction argument (airliners, civilian traffic box, digital position update); the strongest technical complexity flag -Task & Purpose, "The Lost Lesson of Millennium Challenge 2002" (November 2019) -- for the Blue team objectives not fully completed even with a stacked deck; the guerrilla resistance point -We Are The Mighty, "A Marine Corps General Led a Fictional Iran Against the US Military -- and Won" (March 2026) -- for the muezzin code detail, the USS Cole comparison, and the "nobody would have thought anyone would fly an airliner into the World Trade Center" exchange -YNet News, "How Iran Defeated the US in a War" (February 2026) -- for the diplomatic phase collapse, the eight-point ultimatum structure, Van Riper's six-day resignation timeline, and the critique-without-response detail -NOVA/PBS interview with Paul Van Riper (2002) -- for the direct Van Riper quotes on McNamara, the $250 million "wasted" characterization, and the "never truly validated" statement -Guardian, Julian Borger, "Wake-Up Call" (September 6, 2002) -- for Van Riper's "nothing was learned from this" and "a culture not willing to think hard" quotes -Military Machine, "The War Game That Terrified the Pentagon in 2002" (December 2024) -- for the Rumsfeld transformation context, the Cebrowski network-centric warfare doctrine, and the "proof of concept for an entire theory of warfare" framing -DVIDSHUB, "Rumsfeld Visits Millennium Challenge Experiment" -- for Rumsfeld's direct quote about the exercise -Wikipedia, "Paul Van Riper" -- for biographical details, the Silver Star awards, and the April 2006 letter calling for Rumsfeld's resignation -Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Little, Brown, 2005) -- for the Van Riper account of Blue's predetermined scenario modeling and the "created the conditions for successful spontaneity" framing www.tenthman.ai

    The Test That Wasn't

  6. Apr 29

    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, they had advised presidents, shaped foreign policy for half a century, and overseen military operations across three continents. The board had authority, prestige, and the structural position that should make institutional challenge possible. The board lacked the one thing every dissent mechanism requires: access to the information that would make challenge possible. Ep. 8 examines Theranos through the lens of this series' central question. When every institutional safeguard is formally present and informationally starved, the structure produces the appearance of oversight while making actual oversight impossible. Featuring the stories of the whistleblowers who paid the price for knowing what the board could not see, the investigative journalist whose reporting broke the information barrier, and the structural lesson that connects Theranos to every failure documented in the previous seven episodes. Sources Referenced: John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (Knopf, 2018) -- primary narrative source for the Theranos story, the internal culture, the whistleblower accounts, the board dynamics, the Murdoch refusal, the "make-believe board" characterization, and the 99.7% voting rights detail Fortune, "Theranos' Board: Plenty of Political Connections, Little Relevant Expertise" (October 2015) -- for the average age analysis, the absence of biotech expertise, and the governance critique John Ioannidis, "Stealth Research: Is Biomedical Innovation Happening Outside the Peer Reviewed Literature?" JAMA (February 2015) -- for the "stealth research" concept and the "total ambiguity" quote Eleftherios Diamandis, "Theranos Phenomenon: Promises and Fallacies," Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (2015) -- first peer-reviewed Theranos critique The Lancet, "Theranos and the Scientific Community: At the Bleeding Edge" (2022) -- for the "absence of open enquiry, scepticism, rigorous testing, reproducibility, sharing of findings, and peer review" characterization STAT News/Ioannidis, Cristea, and Cahan, "Peer Review Could Help Smoke Out the Next Theranos" (January 2019) -- for the healthcare unicorn study and the "stealth research" follow-up Stanford Graduate School of Business, "What Can We Learn from the Downfall of Theranos?" (December 2018) -- for Carreyrou's "make-believe board" characterization, the 99% voting rights narrative, and the "fake it till you make it" analysis NPR, "Theranos Whistleblower Celebrated Elizabeth Holmes Verdict" (January 2022) -- for Tyler Shultz's account of meeting Holmes, the confrontation with his grandfather, and the legal fees Adam Epstein, "An Unsung Hero from the Theranos Board" (2018) -- for the Tevanian-Lucas meeting, the document review, and the resignation dynamics The Register, "Theranos Blood-Test Demo Machines Hid Errors" (October 2021) -- for the Edlin trial testimony, the demo app, and the null protocol CBS News, "The Theranos Deception" (2018) -- for the Shultz/Matje/Cheung interviews, the fake demonstration testimony, and the CMS shutdown details UC Hastings Law Journal, "Secrets, Lies, and Lessons from the Theranos Scandal" (2021) -- for the NDA analysis, the Cheung pre-interview NDA, the departure NDA protocol, the "stole property in his mind" incident, and the Boies Schiller confrontation details AP/US News, "Elizabeth Holmes Fails to Overturn Her Theranos Fraud Conviction" (February 2025) -- for the 9th Circuit ruling, the "nothing more than a mirage" quote, and the $452 million restitution www.tenthman.ai

    The Laboratory

  7. Apr 22

    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 logical gaps. Prose forces every connection to be visible. If the reasoning is visible, the reasoning can be attacked. This episode examines two companies that tried to build dissent into their institutional architecture. Amazon encoded it into written mechanisms: narrative memos that expose the reasoning, a press release process designed to kill ideas before resources are committed, and a leadership principle that makes disagreement an obligation enforced through hiring and evaluation. Berkshire Hathaway concentrated the challenge function in one person: Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's partner for fifty years, whose structural role was to reject the investment thesis before it could be approved. Buffett called him "The Abominable No-Man." Both models address the failure modes documented across the first six episodes of this series. They arrive at opposite architectures. The process model scales but erodes. The person model is irreplaceable but expires. The question the episode keeps returning to: the institutional half-life of dissent is shorter than the institutional memory of why dissent matters. Show Notes and Sources Referenced: Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon (St. Martin's Press, 2021)Jeff Bezos, Letters to Shareholders (2016, 2018)Jeff Bezos, 2004 Internal Email banning PowerPointJeff Bezos, Lex Fridman Interview (2023)Amazon.jobs, Leadership Principles (official)Edward Tufte, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within" (2003)Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger (expanded edition)Janet Lowe, Damn Right: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger (2000)Jim Collins, Good to Great (Intel constructive confrontation documentation)Fortune, "Can Amazon's Leadership Principles Survive the Andy Jassy Era?" (July 2024)Fortune, "Amazon Exec on Bezos's 16 Leadership Principles" (February 2026)Ethan Evans, "Weaponizing Amazon Leadership Principles" (Substack, 2023)Robert Sutton / Logan Shrine, on Intel's post-Grove cultural decay (2007)Kiplinger, "How Charlie Munger Helped Create Berkshire Hathaway, and Warren Buffett" (November 2023)Corporate Board Member, "How Munger Did It" (January 2024)Wikipedia: "Disagree and commit" (for McNealy/Grove lineage)www.tenthman.ai

    The Obligation to Disagree

  8. Apr 15

    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 that gets it wrong: "How could we have been so stupid?" Thirteen months later, the same president, in the same office, with many of the same advisors, faced Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. He got it right the second time. The difference was the structure of the room. This episode traces what went wrong in the Bay of Pigs decision. The self-censorship, the mindguards, the assumed consensus. And why a Yale psychologist coined the term "groupthink" specifically to describe it. It traces what Kennedy changed for the Cuban Missile Crisis: removing himself from meetings so his advisors could think without deferring. Turning a mindguard into a devil's advocate. Splitting the group into subgroups. Inviting outside challengers. Building a moot court to stress-test every option. Same man. Same office. Same advisors. Different structure. Different outcome. The episode also examines why the groupthink diagnosis may be partly wrong, and why the prescription works regardless. Episode 6 of The Tenth Man. New episodes weekly. Show Notes: This episode covers the Bay of Pigs invasion (April 1961), the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962), Irving Janis's groupthink theory, and Roderick Kramer's revisionist "politicothink" critique. It traces the structural changes President Kennedy made between the two crises and maps them to the failure modes documented in the first five episodes of the series. Sources Referenced: -Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Houghton Mifflin, 1972; revised edition, Groupthink, 1982) -Arthur Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Houghton Mifflin, 1965) -Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (W.W. Norton, 1969) -Roderick M. Kramer, "Revisiting the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam Decisions 25 Years Later: How Well Has the Groupthink Hypothesis Stood the Test of Time?" Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 73 (1998): 236–271 -Joshua H. Sandman, "Analyzing Foreign Policy Crisis Situations: The Bay of Pigs," Presidential Studies Quarterly 16, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 310–316 Robert McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (Times Books, 1995) — for the April 4 meeting account -Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Belknap Press, 1997) — for ExComm meeting transcripts -Martin J. Sherwin, "The Cuban Missile Crisis at 50: In Search of Historical Perspective," Prologue Magazine (National Archives, Fall 2012) -JFK Presidential Library — "The Bay of Pigs," "Cuban Missile Crisis," and "The JFK White House Tape Recordings" -British Psychological Society — "Groupthink: A Monument to Truthiness?" (2024) www.tenthman.ai

    The Room Where It Happened Twice
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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Chris Pordon
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    13
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Tenth Man Podcast
  • Show Website
    The Tenth Man Podcast