A conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat on authoritarians, debasement, and defending Democracy

February 23, 2024. Exactly two years since russia launched its brutal assault on Ukraine. The situation in Ukraine remains dire. It is our common moral duty to continue to help the people of Ukraine. And to understand that the war the Ukrainians are fighting is not just theirs and not just over there.

The massacre in Lewiston Maine is not just the heinous cowardly act of one man with a gun, but symptomatic of a broken society.

Oliver Sacks’ body of works present an ideal balance of insight and erudition with wonderful story-telling and deep compassion for individual human experience.

Fraud is a crime of relationships. It involves dishonesty, deception, betrayals of trust and abuses of power. This article elaborates the complex psychodynamics in fraud matters and delineates psychologically sophisticated tools for actionably leveraging psychodynamic intelligence.

Cybersecurity is a human issue that involves technology, not a technology problem that can be solved technocratically.

How does an organization achieve the goal of high-performing governance? Transformational change doesn’t just happen. It takes strategic vision, planning, and huge reserves of commitment, fortitude, and hard work from all the institutional stakeholders.

My experiences on and after that day transformed and still inform the trajectory of my life and my career.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat Interviews Alexander Stein on the Psychology of Fraudsters and Power Abusers

Why do enterprise leaders and institutional stakeholders reject expert help even when there’s clear need and benefit? Here’s what every leader needs to know.

Bernard Madoff, architect of the largest Ponzi scheme in history, died today, 14 April 2021, at the age of 82. His fraud was far more than a masterfully executed economic crime. We must never lose sight of the devastating human toll wrought by his actions.

Do you want to be a terrible leader? Not terrible as in not good. But in the classical sense: venal, amoral, remorseless. Feared and admired. Destructive and self-serving. Then this is the how-to guide you’ve been waiting for.

A brief article on human decision-making and the RSA Security Conference 2020 on “The Human Element”

Master-imposters are virtuoso liars. It's hard to see the truth about who they are before getting duped. But potential victims aren’t defenseless. Here's what you need to know.

There's a different class of AI now. It doesn’t entertain, simplify, expedite, problem-solve, or do work for us in a conventional sense. Its purpose is to assess, monitor and manage aspects of human thought, emotion, and behavior. We’re outsourcing self-awareness, self-knowledge, and self-agency.

My year-end/new year summary of thoughts and insights about the human mind—how it differs from the brain and the criticality of bringing to bear more sophisticated understandings of the mind to machine cognition.

Some thoughts on human cruelty spurred by a recent interview on the topic with a Yale psychology professor.

We are crossing a threshold. Prosthetic intelligence and autonomous agents acting for and on behalf of us and themselves represents a different order of involvement in human affairs.

Choosing a replacement chief executive is among the most consequential decisions a company’s board may ever tackle.

Human history is a catalogue of conflicts, often expressed with horrifyingly unconscionable amorality, over whose system of ethics or code of behavior is more right.