THE BANKERS’ BOOKSHELF is a podcast show inspired by bestselling authors and renowned researchers—the minds behind the books and articles that hold a prominent place in the libraries of curious bankers and fintech entrepreneurs. They challenge corporate culture and redefine technological expectations to unlock a deeper understanding of the banking present and its fintech future. By engaging with these powerful ideas, we empower ourselves to make smarter, more informed business decisions.
In this episode of Banker’s Bookshelf, Paolo Sironi sits with Eric So, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Global Economics and Behavioral Science, to discuss his new book “The Collision”.
The conversation opens on a distinction most AI talk skips. The industry asks what the technology can do for us. So asks what it is doing to us: to the skills we still bother to build, to our tolerance for difficulty, to what we remember, and to the way we judge the world. He treats AI less as a tool upgrade than as an invasive form of intelligence already reshaping the people who use it. The frame is Steve Jobs’s 1980 line that a computer is a bicycle for the mind, the most efficient mover on the chart. So’s revision is blunt. In the age of AI, the bicycle has become a motorcycle. It offers speed and self-propulsion, and it multiplies the cost of a bad decision. The title is chosen for the same reason. “Adoption” and “shift” sound orderly. “Collision” names a rapid force that is changing human intelligence and machine intelligence at the same time.
From the research, he draws four rules. Value the struggle: products sell the removal of friction, but struggle is how knowledge becomes yours. Students who outsource essays look strong at home and collapse in the exam room. Value who you are without AI: a polished deck you cannot defend is not your work, and the same failure shows up in a client pitch. Reinvest the surplus: history’s transformative tools did not merely speed the old task; they let people reach harder problems. Saved time spent scrolling is a wasted surplus. Make AI a cognitive trainer: personalized tutoring has long delivered a two-sigma learning gain, and AI can approximate it only if it walks you to the answer instead of handing it over.
Banking sits in the middle of the argument. The sector’s instinct is to strip friction and automate cost. So’s warning is cognitive short-termism: fewer juniors, less mentoring, and a thinner bench of people who can still trace a problem when the model is wrong. Efficiency that deskills the institution is not a saving. It is a debt.
The episode is a call to treat AI as a behavioral problem, not only a productivity one.
28 Sept 2026
Pulp Finction
In this episode, Paolo Sironi welcomes Chris Skinner for an unconventional episode: not the presentation of a business manual, but a financial thriller. In Diary of a Ponzi Scheme — the first novel in Skinner’s Pulp Finction series — a broke operator launches a fund invested in stablecoins, crypto, and digital currencies, then pulls his wealthy circle into a scam that only works as long as new money keeps arriving. Skinner explains why he moved into fiction: to smuggle how finance works into a story, so readers learn tokenization, CBDCs, and crypto without being lectured. The conversation ranges across the wider series like fintech fundraising, a last branch in town, climate activism, and an AI attack that stops payments to return, again and again, to the same question: how do you scale trust?
14 Sept 2026
The System Gambit
In this episode, Paolo Sironi speaks with Ritavan, author of the new book The System Gambit—a rigorous guide to the one strategic move that most investors and operators never make. They say companies get disrupted because they miss the signals. This is technically true, but many are not missing the signals. They are reading them correctly and responding rationally, and the rational response is the trap. Every benchmark they hit is proof that they are excellent at a game whose rules have already changed. Nobody is going to tell them this. Their metrics cannot see it, and their board is scoring the old game. Finding it is your job, and it is worth doing properly. The move is a system crossing rather than a reallocation of resources, because the logic that wins in your current system is the same logic that blocks the position that compounds in the next one, and you cannot run both at once. This book conversation maps the eight system crossings, the sacrifice each one demands, and how to defend that sacrifice to people keeping score the old way.
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Paolo Sironi host the show. Published by Paolo Sironi.
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