Iconoclast Insights

“Explain how the AI works” sounds responsible and rests on the wrong picture. A random walk, a drunk man and a taxi explain why, and where to ask instead: not the path, but the curb.

Last week there was no episode. It was the first one I’ve missed in 84 weeks, after 83 in a row. The reason is simple. I caught a cold, lost my voice, and couldn’t record anything you could understand. The usual podcast advice is to build a buffer of finished episodes for exactly that situation. That advice isn’t wrong. It just doesn’t fit this show. In this episode I explain why. Every episode st...

"That's basically the same as." Almost never. A look at what happens to a discussion when different words are treated as interchangeable, why we hate admitting we don't know a definition, how that turns "GDPR" into a rule of thumb, and how to define terms without annoying anyone.

Only 12 of 405 AI-linked malware samples were observed on protected endpoints in the study's data. Relax? No. A look at fear without a noun, what the study really measured, and why actionable caution beats unexamined fear.

There's a website sitting unpublished in my browser right now. I know exactly what's wrong with it. Nobody else does, because nobody else has seen it — I haven't sent a single LinkedIn post its way. I used to call that procrastination. It isn't. It's a measurement problem: I hold a high-price, high-trust bar (does it work, flawlessly, every time) and I was applying it to a chan...

A coach once told me to get rid of the general store: stop offering everything, pick consulting or IT, and do only that. I followed the advice. It didn't work, because on almost every project, I still understood the technical side better than the IT consultants in the room, and the skill came back anyway, unannounced and unpaid. This episode is about why "pick one" and "invent y...

I keep reading the same comment under almost every online event I'm invited to: any chance this will be recorded? I've watched people ask the same thing live, in the room, three meters from the speaker, with a chance to ask a real question in five minutes. This episode is about the difference between a session where the recording actually gives you everything, and one built entirely around...

A website owner deliberately turned off his own backups, months before he needed them. When his data disappeared, he told anyone who'd listen that a serious provider should have protected him anyway. The hosting company pulled the logs. He'd flipped the switch himself. He didn't back down. That story isn't about backups. It's about what happens when a convenient answer replaces...

The EU just declared ChatGPT a search engine, and a German court ruled the same month that an IP address doesn't identify the person behind the screen. Two data points, one pattern: Brussels writes the maximalist rule first, discovers the cost later, and reverses course only once the companies that complied in good faith already paid for it. I share what that actually cost me, and why common s...

An email landed with a subject line about a seizure of assets — my bank accounts, my property, ordered under German tax law. I didn't open it. I decrypted it by hand instead: three layers of obfuscation, a fake login page built pixel-perfect from the real tax office's own logo, and my own email address hardcoded inside it, with a campaign number attached, like I was one row in a spreadshee...

There's a specific kind of being wrong that doesn't feel like being wrong at all. It's being completely right, saying so, in writing, at the right moment — and watching it change nothing, because someone else would have had to give something up for you to be believed. This episode is built from two real moments out of my own consulting career, years apart, same structure: a correct rea...

Go look at the job postings the next time a German Mittelstand company announces it's "investing in AI." The roles filling fastest aren't implementation or compliance. They're sales — people who can produce the moment where a room goes quiet and someone says "wow." That's the honest shape of how most Mittelstand companies are buying AI right now, and it's th...

A food company once bought an entire manufacturing operation for the secret to an excellent orange flavoring — sampled it, tested it, verified the market wanted it, and closed the deal. Then it turned out nobody they'd just paid for actually knew how to make it. The knowledge was never in the building. It was in two old men's heads, and they'd already sold the same secret to a competit...

Four hundred fifty people logged into a webinar last week. Ninety minutes in, the presenter told them the truth: only fifteen would get a seat in what he was selling. Then he spent the rest of the session convincing all four hundred fifty they wanted in anyway. That part isn't strange. Scarcity sells. What's strange is what he was selling: a framework for building the same kind of AI syste...

Someone on LinkedIn told me the trick to getting AI to sound like you: let it interview you first, exactly fifteen questions. Not ten. Not twenty. Fifteen. Two people asked why. Twenty people cheered anyway. That's not really a post about prompting. It's an opinion wearing a fact's clothes — and it happens constantly, everywhere, not just in AI hype. I watched the same move in a vendor...

Everyone cheers for the fresh start. Nobody shows up to build it. This episode dissects the most reliable pattern in politics, business, and projects: the vaguer an idea, the more people believe they agree with it — until someone asks what it costs and who pays. I share a corporate project that circled for years because circling was the success condition for the man running it, explain why climate...

An AI suggested this episode about the dangers of quick answers — and expected me to read its script. Instead: where the line runs between AI as accelerator and AI as thinking substitute, why "solutions" are the easiest lie in consulting, why speed gets rewarded while doubt gets punished, and what confident ignorance costs when it finally gets caught. Plus the one question that keeps you...

Organizations don't take wrong turns by accident — they build infrastructure to protect them. This episode looks at how metrics, process, and reporting structures quietly turn a bad direction into "the way we do things," and why the system will defend the turn long after everyone privately knows it's wrong.

Neurodiversity was supposed to challenge labeling. Instead it created a new label — one that requires a doctor's signature to access and a medical institution to enforce. In this episode I argue that the concept traded scientific precision for social palatability, that its liberation rhetoric depends entirely on the medicalization it claims to reject, and that the "superpower" framin...

Most failures don't start with a bad decision. They start with a reasonable one - and the slow failure to keep questioning it. This episode draws the line between mistakes and wrong turns: what they are, why they're invisible, and why the road still looking fine is exactly the problem. If you've ever committed to something that stopped making sense without noticing - this one is for yo...

Many people treat consequences like something to be avoided. But consequence is neutral. It is simply what follows an action. Or an inaction. In this episode, André breaks down how we’ve quietly corrupted the word into a synonym for punishment, invented “reward” as its supposed positive counterpart, and in doing so, broken how we actually make decisions. Because if consequences are bad and rewards...

The engineers using AI to write code are working more hours than they ever have. Sleep-deprived. Ecstatic. Marc Andreessen called it the AI vampire — developers managing twenty agents in parallel, too afraid to sleep because the opportunity cost is too high. Nobody predicted this. Not the economists who model automation. Not the people who forecast mass unemployment, and not the people who predict...

Angela Merkel just received the European Parliament's first Order of Merit — and used the occasion to call for regulation of "lies" on social media. Without defining what a lie is. That missing definition is the entire problem. Because in a world where questioning the 1.5°C climate threshold makes you a climate denier, where asking why a quarter of Germans vote AfD makes you an extre...

Everyone has heard it. From politicians. From HR directors. From well-meaning colleagues. Be more constructive. Work harder. Adapt. But what if that advice is making the problem worse? In this episode, I argue that telling someone to work harder when they're already working their hardest isn't encouragement — it's a diagnosis error. The people stuck in today's job market aren't...

You're not going to find an original idea. It doesn't exist. And the time you're spending protecting the ideas you already have? Mostly wasted. In this episode, I dig into why originality is the wrong obsession — and why aggressively guarding your intellectual property often does more damage than sharing it ever would. Gary Vaynerchuk said nothing is original; Austin Kleon wrote the bo...