Airships, AI and Alan Cumming: Tim Answers Your Questions
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Hello everyone, Tim Harford here. It is our listener Q&A episode, our very first listener Q&A episode of Cautionary Tales. You have been sending in your questions to tales at pushkin.fm. Thank you very much. I have been thinking about how to answer them, but I'm not going to just read out the emails. No, I need one of the maestros of podcasting. I need Jacob Goldstein to help me. Jacob, welcome to Cautionary Tales.

Hi, Tim. Thanks for having me on. I'm here to read emails. And I also have a few of my own questions for you that I'm going to sprinkle into the mix. Oh, I'm looking forward to that. So, Jacob, do you want to just tell people who you are for the benighted souls who don't already know of your work?

Yes. So like you, I host a podcast for Pushkin. The show that I host is called What's Your Problem? It's great. Not exactly the opposite of Cautionary Tales, but it's an interesting compliment, right? Your show is basically about things going wrong. What's Your Problem is basically about people figuring out how to solve technological problems. I talk to the people who are right now trying to solve big, interesting technological problems to solve things like, you know,

getting away from carbon. I used to host Planet Money. I wrote a book called Money, The True Story of a Made-Up Thing. And I've been interviewing you for more than 10 years. So I'm really delighted to be interviewing you again. Let me just give you a question. I'm not going to let you say anything else. Let's just get to it. This one comes from Peter Massey. He sent a bunch of questions. We're going to start with this one. Tim, if you stood for Parliament, you'd be voted in like a shot?

It's more of a comment than a question, but it's a nice comment. I mean, I could object to the premise, but go on. Well, he does say you'd be voted in like a shot, but I expect you'd have more sense. However, here's the question. What is your sage advice for a party leader of any persuasion or country who believes that the truth is important and that evidence and data based on argument is valuable?

It's a really difficult question, and I'm completely unqualified to offer any political advice. Maybe I could offer some slightly nerdy policy advice. Politicians are directly or indirectly in charge of the statistical infrastructure of countries. We don't really think of statistics or data as being infrastructure in the way that our roads are or the electricity grid is or the water, but they really are.

You want to know what's going on in the world. You need good statistics. And we kind of, I think, even those of us who are a bit nerdy, kind of have this mental model that statistics are just out there. You kind of download them from a spreadsheet somewhere.

And the problem comes because people lie with statistics or they misrepresent statistics or they don't listen to statistics. Of course, those things are problems. But the deeper issue is that the statistics don't make themselves. They've got to be gathered. They've got to be assembled. And we don't pay nearly enough attention

attention to that and I would I would like to see politicians really supporting and valuing the process of deciding what gets counted what gets measured because without that you really have nothing those numbers don't just exist in the world like people work to get them yeah and they can be gathered in in smart ways or less smart ways so one really striking example from about

15, 20 years ago in the UK is we used to measure immigration by having people stand at airports and just politely stop people as they pass through the airports and say, hey, would you mind answering a few questions? And the questions are mostly about tourism, like how much did you pay for your ticket? But a few of them are relevant to migration, like how long are you planning to stay in the country?

And that was how we measured immigration from just randomly sampling people coming through Heathrow Airport. We had this huge problem in about 2005, 2006. We didn't know it at the time.

But just at the moment that more and more people were coming from Eastern Europe because they joined the European Union, they had the right to come to the UK, just at that moment, some Hungarian entrepreneurs set up a cheap airline called Wizz Air, which flew people, no frills, not to Heathrow Airport,

or any of the major airports, but they flew them to all these tiny little regional airports like Luton. We just weren't counting the people coming in from Luton. We had this way of measuring migration, it kind of worked, and then the world changed a bit, and then our migration statistics were completely off. And when it was finally discovered that the statistics were off, that was huge political ramifications. The shock of suddenly realizing,

oh, there's like hundreds of thousands of people in the country and we never even knew they were in the country because we weren't counting them properly. So it's just one example, but this stuff matters. There's a cautionary tale in this somewhere. I need to have a think about this and start working on it. Funny you should mention that. There is another question from one Jonathan Hiller and he writes, in part...

My main question is about how you sift through historical incidents to evaluate which ones fit your criteria for cautionary tales.

What vectors inform you as you sift through humanity's foibles? Also, do the failings of individual protagonists make for better tales than those of institutions? And there were a lot of questions like this. There were a lot of the how do you make the sausage type questions. Well, thanks. Thanks, everyone, for sending in the questions. Jonathan has made it sound way more scientific and systematic than it is. Actually, the process that you just heard of me kind of telling a story and going, hang on a minute, that'd be a good cautionary tale.

That's actually much more true to the life of this podcast.

You know, I read stuff. I'm a journalist. I write stuff. I listen to other podcasts. I come across ideas. Obviously, I have my eyes open for things going wrong. I mean, I have collections of books about things going wrong. Like people write books specifically about here are a hundred terrible things that happened. And you kind of read these. Here are a hundred military mistakes. Here's a book about frauds. Here's a book about business failures. So I have all these different sources. And the main thing I'm looking for is variety, actually. It's very easy to...

to get stuck on economic disasters, booms and busts and crashes and business failures, or only stories involving men? Because I'm a guy and history has been written by the white guys. So can we have some more diverse stories about different parts of the world? That's really what I'm looking for. Because I am a nerd, I keep finding myself writing scripts about something more systemic, some more abstract point. It changes as an economist, what can you do?

And then I find myself trying to look around for some protagonists to put into the story to make the story more relatable and easier to follow. But individual failures, individual errors make for better stories every time. I mean, the basic model of the show is there's a story and there's a lesson, right? And it seems like the individual helps you with the story, but often the lesson, to me, the most interesting lessons in the show are often the ones about institutions, about systems.

Because, you know, people are sort of irredeemably flawed, but we hope that we can create systems and institutions to sort of put a floor under that, right? That seems like one of the recurring themes on the show. Absolutely, it is. Some of these stories have basically, I don't know, three lessons, four lessons. They're really...

tightly woven. There's a lot of different stuff going on. And sometimes there isn't really a lesson. Sometimes it's just, hey, this thing happened. It's really sad, but it's a really compelling story. Let me tell you the story. So I think it's okay to sometimes not have a lesson and to sometimes have several. But you're right. Usually I'm trying to draw out the lesson. And systemic failures have more easily analyzable lessons, I think, than a person did a bad thing or a person did a stupid thing. So

That reminds me of one of the episodes of your show that I wanted to ask you about. This is a question from me. There was a show you did about the guy who invented, amazingly, both chlorofluorocarbons that put a hole in the ozone layer of the whole planet and leaded gas. Yeah.

Incredible. Remind me, his name was Midgley, right? Thomas Midgley, yeah. And he also rather tragically invented, he got polio and he was partially paralyzed and he invented this apparatus to get him out of bed and it ended up strangling him. At least that's the official story. So if you believe that, then he invented CFCs that caused the ozone hole and he invented lead in petrol and he invented something that accidentally killed him.

So, an extraordinary narrative about an individual. And also, you bring in this big idea, which is, you talk first about unanticipated consequences from a

20th century sociologist, Merton. And then you talk about unintended consequences. And, you know, having covered economics, unintended consequences, economists talk about all the time. Unanticipated consequences, I hadn't heard before. Do you want to just briefly draw that distinction? I'm going somewhere with this.

Yeah, there was an interesting slip in the language. So Robert Merton, who's an amazing thinker, he originally wrote about unanticipated consequences. And then over time, he and other people used to say unintended consequences instead. But there is a distinction. It's an important distinction. So unanticipated consequences is like, you couldn't have seen this coming. With the hole in the ozone layer, who could have predicted they tested this CFCs for

For toxicity, they tested them in all kinds of ways. Who could have foreseen, despite all the safety testing, that CFCs would have this chemical reaction that would open this hole in the ozone layer? So that's unanticipated. But unintended is different. Unintended is like, well, we didn't mean to do it, but maybe you could have foreseen that it would have happened. So leaded petrol is not unanticipated. The idea that if you put lead, which is a known toxin,

in fuel, and it's coming out of the exhaust, that that might be a problem. I mean, that was known. Midgley didn't intend to cause a problem. He argued that there probably wouldn't be a problem. But it's not true to say that it was unanticipated. It was anticipated. It's on the record. People warned him, and he brushed those warnings away. And I think that slipped from unanticipated to unintended, which is like, well, I didn't mean to do it. That's just a very different moral standard, I think.

Here's where I'm going with this. Here's why I wanted to talk about it. I want to talk about AI right now because, you know, we're in this extraordinary moment of AI development, and it seems like the most common

anticipated bad potential consequences I know of in the history of technology. Like, the people at the very vanguard, you know, OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, the model that is knocking everybody's socks off, they started their company in part because they were so scared of what AI could do in the wrong hands. It is...

The opposite of unanticipated. They are anticipating the bad consequences. And the more people know about AI, the people working on AI are the ones most worried about it, which seems so different than the Midgley story, than most of the history of technology. And

I don't quite know where to go with that. You know, that's largely a comment, what I just made. But what I feel like you're very good at is like taking something like that and then landing it somewhere. Like, what do we make of this? Yeah, there's a few different angles that you could take. And there's another parallel I would make, very different parallel, and that's with Cambridge Analytica. So we still don't really know what Cambridge Analytica exactly did. But

They were helping various political campaigns, including the Trump campaign in 2016, to target different kinds of ads at people depending on their personality types. And if you believe them, and if you believe what Facebook was saying at the time, this can be incredibly effective. Cambridge Analytica were basically saying it's like mind control. We can just get people to do whatever we want because we really understand their personalities.

And then when the whole thing blew up into a scandal, then the question is, well, maybe actually it wasn't in fact that good. Maybe it didn't really make much difference. Maybe they were just snake oil salesmen. We still don't know.

But the reason I draw a parallel with AI, obviously AI is in the long run, I think, a lot more consequential, is when these people who are designing these AIs are saying, we're kind of worried that this is going to take over the world. Are they worried that it's going to take over the world? Or is this just a backhanded way of saying, we're working on this incredibly awesome technology, you should give us more money. And I really don't know what to make of it. But there is this strategy of kind of using disaster scenarios to

to overhype the importance of your work, to get more funding for your work, and to distract from what might actually be the real problem. There's a fundamental question inherent in what you're suggesting, which is, do the people who are working on AI, who say they're worried about it, you know, destroying humanity, do they really mean it? Or are they just doing marketing, right? I tend to believe they really mean it, but I could be wrong.

You're listening to a special Q&A episode of Cautionary Tales. I'll be back with Jacob Goldstein in just a moment. AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So buckle up.

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Visit GuardianBikes.com to save up to 25% off bikes. No code needed. Plus, receive a free bike lock and pump with your first purchase after signing up for the newsletter. That's GuardianBikes.com. Happy riding! If you're listening to this right now, you probably like to stay on top of things, which is why I want to mention The Economist. Today, the world seems to be moving faster than ever. Climate and economics, politics and culture, science and technology, wherever you look,

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This one comes from Peter Lancashire. Sounds like a very British name. The question comes from his PS, and it's a question that many listeners asked. He writes, PS, I notice that in the Pushkin podcasts, you adapt your language, units, and currency for a U.S. audience. Do they really need this? Shouldn't they get out more? Well, let's put it this way. About half our listeners are.

in the United States. It is the most important country in terms of volume of listeners. And so it kind of makes sense. And Pushkin is an American company also. So it does make sense to use the units that they are most likely to recognize. And I'm sure Americans can cope. Well, Jacob, can you cope with degrees centigrade and kilometers and so on? Or is that just bewildering?

I mean, you know, there's upsides and downsides to being an American. One of the upsides is people accommodate you. I'll take it. But, I mean, the question is who should be...

accommodated. So there's three possible answers. One is the Americans who are the main audience. The second answer is most of the rest of the world who are used to dealing with Americans and who are used to having to cope with American language. And the third answer implicitly is I should be the one being accommodated. I'm British, so I should be using the units that I find personally most convenient. But that doesn't seem to be the right answer. I think people wouldn't ask this question

of you, Jacob, because you're American. They wouldn't ask it of Michael Lewis or Jill Lepore. They ask it of me because I'm British, but I feel that I should be bending to fit the audience in this respect. Doesn't that make sense? Yeah, the one that's hard for me still, like, you know, I know what a pound is worth more or less. I know how far a kilometer is.

It's really hard for me to go from Celsius to Fahrenheit. Like, I definitely think in Fahrenheit, and I don't have an intuition for Celsius, partly because it's weird, right? That translation is difficult. I used to live in Washington, D.C. for a couple of years. And in Washington, D.C., the temperature range across the year is much more than the temperature range in England. It gets colder, it gets hotter.

And so every morning you'd listen to the radio, they'd tell you what the temperature was in Fahrenheit. And so pretty soon you got a sense of like what this means. But you do have to actually live under the other...

system to get that intuition. I think usually if I'm doing temperatures I usually give both Fahrenheit and Celsius. That seems very accommodating. Well I just want everyone to understand. I mean there's obviously a cost to explaining everything to saying everything two or three times but you know for temperatures I want people to understand what's going on and that usually means giving both units.

This next question comes from Tom Quincy, and he writes, "I'm curious about what inventions didn't quite make the cut for your series, '50 Things That Made the Modern Economy.'"

or if in hindsight there's anything you regret not including. Now, let me just, before you answer, is it right that you actually did another 50? You did, you in fact ended up doing 100 or 101 things that made the modern economy? I think it may have been 102 in the end. It was like 50, then another 50, then like a listener special. I forget exactly. So good news for Tom Quincy. Tom, if you want more things that made the modern economy, Tim's got a lot for you. So give us the whatever, 103rd. You got one just on deck? Yeah.

Well, there's one I'm working on right now for Cautionary Tales, which could have been a 50 Things that Made the Modern Economy. And as with many of them, it's not because it's an incredibly important invention. It's because there's a surprise there. There's a broader principle. And that's the Laserdisc. So I'm doing a Cautionary Tales about the Laserdisc. I don't want to introduce too many spoilers, but the gist of it is

the BBC in the 1980s decided that they were going to launch this epic project to go out and interview lots of people, take photographs, measure the country. It was like this informal survey census thing and school kids from all over the country were involved and the whole thing was put on this amazing super modern laser disc system that schools could buy this laser disc and computer and so

It was kind of like Wikipedia in 1986. And the cautionary tale is that within 15 years, it became a genuine problem to find any system that was capable of actually reading the Laserdiscs. So there was supposed to be this generational effort, this time capsule that would last hundreds of years using this super modern technology. And almost immediately, the thing was obsolete and they couldn't read it.

And so I'm just drawing out what the lessons are and these kind of heroic nerd efforts to get the data back and what it took to get the data back and what happened. So the Laserdisc would have been one if I was writing it today. Okay, here's a question from Faye Edwards who writes...

I'm a huge fan of your work, and especially the Cautionary Tales podcast in its original, rich storytelling format. My question is, you seem to have changed the format recently to include more interview-style episodes and conversational pieces. Actually, like this show that we're doing right now, aside. Slowing down the pace of delivery of the episodes that I just can't get enough of. Is there a reason for the change? So, and a few people have asked questions like this. So,

We haven't actually changed the frequency of the show for a while. So it used to be we'd have weekly shows and a series would be like, I don't know, eight episodes or 10 episodes. And then we thought, well, hang on, if we do it every two weeks, we could just keep going forever. So we could do, we think, 26 episodes a year. So that's what we did. And we made that decision in early 2022. So we've been doing that for a year. And

and interspersing the occasional conversation. So usually we have a classic conversation

fully worked cautionary tales episode every two weeks sometimes we will skip a fortnight and we'll put a cautionary conversation in instead so the first answer is i don't see it like like that the cautionary conversations are supposed to be like a bonus i think they're really fun but if you don't like it then you know just skip and we'll be back next week with with the full thing but i'll be interested in people's thoughts whether whether people think no they're brilliant

absolutely love them they're just as good as as any other episode of cautionary tales don't touch them or maybe people think you know they're fine as a bonus i don't love them but you know i i enjoy them from time to time or maybe people are actively like this is very annoying to have any conversations in the feed at all i don't ever want to hear it i'd like to get a sense of how people think about that so you know let us know tales at pushkin.fm let us know what you think

Here's another question. Hi, Tim. I am Amelia. I am 11 years old, and my favorite color is pink. I love listening to the show every time I'm in the car. I have two questions to ask you for the Q&A episode. The first one is, which is your favorite episode of Cautionary Tales? And then the second one is, how does Cautionary Tales compare to editing the newspaper? Thank you for reading this. Amelia, 11 years old, England, Cheshire.

Well, thank you, Amelia. My son is 11 years old and he also likes pink. And he also likes listening to cautionary tales, although I worry that some of the cautionary tales are not really appropriate for 11-year-olds. One, what's your favorite episode of the show? Since Amelia asked so nicely, I am actually going to tell her. But nobody else listened, just Amelia. It's the one about the airships. It's the deadly airship race, which is, it's probably not...

the best episode it's not the most elegant it's not the most important it's the one that I had in my head when I first said to Pushkin we should do a series of podcasts about stuff going wrong and it's the first one that I wrote so that's my favourite the deadly airship race but that's just between the two of us

Her other question is, "How does Cautionary Tales compare to editing the newspaper?" I believe she means writing a column for the Financial Times, if I know your work correctly. I think the main difference is the teamwork. So with Cautionary Tales,

When I've written it, I will send it to my co-writer, Andrew Wright. He will always find loads of comments, loads of improvements. He'll send them back. Or sometimes Andrew writes them and Andrew sends them to me. His are usually better, so I usually have less

stuff to say about them, but we're sending each other scripts and we're working on each other's scripts. And then there's an editorial process where we do table reads and we get comments from other people and people say that this was confusing. You didn't start it in the right direction. You need to change various stuff. So it's a very collaborative process.

process. And then afterwards, it's out of my hands. And Pascal Wise, our composer and sound designer, does this amazing music. We sometimes have brilliant actors and people like Jeffrey Wright, Helena Bonham Carter. I didn't get to meet them. I just get to listen to the results of Helena Bonham Carter playing Florence Nightingale or Jeffrey Wright playing Martin Luther King. So there's this real sense of this whole thing being bigger than just me and being a team effort.

For the newspaper it's different. There is of course a team effort involved in the newspaper, there is an editorial team, but it's much more linear, it's quicker. So Cautionary Tales episodes can take months to finally see the light of day, whereas the newspaper column it's a matter of days. I will write it, I'll send it, they might have a couple of questions, they might make a couple of tweaks,

And then it just goes on the page and there's a cartoonist and they'll send it to me and I'll just check that I'm happy with any edits. There's much less back and forth. And that's fine. I like both of them. I'm very proud to write for the FT. And I really love writing cautionary tales. But that different process is the main thing. Here's a question. I'm going to go big on this one. So you've made 50 or so episodes of cautionary tales by now. If you step back, is there some transcendent

lesson that comes through a lot of them? Is there like a cautionary tale that emerges from all of the cautionary tales? Probably not a single one. I mean, as I say, I am always looking for variety. But there are a few that come up again and again. One is just

that we tend to blame the individuals when in fact it's the system. That's a very common thing. The other is that a lot of disasters are just very unlucky. Like a lot of things needed to go wrong in order for the disaster to happen. But you know,

the world's a big place. There are lots of moments where things can start to go wrong. And so in the end, someone is going to be really unlucky. And that's going to happen often enough that I don't anticipate running out of Cautionary Tales anytime soon. You're listening to a special Q&A episode of Cautionary Tales. We'll be back in just a moment.

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And then he was on the bike and ready to ride. The bike looks great and with the SureStop braking system it brakes quickly and safely without locking the front wheel and sending you over the handlebars. Guardian bikes offer a 365-day money-back guarantee covering returns, repairs and spare parts. Join hundreds of thousands of happy families by getting a Guardian bike today.

Visit GuardianBikes.com to save up to 25% off bikes. No code needed. Plus, receive a free bike lock and pump with your first purchase after signing up for the newsletter. That's GuardianBikes.com. Happy riding! If you're listening to this right now, you probably like to stay on top of things, which is why I want to mention The Economist. Today, the world seems to be moving faster than ever. Climate and economics, politics and culture, science and technology, wherever you look,

Events are unfolding quickly, but now you can save 20% off an annual subscription to The Economist so you won't miss a thing. The Economist broadens your perspective with fact-checked, rigorous reporting and analysis. It's journalism you can truly trust. There is a lot going on these days, but with 20% off, you get access to in-depth, independent coverage of world events through podcasts, webinars, expert analysis and even their extensive archives. So where

Whether you want to catch up on current events or dive deeper into specific issues, The Economist delivers global perspectives with distinctive clarity. Just to give an example, What's Next for Amazon as it turns 30? analyzes how Amazon's fourth decade looks like an area of integration for the company. Go beyond the headlines with The Economist. Save 20% for a limited time on an annual subscription. Go to economist.com and subscribe today.

So, Tim, on the show that I host, a podcast called What's Your Problem? It's available wherever you get your podcasts. Great show. People should listen to it. We close with a lightning round. And I want to close this show with a lightning round. I'm so excited. I want a lightning round. I love the lightning rounds. I hope I'm worthy. Go for it. What's one tip for someone who wants to become a better storyteller? Read good stories and think about how they work.

I'm going to give you a second tip, which is think about how the story is going to end. If you know how it's going to end, that really helps you throughout and particularly when you're writing the beginning. So one of the sort of signature features of cautionary tales is the dramatic reenactment. You've had some famous actors do those, which is fun. And so I'm curious, if there was a dramatic reenactment, a part of your life, who would play you? Who would play me? Oh, gosh.

The person who springs to mind is Alan Cumming. And he springs to mind because he's one of the great actors who's been on Cautionary Tales. He has this role in a Bond movie where he just plays this sort of magnificent nerd who thinks he's brilliant but is kind of an idiot. And I think I'm brilliant and I'm probably an idiot. So Alan Cumming. Is there some book or essay that you think...

Everybody should read. So on the nerdy side, I am fond of the good productivity stuff. So David Allen's Getting Things Done, for example, I think is really good. And on the less nerdy side, the more philosophical side, I have a really soft spot for The Tao of Poo by Benjamin Hoff, which tries to explain Taoism

through the medium of reflecting on Winnie the Pooh stories. And I read that at college and it was important to me. And I've been doing Tai Chi for 30 years now. So yeah, it's a book worth reading. How many episodes of TV have you watched in the last 20 years? Not many. I've never owned a TV, but obviously with Netflix, with computers, it all starts to merge. I mean, I've

There were probably whole years where it was like one in the entire year. But I think more recently since the pandemic and since Netflix, I probably watch like two a month, maybe. When you're kickboxing, what hurts the most? Um...

The push-ups. I didn't see that coming. It's the exercise, it's the fitness exercises that really hurt. I'm sure when I have my black belt, people will start hitting me hard. But at the moment, the idea is not that people hit you hard. So if someone hits you hard, then they've made a mistake. What do you think people who are not economists most often get wrong about economics?

I think they miss the fact that a lot of economics isn't zero-sum. So we naturally think in terms of zero-sum, like anything that I gain, you have to lose. That's just a natural way of thinking about the world. But economics is all about opportunities to create gains from trade, win-win opportunities, or just stuff when...

where things could be better, better in total, better for everybody. And we miss that. And conversely, economists can be blind to conflict sometimes. It's like sometimes things are zero-sum and we're kind of a bit naive about the politics of that. That was true for me. You know, I never studied economics before I went and worked at Planet Money. I sort of learned it there.

The fact that the world can be positive some in so many places, the pie can get bigger, and that in fact the sort of history of the kind of material experience of humanity for the last 200 years has been

of people overall getting better off was a revelation to me. Like, that is the great lesson of economics as far as I'm concerned. I feel like it is not intuitive. It's also not the branding of economics. So economics is famously known as the dismal science. Economics is associated with, like, why we can't have nice things, scarcity, all of this kind of stuff. It feels like quite a grim topic from the outside that somehow we've managed to paint ourselves...

in that light, yet from the inside it's just full of like, hey, there's a way to do this better. Oh, this is getting better all the time. That's getting better all the time. We can improve this. We can solve that problem. It's a much more optimistic discipline from the inside, I think. So I know you play Dungeons & Dragons. So I asked some friends of mine who play D&D what I should ask you. So I'm just going to read some of the questions from them. What's the most surprising emotion you've felt at the table? I once played a...

visually impaired character like a completely she couldn't see at all um and I I took to wearing a blindfold around the house just to try to understand what it was like I'm not sure this is an emotion but that's kind of like the the biggest lesson that was just transformative to to realize how difficult it was at least if you hadn't had any practice to just not be able to see

There's a thing, I think, in D&D where it's like a two-by-two matrix where you can be like lawful evil or chaotic good or whatever. Yeah, it's a three-by-three matrix, but that's fine. We'll allow it. How about this? What's the most fun to play on that matrix?

It's probably chaotic good because you get to think of yourself as the good guy and you get to be the good guy, but you also get to kind of rock and roll and improv and do whatever you want. You don't have to follow any rules as long as you're doing good stuff. That is the creative dream. I would love to be chaotic good. Maybe I used to be chaotic good and now I'm waffle good.

I'd like to. And to answer the question you didn't ask, but you sort of was implicit, I like to think of myself as chaotic good, but I'm actually probably just lawful neutral. I'm just a rules follower deep down who thinks he's kind of rock and roll and jazz. What's your favorite role playing game right now? It is in front of me on the desk. It's called Scum and Villainy. It's very improvisational. I've not played it yet. I'm going to run my first game on Monday. And it's kind of

designed to enable you to run kind of Star Wars-y heists with Han Solo-y or Cassian Andor-y kind of characters, so smugglers and rebels. And I think it's going to be really fun. But it might be a disaster. We'll see. Name one thing Cambridge does better than Oxford. What, economics? I mean, they have an economics undergraduate course and Oxford doesn't. So economics at Cambridge is amazing.

Is there any story from your life that would make a good cautionary tale? I think there were cautionary anecdotes in my life, the same as anybody else's. And just to give you one very quickly, my first job when I finished my master's degree in economics was as a management consultant. And I was a really bad management consultant. I was allergic to my suit. I would cry in the office. I just hated the job. And I stuck with it for a while.

Because all my friends were saying, hey, it's a good job. It's well paid. You need a couple of years on your resume. You can't be seen as just like quitting a job after a few months. And it was a friend of mine, a gaming friend, actually, a D&D friend, if you like, who told me, he actually literally said, if you're taking actual hit points damage,

You should quit immediately. He actually said it like that. But more importantly, he was older. He was from a different industry. He had a different perspective. And he was like, why would you build your reputation and your skills and your contacts in this industry that you hate? Why don't you quit as quickly as possible and go and do something else? And I did. And I never looked back. And it was, you know, that was the right piece of advice. But I think the two cautionary elements about that are,

One, the groupthink, like all the people my age in my position saw it the same way I did, which is, I guess I'm stuck. I guess I just have to tough this out. And also that I felt so stuck, even though in fact, I wasn't stuck at all. I had loads of options. The economy was very strong. I could just go and do it, whatever I liked, but it didn't seem that way from the inside. Great. Thanks for letting me come.

And ask your questions, Tim. Can we do it again? I hope we get more questions and, you know, I'd love it if you'd come back. Would you? Yes. You know, I'll tell you, a lot of the questions this time were sort of about the show and the making of the show. And the thing I would like to say in terms of a request for questions is...

You are a very smart person, and you know a lot, and you're very good at answering questions. And so I would love more questions for you, not about the show per se, but that are about the world, basically. Yeah. Dear smart guy, answer my question about the world. Thank you so much, Jacob. Thanks, Tim.

I hope you enjoyed this special Q&A episode of Cautionary Tales. We will be back with more shows like this one. So if you didn't hear your question answered today, then fear not, there will be another opportunity. Email any queries you might have, however big or small, to tales at pushkin.fm. That's T-A-L-E-S at pushkin.fm. And that email address is also in the show notes.

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes, with support from Edith Ruslo. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Julia Barton, Greta Cohn, Lital Millard, John Schnarz, Carly Migliore, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Murano, and Morgan Ratner.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It helps us for, you know, mysterious reasons. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

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