Fire at The Beverly Hills Supper Club
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Imagine the scene. A large ballroom. 1200 people are seated around tables, enjoying the finest dining that 1977 has to offer, which, admittedly, isn't saying much.

But everyone's having a wonderful evening at the Beverly Hills Supper Club, which, naturally given the name, is just outside Cincinnati. There's a comedy duo on stage and the headline performer is expected very soon: the singer and TV personality John Davidson, a big star at the time. But what the audience here doesn't know is that on the other side of this sprawling complex of function rooms, something's gone wrong.

A fire has broken out and it's spreading fast. The fire department has already been called and the fire is still some distance away from the crowded cabaret room. But the more it spreads, the more fuel it finds, the hotter it gets and the faster it moves. Safety standards at the supper club aren't what they should be. There isn't a fire alarm, there isn't a sprinkler system and there isn't a lot of time. And nobody in that room knows that the fire is on its way.

One remarkable young man, Walter Bailey, did his best. Bailey was barely more than a boy. He was 18 years old and he worked as an assistant waiter. Bailey had seen the fire and he realised that, although it was a long way from the cabaret room, somebody needed to tell all those people to start evacuating. Walter Bailey found the supervisor in the cabaret room, explained about the fire and asked him to clear the room. The supervisor looked confused.

Bailey told him again. The supervisor turned and walked off to clear the room, thought Bailey, who found 70 people lining up to get into the cabaret room. Bailey led them instead to safety. When he returned, he found that nobody inside the cabaret room had moved. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. CAUTIONARY TALES

This cautionary tale is going to be a little different. I hope that's okay. The world seems different these days, so I've been writing some new stories for you to suit the times we're in. They'll be a little shorter, a little simpler, and perhaps a little more focused on the challenges we face right now. And this episode is different in another way too, because in a small way, it's about me, about what I got wrong, and, I hope, about what you can learn from my mistakes.

We'll come back to my mistakes and to the fire in the Beverly Hills Supper Club. But first, I wanted to ask you a question. Do you remember Captain Pastrengo Ruggiati? You must. Cautionary Tales Season 1, Episode 1.

It was about an oil tanker the size of the Chrysler building, a ship with the name Torrey Canyon. That ship was headed for a sunken mass of rocks with a vicious reputation called the Seven Stones and Captain Pastrengo Ruggiati, poor Pastrengo Ruggiati, steered his ship closer and closer and closer to disaster. You can go and listen again if you like. I'll wait.

The mystery of Torrey Canyon, you may remember, is that while Captain Ruggiati was steering his ship towards the rocks, the weather was good, the visibility was good, Torrey Canyon had radar, and the seven stones were clearly marked, both on all the charts and by a lighthouse vessel warning ships to keep away. There was still time to change course, just as there was still time to evacuate the cabaret room, and yet...

Torrey Canyon did not turn, just as the people in the Supper Club cabaret room did not move. Captain Ruggiati was a man in a hurry. He'd made a plan to head straight for a harbour 150 miles beyond those rocks, but his original course was charted safely through deep, open water. That, at least, was the plan.

But now new information is coming in. The ship has drifted off the expected course overnight, closer to shore. He's now heading for a tight squeeze past the Seven Stones. Fishing boats have appeared, blocking his way. The current is pushing him towards the rocks. His plan is getting riskier and riskier, but at no point does he stop, reflect and rethink everything.

Instead, with each new piece of bad news, he furrows his brow and rededicates himself to his original plan. So here's my confession. In the face of the growing coronavirus epidemic, I behaved in exactly the same way. It took me far too long to really think about the information that was coming my way. It took me even longer to take action. I, too, am Captain Ruggiati.

In our very first Cautionary Tale, I discussed one reason why we don't change course. Psychologists call it planned continuation bias. We focus on a particular goal. When bad news comes in that should make us rethink, our tunnel vision only narrows. The bad news makes us redouble our focus on the initial plan, now that we know it's going to be difficult. Ujiyati was racing against the clock and with each setback, the tunnel vision must have closed in further.

He also made his fateful decisions by himself. He was a captain who didn't inform his crew of the details of his plans and didn't seek their comments. As he acknowledged, I must answer for everything, for everyone. I must carry the cross alone. If only Ruggiati had been open to criticism and had sought the views of his officers, they might have helped him to regain his grasp of the risks and rethink his plans.

But having other people to guide you doesn't always help. If they're in the same situation as you, with the same assumptions, they can lull you into thinking that none of you have a problem, when in fact, all of you have a problem. There's a famous psychological study conducted in the 1960s by Bibb Latane and John Darley. The scientists asked their subjects to sit quietly and fill out a questionnaire.

Sometimes the subject would be alone, and sometimes in a group of three. Gradually, the researchers pumped smoke into the room. When the subject was sitting alone, he or she tended to note the smoke and calmly leave to report it. When the subjects were in a group of three, they were much less likely to react. Each person remained passive, reassured by the passivity of the others.

Based on what we now know about the Beverly Hills Supper Club in 1977, that experiment seems darkly prophetic. That incident is vividly described by Amanda Ripley in her book The Unthinkable. Remember where we left off? 1,200 people were in the cabaret room listening to the warm-up act crack jokes on stage.

A fire was racing towards them. Young Walter Bailey's supervisor had shrugged and ignored the problem. Like Pastrengo Ruggiati, the supervisor had a plan and didn't seem able to fully appreciate that the plan would have to change. So Walter Bailey did something big, something he assumed would cost him his job. But someone had to act. He decided that it was going to be him.

Although he was just a teenager, and although he suffered from stage fright, Bailey strode down the middle of the room, climbed up on stage, grabbed a microphone. I want everyone to look to my right. There's an exit to the right corner of the room. And look to my left. There's an exit on the left. And now look to the back. There's an exit at the back. I want everyone to leave the room calmly. There is a fire at the front of the building. And then Walter Bailey left the stage.

I wish I could tell you that 1,200 people rose to their feet and filed out of the room. But they didn't. Who was this kid? They thought. Was he part of the act? Was the fire for real? Was it a problem? People thought of the expense of their ticket, of how much they were enjoying the food. They were looking forward to hearing John Davidson sing. They didn't want to rush out if they didn't have to. So did they have to? It wasn't clear.

Think about the last time you were sitting around in a building and a fire alarm went off. Did you spring to your feet and seek the nearest fire exit? No, I didn't. I looked around to see what others were doing. The same thing happened in the Beverly Hills Supper Club. People did what people do. They looked to the left and to the right, as Walter Bailey had told them to. But they weren't looking for the exits. They were looking at what the people next to them were doing. Was Susan to my left moving?

What about Fred to my right? With everyone taking cues from everyone else, the group was slow to respond, and they really didn't have a minute to spare. 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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Because I'm a journalist and, frankly, a nerd, I should have been way ahead of the curve on coronavirus. Think back to the 13th of February 2020. I know, it feels a long time ago. Only three people outside of China had died from the new virus, at least as far as anyone knew at the time. Nobody in the US was thought to have died of it, nor had anyone in my own country, the UK. The virus felt a very distant threat, but it wasn't.

More than a thousand people had died in China. That number was rising rapidly. 25 countries had confirmed cases. Well-respected epidemiologists had already concluded that there was little chance of stamping out these other cases quickly. The novel coronavirus was too contagious. Like the fire in the supper club, it was spreading everywhere and rapidly gathering speed.

And I know this because I interviewed one of those well-respected epidemiologists. On February 13th, Dr Natalie McDermott of King's College London walked into a studio at the BBC and told me the latest thinking on the new coronavirus. The early data had suggested that the virus killed more than one in ten of the people it infected.

Dr. McDermott reassured me that, no, it probably wasn't quite that dangerous. The best guess at the fatality rate was more like one in a hundred, maybe as low as one in two hundred. Nobody knew for sure. Should I just assume that everyone on the planet would get it, I asked. No, she said, that was too fatalistic. But, if we couldn't contain it, it was certainly infectious enough to infect a majority of the planet's population. I nodded.

I believed her. I even did the mental arithmetic. There might be 5 billion cases, and with a 1 in 100 death rate, that would be 50 million people around the world dying over the course of a few months. In the United States, it would be 2 million deaths. What did I do with the doctor's information? I did what Pastrengo Ruggiati did as his ship ploughed on towards the rocks. I anxiously furrowed my brow,

And I kept on going, hoping the worst wouldn't happen. Now, I don't want to exaggerate my failings. I didn't crash any oil tankers. Nobody died because of my mistakes.

But I could have done better, easily. I could have held off on booking my summer vacation. I could have made sure I caught up with my elderly father and stepmother, who were in high-risk groups. I could have sold all my shares, or at least most of them, and waited for a couple of months to see whether Dr McDermott's grim scenario was starting to become a reality.

Instead, I took some money out of savings to pay down some of my mortgage, because I had gigs firmly in the diary that would top the savings back up again. Those gigs were cancelled, of course, which means I drained my savings at the worst possible moment. If for goodness sake, I could at least have bought some extra toilet paper. But none of this went through my mind.

It wasn't that I wasn't anxious. I was anxious, just like Pastrengo Ruggiati was anxious. I was aware there was a problem. And yet, I didn't step back, think things through, and turn my anxiety into action. And perhaps you may recognise yourself in that description too. Remember the experiment by psychologists Bib Latane and John Darley? They slowly pumped smoke into rooms containing people filling in questionnaires.

Solitary subjects didn't hesitate to leave and report the smoke, but groups of people stayed and stayed as the smoke thickened. Reassured by each other's passivity, those experimental subjects had done nothing. Now, a decade later, the customers of the Beverly Hills Supper Club were re-enacting that experiment in the most terrible way. Some people moved in reaction to young Walter Bailey's warning. He saved them.

But many people were too slow to react, lulled into complacency by the fact that others were also too slow. Four minutes later, the power failed and the lights went out in the ballroom. Toxic smoke rolled in and anyone still in that room faced a dreadful challenge in getting out alive. Walter Bailey repeatedly held his breath and headed back in to drag out as many people as he could. 167 people died that night.

If it hadn't been for Walter Bailey, the death toll might have been many hundreds more. Bailey also survived. He's a true hero. I'd like to think that if disaster struck, I'd have the courage and the presence of mind of Walter Bailey. But I fear I'm more like those poor, unsuspecting supper club patrons, enjoying their food and looking forward to the music, then wondering what to do and taking cues from everyone else.

We're social animals, we humans. We know instinctively that it's normally safer to stay with the group and to do what the group does. But not always. I hesitated too. And then, when I started reacting in earnest to the pandemic, I found that the stock market was already plunging, the pasta and toilet paper was already sold out, and there was no hope of getting masks. Our governments found themselves in the same situation, for much the same reason.

This series, I'll have more to say about what our leaders have done and failed to do. But for now, let's simply note that many Western democracies found themselves in the same crazy scramble. For ventilators, for swab testing kits, for masks and for gowns. If everyone had started taking action in January, while the risk of a pandemic was still just a risk, we'd all be in better shape now. But just as in the supper club.

Before they acted, everyone wanted to be a little more certain that there really was a problem. Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School, calls this sort of problem an ambiguous threat. The warning signs aren't completely straightforward, and the potential for harm is unclear as well. Ambiguous threats might be serious, or they might not.

As Professor Edmondson points out, that ambiguity is exactly what makes these types of threats so dangerous. Because we're not sure that they're serious, we easily find excuses not to take them seriously. While leading epidemiologists were warning that the virus might well become a pandemic, it wasn't obvious that they were right. It wasn't obvious that it would spread so quickly. It wasn't obvious that it would lead to the complete shutdown of major economies around the world.

But then, for Captain Pastrengo Ruggiati, it wasn't obvious that fishing boats would appear to block his way. It wasn't obvious that one of his officers would make a navigational error. It wasn't obvious that his ship's manoeuvring would be delayed by confusion about whether the ship was on autopilot or not. I didn't expect Ruggiati to predict all these things, just as I don't blame myself for failing to forecast every detail of the pandemic.

But what he should have done was realise the risks and take action to reduce those risks. And so should I. I should have thought through the implications. What might it mean if a pandemic threatened to kill 2 million Europeans and another 2 million Americans? How might we all respond? And while I might not have realised on February the 13th that almost half the world was heading into lockdown, it was surely a possibility that I should have considered much sooner than I did.

But no, faced with the unthinkable, it's hard to think it. That was never in my mind. Never. Said Pastrengo Ruggiati. There were a lot of things that were never in my mind either. Perhaps they should have been. I hope that I remember my own limitations in future. Ancio sono il capitano Ruggiati. I, too, am Captain Ruggiati. The End

Three books that helped us research this episode are The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley, The Ostrich Paradox by Howard Kunreuther and Robert Mayer, and Meltdown by Chris Clearfield and Andras Cilcik. As always, a full list of our sources is in the show notes on timharford.com.

Cautionary Tales is written and presented by me, Tim Harford, with help from Andrew Wright. The show was produced by Ryan Dilley, with support from Pete Norton. The music, mixing and mastering are the work of Pascal Wise. The scripts were edited by Julia Barton. Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carly Migliori, Heather Fane, Maya Koenig, Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell. Cautionary Tales is a Pushkin Industries production.

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