The Man Who Bet His House on a Pop Song - A Eurovision Tale
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Pushkin. It's a Saturday evening in May 2018. Across Europe, nearly 200 million people are watching the same live broadcast on television. The grand final of the Eurovision Song Contest.

Eurovision goes back decades. Every year, dozens of countries send a song. Each country appoints a jury of musical experts to judge the other songs. And there's a televote for the viewing public. The jury vote and the televote get turned into points and added together to decide the winner. This year, two countries are generating all the hype.

Cyprus have sent a catchy electro-pop number. Performed with hair flicking abandoned by a sultry singer in a sparkly catsuit, Israel have sent a sassy song about female empowerment, featuring Japanese lucky cat figurines and an impersonation of a chicken. For most people watching, this is light-hearted Saturday night entertainment, but not for one man.

and especially not this year. If Cyprus wins, Daniel Gould will lose his house. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to a Eurovision special of Cautionary Tales. MUSIC

In this cautionary tale, I want to tell Daniel Gould's story, and what a story it is. But I'm going to do things slightly differently, because I'm not going to tell it alone. I'm joined in the studio by one of the Cautionary Tales team, Andrew Wright. Hello, Andrew. Hello, Tim. Andrew helps me research and write the scripts for these podcasts, and normally I sit in front of the microphone by myself and take the glory. But I couldn't keep Andrew out of the spotlight this time, because I'm going to tell you a story.

because Andrew is a very old friend of our hero, Daniel Gould. And you met him yourself, Tim, remember, back in the day? Yep, we were all at college together and you and I were housemates. And I met Daniel because he was a friend of yours. Of course I remember him, although I remember him as Dan. Yeah, I got to know him as Dan as well. A few years later, I noticed he'd started to introduce himself as Daniel. I asked him why, and he said there's a certain southern English accent where the name Dan Gould sounds like the word...

dangled. And as soon as he'd heard this, he couldn't unhear it. And he hated being dangled. Okay, Daniel, it is. Nobody gets dangled on my podcast without their consent. So I didn't keep in touch with Daniel after college, but I understand that he became a professional gambler. Well, not just any professional gambler, Tim. A professional gambler on the Eurovision Song Contest. Right. So we should probably take a moment to explain just what the Eurovision Song Contest is. I'll

Our listeners in Europe will know exactly what it is, but for everyone else, it does take some explaining. Yeah, it does. I think here in the UK, we've got used to thinking of Eurovision as a bit of a joke. People like to poke fun at the terrible songs and the crazy costumes and the rather elastic definition of Euro. So every year there's an entry from Israel, which is at least close to Europe, and also from Australia. Australia, not conventionally regarded as being part of Europe. But I should say that although the

The British think it's a joke. We do like a joke, and I think a lot of Brits like the Eurovision Song Contest as a result. We do. We enjoy it in a post-modern irony kind of way. But there's also this whole community of fans across Europe who embrace Eurovision unironically as a cultural event that brings diverse people together. And a lot of other countries take it rather more seriously than the UK does. They see doing well in Eurovision as a source of national pride.

Eurovision's never been just about the songs. There's always an element of politics to the vote. In 2022, for instance, the contest took place not long after Russia had invaded Ukraine. And the song from Ukraine won in a landslide. I'm guessing that wasn't because people really liked Ukraine's song. No, they did really like Ukraine's song. It was one of the betting favourites even before Russia invaded. And the song's an ode to motherhood in Ukrainian by a folk rap group whose lead singer wears a knitted bra.

pink bucket hat. Okay, I'm sold. Impossible not to like Ukraine's song. But yeah, and clearly you're right. A lot of people were voting to send a message of solidarity. Now, you mentioned that it was one of the betting favourites. And that takes us back to Daniel Gould and the way he made his living by betting on the Eurovision Song Contest. So help me out here, because you've always known more about gambling than I have.

So there's a betting market on which country is going to win Eurovision? There's all kinds of betting markets on Eurovision. You can bet on who'll win, who'll be in the top four or the top ten. You can bet on who'll finish last. The UK, traditionally competitive there. Some of Daniel's biggest bets were on which countries would qualify for the final from the semi-final. OK.

Okay, I'm realizing I'm behind the curve here. There are now semifinals in Eurovision. I don't remember that. There are semifinals because they realize they have too many songs to fit them all into one show on a Saturday night. The very first Eurovision was way back in 1956. They had only seven countries in it.

It got bigger and bigger. And in 2004, the organizers realized they needed to whittle down the countries with a semifinal. And that was when Daniel realized that he could make some serious money from Eurovision. He'd always loved it as a fan, and he bet small amounts on it for years.

But he realised that some countries were practically guaranteed to get enough points to qualify for the final just from the diaspora vote. Why does the diaspora matter? So in Eurovision, you can't vote for your own country. If I'm in the UK, I can't vote for the UK. But if you're a person of Polish descent who's living in the UK, then you can certainly vote for Poland's song.

So by looking at historical patterns of migration across Europe, you could anticipate where some countries will get votes from other countries. And if I'm remembering our days at college correctly...

correctly. Daniel studied history, right? He did, and he was working at the time as a history teacher. He soon started to wonder if he could quit that job and go full-time as a Eurovision gambler. But Eurovision's only one night a year, well, semi-final, so one night plus the semi-final. So how can betting on Eurovision be a full-time job? Well, that's true, but there's a Eurovision season, and the Eurovision season lasts for four or five months, because a lot of countries hold their own national competitions to choose which song to send.

And if you basically live online, you can get ahead of the curve by spotting a good song early. So in 2009, Daniel was sitting at home on Saturday night watching a live stream of Norwegian television on his laptop. As you do. As you do. And they played a song that was competing to be Norway's entry that year. And Daniel heard it and thought, this is going to do really well. How could he tell?

Partly, of course, it's intuition. But the singer was Norwegian, but he was born in Belarus. So there's some points from Belarus to start with. The song itself was a kind of fusion of Eastern European folk violin and Western European pop. And it seemed like the kind of thing that would do really well all across the continent.

So Daniel started to bet on Norway to win Eurovision before Norway had even chosen this song to represent it. And because he'd spotted the song early, the odds were still good, 16 to 1. So for every dollar you bet, you win 16? Yeah, that's right. Norway won, and Daniel won enough that year to pay off the mortgage on his apartment in London. Very nice. Very nice indeed. And he thought, well, I don't need much money to live on anymore. I'm

I'm going to take the plunge. I'm going to quit my day job. So for four or five months of the year, he is now living online, watching live streams of Norwegian television or whatever, and he's following all the Eurovision news.

And what's happening the rest of the year? Well, he spent a lot of it travelling. He had friends all over the world and he'd go and stay with them and he'd go to places he'd never been before. That sounds a nice enough way to live. Yeah, it was a lovely way to live. I think Daniel's the only person I've ever known who lived exactly the lifestyle he wanted to live, but who never had to do anything he didn't enjoy to get the money to fund that lifestyle. How much money are we talking about?

Well, Daniel told me that he could get by on £20,000 a year if he had to. That's about $25,000, so not a fortune by any means. But in a typical Eurovision, he would win maybe two or three times that. So that's what...

50 to 80 thousand dollars so how much did he have to risk to win that much? Some of Daniel's biggest bets might be something like a hundred thousand pounds on a country to qualify from the Eurovision semi-final and the odds would be very short on those kind of bets he might only stand to win about three thousand.

but he'd be 99% confident in the bet coming in. That's more than $100,000 at stake. So how did he get that kind of money? Well, every year before Eurovision, Daniel took out a loan secured against the value of his apartment in London. And every year after Eurovision, he paid the loan back again. So...

Each year he's putting his home on the line and some people might raise an eyebrow at that. Well, I think it would be different for you or me, Tim, because we've both got kids and we wouldn't like to sit them down and explain to them that we've gambled their home away because we misjudged the popular appeal of a Ukrainian folk rapper in a knitted pink bucket hat. But it was different for Daniel. He was a single man. He had no dependents. He wasn't risking anybody's future but his own. How would he find out whether he'd won 3,000 or lost 100,000? Presumably it's the...

the presenters of the programme reading out a list of names of countries that are qualified? Yeah, and with very, very long pauses for dramatic effect. I can imagine. How can he bear to watch? Well, I asked him that once. He said, what do you mean, watch? I'm standing in the corner of the room facing the wall, bent double and biting my fist. I was always amazed that he got through those nights because I would have had a heart attack. That got the second highest vote.

Now, I don't know much about gambling, but I do know a bit about investing. And there is a term of art for this sort of risk in the investment world, where you're putting huge amounts on the line for the near certainty of small rewards. People call it picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. And that sounds very much like what Daniel was doing with some of these Eurovision bets. Yeah, it's exactly what he was doing, though he'd always been careful to make sure that no single bet would be big enough to wipe him out if it lost.

But then, in 2018, he took a bit of a stumble in front of the steamroller. Hold that thought. Cautionary Tales will return.

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You're listening to a Eurovision special of Cautionary Tales. Our hero is professional gambler Daniel Gould, and one of Daniel's closest friends is Andrew Wright, who writes for Cautionary Tales. Andrew, the times I met Daniel at college when we were all students...

It was when you and he were going to the racetrack together. Yeah, Daniel and I became friends as teenagers because we shared an interest in betting on horses. We'd both learned that there are people who make a living from betting on horses, and we thought this sounded like a great way to live. More fun than working. But unlike him, you didn't become a professional gambler. No, I gave up on that idea very quickly because I met some professional gamblers, and I realised that it really is hard work those guys put the hours in. That explains it. You never did, like, hard work. I'm not going to deny that.

That, Tim. But it's not just about the hard work. It's also mindset. I realised that I didn't have the right mindset to be a professional gambler, and Daniel did. But it was only years later that I came across the vocabulary to explain why that was, when I read about a project that I know you know very well, Tim. Philip Tetlock's work on superforecasters. Ah, Phil Tetlock, yes. He's a psychologist, wonderful researcher. And we met his work before on Cautionary Tales, in the episode titled Buried by the Wall Street Crash.

Back in the 1980s, Tetlock noticed that the world was full of people who were treated as experts in areas such as economics and politics, but they kept forecasting things that

didn't happen. And Tetlock asked, what does it even mean to be an expert? He asked these supposed experts to make forecasts on very specific future events, such as election results or whether the stock market would reach a particular level. And they had to put an exact percentage figure on how likely they thought these things were.

He held competitions, first for established experts, and then later he opened things up to all comers. In fact, he even invited me to join the experiment. I got his email on April 1st. I thought it was a joke. You didn't join the experiment, though, did you, Tim? No, I didn't. I'm too lazy, too cowardly. But I did pay close attention to the research. Tedlock's headline result was very famous.

most high-profile pundits do no better than random chance. If you want to know who's going to win an election or a war, you could listen to the talking heads on television, or you could get a chimpanzee to throw a dart at a wall.

Tetlock found that some people did make better than random predictions, and he called them superforecasters. And in his book, he talks about how they have a different thinking style. He quotes the philosopher Isaiah Berlin on the two thinking styles, foxes and hedgehogs. Yes, which that distinction comes from an old fragment of classical poetry. The fox knows many things. The hedgehog knows one big thing.

Tettlock later said that the whole foxes, hedgehogs thing was a bit of an oversimplification, but I think it's stuck in people's mind because it's a great way of understanding his meaning. The superforecasters, they're the foxes. They look at many clues from many sources, and these clues often contradict each other. They decide how much weight to give to each clue. They think in probabilities, which doesn't come easily to a lot of people. Hedgehogs are different. They are convinced that there's one big idea that explains everything.

everything. Maybe it's Marxism or libertarianism, but whatever it is, they try to make all the clues fit that big idea.

When I read Tetlock's book, I realised that a lot of the gamblers I'd met in my horse racing days were hedgehogs, although not quite in the way that Tetlock describes. It's not that they have some grand theory of horse racing, but they're convinced there must be a system. If only they could join the dots and figure out what it is. So maybe they'll bet on the favourites in certain kind of race, or maybe they'll bet on certain jockeys at certain courses.

But the professional gamblers are all foxes. They understand that there's no system to be found. They understand that there aren't any hidden dots to be joined. And Tetlock makes the point that forecasting isn't just about politics or stock markets or even horse races or indeed Eurovision. We're all forecasters all the time. Am I going to be happier if I move to this city? Am I going to be healthier if I go on that diet?

When you're forecasting the future, what you're really doing is trying to understand what forces are acting to shape the present. And we all do that so that we can make better decisions. Well, you mentioned health, Tim, and Daniel's story isn't just about gambling. Let me tell you about something that happened to him early in 2017. This is the year before that tumultuous Eurovision. That's right. Daniel had been on holiday in New York, and the day after he got back to London, he...

had a routine appointment at hospital. A few years earlier he'd been treated for skin cancer, the doctors removed a mole, and every year since then the dermatologists got him back in to check him over and make sure that there was no sign of it coming back. He'd just been checked over by the dermatologist and got the all clear, he was buttoning up his shirt again when he had a stroke.

Well, I mean, it's an astonishing coincidence. If you're going to have a stroke, you want to be in hospital standing in front of a doctor. Yeah, it meant that he got treatment straight away. And that meant that he recovered remarkably quickly in just a few days. He was fascinated afterwards to look back on how his brain had reconstructed itself. So on the first day, his speech was very garbled.

And then there came a day when he was almost back to normal, but he just couldn't access parts of his memory. So the doctor asked him to count to 10. And he said, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. That number between 6 and 8, 8, 9, 10. Well, he couldn't think of the number 7. Or the name New York. When the doctor asked where he'd just been on holiday, all he could say was, you know, the Big Apple, the city that never sleeps.

But that passed, and he then became very anxious to understand why the stroke might have happened and what he might be able to do to stop it happening again. Because it's just like what you said, Tim, when we're forecasting the future, what we're really doing is trying to understand the present. And we do that so that we can make better decisions to shape the future.

But when we looked at the list of risk factors for stroke, none of them really applied to Daniel because he wasn't old, he wasn't obese, he didn't smoke, he didn't drink much. But he'd just been on a long-haul flight from the Big Apple the day before the stroke, so doesn't that explain it? Well, you're thinking of de-stimulating

deep vein thrombosis, Tim, and the doctors wondered that too, but no, they couldn't find any evidence for it. The only thing the doctors could think of was that for many years, Daniel had been living with HIV and he was still on an old-fashioned drug regime, one that raised the risk of blood clots. So they swapped him onto a newer drug and he started to take aspirin every day and he hoped that that would be enough to minimise the chance of it happening again. In that situation, I'd be worried about lingering effects. Yeah, I was...

very worried about it because the stroke happened soon before Eurovision and Daniel was going to have to do his usual rapid mental arithmetic on odds and probabilities. And this is a man who just briefly lost the ability to say the number seven. So yeah, I was worried what would happen if he wasn't on tip-top mental form. And this was when? 2017? Yeah, the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest. And Tim, am I allowed to swear on the podcast? Sure.

It rather depends on what the word is. Let's find out. Go for it. Well, I wanted to introduce you to a term of art from Eurovision betting, and that term is fan wank. Very good. All right. Yes, I'll allow it. Excellent. Well, this was Daniel's word for a song that was really popular with the Eurovision fan community, but that wasn't going to catch on with the wider viewing public, the people that actually vote for the winner.

Because for most of Eurovision season, it's only really the fans who are engaging with the betting. And a lot of people make the mistake of betting on things that they want to happen. Over the years, Daniel had made a lot of money by identifying these fan-wank songs and betting against them. So betting against them. So just so I understand, that means, say the odds are 16 to 1, and I'm a fan, so I'm betting $1 to win $16. Right.

And then Daniel's on the opposite side of the bet. So he is risking $16 in the hope of winning $1 because he thinks that actually my 16 to 1 song has basically no chance. He's picking up the pennies in front of a steamroller again. Yeah, that's exactly right. And in 2017, Daniel thought that the song from Portugal was an example of fan wank. It was a very simple jazz waltz. The fans loved it because they thought it was charming and authentic. Daniel thought that the wider TV viewers would see it as affected and dull.

You can only really get a sense of what's proven popular when the semi-finals are broadcast. And it turned out that Daniel had got it wrong. The wider viewers really did like Portugal's song as much as the fans did. So how could he tell that? Because the song qualified for the final? Well, that alone doesn't tell you much because more songs...

qualify than not. But there's other data that you can look at to get a sense of which of the songs have caught the attention of the viewing public. You can look at which of them people are listening to on Spotify. You can look at which of the performances people are re-watching on YouTube. You can look at Google Trends. So you were right to worry because Daniel had made a mistake. Well, Daniel had made a mistake, but that doesn't mean I was right to worry because professional gamblers make mistakes all the time. And part of the reason they're professional is that they notice those mistakes quickly and they act quickly to

cut their losses and minimise the damage. So minimising the damage, that's, for example, it's like buying a share in a company and then the share price fluctuates.

So you've lost money. Now, cutting your losses means you anticipate that the share price is going to continue to fall and you sell before that happens. You lost money, but you could have lost a lot more. Yeah, and psychologically, that's really difficult to do, whether you're an investor or a gambler. The temptation is always to be stubborn, to hold on and hope. Now, Philip Tedlock tells us that foxes are good at changing their minds.

And hedgehogs aren't. And that's part of the reason why foxes do so well. Yes, I remember in Tetlock's competitions for super forecasters, the ones who did best would be constantly updating their forecasts in response to new information. And sometimes they'd just be tweaking a prediction by a percentage point or two, but sometimes they'd completely reverse their opinion. And Daniel was great at completely reversing opinion when he saw that he had to. So yeah, he lost money on Portugal, but...

Not too much, because he acted quickly to cut his losses. And he made lots of money on most of his other bets that year. So he ended the year with his normal kind of profit to fund another year's travels. Which brings us to the following year's Eurovision, 2018. The last Eurovision that Daniel ever bet on. And this time, he made a mistake that he couldn't back out of. Cautionary Tales will be back in a moment. CAUTIONARY TALES

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It's the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest, the one we heard about at the start of the show, with two songs in contention for the win, Cyprus and Israel. Andrew Wright is with me in the studio to tell the story. All through Eurovision season, Daniel had been very keen on the chances of the song from Israel. That's the sassy female empowerment song with the chicken noises and the Japanese lucky cat figurines.

He also thought that he'd spotted a fan wank in the shape of the song from Cyprus, Fuego. That's the sultry singer in the sparkly catsuit. The fans loved Cyprus. They thought it was a classic Euro dance banger. Daniel thought that the wider viewing public would think of it as something they'd seen a hundred times before. So he was betting...

for Israel and he was betting against Cyprus winning, just as he'd bet against Portugal the previous year. And just like the previous year, when the semi-final was broadcast, the data from YouTube and Spotify showed that people actually did like the song. Yeah, he'd got it wrong. But as I said, that happens. The trick is to notice your mistake early and act quickly to cut your losses.

So what went wrong this time? Did he stubbornly ignore the data or did Daniel fail to notice what was happening? Not at all. No, he saw straight away that there was this huge positive reaction to Cyprus and he immediately tried to cut his losses. What happened this time is that the markets moved too quickly for him. Fuego really caught fire. Very nice. So this time it was like he'd bought a share, he'd seen the price go down, he'd tried to sell the share and

And before he could find a buyer, the share price had basically gone to nothing. Yeah. So he was left with bigger liabilities on Cyprus than he'd ever had on any song before. And if you'll forgive me another swear word, let me read you the message that he wrote me after that semi-final. It read,

You see, when he'd had these big bets in the past, he'd been 99% sure that they were going to come in. And this time, it was looking really rather likely that Cyprus was going to win. And when he'd had these big bets in the past, they'd always been small enough that he could survive them. This loss would be bigger. This loss would be life-changing. He'd borrowed the money against his apartment again. That's right. And if Cyprus won Eurovision, he was going to have to sell his apartment.

He had a few days between the semi-final and the final to try to get used to this idea, but he also still had hope that Israel was going to come to his rescue because he'd been convinced all along that the sass and the chicken noises would be just the kind of thing the Saturday night audience would go for. I'm guessing they drag out the votes in the Eurovision final. It takes forever to announce the results. They go around every...

every single country to ask which of the songs that country's expert jury has given their points to. And at the end of all this, Israel was ahead of Cyprus, but only just.

But Eurovision voting isn't just long, it's also really complicated. At this point, they're still only halfway through. They have to add in all of the combined votes from the viewers across the continent. And the way they do this is in reverse order. So it gets to the point where they have only two countries left to announce the televote score for Israel and Cyprus. And Daniel is desperately hoping that Cyprus is going to be second in this one too. The country that

that got the second highest vote with 253 points is

Cyprus! Which means that Israel is the winner. Israel won. Daniel got away with it. I was watching and my heart was pounding. I can't imagine how Daniel felt. I sent him a message. When you get a moment, let me know you're still alive.

What did he reply? Always in the bag. You can imagine the relief. He'd kept his apartment, and not only that, he'd won a lot of money on Israel. It seemed like he was set for to go off on his travels and come back next year and do it all again. Yes.

Well, now it's time for us to come clean with listeners because we've been telling Daniel's story as if it was all leading up to that big Eurovision moment. But in fact, we are going somewhere else with this, aren't we, Andrew? I'm afraid we are. Because when I sent Daniel that jokey message, let me know you're still alive.

It never occurred to me, it would never have occurred to him, that at this point Daniel still being alive really wasn't something we should have been taking for granted. He had only seven months to live. But since the stroke, his health had been fine. It had. A bit later in the year, just before one of his overseas adventures, he sent me a message about a strange pain he'd been having in one leg. He wasn't sure how much to be worried about it. I said, pain in one leg? Is that sciatica?

He looked it up and said, yeah, that's exactly what it is. It fits the symptoms perfectly. Sciatica, that's when a slipped disc puts pressure on the sciatic nerve. Yeah, it's normally painful, but not too serious. It tends to get better on its own in a few weeks. And that was a relief because it meant that Daniel didn't need to cancel his travel plans. A bit later, he started to get some bad headaches that seemed like a separate problem. And then he died at the age of 43.

What happened? I don't know exactly, and nor do his family, who've given me permission to tell his story. He was on vacation in Fort Lauderdale. Nobody was with him at the time, but he's there on the hotel security camera, coming back from a swim, looking fit and healthy. And then he died in his hotel room. Of what? Well, the post-mortem found that it was cancer. His body was riddled with tumours.

When he'd been treated for skin cancer a few years earlier, the doctors removed the mole and they thought they'd caught it in time. They hadn't. It had since been spreading inside his body and he hadn't been aware of it. But people don't just drop dead from cancer, do they? I mean, everyone I've known who's died of cancer, there's been some warning, even if it's only a few days. Well, I also hadn't realised that this could happen, so I started to Google. One way it can happen is if you have a brain tumour that bleeds. The post-mortem found that

that's what had happened to Daniel. But a brain tumour would, well, with hindsight, it would explain his stroke. Yes, it would. And remember that, ironically, he'd had the stroke while standing in front of the dermatologist, and the dermatologist had just checked him over and said there's no sign of the skin cancer coming back. The tumour would explain his headaches too, of course, and I kept googling. I read up more on sciatica. It's usually a slipped disc that puts pressure on the sciatic nerve. Sometimes, in very rare cases, it's a tumour.

With hindsight, the dots were there to be joined. And as I sat there googling and joining the dots, I found myself thinking about Philip Tetlock and his foxes and hedgehogs. The hedgehog wants to find the one key insight that explains everything, and usually there isn't one. But sometimes there is, including Daniel's cancer, which explained all his mysterious symptoms. So, Andrew, do you feel...

You could have, you should have joined the dots sooner. It's hard not to wonder, isn't it? But I think that by the time there were enough dots to be joined, it would have been too late because the prognosis for metastatic melanoma generally isn't great.

At Daniel's memorial service, I think we were all quite happy that he hadn't known, because it wouldn't have saved his life. He might have eked out a few more months in hospital, but because he didn't know, he enjoyed his last few months. He spent them hanging out with his friends and jetting off to new places. So what's the moral of this story? Because we like a moral with our cautionary tales. Maybe it's that sometimes hedgehog thinking has its uses.

Philip Tetlock defends the hedgehogs too. I mean, to be sure, the foxes make better forecasters. If you want to weigh up whether chicken noises beat sparkly catsuits on Eurovision, definitely think like a fox. But if you're trying to make sense of a puzzling situation, it can help to have a hedgehog around. They'll try to make one explanation fit all the clues, and they'll often be wrong. But in the process, they can ask deep or original questions, and they can find insights that the foxes might not have thought of. That's right.

And I think there's another moral too. It's that Daniel died far too young, but more than anybody else I've ever known, he died living exactly the life that he wanted to live. That's something for foxes and hedgehogs alike to aspire to. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you, Tim. And thank you also to Corinne and Martin Gould, Daniel's parents, for giving me their permission to tell Daniel's story. And to Daniel's friend, Katie Sutherland, for all of her advice and support.

This Cautionary Tales Eurovision special was written and presented by me, Tim Harford. And me, Andrew Wright. Cautionary Tales is produced by Alice Fiennes with support from Edith Russelo. 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 Migliori, 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 don't like the show, please remember to subscribe.

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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