Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - "7000 horses are being flown across space..." - Cautionary Questions #2

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

Why are board games so popular in Germany? What’s Tim Harford’s top tip for productivity? And where do all those sound effects come from? Tim is joined by Cautionary Tales’ very own wizard of sound Pascal Wyse, to read your emails and answer your questions.Do you have a question for Tim? Please email any queries you might have, however big or small, to [e-mail] note that some emails in this episode have been edited for length.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tim here, if you're interested in exploring the unexpected turns of bookish fiascos for the biggest changes in the book world today, then you should check out the chart-topping podcast, Missing Pages, which just returned for a brand new season. Namely, Must Listen in 2022 by the Washington Post and the Guardian, Missing Pages lives up to the hype, including this second season. Produced by the award-winning firm, The Podglomerate, missing pages aims to set the record straight on the publishing industry's hot button topics.

From the rise of Colleen Hoover and bookbans across America, to the idea of who owns what in fan fiction. Host and acclaimed literary critic, Bethan Patrick investigates it all. Not to mention, you'll hear from notable guests, such as New York Times, Best Selling Author, Jodie Pico, and Publishers Weekly's Jim Million. So go ahead, follow missing pages today

on Apple podcasts or wherever you're listening. where ever you're listening. Pushkin. Hello and welcome to our second cautionary questions episode. I'm Tim Haferd, you are our loyal listeners, you have sent in your questions and we are going to try to provide some answers. This episode I am delighted to be joined by composer, sound designer, representative of you, our listeners, representative of the people. Pascal Wise. Pascal.

Hello Tim. This is very exciting, isn't it? It's so exciting because you were with cautionary tales from the beginning. Do you remember when we sat down in my producer, Ryan's apartment? In his apartment, yeah. And we just, we talked about airships

and what are airships going to sound like? What's the music and sound like? Yeah, and then I went off to record a hairdryer or something, you know, whatever was required. I feel like I've been, I'm like a kid and then I went off to record a hairdryer or something, you know, whatever was required. It's, I feel like I've been, I'm like a kid who's been allowed onto the, into the cockpit for this episode. Although, I think it's head that,

that's a really bad sort of analogy, because we did an episode. Yeah, no, I didn't, and it didn't go well at all. So that's how we, you've set the bar low there. That's good. So hopefully we're not going to crash on this one. On our last Q&A episode with Jacob Goldstein, we invited people to tell us what they thought of cautionary conversations. So what about the episodes where we're not doing a fully mixed, fully composed, narrated

story, but we're doing something else, like having this kind of conversation or talking to an author. And we've got a lot of opinions, a lot of feedback. So Pascal, you've got some of them in front of you. Yes, now Tim, for this, I would like you... It's been a bit of an exercise for you. I want you to imagine that there's a bowl of chocolates

in front of us, okay? Okay. You got that in mind of us, okay? Okay. You got that in mind? I'm liking that already. I don't want to stress your imaginative skills. Because Ruth Ware. Alice R. Producer is telling us it is the Ruth Ware, the novelist. Okay, that had not hit my radar.

Well, she sent a great email in with a little analogy for us. I do enjoy the cautionary interviews. Some more than others, depending on the person you're speaking to, but I think perhaps the issue is they're quite a different pleasure from the cautionary tales. I'm sure I'm not the only podcast addict who gets a pleasurable little ping of dopamine when I see there's a new episode of my favourite podcast, but that can turn into slight disappointment when it's not what you are expecting. I suppose it's a bit like picking your way through a box of chocolates

and going, chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, olive. I mean, I like olives. I like them a lot. But if I've been promised a chocolate, I may not be in the best frame of mind to enjoy the olive. There you go. I could have offered you a bowl of olives, but I went chocolate. You can tell she's an oveless, can't you? Thank you so much Ruth. Yeah. What I've been trying to do when a cautionary conversation appears is I try to make it seem a little bit like a cautionary tale. I try and write a little bit of narrative up at the front to make it seem as close as possible to the original. It's a really good point, isn't it, about expectation?

I mean, I really recognize that sort of dopamine hit, which of course, all our technology at the moment seems to be entirely based on. Yeah. So maybe we should be teaching people to resist. You should enjoy the olive. Yeah. Don't be controlled by the steady flow of chocolate.

We invited people to keep writing in about this question of the cautionary conversations versus the full-fledged cautionary tales and all the thoughts. Definitely. We've had a really good response, actually. And obviously, that one is pointing to the idea that we should flag this up. Again, dopamine management. Other people, like Nadha and Sandra, they were very keen on the traditional episodes

with full sound design, full stop. They love those and didn't really want the conversation episodes. Yeah, fair enough. And then there are lots of listeners who are just very happy with the current setup. Kira says, all of your episodes are thoroughly enjoyable and incredibly enlightening.

She's so wise. Ed Midden from Arlington, Chimes With, while I'm always interested in a good story and a lesson, I also find it very interesting to learn about the storyteller. Context matters. I'm getting to know more about the world around you, helps me better understand caution retails. Okay, so it is a, it's like a mixed box chocolate, any others? Yeah, Sammy Maclinon,

and I hope I'm pronouncing that somewhere in the ballpark. Maclinon maybe? Maclinon, yeah. We apologize to everyone who's name we're mangling. We do our best. Sammy went to the trouble of making as a chart. He will love Tim, because you love a chart, then. Yeah, I've seen the that. Sammy went to the trouble of making as a chart. He will love Tim because you love a chart. I've seen the charts.

Tell me the other chart. So, as far as I understand that, I think you will probably have a deeper understanding than me. But it shows how the conversational format has grown over the life of the podcast. Yeah, so I enjoyed Sammy's graph, Alice sent it on to me. What Sammy did was to show what proportion of the show is now cautionary conversations rather than cautionary tales, which is fair enough. That's a question

to ask. But for me, I would also have liked to have seen just the absolute number of cautionary tales. But I think I have it, I think I have it from memory. So in 2019, we did eight. In 2020, I think we did six. In 2021, I think we did 16. And in 2022, I think we probably did 18. So we're trying to do 20 a year now of the fully fledged fully mixed and the aim is to get something out every two weeks So obviously 20 doesn't quite cover it so then you would need these Conversations that we're having now you and I the Q&A episodes some reruns some cautionary conversations Otherwise, I'm just gonna fall over yeah Yeah, I mean yeah because you got I mean I can't write them Andrew of course Andrew right right some of the episodes fall over. Yeah, but I mean, yeah, because you got I mean, I can't write them. Andrew,

of course, Andrew, write, write some of the episodes. There's a limit to how much he can write. There's a limit to how much I can write. There's a limit to how much you can compose and mix. So really the the choice is not, could we have some more cautionary tales instead of these cautionary conversations? Sorry, we can't write any more cautionary tales about 20 years about the limit. The question is, would you like some cautionary conversations on top of those? Or not? Thanks everyone for writing in. I mean, I acknowledge that everyone who bothered to write in, they'll have their own

view, and they wrote in in response to a conversation episode, a Q&A episode, so people who despise such episodes won't even be around to respond. And then, you know, there's more jazz in it for you, isn't there, in terms of when you get someone else in the studio, there's more of an improvisation, you're being pulled in different ways. The others are written and set, and you know, we know what's coming, whereas it's really interesting to hear different brains

and different brains interacting with you and encouraging the conversation in different directions. Yeah, it's a different thing. Now, let's move on to D&D. Of course, Dungeons & Dragons, why not? The look of excitement and relief on your face. I used to play D&D, and I can't remember too much about it. Other than that, it did have an 18th-level monk.

Does that mean anything to you? It doesn't mean something to me, but I mean, you say you used to play D&D. I've played D&D twice in June and we're recording this conversation in July so Yeah, I'm not taking on. I am a current player. Are you a dungeon master? Sometimes I'm a dungeon master So the dungeon master for the people who don't know is the kind of referee stroke storyteller stroke Arbiter the director of the drama, if you like, while the others are the actors in the drama. There's no, I mean, there's no precise analogy.

So yeah, D&D has got some of our listeners very interested here more. Norwin, that's a good D&D name, isn't it? Yeah. I can't believe you would think of yourself as lawful neutral. You might need to unpack that one. I've listened to a lot of your stuff on the radio and your podcasts and even read a book and you're clearly good. I also suspect the UK government would consider you chaotic rather than lawful. I'm not even sure we should unpack this. I think people who know what Norman is talking about know,

and if you don't know, you don't know. All I'd say is yes, as I mentioned, I'm not really a D&D player, I play other games and other games do not. I'm not hedging now. Hey, don't, I'm not hedging. I'm completely consistent with what I told you 45 seconds ago.

I don't remember that far enough. I'm fair enough. Fair enough. Yes, I'm very flattered that Norwin regards me as chaotic good, because chaotic good is you're the rule-breaking good guy. This is definitely the coolest of all the alignments. I'm not gonna let you out of the dungeon quite yet.

I'm afraid, because the D&D thing did spark quite a few questions from the listeners. Ryan Kennedy and his son Ian were in touch. Hello, Mr. Halford. My youngest son and I are huge fans of caution retails. Ian is eight and really looks forward to each new episode coming out. We listen to your show every time we are driving somewhere to go camping or hiking together, and we each have a question for you.

From me, have you ever thought about doing a cautionary tales podcast episode specifically for kids who like to listen to your show. And from Ian, Ian loves D&D and after listening to your first question episode, would like to know what is your favourite D&D character class and why. So thank you for your time for such a great podcast and for your fantastic books. Ryan and Ian Kennedy, now your best friend. I would imagine. Yeah, yeah. As lovely email, thank you. So I haven't considered doing a

caution tails podcast specifically for children. I know there are quite a lot of quite young people who listen, which always makes me worry a little bit because I mean, these really are stories for grown-ups, some of them are horrible. Some of them aren't. But my son, who is 11, he was photographed glued to the cautionary tale's table read. The table read is when we, it's basically like a rehearsal where we kind of explore things.

I was doing a table read at home and he was lying on the floor outside my study with his ear, the bottom of the door, listening to me read this story and the story in particular is about this guy who murders his own son. It's the most horrific episode, but he was completely hooked. So yeah, I think about that. I have written a book for children, which is not yet available in the US and Canada, but is available in most other places called the Truth Detective. So if there are any 8 to 13 year olds listening and they want a bit more of me, they can get

a copy of the Truth Detective and have fun with that. And Ian's question was, what's my favourite character class in D&D? I'm going to say a fighter. The reason I say that is because I actually find Dungeons & Dragons to be quite complicated. I prefer simpler games that are more about the narrative of the storytelling, the description, all of that, unless about all the complex rules, and fighters have the simplest rules. So, I tend to stick with a fighter when I can.

First person shoot them up. Exactly. So here's another question from Mary, who's a Brit living in France and who sends some kind words Get ready Tim. Oh, yeah, I like kind words. Yeah. Hello. I just like to start by saying thank you for cautionary tales. I've recommended it to a lot of people and I look forward to the new episodes when they come out. You're my pleasure. Thank you. Right. Come on a question. Here we go. A question I ponder is Why do board games and especially role-playing games have such a geeky and often negative reputation?

I think it's much more socially acceptable in France to be a role-player gamer, and indeed any kind of gamer. I know lots more people who talk openly about them in different kinds of social circles. Can't quite get my head around why in the UK regularly playing board games with a bit of strategy or roleplay games seems to somehow marginalise you. After all, they're all social activities that you do with your friends.

Anyway, makes me ponder. Thanks again for the podcast, Mary. Wow, great question. It is. It is. I did do some thinking about this. About 15 years ago I wrote a magazine cover story for the financial times That partly involved me going to Germany to the biggest board game conference in the world at Essen

Where there's just these huge huge conference centers full of board game geeks and and interviewing the board game geeks about the board games And one of the questions was how come board games are so big in Germany and so relatively small in the UK and the US? And I mean, I think the best answer I've got, it's a historical accident and these things feed upon themselves. So if you have a board game culture, then the newspapers are kind of interested in board games. And so a new board game comes out, people actually review it.

So it gets reviewed in the newspapers. It's a good board game. That means that there's more mileage in making a good board game. So the board games get better. Or board games that win a prize in Germany. Our guarantee is like winning the book a prize in the UK, you're instantly guaranteed

to sell half a million copies because you won the game of the year. And so there's this virtual circle. And then just in terms of people's own social activity, is it acceptable after you've had people over for dinner to crack open a board game? I think back in the day it would have been quite common for a certain kind of English person to suggest a game of bridge.

But I think it's less weird now. I've got lots of friends who are happy to try a board game. So yeah, I don't think I have a better answer than that, which is that it's success, breed success, and this sort of thing. I wonder if things like, stranger things, the television series, which features a bunch of kids, quite obsessed with D&D.

I mean, I wonder if that sparked any interest. I certainly know quite a few kids around the 10 to 14 age group, some's and daughters of friends of mine who are really into it. And I'm always quite surprised because I feel like they've picked up something from my childhood and they're like, wow, you know. YouTube as well. So they're a live play channels for D&D and reviews of board games on YouTube, all of that.

So yeah, the hobby is bigger than it's ever been. The next question, Tim, comes from Peter, who's in Calgary, and he asks, Tim, what do you feel is the most pressing problem we need to solve as humans, and how substantial is any progress we've made? I guess the interesting thing about this is that if we have made a lot of progress in solving it, it no longer becomes a pressing problem. So the foot comes off the gas a bit. So I did discuss this in my book, The Data Detective Stroke, How to Make the World Add Up. If you go back 100 years, I think the most obvious problem that the human race faced was infant mortality,

which is the polite way of saying babies and young kids dying. And it was incredibly common occurrence. So if you imagine a class full of 30 kids who are going to show up to kindergarten at the age of four. And that these 30 children have just been born. Perhaps a quarter of them, perhaps eight, will never make it to kindergarten, because the mortality rate is so high, so many children would have died immediately after childbirth, in childbirth, or from these diseases. That would have been the situation in the early 19th century. And in this country or globally, that is the global average, but it would have been

in true most places. But now the global average, I think it's less than one would die under the age of five out of 30. And that is globally. That is including the very poorest, most deprived countries in the world. So I would say if that's the most pressing problem that human race faced, that problem has not been solved but we've made the most incredible progress. But then you just turn it around and say, well, maybe that's no longer

the most pressing problem, maybe the most pressing problem is fascism or maybe the most pressing problem is climate change or the risk of nuclear war, who knows? But that's the one that springs to my mind. And it's not as pressing as it used to be, thankfully. The writer Oliver Berkerman argues that instead of making to-do lists, we should make done lists. At the end of every day, you should make a list of all the things you've done,

it's just much more uplifting. And so maybe infant mortality. It's on the done list rather than the to-do list. But we shouldn't forget that we have made that progress. Yeah. Oliver is an intriguing writer, and I've got a question relating to him later. Okay. Well, we will come to that after the break, but not immediately, because the first thing

we are going to do after the break is Pascal. I am going to start asking you some questions, because I am very curious about where all the magic comes from. Oh, cue sound effect off-screen. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, Tim here, if you're interested in exploring the unexpected turns of bookish fiascos for the biggest changes in the book world today, then you should check out the chart topping podcast, Missing Pages, which just returned for a brand new season. Namely, Must Listen in 2022 by the Washington Post and the Guardian, missing pages lives up to the hype, including this second season. Produced by the award-winning firm The Podglomerate, missing pages aims to set the record straight on the publishing industry's hot button topics.

From the rise of Colleen Hoover and bookbans across America to the idea of who owns what in fan fiction, host and acclaimed literary critic Bethan Patrick investigates it all. Once mentioned, you'll hear from notable guests, such as New York Times bestselling author Jodie Peaco and publishers Weekly's Jim Million. So go ahead, follow missing pages today on Apple podcasts or wherever you're listening. We're back. It's me, Tim Halford, host of Corsion Details. And if I am the heart of Corsion Details, perhaps I am, Pascal Weiss is the soul of Corsion Details.

Pascal is our composer. He does the sound design for all the episodes. He's been with Corsing tales right from the start. Before even a word of any of these episodes had been written, Pascal and I and the producer Ryan were talking about, you know, what does an airship hang of full of rats sound like anyway? And so Pascal, you are such an important part of the way cautionary tales sounds

and what people love about the show. How do you do it? How does it happen? Just taught me through the process. I mean, often actually in the cut and thrust of our production schedule, often times I've not really had much of a chance to look through the script before I get, as I say, you naked. It's you in the studio reading the whole show. Yeah. And I just get that as what we would call you. You get the audio, okay. Yeah, just the audio of you having read out the entire episode, what we'd call a stem,

I suppose, in audio terms. And it's interesting. I've done so many episodes. A lot of things happen very instinctively now for me, but they deserve, I suppose, a little bit of unpacking, because what I do with that, and often I'm doing this away from the script, I just play it, and I drop little markers in on my computer, which is playing the audio, so I have a timeline with you speaking. And I just start to drop in thoughts about what I'd like to hear at any given moment, you

know, and they'll, those markers, as I would call them, will kind of come into two categories. Some will be music and some will be sound effects or sound design. And one of the great things about podcasts, you know, you look at the sort of size of this operation, the quite small team, and I'm handling effectively everything that happens in sound after you. Yeah. So I can play around with the relationship between those two things. But fundamentally the first thing I've got to do is think, well, what do we want to hear

here? Do we want to hear anything? Or is this something the listener will happily imagine? And of course, you know, when you're doing music and sound design for something which is audio only, there's very rarely a moment that you kind of have the stage to yourself and when I suppose the theme tune is the only spot where there's a little moment where the one is just listening to music. Yeah, which I'm sorry to interrupt with that. I mean the theme tune is magical and I vividly remember I was on a holiday with some family and so I'm on some Italian hillside with a glass of glass of wine

I was sent the draft of the theme to you and I said you know this podcast thing that you know I may be doing I've just been sent the music. Let's all have a listen and just and you're clicking the button on my phone and and all of us gathering around the phone and just hearing through the tini speakers these The caution tells theme and it was magic. I thought, wow, that sounds really good. I don't have the vocabulary to explain why it sounds really good, but trust me, it sounds really good. Well, thank you. I mean, yeah, sometimes you get it lucky

and your first idea kind of fits. I mean, I think the theme had to indicate a certain sense of kind of jeopardy or drama without being overtly kind of grim because of course there are so many different kinds of tales so it has to be kind of quite multi-purpose. I think somewhere in the back of my mind would be the music to tales of the unexpected you know the rolled-on stories. There's a sort of vintage about it. Yes there's a kind of Victorian-o kind of wind up music box element to it. There's a sort of vintage about it. Yes, there's a kind of Victorian-o-guined-up music box element to it. There's a moment where it gets a little bit wide-screen and goes almost sort of bond-like. And I mean there are other things that you do an episode that you've mixed

and this is an epic three-parter about the creation of the V2 rocket. And I want to talk too much about it, but there's a scene where there's a high pressure meeting with Heinrich Himmler, who is arguably the most evil man of the 20th century, and there's a lot of competition for that. And you just made it sound so frightening in ways that I cannot put my finger on just the echo, the sound design. We had wonderful acts as reading these lines, the lines are a matter of historical record.

There's just something chilling about the effects, the mixing. Himmler's command centre had the nickname, the black lair. At first, a few concrete bunkers hidden from air assaults by the Polish forests, it had grown. Low wooden buildings were scattered through the trees, heavily camouflaged. There was even a command train parked up on a ramp. SS guards were everywhere. It was the kind of place people were summoned to, never to return.

Even the self-assured Fond Brown was unnerved by the prospect of meeting the most sinister man in the Third Reich. Himmler received Fond Brown behind a simple wooden table. I must confess that I felt a bit jittery when I was shown into his office, but he greeted me politely and conveyed rather the impression of a country grammar school teacher than that horrible man who was said to wait knee deep in blood. I trust you realize that your V2 rocket has ceased

to be an engineer's toy and that the German people are eagerly waiting for it. Why don't you come to us? You know that the fuel's door is open to me at any time, don't you? I shall be in a much better position to help you lick the remaining difficulties than that clumsy army machine. Heinrich Himmler was making his play. The SS was launching a hostile takeover of Pena Munda and the entire rocket program. von Braun pushed back. Yeah, it's funny isn't it?

There are sometimes when pressure, you know, what a necessity being the mother of invention, but when pressure and of time to do things sometimes leads you to a quick solution which is actually really effective. Because when the one of the world's most evil men gets ushered onto the script, it's very tempting to reach for the Wagnerian orchestra or whatever. Which is just what he would want. Yeah,

yeah, I'm not playing that game. And gets 12 French horns up and running. But in this case, it came down to just a very uneasy, very low humming background sound. There's something just rumbling down in there to unsettle the listener. It worked for me. I'm curious, is there an episode that sticks in your mind as being either particularly satisfying to work on or particularly difficult one that you got through and just thought, what on earth am I going to do with this? This is very hard.

Well, that's a very good question because there's a real pain and pleasure principle at play with cautionary tales. In that, every time we move on to the next episode, we reset the clock, you know, literally one week, I'll be doing the charge of the library gate, and the next week, I'll be doing Clive's and Clare. Now, that's incredibly refreshing and fun because literally I can just chuck everything off the desk and start again. But it's, I suppose it's in a sense, labor intensive, in the way that when you're working on a long form in any given story, what tends to happen is you build up a library of things

that are repeatable and usable. And there is an element of that in caution hotels actually because we do often return to subjection, like quite often we end up on an airplane in caution hotels. But to go back to your actual question, I often do open up an episode and you'll say something casual like, you know, 7,000 horses are being flown across space, you know, and it's like, oh know, 7,000 horses are being flown across space. You know, and it's like, oh god, I've got to, oh, really, I've got to do that now. And I sort of, you know, start reaching the stuff to put in.

And sometimes I kind of, you know, I dread that moment to think, oh god, I'm going to have to build a massive world here. But more often than not, it's exciting. I mean, there are so many different episodes that had different, really nice challenges for me. The Clive Sinclair episode I really liked kind of trying to dig into the synthesizer world of that era and not least because I was a ZX-181 owner that was Clive Sinclair's second computer.

The Clive Sinclair episode being the the false dawn of the electric car which I think is still one of our most popular ever episodes so you did your job on that one. That is it, oh great. Yeah so I found it very redulent and I really enjoyed trying to get us into that time and that's a really key thing in cautioning tales because it moves through time it's really there's a really interesting question every every episode is like what are the kind of signature sounds of that period? What would things have sounded like? In what way would they be different? What will listeners be expecting if we're in, you know, 1920s New York? How is that different from 1980s?

London, you know, over in a restaurant or something? Yeah. Oh Actually my favourite episode in terms of the sound design was the one about Claude Shannon and Ed thought. Oh yeah, that was the last thing. And I think it's partly because it seemed to be very unpromising. I don't think it was my best work in terms of setting scenes or telling a story. It was a little bit more of an essay than a story in some ways. And you just used your wonderful work on that.

Very briefly, there was a gift in that episode there, which was that part of the clever machinery that Shannon developed for predicting the outcome of a roulette. We're involved a guy having a little earpiece in that played a little scale. And of course, you know, that was... You long for moments like that because it's... You know, when you open an episode up, you've got infinite possibility. And then if something in the story tells you something musical,

it's like, brilliant. It's like, that's the way I've got to go. And suddenly, you know, your idea's flow from that. It's great to have, it's like that's the way I've got to go and suddenly you know your ideas flow from that, it's great to have a little peg like that. Well thank you Pascal, thank you for answering my questions, thank you for putting the listeners questions to me. Do you have a question for me? Anything you wanted to ask me while you're here? Yeah, I've got a meta question for you. Okay, that's kind of question maybe. Yeah, this is going to have you kind of walking up and down an Escher staircase for the next three days. So you've now done a podcast called Corsion Retails for what?

Nearly three years now? Is this three? It's more than three. It's about 50 episodes, maybe 60 episodes now. So since the Victorian era basically. Yeah. So what Corsionary tale would you tell about making a podcast called cautionary tales? Yes, that's very meta. Well, and the obvious thing to talk about is the mistakes that I've made over the time. I've been writing, but rather than pick out specific mistakes, because we do make mistakes. We get things wrong, we accidentally get a fact wrong.

I guess what's on my mind at the moment just to get very personal is I absolutely love writing cautionary tales, but it just takes so much time. And so it's a question of, how do I divide my time between writing something like cautionary tales and doing something else I might want to do like writing a book. I guess the caution entails is a man who loved his podcast so much that he couldn't let go of it.

Well, actually, quite a few listeners are really interested in this and it does, again, I mentioned Oliver Burke when I was a year old. He wrote this wonderful book called 4,000 Weeks, which is about how to live your life wisely, I suppose. Yeah, in the very limited time that we have. And he's, you know, a lot of the questioners are fascinated by. I think they think they must be like four Tim Huffitz, because they don't quite understand how you do all that you do. I mean, there are kind of two Tim Huffitz, because Andrew Wright writes half the script for the horses. He does, yeah, he does all the good ones.

Obviously in your writings and in cautionary tales and elsewhere, you have come across consumed and investigated, so many different kinds of life hacks and self-help things and ways of operating and dealing with the myriad problems we face. And I wondered, you know, what has stuck? Because I asked Oliver Beckman the same thing, you know, having tried so many ways of organizing your life

and experimented with them. What really remained is something that you now routinely do. There's so many different things. There's no one hack is there, because life is complicated. I mean, the one piece of advice that I think people underrate is looking ahead more often and more thoughtfully than seems sane.

What have I got to do tomorrow? What have I got to do this afternoon? What have I got to do next week? What have I got to do the week after that? What have I got to do over the next three months? And just keep doing it and keep asking the question. And it's not because these things can be controlled, because they can't be, and unexpected stuff happens

all the time. And if you're looking ahead and you just see, oh, it's gonna be a bit of a crunch towards the end of next week. You just, you know what's happening, and you can be calmer, and you haven't got this, this sort of sense of something's out of your control, and you're not quite sure what it is.

It's like going into the shed, isn't it? You know, don't let the rats know where we're in there and face it. One thing I would say though, and I've been thinking about this kind of thing for a long, long time. I've read a lot of productivity books. I've written a lot of articles for the FT about getting things done and being productive. There is no hack. There's no piece of advice. There's no maxim that I could give you that I couldn't then retract or give the counter example.

Well that's why the bookshelves are so heavily stopped. No one's obviously got the right answers because self-help shelves are groaning aren't they? Absolutely. Carl Jung famously wrote a letter to a patient who asked him about this and he said, what you're asking me for is to be told how to live your life. And I can't tell you how to live your life. So Pascal, it has been such a pleasure. Thank you for joining us on Corsair New Tales. Thank you. I mean, so great to be in the cockpit.

I'll now return to my seating economy now. You know, make some sounds. Yes, either the cockpit or economy, probably a very bad place to be given what happens to airplanes on cautionary tails a lot. Thank you to everybody who sent in their questions to tailsatpushkin.fm, that's T-A-L-E-S. Keep sending your questions in, really about anything you want, about Pascal, about me, about cautionary tails, about anything.

We will have the wonderful Jacob Goldstein back in the studio soon enough. He is an expert on podcasting, entrepreneurship, technology, problem solving, finance, and economics. So if you have any particular questions about those subjects, send them in, but anything really. And thank you so much for listening to cautioning tales. And thank you once more Pascal Wise. Great pleasure. Thanks everyone. Corsairy Tales is written by me Tim Halford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Feins with support from Edith Husslo. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Weiss.

Sarah Nicks edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Brian Dilly, Greta Cohn, Lytel Moulard, John Schnarrs, Carly McGlory and Eric Sandler. Corsan retails as a production of Pushkin Industries. It was recorded in Wardle Studios in London by Tom Berry.

If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Go on, you know it helps us. And if you want to hear the show add free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus. I'm going to go to the next one. Tim here, if you're interested in exploring the unexpected turns of bookish fiascos for the biggest changes in the book world today, then you should check out the chart-topping podcast, Missing Pages, which just returned for a brand new season. Namely, Must Listen in 2022 by the Washington Post and the Guardian, missing pages lives up to the hype, including this second season.

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