Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Airships, AI and Alan Cumming: Tim Answers Your Questions

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

Why does economics get a bad rap? How did a small Hungarian airline wreak havoc in the 2000s? What cautionary tales can we glean from Tim’s own life? And what’s his favourite role-playing game? You sent in your questions and now - with the help of podcasting maestro Jacob Goldstein (What’s Your Problem?) - Tim is answering them. Do you have a question for Tim? Please email any queries you might have, however big or small, to [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Do you want to know what it's like to hang out with MS-13 Nelsabrador? How the Russian Mafia fought battles all over Brooklyn in the 1990s? What about that time I got lost in the Burmese jungle hunt in the world's biggest MF lab? Why the Japanese Yakuza have all those crazy dragons at those? I'm Sean Williams. And I'm Danny Goldz. And we're the host of the Underworld podcast. We're journalists that have traveled all over, reporting on dangers people in places.

And every week we'll be bringing you a new story about organized crime from all over the world. We know this stuff because we've been there we've seen it and we've got the near misses and embarrassing tales to go with it. We'll mix in reporting with our own experiences in the field and we'll throw in some bad jokes while we're at it. The only world podcast explores the criminal underworld that affect all of our lives whether we we know it or not. Available wherever you get your podcasts. Pushkin Hello everyone, Tim Halford here. It is our listener Q&A episode. I'm very first listener

Q&A episode of Corsionary Tales. You have been sending in your questions to tailsatpushkin.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 mystros of podcasting. I need Jacob Goldstein to help me. Jacob, welcome to Corsian details. 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 next. I'm looking forward to that. So Jacob, do you want to just tell people who you are for the for the benignated souls who don't already know of your work. Yes, so like you, I host a podcast for Pushkin, a 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 have planned up 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 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 gonna start with this one. Tim, if you stood for Parliament, you'd be voted in like a shot. Parts more of a comment than a question,

but it's nice, 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. And maybe I can 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, you know, 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 can't download them from a spreadsheet somewhere. And the problem comes because or 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 to that. And 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 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 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 and they had the right to come to the UK. Just at that moment, some Hungarian entrepreneurs set up a cheap airline called Wizair, 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. Oh, 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 these 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 humanities

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 standing in the questions. I mean, 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, like, 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 get stuck on economic disasters, at booms and busts and crashes and business failures, or only stories involving men. Because I'm a guy and like history's 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 trains an economist what you know 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 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 let it gas. Incredible. Remind me, just his name was midgely, right? Thomas midgely, 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 at whole 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 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 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 in 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

infuel, and it's coming out of the exhaust, that that might be a problem. I mean, that was known. Midgely didn't intend to cause a problem. He argued that there probably wouldn't be a problem. I mean, that was known. Midgeley 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. That 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 is where I'm going with this. Here's why I wanted to talk about it. I want to talk about AI right now,

because we're in this extraordinary moment of AI development, and it seems like the most anticipated bad potential consequences I know of in the history of technology. Like the people at the very Vanguard, you know, open AI, the makers of chat GPT, 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. That's largely a comment what I just made. But what I feel like you're very good at is taking something like that and then landing it somewhere like, what do we make of this? There's a few different angles that you could take.

And there's another parallel that 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 personality. 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 AI's 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 over-hype 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. Music

Listening to a special Q&A episode of Corsionary Tales, I'll be back with Jacob Goldstein in just a moment. Music Music Music Business notifications getting out of hand, buried under an avalanche of customer emails, texts, and social media messages? Keep your edge with Thrive Small Business software and never miss a message again. Thrive offers one solution to communicate, market, and run your business.

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Is the role-playing game Warhammer basically lawyers playing with action figures? I'm Eric Mulinsky, the host of Imaginary Worlds. Science fiction and fantasy stories may be set on other planets or parallel dimensions, but they're created by people in our world. Each episode, we examine these fantasy stories to learn, what they can tell us about ourselves. I've talked with novelists like Andy Weir, who wrote the Martian, designers of games like Magic of the Gathering,

writers of Hit TV shows like Star Trek Strange New Worlds, and the puppeteer who designed Miss Piggy. You can subscribe to Imaginary Worlds wherever you get your podcasts. The question comes from his PS, and it's a question that many listeners asked. He writes, PS, I notice that in the Pushkin podcast, you adapt your language, units, and currency for a US 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 push-kidders in 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? Was 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. Does 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 DC for a couple of years. And in Washington DC, 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, if you listen to the radio, they tell you what the temperature was in Fahrenheit. And so pretty soon, you've 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 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 a listener, special. I forget, 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, hundred and third, you got one just on deck? 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 laser disc. So I'm doing a caution in tells about the laser disc. 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 Laserdisc system that schools could buy this Laserdisc in 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 laser disk would have been more 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 interspersing the occasional conversation. So usually we have a classic, 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 that. The cautionary conversation is supposed to be like a bonus. I think they're really fun, but if you don't like it, then just skip and we'll be back next week with the full thing. But I'll be interested in people's thoughts, whether people think, no, they're brilliant, absolutely love them, they're just as good as any other episode of cautioning tales. Don't touch them or maybe people think You know, they're fine as a bonus But don't love them, but you know, 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. Tails 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 favorite, the Deadly Airship Race, but that's just first one that I wrote. So that's my favorite, the Deadly Airship Race. But that's just between the two of us. Her other question is how does

questionnaire 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. 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 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. And then afterwards, it's out of my hands. And Pascal Weiss, our composer and sound designer, does this amazing music. We sometimes have brilliant actors, some 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. 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, it goes on the page, and there's a cartoonist, and they'll send it, they might have a couple of questions, they might make a couple of tweaks, and then it just, it 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 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, that's a 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 any time soon. Listening to a special Q&A episode of cautionary tales will be back in just a moment. Business notifications getting out of hand buried under an avalanche of customer emails, texts, and social media messages, keep your edge with Thrive Small Business software

and never miss a message again. Thrive offers one solution to communicate, market, and run your business, but simply, small businesses run better on Thrive. Get Command Center for free today at Thrive.ca. That's THR-YV.ca. Terms and conditions apply. Free plans have limited functionality. Do you want to know what it's like to hang out with MS-13, Nusabrur?

How the Russian Mafia fought battles all over Brooklyn in the 1990s. Or what about that time I got lost in the Burmese jungle and in the world's biggest Meflab? Or why the Japanese Yakuza have all those crazy dragon tattoos? I'm Sean Williams. And I'm Danny Gold. And we're the host of the Underworld podcast. We're journalists that have traveled all over, reporting on dangerous people in places.

And every week we'll be bringing you a new story about organized crime from all over the world. We know this stuff because we've been there. We've seen it, and we've got the near misses and embarrassing tales to go with it. We'll mix in reporting with our own experiences in the field, and we'll throw in some bad jokes while we're at it. The only world podcast explores the criminal underworlds that affect all of our lives, whether we know it or not.

Available wherever you get your podcasts. So Tim, on the show that I host, podcast called What's Your Problem? It's available wherever you get your podcast. Great show, people should listen to it. We close with the lightning round. And I want to close this show with the lightning round. I'm so excited, I want the 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, in particular, when you're right in the beginning. So one of the sort of signature features of cautionary tales is the dramatic reenactment. And if you've had some famous actors, do those, which is fun. And so I'm curious, if there was a dramatic reenactment about 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 coming. 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, Alan's getting things done, for example, I think is really good. And on the less nerdy side, 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 when you the poo 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, that'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? The pushups. To have a hard time. You don't see that in comics. 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 may have 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 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 a 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 played Dungeons and Dragons, so I asked some friends of mine who played 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 felt at the table?

I once played a visually impaired character, like a completely, she couldn't see at all. And 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 biggest lesson. That was just transformative 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, and you don't have to follow any rules as long as you're doing good stuff. And here's the creative dream.

I would love to be chaotic good. Maybe I used to be chaotic good, and now I'm laughable 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 following 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 designed to enable you to run star-worsy heists with hand-solo-y or Cassian and ory kind of characters, so smugglers and rebels. 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 look 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 group think, 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 do whatever I liked, but it didn't seem that way from the inside. Great. Thanks for letting me come and ask you 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, basically. Yeah. You're a 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 Corsionary 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 tailsatpushkin.fm. That's T-A-L-E-S at pushkin.fm. And that email address is also in the show notes. Corsinary Tales is written by me Tim Hafed with Andrew Wright.

It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Edith Roussolo. 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 Dilly, Julia Barton, Greta Cone, L'Italmallard, Schnarrs, Carly Migliore, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Marano and Morgan Ratner. Corskney 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.

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