Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - The Hero Who Rode His Segway Off a Cliff

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

Steve Jobs called It “the most amazing piece of technology since the PC.” According to Jeff Bezos It was not only “revolutionary,” but infinitely commercial. It was a fiendishly clever and massively hyped invention. But in the end It — also known as the Segway — was a failure. What makes an invention useful and valuable? Jimi Heselden’s pragmatic brainchild the Concertainer might hold the answers. First used to shore up the collapsing walls of a canal, it ultimately solved problems that Jimi had never even imagined. For a full list of sources for this episode, go to timharford.com If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts, be sure to sign up for our email list at pushkin.fm.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Paul Muldoon, a poet who over the past several years has had the good fortune to record hours of conversations with one of the world's greatest songwriters, Sir Paul McCartney. The result is our new podcast, McCartney, A Life in lyrics. Listen to McCartney, A Life in lyrics on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Pushkin. One Sunday morning in September, Sean Christie was walking his dog along a footpath by the side of the river Woff in Yorkshire, England. The path wound upwards as the bank rose sharply

away from the river. Looking up, Mr Christie saw another man on the path at the top of the hill, about to come down. The path wasn't really wide enough for both of them. This happens all the time on walks in the English countryside, one walker finds a place to move aside to let the other pass. There will be a smile and a greeting, maybe a word about the weather. But the man at the top of the hill wasn't walking. He was on a segway, you know, that two-wheeled, chunky electric scooter-type device that you'd sometimes see being ridden by sightseeing tourists and cities, or security guards in shopping malls. Not so often on country walks. Mr.

Christie later described, seeing the figure on the Segway, up slightly off the path, inviting the dog walker to continue up past him, the man wobbled, then disappeared from view. Mr. Christie went to look over the edge, down the steep drop. At the bottom, 40 feet below was a Segway, and the man, not moving, face down in the river. Mr. Christie called the emergency services, but there was nothing they could do. The man had died, the post-mortem found, of multiple blunt force injuries to the chest and spine. The body of the Segway owner was identified.

It turned out he didn't just own A Segway. He owned Segway, the company, the story made headlines. And you can almost hear the guilty chuckles being suppressed in newsrooms around the world. Owner of Segway dies on Segway. Segway maker is killed on one. Segway Boss dies riding one off cliff. You can't openly poke fun at the accidental death of a 62-year-old man while being courteous to a dog walker. Still, Segways were kind of a joke. President George W. Bush famously tumbled off one at Kenny Bunkport. Their dorky, uncool image had recently been reinforced by the comedy movie Paul Blart, Mall Cop, in which Kevin James plays an out-of-shape segue-riding security guard with delusions of

grandeur. That the boss of Segway, had ridden a Segway off a cliff was the kind of new story that made you suppress a guilty chuckle. But that wasn't the real story here. It wasn't the real story at all. I'm Tim Halford and you're listening to cautionary tale of two inventions. One was simple and boring. We'll hear about that later. And one was fiendishly clever and massively hyped. That hype started with a much-shared news article in January 2001 about a mysterious leak from the world of publishing. What is it? Book Proposal Heitens intrigue about secret invention touted as bigger than the internet or PC. The story was about a book proposal

that had been offered to publishers in strictest confidence. Harvard Business School Press had bought the rights to the book for a quarter of a million dollars. The book was about an invention, currently being worked on, not yet revealed to the world. And the invention, That was the mystery. The book proposal didn't say. Harvard Business School Press had bought the book without knowing what the invention was. The literary agent who had sold it to them didn't know.

The book's author knew, but he couldn't tell. He'd signed a non-disclosure agreement with the inventor, a man called Dean Cayman. Cayman had made his fortune in medical devices. He'd developed the world's first drug infusion pump, portable insulin pump, and portable dialysis machine. Now, he was making something else. Something so important, it invited a writer to document for posterity the process of making it. The book proposal called the invention simply it. The book's author, Steve Kemper, wrote in that proposal that it would profoundly affect the way people live. It will sweep over the world and change lives, sitis, and ways of thinking.

But don't just take Kemper's word for it. In the proposal, Kemper describes how he saw various tech titans and investors respond to seeing it after Dean Kamen had swarmed them to to secrecy. Jeff Bezos let out a loud honking laugh and told Cayman it's a product so revolutionary, you'll have no problem selling it. Steve Jobs said, if enough people see the machine, you won't have to convince them to architect cities around it, it'll just happen. One venture capitalist said he'd never expected to see anything as important as the worldwide web until he saw it. Another investor predicted it would make more money in its first year than

any startup ever, and in five years, Dean Cayman would be worth more than Bill Gates. But what was it? You know, dear listener, exactly what it is, of course. It's a segue. And so did anyone in 2001 who was paying attention. Online sleuths dug out all the patents Dean Cayman had recently filed. Some featured drawings of scooter-type devices. One journalist correctly joined some of the dots.

You can tell by the way the patents connect that Cayman is combining technologies to produce a scooter that mimics the way humans maintain balance. When you stand on the scooter holding that big T-bar, if you lean a little bit, it moves with you. So far, so spot on. But this couldn't just be a scooter, could it? There had to be something special about it. Add up some more clues and you'll come to the inescapable conclusion that it's a scooter using an alternative power source, Hydrogen, others disagreed.

It's an anti-gravity hoverboard. No, it's a teleportation pod, a magnetic levitation device, or maybe it is actually an acronym? IT for inductance transportation? inertial thruster? speculation ran wild? It became the fourth most searched for topic on lycos.com. If you remember lycos.com, just behind Napster and Britney Spears.

The animated sitcom South Park based an episode around it, imagining it as a cross between a personal transportation device and a sex toy. In December 2001, after nearly a year of hype and jokes and increasingly wild guesses, the time has finally come for it to be revealed, live on Good Morning America. Dean Keman wears jeans in a blue work shirt. He stands awkwardly next to a white curtain, flanked by the show's hosts, Charles Gibson and Diane Sawyer. All right, are you ready?

Are you ready? I'm ready. OK, I think it's time. The curtain rises to reveal a segue. The deck to stand on. Two big wheels either side. The waist height handlebars rising up on a central pillar. Alright, there it is.

Now what does it do? This is the world's first self-balancing human transporter, Cayman explains. You think forward, you go forward, you think backward, you go backward. Diane Sawyer seems distinctly unimpressed. I'm tempted to say, that's it? That can't be it. But it was. This was it.

The very same invention that had had Jeff Bezos honking with laughter. Steve Jobs sure that cities would re-architect around it, and various investors falling over themselves to pour money into it convinced that it was going to make a fortune and change the world. Looking at it, there in the studio, it was hard to see what they'd all been thinking. But then the presenters and came and left the studio and went down to Bryant Park to try the segway out. Neither of the presenters had been on one before. Diane Sawyer looked a little hesitant. But in a matter of seconds, Charles Gibson was giggling like a child. And all you do is just, as he said, you think

forward a little bit and off you go. I mean, you do. And then you want to turn to the right. I mean, you just turn to the right. Gibson's verdict, it's really cool. The author, Steve Kemper, said it's seen this many times while shadowing came and to write his book. Skeptics turned into believers as soon as they took one of the devices for a spin. I've never been on a Segway, so I can only go by how others describe it. Like the writer John Hylamon who did a cover story for Time magazine just after the launch.

No matter which way I lean or how hard it refuses to let me fall over. The machine is sensing and reacting to subtle shifts in my balance. I am slack-jored." So, while it was true that much of the media coverage saw the Segway's launch as a letdown, eagerly awaited revolutionary urban transport device, turns out to be a scooter. There was also still scope to believe that if only people just gave one a go, they'd want one. But I've promised you a tale of two inventions,

a clever and complex one, the segue, and a simple and boring one. It's time to meet that other invention, after the break. Unpalm Moldone, a poet who over the past several years, has had the good fortune to record hours of conversations with one of the world's greatest songwriters, Sir Paul Piccartney. The result is our new podcast, McCartney, A Life in lyrics. Listen to McCartney, A Life in lyrics on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, Amazon

music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Jimmy Hessell them was born in 1948 in the English city of Leeds. He grew up on the Haltan More public housing estate, a place where money was scarce and prospects were grim. Here's a writer who escaped the estate, describing life in his family's house, that around the time Jimmy was born. A sultan-crusted kettle simmering on the hob, flat iron resting in the hearth, earthenware milk cooler, chimney rods,

lovtings in the oven, bread cakes the size of hubcaps cooling on the windowsill. Like most young men who grew up on the estate, Jimmy left school as soon as he could at age 15. He worked first as a labourer, then a coal miner. In the 1980s the British coal mining industry collapsed. Jimmy, now in his mid-30s, was one of many who lost his job. But he did get redundancy money, and he used it to start a business, in sandblasting.

Jimmy hollered aid with his family at a caravan park on the northeast coast of England. Year by year, the caravans were getting perilously closer to the sea. This stretch of coastline was eroding more quickly than any in Europe. Every year, a couple more yards of land slipped away. Howes' built a safe looking distance inland, were now being abandoned abandoned as the cliff edge crept ever nearer, until finally, a land beneath them crumbled into the waves. One way to try to shore up eroding coastlines is with Gabyans, an idea that stretches back

to ancient Rome. Gabyans' accages, made once with Wicker, and now with wire mesh, and typically filled with rocks. You can stack them up to build retaining walls. Jimmy came up with an idea for a better gabbyan. A flat pack, wire mesh cage, easy to transport, unfold and erect, with a heavy duty liner so you can fill it up with whatever you have to hand, not just rocks but gravel, sand or mud. It expands like a concertina

to form a container. Jimmy called his brainchild the concertina, and in 1989 he took out a patent and set up a company called Hesco. He made his first sale to a water company that wanted to shore up the collapsing walls of a canal, a promising start. Jimmy thought it might make a nice little sideline to his sandblasting business. The concertena is a simple idea. As soon as you see one being used, you get it. The segue could hardly be more different. When Time magazine's writer got off after his first ride, slack-jored with amazement, he asked Dean Cayman to explain how it worked.

Cayman's reply, he wrote, involved a blizzard of equations. Dean Cayman first got the idea that would become the segue when he watched a man in a wheelchair struggle to get over a step into an ice cream shop. He wondered, could he make a wheelchair that would climb upstairs? It seemed to Cayman that you'd want a device that could regain stability when it was knocked off balance. Cayman got some engineers at his medical device company to rig up a basic prototype with off-the-shelf parts.

Gyroscopes, batteries, motors from a printer. It looked more like a little table on wheels than a wheelchair, but it would do for now to prove the concept. Shove it and it righted itself. Pretty cool but put it on stairs and it kept falling over. Eventually the team realised that they'd been thinking about the problem all wrong. When humans climb stairs, when we walk, it's not that we're constantly losing stability then regaining it. We're a little bit unstable all the time, but we're constantly making little adjustments to keep that instability under control, so we don't end up flat on our faces. Taking a step is like a controlled fall. Walking is one controlled fall after another. Armed with that conceptual insight, Cayman's fast-growing team of engineers

set about mimicking the human ability to stay upright while moving. As Cayman puts it, they made a device with a gyroscope that acts like you're in an ear, a computer that acts like your brain, motors that act like your muscles, wheels that acts like your inner ear, a computer that acts like your brain, motors that act like your muscles, wheels that act like your feet. The sensors and software in the table-like prototypes became more and more sophisticated. Cayman, remember, had set out to make a wheelchair. But then, one day, an engineer stood on one of those prototypes for a laugh, as he shifted

his balance for table moved on its wheels. Soon, the engineer was surfing around the lab. It was great fun. But Cayman didn't just see fun. He saw a product that would revolutionize how people got about. When Cayman invented medical devices, he made his money by selling the rights and collecting royalties. But with this product, it do it differently. He wanted to make it and market it himself. He created a company within his company. He

forbade his engineers from talking about their work. He approached a journalist, Steve Kemper, because he thought the genesis of a world-changing idea ought to be recorded. Steve Kemper's book would eventually be published with the title Reinventing the Wheel. And Dean Cayman wasn't happy with it. The way Kemper tells the story, the product seemed to be taking a long time to get to market,

despite millions of dollars and years of research. The engineers were still surfing around the lab on their prototypes and occasionally crashing into walls. When they crashed hard enough to dent the wall, they'd sign and date the dent. Kemper signed the dent he made. Thought he saw the root of the problem in the wider company culture. Things couldn't just be good. They had to be great, even if that meant constantly going back to the drawing board.

Dean or one of his engineers would come up with a great new idea that yanked the product in a fresh direction. Parts and designs and specs constantly mutated. Dean issued dire warnings about deadlines, but didn't stop making suggestions for improvements. For making things great, costs money. And Cayman's money was fast running out. He had no choice but to show his product to potential investors. Remember the meetings Steve Kemper described? The venture capitalists who thought the

Segway would be as important as the worldwide web? And Steve Jobs, after 30 seconds surfing around, Jobs said, this is the most amazing piece of technology since the PC. Investors practically fought to give Cayman their money. They valued the company at half a billion dollars. True, some things might still go wrong. Jeff Bezos worried about regulators. You have a product so revolutionary, you'll have no problem selling it. The question is, are people going to be allowed to use it? The lead software engineer worried about making the product as safe as possible, though there was only so much he could do.

In a sadly pressient turn of phrase, he told Steve Kemper, somebody will probably go over a cliff on one. Dean came and himself was mainly worried that some bigger company would get wind of his product, figure out the technology behind it, and beat him to market. The technology is so good that the risk is not that it won't be everywhere in 10 years, but that it might not be us providing it, it'll be Honda or Sony. The only advantage we have is that they're clueless. To make sure Honda and Sony remained clueless,

Cayman was paranoid about secrecy. Every potential investor who saw a prototype segue had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. When his company recruited new engineers, the applicants weren't allowed to see what they'd be working on. Job ads were cryptic. We're looking for talented, passionate and unique individuals to design and develop this revolutionary, electro-mechanical product

that will create a new industry. This is the product you will tell your grandchildren about. Cayman's quest for secrecy also hobbled his marketing team. They couldn't do basic consumer research. Cayman did think about his marketing strategy. He heard that Steven Spielberg was about to film a futuristic sci-fi movie with Tom Cruise, Minority Report. He tried to persuade Spielberg to put the characters on Segways. But when his marketers wanted to show some ordinary people a Segway, and ask, would you buy one? How much would you pay? Cayman was dismissive. Who would worry about stuff like that?

Corsion retails will return after the break. I'm Paul Monding, a poet who over the past several years had the good fortune to spend time with one of the world's greatest songwriters, Sir Paul McCartney. We talked through more than 150 tracks from McCartney's songbook, and while we did, we recorded our conversations. I mean, the fact that I dreamed of the song yesterday leads me to believe that it's not just quite as cut and dried as we think it is. And now you can listen to our conversations in our new podcast McCartney, a life.

McCartney's been asked many times to write his autobiography and he's always declined. But as we ventured on this journey, line by line, it became clear how much of McCartney's life is indeed embedded in his lyrics. It was like going back to an old snapshot album looking back on work. I hadn't thought much about for quite a few years. Listen wherever you get your podcasts and if you want to binge the entire season, add free right now. Sign up for Pushkin Plus on the McCartney Aliphonderic Showpage in Apple podcasts or at pushkin.fm-plus. Your membership also unlocks access to add-free Dr. Laurie Santos and many other top hosts.

When Britain's Ministry of Defence saw Jimmy Heseldon's new type of collapsible gabion, the concertaina, they realized straight away that it had used his far beyond shoring up canal walls. They could use them in war zones, they thought, as a quick way to build protective barriers around aircraft, machinery, and people. They placed a big order with Jimi's company, Hesco, and took the concertaners to the first Gulf War in 1991. They worked brilliantly. The traditional way for armies to build protective barriers is with sandbags, but filling up sandbags is time consuming and exhausting. Constructing a typical wall of sandbags might take ten soldiers most of a day. To make the same size wall

out of Jimmy's concertanas took twenty minutes for two soldiers and a digger. Soon, the US military had embraced Jimmy's product too. It became better known as the Hesco Bastion. Saved the lives of soldiers like Sergeant David McGregor from Texas, who was caught up in a mortar attack in Iraq in 2004. If that basket had not been there, then I would have been killed instantly. In July 2008, in Afghanistan, India's diplomatic staff received a tip off from American intelligence that the Taliban planned to attack their embassy in Kabul. A quickly threw up a defensive line of sand-filled Hesco bastions around the compound walls. A few days later, a suicide bomber rammed a car packed with explosives into a diplomatic vehicle outside the embassies gates. The embassy was on a busy street. The explosion killed 58 people.

street, the explosion killed 58 people. But the embassy itself was largely unscathed as the sand-filled containers absorbed the blast. A senior official later expressed no doubt. The Hesco barriers saved the lives of all those in the compound. When Jimmy dreamed up his idea, it thought of shoring up coastlines against erosion, and it turned out that the Hesco Bastion did indeed work pretty well for that, and for building other kinds of retaining wall, such as for garden landscaping, also containing fuel spills, and creating barriers against sediments to help wetlands regenerate and making walls for temporary housing after natural disasters and flood defence. In 2005, as Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans, workers raced to plug gaps in the city's levees. They built a wall of pesco bastions along the 17th Street Canal.

It survived the storm. A nearby concrete wall did not. As it sat in the caravan part by the seaside, Jimmy had thought his idea of a flat-packed gabbian might make him a bit of income as a sideline to his sand-lasting business. Two decades on, he featured in a newspaper's list of the 400 wealthiest people in Britain. Jimmy's fortune was estimated at £200m, $300m. As Dean Cayman prepared to launch the Segway, his team met with investors and advisors.

The author Steve Kemper described someone posing a question to the company's marketing director. What's the product's value proposition? You know, like, why would anybody want to use it? The marketing director seemed stumped. Perhaps not surprisingly, given that he hadn't been allowed to test the product with actual consumers. Cayman waved the question away. We need to remember that what big ideas do is make new ways to see things. Steve Jobs chimed in to agree. That's the story of the PC. Nobody had any idea how they'd be used and look

what happened. They're right. Big ideas do make new ways to see things. It's the story of the PC. It's the story of Jimmy Heseldon's concertena too. Other people looked at this product to stop erosion and saw a new way to fight floods, regenerate wetlands and protect soldiers. But it's not the story of the Segway. When people looked at the Segway, they shrugged, or laughed. Not everyone, of course. Some people loved it, until they heard the price. Dean Cayman had burned through so much money to make the Segway great, he had to charge nearly $5,000 for the entry-level version, over 8,000 in today's money. It was too much for many.

Cayman had imagined Tom Cruise riding a Segway in minority report, but when screenwriters saw the Segway, they gave them to characters who were comically unaware of how silly they looked. Niles Crane in Frazier, Joe Bluth in arrested development. The mall cop, Paul Blart. 20 years on, Segways aren't made anymore. After some changes in ownership, the Segway brand now sits with a Chinese company called Ninebot. They make electric scooters that have the word Segway on them, but they're

just regular electric scooters, the kind that a dime a dozen incities these days, where you have to do the balancing yourself. What's to blame for the Segway's failure? Dan Corrie's was Steve Kempers literary agent, and he wonders if the answer is… him. He recalls how he wasn't quite careful enough with Kempers mysterious proposal for a book about it. The proposal was supposed to stay confidential, but he shared it too widely. It got leaked. And after all the hype about anti-gravity or teleportation devices, the reveal of the self-balancing scooter couldn't help but invite the question, is that it? Writing in

slate, Dan Coise argues that, often with new products, the audience doesn't quite understand them immediately. It takes a while for their value proposition to emerge, but the Segway could never quite recover from the letdown of its launch. He wrote, I can't stop thinking that the Segway might still have had a chance, but for the hype. Maybe.

But maybe the answer is simpler. Most of us don't really mind doing our own balancing. We don't need a machine with gyroscopes that mimic the inner ear and motors that act like muscles. We're happy enough to use our own muscles and inner ears. The Segway was a brilliantly clever, exquisitely engineered solution to something most people never saw as a problem.

The concertena, solved problems that Jimmy Hesselden hadn't even thought about. Before cautionary tales, I wrote another podcast series called 50 Things That Made The Modern Economy. Some of the inventions I talked about were as complex and hyped as the Segway, but many were as simple and boring as the Concertena, the pencil, the brick, the post-digit stamp. Easy to understand, obvious in retrospect, and used in ways that turned out to be far more powerful than anyone could have foreseen.

Often, it's the simple ideas that change the world. Sometimes, they make their inventors rich, too. What does a man like Jimmy Hessel then do with a couple of hundred million pounds? To start with, create jobs. Jimmy built his Hesco Bastion factory next to the public housing estate where he'd grown up. Not much had changed. Holtan Moore still had a grim reputation for poverty

and unemployment. Jimmy recruited kids who just left the local school. Youngsters, he said, who've grown up without role models. And older workers too. Those who, like him, had been made redundant late in life, and feared they might never work again. He paid them way over the going rate. No wonder they felt loyal in return, and worked so hard for him. When war broke out in Kosovo, the United Nations ordered

a load of Hesco Bastions to protect their forces. Jimmy's workers delivered the order ahead of schedule. Jimmy decided to thank them by taking the mall on vacation to Spain. Jimmy gave millions to military charities, with no publicity or fuss. He set up a foundation to work on projects in his local community and gave tens of millions to that. He indulged himself too, of course he did. Jimmy bought an 18th century mill by the river with 67 acres of land. He employed a team of workers to convert it into his dream house. They made the water wheel work again. But the dream house never quite got finished because Jimmy and his wife, Julie, were perfectly

happy living in a small, lodge on the site. And Jimmy kept getting distracted with other ways to keep his workers busy. He had them build a miniature train track and a donkey sanctuary. Kids from local schools could come for day trips, he thought. He built a replica of Stonehenge because… why not? He built a museum for the classic car that had collected. An Aston Martin DB5, once owned by the Beatles George Harrison, a Rolls-Royce phantom that belonged to Hollywood star, Betty Davis. Jimmy fell in love with another form of transport too. The Segway.

He bought an off-road version. He liked to scoot around on the countryside paths near his house. In 2009, Dean Cayman decided to cut his losses and put the Segway Company up for sale. Jimmy Hesaldon bought it. A few months later, one Sunday morning in September, Jimmy took his off-road Segway out for a scoot by the river. As he crusted a hill, he looked down the path to see a man walking his dog about to climb up. The path wasn't really wide enough for both of them. Jimmy Hesaldon's funeral wasn't held in a church. They put up a big marquee on the industrial

estate by his factory. 2,000 people turned out to pay their respects. Most were local, one had flown in from Texas. Sergeant David McGregor explained, I'm here to pay tribute and thanks to a man who saved my life through his product. If it wasn't for Jimmy's barriers, my wife and children would only have a flag to remember me by. As a bugler from the Yorkshire Regiment played the last post, a thousand green balloons floated up towards the sky, bearing the words, a hero to the heroes. Just a few days had passed since those headlines about Jimmy Hesaldon's accident, Segway Boss dies riding one-off cliff. It might have looked like a darkly ironic footnote

to an absurdly over-hiked invention. But everyone at Jimi's funeral knew that wasn't the real story. It wasn't the real story at all. For a full list of our sources, please see the show notes at timhalford.com. 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'Italmalade, John Schn Schnarrs, Carly Migliore, Eric Sandler, Maggie

Taylor, Nicole Marano and Morgan Ratman. Porsche retail is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It helps us for, you know, the serious reasons. And if you want to hear the show, add free. Sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page and Apple podcasts or at Pushkin.fm slash plus. I'm Paul Monding, a poet who over the past several years had the good fortune to spend time with one of the world's greatest songwriters, Sir Paul McCartney.

We talked through more than 150 tracks from McCartney's songbook, and while we did, we recorded our conversations. I mean, the fact that I dreamed the song yesterday leads me to believe that it's not just quite as cut and dried as we think it is. And now you can listen to our conversations in our new podcast, McCartney, a life in... McCartney's been asked many times to write his autobiography, and he's always declined. But as we ventured on this journey, line by line,

it became clear how much of McCartney's life is indeed embedded in his lyrics. It was like going back to an old snapshot album, looking back on work I hadn't thought much about for quite a few years. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts and if you want to binge the entire season, add free right now. Sign up for Pushkin Plus on the McCartney Aliphonderic Showpage in Apple podcasts or at pushkin.ethm-plus. Your membership also unlocks access to ad-free binges

from Malcolm Gladwell, Dr. Laurie Santos, and many other top hosts.