Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - The Man Who Bet His House on a Pop Song - A Eurovision Tale

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

You can gamble on horses or on the turn of a card - but Daniel Gould made a living betting on the outcome of the annual Eurovision Song Contest. Daniel made a profit because he studied the voting history of the competition, as well as the cultural and geo-political factors that predict which songs will triumph and which will score "nil point".     In 2018, Daniel was so sure of his system of reducing the risk that he took out a loan on his home and bet it on Israel's song to win...  only to see the entry from Cyprus suddenly rocketing up the leader board. Was Daniel about to lose everything? For a full list of sources used in this episode visit Tim Harford.comSee 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. It's a Saturday evening in May 2018. Across Europe, nearly 200 million people are watching the same live broadcast on television. The grand final of the Eurovision song contest. Eurovision goes back decades. Every year, dozens of countries send a song. Each country appoints a jury of musical experts to judge the other songs

and there's a televote for the viewing public. The jury vote and the televote get turned into points and added together to decide the winner. This year, two countries are generating all the hype. Cypress have sent a catchy, electro-pop number, performed with hair flicking abandoned by a sult singer in a sparkly cat suit. Israel have sent a sassy song about female empowerment, featuring Japanese lucky cat figurines and an impersonation of a chicken. The most people watching, this is lighthearted Saturday night entertainment, but not for one man, and especially not this year. If Cypress wins, Daniel Gould will lose his house.

I'm Tim Halford, and you story and what a story it is, but I'm going to do things slightly differently because I'm not going to tell it alone. I'm joined in the studio by one of the cautionary tales team Andrew Wright. Hello Tim. Now Andrew helps me research and write the scripts for these podcasts and normally I sit in front of the microphone by myself and take the glory, but I couldn't keep Andrew out of the spot like this time because Andrew is a very old friend of our hero, Daniel Gould. And you met him yourself, Tim, remember, back in the day.

Hey, yep, we were all at college together and you and I were housemates, and I met Daniel because he was a friend of yours. Of course, I remember him, although I remember him as Dan. Yeah, I got to know him as Dan as well. A few years later, I noticed he'd started to introduce himself as Daniel. I asked him why, and he said there's a certain Southern English accent where the name Dan Gould sounds like the word dangled. And as soon as he'd heard this, he couldn't hear it, and he hated being dangle. Okay, Daniel, it is.

Nobody gets dangled on my podcast without their consent. So I didn't keep in touch with Daniel after college, but I understand that he became a professional gambler. Or not just any professional gambler, Tim. Professional gambler on the Eurovision Song Contest. Right, so we should probably take a moment to explain just what the Eurovision Song Contest is. Our listeners in Europe will know exactly what it is,

but for everyone else, it does take some explaining. Yeah, it does. I think here in the UK, we've got used to thinking of Eurovision as a bit of a joke. People liked Pogfun at the terrible songs and the crazy costumes, and the rather elastic definition of Euro. So every year there's an entry from Israel, which is at least close to Europe, and also from Australia. Australia, not conventionally regarded as being part of Europe, but I should say that although the British think it's a joke, we do like a joke and I think a lot of Brits like the Eurovision Song Contest as a result. We do. We enjoy it in a postmodern irony kind of way. But there's

also this whole community of fans across Europe who embrace Eurovision unironically as a cultural event that brings diverse people together. And a lot of other countries take it rather more seriously than the UK does. They see doing well in Eurovision as a source of national pride. Eurovision's never been just about the songs. There's always an element of politics to the vote. In 2022, for instance, the contest took place not long after Russia had invaded Ukraine. And the song from Ukraine won in a landslide. I'm guessing that wasn't because people really liked Ukraine's song.

No, they did really like Ukraine's song. It was one of the betting favourites even before Russia invaded, and the songs are an ode to motherhood in Ukrainian by a folk rap group whose lead singer was a knitted pink bucket head. Okay, I'm sold. It's impossible not to like Ukraine's song, but yeah, and clearly, you're right. A lot of people were voting to send a message of solidarity. No, you mentioned that it was one of the betting favourites

and that takes us back to Daniel Gould and the way he made his living by betting on the Eurovision song contest. So, so help me out here because you've always known more about gambling than I have. So there's a betting market on which country is going to win Eurovision? There's all kinds of betting markets on Eurovision.

You can bet on who'll win, who will be in the top four, or the top ten. You can bet on who will finish last. The UK traditionally competitive there. Some of Daniels biggest bets were on which countries would qualify for the final from the semi-final. Okay, I'm analyzing behind the curve hiss. There are now semi-finals in Eurovision, I don't remember that.

There are semi-finals because they realize they have too many songs to fit them all into one show on a Saturday night. The very first Eurovision was way back in 1956. They had only seven countries in it. It got bigger and bigger and in 2004 the organisers realised they needed to whittle down the countries with a semi-final. And that was when Daniel realised that he could make some serious money from Eurovision.

He'd always loved it as a fan and he'd bet small amounts on it for years. But he realised that some countries were practically guaranteed to get enough points to qualify for the final, just from the diaspora vote. Why does the diaspora matter? So in Eurovision, you can't vote for your own country. If I'm in the UK, I can't vote for the UK. But if you're a person of Polish descent who's living in the UK, then you can certainly vote for Poland's song. So by looking at historical patterns of migration across Europe, you could anticipate where some countries will get votes from other countries.

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

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

And partly of course, it's intuition. But the singer was Norwegian, but he was born in Belarus, so there's some points from Belarus to start with. And the song itself was a kind of fusion of Eastern European folk file-in and Western European pop, and it seemed like the kind of thing that would do really well all across the continent. So Daniel started to bet on Norway to win Eurovision before Norway had even chosen this song to represent it, and because he'd spotted the song early, the odds were still good, 16-1. So for every dollar you bet, you win 16. Yeah, that's right. Norway won, and Daniel won enough that year to pay off the mortgage on his apartment in London. I mean, nice. Very nice indeed. And he thought, well, I don't need much money to live on anymore.

I'm going to take the plunge, I'm going to quit my day job. So, for four or five months of the year, he is now living online, watching live streams of Norwegian television or whatever, and is following all the Eurovision news. What's happening the rest of the year? Well, he spent a lot of it traveling. He had friends all over the world and he'd go and stay with them. And he'd go to places he'd never been before. What sounds a nice enough way to live?

Yeah, it was a lovely way to live. I think Daniel's the only person I've ever known who lived exactly the lifestyle he wanted to live but who never had to do anything he didn't enjoy to get the money to fund that lifestyle. How much money are we talking about? Well, Daniel told me that he could get by on £20,000 a year if he had to. That's about £25,000, so not a fortune by any means.

But in a typical Eurovision, he would win maybe two or three times that. So that's what? £50,000 to £80,000. So how much did he have to risk to win that much? Some of Daniel's biggest bets might be something like a £100,000 on a country to qualify from the Eurovision semi-final. And the odds would be very short on those kind of bets. He might only stand to win about £3,000, but he'd be 99% confident in the bet coming in.

That's more than $100,000 at stake. So how did he get that kind of money? Well, every year, before Eurovision, Daniel took out a loan, secured against the value of his apartment in London. And every year after Eurovision, he paid the loan back again. So each year he's putting his home on the line, and some people might raise an eyebrow at that. Well, I think it'll be different for you or me, Tim, because we've both got kids, and

we wouldn't like to sit them down and explain to them that we've gambled their home away, because we misjudged the popular appeal of a Ukrainian folk rapper and a nitty-pink bucket hat. But it was different for Daniel. He was a single man. He had no dependence. He wasn't risking anybody's future but his own. How would he find out whether he'd won 3,000 or lost 100,000? Presumably, it's the presenters of the program reading out a list of names of countries that are qualified.

Yeah, and with very, very long pauses for dramatic effect. I can imagine how can he bear to watch. Well, I asked him that once. He said, what do you mean watch? I'm standing in the corner of the room facing the wall, bent double and biting my fist. I was always amazed that he got through those nights because I would have had a heart attack.

That got the second highest vote. Now, I don't know much about gambling, but I do know a bit about investing. And there is a term of art for this sort of risk in the investment world, where you're putting huge amounts on the line for the near certainty of small rewards. People call it picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. And that sounds very much like what Daniel was doing

with some of these Eurovision bets. Yeah, it's exactly what he was doing, though he'd always been careful to make sure that no single bet would be big enough to wipe him out if it lost. But then, in 2018, he took a bit of a stumble in front of the steamroller. Hold that thought. Corsionary tales will return. Tim here, if you're interested in exploring the unexpected turns of bookish fiascos, or 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. You're listening to a Eurovision special of cautionary tales. Our hero is professional gambler, Daniel Gould, and one of Daniel's closest friends is Andrew Wright, who writes for cautionary tales. Andrew, the time I met Daniel at college when we were all students, it was when you and he were going to the race track together. Yeah, Daniel and I became friends as teenagers because we shared an interest in betting

on horses. We both learned that there are people who make a living from betting on horses and we thought this sounded like a right way to live, more fun than working. But unlike him, you didn't become a professional gambler. No, I gave up on that idea very quickly because I met some professional gamblers, and I realized that it really is hard work, those guys put the hours in. It explains it, you never did like hard work. I'm not going to deny that, Tim.

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

Back in the 1980s, Tetlock noticed that the world was full of people who were treated as experts in areas such as economics and politics, but they kept forecasting things that didn't happen. And Tetlock asked, what does it even mean to be an expert? He asked these supposed experts to make forecasts on very specific future events, such as election results or whether the stock market would reach a particular level. And they had to put an exact percentage figure on how likely they thought these things were. He held competitions, at first for established

experts and later he opened things up to all comers. In fact, he even invited me to join the experiment. I got his email on April 1st, I thought it was a joke. You didn't join the experiment though did you Tim? No I didn't, I'm too lazy, too cowardly. But I did pay close attention to the research. Tedlock's headline result was very famous. Most high-profile pundits do no better than random chance. If you want to know who's going to win an election or a war,

you could listen to the talking heads on television or you could get a chimpanzee to throw a dart at a wall. Tellog found that some people did make better than random predictions, and he called them super-forecasters. And in his book he talks about how they have a different thinking style. He quotes the philosopher Isaiah Berlin on the two thinking styles, foxes and hedgehogs. Yes, which that distinction comes from an old fragment of classical poetry. The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Tellerglator said that the whole fox's hedgehogs thing was a bit of an oversimplification, but I think it's stuck in people's mind, because it's a great way of understanding his meaning. The super forecasters, they're the foxes. They look at many clues from many sources, and these clues often contradict each other. They decide how much weight to give to each clue, they think in probabilities,

which doesn't come easily to a lot of people. Hedgehogs are different. They are convinced that there's one big idea that explains everything. Maybe it's Marxism or libertarianism, but whatever it is, they try to make all the clues fit that explains everything. Maybe it's Marxism or Libertarianism, but whatever it is, they try to make all the clues fit that big idea. When I read Tetlock's book, I realized that a lot of the gamblers I've met in my horse-racing days were head-chogs, although not quite in the way that Tetlock describes. It's not

that they have some grand theory of horse-racing, but they convinced there must be a system. If only they could join the dots and figure out what it is. So maybe they'll bet on the favourites in certain kind of race, or maybe they'll bet on certain jockies at certain courses, but the professional gamblers are all foxes. They understand that there's no system to be found. They understand that there aren't any hidden dots to be joined. And Tetlock makes the point that forecasting isn't just about politics or stock markets or even horse races, or indeed Eurovisioned. We're all forecast as all the time. Am I going to be happier if I move to this city? Am I going to be healthier if I go on that

diet? When you're forecasting the future, what you're really doing is trying to understand what forces are acting to shape the present. And we all do that so that we can make better decisions. Or you mentioned health, Tim, and Daniel's story isn't just about gambling. Let me tell you about something that happened to him early in 2017. This is the year before that tumultuous Eurovision. That's right. Daniel had been on holiday in New York, and the day after he got back to London, he had a routine appointment at hospital. A few years earlier, he'd been treated for skin cancer, the doctors removed a mole, and every year since then, the dermatologist got him back in to he had a routine appointment at hospital. A few years earlier, he'd been treated for skin cancer,

the doctors removed a mole, and every year since then, the dermatologist got him back in to check him over and make sure that there was no sign of it coming back. He'd just been checked over by the dermatologist and got the all clear, he was buttoning up his shirt again when he had a stroke. Well, that means an astonishing coincidence.

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

And then the came a day when he was almost back to normal, but he just couldn't access parts of his memory. So the doctor asked him to count to ten and he said, one, two, three, four, five, six, that number between six and eight, eight, nine, ten. Well, he couldn't think of the number seven. Or the name New York, when the doctor asked where he'd just been on holiday, all he could say was, oh, you know, the big apple, the city that never sleeps. But that passed and he then became very anxious to understand why the stroke that never sleeps. But that passed, and he then became very anxious

to understand why the stroke might have happened. And what he might be able to do to stop it happening again, because it's just like what you said, Tim. When we're forecasting the future, what we're really doing is trying to understand the present, and we do that so that we can make better decisions to shape the future. But when we looked at the list of risk factors for stroke, none of them really applied to Daniel because he wasn't old, he wasn't obese, he didn't smoke, he didn't drink much. But it just been a long-haul flight from the big apple the day before the stroke, so it wasn't that excitement.

Well, you're thinking of deep veins from Bosis, Tim, and the doctors wondered that too, but no, they couldn't find any evidence for it. The only thing the doctors could think of was that for many years, Daniel had been living with HIV and he was still on an old-fashioned drug routine one that raised the risk of blood clots. So they swapped him onto a newer drug and he started to take aspirin every day and he hoped that that would be enough

to minimise the chance of it happening again. In that situation, I'd be worried about lingering effects. Yeah, I was very worried about it because the stroke happened soon before Eurovision, and Daniel was going to have to do his usual rapid mental arithmetic on odds and probabilities. And this is a man who just briefly lost the ability to say the number seven. So yeah, I was worried what would happen if he wasn't on tip-top mental form.

And this was when 2017? Yeah, the 2017 Eurovision song contest. And Tim, am I allowed to swear on the podcast? Right, it rather depends on what the word is. Let's find out, go for it. Well, I wanted to introduce you to a term of art from Eurovision betting, and that term is fanwank. This was very good.

All right, yes, I'll allow it. Excellent. Well, this was Daniel's word for a song that was really popular with the Eurovision fan community, but that wasn't going to catch on with the wide viewing public, the people that actually phoned for the winner. Because for most of Eurovision season,

it's only really the fans who are engaging with the betting and a lot of people make the mistake of betting on things that they want to happen. Over the years, Daniel had made a lot of money by identifying these fan-wank songs and betting against them. So betting against them. So just so I understand. That means, say the odds are 16 to 1, and I'm a fan. So I'm betting a dollar to win 16 dollars. And then Daniel's on the opposite side of the bet. So he is risking 16 dollars in the hope of winning 1 dollar, because he thinks that actually my 16-1 song

has basically no chance. He's picking up the pennies in front of a steamroller again. Yeah, that's exactly right. And in 2017, Daniel thought that the song from Portugal was an example of fanwank. It was a very simple jazz waltz. The fans loved it because they thought it was charming and authentic.

Daniel thought that the wider TV viewers would see it as affected and dull. You can only really get a sense of what's proven popular when the semi-files are broadcast, and turned out that Daniel had got it wrong, the wider viewers really did like Portugal's song as much as the fans did. So how could he tell that? Because the song qualified for the final? Well, that alone doesn't tell you much because more songs qualify than not, but there's other data that you can look at to get a sense of which of the songs have caught the attention of the viewing public. You can look at

which of them people are listening to on Spotify. You can look at which of the performances people are rewatching on YouTube. You can look at Google Trends. So you were right to worry because Daniel had made a mistake. Well, Daniel had made a mistake, but that doesn't mean I was right to worry because professional gamblers make mistakes all the time. And part of the reason they're professional is that they notice those mistakes quickly and they act quickly to cut their losses and minimise the damage. So minimising the damage, that's, for example, it's like buying a share in a company and then the share price falls. So you've lost money. Now, cutting your losses means you anticipate that the share price is going to continue to fall

and you sell before that happens. You lost money, but you could have lost a lot more. Yeah, and psychologically, that's really difficult to do, whether you're an investor or a gambler. The temptation is always to be stubborn, to hold on and hope. Now, Philip Tedlock tells us that foxes are good at changing their minds and hedgehogs aren't, and that's part of the reason why foxes do so well. Yes, I remember in Tetlock's competitions for super forecasters, the ones who did best would be constantly updating their forecasters in response to new information, and sometimes

they'd just be tweaking a prediction by a percentage point or two, but sometimes they'd completely reverse their opinion. Daniel was great at completely reversing opinion when he saw that he had to. So yeah, he lost money on Portugal, but not too much because he acted quickly to cut his losses. And he made lots of money on most of his other bets that year. So he ended the year with his normal kind of profit to fund another year's travels. Which brings us to the following year's Eurovision 2018. The last Eurovision that Daniel ever bet on. And this time, he made a mistake that he couldn't back out of.

Corsely Tales, we'll be back in a moment. Tim here, if you're interested in exploring the unexpected turns of bookish fiascos, or 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 Podglate, 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 Peaco, and Publishers Weekly's Jim Million. So go ahead, follow missing pages today on Apple podcasts or wherever you're listening. It's the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest. The one we heard about at the start of the show with two songs in contention for the win, Cyprus and Israel. Andrew Wright is with me in the studio to tell a story. All through Eurovision season, Daniel had been very keen on the chances of the song

from Israel. That's the sassy female empowerment song with the chicken noises and the Japanese lucky cat figurines. He also thought that he'd spotted a fanwank in the shape of the song from Cyprus. Fuego, that's the sultry singer in the sparkly cat suit. Fuego! The fans loved Cyprus, they thought it was a classic Euro dance banger.

Daniel thought that the wide-eviewing public would think of it as something they'd seen a hundred times before. So he was betting four Israel and he was betting against Cyprus winning, just as he'd bet against Portugal the previous year. And just like the previous year, when the semifinal was broadcast, the data from YouTube and Spotify showed that, mm, people actually did like the song.

Yeah, he'd got it wrong, but as I said, that happens. The trick is to notice your mistake early and act quickly to cut your losses. So what went wrong this time? Did he stubbornly ignore the data or did Daniel fail to notice what was happening? Not at all, no. He saw straight away that there was this huge positive reaction to Cyprus and he immediately tried to cut his losses. What happened this time is that the markets moved too quickly for him. Fuego, really caught fire. Very nice. So this time it was like it bought a share, had seen the price go down,

he'd tried to sell the share, and before he could find a buyer, the share price had basically gone to nothing. Yeah. So he was left with bigger liabilities on Cyprus than he'd ever had on any song before. And if you'll forgive me another swear word, let me read you the message that you wrote me after that semi-final. It read, I'm really rather fucked, Andrew, terribly so. You see, when he'd had these big bets in the past, he'd been 99% sure that they were going to come in, and this time it was looking really rather likely that Cyprus was going

to win. And when he'd had these big bets in the past, they'd always been small enough that he could survive them. This loss would be bigger, this loss would be life-changing. He'd borrowed the money against his apartment again. That's right. And if Cyprus won Eurovision, he was going to have to sell his apartment. He'd had a few days between the semi-final and the final to try to get used to this idea,

but he also still had hope that Israel was going to come to his rescue, because he'd been convinced all along that the sass and the chicken noises would be just the kind of thing the Saturday night audience would go for. I'm guessing they'd drag out the votes in the Eurovision final. It takes forever to announce the results. They go around every single country to ask which of the songs that country's expert jury has given their points to. 12 points go to Cyprus! Cyprus! And at the end of all this, Israel was ahead of Cyprus, but only just.

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

with 253 points is Cyprus with 253 points. Is... Cyprus! Which means... That Israel is the winner. Israel won. Daniel got away with it. I was watching and my heart was pounding. I can't imagine how Daniel felt.

I sent him a message. When you get a moment, let me know you're still alive. What did he reply? I was watching and my heart was pounding. I can't imagine how Daniel felt. I sent him a message. When you get a moment, let me know you're still alive. What did he reply? Always in the bag. And you can imagine the relief. He kept his apartment and not only that, he'd won a lot of money on Israel.

It seemed like he was set free to go off on his travels and come back next year and do it all again. Yes. Well now it's time for us to come clean with listeners because we've been telling Daniel's story as if it was all leading up to that big Eurovision moment. But in fact, we are going somewhere else with this, aren't we Andrew?

I'm afraid we are because when I sent Daniel that joky message, let me know you're still alive, it never occurred to me, it would never have occurred to him that at this point Daniel still being alive really wasn't something we should have been taking for granted. He had only seven months to live. But since the stroke, his health had been fine.

It had. A bit later in the year, just before one of his overseas adventures, he sent me a message about a strange pain he'd been having in one leg. He wasn't sure how much to be worried about it. I said, pain in one leg. Is that sciatica? He looked it up and said, yeah in one leg, is that sciatica? He looked

it up and said, yeah, that's exactly what it is. It fits the symptoms perfectly. Sciatica, that's when a slip disc puts pressure on the sciatic nerve. Yeah, it's normally painful, but not too serious. It tends to get better on its own in a few weeks. And that was a relief, because it meant that Daniel didn't need to cancel his travel plans. A bit later, he started to get some bad headaches, that seemed like a separate problem, and then he died at the age of 43. What happened? I don't know exactly, and Nordy's family, who've given me permission to tell his story.

He was on vacation in Fort Lauderdale. Nobody was with him at the time, but he's there on the hotel security camera, coming back from a swim, looking fit and healthy. And then he died in his hotel room. Of what? Well, the post-mortem found that it was cancer. His body was riddled with tumors. When he'd been treated for skin cancer a few years earlier, the doctors removed the mole and they thought they'd caught it in time. They hadn't. It had since been spreading inside his body and he hadn't been aware of it. But people don't just drop dead from cancer

to they. I mean, everyone I've known who's died of cancer, there's been some warning, even if it's only a few days. Well, I also hadn't realized that this could happen, so I started to Google. One way it can happen is if you have a brain tumour that bleeds, the post-mortem fan, that that's what had happened to Daniel. But a brain tumour would bleeds, the post-mortem fan, that's what it happened to Daniel. But a brain tumour would, well, with hindsight, it would explain his stroke. Yes, it would. And remember that ironically he'd had the stroke while standing in front of the dermatologist, and the dermatologist had just checked him over and said there's no sign of the skin cancer coming back. The tumour would explain his headaches, too,

of course, and I kept googling. I read up more on sciatica. It's usually a slip disc that puts pressure on the sciatica of sometimes in very rare cases. It's a Tumor. With hindsight, the dots were there to be joined. And as I sat there googling and joining the dots, I found myself thinking about Philip Tetlock and his foxes and Ted Chogs. The headchog wants to find the one key insight that explains everything, and usually there isn't one.

But sometimes there is, including Daniels' cancer, which explained all his mysterious symptoms. So Andrew, do you feel you could have, you should have joined the dots sooner? It's hard not to wonder, isn't it? But I think that by the time there were enough dots to be joined, it would have been too late, because the prognosis for metastatic melanoma generally isn't great. Daniel's memorial service, I think, we were all quite happy that he hadn't known, because it wouldn't have saved his life. He might have eaked out a few more months in hospital,

but because he didn't know, he enjoyed his last few months, he spent them hanging out with his friends and jetting off to new places. So what's the moral of this story? Because we like a moral with our cautionary tales. Maybe it's that sometimes hedgehog thinking has its uses. Philip Tetlock defends the hedgehogs too. I mean, to be sure, the foxes make better forecasters if you want to weigh up where the chicken noises beat sparkly cat suits on Eurovision definitely think like a fox. But if you're trying to make sense of a puzzling situation, it can help to have a hedgehog around.

They'll try to make one explanation fit all the clues, and they'll often be wrong. But in the process, they can ask deep or original questions, and they can find insight that the foxes might not have thought of. That's right. And I think there's another moral too. It's that Daniel died far too young, but more than anybody else I've ever known,

he died living exactly the life that he wanted to live. That's something for Foxes and hedgehogs alike to aspire to. Thank you Andrew. Thank you Tim, and thank you also to Corinne and Martin Gould, Daniels parents, for giving me their permission to tell Daniels story and to Daniels friend Katie Sutheran for all of her advice and support. This cautionary tale's Eurovision special was written and presented him half-ed and me Andrew Rys. Corsionary Tales is produced by Alice Fimes 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 Cohn, Little Malade, John Schnarrs, Kali Migliori, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Marano, and Morgan Ratner. Porshmi Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review. It helps us for, you know, mysterious reasons. And if you 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. 2.0-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5- 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 bestselling author Jodie Peacow and publishers Weekly's Jim Million. So go ahead, follow missing pages today on Apple podcasts or wherever you're listening.

So, go ahead, follow missing pages today on Apple podcasts or wherever you're listening.