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We tell our children unsettling fairy tales to teach them valuable lessons, but these Cautionary Tales are for the education of the grown ups – and they are all true. Tim Harford (Financial Times, BBC, author of “The Data Detective”) brings you stories of awful human error, tragic catastrophes, and hilarious fiascos. They'll delight you, scare you, but also make you wiser. New episodes every other Friday.
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Cautionary Tales With Harper

Cautionary Tales With Harper

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Our whole lives, we are told “Cautionary Tales” to keep us safe from trouble. But how many cautionary tales do you live by? Are there other things in this world we should be aware of beyond the obvious? This is the podcast where Harper and Tony Brueski explores true cautionary tales and what happens to those who did not heed the warning and learned the hard way. Please subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.
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Take the Cautionary Tales listener survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HCHGGZ3 What really drove the 2008 financial crash? What’s a shadow bank? And what’s the connection between NIMBYs and BANANAs? Tim Harford and Jacob Goldstein answer more of your questions. Do you have a question for Tim? Please send it in to tales@pushkin.fm. See omnys…
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Take the Cautionary Tales listener survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HCHGGZ3 Charles Darwin was stumped by peacocks. According to his theory of evolution, some creatures were better equipped to survive in their particular environment than others. It explained a lot - but it didn't explain the peacock's brightly coloured tail feathers, whi…
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Take the Cautionary Tales listener survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HCHGGZ3 In 1827, Edinburgh, Scotland was a world centre for anatomical study, but there was a shortage of cadavers for medical students to dissect. Two men, William Burke and William Hare, spotted a grim business opportunity. They began sourcing bodies - by any means pos…
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Tim Harford joined Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova on their podcast Risky Business to discuss two of history’s most compelling swindlers: Sam Israel III and John Law. We hope you enjoy this episode of Risky Business. It's available wherever you listen to podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.…
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India, 1930. Sarojini Naidu is marching towards a British-controlled saltwork; behind her is a long column of protestors all dressed in white. The great campaigner for India's Independence, Gandhi, is now in jail. In his place, he's chosen Naidu to lead this movement against the hard and fearsome British Empire. Naidu and her marchers want change, …
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Early morning, April 1789. Captain Bligh is abruptly dragged from his cabin. Wrists bound, bayonet pressed to his chest, he and a few loyal sailors are forced into a tiny launch and set adrift on the vast Pacific Ocean. This far from land, no-one is likely to survive for long. History remembers Captain Bligh as a cruel, petty tyrant. The reality is…
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Paul Starrett has just won a major building contract. If everything goes according to plan, this will be the tallest building in the world. But will everything go according to plan? This prestigious new project will have Starrett's biggest workforce yet. Everyone will need to pull together, but labour relations in the United States have been rough.…
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Leo Durocher would stop at nothing to win. The baseball player-turned-manager was a skilled tactician and famously tough. But he also cheated, intimidated umpires and was violent; he was even known to beat up fans. Durocher was famous for coining the phrase "nice guys finish last" - but is that really true? Tim Harford and David Bodanis examine les…
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Tim Harford's life has been building up to this moment. In this Cautionary Conversation, he discusses the works of his favorite author J.R.R. Tolkien and the social science at play in Amazon Prime's series The Rings of Power. What do elves and whistleblowers have in common? How can evil hide in plain sight? And where do orcs come from? Season 2 of …
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Young doctor Jesse Lazear has deadly Yellow Fever. He thrashes around and convulses in his sick bed, and his vomit is black. He is just 34 when he dies. Curiously, mosquito expert Lazear was researching the disease when he became ill. Some historians think his infection wasn't an accident, and that he was secretly experimenting on himself... Today,…
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Cautionary Conversation: Steve Jobs hated his phone so much that he smashed it against a wall. He also referred to mobile carriers as "orifices". Yet he went on to invent the world's most popular smartphone. Why did he change his mind? Tim Harford and organizational psychologist Adam Grant (Think Again, Hidden Potential) discuss the consequences of…
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The disappearance and death of Mitrice Richardson remains Malibu, CA’s most baffling unsolved case. It’s been nearly 14 years since her remains were discovered in a remote canyon, and still, no one has been held accountable for her demise. To this day, her death remains an unsolved mystery. The truth lies in the remote Malibu community where Mitric…
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Panic has erupted in the cockpit of Air France Flight 447. The pilots are convinced they’ve lost control of the plane. It’s lurching violently. Then, it begins plummeting from the sky at breakneck speed, careening towards catastrophe. The pilots are sure they’re done-for. Only, they haven’t lost control of the aircraft at all: one simple manoeuvre …
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Until the 1960s, it was deemed too "dangerous" for women athletes to run distances longer than 200m - and a marathon would kill them, or leave them unable to have children. Rubbish, of course. But when Kathrine Switzer signed up for the 1967 Boston Marathon, it wasn't the distance that bothered her - it was the enraged race director trying to assau…
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Adi and Rudi Dassler made sports shoes together - until a feud erupted between them. They set up competing companies, Adidas and Puma, and their bitter rivalry divided the sporting world, their family and even the inhabitants of their home town. The Dassler clan turned bickering into an art form - even drawing the likes of soccer legend Pele into t…
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In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, in 1819, Owen Chase is standing on a slowly sinking ship. It's just been headbutted by an 85 foot whale. It's taking in water. And now the creature is coming back for another go. This is a whaling ship, and Chase is convinced that he observes "fury and vengeance" in the animal. In 2010, an orca is performing for …
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Tim Harford is joined by Jacob Goldstein to answer your questions. Does winning the lottery make you unhappy? Is Bitcoin bad for the economy? When does correlation imply causation? And what will Tim and Jacob do when the robot overlords come for their jobs? We love hearing from you, so please keep your questions coming: tales@pushkin.fm. See omnyst…
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Neatly dressed in his suit, Hans Ferdinand Mayer was every inch the unassuming corporate executive. So, when he asked to borrow a typewriter from his hotel in Oslo, nobody could have guessed he would use it for one of the most extraordinary intelligence leaks in history. Mayer's gloved fingers punched out the details of Nazi Germany's most sensitiv…
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Sam Israel had a problem. The investors in his hedge fund, Bayou Capital, were expecting spectacular returns. Sam himself had spent years proclaiming the fund's brilliant results. But in reality, Sam had been marking his own homework, publishing fraudulent accounts and using these to lure in new investors. What to do? Well, the logical thing of cou…
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Bonus: When Spanish conquistadors arrived in Peru in 1526, it was the beginning of the end for the Inca. Their bloody pursuit of gold, fame and fortune was rife with treachery and deceit. Within a few short years, the once-thriving Inca empire had been decimated. Tim Harford is joined by Dan Snow for a special crossover episode of Cautionary Tales …
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Nicolae Ceaușescu was not beloved. His regime was vicious and he treated Romania as his personal wallet: while Ceaușescu emptied the coffers to construct a vast, ornate palace, his people starved. He imposed disastrous population control policies on his country, too, which saw hundreds of thousands of unwanted children left to rot in squalid orphan…
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Why are so many autocrats germaphobes? Why was the truth so dangerous for Soviet engineers? And what can salami reveal to us about the mind of Vladimir Putin? This is the first of two special episodes in partnership with HBO's new series "The Regime". Tim Harford investigates real-life dictatorships and the social science that explains them, drawin…
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The Happiness Lab’s Dr. Laurie Santos brings together other Pushkin hosts to mark the International Day of Happiness. Revisionist History’s Malcolm Gladwell talks about the benefits of the misery of running in a Canadian winter. Dr. Maya Shankar from A Slight Change of Plans talks about quieting her mental chatter. And Cautionary Tales host Tim Har…
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Chuck Yeager's plane pitched and rolled as it plummeted from the sky. He grappled with the controls inside the cockpit, but to no avail: he couldn't steady the aircraft. The test pilot was known for his nerves of steel but, as the barren Mojave Desert hurtled towards him, even he was afraid. What to do? It's tempting to think that adding to our liv…
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As US troops approached a Nazi prison camp, they could hear agonized wailing. The stench of rotting flesh filled their nostrils. Moments later they discovered a pile of smoldering corpses, alongside emaciated survivors. Next to the concentration camp they found something else: tunnels filled with tools — and partially assembled rockets. The soldier…
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In the 1920s, Germany’s Society for Spaceship Travel boasted some of the sharpest scientific minds – like the incandescently brilliant young Wernher von Braun. But it had very little money, and progress was slow. Then, in 1932, the army made a proposal: it would fund more serious research if the enthusiasts at the Society would develop a rocket wea…
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At the height of World War Two, British intelligence began receiving reports that the enemy was developing a rocket weapon. The idea seemed fantastical — resources in Nazi Germany were scarce and a rocket-building program defied economic logic. But one intelligence chief took the reports of a rocket weapon seriously and he managed to convince Winst…
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Teaser: In 1977, two planes collided on the runway at Tenerife Airport. Why did the crash happen? And, given that it took place on the ground, why didn't more people escape? In this new two-parter, Tim Harford explores the most deadly aviation accident in history. Both episodes are available now, ad-free, exclusively for subscribers to Pushkin+. If…
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One speechmaker inspired millions with his words, the other utterly destroyed his own multi-million-dollar business with just a few phrases. Civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr (played by Jeffrey Wright of American Fiction, Westworld and The Hunger Games) and jewelry store owner Gerald Ratner offer a stark contrast on when you should stick to t…
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Torrey Canyon was one of the biggest and best ships in the world - but its captain and crew still needlessly steered it towards a deadly reef known as the Seven Stones. This course seemed like madness, but the type of thinking that resulted in this risky maneuver is something we're all prone to... We have a treasure chest of Cautionary Tales to bri…
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What if you could never have the same day off as your family and friends? Would you quit your job? What if it was the murderous dictator Joseph Stalin giving you the order? The Soviet Union wanted its factories to run every day, all year long. And so, in 1929, Stalin killed the weekend: workers were prevented from all taking the same day off at the…
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Cautionary Book Club: Mollie Maggia's dentist planned to remove a painful abscess from her mouth. But to his horror, her jawbone disintegrated at his touch, crumbling and splintering until it resembled ash. Like hundreds of her colleagues, Mollie had been slowly poisoned by her work with glowing radium dust. Eight months after her first toothache, …
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In Goiânia, Brazil, a junk dealer acquires an old medical device from two scrap-metal scavengers. The device itself isn't useful, but it comes with precious lead which will fetch him good money. There's something else inside the device, too: a curious, crystal-like substance that glows bright blue in the dark. At first, the dealer is mesmerized by …
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Cautionary Conversation: Just before Christmas 1799, President George Washington was riding around his country estate, Mount Vernon, when it began to snow. When he arrived home, guests were waiting for him. Known for his punctuality, he hurried to entertain them - still clad in his damp clothes. The next morning, Washington had a sore throat and a …
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William the Conqueror undertook a remarkably modern project. In 1086, he began compiling and storing a detailed record of his realm: of where everyone lived, what they did and where they came from. 900 years later, the BBC began its own Domesday project, sending school children out to conduct a community survey and collect facts about Britain. This…
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On The Dream, host Jane Marie gets to know the life coaches and gurus who claim they know the secret to living our best lives. Is it all in our mindset? Or our privilege? Or are we all under a spell? Tim Harford is joined by Jane Marie to talk about who coaching works least well for. Turns out it’s the exact people who could benefit most from it, a…
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Henry Roan has been shot through the back of his head. The local authorities have found his body slumped over the steering wheel of his car. There's no gun at the scene: this is no suicide - it's brutal murder. And the man who ordered Henry Roan's killing? He claims to be his best friend... Former Principal Chief of the Osage Nation Jim Roan Gray j…
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Minnie Smith grew sick quite suddenly. She had been young, fit and healthy - and the doctors were baffled when she died. "A peculiar wasting illness," they called it. Then, her sister Anna went missing. Her rotting corpse was found a week later, a bullet hole through her skull. When a third sister, Rita, was blown up in her own bed, a grim pattern …
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This week, we've twice the storytelling fun for you: two Cautionary Tales shorts, previously only available to Pushkin+ subscribers. A Monkey for Mayor: It was supposed to be a publicity stunt, but when the man who dressed as Hartlepool United’s monkey mascot stood in a mayoral election... he won. Actual politicians predicted disaster - since thous…
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Why are board games so popular in Germany? What’s Tim Harford’s top tip for productivity? And where do all those sound effects come from? Tim is joined by Cautionary Tales’ very own wizard of sound Pascal Wyse, to read your emails and answer your questions. Do you have a question for Tim? Please email any queries you might have, however big or smal…
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The longest running television series of the 20th century was Gunsmoke, a western set in the notorious Dodge City, Kansas. Malcolm sweeps away mountains of legal scholarship to make a bold claim: The simplest explanation for the Supreme’s Court’s puzzling run of gun rights decisions may be that the justices watched too much Gunsmoke when they were …
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1957. Jørn Utzon receives a phone call: he's just won an international competition to design a brand new opera house for the Australian city of Sydney. Utzon is unknown in the field, so this is a triumph. The young architect couldn’t have imagined what a bitter victory it would turn out to be... The Guggenheim in Bilbao; the Burj Khalifa in Dubai; …
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Cautionary Book Club: When Morgan Stanley offered to lease Chicago's parking meters for the princely sum of $1 billion, the City Council were convinced that they had struck gold. They hastily signed the deal. But they soon learnt that they hadn't just traded away parking revenue - they had traded away the streets themselves... In this hybrid episod…
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1812. A band of "Luddites" is laying siege to a textile mill in the North of England, under cover of night. They plan to destroy the machines that are replacing their jobs. But mill owner William Cartwright is prepared: he's fortified his factory with skilled marksmen, fearsome eighteen-inch metal spikes and barrels of sulphuric acid. Today "Luddit…
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Cautionary Conversation: Andy Warhol’s assistant, Gerard Malanga, is facing a long prison sentence in Italy. He’s forged several Che Guevara portraits and tried to pass them off as genuine Warhols. What happens next is a landmark event in the history of art and authenticity… Tim Harford is joined by Alice Sherwood, author of Authenticity, to discus…
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Heroic explorer Frederick Cook has just returned from the very roof of the world, the first man to reach the North Pole. Or so he says. Journalist Philip Gibbs has been watching him, and he’s convinced he’s lying. When Gibbs publishes that belief, he stands alone. Cook has a gripping manner and an excellent reputation: his winning tale must be true…
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Cautionary Conversation: Did a Nazi put America on the moon? To celebrate the launch of his mini-series on the V-2 rocket, Tim Harford sits down with Pushkin’s resident V-2 expert, Ryan Dilley. They discuss the so-called “Father of Space Travel”, Wernher von Braun, and satirist Tom Lehrer’s musical lampooning of him. A three-part mini series on the…
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Henry Petroski is one of Tim Harford's favourite fellow nerds. His study of engineering failures has profoundly influenced Tim's own writing, including the classic Cautionary Tales episode Death on the Dance Floor. Petroski passed away in June 2023, at the age of 81. This week, in honour of the late great engineer, Tim looks back at the catastrophi…
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Cautionary Conversation: An invasive parakeet species began spreading in New York City - and the government decided to kill every last bird. Tim Harford is joined by Ben Naddaff-Hafrey, host of The Last Archive, to talk about the great parakeet panic of the 1970s and a history of anxieties about population growth. See omnystudio.com/listener for pr…
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“If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss..." Those words - from Rudyard Kipling's poem "If" - were based on charismatic nineteenth century doctor, Leander Starr Jameson. In Britain, Jameson was worshipped as a plucky hero: a bastion of courage and mental fortitude. Ironically, he was also responsible …
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