August 8, 2025 • 38 mins
In the early 90s, cutting-edge advertising agency Chiat/Day announced a radical plan, aimed at giving the company a jolt of creative renewal. They would sweep away corner offices and cubicles and replace them with zany open spaces, as well as innovative portable computers and phones. A brand new era of “hot-desking” had arrived.
Problems quickly began. Disgruntled employees found themselves hauling temperamental, clunky laptops and armfuls of paperwork all over the office; some even had to use the trunks of their cars as filing cabinets. Soon, the unhappy nomads had had enough.
Bad execution was to blame for the failure of this “playful” workspace. But Chiat/Day had made another mistake here, too – one that was more serious, more fundamental and altogether more common.
For a full list of sources for this episode, go to timharford.com.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hello Tim here, and we've got a classic episode
of Cautionary Tales for you this week while I'm on
my summer holidays office hell the demise of the playful workspace.
I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, maybe
head over to Pushkin Plus because this Tuesday there'll be
(00:37):
a brand new episode, another cautionary tale about a disastrous
invention that shaped the office of Today. To subscribe, head
to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts,
or go to pushkin dot fm slash plus. As well
as an exclusive show every month, you also get all
episodes add free. Next week here on the main feed,
(00:59):
we are back in action with a brand new episode
of Cautionary Tales, all about the worst poet in the world.
See you then. By the end of the nineteen eighties,
shyat Day was the most fashionable advertising agency on the planet.
Then commissioned a short film by the director of Blade
(01:22):
Runner Ridley Scott to launch the Apple Mac pioneered the
idea of using Super Bowl spots to create news and
made an unforgettable series of adverts in which the Energizer
Bunny kept crashing through ads for other products, but an
ad agency always needs to keep things fresh, and so
(01:43):
in nineteen ninety three, the agency's boss, Jay Shyatt, announced
a radical plan to give Shyat Day a jolt of
creative renewal. Jay Shyatt was going to sweep away corner
offices and cubicles and even desks. Armed with the best
mobile technology that nineteen ninety three had to offer, Shayat
(02:06):
Day employees would roam free in open space, winning sales
and creating great ads wherever they wished. What's more, these
spaces would be playful, zany and stylish. Shayat hired the
legendary architect Frank Gerry to work on the Los Angeles office,
which boasted a four story sculpture for a pair of binoculars.
(02:29):
Curvacious two seater pods from fairground rides were installed with
the hope that people would sit together in them and
think creative thoughts. The New York office was designed by
Gaetan No Peschet. It had a mural of a vast
red pair of lips and a luminous, multi colored floor
(02:49):
with hieroglyphs all over it. Eschet had a boyish sense
of humor. The floor in front of the men's room
had an illustration of a man urinating. His conference tables
were made of a silicone resin that would amusingly grab
and hold important papers during important meetings. Some of his
chairs had instead of feet, springs, and they would wobble
(03:14):
and tip back. Not so much fun if you happen
to be wearing a skirt. But hey, creativity right from
a distance. People loved the shayat Day offices. Design magazines
raved about the futuristic spaces. The agency even started charging
to give paid tours of their offices. The New York
(03:35):
Times architecture critic called the Manhattan office the apotheosis of
the dream factory and declared that the agency staff were
happily at home inside. The dream Time magazine added thoroughly
armed with a modern weaponry of the road warrior. The
telecommuters of Shayat Day are among the forerunners of employment
(03:58):
in the information age. That's not wrong, laptops and mobile phones,
hot desks in zany offices. Shayat Day really was ahead
of its time. But the closer you got to that
cutting edge of workplace design, the more likely you were
to get hurt. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to
(04:22):
cautionary tales. At first, the radically playful workspace seemed so brilliant.
(04:51):
Jay Shyatt had been visionary in hiring Frank Garry a
few years before he became the most famous architect on
the planet. Equally visionary was Shyatt's idea that the office
should be like a university campus. The idea is you
go to lecture, gather information, but you do your work
(05:12):
wherever you like, said Jay Shyatt. That idea is so
influential that it's now a cliche. Microsoft has a campus,
Pixar has a campus, Google has a campus, and many
of the offices which regard themselves as cool today mimic
Gaetano Peschet's bright colors, different architectural zones, and clusters of
(05:37):
couches interspersed with large tables. Shayat Day's free range office
really was ahead of its time. But even before the
full majesty of the shayat Day vision was unveiled, problems
started to emerge. The agency had experimented by removing a
few people's desks to see what would happen. Unfortunately, when
(05:59):
what happened happened, they didn't seem to care. One of
the Guinea Pigs was an associate director called Monica Miller.
She took her desk away. She got hold of a
little red wagon, the classic children's toy. She described to
the journalist Warren Berger how every morning should pile the
(06:19):
little red wagon high with documents and files, then walk
up and down the hallways of shy At Day looking
for a desk left temporarily vacant. Everyone thought it was
so cute, she said. I'd be trudging down the hall
and they'd laugh and say, oh, look, here she comes
with that little red wagon. It was like a bad dream,
(06:43):
like a bad dream. Well, the New York Times did
call it a dream factory. The laugh would be on
those mocking colleagues soon enough. When they returned from their
holiday break at the start of nineteen ninety four, the
hot desking era had begun. They were confronted with row
(07:04):
upon row of lockers, less college campus, more junior high school.
Jay Shyat had sneered dismissively that the lockers would be
for people's dog pictures or whatever, But there wasn't room
for much. People started hauling armfuls of paperwork along with
their clunky laptops. Monica Miller, of course, had her little
(07:27):
red wagon. Every day there'd be these frantic email messages
like has anybody seen my binder? Does anyone know where
my files are? She recalled. It was a colossal headache.
Part of the problem was simply that Jay Shyat's cutting
edge idea had been so badly executed. Using a laptop
(07:48):
and a portable phone seems mundane today, but back in
the early nineteen nineties that sort of gear was expensive, temperamental,
and clunky. Staff wouldn't take their phones or computers home. Instead,
they'd sign them out each morning and return them to
a concierge when they went home at night, and to
(08:09):
save money, shay at Day didn't buy enough for all
of the one hundred and fifty staff who worked in
the Manhattan office. Instead, ill tempered cues formed like breadlines
each morning at the concierge desk. Staff who lived near
the office would show up at dawn, sign out a
(08:30):
precious computer and phone, hide them somewhere, and then go
back to bed for a couple of hours. Senior staff
would enlist their assistance to rise early and secure their kit.
Damned if I was going to get up at six
in the morning to get a phone recalled one. I
had to put my foot down. I told my assistant,
go in there at six in the morning, get me
(08:50):
a phone in a computer, and hide it till I
get there. I'm not sure that's what putting my foot
down really means, but you get the gist. Rather than
freeing people to work anywhere and any time that suited them,
shy at Day's campus had staff queuing before daybreak, a
basic equipment. In the Los Angeles office, people started using
(09:13):
the trunks of their cars as filing cabinets, their head
out to the parking lot whenever they needed a new document.
Staff in the Manhattan office, of course, could only dream
of using cars as filing cabinets. The boss, Jay Shyatt,
seemed to be in denial about how much paper and
advertising agency needed. Paper was something he frowned on. He'd
(09:38):
send emails around reminding staff that shyat Day was a
paperless office. One creative director remembers Jay mocking the paper
storyboards and demanding the removal of posters showing the agency's
latest ads. But the truth was that paper was still
an essential part of the creative flow. That was doubly
(10:02):
true at an organization where people had to queue in
the hope of scoring a laptop for the day, who
would switch to digital in a world where they couldn't
even be sure of getting a computer. The execution of
Hyatt Day's new office was disastrously bad, making false economies
(10:22):
with clunky equipment. But Jay Schiatt made another mistake, one
that was more serious, more fundamental, and much much more common.
But he wasn't the first, not by a long way.
A century ago, a French industrialist, Henri Fruges commissioned a
(10:47):
rising star in the field of architecture to design some
radical new homes for factory workers in Paysack, near Bordeaux.
The architect's name was Charles Edoin Genert Grig. Today we
know him as Lokobousier. The Kabousier designed Cite Fruges to Paysack,
(11:09):
a set of modern cubes stacked into family homes. The Korbuzier,
of course, was the archmodernist, a man who dealt in
minimalism and concrete. His vision couldn't be more opposed to
the spring loaded chairs or four story sculptures of binoculars
that adorned the offices of Shayat Day One creative director
(11:32):
of Shayat Day described the experience of working in Gaetano
Peschet's radical office as like sitting inside of a migraine.
How he must have yearned for the pared down minimalism
of Lokorbusier. We are tired of decorps. What we need
is a good visual laxative. Lukorbuzier once explained bare walls,
(11:57):
total simplicity, that is how to restore our visual sense.
And yet the humble factory workers didn't seem to see
l Korbusier's vision quite like that. They hated it and
they refused to move in. It was terrible, said one.
I felt as if I was being sent to prison.
(12:18):
If you focus on the design, this seems paradoxical. Gary
and Peschet and Jay Shiat were offering the workforce a
playfully riotous explosion of visual stimulation or refuges, and Lokalbousier
were offering the workforce bare walls and total simplicity. The
(12:41):
design ideas were radically different. The reaction was the same.
People hated it. Cautionary tales will return after the break.
(13:07):
In two thousand and ten, two psychologists at the University
of Exeter Alex Haslam and Craig Knight conducted an experiment
to test the impact of different office spaces on how
much people got done and how they felt about it.
Haslam and Knight recruited experimental subjects to spend an hour
(13:27):
on administrative tasks such as checking documents, and randomly assigned
these subjects to different kinds of office. There were four
office layouts in the experiment. First was the minimalist office,
a clean and spartan space with a bare desk, swivel chair,
pencil and paper. Many people in Haslem and Knight's experiments
(13:51):
found the sheer tidiness of the minimalist office oppressive. It
just felt like a show space with nothing out of place,
commented one participant, adding you couldn't relax in it. The
second office layout was nothing radical, no binocular sculptures or
(14:13):
fairground pods. It was just the simple minimalist office with
a few tasteful additions, some potted plants, some large framed
prints hanging on the wall. The prince showed close up
photographs of plants, vaguely evoking a Georgia O'Keefe painting. All
simple enough, but people liked it. In the experiment, workers
(14:36):
preferred the decorated office space to the minimalist one, and
they got more and better work done there too. But
this experiment wasn't really about the effect of having some
greenery or a few pictures on the wall. What really
interested haslamon Knight wasn't pot plants. It was power. And
(14:57):
so the final two office layouts used the same components
as the decorated office. Visually, they seemed much the same,
but there was an invisible distinction, something that made all
all the difference between a pleasant space and a hellhole.
That invisible distinction was all about autonomy. The most successful
(15:20):
office space offered the same tasteful prints and the same
little shrubs, but it offered something else to control over
the space. Participants were invited to spend some time arranging
those decorations however they saw fit, or even having them
removed to perfectly mimic the minimalist space if that's what
(15:40):
they wanted. The researchers called this arrangement the empowered office.
The empowered office could be just like the minimalist office,
or exactly like the decorated office, or it could be
something else. The point was that the person working in
the office had the choice. The empowered office was a
(16:02):
great success. People got much more done there than either
the minimalist or the decorated office, and they liked it
more too. And you can guess what Alex Haslam and
Craig Knight did to produce a hated environment. They simply
said they were offering people control and then took the
control away. They invited people to arrange the prints and
(16:24):
the plants, but then at the last minute a researcher
returned and undid all that personalization, instead setting everything up
as it was in the decorated office. If they were
questioned or challenged, they simply said that the previous arrangement
hadn't been suitable for the experiment. The scientists called this
(16:45):
condition the disempowered office. People loathed it. I wanted to
hit you, one participant told the researchers later, after the
experiment had been explained, several people felt physically unwell. And remember,
there was nothing actually wrong with the physical design of
(17:07):
the disempowered office. It was exactly like the decorated office,
which people had found perfectly pleasant. What mattered was the
sense of powerlessness of implicitly being told that you'd done
it wrong, that you weren't in charge, that you didn't matter.
(17:29):
The lesson office design doesn't matter nearly as much as
letting people design their offices, and this explains why the
simple clean homes that Enrive Fuge's commissioned for his workforce
met with much the same revulsion as the crazy, chaotic
(17:50):
workspace that Jay Shyat commissioned for his It wasn't a
response to the esthetics themselves. It was a response to
being powerless as those esthetics were imposed by an overconfident employer.
As one of J. Shyatt's deputies recalled, Jay didn't listen
(18:11):
to anybody. He just did it. But this study doesn't
tell us everything about why Jay Shyatt's experiment failed. The
scientists looked only at how office aesthetics affected a worker's
productivity on an administrative task, and people didn't just do
admin At Shyat day, they came up with creative ideas.
(18:36):
When Gaetano Peschet and Jay Shyat swept away the cubicle
farms and the office doors, they were trying to stimulate
a certain kind of serendipitous, imaginative way of working together.
Peschet thought that office doors and cubicle walls were just
barriers to that creative teamwork. You don't need the office,
(19:01):
he recalled in an interview with the Planet Money podcast.
His vision was different, somewhere that would encourage collaborative chat.
It was an open space with a lot of corners,
with a sofa, comfortable chair, with a coffee shop, because
I think people when they meet, they'd like to have
a drink. You can see the logic. A coffee shop
(19:23):
is just the kind of place where you might serendipitously
bump into a random colleague and unexpectedly have a creative conversation.
Sometimes you just want some peace and quiet. You felt
totally exposed, recalled one executive at SHIAT day. There would
be six conversations going on around you. I'd try to think,
(19:46):
and I couldn't. We were the laughing stock of the industry.
It was weird. You just had no idea where you
should go. There was a rush for the only enclosed
spaces in the place, the meeting rooms. The rooms would
quickly fill up with people and then they'd say to
(20:08):
everyone else, get out, this is mine. And what about
when you wanted to talk to someone in particular and
you just couldn't find them. When the journalist Warren Berger
wrote an epic magazine feature about the Shayat day experiment,
he titled it Lost in Space. I can remember coming
(20:30):
back from a presentation and being unable to find my
creative department for two days, complained one creative director. Another
developed what he called the three time around rule. If
he walked around the entire office three times and he
still couldn't find the person he wanted, he'd walk back
to the concierge, hand back his laptop and his phone,
(20:54):
and go home. And if someone needed me, they could
find me on my virtual couch. It's hard to bump
into random colleagues when everyone's given up and gone home.
And that's a proper because Shayat and Peschet weren't wrong
about the need for personal proximity to spark creative conversations.
(21:19):
Back in the nineteen seventies, a management professor named Thomas
Allen measured how communication between workers dropped off exponentially as
their desks were further and further away from each other
fifty yards apart. And it was like they were in
different states, different floors or buildings. They might as well
(21:41):
have been different planets. Let's leave Jay Shyatt's unhappy nomads
behind for a while and travel forward in time five
or six years to another employer with a strong esthetic sensibility,
a clear sense that he was right about everything, and
(22:02):
a creative, collaborative office space to design. He needs no
introduction because Steve Jobs is one of the most famous
entrepreneurs in history. He was the force behind the Apple Mac,
the iPhone, those little round glasses. But for our purposes,
(22:24):
he was the force behind the headquarters of Pixar, the
animation studio that's produced films from Toy Story to Wally.
Steve Jobs was a man who hated ugliness and demanded
beauty everywhere he looked. In Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs,
(22:45):
one of the saddest and most eloquent stories, describes Jobs
semi conscious after receiving a liver transplant, ripping off his
oxygen mask because it was ugly, and demanding that the
medical team bring him five alternative designs so that he
could pick the best. In happier times, he had much
(23:05):
more to say about Pixar's headquarters. Construction budget was almost unlimited,
and the building set in Emeryville, near Oakland and San
Francisco was crafted in an industrial style, full of exposed steel,
wood and brick, with Jobs obsessing over every detail. He
(23:27):
poured over samples of steel from across the country and
selected a particular steel mill in Arkansas, which he judged
to have the best color and texture. He insisted that
the girders were bolted rather than welded, and the bolts
were designed with circular caps to look like rivets, even
though rivets hadn't been much used for half a century.
(23:50):
Jobs commissioned a brick manufacturer from Washington State and told
them to precisely match the bricks on the Hills Brother's
coffee plant across the bay on the San Francisco waterfront.
Then Jobs kept sending back samples, insisting they didn't match
the exact color palette he had in mind, until the
manufacturer threatened to quit. Steve Jobs was one of a kind,
(24:17):
but when it came to dictating how his underling's office
spaces should look, you can draw a direct line from
Henrifuges and Lokalbousier, through shayat Gary and Peschet to Steve Jobs.
That Pixar and Steve Jobs didn't limit himself to the
patina on the steels and the palette of the bricks.
(24:39):
Like Jay Shyat and Gaetano Peschet, Jobs had become fascinated
by the idea of random meetings sparking creative conversations. Pixar's
president Ed Catmill explained, Steve had this firm belief that
the right kind of building can do great things for
a culture. Steve wanted the building to support our work
(25:02):
by enhancing our ability to collaborate. Jobs hit upon a plan.
Headquarters should have just a single pair of large restrooms
off the main lobby. People would make new connections or
revive old ones because everybody would have to head to
the lobby, brought together by a shared human need to urinate.
(25:27):
It starts with the most benevolent aims, doesn't it. One
moment you're trying to make a place that looks elegant
and beautiful, the next you're trying to control people by
manipulating their bladders. The road to office hell is paved
with precisely the right color palette of good intentions. Cautionary
(25:50):
tales will return in a moment. Localbousier had demanded a
visual laxative with bare walls and total simplicity. The eventual
(26:12):
residents of Paysack did not agree. They added old fashioned
shutters and windows. They erected pitched roofs over the flat ones.
They put up flowery wallpaper over the uninterrupted monochrome walls,
and marked out little blocks of garden with wooden picket fences.
Their gardens were decorated with gnomes. I can't imagine anything
(26:36):
that Steve Jobs would have hated more than a garden gnome.
Like Paysack's residents, Jay Shiatt's employees gradually began to chip
away at the purity of his vision. They figured out
a system where you could sign up in advance to
reserve a particular place. Rather than queuing each morning for
(26:58):
laptops and phones, they'd store them overnight in their lockers.
Makeshift desks started to appear, and before long desktop computers too.
Hyatt Day's dream factory, like LeCorbusier's Paesak, was steadily being
retrofitted by the people who had to live with it
(27:19):
every day. These twentieth century cautionary tales feel to me
like they have lessons to teach us about work life.
In the twenty twenties, On one hand, knowledge workers are
finally equipped with genuinely portable computing technology, the kind of
thing that might actually make a functional workspace out of
(27:40):
Gaetano Peschet's cool sofas, hot desks, and nowhere to put
your dog pictures. On the other hand, this technology means
we could easily work from home during the pandemic, and
much of the office workforce has since been in no
rush to get back to the office. In the United States,
(28:01):
for example, nearly half of all paid working days in
twenty twenty one were worked from home. The figure barely
shifted as effective vaccines were made available to everyone who
wanted them. Instead of eagerly returning to their creative office
spaces to boldly strut from one collaborative huddle to another,
(28:23):
people preferred to stay at home zoom call. Homeworking isn't
always fun writing emails on a laptop while perched on
a bed, or trying to stop the kids from crying
during a client meeting. But many people noticed one thing
that more than makes up for all these strains and
(28:43):
sorrows at home. Nobody complains if you leave your dog
pictures on your desk. People got a taste of control
over their own space, and they didn't want to give
it up. In surveys, one of the leading reasons that
people give for working from home is the autonomy. Alex
(29:03):
Haslam and Craig Knight could have predicted that it is
no small thing to be the undisputed boss of your
own desk, but that's a problem for serendipity. Zoom is
fine for the meetings we plan, but it's hopeless at
facilitating chance encounters with colleagues we don't know so well.
(29:26):
A large study at Microsoft during the first wave of
the pandemic found that virtual workers tended to connect only
to people that had already been close to And when
we need to urinate, we're going to feel something very
far from serendipitous to light if we bump into a
random coworker outside our own bathroom door. When Steve Jobs
(29:53):
got an important idea in his head, it wasn't easy
to dissuade him. His plan to impose a single pair
of serendipity inducing mega bathrooms on Pixar seemed to be
a very important idea. Indeed, simity mattered, thought Jobs, and
he was right, And what better way to ensure that
(30:15):
different people from different departments spent some time in close
proximity than by forcing them all to go through the
atrium several times a day at intervals governed by the
call of nature. He felt that very very strongly, says
Pam Kerwin, Pixar's general manager. So Jobs explained his idea
(30:37):
to Pixar staff at an off site meeting, and the
staff didn't like it at all. As Kerwin recalls, one
pregnant woman said she shouldn't be forced to walk for
ten minutes just to go to the bathroom, and that
led to a big fight. Some senior Pixar staff stood
up for the pregnant woman. Jobs was frustrated people just
(31:02):
didn't understand the vision. They didn't get it. But then
Jobs did something extraordinary and out of character. He compromised
The Steve Jobs building contains not one, but four pairs
of bathrooms. There is still plenty of opportunity for serendipity
(31:23):
thanks to an atrium that focuses activity, with the main
doors of the building, a cafe, a game area, the mailboxes,
three theaters, conference rooms, and screening rooms all spilling into it.
Pixar's bosses said that Jobs's basic instincts had been correct.
(31:43):
I kept running into people I hadn't seen for months.
I've never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity
as well as this one. People encountered each other all
day long. Inadvertently, you felt the energy in the building.
No doubt that's true. But the serendipity at Pixar wasn't
just down to Steve Jobs's ideas, but to his willingness
(32:07):
to let them go. Junior staff were able to stand
up to Steve Jobs, the owner, the legend, the control
Freak's control freak, and get their own way about something
that mattered to them, that was more important than all
the bolted steel and elegant brickwork. Pixar's success could buy.
(32:33):
Inside Jobs's beautiful building, the Pixar staff ran riot. The
most famous example is a concealed room that can be
reached only through a crawlway, in which was originally designed
merely to provide access to the air conditioning valves. Once
a Pixar animator discovered the secret panel into the space,
(32:54):
he installed Christmas lights, lava lamps, animal print furnishings, a
cocktail table, a bar, and napkins printed up with the
logo The Love Lounge the animators who work here are
free to no encouraged to decorate their workspaces in whatever
(33:16):
style they wish, explained the Pixar boss ed Catmore, they
spend their days inside pink dollhouses whose ceilings are hung
with miniature chandeliers, tiki huts made of real bamboo, and
castles whose meticulously painted fifteen foot high styrofoam turrets appear
(33:36):
to be carved from stone. Steve Jobs apparently hated all
that juvenile mess, but he let it happen, and the
serendipity he craved became a daily feature of life at Pixar,
even if not precisely as set out in his original blueprint.
(33:58):
Steve Jobs wanted to create an office space that would
still be beautiful and functional in a century. Will have
to wait awhile to know whether he succeeded. All we
know is that Jay Shyat did not. He sold his
company to a bigger advertising conglomerate, helped perhaps by all
(34:20):
the attention that had been lavished on his radical office space.
Yet neither the Gerry offices in Los Angeles nor the
riotous Gaetano Peschet offices in Manhattan survived the merger for long.
The entire experiment had lasted just a few years. Jay
(34:40):
Shyat declared that it was the only thing I ever
did in business that I was satisfied with. Very few
of his colleagues seemed to agree, and while the giant
binocular sculpture remains in Los Angeles, the interior designs are
long gone. In contrast, le Corbusier's modernist homes for work.
(35:09):
Because at Paysack did last a century, Paysack is now
viewed as something of an architectural destination. It's full of
people with money and modernist tastes, people who love Lokalbousier's
visual laxative, even though they're very far from being the
kind of people Paysack was designed for. Long after Lokorbuzier
(35:32):
himself had died, these new residents cleared away the picket
fences and the pitch roofs and the garden gnomes and
restored the purity and simplicity of his original vision. But
I don't think it's a coincidence that that vision withered
when it was imposed on workers, and blossomed when people
(35:55):
who loved it got to choose. As the pandemic receded
and bosses started to worry that working from home was
undermining workplace serendipity. Many decided to mandate a return to
the office. But maybe they should instead try harder to
create the kind of office that workers will freely choose
(36:18):
to come into. Maybe the principle for a flourishing creative
space is that if we build it, they will come,
provided we don't try too hard to control what happens there.
The Kobuzier himself might have agreed. When he was told
about the garden Gnomes of Paysack, he said something that
(36:41):
I wish all the tasteful, powerful people like Jay Shiatt
could understand. You know, life is always right. It is
the architect who is wrong. For a full list of
our sources, please see the show notes at Timharford dot com.
(37:05):
Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford, with and write.
It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Edith Russlo.
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 Dilley, Julia Barton, Greta Cohne,
(37:27):
Littal Millard, John Schnaz, Carli Migliori, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor,
Nicole Morano, and Morgan Ratner. Cautionary Tales is a production
of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember
to share, rate, and review. It helps us for mysterious reasons,
and if you want to hear the show, add free
(37:48):
sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page and
Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, Slash plus s
Pushkin. Hello Tim here, and we've got a classic episode
of Cautionary Tales for you this week while I'm on
my summer holidays office hell the demise of the playful workspace.
I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, maybe
head over to Pushkin Plus because this Tuesday there'll be
(00:37):
a brand new episode, another cautionary tale about a disastrous
invention that shaped the office of Today. To subscribe, head
to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts,
or go to pushkin dot fm slash plus. As well
as an exclusive show every month, you also get all
episodes add free. Next week here on the main feed,
(00:59):
we are back in action with a brand new episode
of Cautionary Tales, all about the worst poet in the world.
See you then. By the end of the nineteen eighties,
shyat Day was the most fashionable advertising agency on the planet.
Then commissioned a short film by the director of Blade
(01:22):
Runner Ridley Scott to launch the Apple Mac pioneered the
idea of using Super Bowl spots to create news and
made an unforgettable series of adverts in which the Energizer
Bunny kept crashing through ads for other products, but an
ad agency always needs to keep things fresh, and so
(01:43):
in nineteen ninety three, the agency's boss, Jay Shyatt, announced
a radical plan to give Shyat Day a jolt of
creative renewal. Jay Shyatt was going to sweep away corner
offices and cubicles and even desks. Armed with the best
mobile technology that nineteen ninety three had to offer, Shayat
(02:06):
Day employees would roam free in open space, winning sales
and creating great ads wherever they wished. What's more, these
spaces would be playful, zany and stylish. Shayat hired the
legendary architect Frank Gerry to work on the Los Angeles office,
which boasted a four story sculpture for a pair of binoculars.
(02:29):
Curvacious two seater pods from fairground rides were installed with
the hope that people would sit together in them and
think creative thoughts. The New York office was designed by
Gaetan No Peschet. It had a mural of a vast
red pair of lips and a luminous, multi colored floor
(02:49):
with hieroglyphs all over it. Eschet had a boyish sense
of humor. The floor in front of the men's room
had an illustration of a man urinating. His conference tables
were made of a silicone resin that would amusingly grab
and hold important papers during important meetings. Some of his
chairs had instead of feet, springs, and they would wobble
(03:14):
and tip back. Not so much fun if you happen
to be wearing a skirt. But hey, creativity right from
a distance. People loved the shayat Day offices. Design magazines
raved about the futuristic spaces. The agency even started charging
to give paid tours of their offices. The New York
(03:35):
Times architecture critic called the Manhattan office the apotheosis of
the dream factory and declared that the agency staff were
happily at home inside. The dream Time magazine added thoroughly
armed with a modern weaponry of the road warrior. The
telecommuters of Shayat Day are among the forerunners of employment
(03:58):
in the information age. That's not wrong, laptops and mobile phones,
hot desks in zany offices. Shayat Day really was ahead
of its time. But the closer you got to that
cutting edge of workplace design, the more likely you were
to get hurt. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to
(04:22):
cautionary tales. At first, the radically playful workspace seemed so brilliant.
(04:51):
Jay Shyatt had been visionary in hiring Frank Garry a
few years before he became the most famous architect on
the planet. Equally visionary was Shyatt's idea that the office
should be like a university campus. The idea is you
go to lecture, gather information, but you do your work
(05:12):
wherever you like, said Jay Shyatt. That idea is so
influential that it's now a cliche. Microsoft has a campus,
Pixar has a campus, Google has a campus, and many
of the offices which regard themselves as cool today mimic
Gaetano Peschet's bright colors, different architectural zones, and clusters of
(05:37):
couches interspersed with large tables. Shayat Day's free range office
really was ahead of its time. But even before the
full majesty of the shayat Day vision was unveiled, problems
started to emerge. The agency had experimented by removing a
few people's desks to see what would happen. Unfortunately, when
(05:59):
what happened happened, they didn't seem to care. One of
the Guinea Pigs was an associate director called Monica Miller.
She took her desk away. She got hold of a
little red wagon, the classic children's toy. She described to
the journalist Warren Berger how every morning should pile the
(06:19):
little red wagon high with documents and files, then walk
up and down the hallways of shy At Day looking
for a desk left temporarily vacant. Everyone thought it was
so cute, she said. I'd be trudging down the hall
and they'd laugh and say, oh, look, here she comes
with that little red wagon. It was like a bad dream,
(06:43):
like a bad dream. Well, the New York Times did
call it a dream factory. The laugh would be on
those mocking colleagues soon enough. When they returned from their
holiday break at the start of nineteen ninety four, the
hot desking era had begun. They were confronted with row
(07:04):
upon row of lockers, less college campus, more junior high school.
Jay Shyat had sneered dismissively that the lockers would be
for people's dog pictures or whatever, But there wasn't room
for much. People started hauling armfuls of paperwork along with
their clunky laptops. Monica Miller, of course, had her little
(07:27):
red wagon. Every day there'd be these frantic email messages
like has anybody seen my binder? Does anyone know where
my files are? She recalled. It was a colossal headache.
Part of the problem was simply that Jay Shyat's cutting
edge idea had been so badly executed. Using a laptop
(07:48):
and a portable phone seems mundane today, but back in
the early nineteen nineties that sort of gear was expensive, temperamental,
and clunky. Staff wouldn't take their phones or computers home. Instead,
they'd sign them out each morning and return them to
a concierge when they went home at night, and to
(08:09):
save money, shay at Day didn't buy enough for all
of the one hundred and fifty staff who worked in
the Manhattan office. Instead, ill tempered cues formed like breadlines
each morning at the concierge desk. Staff who lived near
the office would show up at dawn, sign out a
(08:30):
precious computer and phone, hide them somewhere, and then go
back to bed for a couple of hours. Senior staff
would enlist their assistance to rise early and secure their kit.
Damned if I was going to get up at six
in the morning to get a phone recalled one. I
had to put my foot down. I told my assistant,
go in there at six in the morning, get me
(08:50):
a phone in a computer, and hide it till I
get there. I'm not sure that's what putting my foot
down really means, but you get the gist. Rather than
freeing people to work anywhere and any time that suited them,
shy at Day's campus had staff queuing before daybreak, a
basic equipment. In the Los Angeles office, people started using
(09:13):
the trunks of their cars as filing cabinets, their head
out to the parking lot whenever they needed a new document.
Staff in the Manhattan office, of course, could only dream
of using cars as filing cabinets. The boss, Jay Shyatt,
seemed to be in denial about how much paper and
advertising agency needed. Paper was something he frowned on. He'd
(09:38):
send emails around reminding staff that shyat Day was a
paperless office. One creative director remembers Jay mocking the paper
storyboards and demanding the removal of posters showing the agency's
latest ads. But the truth was that paper was still
an essential part of the creative flow. That was doubly
(10:02):
true at an organization where people had to queue in
the hope of scoring a laptop for the day, who
would switch to digital in a world where they couldn't
even be sure of getting a computer. The execution of
Hyatt Day's new office was disastrously bad, making false economies
(10:22):
with clunky equipment. But Jay Schiatt made another mistake, one
that was more serious, more fundamental, and much much more common.
But he wasn't the first, not by a long way.
A century ago, a French industrialist, Henri Fruges commissioned a
(10:47):
rising star in the field of architecture to design some
radical new homes for factory workers in Paysack, near Bordeaux.
The architect's name was Charles Edoin Genert Grig. Today we
know him as Lokobousier. The Kabousier designed Cite Fruges to Paysack,
(11:09):
a set of modern cubes stacked into family homes. The Korbuzier,
of course, was the archmodernist, a man who dealt in
minimalism and concrete. His vision couldn't be more opposed to
the spring loaded chairs or four story sculptures of binoculars
that adorned the offices of Shayat Day One creative director
(11:32):
of Shayat Day described the experience of working in Gaetano
Peschet's radical office as like sitting inside of a migraine.
How he must have yearned for the pared down minimalism
of Lokorbusier. We are tired of decorps. What we need
is a good visual laxative. Lukorbuzier once explained bare walls,
(11:57):
total simplicity, that is how to restore our visual sense.
And yet the humble factory workers didn't seem to see
l Korbusier's vision quite like that. They hated it and
they refused to move in. It was terrible, said one.
I felt as if I was being sent to prison.
(12:18):
If you focus on the design, this seems paradoxical. Gary
and Peschet and Jay Shiat were offering the workforce a
playfully riotous explosion of visual stimulation or refuges, and Lokalbousier
were offering the workforce bare walls and total simplicity. The
(12:41):
design ideas were radically different. The reaction was the same.
People hated it. Cautionary tales will return after the break.
(13:07):
In two thousand and ten, two psychologists at the University
of Exeter Alex Haslam and Craig Knight conducted an experiment
to test the impact of different office spaces on how
much people got done and how they felt about it.
Haslam and Knight recruited experimental subjects to spend an hour
(13:27):
on administrative tasks such as checking documents, and randomly assigned
these subjects to different kinds of office. There were four
office layouts in the experiment. First was the minimalist office,
a clean and spartan space with a bare desk, swivel chair,
pencil and paper. Many people in Haslem and Knight's experiments
(13:51):
found the sheer tidiness of the minimalist office oppressive. It
just felt like a show space with nothing out of place,
commented one participant, adding you couldn't relax in it. The
second office layout was nothing radical, no binocular sculptures or
(14:13):
fairground pods. It was just the simple minimalist office with
a few tasteful additions, some potted plants, some large framed
prints hanging on the wall. The prince showed close up
photographs of plants, vaguely evoking a Georgia O'Keefe painting. All
simple enough, but people liked it. In the experiment, workers
(14:36):
preferred the decorated office space to the minimalist one, and
they got more and better work done there too. But
this experiment wasn't really about the effect of having some
greenery or a few pictures on the wall. What really
interested haslamon Knight wasn't pot plants. It was power. And
(14:57):
so the final two office layouts used the same components
as the decorated office. Visually, they seemed much the same,
but there was an invisible distinction, something that made all
all the difference between a pleasant space and a hellhole.
That invisible distinction was all about autonomy. The most successful
(15:20):
office space offered the same tasteful prints and the same
little shrubs, but it offered something else to control over
the space. Participants were invited to spend some time arranging
those decorations however they saw fit, or even having them
removed to perfectly mimic the minimalist space if that's what
(15:40):
they wanted. The researchers called this arrangement the empowered office.
The empowered office could be just like the minimalist office,
or exactly like the decorated office, or it could be
something else. The point was that the person working in
the office had the choice. The empowered office was a
(16:02):
great success. People got much more done there than either
the minimalist or the decorated office, and they liked it
more too. And you can guess what Alex Haslam and
Craig Knight did to produce a hated environment. They simply
said they were offering people control and then took the
control away. They invited people to arrange the prints and
(16:24):
the plants, but then at the last minute a researcher
returned and undid all that personalization, instead setting everything up
as it was in the decorated office. If they were
questioned or challenged, they simply said that the previous arrangement
hadn't been suitable for the experiment. The scientists called this
(16:45):
condition the disempowered office. People loathed it. I wanted to
hit you, one participant told the researchers later, after the
experiment had been explained, several people felt physically unwell. And remember,
there was nothing actually wrong with the physical design of
(17:07):
the disempowered office. It was exactly like the decorated office,
which people had found perfectly pleasant. What mattered was the
sense of powerlessness of implicitly being told that you'd done
it wrong, that you weren't in charge, that you didn't matter.
(17:29):
The lesson office design doesn't matter nearly as much as
letting people design their offices, and this explains why the
simple clean homes that Enrive Fuge's commissioned for his workforce
met with much the same revulsion as the crazy, chaotic
(17:50):
workspace that Jay Shyat commissioned for his It wasn't a
response to the esthetics themselves. It was a response to
being powerless as those esthetics were imposed by an overconfident employer.
As one of J. Shyatt's deputies recalled, Jay didn't listen
(18:11):
to anybody. He just did it. But this study doesn't
tell us everything about why Jay Shyatt's experiment failed. The
scientists looked only at how office aesthetics affected a worker's
productivity on an administrative task, and people didn't just do
admin At Shyat day, they came up with creative ideas.
(18:36):
When Gaetano Peschet and Jay Shyat swept away the cubicle
farms and the office doors, they were trying to stimulate
a certain kind of serendipitous, imaginative way of working together.
Peschet thought that office doors and cubicle walls were just
barriers to that creative teamwork. You don't need the office,
(19:01):
he recalled in an interview with the Planet Money podcast.
His vision was different, somewhere that would encourage collaborative chat.
It was an open space with a lot of corners,
with a sofa, comfortable chair, with a coffee shop, because
I think people when they meet, they'd like to have
a drink. You can see the logic. A coffee shop
(19:23):
is just the kind of place where you might serendipitously
bump into a random colleague and unexpectedly have a creative conversation.
Sometimes you just want some peace and quiet. You felt
totally exposed, recalled one executive at SHIAT day. There would
be six conversations going on around you. I'd try to think,
(19:46):
and I couldn't. We were the laughing stock of the industry.
It was weird. You just had no idea where you
should go. There was a rush for the only enclosed
spaces in the place, the meeting rooms. The rooms would
quickly fill up with people and then they'd say to
(20:08):
everyone else, get out, this is mine. And what about
when you wanted to talk to someone in particular and
you just couldn't find them. When the journalist Warren Berger
wrote an epic magazine feature about the Shayat day experiment,
he titled it Lost in Space. I can remember coming
(20:30):
back from a presentation and being unable to find my
creative department for two days, complained one creative director. Another
developed what he called the three time around rule. If
he walked around the entire office three times and he
still couldn't find the person he wanted, he'd walk back
to the concierge, hand back his laptop and his phone,
(20:54):
and go home. And if someone needed me, they could
find me on my virtual couch. It's hard to bump
into random colleagues when everyone's given up and gone home.
And that's a proper because Shayat and Peschet weren't wrong
about the need for personal proximity to spark creative conversations.
(21:19):
Back in the nineteen seventies, a management professor named Thomas
Allen measured how communication between workers dropped off exponentially as
their desks were further and further away from each other
fifty yards apart. And it was like they were in
different states, different floors or buildings. They might as well
(21:41):
have been different planets. Let's leave Jay Shyatt's unhappy nomads
behind for a while and travel forward in time five
or six years to another employer with a strong esthetic sensibility,
a clear sense that he was right about everything, and
(22:02):
a creative, collaborative office space to design. He needs no
introduction because Steve Jobs is one of the most famous
entrepreneurs in history. He was the force behind the Apple Mac,
the iPhone, those little round glasses. But for our purposes,
(22:24):
he was the force behind the headquarters of Pixar, the
animation studio that's produced films from Toy Story to Wally.
Steve Jobs was a man who hated ugliness and demanded
beauty everywhere he looked. In Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs,
(22:45):
one of the saddest and most eloquent stories, describes Jobs
semi conscious after receiving a liver transplant, ripping off his
oxygen mask because it was ugly, and demanding that the
medical team bring him five alternative designs so that he
could pick the best. In happier times, he had much
(23:05):
more to say about Pixar's headquarters. Construction budget was almost unlimited,
and the building set in Emeryville, near Oakland and San
Francisco was crafted in an industrial style, full of exposed steel,
wood and brick, with Jobs obsessing over every detail. He
(23:27):
poured over samples of steel from across the country and
selected a particular steel mill in Arkansas, which he judged
to have the best color and texture. He insisted that
the girders were bolted rather than welded, and the bolts
were designed with circular caps to look like rivets, even
though rivets hadn't been much used for half a century.
(23:50):
Jobs commissioned a brick manufacturer from Washington State and told
them to precisely match the bricks on the Hills Brother's
coffee plant across the bay on the San Francisco waterfront.
Then Jobs kept sending back samples, insisting they didn't match
the exact color palette he had in mind, until the
manufacturer threatened to quit. Steve Jobs was one of a kind,
(24:17):
but when it came to dictating how his underling's office
spaces should look, you can draw a direct line from
Henrifuges and Lokalbousier, through shayat Gary and Peschet to Steve Jobs.
That Pixar and Steve Jobs didn't limit himself to the
patina on the steels and the palette of the bricks.
(24:39):
Like Jay Shyat and Gaetano Peschet, Jobs had become fascinated
by the idea of random meetings sparking creative conversations. Pixar's
president Ed Catmill explained, Steve had this firm belief that
the right kind of building can do great things for
a culture. Steve wanted the building to support our work
(25:02):
by enhancing our ability to collaborate. Jobs hit upon a plan.
Headquarters should have just a single pair of large restrooms
off the main lobby. People would make new connections or
revive old ones because everybody would have to head to
the lobby, brought together by a shared human need to urinate.
(25:27):
It starts with the most benevolent aims, doesn't it. One
moment you're trying to make a place that looks elegant
and beautiful, the next you're trying to control people by
manipulating their bladders. The road to office hell is paved
with precisely the right color palette of good intentions. Cautionary
(25:50):
tales will return in a moment. Localbousier had demanded a
visual laxative with bare walls and total simplicity. The eventual
(26:12):
residents of Paysack did not agree. They added old fashioned
shutters and windows. They erected pitched roofs over the flat ones.
They put up flowery wallpaper over the uninterrupted monochrome walls,
and marked out little blocks of garden with wooden picket fences.
Their gardens were decorated with gnomes. I can't imagine anything
(26:36):
that Steve Jobs would have hated more than a garden gnome.
Like Paysack's residents, Jay Shiatt's employees gradually began to chip
away at the purity of his vision. They figured out
a system where you could sign up in advance to
reserve a particular place. Rather than queuing each morning for
(26:58):
laptops and phones, they'd store them overnight in their lockers.
Makeshift desks started to appear, and before long desktop computers too.
Hyatt Day's dream factory, like LeCorbusier's Paesak, was steadily being
retrofitted by the people who had to live with it
(27:19):
every day. These twentieth century cautionary tales feel to me
like they have lessons to teach us about work life.
In the twenty twenties, On one hand, knowledge workers are
finally equipped with genuinely portable computing technology, the kind of
thing that might actually make a functional workspace out of
(27:40):
Gaetano Peschet's cool sofas, hot desks, and nowhere to put
your dog pictures. On the other hand, this technology means
we could easily work from home during the pandemic, and
much of the office workforce has since been in no
rush to get back to the office. In the United States,
(28:01):
for example, nearly half of all paid working days in
twenty twenty one were worked from home. The figure barely
shifted as effective vaccines were made available to everyone who
wanted them. Instead of eagerly returning to their creative office
spaces to boldly strut from one collaborative huddle to another,
(28:23):
people preferred to stay at home zoom call. Homeworking isn't
always fun writing emails on a laptop while perched on
a bed, or trying to stop the kids from crying
during a client meeting. But many people noticed one thing
that more than makes up for all these strains and
(28:43):
sorrows at home. Nobody complains if you leave your dog
pictures on your desk. People got a taste of control
over their own space, and they didn't want to give
it up. In surveys, one of the leading reasons that
people give for working from home is the autonomy. Alex
(29:03):
Haslam and Craig Knight could have predicted that it is
no small thing to be the undisputed boss of your
own desk, but that's a problem for serendipity. Zoom is
fine for the meetings we plan, but it's hopeless at
facilitating chance encounters with colleagues we don't know so well.
(29:26):
A large study at Microsoft during the first wave of
the pandemic found that virtual workers tended to connect only
to people that had already been close to And when
we need to urinate, we're going to feel something very
far from serendipitous to light if we bump into a
random coworker outside our own bathroom door. When Steve Jobs
(29:53):
got an important idea in his head, it wasn't easy
to dissuade him. His plan to impose a single pair
of serendipity inducing mega bathrooms on Pixar seemed to be
a very important idea. Indeed, simity mattered, thought Jobs, and
he was right, And what better way to ensure that
(30:15):
different people from different departments spent some time in close
proximity than by forcing them all to go through the
atrium several times a day at intervals governed by the
call of nature. He felt that very very strongly, says
Pam Kerwin, Pixar's general manager. So Jobs explained his idea
(30:37):
to Pixar staff at an off site meeting, and the
staff didn't like it at all. As Kerwin recalls, one
pregnant woman said she shouldn't be forced to walk for
ten minutes just to go to the bathroom, and that
led to a big fight. Some senior Pixar staff stood
up for the pregnant woman. Jobs was frustrated people just
(31:02):
didn't understand the vision. They didn't get it. But then
Jobs did something extraordinary and out of character. He compromised
The Steve Jobs building contains not one, but four pairs
of bathrooms. There is still plenty of opportunity for serendipity
(31:23):
thanks to an atrium that focuses activity, with the main
doors of the building, a cafe, a game area, the mailboxes,
three theaters, conference rooms, and screening rooms all spilling into it.
Pixar's bosses said that Jobs's basic instincts had been correct.
(31:43):
I kept running into people I hadn't seen for months.
I've never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity
as well as this one. People encountered each other all
day long. Inadvertently, you felt the energy in the building.
No doubt that's true. But the serendipity at Pixar wasn't
just down to Steve Jobs's ideas, but to his willingness
(32:07):
to let them go. Junior staff were able to stand
up to Steve Jobs, the owner, the legend, the control
Freak's control freak, and get their own way about something
that mattered to them, that was more important than all
the bolted steel and elegant brickwork. Pixar's success could buy.
(32:33):
Inside Jobs's beautiful building, the Pixar staff ran riot. The
most famous example is a concealed room that can be
reached only through a crawlway, in which was originally designed
merely to provide access to the air conditioning valves. Once
a Pixar animator discovered the secret panel into the space,
(32:54):
he installed Christmas lights, lava lamps, animal print furnishings, a
cocktail table, a bar, and napkins printed up with the
logo The Love Lounge the animators who work here are
free to no encouraged to decorate their workspaces in whatever
(33:16):
style they wish, explained the Pixar boss ed Catmore, they
spend their days inside pink dollhouses whose ceilings are hung
with miniature chandeliers, tiki huts made of real bamboo, and
castles whose meticulously painted fifteen foot high styrofoam turrets appear
(33:36):
to be carved from stone. Steve Jobs apparently hated all
that juvenile mess, but he let it happen, and the
serendipity he craved became a daily feature of life at Pixar,
even if not precisely as set out in his original blueprint.
(33:58):
Steve Jobs wanted to create an office space that would
still be beautiful and functional in a century. Will have
to wait awhile to know whether he succeeded. All we
know is that Jay Shyat did not. He sold his
company to a bigger advertising conglomerate, helped perhaps by all
(34:20):
the attention that had been lavished on his radical office space.
Yet neither the Gerry offices in Los Angeles nor the
riotous Gaetano Peschet offices in Manhattan survived the merger for long.
The entire experiment had lasted just a few years. Jay
(34:40):
Shyat declared that it was the only thing I ever
did in business that I was satisfied with. Very few
of his colleagues seemed to agree, and while the giant
binocular sculpture remains in Los Angeles, the interior designs are
long gone. In contrast, le Corbusier's modernist homes for work.
(35:09):
Because at Paysack did last a century, Paysack is now
viewed as something of an architectural destination. It's full of
people with money and modernist tastes, people who love Lokalbousier's
visual laxative, even though they're very far from being the
kind of people Paysack was designed for. Long after Lokorbuzier
(35:32):
himself had died, these new residents cleared away the picket
fences and the pitch roofs and the garden gnomes and
restored the purity and simplicity of his original vision. But
I don't think it's a coincidence that that vision withered
when it was imposed on workers, and blossomed when people
(35:55):
who loved it got to choose. As the pandemic receded
and bosses started to worry that working from home was
undermining workplace serendipity. Many decided to mandate a return to
the office. But maybe they should instead try harder to
create the kind of office that workers will freely choose
(36:18):
to come into. Maybe the principle for a flourishing creative
space is that if we build it, they will come,
provided we don't try too hard to control what happens there.
The Kobuzier himself might have agreed. When he was told
about the garden Gnomes of Paysack, he said something that
(36:41):
I wish all the tasteful, powerful people like Jay Shiatt
could understand. You know, life is always right. It is
the architect who is wrong. For a full list of
our sources, please see the show notes at Timharford dot com.
(37:05):
Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford, with and write.
It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Edith Russlo.
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 Dilley, Julia Barton, Greta Cohne,
(37:27):
Littal Millard, John Schnaz, Carli Migliori, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor,
Nicole Morano, and Morgan Ratner. Cautionary Tales is a production
of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember
to share, rate, and review. It helps us for mysterious reasons,
and if you want to hear the show, add free
(37:48):
sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page and
Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, Slash plus s
Host
Tim Harford
Popular Podcasts
Fudd Around And Find Out
UConn basketball star Azzi Fudd brings her championship swag to iHeart Women’s Sports with Fudd Around and Find Out, a weekly podcast that takes fans along for the ride as Azzi spends her final year of college trying to reclaim the National Championship and prepare to be a first round WNBA draft pick. Ever wonder what it’s like to be a world-class athlete in the public spotlight while still managing schoolwork, friendships and family time? It’s time to Fudd Around and Find Out!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!