May 12, 2023 • 31 mins
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.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. It's a Saturday evening in May twenty eighteen. Across Europe,
nearly two hundred million people are watching the same live
broadcast on television. The Grand final of the Eurovision Song contest.
(00:37):
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 longis
(01:01):
Cypress have sent a catchy electro pop number performed with
hair flicking abandoned by a sultry 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.
(01:26):
For 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 Harford and you're listening to a Eurovision special of
cautionary tales In this Cautionary Tale, I want to tell
(02:11):
Daniel Gould's 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. Andrew
Illou's him. Andrew helps me research and write the scripts
for these podcasts, and well, normally I sit in front
of the microphone by myself and take the glory. But
(02:31):
I couldn't keep Andrew out of the spotlight this time
because Andrew is a very old friend of our hero
Daniel Gould.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
And you met him yourself to him, remember back in
the day.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
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
(03:02):
couldn't done hear it, and he hated being dangle. Okay, Daniel,
it is nobody gets dangled on my podcast without their
concer and so I didn't keep in touch with Daniel
after college. But I understand that he became a professional gambler.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Or not just any professional gambler, tim a professional gambler
on the Eurovision Song Contest.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Yeah, it does. I think here in the UK we've
got used to thinking of Eurovision as a bit of
a joke. People like to poke fun at the terrible
songs and the crazy costumes and the rather elastic definition
of Europe. So every year there's an entry from Israel,
which is I'm at least close to Europe, and also
from Australia.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Result we do. We enjoy it in a post modern
irony kind of way. But there's also this whole community
of fans across Europe who embrace Eurovision un ironically 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
(04:18):
the songs. There's always an element of politics to the vote.
In twenty twenty two, for instance, the contest took place
not long after Russia had invaded Ukraine and the song
from Ukraine one in a landslide.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
I'm guessing that wasn't because people really liked Ukraine's song.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Now, they did really like Ukraine's song. It was one
of the betting favorites even before Russia invaded. And the
song's an ode to motherhood in Ukrainian by a folk
rap group whose lead singer where as a knitted pink
bucket head. Okay, I'm sold impossible not to like Ukraine song.
But yeah, and clearly you're right, a lot of people
were voting to send a message of solidarity.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Now you mentioned that it was one of the betting favorites.
And that takes us back to Daniel Gould and the
way he made his living by betting on the Eurovision
Song contest. 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.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
There's all kinds of betting markets on Eurovision. You can
bet on who'll win, who'll be in the top four
or the top ten, you can bet on will finish last.
The UK traditionally competitive there. Some of Daniel's biggest bets
were on which countries would qualify for the final from
the semifinal.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Okay, I meanizing I'm behind the curve is that there
are now semi finals and Eurovision.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Remember that there are semifinals because they realized they have
too many songs to fit them all into one show
on a Saturday night. And the very first Eurovision was
way back in nineteen fifty six. They had only seven
countries in it. It got bigger and bigger, and in
two thousand and four the organizers realized they needed to
whittle down the countries with a semi final, and that
was when Daniel realized that he could make some serious
(05:48):
money from Eurovision. He'd always loved it as a fan,
and he'd bet small amounts on it for years. But
he realized that some countries were practically guaranteed to get
enough points to qualify for the final just from the
diaspora vote.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Why does the diasper matter?
Speaker 2 (06:02):
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 song.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
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,
Daniels studied history.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Wait, Eurovision's only one night a year, or the well semifinals,
So one night plus the semifinal, So how can betting
on Eurovision be a full time job?
Speaker 2 (06:41):
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 two thousand and nine, Daniel
was sitting at home on Saturday night watching a live
(07:02):
stream of Norwegian television on his laptop as you do,
as you do, and they've 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.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
How could he tell?
Speaker 2 (07:14):
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. The song itself was a
kind of fusion of Eastern European folk violin and Western
European pop, and it seemed like the kind of thing
that would do really well all.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Across the continent.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
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 sixteen to one.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
So for every dollar you bet you win sixteen.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Yeah, that's right, Norway one. And Daniel won enough that
year to pay off the mortgage on his apartment in London.
Very 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.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
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.
That 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,
(08:32):
Daniel told me that he could get by on twenty
thousand pounds a year if he had to. That's about
twenty five thousand dollars so not a fortune by any means,
But in a typical Eurovision he would win maybe two
or three times that.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
So that's what fifty to eighty thousand dollars. So how
much did he have to risk to win that much?
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Some of Daniel's biggest bets might be something like one
hundred thousand pounds on a country to qualify from the
Eurovision semifinal, and the odds would be very short on
those kind of bets. He might only stand to win
about three thousand, but he'd be ninety nine percent confident
in the bet coming in.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
That's more than one hundred thousand dollars at stake. So
how did he get that kind of money?
Speaker 2 (09:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
So each year he's putting his home on the line.
And some people might raise an eyebrow at that.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Well, I think it will 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 in a edited 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 you find out whether he had
one three thousand or lost one hundred thousand? Presumably it's
(09:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
I can imagine how can he bear to watch?
Speaker 2 (09:54):
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 see,
I would have had a heart attack.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
That got the second highest votes.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
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 twenty eighteen he took a bit of
a stumble in front of the steamroller.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Hold that thought. Cautionary Tales will return. You're listening to
a Eurovision special of Cautionary Tales. Our hero is professional
(11:02):
gambler Daniel Gould, and one of Daniel's closest friends is
Andrew Wright, who writes for Cautionary Tales. Andrew t I
met Daniel at college when we were all students. It
was when you and he were going to the racetrack together.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
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 great
way to live, more fun than working.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
But unlike him, you didn't become a professional gambler.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
No.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
It explains it. You never did like hard work.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
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, Tim, Philip Tetlock's work on
super Forecast.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Phil Tetlock, Yes, he's a psychologist, wonderful researcher, and we
met his work before on Cause Metales. In the episode
titled Buried by the Wall Street Crash. Back in the
nineteen eighties, 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
(12:20):
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
(12:41):
to all comers. In fact, he even invited me to
join the experiment, and I got his email on April first.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
I thought it was a joke. You didn't join the experiment, though,
did you?
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Tim?
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (12:50):
No, I didn't and too lazy, too cowardly. But I
did pay close attention to the research. Tetlock's headline result
was very famous. Most high profile pundits do no better
than random chants. 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 data at a wall. Tellock
(13:13):
found that some people did make better than random predictions,
and he called them super forecasters.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Yes, which that distinction comes from an old fragment of
classical poetry. The fox knows many things. The hedgehog knows
one big thing. Tellog later 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.
(13:48):
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
(14:10):
try to make all the clues fit that big idea.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
When I read Tetlock's book, I realized that a lot
of the gamblers I've met in my horse racing days
were hedgehogs, although not quite in the way that Tetlock describes.
It's not that they have some grand theory of horse racing,
but they're 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 favorites in certain kind
of race, or maybe they'll bet on certain jockeys at
(14:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
And Tetlock makes the point that forecasting isn't just about
politics or stock markets, or even horse races or indeed Eurovision.
We're all forecasters all the time. Am I going to
be happier if I moved 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.
(15:06):
And we all do that so that we can make
better decisions. 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 twenty seventeen. This is the
year before that tumultuous Eurovision. That's right, Daniel had been
on holiday in New York. The day after he got
back to London, he had a routine appointment at hospital.
(15:26):
A few years earlier, he'd been treated for skin cancer.
The doctors removed a mole, and every year since then
the dermatologists 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. Wow. I mean,
it's an astonishing coincidence. If you're going to have a stroke,
(15:46):
you want to be in hospital standing in front of
a doctor.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Yeah. It 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 there came
a day when he was almost back to normal, but
he just couldn't access parts of his memory. So doctor
(16:09):
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
(16:30):
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,
(16:51):
he didn't smoke, he didn't drink much.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
But it'd just been on a long haul flight from
the Big Apple the day before the stroke. Said doesn't
that explain it?
Speaker 2 (16:59):
Well, you're thinking of deep vein thrombosis to 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 regime, one that raised the risk of blood clots.
So they swapped him onto a newer drug and he
started to take asprin every day, and he hoped that
(17:19):
would be enough to minimize the chance of it happening again.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
Now in that situation, i'd be worried about lingering effects. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
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 tiptop mental form.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
And this was when twenty seventeen, Yeah, the.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Twenty seventeen Eurovision Song Contest and tim am I allowed
to swear on the podcast.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
It rather depends on what the word is. Let's find out,
go for it.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Well, I wanted to introduce you to a term of
art from Eurovision betting, and that term is fan wank.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
This was very good, all right, yes, I'll allow it.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
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 wider viewing public,
the people that actually vote 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
(18:26):
of money by identifying these fan wank songs and betting
against them, betting against them. So, just so I understand
that means, say, the odds are sixteen to one, and
I'm a fan, so I'm betting a dollar to win
sixteen dollars. And then Daniel's on the opposite side of
the bet, so he is risking sixteen dollars in the
hope of winning one dollar because he thinks that actually,
(18:48):
my sixteen to one song has basically no chance. He's
picking up the pennies in front of a steamroller again. Yeah,
that's exactly right. And in twenty seventeen, Daniel thought that
the song from Portugal was an example of fan wank.
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
(19:09):
did and dull. You can only really get a sense
of what's proven popular when the semi finals are broadcast,
And it turned out that Daniel had got it wrong.
The wider viewers really did like Portugal 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
(19:30):
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
(19:53):
to cut their losses and minimize the damage.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
So minimizing 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
(20:17):
a gambler, the temptation is always to be stubborn, to
hold on and hope. Now, Philip Tetlock 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 forecasts in
(20:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
And 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 twenty eighteen, the last Eurovision that Daniel ever
(21:06):
bet on, and this time he made a mistake that
he couldn't back out of cautionary tales. Will be back
in a moment. It's the twenty eighteen Eurovision Song Contest
what we heard about at the start of the show,
(21:26):
with two songs in contention for the win, Cypress and Israel.
Andrew Wright is with me in the studio to tell
the 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 of
the Japanese lu Fagorinas. He also thought that he'd spotted
(21:47):
a fan wank in the shape of the song from
Cyprus Fuey Go that's the sultry singer in the Sparky
Cat sued. The fans loved Cypress. They thought it was
a classic euro dance banger. Daniel thought that the wider
viewing public would think of it as something they'd seen
a hundred times before.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
So he was betting for Israel and he was betting
against Cypress winning, just as he'd bet against Portugal the
previous year. And just like the previous year. When the
semi final was broadcast, the data from YouTube and Spotify
showed that 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
(22:24):
to cut your losses. So what went wrong this time?
Did he stubbornly ignore the data or did did Daniel
fail to notice what was happening?
Speaker 2 (22:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Very nice. So this time it was like he'd bought
a share, he'd seen the price go down, he'd tried
to sell the share before he could find a buyer.
The share price had basically gone to nothing.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
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 he wrote me after that semi final
It read I'm really rather fucked Andrew probably. So. You see,
when he'd had these big bets in the past, he'd
been ninety nine percent sure that they were going to
(23:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
He'd borrow the money against his apartment again.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
That's right, And if Cyprus won Eurovision, he was going
to have to sell his apartment. He 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 SaaS and
the chicken noises would be just the kind of thing
the Saturday night audience would go for. Well.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
From Bellarus, I'm guessing they'd drag out the votes in
the Eurovision Final, it takes forever to announce the results.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
They go around every single country to ask which of
the songs that country's expert jury has given their points to.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
The funds go to Cyprus, Cyprus, And at the end of.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
All this, Israel was ahead of Cyprus, but only just.
But Eurovision voting isn't 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
(24:26):
televote score for Israel and Cyprus, and Daniel is desperately
hoping that Cyprus is going to be second in this
one too.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
The country that got the second highest vote with two
hundred and fifty three points is Cyprus, which means that
(24:56):
Israel is the winner.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Israel one. Daniel got away with it.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
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 your st alive.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
What did he reply?
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Always in the bag? 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 for to go off on his travels and come
back next year and do it all again. Yes.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Andrew, I'm afraid we are, because when I sent Daniel
that joking 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.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
But since the stroke his health had been fine.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
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, that's exactly what it is.
It fits the symptoms perfectly. Sciatica. That's when a slip
(26:13):
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 forty three. What
(26:33):
happened I don't know exactly, and norder his 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
(26:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
But people don't just drop dead from cancer, do 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.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
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 tumor that bleeds. The post
mortem fan that that's what had happened to Daniel.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
But a brain tumor would well with hindsight, it would
explain his stroke, Yes it would.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
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 tumor 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 sciatic nerve. Sometimes, in very rare cases, it's
(27:53):
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 Tadlock and his foxes
and edgehogs.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
The hedgehog wants to find the one key insight that
explains every and usually there isn't one, but sometimes there is,
including Daniel's cancer, which explained all his mysterious symptoms. So Andrew,
do you feel you could have You should have joined
the dot sooner.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
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 eked
out a few more months in hospital, but because he
(28:42):
didn't know, he enjoyed his last few months. He spent
them hanging out with his friends and jetting off to
new places.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
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 whether chicken noises beat
Sparkley cat suits on Eurovision, definitely think like a fox.
(29:08):
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 insights that
the foxes might not have thought of.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
That's right, and I think that'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 Carinn and Martin Gould, Daniel's
(29:47):
parents for giving me their permission to tell Daniel's story,
and to Daniel's friend Katie Southern for all of her
advice and support.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
This Cautionary Tales Eurovision special was written and presented by me, Tim.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Harford and me Andrew Wright.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Cautionary Tales is 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 Dilly, Julia Barton,
Greta Cohne, Little Millard, John Schnaz, Carli mcgliori, Eric Sandler,
(30:31):
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 sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show
page and Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, Slash
(30:56):
plus s
Pushkin. It's a Saturday evening in May twenty eighteen. Across Europe,
nearly two hundred million people are watching the same live
broadcast on television. The Grand final of the Eurovision Song contest.
(00:37):
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 longis
(01:01):
Cypress have sent a catchy electro pop number performed with
hair flicking abandoned by a sultry 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.
(01:26):
For 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 Harford and you're listening to a Eurovision special of
cautionary tales In this Cautionary Tale, I want to tell
(02:11):
Daniel Gould's 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. Andrew
Illou's him. Andrew helps me research and write the scripts
for these podcasts, and well, normally I sit in front
of the microphone by myself and take the glory. But
(02:31):
I couldn't keep Andrew out of the spotlight this time
because Andrew is a very old friend of our hero
Daniel Gould.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
And you met him yourself to him, remember back in
the day.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
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
(03:02):
couldn't done hear it, and he hated being dangle. Okay, Daniel,
it is nobody gets dangled on my podcast without their
concer and so I didn't keep in touch with Daniel
after college. But I understand that he became a professional gambler.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Or not just any professional gambler, tim a professional gambler
on the Eurovision Song Contest.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
Yeah, it does. I think here in the UK we've
got used to thinking of Eurovision as a bit of
a joke. People like to poke fun at the terrible
songs and the crazy costumes and the rather elastic definition
of Europe. So every year there's an entry from Israel,
which is I'm at least close to Europe, and also
from Australia.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Result we do. We enjoy it in a post modern
irony kind of way. But there's also this whole community
of fans across Europe who embrace Eurovision un ironically 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
(04:18):
the songs. There's always an element of politics to the vote.
In twenty twenty two, for instance, the contest took place
not long after Russia had invaded Ukraine and the song
from Ukraine one in a landslide.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
I'm guessing that wasn't because people really liked Ukraine's song.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Now, they did really like Ukraine's song. It was one
of the betting favorites even before Russia invaded. And the
song's an ode to motherhood in Ukrainian by a folk
rap group whose lead singer where as a knitted pink
bucket head. Okay, I'm sold impossible not to like Ukraine song.
But yeah, and clearly you're right, a lot of people
were voting to send a message of solidarity.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Now you mentioned that it was one of the betting favorites.
And that takes us back to Daniel Gould and the
way he made his living by betting on the Eurovision
Song contest. 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.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
There's all kinds of betting markets on Eurovision. You can
bet on who'll win, who'll be in the top four
or the top ten, you can bet on will finish last.
The UK traditionally competitive there. Some of Daniel's biggest bets
were on which countries would qualify for the final from
the semifinal.
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Okay, I meanizing I'm behind the curve is that there
are now semi finals and Eurovision.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Remember that there are semifinals because they realized they have
too many songs to fit them all into one show
on a Saturday night. And the very first Eurovision was
way back in nineteen fifty six. They had only seven
countries in it. It got bigger and bigger, and in
two thousand and four the organizers realized they needed to
whittle down the countries with a semi final, and that
was when Daniel realized that he could make some serious
(05:48):
money from Eurovision. He'd always loved it as a fan,
and he'd bet small amounts on it for years. But
he realized that some countries were practically guaranteed to get
enough points to qualify for the final just from the
diaspora vote.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Why does the diasper matter?
Speaker 2 (06:02):
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 song.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
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,
Daniels studied history.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Wait, Eurovision's only one night a year, or the well semifinals,
So one night plus the semifinal, So how can betting
on Eurovision be a full time job?
Speaker 2 (06:41):
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 two thousand and nine, Daniel
was sitting at home on Saturday night watching a live
(07:02):
stream of Norwegian television on his laptop as you do,
as you do, and they've 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.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
How could he tell?
Speaker 2 (07:14):
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. The song itself was a
kind of fusion of Eastern European folk violin and Western
European pop, and it seemed like the kind of thing
that would do really well all.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Across the continent.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
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 sixteen to one.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
So for every dollar you bet you win sixteen.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Yeah, that's right, Norway one. And Daniel won enough that
year to pay off the mortgage on his apartment in London.
Very 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.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
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.
That 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,
(08:32):
Daniel told me that he could get by on twenty
thousand pounds a year if he had to. That's about
twenty five thousand dollars so not a fortune by any means,
But in a typical Eurovision he would win maybe two
or three times that.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
So that's what fifty to eighty thousand dollars. So how
much did he have to risk to win that much?
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Some of Daniel's biggest bets might be something like one
hundred thousand pounds on a country to qualify from the
Eurovision semifinal, and the odds would be very short on
those kind of bets. He might only stand to win
about three thousand, but he'd be ninety nine percent confident
in the bet coming in.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
That's more than one hundred thousand dollars at stake. So
how did he get that kind of money?
Speaker 2 (09:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
So each year he's putting his home on the line.
And some people might raise an eyebrow at that.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Well, I think it will 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 in a edited 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 you find out whether he had
one three thousand or lost one hundred thousand? Presumably it's
(09:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
I can imagine how can he bear to watch?
Speaker 2 (09:54):
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 see,
I would have had a heart attack.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
That got the second highest votes.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
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 twenty eighteen he took a bit of
a stumble in front of the steamroller.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Hold that thought. Cautionary Tales will return. You're listening to
a Eurovision special of Cautionary Tales. Our hero is professional
(11:02):
gambler Daniel Gould, and one of Daniel's closest friends is
Andrew Wright, who writes for Cautionary Tales. Andrew t I
met Daniel at college when we were all students. It
was when you and he were going to the racetrack together.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
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 great
way to live, more fun than working.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
But unlike him, you didn't become a professional gambler.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
No.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
It explains it. You never did like hard work.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
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, Tim, Philip Tetlock's work on
super Forecast.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Phil Tetlock, Yes, he's a psychologist, wonderful researcher, and we
met his work before on Cause Metales. In the episode
titled Buried by the Wall Street Crash. Back in the
nineteen eighties, 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
(12:20):
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
(12:41):
to all comers. In fact, he even invited me to
join the experiment, and I got his email on April first.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
I thought it was a joke. You didn't join the experiment, though,
did you?
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Tim?
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (12:50):
No, I didn't and too lazy, too cowardly. But I
did pay close attention to the research. Tetlock's headline result
was very famous. Most high profile pundits do no better
than random chants. 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 data at a wall. Tellock
(13:13):
found that some people did make better than random predictions,
and he called them super forecasters.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Yes, which that distinction comes from an old fragment of
classical poetry. The fox knows many things. The hedgehog knows
one big thing. Tellog later 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.
(13:48):
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
(14:10):
try to make all the clues fit that big idea.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
When I read Tetlock's book, I realized that a lot
of the gamblers I've met in my horse racing days
were hedgehogs, although not quite in the way that Tetlock describes.
It's not that they have some grand theory of horse racing,
but they're 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 favorites in certain kind
of race, or maybe they'll bet on certain jockeys at
(14:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
And Tetlock makes the point that forecasting isn't just about
politics or stock markets, or even horse races or indeed Eurovision.
We're all forecasters all the time. Am I going to
be happier if I moved 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.
(15:06):
And we all do that so that we can make
better decisions. 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 twenty seventeen. This is the
year before that tumultuous Eurovision. That's right, Daniel had been
on holiday in New York. The day after he got
back to London, he had a routine appointment at hospital.
(15:26):
A few years earlier, he'd been treated for skin cancer.
The doctors removed a mole, and every year since then
the dermatologists 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. Wow. I mean,
it's an astonishing coincidence. If you're going to have a stroke,
(15:46):
you want to be in hospital standing in front of
a doctor.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
Yeah. It 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 there came
a day when he was almost back to normal, but
he just couldn't access parts of his memory. So doctor
(16:09):
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
(16:30):
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,
(16:51):
he didn't smoke, he didn't drink much.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
But it'd just been on a long haul flight from
the Big Apple the day before the stroke. Said doesn't
that explain it?
Speaker 2 (16:59):
Well, you're thinking of deep vein thrombosis to 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 regime, one that raised the risk of blood clots.
So they swapped him onto a newer drug and he
started to take asprin every day, and he hoped that
(17:19):
would be enough to minimize the chance of it happening again.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
Now in that situation, i'd be worried about lingering effects. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
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 tiptop mental form.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
And this was when twenty seventeen, Yeah, the.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Twenty seventeen Eurovision Song Contest and tim am I allowed
to swear on the podcast.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
It rather depends on what the word is. Let's find out,
go for it.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Well, I wanted to introduce you to a term of
art from Eurovision betting, and that term is fan wank.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
This was very good, all right, yes, I'll allow it.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
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 wider viewing public,
the people that actually vote 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
(18:26):
of money by identifying these fan wank songs and betting
against them, betting against them. So, just so I understand
that means, say, the odds are sixteen to one, and
I'm a fan, so I'm betting a dollar to win
sixteen dollars. And then Daniel's on the opposite side of
the bet, so he is risking sixteen dollars in the
hope of winning one dollar because he thinks that actually,
(18:48):
my sixteen to one song has basically no chance. He's
picking up the pennies in front of a steamroller again. Yeah,
that's exactly right. And in twenty seventeen, Daniel thought that
the song from Portugal was an example of fan wank.
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
(19:09):
did and dull. You can only really get a sense
of what's proven popular when the semi finals are broadcast,
And it turned out that Daniel had got it wrong.
The wider viewers really did like Portugal 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
(19:30):
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
(19:53):
to cut their losses and minimize the damage.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
So minimizing 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
(20:17):
a gambler, the temptation is always to be stubborn, to
hold on and hope. Now, Philip Tetlock 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 forecasts in
(20:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
And 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 twenty eighteen, the last Eurovision that Daniel ever
(21:06):
bet on, and this time he made a mistake that
he couldn't back out of cautionary tales. Will be back
in a moment. It's the twenty eighteen Eurovision Song Contest
what we heard about at the start of the show,
(21:26):
with two songs in contention for the win, Cypress and Israel.
Andrew Wright is with me in the studio to tell
the 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 of
the Japanese lu Fagorinas. He also thought that he'd spotted
(21:47):
a fan wank in the shape of the song from
Cyprus Fuey Go that's the sultry singer in the Sparky
Cat sued. The fans loved Cypress. They thought it was
a classic euro dance banger. Daniel thought that the wider
viewing public would think of it as something they'd seen
a hundred times before.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
So he was betting for Israel and he was betting
against Cypress winning, just as he'd bet against Portugal the
previous year. And just like the previous year. When the
semi final was broadcast, the data from YouTube and Spotify
showed that 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
(22:24):
to cut your losses. So what went wrong this time?
Did he stubbornly ignore the data or did did Daniel
fail to notice what was happening?
Speaker 2 (22:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (22:44):
Very nice. So this time it was like he'd bought
a share, he'd seen the price go down, he'd tried
to sell the share before he could find a buyer.
The share price had basically gone to nothing.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
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 he wrote me after that semi final
It read I'm really rather fucked Andrew probably. So. You see,
when he'd had these big bets in the past, he'd
been ninety nine percent sure that they were going to
(23:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
He'd borrow the money against his apartment again.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
That's right, And if Cyprus won Eurovision, he was going
to have to sell his apartment. He 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 SaaS and
the chicken noises would be just the kind of thing
the Saturday night audience would go for. Well.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
From Bellarus, I'm guessing they'd drag out the votes in
the Eurovision Final, it takes forever to announce the results.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
They go around every single country to ask which of
the songs that country's expert jury has given their points to.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
The funds go to Cyprus, Cyprus, And at the end of.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
All this, Israel was ahead of Cyprus, but only just.
But Eurovision voting isn't 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
(24:26):
televote score for Israel and Cyprus, and Daniel is desperately
hoping that Cyprus is going to be second in this
one too.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
The country that got the second highest vote with two
hundred and fifty three points is Cyprus, which means that
(24:56):
Israel is the winner.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Israel one. Daniel got away with it.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
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 your st alive.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
What did he reply?
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Always in the bag? 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 for to go off on his travels and come
back next year and do it all again. Yes.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Andrew, I'm afraid we are, because when I sent Daniel
that joking 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.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
But since the stroke his health had been fine.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
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, that's exactly what it is.
It fits the symptoms perfectly. Sciatica. That's when a slip
(26:13):
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 forty three. What
(26:33):
happened I don't know exactly, and norder his 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
(26:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
But people don't just drop dead from cancer, do 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.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
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 tumor that bleeds. The post
mortem fan that that's what had happened to Daniel.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
But a brain tumor would well with hindsight, it would
explain his stroke, Yes it would.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
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 tumor 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 sciatic nerve. Sometimes, in very rare cases, it's
(27:53):
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 Tadlock and his foxes
and edgehogs.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
The hedgehog wants to find the one key insight that
explains every and usually there isn't one, but sometimes there is,
including Daniel's cancer, which explained all his mysterious symptoms. So Andrew,
do you feel you could have You should have joined
the dot sooner.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
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 eked
out a few more months in hospital, but because he
(28:42):
didn't know, he enjoyed his last few months. He spent
them hanging out with his friends and jetting off to
new places.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
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 whether chicken noises beat
Sparkley cat suits on Eurovision, definitely think like a fox.
(29:08):
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 insights that
the foxes might not have thought of.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
That's right, and I think that'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 Carinn and Martin Gould, Daniel's
(29:47):
parents for giving me their permission to tell Daniel's story,
and to Daniel's friend Katie Southern for all of her
advice and support.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
This Cautionary Tales Eurovision special was written and presented by me, Tim.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
Harford and me Andrew Wright.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
Cautionary Tales is 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 Dilly, Julia Barton,
Greta Cohne, Little Millard, John Schnaz, Carli mcgliori, Eric Sandler,
(30:31):
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 sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show
page and Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, Slash
(30:56):
plus s
Host
Tim Harford
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