N/A (15:32)

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Ben Walter (16:32)

The Unshakables podcast is back for season two, and it's kicking off with an episode you absolutely won't want to miss. Host of the show and CEO of Chase for Business, Ben Walter welcomes a very special guest, chairman and CEO of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon. One of the world's most respected financial thought leaders, Jamie will connect the dots between the current challenges and opportunities facing small business owners and the broader financial landscape and of course, it wouldn't be an episode of the Unshakables if Jamie didn't share some of the, oh, moments that he overcame to forge ahead in his own career. You can find this must hear episode and the rest of the upcoming season of the Unshakeables wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more@chase.com podcast chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JP Morgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC Copyright 2025 JP Morgan Chase & Co.

Jacob (17:35)

I was joking with my producer Jacob the other day, who's one of Pushkin's most valuable employees. I hired him to be my assistant years ago in the most random manner possible. I think he saw a message board posting somewhere and I interviewed him for basically 10 minutes and said, go for it. I made a wild gamble on someone and got incredibly lucky. But let's be honest, you can't rely on getting lucky when it comes to hiring people. Lightning's not going to strike more than once. You need a system and you need tools. And that's why LinkedIn is so important. LinkedIn is more than just a job board. They help connect you with professionals you can't find anywhere else, even people who aren't actively looking for a new job in a given month. Over 70% of LinkedIn users don't visit other leading job sites. So if you're not looking on LinkedIn, you're looking in the wrong place. Hire professionals like a professional and post your job for free@LinkedIn.com gladwell that's LinkedIn.com gladwell to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

Tim Harford (18:50)

Roller coasters are safer than lots of things people do for fun. They're certainly a lot safer than riding in a car, if you believe the numbers from the International association of Amusement Parks and Attractions. And why wouldn't you believe them? My son and I ran about the same risk in driving 100 miles to Alton Towers and 100 miles back again that we would have faced if we'd ridden 600 roller coasters. So sure, roller coasters are pretty safe. But they don't feel safe. They're not meant to feel safe. And if you pushed a nervous roller coaster rider to think about what might actually be dangerous about a roller coaster, they'd probably tell you two things. First, I might fall out of my seat. And second, the entire train might fall off the track. That makes intuitive sense. The tracks look narrow and exposed, and the trains go fast, take perilous curves, and for goodness sake, they go upside down. But that's not really the problem. Here are the words of Stephen Flanagan, an expert on roller coaster safety. Although the public perception of the hazards associated with roller coasters may be focused in the danger of a train parting company with the track, in reality the bigger and more difficult to resolve issue has always been the hazard of trains colliding on the track. When you get on a roller coaster like the Smiler, you really don't need to worry that the train is going to fall off one of those gravity defying loops. You really don't need to worry about anything. But if you did feel like worrying about something, I'd suggest worrying that your train might smash into another train. As Leah and Joe's train moved off, a diabolic voice boomed over the speakers. Join us. Then the train plunged into a dark section of track, shocking the passengers by flipping upside down and right side up again before emerging into daylight and slowly clanking up the first chance chain lift. Higher and higher and higher. Ahead of them on the Smiler tracks was an empty train. And none of the passengers realised that empty train was slowing as it approached the top of a loop. The wind was still gusting. The empty trains were still a little on the light side. The train came to a stop, then slowly rolled back to settle in a dip. Once Lear and Joe's train was released from the lift hill, it would take 26 seconds to loop over to that dip. They were less than half a minute from disaster. Except. Except their train just stopped right at the top of the lift. We got to the first lift hill and it got stuck at the top. So obviously me and Joe were discussing, oh, this isn't right. Why had the train stopped? Simple. Although the Smiler engineers hadn't realised there was a problem, the Smiler's monitoring system knew perfectly well that there was a train stalled out on the track. Automatically, it held Lear and Joe's train at the top of the slope, the highest point of the Smiler, waiting for the blockage to be cleared. Catastrophe had been averted by an automated system. So now what? Paul Mee was an expert who became fascinated by the mistakes experts make. That was partly an intellectual interest of his, but it was also very personal. In 1935, when Meal was 15 years old, his mother had gone to her doctor with some symptoms which the doctor attributed to problems with her inner ear. In fact, the cause was a brain tumour. The doctor could have diagnosed the tumour by asking some basic questions and performing some basic checks, but didn't. A year later, the tumour had grown and spread. It was finally diagnosed by a different doctor and Paul Mehl's mother died soon after meal later. This episode of gross medical bungling permanently immunised me from the childlike faith in physicians omniscience that one finds among most persons. Mee became an academic researcher and a clinical psychologist. And he never lost his curiosity about the fallibility of human experts. In his early 30s, he published a book that was to become famous, Clinical versus Statistical Prediction. The book asked a question. Should you trust the judgment of an expert doctor? Or is it better to take a short list of symptoms, feed them into a simple flowchart and do whatever the flowchart says? Such a flowchart might have saved his mother. This was 1954. So we're not talking about pitting human experts against sophisticated artificial intelligence. We're talking about pitting human experts against a crude formulaic process. But Meehl found that the crude formulaic process often beat the humans. Three years later, he published an academic article with a punchy follow up question, when shall we use our heads instead of the formula? It's a question that's much more pressing today than it was when he asked it in the 1950s. Computers tell managers who to hire and who to fire. They tell radiologists whether a shadow on a scan is cancer or not. They advise judges on who should be released on bail and who should be detained. And they help social services prioritise calls about children at risk. The computers are everywhere, so when should we trust them instead of our own judgment? Paul Meal wrote, I find the two extreme answers to this question, namely always and never, equally unacceptable. At Alton Towers, the engineers were about to override the computer. That's not always the wrong choice. Sometimes the human is right and the computer is wrong. Unfortunately, this wasn't one of those times. Lear and Joe and the others had waited an hour and a half to get onto the Smiler. Then another half an hour while the technical fault was resolved. Now they were perched precariously at the highest point of the ride. A long minute ticked by. Then another excitement gave way to waves of anxiety, boredom and annoyance. They said over the tannoy, we're experiencing technical difficulties. Bear with us. They really weren't supposed to be poised and ready to roll for such a long time. What was going on? The Smiler's engineers were trying to figure that out too. The Smiler has a simple computer system designed to prevent trains from smashing into each other. At certain points on the track, there are proximity switches which register when a train enters a block of track, and when it leaves it again, if the system thinks a train is on a particular block of track, it will automatically prevent the train behind it from being released into that block. That's what was happening here. Of course, the empty train hadn't left the block. In fact, it was still gently penduluming backwards and forwards, settling in the valley ahead of Leah and Joe's train. So the Smiler's computer prevented the occupied train behind it from moving forward, leaving Lear and the other passengers waiting and waiting at the top of the lift hill. Meanwhile, on the ride's control panel, the zone stop alarm was activated, notifying the engineers that one train was being held because the train ahead hadn't left its block of track. Hmm. Well, the occupied block was the one including the vertical chain lift where the previous train had stalled. It was natural to assume that if a second train had stalled, that would be where it was. One of the engineers went out to have a look, but there was no train at the bottom of the vertical lift. As far as he was concerned, then, the Smiler's collision prevention system was just malfunctioning. Probably it hadn't reset itself from the train which stalled 15 minutes before. Now, that might seem like a big assumption, but this was one of the engineers who'd arrived after the fifth train had been added. He didn't know about it, or if someone had mentioned it, it had slipped his mind. So he thought there were four trains, and he knew where four trains were. Lear's at the top of the lift hill and three in the station. If he'd turned to look over his shoulder and looked carefully, he might have seen the fifth train valid at the other end of the ride through the tangle of roller coaster track. But he didn't look. Or if he did, he didn't see. At the bottom of the vertical chain lift was a control panel to reset the block sensors. The engineer performed that reset, telling the computer to forget its erroneous belief that there was a train stuck on the track. Unfortunately, it wasn't the computer, which had an erroneous belief. It was the humans. Cautionary tales will return in a moment.

Ben Walter (30:00)

The Unshakeables podcast is back for season two, and it's kicking off with an episode you absolutely won't want to miss. Host of the show and CEO of Chase for Business, Ben Walter welcomes a very special guest, Chairman and CEO of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon. One of the world's most respected financial thought leaders, Jamie will connect the dots between the current challenges and opportunities facing small small business owners and the broader financial landscape. And of course, it wouldn't be an episode of the Unshakables if Jamie didn't share some of the, oh, moments that he overcame to forge ahead in his own career. You can find this must hear episode and the rest of the upcoming season of the Unshakeables wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more@chase.com podcast chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rate. May apply JP Morgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC Copyright 2025 JP Morgan Chase & Co.

Jacob (31:03)

I was joking with my producer Jacob the other day, who's one of Pushkin's most valuable employees. I hired him to be my assistant years ago in the most random manner possible. I think he saw a message board posting somewhere and I interviewed him for base B 10 minutes and said go for it. I made a wild gamble on someone and got incredibly lucky. But let's be honest, you can't rely on getting lucky when it comes to hiring people. Lightning's not going to strike more than once. You need a system and you need tools. And that's why LinkedIn is so important. LinkedIn is more than just a job board. They help connect you with professionals you can't find anywhere else, even people who aren't actively looking for a new job in a given month. Over 70% of LinkedIn users don't visit other leading job sites. So if you're not looking on LinkedIn, you're looking in the wrong place. Hire professionals like a professional and post your job for free@LinkedIn.com gladwell that's LinkedIn.com gladwell to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

Narrator (32:12)

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Tim Harford (32:50)

Leah's train has now been held at the top of the Chain hill for six long minutes. There's still a chance the Smiler system won't release the train without an explicit override from the humans. So now the critical decision is with the engineers back in the station. But they don't explicitly discuss whether there are four trains running or five. They don't send anyone out to visually confirm that the whole track is clear. Nor, it seems, do they look carefully at the CCTV screens. The Smiler does have lots of CCTV screens, very on brand for a dystopian roller coaster experience. But the ride is such a tangle of track that it's hard to see clearly. Right now, the valid train is partly obscured and the engineers don't look carefully enough. Maybe they don't look at all. They're all just assuming the computer must be wrong, so they decide to override it. The Smiler's system still won't release one train into a section where it knows another train is stationary. But it it doesn't know about the stationary train anymore because its memory of the obstacle has been deliberately reset. Leah recalled it just set back off without any warning. At last, Leah's train starts to roll down from the lift hill and accelerate into loop after loop after loop. 26 seconds away is a stationary train. It were fine. We were going round loops and everything, and we just came round this corner and I saw this car and I'm like, oh, my God, this isn't good. Paul Meehl, the clinical psychologist who posed the question about when we should follow the formula and when we should use our heads, didn't have an easy answer. But he did suggest a rule of thumb. If you as the human know something that the algorithm doesn't know that the algorithm can't know, that's a reason to think about overruling the computer. But when investigators later looked into the causes of the Smiler accident, they noticed that the engineers had a patchy knowledge about how the ride's fault alarms actually worked. This meant they were often puzzled when the alarms went off. They'd do some safety checks and reset the system. But exactly why the alarm had sounded was sometimes a mystery. So the engineers regarded the alarm system as capricious and unreliable. If the engineers had been better trained, they'd have understood the logic of the alarm system and would have been able to think clearly about when to override it and when not to. Paul Meehl warned us, if you're going to overrule the computer, you'd better have a reason to think you know something that it doesn't. But to do that, you need to have a firm understanding of how the computer works. The Smiler's engineers didn't. As Leah and Joe and the others loop upside down and saw the empty train ahead of them, they had only a moment to brace for the shattering impact. The train wasn't going Especially fast. You'd probably walk away from a car crash at that speed. But unlike cars, roller coasters don't have crumple zones. Lear was right at the front with no protection. And as metal smashed into metal, the two trains locked together and rocked backwards and forwards 12 times, with the legs of the front row passengers crushed between them. The next thing I remember was the screaming and the blood. There was so much of it. The metal of the safety bars had folded into our bodies, said Leah later. All I wanted was to hold Joe's hand, but when I looked down at it, I could see there was no way I could. His little finger was hanging off his left hand and the middle finger on the other was broken. All the front row passengers had horrendous leg wounds. Both Joe's kneecaps were shattered. Leah's injuries were even worse. I started getting pain. I couldn't feel my toes, Leah remembered. And I started to look at my legs. My left leg was all pushed up. They were snarled up in a tangle of metal at a 45 degree angle 20ft above the ground. And the Smiler operators were apparently still confused because it took 17 minutes before anybody called for the emergency services up on the coaster. Leah nearly died from blood loss, but an air ambulance flew in blood for an emergency transfusion 20ft above ground. Later, she stopped breathing, but the medics reaching her from precarious ladders and hoists managed to resuscitate her once she was released from the train. Hours later, Leah was flown to hospital, slipping in and out of consciousness. She woke up 24 hours later. I realized two things were missing. My boyfriend and my entire left leg. The doctors told her sorrowfully that they'd faced a choice, her leg or her life. So they took the leg. The woman sitting next to her on the roller coaster, Vicki Balch, also had her leg amputated. Joe Pugh was elsewhere in the hospital. He and several other passengers also suffered severe injuries. All because the Smiler's engineers hadn't double checked when the computer told them there was a train and out on the track. Given what she's been through, Leah Washington is doing incredibly well. She's something of an Instagram influencer, posting videos of herself learning to walk, learning to run, learning to ski, or selfies of her looking fabulous in a bikini. They look like a lot of Instagram selfies, in fact, except that she's looking fabulous in a bikini with an artificial leg. Jo never regained the use of one finger, but his knees recovered eventually and the pair are still together. Leah is now Mrs. Washington Pugh after she and Joe tied the knot in 2024. But that happy ever after ending so nearly didn't happen. At that moment, when Lear was unconscious and trapped in crumpled metal 20ft above the ground, when a team of paramedics on hoists were trying to get her breathing started again, it was touch and go. The medics later told her if the weather had been any colder, she wouldn't have made it. In a world where we're surrounded by automatic systems, statistical formulas, algorithms and computers, we're going to have to get better at deciding when to trust them and when to overrule them. There will never be a hard and fast rule for when to do that. But if you're thinking of ignoring the computer, it's wise to have a logical reason to think you know better. The Smiler engineers didn't. When investigators picked over the disaster, they concluded that there was nothing wrong with the roller coaster itself, nor with the automatic alarm system. It was modern, well designed, and functioned exactly as intended. The problems emerged from the working practices of the engineering team. It was partly the fact that the engineers didn't fully understand their own safety alarms, and it was also that nobody in particular was in charge of the process of resetting the Smiler after the very first fault alarm. There were the ride operators, the first engineering team and the second engineering team all trying to make decisions. There were loose, informal conversations in which nobody had a full overview of what was going on. There was no written process for working systematically through a checklist before resetting the ride, and there was no formal assignment of responsibility as to who had the authority to override the automatic system and under what circumstances. This lack of a formal process was critical. Without it, the engineering team could just assume that the track was clear. With a formal process, someone would have been clearly responsible for checking. Fifteen months after the accident, a judge called it an obvious shambles involving lack of communication and double checking, which could and should easily have been avoided by a written system of working, including a single overall supervisor. Automatic systems can help us avoid accidents and make better decisions. But Paul Mehl's question will never go away. When should we use our heads instead? Maybe the trick is in the question. It's okay to use your head if you really are thinking. Very often we aren't. As I waited in line for the smiler with my 12 year old son snaking through the maze of concrete under the black netting, it was hard knots to think about Leah Washington and her accident. Maybe all this was going through my son's mind too, as the queue edged forward and his knees buckled. I'm not sure I want to do this. Come on, I said. You came all this way. You'll be sad if you don't do it. So we did it and it was amazing. We had a great time. He was so proud of himself. But there was one moment when we got to the front of the line, when we were offered a place on the front row. We looked at each other and shook our heads. No, not the front row. Thanks. We'll sit a little bit further back. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford with Andrew Wright, Alice Fiennes and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Alice Fiennes and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio. Ben Nadaff Haffrey edited the scripts. The show features the voice talents of Melanie Gutter, Stella Harford, Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jupp, Masaya Munro, Jamal Westman and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brodie, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It really makes a difference to us. And if you want to hear the show ad free, sign up to Pushkin plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin FM plus with.

N/A (46:36)

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Ben Walter (47:08)

Is kicking off season two with an episode you won't want to miss. Join host Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business as he welcomes a very special guest, Chairman and CEO of of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon. Hear about the challenges facing small businesses and some of the oh moments Jamie has overcome. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. J.P. morgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC Copyright 2025 J.P. morgan Chase & Co.

N/A (47:43)

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