Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Fire at The Beverly Hills Supper Club (Update)

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

It's been five years since Cautionary Tales ran a mini-series about the Covid-19 pandemic, exploring the lessons we were learning in real time as the crisis unfolded. 'Fire at The Beverly Hills Supper Club' tells the story of a deadly blaze in a Cincinnati hotel and Tim's own experience reacting to new information about the virus. After the episode, Tim reflects on the anniversary, the cautionary tales the pandemic still had to teach us, and whether we've learned enough to deal with the next one.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The destruction is nearly incomprehensible unless you see it for yourself. I found that my house was gone, as well as every house on my block. How could this have happened? And where do we go from here? LA is rebuilding. There is no doubt about that. Less clear is how. We know the faster we can rebuild, the faster we can heal. There are kind

of two separate conversations at a high level that I don't think we're having that we could have in this rush to kind of build things back as they were. I'm Kate Kegel, host of the new podcast Rebuilding LA from LA Times Studios. We will try to answer some of these questions as we assess the path forward. Rebuilding LA launches June 11th. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Cautionary Tales. This week we're on our summer holidays, but we've got something from the archives I hope you'll like. This year of course marks the anniversary we would all rather forget, five years since Covid and the Covid lockdowns. During the summer of 2020, when I and everyone

else were shut indoors, I wrote some mini-episodes about what we were learning in real time over the pandemic. Five years on, are those lessons any different? Here is one of those episodes. It's called Fire at the Beverly Hills Supper Club. And afterwards, I will be back for a talk with my producer, Georgia Mills, about whether we've really learned our lessons. Imagine the scene. A large ballroom, 1200 people are seated around the tables enjoying the finest dining that 1977 has to offer, which admittedly isn't saying much. But everyone's having a wonderful evening at the Beverly Hills Supper Club, which naturally given the name is just outside Cincinnati.

There's a comedy duo on stage and the headline, is just outside Cincinnati. There's a comedy duo on stage and the headline performer is expected very soon. The singer and TV personality John Davidson, a big star at the time. But what the audience here doesn't know is that on the other side of this sprawling complex of function rooms, something's gone wrong. A fire has broken out and it's spreading fast. The fire department has already been called and the fire is still some distance away from the crowded cabaret room. But the more it spreads, the more fuel it finds, the hotter it gets and the faster it moves. Safety standards at the supper club aren't what they should be.

There isn't a fire alarm. There isn't a sprinkler system. And there isn't a lot of time. And nobody in that room knows that the fire is on its way. One remarkable young man, Walter Bailey, did his best. Bailey was barely more than a boy. He was 18 years old and he worked as an assistant waiter. Bailey had seen the fire and he realised that, although it was a long way from the cabaret room, somebody needed to tell all those people to start evacuating. Walter Bailey found the supervisor in the cabaret room, explained about the fire and asked him to clear the room. The supervisor looked confused. Bailey told him again. The supervisor turned and walked off.

To clear the room, thought Bailey, who found 70 people lining up to get into the cabaret room. Bailey led them instead to safety. When he returned, he found that nobody inside the cabaret room had moved. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. This cautionary tale is going to be a little different. I hope that's ok. The world seems different these days, so I've been writing some new stories for you to suit the times we're in. They'll be a little shorter, a little simpler and perhaps a little more focused on the challenges we face right now. And this episode is different in another way too, because in a small way it's about me, about what I got wrong and, I hope, about what you can learn from my mistakes.

We'll come back to my mistakes and to the fire in the Beverly Hills Supper Club, but first I wanted to ask you a question. Do you remember Captain Pastrengo Rugiate? You must. Cautionary Tales Season 1, Episode 1. It was about an oil tanker the size of the Chrysler building, a ship with the name Torrey Canyon. That ship was headed for a sunken mass of rocks with a vicious reputation called the Seven Stones, and Captain Pastrengo Ruggiati, poor Pastrengo Ruggiati, steered his ship closer and closer and closer to disaster. You can go and listen again if you like. I'll wait. The mystery of Torrey Canyon, you may remember, is that while Captain Rugiatti was steering his ship towards the rocks, the weather

was good, the visibility was good, Torri Canyon had radar and the seven stones were clearly marked both on all the charts and by a lighthouse vessel warning ships to keep away. There was still time to change course, just as there was still time to evacuate the cabaret room. And yet, Torrey Canyon did not turn. Just as the people in the supper club cabaret room did not move. Captain Ruggiatti was a man in a hurry. He'd made a plan to head straight for a harbour 150 miles beyond those rocks. But his original course was charted safely through deep, open water. That at least was the plan. But now new information is coming in.

The ship has drifted off the expected course overnight, closer to shore. He's now heading for a tight squeeze past Seven Stones. Fishing boats have appeared, blocking his way. The current is pushing him towards the rocks. His plan is getting riskier and riskier. But at no point does he stop, reflect and rethink everything. Instead, with each new piece of bad news,

he furrows his brow and rededicates himself to his original plan. So here's my confession. In the face of the growing coronavirus epidemic, I behaved in exactly the same way. It took me far too long to really think about the information that was coming my way. It took me even longer to take action. I too am Captain Ruggiatti. In our very first cautionary tale, I discussed one reason why we don't change course. Psychologists call it planned continuation bias. We focus on a particular goal. When bad news comes in that should make us rethink, our tunnel vision only narrows. The bad news

makes us redouble our focus on the initial plan, now that we know it's going to be difficult. Uziati was racing against the clock and with each setback, the tunnel vision must have closed in further. He also made his fateful decisions by himself. He was a captain who didn't inform his crew of the details of his plans and didn't seek their comments. As he acknowledged, I must answer for everything, for everyone. I must carry the cross alone. If only Rugiatti had been open to criticism and had sought the views of his officers, they might have helped him to regain his grasp of the risks and rethink his plans.

But having other people to guide you doesn't always help. If they're in the same situation as you, with the same assumptions, they can lull you into thinking that none of you have a problem, when in fact, all of you have a problem. There's a famous psychological study conducted in the 1960s by Bibb Latane and John Darley. The scientists asked their subjects to sit quietly and fill out a questionnaire. Sometimes the subject would be alone, and sometimes in a group of three. Gradually the researchers pumped smoke into the room. When the subject was sitting alone, he or she tended to note the smoke and calmly leave

to report it. When the subjects were in a group of three, they were much less likely to react. Each person remained passive, reassured by the passivity of the others. Based on what we now know about the Beverly Hills Supper Club in 1977, that experiment seems darkly prophetic. That incident is vividly described by Amanda Ripley in her book The Unthinkable. Remember where we left off? 1200 people were in the cabaret room listening to the warm-up act crack jokes on stage. A fire was racing towards them. Young Walter Bailey's supervisor had shrugged and ignored the problem.

Like Pastrengo Ruggiati, the supervisor had a plan and didn't seem able to fully appreciate that the plan would have to change. So Walter Bailey did something big, something he assumed would cost him his job. But someone had to act. He decided that it was going to be him. Although he was just a teenager, and although he suffered from stage fright, Bailey strode down the middle of the room, climbed up on stage, grabbed a microphone. I want everyone to look to my right. There's an exit to the right corner of the room. And

look to my left. There's an exit on the left. And now look to the back. There's an exit at the back. I want everyone to leave the room calmly. There is a fire at the front of the building." And then Walter Bailey left the stage. I wish I could tell you that 1,200 people rose to their feet and filed out of the room. But they didn't. Who was this kid? They thought. Was he part of the act? Was the fire for real? Was it a problem? People thought of the expense of their ticket of how much they were enjoying the food. They were looking forward to hearing John Davidson sing. They didn't want to rush out if they didn't have

to. So did they have to? It wasn't clear. Think about the last time you were sitting around in a building and a fire alarm went off. Did you spring to your feet and seek the nearest fire exit? No, I didn't. I looked around to see what others were doing. The same thing happened in the Beverly Hills Supper Club. People did what people do. They looked to the left. And to the right, as Walter Bailey had told them to. But they weren't looking for the exits.

They were looking at what the people next to them were doing. Was Susan to my left moving? What about Fred to my right? With everyone taking cues from everyone else, the group were slow to respond. And they really didn't have a minute to spare. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.

Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com. That's iHeartAdvertising.com. The destruction is nearly incomprehensible unless you see it for yourself. I found that my house was gone, as well as every house on my block.

How could this have happened? And where do we go from here? LA is rebuilding. There is no doubt about that. Less clear is how. We know the faster we can rebuild, the faster we can heal. There are kind of two separate conversations

at a high level that I don't think we're having that we could have in this rush to kind of build things back as they were. I'm Kate Kegel, host of the new podcast Rebuilding LA from LA Times Studios. We will try to answer some of these questions as we assess the path forward. Rebuilding LA launches June 11th. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. Because I'm a journalist and, frankly, a nerd, I should have been way ahead of the curve on coronavirus. Think back to the 13th of February. I know, it feels a long time ago. Only three people outside of China had died from the new virus, at least as far as anyone knew at the time.

Nobody in the US was thought to have died of it, nor had anyone in my own country, the UK. The virus felt a very distant threat. But it wasn't. More than a thousand people had died in China. That number was rising rapidly. 25 countries had confirmed cases. Well-respected epidemiologists had already concluded that there was little chance of stamping out these other cases quickly. The novel coronavirus was too contagious.

Like the fire in the supper club, it was spreading everywhere and rapidly gathering speed. And I know this because I interviewed one of those well-respected epidemiologists. On February 13, Dr Natalie McDermott of King's College London walked into a studio at the BBC and told me the latest thinking on the new coronavirus. The early data had suggested that the virus killed more than one in ten of the people it infected. Dr McDermott reassured me that no, it probably wasn't quite that dangerous. The best guess at the fatality rate was more like 1 in 100, maybe as low as 1 in 200. Nobody

knew for sure. Should I just assume that everyone on the planet would get it? I asked. No, she said that was too fatalistic. But if we couldn't contain it, it was certainly infectious enough to infect a majority of the planet's population. I nodded. I believed her. I even did the mental arithmetic. There might be 5 billion cases, and with a 1 in 100 death rate, that would be 50 million people around the world dying over the course of a few months. In the United States, it would be 2 million deaths. What did I do with the doctor's information? I did what Pastrengo Ruggiati did as his ship

ploughed on towards the rocks. I anxiously furrowed my brow and kept on going, hoping the worst wouldn't happen. Now, I don't want to exaggerate my failings. I didn't crash any oil tankers. Nobody died because of my mistakes. But I could have done better. Easily. I could have held off on booking my summer vacation. I could have made sure I caught up with my elderly father and stepmother who were in high risk groups. I could have sold all my shares, or at least most of them, and waited for a couple of months to see whether Dr McDermott's grim scenario was starting to become a reality. Instead, I took some money out of savings to pay down some of my

mortgage because I had gigs firmly in the diary that would top the savings back up again. Those gigs were cancelled of course, which means I drained my savings at the worst possible moment. If for goodness sake I could at least have bought some extra toilet paper. But none of this went through my mind. It wasn't that I wasn't anxious. I was anxious. Just like Pastrengo Vigiatti was anxious. I was aware there was a problem. And yet I didn't step back, think things through and turn my anxiety into action. And perhaps you may recognise yourself in that description too.

Remember the experiment by psychologists Bibletane and John Darley? They slowly pumped smoke into rooms containing people filling in questionnaires. Solitary subjects didn't hesitate to leave and report the smoke, but groups of people stayed and stayed as the smoke thickened. Reassured by each other's passivity, those experimental subjects had done nothing. Now, a decade later, the customers of the Beverly Hills Supper Club were re-enacting that experiment in the most terrible way. Some people moved in reaction to young Walter Bailey's warning. He saved them.

But many people were too slow to react, lulled into complacency by the fact that others were also too slow. Four minutes later, the power failed and the lights went out in the ballroom, toxic smoke rolled in, and anyone still in that room faced a dreadful challenge in getting out alive. Walter Bailey repeatedly held his breath and headed back in to drag out as many people as he could. 167 people died that night. If it hadn't been for Walter Bailey, the death toll might have been many hundreds more. Bailey also survived. He's a true hero. I'd like to think that if disaster struck, I'd have the courage and the presence of mind of Walter Bailey. But I fear I'm more like those poor, unsuspecting Supper Club

patrons, enjoying their food and looking forward to the music, then wondering what to do, and taking cues from everyone else. We're social animals, we humans. We know instinctively that it's normally safer to stay with the group and to do what the group does. But not always. I hesitated too. And then when I started reacting in earnest to the pandemic, I found that the stock market was already plunging, the pasta and toilet paper was already sold out, and there was no hope of getting masks. Our governments found themselves in the same situation, for much the same reason. In this series I'll have more to say about what our leaders have done and failed to do. But for now, let's simply note that many Western democracies found themselves in the same crazy scramble for ventilators, for swab testing kits, for masks and for gowns.

If everyone had started taking action in January while the risk of a pandemic was still just a risk, we'd all be in better shape now. But just as in the supper club, before they acted everyone wanted to be a little more certain that there really was a problem. Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School calls this sort of problem an ambiguous threat. The warning signs aren't completely straightforward and the potential for harm is unclear as well. Ambiguous threats might be serious or they might not. As Professor Edmondson points out, that ambiguity is exactly what makes these types of threats

so dangerous. Because we're not sure that they're serious, we easily find excuses not to take them seriously. While leading epidemiologists were warning that the virus might well become a pandemic, it wasn't obvious that they were right. It wasn't obvious that it would spread so quickly. It wasn't obvious that it would lead to the complete shutdown of major economies around the world. But then, for Captain Pastrengu Ruggiatti, it wasn't obvious that fishing boats would appear to block his way. It wasn't obvious that one of his officers would make a

navigational error. It wasn't obvious that his ship's maneuvering would be delayed by confusion about whether the ship was on autopilot or not. I didn't expect Rugiate to predict all these things, just as I don't blame myself for failing to forecast every detail of the pandemic. But what he should have done was realise the risks, and take action to reduce those risks. And so should I. I should have thought through the implications. What might it mean if a pandemic threatened to kill 2 million Europeans and another 2 million Americans? How might we all respond? And while I might not have realised on February 13th that almost half the world was heading

into lockdown, it was surely a possibility that I should have considered much sooner than I did. But no, faced with the unthinkable, it's hard to think it. That was never in my mind. Never. Said Pastrengo Ruggiati. There were a lot of things that were never in my mind either. Perhaps they should have been. I hope that I remember my own limitations in future. Ancio sono il capitano Ruggiati.

I, too, am Captain Ruggiatti. Hello everyone, it is 2025, Tim Harford back with you and I am joined in the studio by series producer Georgia Mills. Hello Georgia. Hi Tim. Listening to this episode and looking back at the lockdown, what was that time like for you both as a journalist and also just as a regular human? Well, I don't think my experiences as a regular human were any different from anyone else's.

I was thinking, oh, this must be particularly tough for people with young children who could be going to nursery. I was, oh, no, actually, maybe it's particularly tough for people with young children who could be going to nursery. I was like, oh no, actually maybe it's particularly tough for people with teenagers who are studying for exams. I don't know, it must be really tough for people who don't have any family and who are all by themselves. Actually no, maybe it's really tough for older people who are most at risk. And then I realised it's kind of tough for a lot of people. I had the privilege of feeling useful while also staying safe. So unlike the medics

or essential workers, I didn't have to go out and expose myself to the virus. But at the same time, I was covering the story for the Financial Times and particularly for the BBC. We had an epic series of our numbers related radio series more or less trying to make sense of what was going on and I did all of that from home so really feeling that I was kind of I was doing something useful and I had something to do but at the same time an absolutely no risk so frankly a lot easier for me than for many. And listening back to the pandemic series you made, what thoughts do you have hearing that now?

It is fascinating the number of different issues that have come up. So we were talking about unintended consequences, we were talking about the failure to react, we were talking about the importance of data. So I think a lot of it still stands up. But at the same time there were certain things listening to the series you just think, oh we had no idea what was coming. So it's an interesting time capsule. One other thing I've found is that some people listen to the podcast and go, oh wow that was so prescient.

And other people listen to the podcast and go, wow that's so embarrassing, you got everything wrong. Which is just a reminder that people are going to adopt particular views of the world and you're going to seem very smart or very stupid depending on whether what you said happens to align with those views. I mean, they were made in June 2020, so it already felt like probably a million years of Covid by then, but there was so much of a wild roller coaster to come. So what other cautionary tales related to Covid do you think have emerged since? Well, there's obviously a whole slew of lessons to learn about vaccines and vaccine communication

and vaccine skepticism. The vaccine obviously was a huge story in 2021 as vaccines started to be rolled out and protect people from the virus. I think another lesson is that how countries did in the first wave does not necessarily predict much about how well they did overall. So I remember very clearly that summer of 2020 doing a series for the BBC or an episode for the BBC asking why had things gone so much worse in the UK than in Germany. The number of people who died in Germany was so much less, about a quarter the number of people who died in the UK. And then actually roll forward a year and the Germans had caught up and in the long run it didn't really make any difference the virus was

going to do what it was going to do so that I think what was a surprise we had we'd told ourselves the Germans had done so much better but maybe in the end all the preparation you can do doesn't make as much difference as you might think. What about looking back at lockdowns were they they worth it? Were they important? Do we even have answers today? Well, we have some answers, but a lot of the kind of data that we would want to have stopped being collected during the lockdowns because of the lockdown. So, for example, children's exam performance. Did children's academic performance suffer, did they regress?

Actually quite hard to answer that question because the very exams that you might use to answer that question were discontinued or were changed. It's hard to generalise because different parts of the world had very different lockdown policies. But let me offer a couple of reflections. One is that looking at the UK, which I have done in some detail, we have quite good evidence that a lot of kids bounced back academically. The academic impact was really bad, but it was quite short lived and a lot of kids had caught up surprisingly quickly. So in the end you go, okay fine, no harm done, it turns out people can bounce back. The impact on mental health, I think less of a cheerful

story, mental health definitely deteriorated a lot. There was a long-term decline of teenage mental health, possibly something to do with smartphones, possibly something to do with something else. And then we had Covid and we had the lockdowns and that seemed to make it all worse. Unclear whether it really made a long term difference. And also unclear was the problem the lockdowns or was the problem the virus? Because they're happening at the same time. So you know, are you suffering because you can't get out and see your friends or are you suffering because you're't get out and see your friends? Or are you suffering because you're terrified that you're going to lose your parents to

this deadly virus? Or is it both? So hard to know. One final point I think is worth making is when you look at countries such as Sweden, who had much more liberal lockdown policies, actually, and you get a similar story in certain US states, people still sort of lock themselves down. So you had many of the same benefits of the lockdowns in terms of controlling the virus. And you had many of the same costs in terms of, you know, if you're running a restaurant

or a bar in Sweden, it's legal for people to come and sit in your restaurant, but they're not going to do it. So I understand why when a government mandates something, that's to be taken seriously and that is to be debated. It's not a trivial matter. But it's worth bearing in mind that if governments had done nothing, I think a lot of the impact on the virus, on the economy and on people's mental health might not have been as different as all the people shouting at each other about it would

like to think. Right, and you mentioned there that there's not enough data to really establish quite a lot of things we'd like to establish. So is there a cautionary tale here about the gathering of data? I think there is. It's easy to underestimate quite how important data was. And ultimately, if you had enough data, there's no pandemic. I mean, it may sound a strange thing to claim,

but imagine in the ideal case, OK, here's the data we've got. We've got data. The moment somebody is infected, we immediately know they're infected, and immediately know they're infected and we know how infectious they are, how likely they are to spread the disease to other people. And let's say that everybody is wearing a smartwatch and that smartwatch just glows bright red as you're walking down the street if you're infectious. And you just look around and you can see anybody who's wearing a bright red smartwatch, you keep away from them and in fact those people have to stay at home and if they don't stay at home

the police will come and have a word. If you had that, if the data were that good, the pandemic's over in a week, right? It's literally over. When you realise that, you realise, oh so much of this is not actually about treatments or about vaccines, it's about that we don't know who's infectious and who isn't. And if we had better data, we'd make a real contribution to preventing future pandemics. Now of course we're not going to have that ultimate glowing smartwatch in future. Well, probably not. Probably not. Maybe not. Who knows what we'll have in the future. But what we might have is much better testing availability of really rapid tests and maybe

some smarter algorithms to process the information. So you do a test, you come up positive and the computer is better able to say, oh well, you know, here are the people you met after you got infected. Here are the people you met before you got infected, they might be infected, and just do a better job of controlling the disease without these really widespread draconian lockdowns. So there's a huge amount to be gained by having better data and I think it's very, very easy to overlook. We always overlook the power of data in my experience. So are you optimistic for whenever the next pandemic hits that we'll get the data right or at least better?

I think we've learned an awful lot. I think the technology is going to get a lot better. I think we're going to have a much faster development of vaccines, you know, all things being equal. So, you know, there's a lot to be optimistic about. Clearly, what we've also learned is there's an awful lot of politics and the politics is not necessarily helpful. But overall, I think COVID could have been a much more serious illness. Just imagine if it had been 10 times more deadly than it was. Just imagine if it had affected children instead of 80 year olds. I mean, obviously it did affect some children, but imagine if it had been more deadly for children than for the very elderly. It could have been so much worse.

It could have been so much deadlier. It could have been absolutely terrifying. So in a way, maybe we should think of COVID not as this disaster, but as a near miss that should give us lessons that would help us avoid a much worse disaster in future and well the lesson of cautionary tales is always you should try to learn from past mistakes but also we don't always do so. Nice we'll have to wait and see so thank you Tim I think we'll leave it there but if you haven't heard the rest of the pandemic specials I really recommend going back.

I listened to them for the first time this year and they are both a really interesting time capsule but also really relevant still. So lots of other episodes to check out. And we'll be back next week with another classic from the archive. A tale about Pepsi's disastrous bottle cap promotion and a man who bought more than a thousand chocolate puddings. See you then. a monstrous bottle cap promotion and a man who bought more than a thousand chocolate puddings. See you then.

Three books that helped us research this episode are The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley, The Ostrich Paradox by Howard Kuhnreuther and Robert Mayer and Meltdown by Chris Clearfield and Andras Tiltik. As always, a full list of our sources is in the show notes on timharford.com. Cautionary Tales is written and presented by me, Tim Harford, with help from Andrew Wright. The show was produced by Ryan Dilley with support from Pete Norton. The music, mixing and mastering are the work of Pascal Wise. The scripts were edited by Julia Barton.

Special thanks to Mia LeBelle, Carly Migliori, Heather Fane, Maya Koenig, Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell. Cautionary Tales is a Pushkin Industries production. The destruction is nearly incomprehensible unless you see it for yourself. I found that my house was gone, as well as every house on my block. How could this have happened? And where do we go from here? LA is rebuilding. There is no doubt about that.

Less clear is how. We know the faster we can rebuild, the faster we can heal. There are kind of two separate conversations at a high level that I don't think we're having that we could have in this rush to kind of build things back as they were. I'm Kate Kegel, host of the new podcast Rebuilding LA from LA Times Studios.

We will try to answer some of these questions as we assess the path forward. Rebuilding LA launches June 11th. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.