Tim Harford's Blog

Misinformation, double-dealing, character assassination – lobbyist Don Pearlman will stop at nothing to prevent the world from agreeing to cut carbon emissions. This arch disrupter, who works for fossil fuel companies and oil-producing nations, is determined that the climate talks in Kyoto, COP3, will fail. Will Don’s methods succeed, and what will it mean for the future of the planet?

Tim is joined by playwright Joe Robertson to discuss Kyoto, the political thriller he and co-writer Joe Murphy based on 1997’s international climate negotiations.

Kyoto is currently on stage at the Lincoln Center in New York.

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Algorithmic dating, like online dating in general, has overpromised and underdelivered. Yes, that is the uninformed opinion of a centrist dad who has never tried online dating — but it is not merely the uninformed opinion of a centrist dad who has never tried online dating. The market has reached the same conclusion: despite a background of frothy valuations for all things tech, share prices of the dating companies Bumble and Match Group (the owner of Tinder) have fallen precipitously in the past few years. User numbers are flagging too.

This reckoning has been brewing for a very long time. Scientific matchmaking dates back at least to the 1920s, when Science and Invention magazine explained the use of pulsometers (“electrical sphygmographs”) and a body odour test (put the object of your affection in a glass capsule to which a hosepipe is attached, and sniff away). One test even had a researcher suddenly fire a pistol into the air to see how the loving couple reacted to stressful situations — if both of them showed signs of panic, this was alleged to be a bad omen for the chances of marital harmony. But a more direct precursor of today’s dating apps is Operation Match, a 1960s effort by enterprising Harvard students who were scrounging some time on a punch-card computer.

Operation Match claimed to rely on a 75-point questionnaire to make the perfect pairings, but the truth was simpler. “The first thing we did was to make sure they were in the same area,” co-founder Jeff Tarr later told a documentary-maker. “Mostly girls wanted to go out with boys who were the same age or older, their height or taller, the same religion. So after we had these cuts, then we just kind of randomly matched them.”

So much for scientific matchmaking, but there are worse ways to find love. While Grindr and Tinder are slicker and more immediate, they seem to work in much the same way, eschewing an algorithmic match in favour of what so many web ads describe as “hot singles in your area now”. (If I am the only one seeing these ads, please never tell me this.)

Perhaps that is sensible. There is obvious appeal in the idea that from a sphygmograph to a deep-learning system, “science” will find your perfect match, but it is not hard to see the shallowness in the promise of an algorithmic pairing. Mathematician Hannah Fry — author of The Mathematics of Love — put her finger on the problem: “You don’t really know what you want.”

We can write down the list of qualities we might want in a partner, but some of them are circular (“I would be attracted to someone attractive”), some of them seem important but may not be (such as a shared taste in books or music) and some defy description. A list of categories in a computer database might feel scientific, but we should hardly be surprised if our affections are governed by a very different subconscious checklist.

Also, people lie. Researchers have discovered that the typical user of online dating websites is richer, slimmer, blonder and sexier than the rest of the population — at least, according to their own profiles. Lake Wobegon is real, and accessible on a dating app near you.

A further complaint is simply that dating apps induce people to spend a lot of time anxiously scrolling and not nearly enough time going out and having fun. This is 21st-century life anyway, but the gap between what the app promises and what the app delivers is particularly stark when the app is offering to help you find love — or, at the very least, some kind of intimacy with another human.

Looming over all this is a broader social question: are dating apps bad for society? The worry here is not prudish but more of a parallel with social media. We worry about Twitter, YouTube and TikTok not only because they distract and distress us but because they may be contributing to a polarised society in which everyone lives in their own information bubble.

A recent working paper written by three economists, Yujung Hwang, Aureo de Paula and Fanzhu Yang, tries to shed light on the question of whether dating apps polarise us. As with social media there are forces pushing in both directions: some dating apps allow people to filter who they see by categories including race, religion and education. These filters might contribute to greater polarisation, where people date only people of the same race and education level. On the other hand, dating apps make it easier to skim through a large number of possible matches, just as a social media account presents a vast range of different hot takes. So perhaps dating apps encourage more mixing across ethnic or educational lines?

My bet was on increased polarisation. Faced with a broader choice of people to connect with, we often use that choice to seek out people just like us. Consider a study of college friendships conducted by three psychologists, Angela Bahns, Kate Pickett and Christian Crandall. They compared the friendships that students formed at small college campuses with those at the much-larger University of Kansas. The smaller campuses offered less diversity overall, yet students at small colleges were more likely to have a diverse group of friends — diversity here referring to all sorts of differences in opinion, background and behaviour. Given more choice, people sought out their ideological twins.

Despite this, Hwang and colleagues found that the impact of online dating was — to my surprise — to enable people to date and eventually to marry people of a different ethnic background. Why? The answer is simple: Tinder, the most popular app, does not offer filters beyond basics such as location and sexual orientation. Instead, users are thrown into an undifferentiated pool of dating prospects and have to figure it out.

There is a strange parallel to social media here: although social media are filtered and highly polarised, they are also chaotic and scattershot. Filter bubble notwithstanding, you are more likely to encounter opposing viewpoints on Twitter than reading your favourite tabloid newspaper.

Chaotic and scattershot doesn’t sound like a recipe for dating success any more than it sounds like a healthy news diet. But in both situations, there is a case to be made for casting the net widely and in strange waters — as long as we can occasionally move past the shallows into something deeper.

That deeper experience might be a good book, a serious hobby or a long-term romance. The only problem: there’s no revenue in any of that.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 23 Oct 2025.

I’m running the London Marathon in April in support of a very good cause. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.

I’ve played tabletop role-playing games for forty years or so, but I’ve never played in a “professional” game. That changed last week when – as a guest of RPG Taverns in south London – I was given a run through one of the new adventures in “Welcome to Hellfire Club“, which is the new D&D boxed set based on the game Eddie and friends play in Stranger Things. (A play with a play, indeed.)

Impressions? Well, the folks at RPG Taverns have created a safe space for adventure – bar on the ground floor offering food and drink delivered to your gaming table, and downstairs a warren of gaming rooms, all decorated in different vibes. (The 1980s vibe in our room was particularly strong – VHS, the A-team, they even had the tape-to-tape cassette deck I owned as a teenager.) It’s not super-slick (the soundproofing is nonexistent, for example) but it’s fun, and the gaming tables have everything you might want, including large tabletop screens to project maps and other images. (Also: I didn’t pay for my VIP journalist ticket, but £15 for a 2-3 hour session seems pretty good value. My local escape room charges twice that for one hour.) They are clearly aiming to create a real sense of community, including an ongoing campaign world and a Discord server with lots of active chat in between sessions. They’re also very beginner-friendly.

Our DM Phil did a good job – friendly, good pacing, fluent with the rules, spooky voices and strong descriptions.

As for the module? It seemed to have some lovely components – maps, dice, DM screen – and trod a nice line between the retro 1980s style dungeon-crawl, and a few new and genuinely unsettling twists. It’s pretty trad, to the point of trading on nostalgia. But if you like D&D, or like Stranger Things and are D&D curious… I would recommend it. And if you’re based in London and don’t have enough sessions with a regular gaming group and want to meet new gamers in a friendly setting with a safe hands running the game, RPG Taverns is well worth a look.

(For those wanting a different kind of gaming experience, Blades in the Dark is quite a trip.)

Forrest Fenn’s legendary treasure hunt ignites a nationwide obsession. The thrill of adventure, the promise of gold, and the call of the wild entice many seekers into the quest. Over time, excitement gives way to conspiracy and resentment, as treasure hunters stray into increasingly dangerous or aggressive interpretations of the clues. As the body count climbs, even Forrest begins to fear for his safety. 

Please check out our new Cautionary Club and consider joining for bonus episodes, ad-free listening, monthly video conversations and our behind-the-scenes newsletter.

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Further Reading

These episodes drew on a range of articles, books, websites and documentaries. The key sources were:

Chasing the Thrill: Obsession, Death and Glory in America’s Most Extraordinary Treasure Hunt (2021) by Daniel Barbarisi

“A Deadly Hunt for Hidden Treasure Spawns an Online Mystery” by David Kushner, Wired (July 26th 2018). Available at: https://www.wired.com/story/forrest-fenn-treasure-online-mystery/

Here’s the full list:

Articles

“The Man Who Found Forrest Fenn’s Treasure” by Daniel Barbarisi, Outside (December 7th 2020). Available at: https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/exploration-survival/forrest-fenn-treasure-jack-stuef/?mode=fullscreen&scope=initial

“Colorado man dies during hunt for Forrest Fenn’s treasure in Dinosaur National Monument” by Shelly Bradbury, The Denver Post (July 5th 2021). Available at: https://www.denverpost.com/2020/03/24/forrest-fenns-treasure-dinosaur-national-monument-death/

“US Confidence in Instiutions Mostly Flat, but Police Up” by Megan Brenan, Gallup (July 15th 2024). Available at: https://news.gallup.com/poll/647303/confidence-institutions-mostly-flat-police.aspx

“The Everlasting Forrest Fenn” by Taylor Clark, The California Sunday Magazine. Available at: https://story.californiasunday.com/the-everlasting-forrest-fenn/

“In search of Forrest Fenn’s treasure” by Zachary Crockett, Vox (June 30th 2017). Available at: https://www.vox.com/a/fenn-treasure-hunt-map

“Forrest Fenn Wants You To Find His Treasure — and His Bones.” by Tony Doukoupil, Newsweek (August 20th 2012). Available at: https://www.newsweek.com/forrest-fenn-wants-you-find-his-treasure-and-his-bones-64427

“Rivals Scorn His Santa Fé Gallery, but Forrest Fenn Baskets the Cash” by Brenda Eady, People (June 9th 1986). Available at: https://people.com/archive/rivals-scorn-his-santa-fe-gallery-but-forrest-fenn-baskets-the-cash-vol-25-no-23/

“Forrest Fenn: a trader and collector who succeeds” by John Hamilton, The Santa Fé New Mexican (February 1st 1976).

“Forrest Fenn treasure hunter sentenced for illegal digs at Yellowstone” by Phil Helsel, NBC News (April 1st 2021). Available at: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/forrest-fenn-treasure-hunter-sentenced-illegal-digs-yellowstone-n1262694

“The Big — and Illegal — Business of Indian Artifacts” by Sid Kane, The New York Times (September 7th 1986).

“A Deadly Hunt for Hidden Treasure Spawns an Online Mystery” by David Kushner, Wired (July 26th 2018). Available at: https://www.wired.com/story/forrest-fenn-treasure-online-mystery/

“Jet Crashes and Hidden Treasure” by Chris LaFrieda, PhD. Available at: https://exploreindochina.com/jet-crashes-and-hidden-treasure/

“He buried a treasure in the mountains, and someone found it. Or did they?” by Rachel Mabe, The Guardian (September 16th 2020). Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/16/buried-treasure-forrest-fenn-rockies

“Elmy de Hory — Story of the Most Famous Forger in Art History” by Jelena Martinovic, Artsper (June 17th 2025). Available at: https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/elmyr-de-hory-art-forger/

“X marks the bitcoin: the treasure hunt book is back — and it’s bigger than ever” by Stefano Montali, The Guardian (November 26th 2024). Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/26/bitcoin-treasure-hunt-book-picasso-jon-collins-black

“Case Closed: Fate Of Treasure Hunter Remains Mystery”, by Susan Montoya Bryan, CBS News (February 28th 2017). Available at:  https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/case-closed-fate-of-treasure-hunter-remains-mystery/

“At Home With Forrest Fenn” by Chase Reynolds Ewald, Western Art and Architecture (October – November 2018). Available at: https://westernartandarchitecture.com/october-november-2018/at-home-with-forrest-fenn

“How One Colorado Man Disappeared While Hunting For Hidden Treasure” by Robert Sanchez, 5280 (August 2016). Available at: https://5280.com/how-one-colorado-man-disappeared-while-hunting-for-hidden-treasure/

“A remembrance of Forrest Fenn” by Jack Stuef, Medium (September 23rd 2020). Available at: https://thefinder.medium.com/a-remembrance-of-forrest-fenn-1be2a8646ff2

“A Statement on the Disclosure of My Identity” by Jack Stuef, Medium (December 7th 2020). Available at: https://thefinder.medium.com/a-statement-on-the-disclosure-of-my-identity-602d95f04b9f

“A note on the sale of the treasure” by Jack Stuef, Medium (November 11th 2022). Available at: https://thefinder.medium.com/a-note-on-the-sale-of-the-treasure-bf22d305803a

“A Second Chance at Finding Fenn’s Treasure” by Jack Stuef, Medium (November 11th 2024). Available at: https://thefinder.medium.com/a-second-chance-at-finding-fenns-treasure-cd12ecb66c2c

“Seeking an author’s legendary treasure, thief steals a chest of linens, N.M. police say”, by Don Sweeney, The Sacramento Bee (October 16th 2018). Available at: https://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article220102095.html

“Missing treasure hunter’s remains found in New Mexico”, BBC News (July 27th 2016). Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-36900767.

“Man who hid $2m treasure leads search to find missing treasure hunter”, The Guardian (January 30th 2016). Available here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/30/forrest-fenn-randy-bilyeu-missing-treasure-hunter

“Treasure hunter who went looking for $2m in gold found dead in New Mexico”, The Guardian (July 27th 2016). Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/26/randy-bilyeu-dead-new-mexico-treasure-hunter

“Santa Fé Texans”, The Houston Post (May 19th 1985).

“Forrest Fenn Treasure Hunter Digs Himself Into Federal Sentence”, United States Attorney’s Office, District of Wyoming (March 31st 2021). Available at: https://www.justice.gov/usao-wy/pr/forrest-fenn-treasure-hunter-digs-himself-federal-sentence

Books

Chasing the Thrill: Obsession, Death and Glory in America’s Most Extraordinary Treasure Hunt (2021) by Daniel Barbarisi

Who Can You Trust?: How Technology Brought Us Together — and Why It Could Drive Us Apart (2017) by Rachel Botsman.

Phantom Over Vietnam (1984) by John Trotti.

Websites

www.destinationyellowstone.com

www.fennstreasure.com

www.mysteriouswritings.com

www.reddit.com

www.supersabresociety.org

www.thedecisionlab.com

www.treasureinside.com

Documentaries & Videos

“Cognitive Bias in Forrest Fenn Treasure Hunters” by Jack Stuef, YouTube (2019). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFzM7Nn7_AY

“Gold and Greed: The Hunt for Fenn’s Treasure” (2025), Netflix. Available at: https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81636832

Is there a more annoying cliché in policy-wonk circles than “there are no silver bullets”? If so, it does not readily spring to mind. What those who intone this ritual phrase mean, of course, is not to expect too much. Silver bullets kill werewolves, we are told: just point, fire and forget. But those are fantasy tales. Real-life solutions are never quite as simple, are they?

Just pick your potential policy panacea: from microfinance to community currencies, wealth taxes to flat taxes to land value taxes, tool sharing apps to “nudges”, there is no shortage of ideas that somehow fail to reshape the world. Some of them have simply flopped, others have never won enough political support to be tried. Many work just fine, if in a quiet, understated sort of way. And quiet and understated is fine — provided you don’t expect a silver bullet.

Why, then, my irritation? Not just because the phrase “there are no silver bullets” is grotesquely overused, but because it misstates the difficulty. In fact there are plenty of silver bullets. The challenge is that not every problem we face is a werewolf.

The phrase “magic bullet” was coined by Paul Ehrlich, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1908. Ehrlich’s aim was to find chemical compounds that would precisely target bacteria or other disease-causing microbes. He succeeded, discovering that arsphenamine was an effective treatment for syphilis. Penicillin and other antibiotics followed, offering a cure for bacterial infections that was little short of miraculous.

Alongside antibiotics, place vaccines: by priming the immune system with weakened or inactive fragments of a pathogen, vaccines have led to the eradication of smallpox and enormous progress against once-terrible diseases such as polio, measles and more recently Covid-19.

Or, for an example from the world of finance, consider the index fund. The idea was floated by the Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson in 1974, then launched in 1976 by John Bogle of Vanguard. Initially mocked as “Bogle’s folly”, un-American and mediocre by design, index funds are now enormously popular.

Each of these silver bullets downed a particular “werewolf” — a clearly visible, well-defined problem. Antibiotics targeted a common class of pathogens; vaccines recruited the body’s own immune system; the index fund allowed investors a way to make a diversified bet on the stock market without paying high fees to stockpickers of questionable skill. All of them work brilliantly. To say that there are no silver bullets is to do a disservice to the ingenuity of these ideas. Better to say that the difficulty is a lack of werewolves.

In 1973, two professors of design, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, published an article describing what they called “wicked problems”. Wicked problems, they argued, had a number of challenging characteristics. They defied clear description, lacked a “stopping rule” at which point the problem could be declared solved, tended to be contested, had few instructive parallels or analogues, and tended to be linked to or symptomatic of other problems. Most challenging of all, they resisted trial-and-error solutions because each experiment was a costly punt with significant real-world consequences for failure.

Examples of wicked problems include crime, climate change, inequality, the fall of birth rates or the rise of AI. When faced with a wicked problem such as these, expect people to disagree about what, if anything, the problem is. Expect solutions to be controversial, difficult to test, and at best provisional.

Not so with a werewolf problem. When there’s a werewolf stalking the neighbourhood, everyone can agree on the problem and on what a successful solution would look like. So go ahead and forge your silver bullet without shame. Don’t let anybody tell you that it will never exist.

Am I being pedantic in my choice of metaphor? Very well then, I am being pedantic in my choice of metaphor. But the distinction matters. When we mumble that there are no silver bullets, we’re implying that no attempt at any solution for any problem will ever really work. But that’s absurd. There are plenty of clearly defined problems worth solving.

This is true even when those clearly defined problems are surrounded by clusters of other problems. For example, antibiotics work spectacularly but within limits. Bacteria evolve resistance, which means we need incentives to develop, but not use, new classes of antibiotic. We also need to tackle the routine overuse of antibiotics, for example in rearing livestock. But these are distinct new problems for which distinct new solutions must be found. As antibiotics become less effective, shrugging and saying “there are no silver bullets” is no kind of response.

Vaccines, too, are a near-miraculous technology, but they only work if people are willing to be vaccinated. That’s not the kind of problem you can fire a silver bullet at. It requires patient, multidisciplinary work to understand the various reasons for reluctance and how we might respond to them. But are modern vaccines themselves a silver bullet? You can literally bet your life that they are.

As for index funds, there’s a simplicity to the idea that verges on genius. Samuelson gave Bogle the credit for an invention he ranked alongside “the wheel, the alphabet, Gutenberg printing, and wine and cheese: a mutual fund that never made Bogle rich but elevated the long-term returns of the mutual-fund owners. Something new under the sun”. That might be overstating the case, but index funds absolutely deliver on their goal of inexpensive, diversified investment.

Are they an investment panacea, though? Of course not. Index fund investors are as capable as anyone else of buying high and selling low, cowering in fear on the sidelines or scrambling to join a late-stage bubble. But to complain that index funds are not silver bullets is to misunderstand the nature of the werewolf that Bogle and Samuelson slew.

In the years since Rittel and Webber published their analysis of wicked problems, they have been much cited, and rightly so. Their formulation reminds us that there are certain kinds of problems that defy a clean, one-shot solution. But they do not deny the existence of problems for which solutions can be defined, tested and delivered.

We clever humans have managed to make silver bullet after silver bullet and slay werewolf after werewolf. So let’s not make the lazy mistake of believing that because some problems can never be fully solved, there is no such thing as a solution.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 16 Oct 2025.

I’m running the London Marathon in April in support of a very good cause. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.

The US is making the immigration of skilled workers more expensive; the UK is exploring ways to make it cheaper. It is tempting to conclude that one of them must be wrong. But which?

President Donald Trump’s eye-catching proclamation that $100,000 will be added to the cost of new H-1B visas (which are granted temporarily to skilled workers) raises two separate questions. The first is, because most voters seem to have a strong desire to limit immigration, are fees a good way to do that?

There are other systems. A government could limit the number of visas, and allocate them by lottery. This is the current US system, and a modified lottery will continue to apply if there is still enough demand at the new price. Or it could use some kind of “points-based” allocation, trying to figure out what kind of people it would like to admit — people with family already in the country, people of the right age, people with the right qualifications, people with the right experience.

These approaches have some superficial appeal, but also hidden problems. Any system with a fixed quota will disrupt businesses, which can never be sure whether recruitment from overseas will be snarled up or not. And while a lottery is simple and transparent, it gives the same chance to a promising young professional as to a truly exceptional achiever.

A points system sounds attractive, but countries that have tried the idea have often found it unwieldy, complex and either inflexible or full of strange carve-outs. Economist Alan Manning, author of the forthcoming book Why Immigration Policy Is Hard, notes wryly that when the chair of the UK’s Migration Advisory Committee floated the idea of auctioning off citizenship, it was the immigration lawyers who were most outraged. Incomprehensible systems create a lot more work for lawyers, after all.

For those not providing legal advice to would-be immigrants, the price mechanism does have some appeal.

Allowing applicants to buy visas (either in an auction or at a fixed price) means that immigrants — or their employers — can guarantee a visa if they are willing to pay enough. Like lotteries, the system is simple and transparent. And unlike a lottery or a points system, selling or auctioning work visas could raise a considerable sum of money.

The late Gary Becker, who won the Nobel memorial prize for economics back in 1992, used to argue that — provided there was some kind of loan system allowing applicants to pay off the fee gradually — more attractive candidates for immigration would be more likely to bid: younger, better educated, ambitious people committed to making a success of life in the US would be willing to pay more than anyone whose heart wasn’t really in the idea.

Becker added, “Political refugees and those persecuted in their own countries would be willing to pay a sizeable fee to gain admission to a free nation. So a fee system would automatically avoid time-consuming hearings.” I’m not sure I would be willing to let the price system rip to quite such an extent, but you can make up your own mind.

Would voters tolerate a visa auction? It’s hard to say. Letting people buy their way in seems grubby and negligent — but on the other hand, immigration sceptics might be much less worried if they knew that most immigrants had paid $100k or more to be in the country.

The second question is: if we did sell work visas, how much should we charge? And here things get really interesting. There’s a useful piece of economic jargon in this context — substitutes and complements. Left shoes are complements for right shoes. Smartphones are complements for smartphone apps. Cornflakes are complements for milk, but substitutes for Shreddies. Coffee and tea are substitutes for each other.

The idea is intuitive enough. So, what are skilled immigrants substitutes and complements for?

One view is that they are substitutes for skilled, native-born workers, and that large employers use the H-1B visa to suppress skilled wages by bringing in skilled migrant workers — such as consultants or programmers from India — and paying them less than the going rate in the US.

I’m a little sceptical of the evidence for this view, which seems to compare domestic wages, averaged across all levels of experience, with entry-level wages for new H-1B recruits. But it’s certainly not absurd.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank, outsourcing firms such as Cognizant, Deloitte and Tata have been heavy users of H-1B visas. Outsourcing is a perfectly legitimate business, but we are not talking about exciting AI or biotech start-ups here. High fees on H-1B visas would certainly lessen the temptation to use them as a source of cheap labour, although they might simply encourage offshoring labour entirely.

Enthusiasts for the H-1B visa have a different view: that skilled immigrants are complements for the talents of the workers who are already here. It is striking that the bosses of Microsoft, Alphabet and Tesla — Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk — have all held H-1B visas.

There is some evidence for the idea that skilled immigration is good for the native population. One study found that start-up firms “with higher lottery win rates are more likely to receive additional venture capital funding and to have a successful exit via an IPO or acquisition”.

Another used the fluctuations in the number of H-1B visas issued from year to year to determine that by allowing the immigration of qualified scientists, mathematicians and engineers, the programme caused “significant wage gains for college-educated natives”, as well as boosting productivity and even wages for native workers without a college degree.

All this suggests that if the US wants to put a price on skilled visas, that price should be low. The only difficulty is adverse selection: that the lower the price, the less excellent the pool of applicants is likely to be. The US might want millions of the kind of person willing to pay $100,000, yet reasonably fear that cutting the fee would rather dilute the talent of the people who applied.

Immigration policy is, as Alan Manning says, hard. But what a privilege to be born into a country that people would pay a small fortune to live in. As for the right system to choose those people? It is, in football parlance, “a selection headache”. There are worse problems to have.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 9 October 2025.

I’m running the London Marathon in April in support of a very good cause. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.

Forrest Fenn never does things the regular way. Despite no formal training and little knowledge of art, he becomes a millionaire gallery owner.  An outsider by nature, Fenn’s charm, audacity, and disregard for convention earns him both wealth and respect. When a streak of bad luck threatens to destroy his empire, Fenn dreams up an audacious final act. He’ll mastermind the greatest treasure hunt America has ever known. As the legend spreads, and gold fever grips the nation, Fenn begins to lose control. 

The story of Forrest Fenn’s treasure hunt will continue next week. 

Please check out our new Cautionary Club and consider joining for bonus episodes, ad-free listening, monthly video conversations and our behind-the-scenes newsletter.

[Apple] [Spotify] [Stitcher]

Further Reading

These episodes drew on a range of articles, books, websites and documentaries. The key sources were:

Chasing the Thrill: Obsession, Death and Glory in America’s Most Extraordinary Treasure Hunt (2021) by Daniel Barbarisi

“A Deadly Hunt for Hidden Treasure Spawns an Online Mystery” by David Kushner, Wired (July 26th 2018). Available at: https://www.wired.com/story/forrest-fenn-treasure-online-mystery/

Here’s the full list:

Articles

“The Man Who Found Forrest Fenn’s Treasure” by Daniel Barbarisi, Outside (December 7th 2020). Available at: https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/exploration-survival/forrest-fenn-treasure-jack-stuef/?mode=fullscreen&scope=initial

“Colorado man dies during hunt for Forrest Fenn’s treasure in Dinosaur National Monument” by Shelly Bradbury, The Denver Post (July 5th 2021). Available at: https://www.denverpost.com/2020/03/24/forrest-fenns-treasure-dinosaur-national-monument-death/

“US Confidence in Instiutions Mostly Flat, but Police Up” by Megan Brenan, Gallup (July 15th 2024). Available at: https://news.gallup.com/poll/647303/confidence-institutions-mostly-flat-police.aspx

“The Everlasting Forrest Fenn” by Taylor Clark, The California Sunday Magazine. Available at: https://story.californiasunday.com/the-everlasting-forrest-fenn/

“In search of Forrest Fenn’s treasure” by Zachary Crockett, Vox (June 30th 2017). Available at: https://www.vox.com/a/fenn-treasure-hunt-map

“Forrest Fenn Wants You To Find His Treasure — and His Bones.” by Tony Doukoupil, Newsweek (August 20th 2012). Available at: https://www.newsweek.com/forrest-fenn-wants-you-find-his-treasure-and-his-bones-64427

“Rivals Scorn His Santa Fé Gallery, but Forrest Fenn Baskets the Cash” by Brenda Eady, People (June 9th 1986). Available at: https://people.com/archive/rivals-scorn-his-santa-fe-gallery-but-forrest-fenn-baskets-the-cash-vol-25-no-23/

“Forrest Fenn: a trader and collector who succeeds” by John Hamilton, The Santa Fé New Mexican (February 1st 1976).

“Forrest Fenn treasure hunter sentenced for illegal digs at Yellowstone” by Phil Helsel, NBC News (April 1st 2021). Available at: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/forrest-fenn-treasure-hunter-sentenced-illegal-digs-yellowstone-n1262694

“The Big — and Illegal — Business of Indian Artifacts” by Sid Kane, The New York Times (September 7th 1986).

“A Deadly Hunt for Hidden Treasure Spawns an Online Mystery” by David Kushner, Wired (July 26th 2018). Available at: https://www.wired.com/story/forrest-fenn-treasure-online-mystery/

“Jet Crashes and Hidden Treasure” by Chris LaFrieda, PhD. Available at: https://exploreindochina.com/jet-crashes-and-hidden-treasure/

“He buried a treasure in the mountains, and someone found it. Or did they?” by Rachel Mabe, The Guardian (September 16th 2020). Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/16/buried-treasure-forrest-fenn-rockies

“Elmy de Hory — Story of the Most Famous Forger in Art History” by Jelena Martinovic, Artsper (June 17th 2025). Available at: https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/elmyr-de-hory-art-forger/

“X marks the bitcoin: the treasure hunt book is back — and it’s bigger than ever” by Stefano Montali, The Guardian (November 26th 2024). Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/26/bitcoin-treasure-hunt-book-picasso-jon-collins-black

“Case Closed: Fate Of Treasure Hunter Remains Mystery”, by Susan Montoya Bryan, CBS News (February 28th 2017). Available at:  https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/case-closed-fate-of-treasure-hunter-remains-mystery/

“At Home With Forrest Fenn” by Chase Reynolds Ewald, Western Art and Architecture (October – November 2018). Available at: https://westernartandarchitecture.com/october-november-2018/at-home-with-forrest-fenn

“How One Colorado Man Disappeared While Hunting For Hidden Treasure” by Robert Sanchez, 5280 (August 2016). Available at: https://5280.com/how-one-colorado-man-disappeared-while-hunting-for-hidden-treasure/

“A remembrance of Forrest Fenn” by Jack Stuef, Medium (September 23rd 2020). Available at: https://thefinder.medium.com/a-remembrance-of-forrest-fenn-1be2a8646ff2

“A Statement on the Disclosure of My Identity” by Jack Stuef, Medium (December 7th 2020). Available at: https://thefinder.medium.com/a-statement-on-the-disclosure-of-my-identity-602d95f04b9f

“A note on the sale of the treasure” by Jack Stuef, Medium (November 11th 2022). Available at: https://thefinder.medium.com/a-note-on-the-sale-of-the-treasure-bf22d305803a

“A Second Chance at Finding Fenn’s Treasure” by Jack Stuef, Medium (November 11th 2024). Available at: https://thefinder.medium.com/a-second-chance-at-finding-fenns-treasure-cd12ecb66c2c

“Seeking an author’s legendary treasure, thief steals a chest of linens, N.M. police say”, by Don Sweeney, The Sacramento Bee (October 16th 2018). Available at: https://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article220102095.html

“Missing treasure hunter’s remains found in New Mexico”, BBC News (July 27th 2016). Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-36900767.

“Man who hid $2m treasure leads search to find missing treasure hunter”, The Guardian (January 30th 2016). Available here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/30/forrest-fenn-randy-bilyeu-missing-treasure-hunter

“Treasure hunter who went looking for $2m in gold found dead in New Mexico”, The Guardian (July 27th 2016). Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/26/randy-bilyeu-dead-new-mexico-treasure-hunter

“Santa Fé Texans”, The Houston Post (May 19th 1985).

“Forrest Fenn Treasure Hunter Digs Himself Into Federal Sentence”, United States Attorney’s Office, District of Wyoming (March 31st 2021). Available at: https://www.justice.gov/usao-wy/pr/forrest-fenn-treasure-hunter-digs-himself-federal-sentence

Books

Chasing the Thrill: Obsession, Death and Glory in America’s Most Extraordinary Treasure Hunt (2021) by Daniel Barbarisi

Who Can You Trust?: How Technology Brought Us Together — and Why It Could Drive Us Apart (2017) by Rachel Botsman.

Phantom Over Vietnam (1984) by John Trotti.

Websites

www.destinationyellowstone.com

www.fennstreasure.com

www.mysteriouswritings.com

www.reddit.com

www.supersabresociety.org

www.thedecisionlab.com

www.treasureinside.com

Documentaries & Videos

“Cognitive Bias in Forrest Fenn Treasure Hunters” by Jack Stuef, YouTube (2019). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFzM7Nn7_AY

“Gold and Greed: The Hunt for Fenn’s Treasure” (2025), Netflix. Available at: https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81636832

The children of North End, Boston, play in the shadow of an enormous steel tank of molasses. The thick, sticky sugar syrup is being used to make munitions for the First World War. When a worker notices dark molasses seeping from the tank, hewarns the company that there could be a leak. But the man in charge, Arthur Jell, has more important things to worry about: schedules to meet and profits to make. Besides, it’s only sugar. How dangerous could it be? 

This episode is available exclusively to members of the Cautionary Club, and Pushkin+ subscribers.

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Further Reading

The key source for this episode was Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 (2019) by Stephen Puleo. This episode also drew on various contemporary news reports published between 1914 and 1931 in The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Daily News.

Other sources included:

“Brittle Fracture: The Great Molasses Flood”, Epic Engineering Failures and the Lessons They Teach, by Stephen Ressler and The Great Courses Plus

The North End: A Brief History of Boston’s Oldest Neighborhood (2009) by Alex R. Goldfeld

Massachusetts Disasters: True Stories of Tragedy and Survival (2018) by Larry Pletcher, with additional stories by David J. Krajicek

“A sticky problem — a new light shone on Boston’s great molasses spillage” by Tony Fishwick, Loss Prevention Bulletin 264, Institute of Chemical Engineers,December 2018.

“Solving a mystery behind a deadly ‘Tsunami of Molasses’ of 1919” by Erin McCann, The New York Times, 26 November 2016.

“Move Fast And Break Things: Pros and Cons of the Concept“, MasterClass, 21 June 2022.

Was the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel – the story of a woodcutter’s children abandoned in the woods and left at the mercy of a witch – in fact, early true crime? A hit book – The Truth About Hansel and Gretel – said that historical records pointed to the story being based on fact. Are we too quick to dismiss the truth behind tall stories? Or are we always falling for tales that are too good to be true?

This episode was first released in 2021. For bonus episodes, behind-the-scenes conversations, our monthly newsletter and ad-free listening, please take a look at the Cautionary Club.

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Further reading and listening

Hans Traxler’s book is, of course, The Truth About Hansel and Gretel – unfortunately it is available only in German. An excellent starting point to understand the hoax is Jordan Todorov’s article for Atlas Obscura. Paul Berczeller’s documentary about Takako Konishi is This Is a True Story.

The study of the effectiveness of flagging satire is R Kelly Garrett, Shannon Poulsen, Flagging Facebook Falsehoods: Self-Identified Humor Warnings Outperform Fact Checker and Peer Warnings, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Volume 24, Issue 5, September 2019, Pages 240–258, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmz012

A discussion of how many readers believe satirical stories from The Onion and the Babylon Bee are factually correct was published in The Conversation.

In the late 1930s, a Dutch civil servant, Jacobus Lentz, designed a near-unforgeable identity card. In 1940, the Dutch government rejected his proposal as too intrusive. Weeks later, Germany occupied the Netherlands and Lentz travelled to Berlin to pitch his idea. The Nazis loved it, and it became as much a tool of the Holocaust as barbed wire or Zyklon B.

In the hands of a totalitarian regime, an identity card can be a horrifying tool for control. It is no surprise then, that Lentz’s brainchild has cast a shadow over the UK’s efforts to introduce digital ID. It should not. Digital ID, if done right, could strengthen our civil liberties rather than undermining them.

First, let’s realise that digital ID is not a compulsory identity card. You can have either one without the other: Denmark, for example, has a digital ID system without a compulsory ID card; in contrast, Lentz’s identity card became a tool for oppression before digital computers existed.

The simplest form of a digital ID system is that every resident should have a unique number. Different parts of the UK government have assigned me a passport number, an NHS number, a Unique Taxpayer Reference number, a National Insurance number, a driving licence number and, no doubt, various other numbers are floating around too. Introducing a digital ID could be as modest a step as gradually replacing this motley bunch with a single number for each resident.

This doesn’t require a big centralised database; indeed, it doesn’t significantly change what the state knows about me. The tax authorities don’t need my medical records and my doctor doesn’t need to see my tax returns, but it would be handy for all of them to use the same unique number to connect me with their records about me. It should allow services to be joined up, from the basics (not having to tell every government agency when I move house) to more ambitious steps, such as ensuring that child benefit is automatically paid when the birth of a baby is registered.

It’s possible to go further than rationalising all these different official numbers. But further in which direction? Andrew Whitby, author of The Sum of the People, a history of censuses and population registers, tells me that we should ask “what data is collected, how it is stored, and what constraints there are on its use”.

That is fair; in fact, a well-designed digital ID could go a long way to clarifying such questions and strengthening the protection of our liberties. How? Here it is worth considering the potential for abuse and fraud in the current system. I lose track of the number of institutions who have received copies of my utility bills, my bank statement or my passport because there is no simpler or more convenient way for me to demonstrate some basic fact about myself such as my address or that I am old enough to vote.

A cleverer system is summarised in a recent working paper by the computer scientist Steven Bellovin. It could work like this: I log into a government website or app using my digital ID and password, and I request a temporary cryptographic token attesting to some minimal fact about me. (What kind of fact? That I am over 18. That I have a legal right to work. That I have no criminal record. My verified address. That I have a recognised disability. There are all kinds of things I might want to be able to prove, without also revealing every other detail about myself.)

The app would issue the token, which I could then immediately use. In some cases it would be a seamless digital handshake behind the screen of my computer browser. Or the token might generate a barcode on my smartphone, which could be scanned by a landlord letting out a flat or an employer giving me a job. None of this is very different from what happens when I use a credit card.

Beyond this sheer convenience, a token-based ID system provides protections both against identity theft and state surveillance. Identity theft is harder because I can prove what needs to be proved without circulating scans of my passport and bank statements. State surveillance is harder because these cryptographic tokens reveal minimal information: I don’t need to tell the government that I want to watch fetish videos, I just need to request an encrypted token attesting that I am an adult.

That all sounds rather splendid. But couldn’t we have the convenience and security of such a system on a more ad-hoc basis, without a single universal ID number? No. We might like the idea of a system that, for example, allows users to privately verify their age before being allowed to access social media, pornography or alcohol, yet does nothing else. But as Bellovin explains, such a system would be full of holes without a single digital ID system to back it up.

Digital ID is, of course, about more than administrative convenience: it allows the denial of services to people who have no right to them, such as irregular migrants; it also prevents the arbitrary denial of services to people who do have a right to them. The Windrush scandal showed all too clearly that rights for the vulnerable are at risk without a modern identification system. The scandal saw people who had lived for decades in the UK, and who had every right to continue, deported or threatened with deportation because neither they nor the government had the documents to prove it. It is foolish to believe that holes in the population register really protect the innocent.

There is a defeatist argument for digital ID, namely that it does no harm because our privacy is already hopelessly compromised. There is some truth in that. But what that argument misses is that a well-designed digital ID offers us an opportunity to take some of that privacy back by minimising the need to share too much information, and by clearly specifying our rights — including the right to know which information has been accessed, by which authority, and why. (If the state needs covert access, a court order would be required.)

In the hands of a truly oppressive government, such protections would mean little. Nobody should be complacent about such a prospect. But oppressive governments have many other technologies at their disposal. Nobody is proposing the abolition of the telephone, the index card or the lockable door, no matter how convenient they were to the Gestapo and the KGB. It is important to ask how any technology might be abused in the wrong hands. But that cannot be the only question we ask, especially since the best defence against authoritarianism is not to cripple the functioning of liberal states, but to make them work better. Digital ID might just help with that.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 2 Oct 2025.

I’m running the London Marathon in April in support of a very good cause. If you felt able to contribute something, I’d be extremely grateful.