Could you endure weeks sitting across from a mass murderer if it meant gifting society the key to eternal prosperity? Listen now to the man who did exactly this.

Fred Harrison was born in Cyprus in 1944. His dad was posted abroad with the British armed forces, so Fred grew up in Germany and Singapore, with stops in India and Malaysia along the way.

New school every year or two. In a new country. Always meeting lots of new faces.

That sounds quite glamorous at first, but it wasn’t. It was actually lonely. But it gave a young boy something most adults never develop. A habit of standing slightly outside the room. Watching. Wondering. Asking why things were the way they were.

By the time he was ten years old, sitting on a bus in Singapore, he’d decided he wanted to be a journalist. He didn’t really know what one was. He’d only read about reporters in Superman comics.

But the urge was clear. Gather the information. Then tell people the truth. Be like Superman’s alias Clarke Kent. That urge is as strong today as it was over 70 years ago. It’s never left him.

Fred trained for three and a half years on a weekly paper in Shropshire. Then he moved to London, the way every serious reporter did back then. Eventually, he landed at the Sunday People.

The Sunday People is no longer in business. But back then, they sold four to five million copies every Sunday. And here’s the part that matters. They actually paid reporters to dig. Weeks of digging. Months sometimes. They were willing to go deeper and longer than any other paper.

Fred’s bosses gave him a rule he never forgot. One example of a crooked deal could be an accident. Two could be a coincidence. But when you uncover three such examples you’ve establish a pattern.

Only then do you have a real story. Imagine having journalists like that today—not focused on clickbait and social media likes, but real, fully researched stories that make a difference to society.

That’s true investigative journalism.

It was that disciplined approach that coalesced in a manner Fred could not possibly imagine.

In the early 1980s, Fred took on the story that defined his career.

Ian Brady, the Moors murderer, had been in prison for nearly twenty years. At the time, he was the most notorious murderer in history.

His actions, along with those of his accomplice Myra Hindley, shocked the world. Kidnapping, torturing, and then murdering children. Two of his child victims had never been found to this day.

Two mothers were still waiting for news about their beloved children. The tabloids splashed Brady’s name across the front pages every other week, but only to sell copies. Nobody was helping those mothers.

Fred decided he would.

He managed to get Ian Brady to agree to meet him. He could have written one easy headline. “Our reporter meets the Moors murderer.” Career made. Editor delighted. End of story.

He didn’t. Because that would have shut the door on Brady forever, and those grieving mothers would have got nothing.

Fred lied to his news editor and didn’t tell him about the interviews (a sackable offence). He spent his Mondays off driving up to Gartree prison. He smuggled in a tape recorder hidden in a button on his jacket (highly illegal). And for months, he sat with a child killer, week after week, enduring his inane ramblings, working him slowly and gently towards the truth.

Eventually, Brady admitted there were other victims. He admitted his accomplice had been a willing partner. Fred handed it all to the Manchester police, who reopened the case and started digging on the moors again.

They found Pauline Reade. Her mother finally got to bury her child.

Think about what that cost Fred. Picture sitting across a table from the evilest man you probably can’t even imagine, month after month, swallowing your disgust so you can help two grieving mums.

Could you have done that? It’s not even a question most people should ever be asked.

These are the footsteps one walks in when you read Fred Harrisons works today.

When Fred turned that same discipline onto the subject of economics, the results were the same relentless pursuit of the truth that no one else could “ferret out” as he says.

He read Henry George by accident, at an evening class in London. He went off to Oxford University to study economics properly. He came back and started applying a journalist’s habit to the markets. Ferret out the pattern. Test it against the evidence. Don’t stop at one example or two. Find at least three.

What he found was the 18.6-year Real Estate Cycle. He published it in The Power in the Land in 1983 which forecasted the 1992 recession nearly a full decade in advance.

In 1997 he wrote to Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, on the back of his work Boom Bust: House Prices, Banking and the Depression of 2010, giving them ten years’ warning of the 2008 crash. Brown stood up in parliament and promised “no more boom and bust.”

You know how that ended.

Economists who get one big call right are usually lucky. Fred has called the cycle, in print, three times. That’s a pattern. A repeatable pattern too.

And the pattern only exists because of the man behind it. A boy who learned to watch from the outside.

A reporter trained to dig until he had three examples, not one. A man who sat across from Ian Brady because two mothers were crying themselves to sleep every night.

When Fred tells you what’s coming next, he’s earned the right to be heard.

Click on the embedded link below and listen to his new podcast interview with Jonathan Brown.