The Fluid Dynamics of Fountain Pens

The wait is finally over: Hannah Fry introduces Michael Stevens to her beloved fountain pen collection and the beautiful physics behind how fountain pens work. From a £20 Lamy Safari to vintage Waterman and Montblanc pens, Hannah explains how capillary action, surface tension, air pressure and carefully engineered feeds control the flow of fountain pen ink. Michael tests the collection, chooses his favourite and discovers why the most expensive pen is not necessarily the nicest to write with. Then Hannah and Michael answer your questions: which words are terrible at their jobs, how do aeroplane wings actually generate lift, and which moment in history would they most like to witness? ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. ------------------- Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack MeekAnimator: Sam BensonVideo & Social: Bex TyrrellAssistant Producer: Lucy LipscombeProducer: Simona RataSenior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-CarterChief Digital Officer: Samuel OakleyExec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Hannah Fry?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Science. I'm Hannah Fry.

• 0:03Michael Stevens?

  And I'm Michael Stevens.

• 0:04Hannah Fry?

  It's time, Michael.

• 0:05Michael Stevens?

  Is it time?

• 0:06Hannah Fry?

  It's time.

• 0:07Michael Stevens?

  Finally.

• 0:08Hannah Fry?

  The day has finally come.

• 0:09Michael Stevens?

  Man, I was just saying, we did a video about my watches and people were like, stop it, Michael. It's Hannah's turn to do fountain pens.

• 0:17Hannah Fry?

  It's fountain pen day.

• 0:19Michael Stevens?

  I love it.

• 0:19Hannah Fry?

  I brought them in. I wanted to wait until you were in person.

• 0:22Michael Stevens?

  That makes sense. That makes sense. And I can't wait to try these because I've probably used a fountain pen once in my life.

• 0:28Hannah Fry?

  Really?

• 0:29Michael Stevens?

  I'm not very familiar with them.

• 0:30Hannah Fry?

  Okay. You're gonna not only be familiar with the delightful range that I brought you, but with the incredibly beautiful physics that lies behind it.

• 0:39Michael Stevens?

  Good, because I don't know how they work.

• 0:41Hannah Fry?

  Because let me tell you this, right? Fountain pens, it's not just like doodling with a ballpoint, right? This is an elegant dance of hydrodynamics going on behind the scenes. You're about to be blown away by it.

• 0:51Michael Stevens?

  And so are you.

• 0:52Hannah Fry?

  And so are you. Okay, so here they are. Here's my, this is not my entire collection, but I just thought I'd bring a range.

• 0:58Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:58Hannah Fry?

  Some of these are much more expensive than others.

• 1:01Michael Stevens?

  Can I guess which one's the most expensive?

• 1:03Hannah Fry?

  You can. You can. And some of them are more special than others. So more expensive and special are not the same thing. I haven't really thought this through. Here we go. Okay, do you want to have a little look? See what you reckon is the most expensive?

• 1:17Michael Stevens?

  Okay, I'm gonna guess the most expensive is this one.

• 1:23Hannah Fry?

  You're absolutely correct.

• 1:24Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 1:25Hannah Fry?

  Should we hold it up?

• 1:25Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I'll hold this up.

• 1:27Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 1:28Michael Stevens?

  It's, it's heavy.

• 1:30Hannah Fry?

  It is heavy.

• 1:31Michael Stevens?

  Oh my gosh.

• 1:31Hannah Fry?

  And big.

• 1:32Michael Stevens?

  And it just looks like it's made of platinum probably or something.

• 1:37Hannah Fry?

  I don't actually think it is.

• 1:39Michael Stevens?

  I don't think it is, but.

• 1:40Hannah Fry?

  But you're right, that one is.

• 1:41Michael Stevens?

  Look at this little dongle. I want to just flick that, but I'm not going to.

• 1:44Hannah Fry?

  The reason why this is expensive, though, this is like, this is sort of writing instruments become jewelry, right?

• 1:50Michael Stevens?

  Yes, that's what I was looking for, the jewelry component.

• 1:53Hannah Fry?

  This is like you're signing autographs with this pen, okay? That's what you're doing. Do you want to try it?

• 1:59Michael Stevens?

  Should I really start with that one?

• 2:01Hannah Fry?

  I don't think this is the nicest one.

• 2:03Michael Stevens?

  Okay, all right, yeah.

• 2:04Hannah Fry?

  It's the most expensive, but I don't think it's the nicest.

• 2:06Michael Stevens?

  How do I start? What do I do?

• 2:08Hannah Fry?

  Wait, let me just, let me tell you what this one is really quickly, though.

• 2:10Michael Stevens?

  Please.

• 2:10Hannah Fry?

  Before you, okay. The reason why this one is expensive is because it's like a limited edition Jimi Hendrix special thing. Do you see how this is like the guitar? You see what I mean?

• 2:20Michael Stevens?

  I get it. That's like the little wah wah bar. Or what do they call that?

• 2:24Hannah Fry?

  Let's call it a wah wah bar.

• 2:25Michael Stevens?

  No, let's call it what it is. So that everyone goes, wow, he knows guitars so well. Whammy bar. The wah wah pedal. All right, hold, let me say this again. Oh, that's like the whammy bar on my mini guitars.

• 2:41Hannah Fry?

  Don't pretend for even a second that you don't think it was called the wah wah bar.

• 2:45Michael Stevens?

  Editors include that entire bit because it pays off.

• 2:56Michael Stevens?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 2:59Hannah Fry?

  As if they weren't cool enough already, some astronauts have now added cancer scientists to their CUP. They are making use of microgravity conditions in space to carry out experiments.

• 3:10Michael Stevens?

  That's because the same thing that lets astronauts experience weightlessness also affects how cancer cells grow, behave, and respond to drugs.

• 3:19Hannah Fry?

  And back down on Earth, Cancer Research UK is working with astronomers to explore tumors with technologies that are typically used to map the Milky Way, which I think gives you an idea of just how complex this disease is.

• 3:32Michael Stevens?

  That's right. There are over 200 different types of cancer, but by pushing boundaries and embracing the latest technologies, Cancer Research UK has helped double cancer survival in the UK over the past 50 years.

• 3:44Hannah Fry?

  And today it is continuing to save and improve lives around the world. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/restiscience.

• 3:57Speaker 02

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• 4:27Speaker 03

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• 5:04Hannah Fry?

  I have two favorites. One is my favorite to write with, and the other is my favorite because of the mechanism.

• 5:09Michael Stevens?

  Okay, your favorite to write with is this one.

• 5:12Hannah Fry?

  Incorrect. That is the least interesting.

• 5:15Michael Stevens?

  Really?

• 5:15Hannah Fry?

  It's also up there with the most expensive.

• 5:17Michael Stevens?

  I picked it because I can see ink stains on it, like it's used a lot. Okay, your favorite to write with is this one.

• 5:27Hannah Fry?

  No, but that is the most special one. That's a 1920s Waterman.

• 5:32Michael Stevens?

  Ooh.

• 5:33Hannah Fry?

  That is extremely special, and I'm gonna tell you why. But to write with, it's because it's quite old. It's still quite fun to write with. It's got a 14-karat gold nib that's flexible, so you can change the width of the line as you write it. But it's not the nicest to write with. I would say the nicest to write with is this Pelican.

• 5:55Michael Stevens?

  Oh, okay.

• 5:56Hannah Fry?

  Little German design.

• 5:57Michael Stevens?

  I've heard this name before.

• 5:59Hannah Fry?

  It's absolutely delightful. It was, the nice thing about this one is they got a patent in the 1920s for the way that you fill the ink. So you unscrew and then screw it. Sort of creates a little vacuum in the chamber. It's very delightful to write with. But it's also just, it's the right stiffness of the nib. It's just, it's just absolutely delightful.

• 6:20Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 6:20Hannah Fry?

  Shall I give you a little history lesson?

• 6:22Michael Stevens?

  Tell, yeah, give me a history and tell me how they work. Why, why the fountain? What's a fountain about these pens?

• 6:28Hannah Fry?

  Okay, the first thing that's worth saying about a fountain pen, okay, is that unlike a ballpoint pen or a pencil, you've got to write slowly. You can't like, you can't be like rushing what you're doing. So I thought I'd bring in, I wanted to like prove to you that really I'm fountain pen obsessive.

• 6:45Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:46Hannah Fry?

  So I brought in my PhD, right?

• 6:48Michael Stevens?

  Oh.

• 6:49Hannah Fry?

  This is the thing that I brought into my Viva. And just to prove to you that I really do love writing in fountain pens, look how beautiful it is when you write equations with a fountain pen.

• 7:00Michael Stevens?

  Look at that.

• 7:01Hannah Fry?

  Right? You've got, you're not rushing that. You are, you are, you've got to take care because otherwise you get blots all over the place.

• 7:08Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 7:09Hannah Fry?

  You've got to like.

• 7:10Michael Stevens?

  Can I keep leafing through it?

• 7:11Hannah Fry?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:11Michael Stevens?

  Oh, yeah. Now, here, this is, these aren't equations, but this is your handwriting.

• 7:16Hannah Fry?

  My handwriting.

• 7:17Michael Stevens?

  In fountain pen.

• 7:18Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:19Michael Stevens?

  Interesting.

• 7:20Hannah Fry?

  The other thing that's worth saying about writing with a fountain pen, I mean, writing more generally, but I think particularly so with a fountain pen, is that it just uses different parts of your brain than when you are typing on a computer. When you're typing on a computer and you hit the letter A, it's the same action every single time. The A comes out exactly the same. But when you're handwriting something, no two As are ever going to be identical.

• 7:41Michael Stevens?

  That's right, yeah.

• 7:43Hannah Fry?

  The information that you're writing is just a more holistic, full-body experience than it is when you're just like plugging your brain into a computer.

• 7:51Michael Stevens?

  You don't have to tell me about the beauty of handwriting. I do it with pencils, but you're right, there's so much more information in every letter because you can change its attitude, its size, its boldness. I can say, I'm switching to 2B for this. And yes, you can change the typeface and the font in a digital thing, but the connection to my visceral body.

• 8:16Hannah Fry?

  It's not the same, is it?

• 8:17Michael Stevens?

  Is so different. It's, first of all, it's like, it's analog. Exactly how much bigger I make it and how, where it curves, it's all changeable. And it imprints in my memory because it's not just been up here and on my fingertips, it's been in my whole body.

• 8:34Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm. I genuinely find that I make less mistakes when I am handwriting, but particularly when I'm handwriting with fountain pen, because you have no choice but to go slowly.

• 8:46Michael Stevens?

  I really want to write with a fountain pen now. I want to see what it's like to have to go slow.

• 8:50Hannah Fry?

  Okay, I'm gonna start with a cheapy. Okay, this is like a very modern fountain pen. This is the cheapest end. Okay, this is like 20 quid. This fountain pen is very functional. It's called a Lamy, a Lamy Safari. There's no, there's no bells, no whistles going on here. But it's a good way to understand exactly what is going on with the fountain pen. Because, okay, you have this little chamber of ink. Let me see if I can remember. This one is a cartridge. Okay, you have a little chamber of ink. And then somehow that ink has to make its way down the pen to the page. Now, it can't be just gravity that's working here, because otherwise, as you turn your pen upside down.

• 9:25Michael Stevens?

  It would come out.

• 9:26Hannah Fry?

  It would drop out. So what is going on here is capillary action. So it's the same reason why redwood trees are able to soak up water from, from underground despite being unbelievably tall in the sky. As you touch the fountain pen to the page, the page itself is drinking in the ink. That is what is causing the ink to.

• 9:49Michael Stevens?

  So there is ink already at the tip.

• 9:52Hannah Fry?

  There is.

• 9:52Michael Stevens?

  It's thin and it's waiting to be sucked in, absorbed into paper.

• 9:57Hannah Fry?

  Exactly right. And the reason why there is ink at the tip is because the nib has got a little ridge down it, sort of split down the middle. Do you see the line down the middle of the nib?

• 10:06Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 10:06Hannah Fry?

  So that is what is allowing the ink to flow from the chamber. You can go to some writing. I got you some nice paper as well that's got.

• 10:13Michael Stevens?

  And I need to press the nib, like flat side down. Like if the nib is, is like this, I don't write on the edge of the nib. I like push.

• 10:22Hannah Fry?

  I mean, you kind of can. It depends on the design of the nib. Some of them, some of them work better with angles. Okay, but what I also want you to notice with this, he's written an A. Do another A. It'll never be the same again.

• 10:35Michael Stevens?

  I'm gonna write the whole alphabet.

• 10:36Hannah Fry?

  Okay, go on. Alright, so the other thing that's worth noticing with this very no-frills fountain pen.

• 10:41Michael Stevens?

  Oops, I just wrote the alphabet wrong. Shoot.

• 10:45Hannah Fry?

  It's cause you're, it's cause you're over, you're so enamored.

• 10:47Michael Stevens?

  I was just so into the, the flow.

• 10:50Hannah Fry?

  The action.

• 10:50Michael Stevens?

  I liked, I liked my E so much. I'm like, I'm gonna do another E. You can wait, G.

• 10:56Hannah Fry?

  Okay, so the other thing that you'll notice with this no-frills pen is that not only do you have the channel that allows the ink to come down the front, but there's also a little hole that's been drilled at the top of that line.

• 11:06Michael Stevens?

  What is up with that hole? They all have it.

• 11:07Hannah Fry?

  Okay, so they all have it. Basically, what is happening here is that that hole is like a structural fix to stop that line from cracking further.

• 11:19Michael Stevens?

  Oh.

• 11:20Hannah Fry?

  So this is what you do also on aircraft. If you have like a little crack or something, you go and you drill a hole at the top of the crack. Um, and it just spreads out the forces a little bit better so that it doesn't end up cracking further. So it's like, it's, it makes the, it makes the split physically stronger, counterintuitively, to have that little hole there at the top. Here's the thing, though. If you just had that line, that kind of capillary line down the top of the nib and the hole, then uh, the ink would just splay out all over the place.

• 11:53Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 11:53Hannah Fry?

  So old school pens, like really old fashioned pens would have that, that would be, um, it would just be like the metal front, the kind of things that you would put on a quill, metal front, split down the middle to allow the ink to flow down. And then you'd often end up with like splodges all over the place. So legend has it that in like the eighteen eighties or so, Lewis Waterman, right, of Waterman Pen fame, was signing a contract and he just had a normal nib, like the metal nib with this kind of capillary tube and the hole at the top. And then he was signing this contract and in, ink went everywhere because there's no control of that flow. Also, if you press the, the nib too hard and that capillary channel splits, you just get like this dump of ink.

• 12:37Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 12:38Hannah Fry?

  That comes down. In fact, it's almost like, it, it can be like bellows where you're lowering and raising the pressure as you, if you repeatedly touch the, the nib down on the paper, which opens and closes this capillary channel, which draws loads and loads of ink down.

• 12:52Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 12:53Hannah Fry?

  So he was like, this is, this is not working. This is not good. So what he did supposedly, as legend has it, is uh, he got a penknife out and started cutting uh, this shape that you see on the underside of fountain pens.

• 13:07Michael Stevens?

  This black part.

• 13:08Hannah Fry?

  The black part, exactly.

• 13:09Michael Stevens?

  What is that called?

• 13:10Hannah Fry?

  The feed. Okay, so here is the nineteen twenties Waterman. So that's his.

• 13:16Michael Stevens?

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:16Hannah Fry?

  Design. And it's slightly changed. The one, the, the, the pink lamy is um, is like, I bought it about two months ago. You can kind of see the differences. And some of them have like his, his, the, the fancy pants Mont Blanc. You see how it's almost like a fin?

• 13:35Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, like a heat sink.

• 13:36Hannah Fry?

  Like a heat sink, exactly. So what happens with this feed is that if you get too much ink coming down, it will end up filling into all of those channels. It will end up sitting behind the metal front of the nib and stopping it from just flooding onto the page.

• 13:53Michael Stevens?

  So do you need to periodically empty that?

• 13:55Hannah Fry?

  No.

• 13:56Michael Stevens?

  Or it'll just eventually makes its way onto the page?

• 13:58Hannah Fry?

  It makes its way through. But this is, this is where the unbelievably delicate balance of these pens comes into play. And it's where you get the complete difference between a pen that costs twenty quid, although to be honest, this one is pretty good. Um, but a pen that costs twenty quid and a pen like this one, which is more like a grand, right?

• 14:16Michael Stevens?

  Whoa. What about this one? This Mont Blanc?

• 14:19Hannah Fry?

  That one, uh, that one, yeah. Anyway.

• 14:21Michael Stevens?

  Okay, can I, first of all, can I, can I write with these as well?

• 14:24Hannah Fry?

  Please go ahead.

• 14:25Michael Stevens?

  I'll start with the Waterman.

• 14:26Hannah Fry?

  Okay, so what you're gonna like about the Waterman here.

• 14:29Michael Stevens?

  Which did I notice?

• 14:29Hannah Fry?

  This is, because it's a, a gold nib, it's flexible. So it's from the nineteen twenties. I mean, imagine what people were writing in the nineteen twenties. So it's flexible. So the width of your line changes the harder you press. So you can get really fine lines with it, but if you press a bit harder, you get like a bit more chunk.

• 14:47Michael Stevens?

  I can. I can get very fine lines and this ink is like a purple ink. And so the very fine lines are very purple, but the thicker ones are like a black.

• 14:56Hannah Fry?

  Almost dark, much darker.

• 14:57Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 14:58Hannah Fry?

  So this is this hydrodynamics balance that is going on with these pens because, you know, you're, you're having the ink that's coming down. You don't want it to dry too quickly because otherwise it will dry on the nib itself. Um, you uh, you don't want it to come down too fast because otherwise it will flood the feed. And then you'll end up with a really blobby pen. Um, but you uh, you, you also want it to like, you don't want it to, to choke up. You don't want the pen to choke up and then not to be enough, enough of the fluid coming out. And so this is the thing, is that these pen designers end up designing the ink absolutely perfectly in balance with the shape and structure of their nibs. So if you've got a Mont Blanc pen, you need to put Mont Blanc ink in it.

• 15:43Hannah Fry?

  If you've got a Waterman pen, you need to put Waterman ink in it. Because especially some of the Japanese ones like Pilot, I don't have one, I'm really like, or Sailor, oh my gosh, what I would do. They're so expensive. But you can't just like whack another ink in there because the whole design of it is very specific to the chemistry of the ink that you're putting through it.

• 16:04Michael Stevens?

  I've already got ink on my finger.

• 16:06Hannah Fry?

  I know. I, I think it's because I washed them quite, I washed them all yesterday because they're in a drawer and like, you know, I didn't, don't use all of them every day. So I like rinsed them all through and I think I, I didn't dry them properly. So. Um, right. What's your favorite so far? Do you notice how much stiffer this nib is of the?

• 16:21Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 16:22Hannah Fry?

  This is the like fancy Mont Blanc.

• 16:22Michael Stevens?

  I noticed the, the Waterman one with the gold nib was very soft. It felt soft and the lettering that it put down could be so thick, so wet.

• 16:31Hannah Fry?

  So, so sloshy. A wet noodle is what they call it. I mean, this one's not quite a wet noodle. It's a, it's a flex nib. But um, yeah, you can get up to like where you're almost, you're almost painted.

• 16:42Michael Stevens?

  Okay, let me try the lamy again.

• 16:43Hannah Fry?

  You wanna try the lamy?

• 16:44Michael Stevens?

  I wanna try a twenty dollar.

• 16:45Hannah Fry?

  The twenty dollar guy.

• 16:47Michael Stevens?

  Cause this one felt to me the most like just writing with a regular pen.

• 16:51Hannah Fry?

  Right, which is what it's supposed to be. It's a workhorse, this one.

• 16:54Michael Stevens?

  It, yeah.

• 16:55Hannah Fry?

  You can get, you can do good speed on that one as well.

• 16:57Michael Stevens?

  You can do good speed, yes. Whereas I felt like with uh, the other two, I could not go too quickly. I went too quickly with my autograph with the Waterman and it just became like a scratch.

• 17:09Hannah Fry?

  Sloshy. It is.

• 17:11Michael Stevens?

  Not even sloshy, but I just didn't even push hard enough.

• 17:13Hannah Fry?

  Right, yeah. Yeah, incredibly fine balance you've got going on. So you have to find the pen that also matches your handwriting style and what you want it to do. So, so the other thing about this Waterman that I think is really interesting is the way that they fill the chamber. So, you know, in this design of the nineteen twenties, you know, previously you would have an ink well and you would dip into the ink well and then, and then, you know, write and then dip and then write.

• 17:37Michael Stevens?

  When you dipped an old style pen, like a quill into an ink well, the ink through just surface tension gets like stuck on it, like you've wet the pen.

• 17:48Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, which is what's going on behind the scenes here, right? This is like surface tension that keeps it in the, in the feed and that, all those fins that you get at the back. Um, yes, but you, you would be incredibly difficult to get, to get the right line, right? You would start off and it'd be very splashy and then as you go on, it would get more scratchy and scratchy until you can't see it anymore and you need to dip again. Um, so one of the big innovations of fountain pens, uh, which is really nice in this Waterman from the nineteen twenties, is uh, they create a little chamber inside that's like, uh, it's, it's essentially like a, a little rubber bag, right? That you can compress. Now, I don't wanna squirt ink everywhere, but you can compress. Okay, so what you do is this has got this lever here. If you flick it up, what you can do is you can, do you see that?

• 18:32Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 18:32Hannah Fry?

  Do you see that? Like little bubble appear?

• 18:34Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 18:34Hannah Fry?

  So you compress the little bag inside.

• 18:38Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 18:38Hannah Fry?

  And so that is how, uh, which causes the ink to flood out. So what you can do, this is how you, you fill up this pen. This pen doesn't unscrew. It's not like the modern ones.

• 18:47Michael Stevens?

  Oh.

• 18:48Hannah Fry?

  You dunk it into a pot of ink.

• 18:50Michael Stevens?

  And it sucks it up.

• 18:51Hannah Fry?

  You, exactly. You like create a vacuum, compress the bag inside and then open up the bag. And then all the, of the ink floods in. So this was like, that was like a really big innovation of a way to fill these, these pens with ink. The only problem with it is that, that the, the rubber inside can perish.

• 19:10Michael Stevens?

  I was going to say.

• 19:11Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. I mean, it worked really well though. So this is like the really nice, beautiful kind of innovative design. This one here, this is the Parker. This is the Parker Duo fold.

• 19:21Michael Stevens?

  I like how that one looks.

• 19:23Hannah Fry?

  Do you?

• 19:23Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 19:24Hannah Fry?

  I thought you might, you know. So this is like the loud American cousin, okay? So, so this pen, also from the nineteen twenties, can you imagine all of the things this has written in the last hundred years? I just love that idea.

• 19:35Michael Stevens?

  Can I, can I write with it?

• 19:36Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely, you can. I think you might like this one more because it's much thinner.

• 19:39Michael Stevens?

  It's also very short and it's just, it's just kind of a, like a, a burnt orange color.

• 19:45Hannah Fry?

  It is a burnt orange color. Okay, so this pen, Parker created it. Do you like that one?

• 19:50Michael Stevens?

  This is much thinner.

• 19:52Hannah Fry?

  It's way thinner. It's too scratchy for me. I like it, I like them sloshier.

• 19:55Michael Stevens?

  I think I could write smaller with this, which I like to do.

• 19:59Hannah Fry?

  Okay, so this pen, it's like, it's a similar idea to the Waterman. It's got a little bag inside. But this one, you unscrew the end, um, and then there's a little button that you can pull and push. So it's the same idea. Be careful not to get ink everywhere, but if you pull that button out.

• 20:15Michael Stevens?

  Should I?

• 20:16Hannah Fry?

  You can, I mean, you can.

• 20:17Michael Stevens?

  I'm, I've got ink all over my hands. This one is inking me a lot.

• 20:22Hannah Fry?

  Inking you, I'm sorry. This is actually unfortunately an occupational hazard. It's just that, um, you can tell how hard I've been working by how much ink I've got on my hands.

• 20:28Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, right.

• 20:30Hannah Fry?

  Um, okay, so this one is the same idea.

• 20:32Michael Stevens?

  Pull this all the way out?

• 20:33Hannah Fry?

  I wouldn't.

• 20:34Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 20:35Hannah Fry?

  You get ink everywhere, but it's the same idea, same idea that you are, you are physically. Creating a space that is larger and smaller in order to backfill it within.

• 20:45Michael Stevens?

  I see.

• 20:46Hannah Fry?

  Okay, so this pen, the thing that's nice about this pen is that they released this pen nineteen twenties and they charged seven dollars for it when normally good pens cost about three dollars.

• 20:55Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:56Hannah Fry?

  But they wanted to make this pen super famous, so they deliberately made it this like burnt orange colour, sort of like really, it sort of, it reads alarm. And then they did a stunt where they took them into aeroplanes, chucked them out of aeroplanes.

• 21:10Michael Stevens?

  Ah.

• 21:11Hannah Fry?

  And then collected them on the ground and be like, look, it still worked.

• 21:14Michael Stevens?

  It survived.

• 21:15Hannah Fry?

  So this is, this pen isn't so much solving a sort of a physical challenge. It's not like the mechanism of this pen that's so special. It's more that this pen was solving the, the problem of like, how do you make a pen really famous? How do you make a pen break through and have loads of people want to buy it? The other ones, hang on, let me just show you what else I've got here. So you know how I said that thing about how the ink drying really can be an issue? You want your ink to not dry too much. You want it to be thin enough that it can find its way down to the paper, but you don't want it to dry really quickly.

• 21:46Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 21:46Hannah Fry?

  So this is one innovation that Montblanc came up with. This is from, I think, the nineteen sixties where they cover the front of the nib in order to reduce how quickly the ink would dry. You might like this one as well, this one's also really thin.

• 22:02Michael Stevens?

  I like this one a lot. It's the most like a normal pen.

• 22:08Hannah Fry?

  This one, by the way, also was aimed at, this is a Montblanc that was aimed at school teachers, which I think tells you everything about how this, this, this industry of fountain pens has changed. Because it used to be really just like, oh yeah, of course you would own a fountain pen. It's sort of a, a thing that everybody needs to have. And now Montblanc has gone like high end, luxury, luxury, luxury. It's not sort of, you know, it is, it's writing instruments as jewellery. Okay, two, two last ones to show you. These are the ones that I use the most, these are the ones that I write with the most. So this is a classic Montblanc, right? It's, they, they are expensive, but I think that they are worth the investment because this is the, the, the foolproof pen. This one doesn't leak, this one doesn't, you don't get ink everywhere.

• 22:50Hannah Fry?

  It's just like, it's just a really good pen. It's a design, it's got a gold nib on the end, go ahead.

• 22:56Michael Stevens?

  Very classic look.

• 22:57Hannah Fry?

  Very classic, right? Designed in the nineteen twenties, I think, and basically has kept the same design ever since. It's just like a really good, amazing pen. Um, but you'll also see these, these are the ones that you'll see when you get like presidents or CEOs signing documents, they'll sort of whip out one of these.

• 23:18Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, they'll sign like their first letter and then they'll donate it to someone who helped.

• 23:23Hannah Fry?

  Right, but these ones, the other innovation that these ones had is that they, uh, they made it so it had a removable piston. So as opposed to these ones from, so all of these earlier ones from the nineteen twenties up to nineteen sixties, where you were filling a barrel inside of the pen. This one has a piston, so if you open it up on the bottom bit where you would normally expect it when you're at school, your hands are so covered in ink, I'm really sorry.

• 23:49Michael Stevens?

  What, uh, where do I open it?

• 23:51Hannah Fry?

  No, you do it. Here we go. Okay, so this one, it has a piston, but the piston is like, sorry, you can see where I've washed it. The piston you can remove, so it's sort of like halfway between a cartridge and a.

• 24:04Michael Stevens?

  Okay, okay.

• 24:05Hannah Fry?

  So it's still a valve that you're filling.

• 24:07Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 24:07Hannah Fry?

  Um, but it's one that, that, that you can, you can take away.

• 24:10Michael Stevens?

  So you dip the tip into ink and draw it up?

• 24:14Hannah Fry?

  You still do that, yeah, exactly. And then finally, my favourite one.

• 24:17Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 24:18Hannah Fry?

  My Pelican, right? This has, this has been through, been with me in so many good ways. You're not going to like it at all, though.

• 24:25Michael Stevens?

  Let me try.

• 24:25Hannah Fry?

  It's, um, I like it because it's really wide, it's big. This one you have to be very slow with.

• 24:32Michael Stevens?

  Huh, yes, it's very big.

• 24:35Hannah Fry?

  It's big.

• 24:35Michael Stevens?

  Uh, it's, it's a big device and the letters it writes are very thick.

• 24:40Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:40Michael Stevens?

  You cannot write little tiny things with this.

• 24:42Hannah Fry?

  Little tiny things. You've got to mean it.

• 24:45Michael Stevens?

  You've got to mean it, you're committed.

• 24:47Hannah Fry?

  You're committed.

• 24:47Michael Stevens?

  You're putting on a show when you write with this.

• 24:50Hannah Fry?

  It's halfway between writing and painting.

• 24:52Michael Stevens?

  It does put down ink really well, it's very smooth. I can actually go pretty quick with it.

• 24:58Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:58Michael Stevens?

  And it still has putting down ink. Some of them, when I go fast, I get like a dotted line.

• 25:05Hannah Fry?

  Right, yes, rally instability, yes.

• 25:10Michael Stevens?

  Is that what it is?

• 25:11Hannah Fry?

  Bit of a, yeah, but what, because the other thing about this is especially the older ones where they had a chamber, what can end up happening is you, you sort of, as you, as you draw down ink, you end up creating a bit of a vacuum in the well, uh, in, in the chamber so that it, it can choke the ink flow. So what happens with these, what ends up happening is the pens have to breathe, basically, right? So, uh, within the fins at the back in the feed, um, they'll have like little ways that air can soak in. Or even, I mean, the other thing that I really like about some of these is in the hole that's right at the top of the capillary line, um, they can end up, uh, air can get in through that way.

• 25:55Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 25:55Hannah Fry?

  But they can be really decorative, like look at this little waterman, it's got a heart instead of a hole, which I think is really sweet.

• 26:00Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:01Hannah Fry?

  But yes, what can end up happening if you, if you go too fast is that, uh, rally instability is the, is the thing that when you turn on your tap and it sprays off into little splashes, sprays off into little droplets, you end up with the same thing as air goes back into the, into the main chamber, but sort of in reverse. Um, but yeah, you can end up with the pen kind of choking if you're going too fast, especially the older ones where they've got these like vacuum chambers. Yeah, which one's your fave?

• 26:29Michael Stevens?

  Well, I'm not sure, what, what should I be looking for in a fountain pen?

• 26:32Hannah Fry?

  It's, it's about your style.

• 26:34Michael Stevens?

  How is this different? Why would you choose a fountain pen and not a felt tip pen? For example, because I love those, I love how much ink they put down, but also I can, I can rotate them in my hand without, um, causing a problem. Whereas here, I, I have to always keep the nib in a certain orientation to the page.

• 26:55Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, but that's why I like them, is the discipline that they require. I do think actually, um, that is genuinely one of the reasons why I like them so much is because they're really hard, like they're such a pain in the ass. And I think that, um, that adds to the joy of them.

• 27:11Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, this is, this is my favourite.

• 27:13Hannah Fry?

  Is it?

• 27:13Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 27:13Hannah Fry?

  You know what, it's the Solitaire Montblanc, you've gone, this is, uh, from the nineteen seventies. Uh, it has a solid silver, um, lid. You've basically gone for the fanciest one.

• 27:25Michael Stevens?

  Have I?

• 27:26Hannah Fry?

  You've gone for the fanciest.

• 27:27Michael Stevens?

  I like it because it's small.

• 27:28Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:29Michael Stevens?

  I just feel like I really am in control of it.

• 27:31Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm, you've got expensive tastes, basically.

• 27:34Michael Stevens?

  I guess so.

• 27:35Hannah Fry?

  See, I think this one is the least interesting.

• 27:37Michael Stevens?

  I thought the Lammy was good too. Let me try that one again, it's just a little, it feels less dense, like there's a lot more emptiness inside of it because it's larger.

• 27:47Hannah Fry?

  Plastic.

• 27:48Michael Stevens?

  And it's plastic. The plastic I don't like so much because if it's in my pocket or if I sit on it, it's going to break. Yeah, no, I still, I think I prefer, what was this one? Let me try the, um.

• 28:02Hannah Fry?

  What colour ink, this one?

• 28:03Michael Stevens?

  It's got black ink.

• 28:05Hannah Fry?

  That one.

• 28:05Michael Stevens?

  Oh, I think it was this one. This one.

• 28:08Hannah Fry?

  You've gone for the two vintage Montblanks.

• 28:11Michael Stevens?

  Well, and honestly, I think it's because they have the thinnest lines.

• 28:16Hannah Fry?

  That's it, the closest to being a pencil.

• 28:19Michael Stevens?

  The closest to, to not being a fountain pen.

• 28:23Michael Stevens?

  Well, so my least favourite would be the gold tipped waterman.

• 28:28Hannah Fry?

  Oh, really?

• 28:29Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 28:30Hannah Fry?

  This guy.

• 28:31Michael Stevens?

  And then you're actually, no, I disliked your favourite the most. That was ridiculous, that was basically a marker. I don't even, my hand can't even move large enough. But your dream is a Japanese fountain pen, what's it called?

• 28:44Hannah Fry?

  There's a particular one, my dream is a Sailor Nagenata Togi. Cause he is probably the best nib maker of all time. He basically approached fountain pens as though they were samurai swords.

• 28:58Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 28:59Hannah Fry?

  So unimaginable craftsmanship, incredibly perfectly finely balanced in terms of where you're fighting the gravity and the surface tension and the capillary action. Really, really carefully designed ink, beautifully balanced pen, you know, like when you hold it, just it feels the correct weight in your hand. Honestly, they're gorgeous, but they don't, they are so hard to get. Even if you are willing to spend a lot of money, they are really, really hard to come by.

• 29:29Michael Stevens?

  They are samurai swords.

• 29:30Hannah Fry?

  But you know what, Christmas is coming up, so.

• 29:33Michael Stevens?

  So you guys all know what's on her list?

• 29:37Hannah Fry?

  Gosh, I was looking expectantly at you, Michael.

• 29:40Michael Stevens?

  I'm writing, I'm writing with a mechanical pencil and I'm just enjoying this so much more.

• 29:46Michael Stevens?

  I mean, look, you haven't converted me, but you have enlightened me.

• 29:49Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 29:49Michael Stevens?

  I've learned about you, but I've also learned about myself. And that's really what friends are for.

• 29:56Hannah Fry?

  Certainly is. And I mean, we're, we're recording four episodes today, so we're gonna have, we're gonna have inky hands all day.

• 30:03Michael Stevens?

  Well, I do love that you can change up the ink because there's different kinds of ink, different colors, different permanency.

• 30:13Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 30:14Michael Stevens?

  But you need to match the ink to the pen design.

• 30:16Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 30:17Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 30:17Hannah Fry?

  Okay. Well, thank, thank you. I hope that was worth, I hope that was worth the wait.

• 30:22Michael Stevens?

  It was definitely worth it. I, I also realize I have a lot more to learn because I don't know, they don't feel different enough. And I'm like, ooh, I'm noticing this. I'm still just falling back on my old, like, how heavy is it? How big is it in my hand? How quickly can I control it? Which isn't necessarily the rubric I should be using for fountain pens.

• 30:42Hannah Fry?

  Well.

• 30:42Michael Stevens?

  Because like what I write, when I write, I'm writing because I want to put down an idea and sometimes I have to go pretty quickly. These feel like the pens where you've got the final draft and you're like, aha, and now I'm going to put it in ink.

• 30:58Hannah Fry?

  That's interesting. Yes, I think that they are.

• 31:02Michael Stevens?

  Like, let me ask you this. If you're watching a movie and something in the movie makes you go, oh, that would be a really good idea for a video.

• 31:10Hannah Fry?

  Oh, I wouldn't do that.

• 31:10Michael Stevens?

  You can't just pull out a fountain pen and be like, okay.

• 31:13Hannah Fry?

  No, but at the same time, if I was starting a day of work and I was like, okay, what is it that I want to achieve today? I want to think about that, you know? I think the world is so fast and so many things are coming at you all over the place. You know, you go on your computer and then your WhatsApp's going and then your Instagram's going, then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There is nothing, I think, more centering. It's almost like meditation of like sitting down with my favorite notebook, my favorite fountain pen, and just alone with my thoughts and deciding what it is that I want to achieve or what the idea is that I want to get out.

• 31:51Michael Stevens?

  Okay, I completely agree with that, for sure. But I feel like I can accomplish that with pencils as well. Because if I want to really sit down and make this, like making tea.

• 32:05Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 32:06Michael Stevens?

  Then I'll be like, ah, yes, I'm gonna grab my Write in the Rain 1.3 millimeter. I gotta switch it to the 2B lead and I gotta sharpen it. And there's all these processes and then it writes with this like thicker, slower quality.

• 32:23Hannah Fry?

  I think they're writing in pencil. It's like you're showing some self doubt there, you know? It could be undone, whereas in pen, it's in pen.

• 32:30Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, you know, there's room for both. I think doubt

• 32:34Hannah Fry?

  It rains.

• 32:34Michael Stevens?

  Is doubt is one of the best kinds of skeletons to be built with, and I doubt everything. And so the pencil is for me. The pen is like laughing at God.

• 32:47Michael Stevens?

  And don't get me wrong, my father was a pen man. He taught me to always solve the crosswords in pen, as we've discussed. Because to use a pencil shows a lack of confidence. You're gonna let the puzzle beat you. You don't, you don't bring, you don't bring a, um, a knife to the crossword fight. You bring a gun.

• 33:05Hannah Fry?

  Maybe in America you do. Here we, yeah, but you bring a 2B pencil and a sharpener.

• 33:12Michael Stevens?

  I have one more question. So which one, do, do you travel with a fountain pen at all times? Okay, so one or more?

• 33:19Hannah Fry?

  Hmm, usually these two. This one.

• 33:23Michael Stevens?

  That one and?

• 33:24Hannah Fry?

  And this one.

• 33:24Michael Stevens?

  And, and remind me what they are again?

• 33:26Hannah Fry?

  Uh, the Mont Blanc Meisterstruck, slightly smaller size, and the Pelican Silveran, this is the M1000, but I also have an M800, which I like a lot.

• 33:35Michael Stevens?

  Is that smaller? I might like that one more.

• 33:37Hannah Fry?

  You won't.

• 33:40Michael Stevens?

  Is it still all gushy?

• 33:41Hannah Fry?

  It's sloshy.

• 33:42Michael Stevens?

  It's still all, not gushy, but just like bam, look at me.

• 33:46Hannah Fry?

  Yes.

• 33:47Michael Stevens?

  Right, right.

• 33:48Hannah Fry?

  With the brightest ink I can find.

• 33:49Michael Stevens?

  Well, Hannah, thank you.

• 33:50Hannah Fry?

  You're welcome.

• 33:51Michael Stevens?

  As I said, yeah, I would, I, I, I, yeah, I learned about you and, and, and myself. So, uh, next up, we're gonna learn about you guys. We're gonna visit some of your questions after the break.

• 34:11Speaker 04

  On that flight with 350 passengers.

• 34:16Speaker 05

  We assess the Prime Minister with high confidence. It was Russian.

• 34:20Speaker 06

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 34:22Speaker 07

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 34:25Speaker 08

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing.

• 34:37Speaker 09

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 34:39Speaker 10

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today.

• 34:44Speaker 06

  Kill the President of Russia.

• 34:46Speaker 10

  Yes.

• 34:48Speaker 06

  Who is going to be able to pull this off?

• 34:51Speaker 08

  Sergeant Tom McLaughlin.

• 34:53Speaker 06

  Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller.

• 34:58Speaker 06

  Where Britain plays its strongest hand against its strongest foe. Bear Hunt. Available now in full wherever you get your podcasts.

• 35:15Michael Stevens?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 35:18Hannah Fry?

  Dentist appointments, MOTs, routine checkups, help us to spot faults early before we need a root canal or breakdown at the side of the road. And cancer screening is the same idea.

• 35:29Michael Stevens?

  It's about aiming to spot cancer early before symptoms show and when treatment works best. The UK's breast, bowel, and cervical cancer screening programs, developed with Cancer Research UK, save thousands of lives every year.

• 35:42Hannah Fry?

  Today, Cancer Research UK is backing innovations that could transform the future of screening. Picture a smart bra that could one day detect breast changes as it's worn, making screening more accessible.

• 35:55Michael Stevens?

  And AI trained on a database of over 10 million mammograms that helps doctors spot early signs of cancer.

• 36:02Hannah Fry?

  Research like this saves and improves lives.

• 36:04Michael Stevens?

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience.

• 36:23Hannah Fry?

  Okay, we're back. Um, I brought my laptop out. Means business.

• 36:27Michael Stevens?

  Means business, yeah.

• 36:28Hannah Fry?

  And by business, I mean your questions. Okay, here we go. Uh, one for you, Michael, first. This is from Rock Hard Maple Syrup.

• 36:37Michael Stevens?

  Rock Hard Maple Syrup. I've had some of that before.

• 36:40Hannah Fry?

  What are your favorite bad words? Not cuss words, but words that are bad at their job. That could be a lot of different things, so I will leave the interpretation up to you. Part of me wants to say something like inflammable, because it means the exact same as flammable. But at the end of the day, it's a valuable word because it still at least describes something.

• 36:58Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. Oh, I love this idea, like a bad word, rather than some weird cultural taboo that makes it bad. What's a word that's bad at its job? For example, the first one I think of is noisome.

• 37:11Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 37:12Michael Stevens?

  What do you think noisome means? You probably know.

• 37:14Hannah Fry?

  I don't.

• 37:15Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so what do you think it means?

• 37:17Hannah Fry?

  Noisome.

• 37:18Michael Stevens?

  If I said, ah, yeah, he actually just lives underneath the, the freeway. It's a really noisome, gross place.

• 37:26Hannah Fry?

  Like, so some, you know, like awesome is full of awe.

• 37:32Hannah Fry?

  So I would assume that it was full of noise.

• 37:34Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, you would.

• 37:35Hannah Fry?

  Which I would guess is noise.

• 37:36Michael Stevens?

  And that's not what it means.

• 37:38Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 37:38Michael Stevens?

  Noisome, noise some, means stinky, smelly.

• 37:44Hannah Fry?

  Does it?

• 37:45Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. The word noise comes from actually the word annoy.

• 37:50Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 37:51Michael Stevens?

  So does ennui, by the way, which is a whole other discussion, which people don't, don't understand where this comes from. But yeah, noisome means, uh, really, really smelly in a bad way. Even though there's the word noise in it, and it just causes a lot of confusion all the time. I think there's also confusion with nauseous.

• 38:11Michael Stevens?

  What do you think nauseous means?

• 38:13Hannah Fry?

  Where you are overcome by a feeling of needing to vomit.

• 38:18Michael Stevens?

  That's what I thought too. But actually nauseous means producing the feeling of nausea. Like, ah, his shirt is nauseous.

• 38:28Hannah Fry?

  Oh, but what about nauseating?

• 38:31Michael Stevens?

  That means the same thing.

• 38:32Hannah Fry?

  Right. Nauseous and nauseating technically mean the same thing.

• 38:35Michael Stevens?

  People, people often use nauseous to mean, uh, the, the feeling itself. Like, oh, I'm feeling nauseous. That means, oh, so you're feeling like you're going to be creating nausea in other people? And the thing is, I'm getting obsessed with this because I bought this, uh, this kind of dictionary. It's called a usage dictionary.

• 38:53Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 38:53Michael Stevens?

  And it's not about what words mean, it's about how they can be used best. Because David Foster Wallace said that all you need is a dictionary and a usage dictionary. And it really is helpful. You read through, you go, oh, that's the difference between these words.

• 39:08Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 39:08Michael Stevens?

  So I think nauseous does its job. People don't let it do its job. They use it to mean, like, uh, the, the feeling itself of like almost puking, like, oh, I'm nauseous. If you're nauseous, that means that you are nauseating.

• 39:24Hannah Fry?

  In others. Or maybe yourself.

• 39:27Michael Stevens?

  Or maybe in yourself as well. You're causing, you cause yourself. What are some other words that don't do their jobs?

• 39:32Hannah Fry?

  The one that I always think about is how emasculate or emasculating and effeminate mean the same thing, which, I mean, look, there's a, you know, flammable, inflammable, they mean the same thing. But what bothers me about it is that there's no version for the female version.

• 39:50Michael Stevens?

  That's right.

• 39:51Hannah Fry?

  Right?

• 39:51Michael Stevens?

  You can be masculine and you can be emasculated.

• 39:54Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 39:55Michael Stevens?

  But a woman can't be effeminated.

• 39:59Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 39:59Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 40:00Hannah Fry?

  Because effeminate means.

• 40:01Michael Stevens?

  You're already at the bottom. Yeah. I mean, that is what the language is causing. It causes us to go, well, look, you're either feminine and you have no lower to go, or you become, uh, uh, or you, you, what do, you can't leave, you can't go up. There is no up. You masculinated?

• 40:19Hannah Fry?

  Masculinated, or yeah, I guess. Because emasculate, you're right, is like masculine is there, you go down to be emasculated.

• 40:27Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 40:27Hannah Fry?

  And then effeminate is like there.

• 40:32Hannah Fry?

  And then feminine is at the bottom.

• 40:35Michael Stevens?

  I mean, we can turn this ninety degrees and just make it a spectrum. But you're right, there's no, there's no word for a woman losing her femininity. That's what we're getting at.

• 40:46Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:47Michael Stevens?

  To be, right, it's, it's not like, oh, you were infeminated, it's just masculinized. The dominant word is the male, the maleness.

• 40:57Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 40:58Michael Stevens?

  You're either becoming more or less male.

• 41:00Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm, more or less male.

• 41:01Michael Stevens?

  That's it.

• 41:02Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 41:02Michael Stevens?

  Cause the focus is on the male side.

• 41:04Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. Yeah, you're right. The other one that um bothers me a bit, but I can't ever remember the real definition, is the phrase begs the question.

• 41:13Michael Stevens?

  Hmm, yeah.

• 41:14Hannah Fry?

  Because people always use it to say, well, this is strange and that begs the question. Blah, blah, blah, blah, right?

• 41:22Michael Stevens?

  Right, it causes us to ask another question.

• 41:24Hannah Fry?

  Exactly.

• 41:24Michael Stevens?

  That's not what it means.

• 41:25Hannah Fry?

  It's not what it means, but I can never remember the actual definition.

• 41:28Michael Stevens?

  It means, it means to assume the answer in the question itself.

• 41:33Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 41:34Michael Stevens?

  So, for example, if you were to say, well, look, um, that medicine causes you to feel sleepy because it contains a sleep inducing drug. That's begging the question.

• 41:46Hannah Fry?

  Okay, as in like, you've answered the question already?

• 41:49Michael Stevens?

  Let me think of a better example.

• 41:51Hannah Fry?

  Okay, here's one, so I, I looked it up as we were going.

• 41:54Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 41:55Hannah Fry?

  Okay, this fabric is the best because it's superior to all other fabrics.

• 41:58Michael Stevens?

  Exactly, see, you're, you're just kind of not actually providing an answer. You're causing the question to just be stated as a statement.

• 42:09Hannah Fry?

  Here, here's what it says, it says, putting forward an argument where the premise secretly assumes the conclusion is already true.

• 42:15Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, right, right, that's begging the question. Same with question begging is the exception that proves the rule. That one took me a long time to understand, because I thought, well, if there's an exception, then it's disproving the rule.

• 42:30Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:31Michael Stevens?

  But here's, you know what it really means?

• 42:33Hannah Fry?

  No, I don't know if I do.

• 42:34Michael Stevens?

  What it really means is two things. One is that you, you thought of that exception because it is so exceptional. It proves that it's exceptional because it's just not the norm at all. Like if someone said, oh, uh, it's so quiet in the country. And someone said, well, no, because two years ago, there was a concert one night and it was so loud. And you're like, that's the exception that proves the rule.

• 42:57Hannah Fry?

  And it's because it's an exception.

• 42:59Michael Stevens?

  Yes, because two years ago, you're able to still remember that loud night in the country. That's because the country is as a rule, like always so quiet.

• 43:07Hannah Fry?

  I see, I see.

• 43:08Michael Stevens?

  The other thing, and this is what, this is a, I think, uh, actually very useful. Is when you are notified of an exception to a rule, so you can immediately assume that the rule exists. For example, in a shop, if you see a sign that says, all refrigerator orders must prepay for delivery.

• 43:28Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 43:29Michael Stevens?

  That's an exception to the rule, which probably exists, which is you don't have to prepay for delivery for anything else.

• 43:34Hannah Fry?

  Right, of course.

• 43:37Michael Stevens?

  Okay?

• 43:37Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 43:38Michael Stevens?

  That is the exception proving the rule. It's, it's showing that the rule exists because an exception must have been made against some rule that actually exists. So yeah, you, you can assume that a rule exists and it's not even been spoken, it's been proved by its exception.

• 43:53Hannah Fry?

  Okay, I just like the idea of going shopping with you and you sort of walking past a sign like that, being like, aha.

• 43:59Michael Stevens?

  Aha, exceptions are proving rules today. Yeah, that's me.

• 44:04Hannah Fry?

  This is about bad sentences, right, and bad phrases.

• 44:07Michael Stevens?

  Well, bad words.

• 44:09Hannah Fry?

  Bad words. I think, I think it's bad if no one knows what it means. I'm putting begs the question in there, because no one knows what it means.

• 44:14Michael Stevens?

  Exactly.

• 44:15Hannah Fry?

  And even though we've just sat and explained it and I've read out the definition, I still don't know for sure what it means.

• 44:19Michael Stevens?

  Oh yeah, exactly, are people gonna start using it correctly now?

• 44:21Hannah Fry?

  Nope, nope, so, okay, that's going in. There's also words that mean the opposite thing, right? So I'm thinking here, um, dust is the classic one, right? Of like, to dust something means that you get rid of the dust. And then to dust something can also mean that you have. The other one that I always think about is the American definition for quite versus the British definition for quite.

• 44:48Michael Stevens?

  Oh.

• 44:48Hannah Fry?

  Because in America, am I correct in saying that quite means very? And here, it means not very.

• 44:55Michael Stevens?

  Oh, right, like, if I say, oh, that's quite good. I mean, it's really good.

• 44:59Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, and if I say that's quite good, it means it's not very good.

• 45:02Michael Stevens?

  Really?

• 45:03Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 45:04Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 45:04Hannah Fry?

  I mean, okay, if you were doing like posh old English and you were like, that was quite lovely, then yes, it means very good.

• 45:10Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so we're doing it the old fashioned way.

• 45:11Hannah Fry?

  I think you are doing it the old fashioned way, because if you said to me now, did you have a nice weekend? And I said, it was quite good, it means it wasn't very good at all.

• 45:20Michael Stevens?

  What does chuffed mean?

• 45:22Hannah Fry?

  Happy.

• 45:22Michael Stevens?

  Happy, okay, it doesn't sound like it means happy.

• 45:28Hannah Fry?

  What does it sound like?

• 45:28Michael Stevens?

  My wife would be like, oh, she's so chuffed. I'm like, oh, does she need like some ointment? It sounded like the worst thing to be, oh, guys, I'm chuffed. Like, I've, my skin's coming off and it's all red. But no, chuffed means happy, and I was like, how? You had so many sounds to choose from and you chose chuffed.

• 45:48Hannah Fry?

  You Americans are missing out on some great words, though. You don't have the word faff.

• 45:52Michael Stevens?

  Ah, yeah, faff about.

• 45:53Hannah Fry?

  You honestly, I think that is, that is, I think America as a country would be doing much better if they only had the word.

• 45:59Michael Stevens?

  Lollygag, we've got dillydally.

• 46:02Hannah Fry?

  Lollygag sounds like an X rated channel, frankly.

• 46:05Michael Stevens?

  It does, actually, whoa. Okay, we've got dillydally, I use that one a lot.

• 46:11Hannah Fry?

  Okay, dillydally, but dillydally is old school English.

• 46:14Michael Stevens?

  Is it?

• 46:14Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 46:15Michael Stevens?

  Shoot.

• 46:15Hannah Fry?

  Just copying stuff from us when we were in charge of you.

• 46:18Michael Stevens?

  Okay, let's move on to another question.

• 46:20Hannah Fry?

  All right, let's go for it, okay. This is from Quest for Neon, also from Reddit. I work at an aerospace company. One of the basic principles we rely on is the lift generated by the aerofoils, the shape of the wing. While talking to a group of engineers, it came up that the old explanation of what causes low pressure above the wing and high pressure below, that the longer part of an air molecule over the wing causes it to travel faster, is not valid due to the false assumption of continuity between the two particles. However, none of us knew the proper explanation that succeeded it. Can you help update this mental model for a curious engineer?

• 46:55Michael Stevens?

  Can you, yeah.

• 46:56Hannah Fry?

  Can I tell you my favorite thing about this question?

• 46:58Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 46:58Hannah Fry?

  This is an engineer at aerospace company asking about how aerofoils work.

• 47:03Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:04Hannah Fry?

  And you know what? I once was on a flight, um, a BA flight, a transatlantic BA flight. And um, it was one of those situations where the, the captain, because I think they get a list of the names of the passengers. And the captain recognized my name on the list and then came over for a chat and I got to go in the cockpit and so on.

• 47:21Michael Stevens?

  Oh my gosh.

• 47:22Hannah Fry?

  But when I was in the cockpit, while we were over the Atlantic, okay, I was like, guys, do any of you know how planes fly? Do any of you know how aerofoils work? And the three pilots got into this massive argument with each other. And none of them could actually agree as to what it is that makes planes fly.

• 47:40Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I believe it.

• 47:41Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 47:41Michael Stevens?

  It's, it's not as simple as most of the explanations were given are.

• 47:47Hannah Fry?

  I mean, it also sort of doesn't matter because we know that they do.

• 47:50Michael Stevens?

  They work.

• 47:51Hannah Fry?

  They work and they work reliably and we know how to tune the design in order to make them work extremely well. So it sort of doesn't matter.

• 47:57Michael Stevens?

  What's going on?

• 47:58Hannah Fry?

  But what is going on? Okay, so the traditional explanation that Quest for Neon is, is describing here is that you have this shape of the, of the wing, sort of like a teardrop shape almost.

• 48:07Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, it's curved on top, flat on the bottom.

• 48:09Hannah Fry?

  Exactly, and the idea is that you have two air particles. You can kind of change your frame of reference, so you can imagine that you've got the wing passing through the air. Or you can imagine that the wing stays still and the air moves around it, okay? So if you go for the first version where the wing cuts through the air, let's say you've got two little air particles here that are just minding their own business, having a lovely time. And then all of a sudden, this wing slices through them, okay? One of them's gonna go up, it's gonna be pushed up, the other one's gonna be slightly pushed down, and then they meet again at the end.

• 48:39Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 48:39Hannah Fry?

  This is the old school explanation. If you then change that frame of reference that you keep the, the wing steady. Essentially, what these particles are doing is one's going up and over the long way around, around this curve. And the other one is just going straight to the back.

• 48:53Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 48:53Hannah Fry?

  So when they meet again, uh, one of them has traveled further than the other. Therefore, it's moved faster.

• 49:00Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 49:01Hannah Fry?

  Therefore, the pressure must be lower because faster air has lower pressure.

• 49:05Michael Stevens?

  That's what I was told as a kid.

• 49:07Hannah Fry?

  Right, and then in addition to that, then if there is uh, lower pressure, the wing moves up in order to match it. Okay, the problem with this explanation is there is no rule that says that these two particles have to meet up at the back, right?

• 49:20Michael Stevens?

  No, how do they, yeah. While, while they're halfway across the wing, why was the guy on the top going, I gotta go faster?

• 49:27Hannah Fry?

  Right, it doesn't make any sense.

• 49:28Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 49:28Hannah Fry?

  Okay, that doesn't mean that the shape of the wing being curved doesn't change the pressure, because it almost certainly does. But here is the thing, okay, if it is only because the curve of the wing. Makes the pressure lower on the top. How can planes fly upside down?

• 49:44Michael Stevens?

  Exactly.

• 49:44Hannah Fry?

  How is that possible?

• 49:45Michael Stevens?

  I don't know. You tell me.

• 49:46Hannah Fry?

  Okay, I will.

• 49:49Hannah Fry?

  Okay. Lower pressure makes things move up.

• 49:51Michael Stevens?

  Yep.

• 49:52Hannah Fry?

  So if it is all to do with the shape of the wing means you get lower pressure on the tops. And that's the reason why the wing moves up. Sure, fine, happy. But then how come planes can fly upside down? Right? It doesn't make any sense. So the alternative explanation, the first explanation is called Bernoulli. He's the guy who says fast air is low pressure. The second explanation is Newton. So Newton says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So the Newton explanation says that if you've got air that's coming along like this and your wing is sort of angled like this, your wing is angled ever so slightly upwards.

• 50:26Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 50:27Hannah Fry?

  You've got air that's coming in this direction. That air is then going to be deflected downwards. And so the equal and opposite reaction is that.

• 50:34Michael Stevens?

  You go up.

• 50:35Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. So the Newton explanation basically says that it's about the angle of attack, which is the angle that you set your wings at. And thus you can fly upside down if you fly at an angle where you have.

• 50:45Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 50:47Hannah Fry?

  Um, so that's fine. Uh, the only problem with that being the only explanation is that when you run um, smoke particles in advance of of an airplane wing, uh, well, in in in advance of the of an aerofoil, uh, the air particles start moving upwards way before they get to the wing. So this is what these pilots were saying on this BA flight. They were like, sometimes the toilets uh will let out. Um, if you're like following another plane, you can see another plane out the window. Uh, the toilets let out some sort of, I don't know, like chemicals. Well, hopefully it's not wee.

• 51:23Michael Stevens?

  Do they?

• 51:24Hannah Fry?

  I don't know. I can't remember what they actually said.

• 51:26Michael Stevens?

  Just kind of outgas.

• 51:27Hannah Fry?

  There's some stuff.

• 51:27Michael Stevens?

  During the flight.

• 51:28Hannah Fry?

  During the flight. And you can see the trail of it and it departs uh and goes over the wing, but well in advance of the wing, right? Like, it's not just waiting to the wing and then hitting the wing and going downwards. There's been so much debate about this, by the way. There's been so many arguments about which of the two is it actually? And I think that the ultimate conclusion is it's sort of both. It's sort of both. You can't have Newton irrespective of Bernoulli, right? It's the the two things are together. When you have fast air, you do have lower pressure. And you can't have Bernoulli and ignore Newton. The two of them are both in there.

• 52:04Michael Stevens?

  Working together to hold the plane up. And that's why they need two wings, a Newtonian wing and a Bernoulliian wing.

• 52:10Hannah Fry?

  Exactly. The thing is Bernoulli and Newton, they're sort of, they're like explanations as to what's going on that kind of compete with one another, that can kind of exist side by side. I mean, when you're actually trying to do this, when you're actually trying to design an aerofoil, you don't, you don't sort of like sit down and write down Bernoulli and Newton and work out which one. It's like way more complicated than that. Um, but they're sort of, they're just, they're shorthand explanations as to why you actually generate lift over an aerofoil.

• 52:45Michael Stevens?

  I still don't understand planes, though. I mean, I I I literally flew here on one and I left the plane in in London, looked out the window at the plane I just flew in and I'm like, there's no way that stays up in the air.

• 52:59Hannah Fry?

  I completely agree with you.

• 53:00Michael Stevens?

  It's still so magic to me. And I I did an entire live show where half of the show was about how things fly.

• 53:06Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 53:07Michael Stevens?

  And I'm still like, uh, how are we up here? Is this just luck? Because I don't get it. It's.

• 53:13Hannah Fry?

  The the thing, it's like whenever I'm getting on a plane, especially a big one, if you're on like an A three eighty or something. Um, also, by the way, you think I'm obsessed about fountain pens? You should see how obsessed I am about planes. Um, we get on a nice A three eighty and Airbus, one of the classics um of the genre, uh, not the best one, but one of the classics. Uh, and uh, the number of people that are waiting by the gate, it's like, it doesn't make any sense.

• 53:40Michael Stevens?

  Doesn't make any sense.

• 53:41Hannah Fry?

  Doesn't make any sense. But it is because air, when it's fast moving, just has different properties than air when you're when you're almost stationary.

• 53:48Michael Stevens?

  I mean, planes can be small. But if you were to tell me, I I had never heard of an airplane before and you were like, yeah, yeah, you can build a machine that flies. Um, it can be like the heaviest thing ever. Like people use its size and weight to describe big stuff. It'd be like, no, no, no. A plane has to be made of gossamer whispers. How else is it gonna stay up?

• 54:09Hannah Fry?

  Canvas, yeah.

• 54:10Michael Stevens?

  But they've just got powerful engines that hit that air so fast.

• 54:13Hannah Fry?

  Whack it through.

• 54:14Michael Stevens?

  They whack it through.

• 54:15Hannah Fry?

  Whack it through, yeah. Oh, man, do you know the design of jet engines? Oh, they're, and the one for another day. They're amazing. They're amazing. Ask me a question about how jet engines are made so I can have an excuse to talk about them. Okay. Last question. This one is from Ren who sent in an email. Ren asks, if you could be there to experience any event in history or prehistory, what event would that be?

• 54:37Michael Stevens?

  I'd like to see language being invented. I I don't think that it it happened fast enough that you could just like show up in, I don't know, like, how how long ago? Say a hundred thousand years ago and there'd be some prehistoric uh human being like, oh, oh,

• 54:59Michael Stevens?

  rock? And they're all like, wait, what was that? That sound was different. And he's like, rock. I'm only gonna say rock for that one thing. And they're like, whoa, one sound for one object? Dude, that could be so useful. And he's like, yes. And and like boom, language is born on like that day. And then you've got the old people walking around being like, hmm, back in my day, we only had grunts and now you've got all these.

• 55:20Hannah Fry?

  There must have been a first word.

• 55:23Michael Stevens?

  Well, that's the thing. A first, you you'd have to define words so precisely that you really could say, and now that sound is being used as a word as opposed to something else, a proto word. But if I could go back in time and and witness the emergence of language over a period of millennia, that would be incredible.

• 55:43Hannah Fry?

  Wouldn't it? I would almost certainly be a name for another individual.

• 55:49Michael Stevens?

  Well, we know, we already know that that non-human animals have different sounds for different predators and for different problems.

• 55:55Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 55:56Michael Stevens?

  Is that a language? Like, what, at what point does it tip over into being like, oh, no, this is a whole creative tool set that can even describe things that don't exist?

• 56:06Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. You know, I did, I did a documentary on this, right? Of like, it was about whether technology can help translate non-human language.

• 56:14Michael Stevens?

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:15Hannah Fry?

  It was amazing. Anyway, went to go and see all these different animals, elephants, dogs, dolphins, whatever. Um, and look at the structure of the their vocalizations towards one another. Anyway, my favorite thing about this whole documentary is I went to go and see some elephant seals in California, um, which are called that because the the males have this like very long nose. It looks like a trunk. Anyway, the thing I learned from elephant seals is that even where, even if you are generous and say that these these creatures have language, um, some of them have much more to say than others because male elephant seals only have one word that they repeat throughout their entire lives.

• 56:53Michael Stevens?

  Oh.

• 56:54Hannah Fry?

  And they are, they just repeatedly say their own names.

• 56:59Michael Stevens?

  Really? So we know that it's their name?

• 57:02Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 57:03Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 57:04Hannah Fry?

  Yes, that they just say over and over again, their own personal. And what I like about this, the way it works is you have like an alpha male and then you have like a harem of of women, of women, of of females. What are the women doing here?

• 57:19Hannah Fry?

  But what happens is the sneakers, the beta males, they'll circle around the harem and then they will, uh, when the alpha's not looking, they'll tuck their nose in, pretend that they're a female to get in amongst the females.

• 57:29Michael Stevens?

  Ah.

• 57:30Hannah Fry?

  And then they'll just slide up to one of the females, sort of put their flipper out and then be like in their ear, Steve.

• 57:36Michael Stevens?

  Their own name.

• 57:39Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 57:39Michael Stevens?

  And the and the women are like, whoa, there's a Steve here. I came for Jonathan, but hello, Tyler. I I heard years ago.

• 57:49Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 57:49Michael Stevens?

  That, and I I'll have to look up whether this is true or not, but they used a a neural network to study whale sounds. And it was able to piece together whale language.

• 58:02Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 58:02Michael Stevens?

  And would know how to respond. But of course, we just didn't figure out what any of it meant.

• 58:07Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 58:07Michael Stevens?

  But we knew that it had the structure of a language enough that a neural network could deal with it.

• 58:11Hannah Fry?

  Exactly right, exactly right. There's also this this amazing stuff about whales where certain whales in Australia will share vocalizations that's, you, there's so much recorded uh audio of this. They will start with particular vocalizations and then over the course of two years, those same signature vocalizations will make their way up to like northern Canada and completely different whales will be singing essentially the same tunes that existed prior.

• 58:41Michael Stevens?

  So you're almost like a whale culture.

• 58:43Hannah Fry?

  Right, completely. And this is the thing, you know, humans are what, three hundred thousand years old? Maximum whales, like way, way, way, way, way, way older, way older. There's all sorts of stuff going on that we have no idea about.

• 58:56Michael Stevens?

  So could I even go back and see language emerge? It was probably already there in some form.

• 59:04Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 59:05Michael Stevens?

  We just created a a a different, not in kind, but in complexity.

• 59:12Hannah Fry?

  Perhaps, yeah. Yeah, perhaps.

• 59:15Michael Stevens?

  This is a dark answer, but I'd like to go back. There might have been a time when suicide was discovered. Because we don't see it in the animal kingdom in the same way.

• 59:25Hannah Fry?

  You're right.

• 59:26Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, Nicholas Humphrey wrote an essay in, I want to say it's the Oxford Handbook to Cognitive Archaeology. Okay, studying how people thought in the past by by finding evidence for it. And he brought up this idea that like. The concept of ending your own life must have occurred to a first person who would have thought, hey, I could do that. And he developed that into an entire theory that our awareness of our own selves was actually an evolved process that makes us love life. And he's like, if you look at higher organisms, uh, which I don't like that term, but if you look at birds,

• 1:00:11Michael Stevens?

  or if you look at chimpanzees, they do stuff seemingly just because they enjoy it. They will fly, they will play with water, simply because they enjoy existing. They enjoy those sensations. And he thinks that a lot of qualia and experiences came about so that we would love to be alive. Because we'd become complicated enough mentally to understand that we could solve a problem by leaving. And that that wasn't actually a solution. And so instead, those of us that were fit and survived fell in love with tomorrow.

• 1:00:45Hannah Fry?

  Gosh, that's so fascinating. That's so fascinating. Because I sort of, as you say, you don't see the same thing in the animal kingdom. And I sort of wonder whether the flip side of that is that are we uniquely able to suffer from our mental health because we are such complex beings in a way that you don't see in others? I mean, this is a question, right? This is not making this as a statement. And then maybe what you need is you need the enjoyment of life, right? The sort of thirst for existing, the falling in love with tomorrow in order to counter that.

• 1:01:24Michael Stevens?

  You would seemingly need an understanding of time and the future. So that you could be afraid of something that wouldn't end.

• 1:01:35Michael Stevens?

  But then from that, the solution evolves, which is hope and other people

• 1:01:42Michael Stevens?

  that you just don't need if you're a cockroach.

• 1:01:44Hannah Fry?

  Hey, also, if you're a cockroach, you're going to survive nuclear winter.

• 1:01:47Michael Stevens?

  It doesn't matter. Yeah, you'll be like, I'm here forever, no matter what.

• 1:01:50Hannah Fry?

  Cut my head off, no big deal.

• 1:01:51Michael Stevens?

  No big deal. I just become two cockroaches. I don't know how it works.

• 1:01:56Hannah Fry?

  Wow, that's such a beautiful idea. What was that book called again? I want to go and find it.

• 1:01:59Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so the, well, the book is the Handbook of Cognitive Archaeology.

• 1:02:03Hannah Fry?

  Amazing.

• 1:02:04Michael Stevens?

  And it's full of just wonderful essays about trying to understand how people used to think.

• 1:02:11Hannah Fry?

  I like that so much.

• 1:02:12Michael Stevens?

  And it's very serious. It's not a bunch of those like just so stories where you're like, hmm, yes, obviously. It's more like, look, we've studied like all the ancient stone tools that we've found. And we can see that they were often made in ways that didn't make them sharper, but made them look like each other. Like people wanted to fit in. Some of the earliest evidence we have of, oh, no, I learned from this group. And that's why I make it this way, even though it's more work.

• 1:02:37Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:38Michael Stevens?

  He wrote an entire book about it called Soul Dust, which sounds a little woo woo. But the guy's not like a little woo-ener. He's, um.

• 1:02:49Hannah Fry?

  Wait, wasn't that what the guitar thing was called?

• 1:02:51Michael Stevens?

  Uh, the, uh, whammy bar?

• 1:02:55Michael Stevens?

  No, but he's, he, uh, went to Trinity College and he's a neuropsychologist.

• 1:02:59Hannah Fry?

  Right, got you. Amazing. I've got a slightly sillier one to finish on.

• 1:03:02Michael Stevens?

  Good.

• 1:03:02Hannah Fry?

  I would have liked to be there the first day that somebody worked out that you can put salt on meat as you cook it.

• 1:03:10Michael Stevens?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:11Hannah Fry?

  Seasoning, that's the birth of seasoning.

• 1:03:15Michael Stevens?

  That would be so cool.

• 1:03:16Hannah Fry?

  Everyone would be like, you would not believe what just happened.

• 1:03:19Michael Stevens?

  Why, yeah, why is this so good? Guys, I put, I put those white rocks on it. And they'd be like, wow.

• 1:03:26Hannah Fry?

  What? You would not believe how good a cook this guy is.

• 1:03:30Michael Stevens?

  And then like two weeks later, they're like, the, you, the meat you put the rocks on isn't covered in mold. You made it last longer. And the guy's like, uh, I meant to do that.

• 1:03:39Hannah Fry?

  Hey, I'm a magician.

• 1:03:40Michael Stevens?

  Geez, yeah. I'd love to see their faces when they tried seasoned food for the first time. And they're like, well, gosh, how come, how come the animal doesn't already come this way? I don't.

• 1:03:51Hannah Fry?

  We're never going back.

• 1:03:52Michael Stevens?

  We're changing the world. Yeah, we are no longer nature. We are now humans.

• 1:03:57Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, too right. And we're changing the world with you, you guys.

• 1:04:02Hannah Fry?

  I was out for a segue, uh, with your questions every week.

• 1:04:05Michael Stevens?

  Every week, keep them coming in. We've got our subreddit, The Rest Is Science. You can also email us at [email protected].

• 1:04:12Hannah Fry?

  Or leave us comments wherever you are watching this, listening to this. We try and get through all of them. This is my favorite part of the week, by the way, when we get to your questions. But yeah, we will see you, we will see you next time.

• 1:04:23Michael Stevens?

  Later.

• 1:05:02Speaker 07

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 1:05:18Speaker 09

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 1:05:20Speaker 10

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today and disseminated into an operation order or frago.

• 1:05:29Speaker 06

  A frago that says to kill the president of Russia?

• 1:05:34Speaker 10

  Yes.

• 1:05:36Speaker 06

  New from Golhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?

• 1:05:45Speaker 06

  An audio drama journey like no other.

• 1:05:47Speaker 07

  Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.

• 1:05:50Speaker 06

  Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller. Where Britain plays its strongest hand. Against its strongest foe.

• 1:06:03Speaker 06

  Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.