Searching For Meaning In Randomness

What do we mean when we call an event random? Most people view randomness as a fundamental property of the universe, but is it just a label for our own lack of knowledge? Whether it is a weighted coin toss, a scratch card, or the digits of Pi, unpredictability usually emerges from rules and patterns that sit just beyond our perception. Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens dismantle the logic of chance, exploring how chaos is governed by strict mathematical laws and why a coin can be '50 / 50' until the moment you apply the laws of physics to its flight. How does probability measure what we cannot see rather than what will happen. Why do patterns inevitably emerge when we zoom out, how minute uncertainties allowed for the formation of galaxies, and why is the human mind is so determined to find meaning in a world built on statistical mechanics. ------------------- 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 Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell Assistant Producer: Imee Marriott Producer: Becki Hills Senior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-Carter Head Of Digital: Samuel Oakley Exec 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.

• 0:00Hannah Fry?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 0:02Michael Stevens?

  Dinosaurs walked the Earth 180 million years ago. But you know, cancer was part of their story, too. Scientists have found tumors in ancient fossils.

• 0:13Hannah Fry?

  Well, that is a part of the reason why cancer is a big, big part of our story, right? It's the other side of evolution. It's the most complex disease that we face. There are more than 200 types of cancer in total, each with distinct characteristics, challenges and mysteries.

• 0:28Michael Stevens?

  And that complexity demands scale. Cancer Research UK is the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research, with more than 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses working across more than 20 countries in the search for answers. And then sharing their discoveries beyond borders.

• 0:45Hannah Fry?

  And the impact of this collaboration is clear, because over the last 50 years, the charity's pioneering work has helped to double cancer survival in the UK. That is more people who are living longer, better lives.

• 0:57Michael Stevens?

  Fossils can show us the past, but research is shaping the future. And for more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Observe the North American dad. 50s, great polo collection. He enters his vehicle information on Carvana. An offer appears in minutes. Remarkable. He squints, reads it again, smiles and says, "Dang, that's a good offer." The highest form of approval. No haggling, no hassle. No one called him "boss." He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  Hey Spotify listeners. When you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. Before takeoff, unwind in the Admirals Club Lounge with curated self-serve offerings of hearty bites and refreshments. In flight, stay connected with high-speed Wi-Fi. Sponsored by AT&T. Your journey is designed to feel easy from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there. Book now at aa.com.

• 2:16Hannah Fry?

  Hello and welcome to The Rest of Science with me, Hannah Fry.

• 2:19Michael Stevens?

  And me, Michael Stephens.

• 2:20Hannah Fry?

  Okay, Michael, I've bought a present for you.

• 2:23Michael Stevens?

  I see them on the table.

• 2:24Hannah Fry?

  The potential to be a very good present, indeed. I've got some scratch cards. Do you have a preference?

• 2:29Michael Stevens?

  Oh, there's different kinds?

• 2:30Hannah Fry?

  There is different kinds.

• 2:30Michael Stevens?

  You didn't just get two of the same?

• 2:31Hannah Fry?

  No, so this one is just a straight up top prize of £5,000. Boring. This one, I think, is a more interesting choice. Would you rather have £20,000 a month for five years?

• 2:39Michael Stevens?

  Uh huh.

• 2:39Hannah Fry?

  Or £300,000?

• 2:41Michael Stevens?

  I'd rather have the £20,000. I think it's more likely to win a smaller prize.

• 2:46Hannah Fry?

  Oh, okay. So here is one, smaller top prize, £5,000 top prize on this one.

• 2:50Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 2:51Hannah Fry?

  So is this the one you won?

• 2:52Michael Stevens?

  No, because that one only cost one pound. So you gotta, you gotta also spend more, you're more likely to win. So give me that £20,000 a month for five years.

• 3:02Hannah Fry?

  I, because it's £5. I agree this is the best one, by the way. I agree that's the best one.

• 3:06Michael Stevens?

  Can I scratch this now or should we do it later?

• 3:09Hannah Fry?

  Because, because let's wait, let's wait, right? Because I want to know what the chance of both of us.

• 3:13Michael Stevens?

  I've got three games on mine.

• 3:15Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, I don't think it works like that.

• 3:18Michael Stevens?

  All right. We'll have to find out what happens.

• 3:20Hannah Fry?

  We'll have to find out.

• 3:21Michael Stevens?

  Funny enough, randomness might lead us there.

• 3:24Hannah Fry?

  Look, hey, that's what I call a hook and tease, you know?

• 3:27Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 3:28Hannah Fry?

  If we're talking about randomness, we should probably define it, right?

• 3:30Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. I'll throw one out there. I like to just say randomness is a property something has that makes it unpredictable and lacking in identifiable, recognizable patterns.

• 3:42Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. Where you don't know the outcomes in advance. I agree with you.

• 3:45Michael Stevens?

  When you don't know the outcomes in advance, you cannot predict them. And you can't even find them when you look at past data. You say, this seems quite random.

• 3:54Hannah Fry?

  Although, I also think that, to add to that, I don't think that that means that something being random is necessarily interesting. I mean, statisticians love the idea of a weighted coin, right? But like, let's say that somehow I managed to trick this coin so that it landed heads 99% of the time. And then do 100 throws. The results would technically be random.

• 4:15Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 4:16Hannah Fry?

  But it would be like heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads. There'd probably be one, maybe a couple of tails in there somewhere.

• 4:22Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, but where they appear, we wouldn't be able to predict.

• 4:25Hannah Fry?

  Agree.

• 4:26Michael Stevens?

  I think that's a really great difference to point out, that randomness doesn't mean equal probability.

• 4:31Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely. You do have the other end of the spectrum, right? Like, if you have a completely fair coin, then you can't tell where any heads or tails will be. Like, it'll be kind of all over the place. And I think that when people talk about purely random, that's sort of what they mean. But really, they're talking about where every possibility is equally likely to come up.

• 4:48Michael Stevens?

  That's right. That's really what they mean, because they will say, oh, well, that doesn't look very random.

• 4:52Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 4:53Michael Stevens?

  And it's like, well, that'll happen sometimes.

• 4:56Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 4:56Michael Stevens?

  Randomly.

• 4:57Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 4:57Michael Stevens?

  Because a weighted coin that's heads 99.9% of the time, it's still random.

• 5:03Hannah Fry?

  It's still random.

• 5:04Michael Stevens?

  Which one it lands on. But what do they call it when there's an equal chance of all the options?

• 5:11Hannah Fry?

  Like pi, for example. So the digits after the decimal place in pi. Well, we think that there's an equal chance of every digit to come up. And if it does, it's called a normal number.

• 5:21Michael Stevens?

  Normal.

• 5:22Hannah Fry?

  Just as likely to get a two as a four, as a, you know, as a six, as an eight, whatever. And every combination, every two combination. So a 22 is like, is a 83 or whatever. And as far as we've checked, which by the way is very, very, very, very far.

• 5:35Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 5:36Hannah Fry?

  After the decimal point in pi, I would say, frankly, too far.

• 5:42Hannah Fry?

  I know people worship pi.

• 5:43Michael Stevens?

  Too far? We haven't even started. It's so long.

• 5:46Hannah Fry?

  I, I.

• 5:46Michael Stevens?

  There will never be far into pi.

• 5:49Hannah Fry?

  No.

• 5:50Michael Stevens?

  But we've checked, and what have we found?

• 5:52Hannah Fry?

  We've found so far that it looks like it's normal.

• 5:54Michael Stevens?

  It's normal. So you're.

• 5:55Hannah Fry?

  I mean, at the moment, we have checked so far into pi, that basically, if you wanted to measure the radius of the entire universe, you could do it, you know, to the level of accuracy that was way beyond the width of an atom.

• 6:07Michael Stevens?

  Oh, yeah. To, to measure the universe, you only need pi to like seven digits max.

• 6:13Hannah Fry?

  Hardly any.

• 6:14Michael Stevens?

  You need hardly any.

• 6:15Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 6:16Michael Stevens?

  I think, I think seven might even be too many, but we know it to seven trillion at least.

• 6:20Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. And still going.

• 6:22Michael Stevens?

  How many, how many digits of pi do you know? Can we do a competition?

• 6:25Hannah Fry?

  Yes, we can. I think you'll win. I think I could probably do.

• 6:28Michael Stevens?

  Do you want to go first?

• 6:29Hannah Fry?

  Go on then. We'll take it in turns, shall we?

• 6:31Michael Stevens?

  Okay, okay, okay. I like that. All right. Three.

• 6:34Hannah Fry?

  Point.

• 6:37Michael Stevens?

  One.

• 6:38Hannah Fry?

  Four.

• 6:39Michael Stevens?

  One.

• 6:40Hannah Fry?

  Five.

• 6:41Michael Stevens?

  Nine.

• 6:43Hannah Fry?

  Two.

• 6:44Michael Stevens?

  Six.

• 6:44Hannah Fry?

  I'm out.

• 6:46Michael Stevens?

  Five. 3.141592653589793.

• 6:51Hannah Fry?

  When you, once you get to, I think it's like the 760 second digits, from there, it goes 999999.

• 6:59Michael Stevens?

  How many nines is that?

• 7:00Hannah Fry?

  I think it's six in a row.

• 7:01Michael Stevens?

  Six in a row.

• 7:02Hannah Fry?

  Right? Which is like, what? That feels unlike, that feels pretty random.

• 7:05Michael Stevens?

  Oh, oh, this is the Feynman point.

• 7:06Hannah Fry?

  This is the Feynman.

• 7:07Michael Stevens?

  I've heard about this.

• 7:08Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. Feynman would always say that what he wanted to do was to memorize the digits of pi all the way up to 762, and then just say 909, 909, and so on.

• 7:17Michael Stevens?

  And so on.

• 7:18Hannah Fry?

  Wasn't he a clever guy?

• 7:19Michael Stevens?

  He, he was.

• 7:20Hannah Fry?

  Okay, so this is the other end of the spectrum, right? The digits of pi are the other end of the spectrum in terms of the random sequence. It's not random.

• 7:26Michael Stevens?

  They're random and potentially normal.

• 7:29Hannah Fry?

  Yes. Well, okay, we should be careful though, because they're not actually random, because pi is a particular number.

• 7:34Michael Stevens?

  That's true. I can predict what it'll be. It'll be the ratio between a circumference and a diameter of a circle.

• 7:39Hannah Fry?

  Exactly. But they have all the characteristics of a random sequence. So, you know, this infinite sequence in pi where the digits are distributed uniformly, right?

• 7:48Michael Stevens?

  First of all, I want to throw in another definition of randomness.

• 7:52Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 7:52Michael Stevens?

  That I really like, but then I got a question about it. And the definition is that when something is random, it takes longer to describe to someone over the phone. So like, imagine that I flipped a coin 100 times and it landed heads every time. I could quickly tell my friend, dude, I rolled a coin 100 times, I got heads every time. Bye.

• 8:15Hannah Fry?

  Completely predictable, completely ordered.

• 8:18Michael Stevens?

  Exactly. The results of those flips were random. Let's say it was just weird luck. However, that string of digits is...

• 8:25Hannah Fry?

  Easy to communicate.

• 8:26Michael Stevens?

  Easy to communicate. So is it still random?

• 8:30Hannah Fry?

  So, okay, there's two slightly different things going on here, right?

• 8:32Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, there are, aren't there?

• 8:33Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, two subtly different things. So one of them is about whether or not the next thing that's going to happen... Can be predetermined, whether it's predictable essentially, right? Whether this this outcome is determined in advance. That's randomness. But then there's also the other thing here, which is like the opportunity for surprise, as it were, right? Because you could have, it's kind of going back to that spectrum of like a very ordered sequence, easy to communicate, a very unordered sequence where, you know, like taking a chunk of the digits of pi is really difficult to communicate. I mean, that, if you were saying that down the phone, you would have to literally read them out one by one by one.

• 9:11Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, right. If I flipped a coin and I got a more typical distribution, I couldn't just call my friend and say, oh, they were all heads. I'd have to be like, oh, dude, okay, there were two heads, tails, heads. I'd basically have to just read the whole thing and it would take a long time. That string of digits is more random. It's less predictable and there aren't a lot of patterns in it.

• 9:33Hannah Fry?

  Well, I don't know if it's more random, right? But I think it has, well, it's what the information theorist called more entropy. It's more chaotic.

• 9:41Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so then there's a difference between being random and being high entropy.

• 9:45Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely. So being random is about whether or not you can tell the next thing that's going to happen in advance. And having high entropy is about like the number of opportunities for surprise. So like in an alphabet, you know, if I if I had some Scrabble tiles, something that was low entropy would be AAAA, right? Perfectly ordered, right? Nothing interesting going on. Something that was high entropy would be like, you know, T, G, D, P, L, W, like no no discernible patterns for you to latch on to. There's two things that are going on here, right? So one of them is randomness, and that's whether or not the next thing in the sequence is predictable. And it doesn't matter whether it's very, very likely to be heads or equally likely to be heads and tails.

• 10:27Hannah Fry?

  It's still whether you or not, you can absolutely say for certain what it's going to be in advance. But then there's this other thing that's going on, which is that we sort of have a spectrum of chaos here. So at one end, you've got something that's perfectly ordered, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, really boring. And then the other end, you've got something that is perfectly messy, right? There's no structure or pattern that you can latch on to. And at the one end, you're going to be able to communicate that down the phone extremely quickly and easily. It's just always. And at the other end, you're going to have to read out the entire thing. There's no way that you can compress that message.

• 11:01Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, that that's a very important distinction to make. The difference between randomness, meaning can't predict it, and How disordered

• 11:09Hannah Fry?

  Yes.

• 11:10Michael Stevens?

  is is the result that we got from a random unpredictable process. You can throw Scrabble tiles on the ground and it is possible that they'll land in a way that spells a sentence.

• 11:21Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:21Michael Stevens?

  That would be highly ordered, but if they just looked like a mess, it's very unordered. And I think it's important to point out, and this will keep us in the topic of randomness, but it's important to point out that this is starting to feel a little bit subjective.

• 11:35Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 11:35Michael Stevens?

  Because what do you mean it looks messy? What I mean is there's a lot of ways Scrabble tiles thrown on the floor can look messy. There's a lot of ways, but there's like only one way they could fall on the ground and spell out how I was born.

• 11:51Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 11:52Michael Stevens?

  All right. And so the fewer different ways something can be arranged to look the way it does, the higher the entropy.

• 12:00Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 12:01Michael Stevens?

  Richard Feynman had a quote that I actually wrote in my notes. "We measure disorder by the number of ways the insides can be arranged so that from the outside it looks the same."

• 12:11Hannah Fry?

  Oh, that's so good.

• 12:13Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 12:13Hannah Fry?

  He really was smart, wasn't he?

• 12:15Michael Stevens?

  Flip a coin 100 times and get heads the whole time? There's only one way. You could get heads every time. But how many ways are there to get something that's really hard to communicate on the phone? Most of them. A bunch.

• 12:28Hannah Fry?

  A lot, a lot, a lot.

• 12:29Michael Stevens?

  That has a low entropy.

• 12:31Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, I like this idea of the distinction between between randomness and disorder, which is what we're really ultimately talking about here. You know, the other thing about the throwing those Scrabble tiles on the floor and getting a sentence that spells out the way that you were born is that that's you imparting meaning onto what is essentially a random sequence. Because if you carried on going forever, if you chucked Scrabble tiles on the floor over and over and over and over again, eventually you would end up with something that that told the story of your birth and your death.

• 13:02Michael Stevens?

  Well, right, but like, let's just imagine that the universe is really huge, like infinite. And that there are intelligent civilizations that number almost infinite as well. Then the chances that I could throw Scrabble tiles on the ground and some alien somewhere could look and go, that's how I was born, using its language, becomes higher and higher. So whether something is disordered really depends on the context that they're looking from.

• 13:34Hannah Fry?

  Have you read The Library of Babel by Jorge Borges?

• 13:38Michael Stevens?

  Uh, yeah, I have.

• 13:39Hannah Fry?

  Oh, my God, I love it so much. I love it so much. But he had this, it's a really short story, it's only like three pages or something. But he had this idea that there was a fictional library, a kind of infinite library, where every single possible combination of letters on a page existed within the books within this library. So that in theory, you could go in, I mean, spaces are included, right? You could go in and you could go to some shelf in this library, pull a book off, flick to a page, and it'd just say nothing on the page at all, apart from your name, I think it was right written in the middle. But there would also be a page somewhere in that library where your name would be written vertically, right? And another one diagonally, and another

• 14:24Hannah Fry?

  one where it was just your name over and over and over and over again. Every possible combination of a way to write your name must appear within that library. But the sort of twist on this story is that even though that might be true, because as you said, the number of ways to order letters on a page, the number of ways to order Scrabble tiles, is so gigantically massive, what this means is your experience of going into the library is that you pull out a book, you open a page, it's junk, another page, it's junk, another page, it's junk. So he has these librarians wandering around this, this infinite library, looking for meaning, and essentially finding nothing for, you know, there's, there's one person who has spent 10 years and, and found half a sentence,

• 15:08Hannah Fry?

  right? Someone found the word, it's a dog, or whatever.

• 15:10Michael Stevens?

  Even that's hard to believe.

• 15:11Hannah Fry?

  Even that's hard to believe.

• 15:13Michael Stevens?

  Even though every single sentence possible is in that library. Your likelihood of finding one of them in your lifetime, it's gotta be close to zero. It's not zero.

• 15:23Hannah Fry?

  It's not zero. Do you know that someone made this? Someone made a digital version.

• 15:27Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I talked about it in my video Messages for the Future. And I got to speak to the guy who made it. And he told me how he coded the site to work. Because, yes, it contains every combination of letters, including spaces, of up to a certain number of characters.

• 15:42Hannah Fry?

  He only did every possible page, right? Rather than every possible book.

• 15:47Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, it's not every possible book. But it also doesn't exist on a server, like every combination. Instead, it's coded within numbers.

• 15:56Hannah Fry?

  He did a mathematical trick, basically.

• 15:58Michael Stevens?

  That's right. You can search, and it will find anything you search in the Library of Babel.

• 16:04Hannah Fry?

  Because we already know they're out there. In theory, they already exist. But what he managed to do was to create a way that he can order them and allow you to search them.

• 16:13Michael Stevens?

  Right, so if I looked up your name, I would find it on a certain page in a certain book in a certain volume in a certain wing. But then if anyone else looked up your name, it would be in that same spot. So he's catalogued everything that's ever been said and everything that still hasn't been said. It is a little bit scary.

• 16:31Hannah Fry?

  It's really scary. But I also think that what this demonstrates is just how like how difficult we find it to conceive of these worlds, right? Of randomness, of combinations. I think that we are just really, really bad at having intuition for what randomness looks like.

• 16:46Michael Stevens?

  We really are. But you said something that I want to get back to, which is that the librarians in the Library of Babel are looking for meaning. What is meaning?

• 16:59Hannah Fry?

  Is it meaning something that we effectively create because the universe doesn't provide it?

• 17:05Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I might not totally agree with that yet. But I think, I will say this, that to me, meaning is what happens when information is discarded, but can be put back in. Meaning is what happens when information is discarded, but not lost.

• 17:23Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 17:24Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so, let's just talk about someone's name.

• 17:27Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:28Michael Stevens?

  Right? Like, the name Hannah Frye means something. It means you, it means your life story, it means a lot. It means a lot to different people.

• 17:38Hannah Fry?

  Sure.

• 17:39Michael Stevens?

  But I don't have to refer to you by describing everything about you and everything that you've done and where you are right now. I can just say your name. If someone goes, "Oh, who'd you see today?" I don't have to be like, "I saw the woman who was born in this town." And then it'd go on and on. I can just say, "Hannah."

• 17:55Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:55Michael Stevens?

  A lot of information has been discarded. I'm not mentioning a lot of stuff, and yet I am.

• 18:01Hannah Fry?

  It's like, you know what? It kind of goes back to that idea of like, how quickly can you communicate something around the phone?

• 18:06Michael Stevens?

  I'm compressing

• 18:07Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Michael Stevens?

  everything you represent into a single name. When we ask what something means, we're asking what information has been discarded.

• 18:16Hannah Fry?

  Right. Okay, you're asking for the invisible thing that you're no longer

• 18:20Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 18:20Hannah Fry?

  directly communicating, but there is common, shared agreement between them.

• 18:24Michael Stevens?

  I heard what you said, but what did you not say?

• 18:27Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 18:27Michael Stevens?

  Because that's what you meant.

• 18:28Hannah Fry?

  But then here's, I'm gonna go back to what I said before, that meaning is something that we create, right? Because the universe doesn't provide it. And I actually, I wanna double down on that, because the thing is, the words Hannah Frye, they might mean something now, right? They might have a shared meaning between people who are my family or whatever, right now. But this is something that only has existed for the briefest flicker of time, and will quite soon cease to exist, right? Like, in a hundred years, maybe less, it will have no longer any meaning whatsoever. In the same way as like, ignatious spelling, you know, or whatever. It doesn't have any meaning to anyone.

• 19:08Michael Stevens?

  That means a lot to me. That was my father's name. How dare you?

• 19:12Hannah Fry?

  And so, yeah, I think that actually meaning is something that we are creating, that we are putting on top of the randomness that already exists.

• 19:20Michael Stevens?

  Not only are we creating meaning, it is what we do.

• 19:24Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 19:24Michael Stevens?

  I think our niche as a species is that we create meaning. We discard information to save time, to solve problems. It's all what cognition really is. And I think we make meaning, just like bees make honey.

• 19:41Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 19:41Michael Stevens?

  Okay, we, we take stuff, we take information from the universe, just like bees take nectar, and we go, eh, this could be sweeter. And we discard a bunch of stuff. The bees dry out that nectar until they've just got this really, really sweet honey. And we take in all this information and we discard stuff until we've just got this meaningful thing.

• 20:04Hannah Fry?

  I really like that idea. I really like that idea. I think we can go further with it. So I'm going to pause for a break. And when we come back, we're going to see if there are other ways to make meaning from randomness and disorder.

• 20:16Michael Stevens?

  Hmm.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  Hey Spotify listeners. When you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. Before takeoff, unwind in the Admirals Club Lounge with curated self-serve offerings of hearty bites and refreshments. In flight, stay connected with high-speed Wi-Fi, sponsored by AT&T. Your journey is designed to feel easy from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there. Book now at aa.com.

• 20:51Speaker 04

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies, 18 plus.

• 21:18Speaker 05

  Born from the intensity of a night in the eternal city. Introducing Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino. Feminine perfume Donna Born in Roma features juicy black currant, central jasmine, soft cashmerin and warm vanilla. Masculine leaning but unisex Womo has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver and mineral salt. Shop holiday gifts at macys.com.

• 21:53Hannah Fry?

  Welcome back. We are talking randomness, we are talking meaning, we're talking disorder and chaos. All of the sweet, easy subjects for today.

• 22:02Michael Stevens?

  It's been so random. I think, I was thinking about that during the break. Went to the bathroom and I was thinking, I was like, yeah, I think people use the word random nowadays in the right way. They're saying, look, I couldn't have predicted it. I didn't know that guy would be at the party, so he was a rando.

• 22:21Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, that one I don't mind is when people say, oh, I just crashed my car, I'm so random. That's the one that bothers me. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. You can't retrospectively apply-

• 22:33Michael Stevens?

  A person who talks like that is someone that I would predict would be in a car accident. It's not random.

• 22:38Hannah Fry?

  That's actually my natural voice.

• 22:41Michael Stevens?

  Oh, so you're just like putting on this-

• 22:42Hannah Fry?

  This one is the fake one. I'm from Essex, you know? Come on. Okay, we agree then that the, there's a lot of disorder, there's a lot of uncertainty. But the thing is, I think science is really, really, very good at taking that uncertainty and using it for our own advantage.

• 22:59Michael Stevens?

  Give me an example.

• 23:00Hannah Fry?

  All right. One of my favorite stories is back in like the 1700s, there was a lot of woo-woo in medicine, right? Even like official hospitals had a lot of crazy, crazy stuff going on.

• 23:13Michael Stevens?

  What wasn't woo-woo back then?

• 23:15Hannah Fry?

  I mean, mathematics, thank you. There's a lot of good mathematics in 1700s. But anyway, one of the most amazing bits of woo-woo was this thing called Perkins metallic tractors. Have you come across these?

• 23:25Michael Stevens?

  No.

• 23:26Hannah Fry?

  There were these little rods and they had pointy ends. And what you would do is you would go around to somebody who was like not feeling very well. And you would point the rods over the bit of their body that was hurting. And then technically, if you stood there for about twenty minutes, they could draw out the noxious electrical fluids. I think people were quite into electricity at the time. And they sold for an absolute fortune. Old Georgie Washington, he had a set. Everyone was like fully bought into them. And then there was this guy called John Hagarth. And he was like, I think this is not, something's not right here. So what he did is he went away and he made some little wooden versions of these tractors. And he painted them to look like the original. And then he went into a hospital and he was like, okay, there's lots of people here, right?

• 24:11Hannah Fry?

  If I try this on a number of different people and I won't tell them, sometimes I'm going to use the real tractors. Sometimes I'm going to randomly assign the other ones, the wooden ones. And I'll see who ends up getting better. And he went around and he collected all the data, wiggling these little sticks in front of people. And demonstrated that the real ones had made no difference whatsoever. Whether he was wiggling the, the, the metal sticks, the really expensive tractors. Or these little wooden toothpicks that he mocked up at home, didn't make any difference. But what he was effectively doing there was he was using the kind of randomness, the disorder of the universe. To his own advantage, to kind of prove that there was nothing special about these tractors.

• 24:53Michael Stevens?

  That's right. He found their meaning, or lack thereof, by randomly applying them. Was it like double blind? Did, did the users not even know whether they had the real things or not?

• 25:05Hannah Fry?

  The, no, he, because he was the user. So no.

• 25:08Michael Stevens?

  So he knew.

• 25:08Hannah Fry?

  He knew, he knew. But it was a bit later on. I mean, it was like the nineteen forties when controlled trials, random controlled trials.

• 25:15Michael Stevens?

  So he was like one of the first.

• 25:17Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 25:18Michael Stevens?

  On record to be doing this kind of a

• 25:20Hannah Fry?

  Randomly assigning.

• 25:21Michael Stevens?

  Random trial.

• 25:22Hannah Fry?

  Exactly.

• 25:22Michael Stevens?

  To find whether there's meaning or not.

• 25:25Hannah Fry?

  Exactly.

• 25:26Michael Stevens?

  Did he look at the outcomes of people that he didn't do any of the treatments to?

• 25:30Hannah Fry?

  No, this is like early doors, right? So for that stuff, for it to be properly, the point at which it became the new gold standard, that was the treatment of TB in the 1940s. And then there was a particular drug, it was called streptomycin. And people weren't sure whether it was actually making a difference or not. Because of course, you give a drug to some people with TB and they get better. You give it to other people with TB and they don't get better. And it's really difficult to kind of hone in on precisely the role of the drug in all of that. So that was when they did it absolutely properly. They deliberately withheld the drug from a randomly selected group of individuals who had TB in order to work out whether it was the drug that was making the difference or it was just randomness.

• 26:10Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, right, because there could even be a placebo effect where, whether it's real medicine or not, just the fact that a doctor cares enough to give you attention can affect how your body heals, how it reacts, what symptoms you have.

• 26:24Hannah Fry?

  And it's only by harnessing randomness and disorder, by doing it on multiple people, that you can start to separate out some of these effects.

• 26:30Michael Stevens?

  To separate out the meaning.

• 26:32Hannah Fry?

  The meaning, exactly.

• 26:33Michael Stevens?

  Meaning can even emerge from randomness. It, I think my favorite example is Ziff's Law.

• 26:41Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 26:42Michael Stevens?

  Ziff's Law is this really bizarre phenomenon that we've observed in every known language. We've observed this in craters on the moon. I'll describe it using language. So in languages, there are words that are used more than others. And you can rank how often a word is used. So in English, it's the word "the." The second most used word, as it turns out, will be used about half as often as the most used word.

• 27:10Hannah Fry?

  Really?

• 27:10Michael Stevens?

  I'm not done yet.

• 27:11Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 27:12Michael Stevens?

  The third most used word will show up in texts a third as often as the number one. The fourth, a quarter as much, the fifth, a fifth as much, and so on.

• 27:23Hannah Fry?

  Really?

• 27:23Michael Stevens?

  All the way down. I did a video about this and I just, I said, "Well, Vsauce is my YouTube channel, I'll check the word sauce." And I don't remember the exact number, but sauce was like the 5,000th most used word in English. And it showed up 1/5,000th as often as the word "the."

• 27:40Hannah Fry?

  No.

• 27:41Michael Stevens?

  In in the Gutenberg corpus and in Google's corpus, I was like, this is incredible. And so what's going on, right?

• 27:48Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, I mean, that sort of feels like it's not random. That feels like it's a like an imparted pattern.

• 27:53Michael Stevens?

  Maybe it's put in there by human minds. No, because we see this in craters as well. Crater size and location, it follows Ziff's law. The most common size shows up a certain amount of time. The next most common shows up half as often as the most. And this it's it's incredible. But then later, it was found that Ziff's law is also obeyed by random typing on a keyboard.

• 28:17Hannah Fry?

  No.

• 28:18Michael Stevens?

  Yep, that just a monkey slap on a keyboard is going to also create a language that follows Ziff's law.

• 28:23Hannah Fry?

  Wait, so hold on, hold on, hold on, though. What are you counting? What counts as the most common thing there? Like the combination of letters?

• 28:30Michael Stevens?

  You just treat it like they're words and you say, what's the most common word? Which means letters that are separated by spaces.

• 28:38Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 28:39Michael Stevens?

  What's the most common word that the monkey's typing? And then you look and they're going to follow the same pattern. And that is because the spacebar is what defines a word ending and beginning. The spacebar is one of the keys. So imagine a keyboard that just had letters and a spacebar. It's got 27 buttons. Eventually, you're going to hit the spacebar. And that makes shorter words more likely than longer ones. A longer word means that you've gone a long time without hitting the spacebar. It's much less likely. And how much less likely? You can look at the math behind it and it just forms that exact same shape.

• 29:15Hannah Fry?

  Wow. So actually, what Ziff's law is doing there is that it's like this inherent pattern that appears when things are generated effectively at random.

• 29:27Michael Stevens?

  And when you stand far enough away, which brings us back to that subjective quality of randomness.

• 29:33Hannah Fry?

  Like if you zoom out, you see a different view.

• 29:36Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, if I look at a bottle of gas really close up, those molecules are going everywhere. They're bouncing off of each other. It's incredibly chaotic.

• 29:44Hannah Fry?

  Maximum disorder.

• 29:45Michael Stevens?

  But I go far enough back and I go, oh, it's cooling down. Or, oh, the hot air at the ground floor is rising. It becomes incredibly predictable the further away I look. Even though at the microscopic level, its nature is randomness.

• 30:01Hannah Fry?

  And that's it, right? That idea of like sliding along from order to chaos, from like clean, everything being the same, to messy disorder. Actually, that's a function of scale as well. Like you zoom in, zoom out. You know, you see this in in patterns of human behavior as well. One of my favorite examples of this is burglaries. So your chance of being burgled is actually at its highest when you've just been burgled.

• 30:27Hannah Fry?

  So in in a lot of ways burglaries follow a similar pattern to earthquakes, right? The very first shock is very difficult to predict, but once something has happened, then the aftershocks, in inverted commas, have this kind of very clear pattern. They kind of, they they they get smaller and smaller and smaller as you go further away from from the epicenter, and they also decay away in time. A few people noticed this with burglaries, right? That it's like if you look across a city, it's really hard to say, here's where a burglary is going to be for the first one. But once a group starts targeting a particular area, particularly in cities where houses are structured in the same way all the way across the street, you know, people get to know the layout of the house, they get to know where you keep your valuables. Also, people replace their valuables. I mean, that's another thing, right? Or it might be that they have been and spotted something and wanted to come back for it

• 31:12Hannah Fry?

  because they couldn't get it the first time. So a little while ago, this is maybe about 10 years ago or so, a group of mathematicians and criminologists, they noticed that there were these patterns that actually, even though they were random, and when you were at the scale of the individual, when it's your house being burgled, right? It feels like there is no order anywhere here. But when you zoom out to the scale of the city, actually, there's a pattern that appears in the randomness. So what they did is they created these tools that could be used by police so that if a set of burglaries started, these tools could say, okay, this is where we predict they're likely to happen next. And Kent Police in particular, they were one of the early adopters of this. And in the first few weeks, I mean, they had this amazing drop.

• 31:58Hannah Fry?

  In the number of crimes, like eight and a half percent drop, right? Really kind of demonstrated this this proof of concept that there is some predictability. There are these patterns you can latch on to. There was one story in particular of where this model that had been created told Kent Police, you need to go to this particular square on the map. This is where crimes are likely to happen tonight. The police officer turned up, pulled up in a car. And as they arrived in the street, they saw someone climbing through a window at the burgling house. Right now, okay, that story sounds really positive, right? And everyone got very excited about this at the time. The problem is, if I tell you, here's where there's likely to be events happening tonight. Here's where burglaries are likely to happen. And you're the police, right?

• 32:41Hannah Fry?

  Your options are quite limited because what you can't do is suddenly change all of your officers to like flood that area. Because then what you're doing is you're disproportionately policing particular neighborhoods over others. And then, of course, you're going to capture more crimes, which then just makes the model think that area is a worse area. And so and you you get to the point where you're actually using statistics to kind of harass particular neighborhoods, right? Which is very bad. So what they do now is that when there has been a burglary, they still have the models running, saying this is where they're likely to be. They'll post a leaflet through your door and they'll say, your chances of being burgled have increased. Make sure that you lock your windows. Make sure that you lock your doors.

• 33:25Hannah Fry?

  That does have a genuine quantifiable decrease in the probability of burglary across an entire city.

• 33:31Michael Stevens?

  Wow. It's a very chaotic system, isn't it? That you've got the behavior of the burglars, but then also the behavior of the police.

• 33:39Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 33:39Michael Stevens?

  And so if they're catching more criminals, because that's where they all are, then that feeds back into the system and it it's a double pendulum of crime.

• 33:46Hannah Fry?

  It just it just gets very messy very quickly. I mean, I would sort of say that a double pendulum in the original sense is a bit of a crime to watch it, but.

• 33:55Michael Stevens?

  Let me tell you this, triple pendulum.

• 33:57Hannah Fry?

  Oh, God.

• 33:58Michael Stevens?

  Just imagine.

• 33:59Hannah Fry?

  No, I can't. It's too, too, too chaotic.

• 34:01Michael Stevens?

  Now, when when scientists need random numbers, where do they get them? Because as as we've been dancing around, like, the more knowledge you have, the less random something becomes. Um, and so we have to look at probably the most confusing things, lava lamps.

• 34:21Michael Stevens?

  Their behavior is very chaotic and you can train a camera at a lava lamp and just ask, is a blob going to cover this pixel or not? And that can generate the numbers that you need that have like no patterns, completely unpredictable, just like the lava lamp. Random.org uses static electricity in the atmosphere to generate random numbers. You can go there right now and tell me, give me a bunch of random numbers between one and a hundred, and it does a pretty good job. I mean, good in the sense that no one's going to be able to predict what it produces. However, to a certain extent, it should be predictable. If you knew a lot about the atmosphere right now, you would have a better chance of predicting what numbers it's going to produce. But since most of us don't, it's random.

• 35:06Michael Stevens?

  In order to find meaning, we have to, and we're advantaged by using randomness, random trials, right? Which means that to find meaning, we need those things that have none.

• 35:16Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:17Michael Stevens?

  What a wonderful yin and yang.

• 35:19Hannah Fry?

  Wait, let me just sit with it for a second. So in order to find meaning from things that look random, we need to use things that have no meaning at all.

• 35:29Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 35:30Hannah Fry?

  To be able to separate out the two.

• 35:31Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 35:32Hannah Fry?

  That's nice, isn't it?

• 35:33Michael Stevens?

  You need both, bright and burning.

• 35:35Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, I like that a lot. You know the Enigma machine during World War II? Basically, it's like a typewriter where you type in your message and it has a series of cogs and dials that changes. If you hit like the letter G, for instance, it will, behind the scenes, this mechanical thing will change it into, I don't know, a letter R, for instance. And then when you hit G again, those wheels will have turned around and it will generate a different letter, T, for instance, okay? So the idea from the Germans' perspective was what they wanted was it to just look like a random jumble of letters. But what the British realized, even though when you originally look at these encoded messages, it's really hard to grab on to anything.

• 36:18Hannah Fry?

  What the British realized was that there was little bits of meaning in there that they could latch on to. And one of them in particular was that messages that were sent would often end with the message Heil Hitler. So they knew that the last few letters of any communication were likely to have been that. And so they managed to like grab on to that little bit of meaning hidden within the randomness in order to decode the entire thing.

• 36:49Michael Stevens?

  Wow.

• 36:50Hannah Fry?

  But then there's also another level of meaning here because what you would do is you would set the dials in a particular way. You would have like a particular code of two letters or three letters that would allow you to set the dials in a particular way for that day. And they worked out that what the Germans were doing is they were choosing the letters of their girlfriends, their girlfriends' initials, right, or their wives. So they had this little book, which was just all of the German military personnel that they were targeting, that they knew were sending these messages, and all of their lovers and mistresses and girlfriends.

• 37:22Michael Stevens?

  And now you've got a really short list of initial settings.

• 37:25Hannah Fry?

  Exactly.

• 37:26Michael Stevens?

  To decode.

• 37:26Hannah Fry?

  To try, to kind of, to like shortcut you.

• 37:29Michael Stevens?

  So just by learning who the Germans were dating, the randomness became a lot less random.

• 37:36Hannah Fry?

  Because we can't help it, right? Humans can't help but impart meaning.

• 37:39Michael Stevens?

  We put this meaning in and then it all unravels.

• 37:42Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 37:43Michael Stevens?

  So is this related to the question of, I'm gonna flip this coin, I'm gonna catch it.

• 37:48Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 37:49Michael Stevens?

  And I'm gonna put it down on the table.

• 37:50Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 37:51Michael Stevens?

  What's the probability that it's heads or tails?

• 37:54Hannah Fry?

  Uh, fifty fifty.

• 37:57Michael Stevens?

  Fifty fifty, okay.

• 38:01Hannah Fry?

  You just looked at it.

• 38:02Michael Stevens?

  And now what's the probability?

• 38:04Hannah Fry?

  For you or me?

• 38:06Michael Stevens?

  For me, it's a hundred percent tails, because I saw it.

• 38:10Hannah Fry?

  Oh, you're lying.

• 38:11Michael Stevens?

  But for you, it's still fifty fifty.

• 38:13Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 38:13Michael Stevens?

  Probability is a measure of our ignorance.

• 38:15Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 38:16Michael Stevens?

  It's not a measure of something that's objectively out there in the universe that God would know.

• 38:21Hannah Fry?

  No, no, I totally agree.

• 38:22Michael Stevens?

  A supremely omniscient creature would have to go, the probability, hmm, for who? How much do they not know? A- as the police learn more, or as the love lives of the Germans become more known, meaning emerges.

• 38:36Hannah Fry?

  Meaning emerges. You know how you were talking earlier about how humans are these basically meaning machines, right? That like, we live in that space between perfect order and perfect chaos, and that is where you can find meaning. I think that's true beyond just like human experience. I think that's also true for like the whole reason we are here in the first place. So in the nineteen sixties, there were these Two astronomers who were putting telescopes in the sky, like recording, you know, loads of information. And there was basically this, this, this constant hiss in their antenna, right? They just couldn't get rid of it.

• 39:10Michael Stevens?

  Now, I haven't checked the news for decades, but it was just birds, right?

• 39:13Hannah Fry?

  That was, I think, one of the original hypotheses, but then they tried it to non-bird places.

• 39:18Michael Stevens?

  Oh, so they fixed that and so the noise went away?

• 39:21Hannah Fry?

  No, the noise did not go away. Literally wherever they went, they tried it a day, they tried it at night. They cleaned out pigeon droppings from the inside. They thought that might be the cause of nothing, nothing would get rid of this hiss. It felt, felt like it was very random, right? It's like static on your TV. It's kind of no discernible source. This is like total cosmic mystery. And what people eventually worked out that actually this, this random noise, it wasn't an arrow. It was what's become known as the cosmic microwave background. Essentially the like, the oldest light in the universe, right? The, the, the residual heat from the big bang, this like afterglow that has been traveling through space for billions of years. That now appears on earth as this electromagnetic bit of radiation, a kind of crackle on your TV sets. If you were born pre nineteen ninety five.

• 40:08Hannah Fry?

  But anyway, since then, what people have done is they have used, you know, satellites to like map out this noise in inverted commas. In like this exquisite detail. And what you see is that at the moment of the big bang, we were so, so, so close to having A A A A A A A A A, right? Or heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads. It was unbelievably close to being completely ordered. The entire universe had almost no fluctuations in it whatsoever. So the estimates are that it was variations of less than one part in a hundred thousand in terms of temperature, right? It was almost completely blanket uniform, but it wasn't totally uniform. It was somewhere on that spectrum between perfect order and perfect error.

• 40:50Hannah Fry?

  Just, just nudged ever so slightly to the right of, of, of perfect order. There were these little quantum jitters, right? These like tiny little variations in temperature. And what that meant was that over time, gravity started to, to form around those really tiny variations. And that then became the seeds of. Every planet, of every galaxy, of every solar system that we have, every, every star that we have across the entire universe is because of those tiny little moments of non-order in an otherwise ordered state.

• 41:24Michael Stevens?

  So if this early universe, which is, that's what the cosmic microwave background radiation is.

• 41:29Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 41:29Michael Stevens?

  It's like the furthest away light. It is, it is us literally looking at what the universe looked like when it was 300,000 years old or something, at the moment it became transparent.

• 41:38Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 41:39Michael Stevens?

  Okay, a long time ago.

• 41:40Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Michael Stevens?

  If that had been more disordered.

• 41:43Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 41:44Michael Stevens?

  What would the universe look like today?

• 41:45Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, if it had been a complete mess, it would have been black holes everywhere.

• 41:49Michael Stevens?

  Okay, and what if it had been super ordered?

• 41:52Hannah Fry?

  If it had been perfectly ordered, death. Nothing would have, nothing would have formed.

• 41:56Michael Stevens?

  But because of these imperfections, gravity is eventually able to make not black holes, but galaxies, planets.

• 42:04Hannah Fry?

  Exactly.

• 42:05Michael Stevens?

  Koalas.

• 42:05Hannah Fry?

  Cool. Exactly, exactly. On the hierarchy of things that we care about, yes. And that's it, right? This is the sweet spot in between. It's where there is the potential to surprise, but the potential to create meaning, by which, by which in this case, I literally mean planets. You know, the physical matter on which life can form. The only reason why it exists is because there was randomness.

• 42:32Michael Stevens?

  So mountains and scratch cards and gingivitis only exist because of randomness?

• 42:40Hannah Fry?

  Only exist because we live in the sweet spot between order and chaos.

• 42:44Michael Stevens?

  The sweet spot, just random enough to be interesting.

• 42:47Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 42:48Michael Stevens?

  I'm gonna go one further and say it's not just the physical matter. It's not just living organisms, but I, I'm working on a theory that consciousness itself.

• 42:58Hannah Fry?

  Uh huh.

• 42:58Michael Stevens?

  Comes about because the universe has no meaning.

• 43:01Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 43:02Michael Stevens?

  So that's the short version. The elevator pitch is that you exist because life has no meaning and you are alone.

• 43:10Michael Stevens?

  Which sounds sad, but like if our universe was completely uniform, discarding information didn't matter because there was just one thing, then there would be no reason for a creature to evolve that incited and excited information, that created meaning, because there would only be one meaning. But we don't live in a universe with meaning. We live in one that is filled with lots of different meanings. I can make anything mean anything. So we'll do an episode on consciousness later, but I think that we need to have a certain amount of complexity, which is the name for this region in between chaos and order. We need a bit of complexity for a creature like ourselves to exist and a creature who needs to figure things out in its own head, pack up meaning and unpack the meaning.

• 43:54Michael Stevens?

  That all happens up here. And I think, long story short, we wind up kind of living in here a little bit. And that's where the concept of a self emerges. That I am a conscious being who lives in my interior. All of this only happens because the universe has no single meaning. It's got a lot that we get to make.

• 44:16Hannah Fry?

  Hey, look, I think that there's no more positive way to end an episode than to say life exists because the universe has no meaning. That's the, you know, perfect possible wrap up. Apart from actually these scratch cards, which we still haven't done.

• 44:28Michael Stevens?

  Oh, my gosh. Let's do it. Let's do it. All right. All right, guys. This is it. So the symbols that we want to match are either a plant, a window, a house, a chest, or a bulb. The winning image is? A stack of coins.

• 44:49Hannah Fry?

  So basically, none of us won anything.

• 44:51Michael Stevens?

  The delicious taste of defeat.

• 44:52Hannah Fry?

  Next time. Next time. Well, that is a wrap on this episode, but there is a lot more where that came from. So please do make sure that you are following The Rest Is Science on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure that you like and subscribe, okay? That's my message to you.

• 45:07Michael Stevens?

  Do it. And you can always reach out to us at [email protected].

• 45:13Hannah Fry?

  See you next time.

• 45:25Speaker 06

  When you shop Kroger Delivery, you can expect the savings you love and fresh groceries delivered right to your door. From delicious produce to everyday essentials, enjoy the convenience of delivery and the trusted selection you've come to know from Kroger. Because bringing you fresh, quality groceries is what we do best. Right now, enjoy free delivery on orders of $50 or more with your digital coupon. Restrictions apply. See site for details. Kroger. Fresh for everyone.

• 45:55Speaker 07

  When you spend enough time around great companies, you notice that the best ones treat trust as a growth strategy, not a box to check. Vanta helps companies build and prove trust from day one. Its Agentic Trust Platform connects compliance, risk, and trust at enterprise scale. Vanta delivers a 526% return on investment over three years and pays for itself in just three months. Learn why over 16,000 of the fastest-growing companies use Vanta at vanta.com.

• 46:26Speaker 08

  If you're building AI agents, you should check out Strands Agents. It's an open-source SDK for Python and TypeScript. The idea is simple. Give a model some tools, let it decide what to call and when, and loop until it's done. No chain configs, no graph orchestration, and works with any model provider. It's also open-source and built and tested for production agents. Get started at strandsagents.com.