Hannah Predicted a Pandemic

What if the next pandemic could be predicted before it even begins? Hannah and Michael step into the unsettling world of outbreak simulations, where scientists map invisible infections, model human behaviour, and try to stop global catastrophe before it starts. Some warnings save millions. Others get ignored, until it’s too late. After the break the conversation takes a turn into space stations, fizzy drinks in zero gravity, the first microscopes, and gravitational waves bending the fabric of spacetime itself. Welcome to Field Notes! ------------------- 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 Meek Animator: Sam Benson Video & Social: Bex Tyrrell Assistant Producer: Lucy Lipscombe Producer: Simona Rata 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.

• 0:01Michael Stevens?

  Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Science. I'm Michael Stevens.

• 0:04Hannah Fry?

  And I'm Hannah Fry.

• 0:05Michael Stevens?

  And today on Field Notes, we're going to be tackling your questions. And then also Hannah has brought something. I think it might be a story. I literally don't know.

• 0:15Hannah Fry?

  It is. It is a story. You know, I noticed in the introduction that I used my BBC voice. Did you hear it?

• 0:19Michael Stevens?

  No, I wasn't even listening, to be honest. I was just looking at my own video going, "Look at that handsome devil." So do your BBC voice again.

• 0:27Hannah Fry?

  It's just much, it's a bit more formal. And I think, I think that might be because, because my story is about, is about a BBC show that I did, where I accidentally, almost perfectly predicted the pandemic two years before it happened.

• 0:41Michael Stevens?

  Whoops.

• 0:42Hannah Fry?

  Whoops. I've got into a lot of trouble for it, I'll be honest.

• 0:45Michael Stevens?

  Wait, no, but do, do the BBC voice again.

• 0:48Hannah Fry?

  Hello, I'm Hannah Fry.

• 0:50Michael Stevens?

  Nice, yeah.

• 0:51Hannah Fry?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 0:52Michael Stevens?

  It's still definitely you, but it feels, it feels like you're not talking to me.

• 0:57Hannah Fry?

  On the spectrum between BBC and Essex, which is, you know, my natural state, I would say that you're closer to the Essex than the BBC.

• 1:06Michael Stevens?

  Oh yeah, let me, let me, let me try to do a BBC voice.

• 1:09Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 1:10Michael Stevens?

  Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Science. I'm Michael Stevens.

• 1:13Hannah Fry?

  Oh, that was good.

• 1:15Michael Stevens?

  It's almost like American newscaster, really.

• 1:17Hannah Fry?

  That was very good. I was gonna say, I think that the only problem with it is that it's, is the accent, I'm afraid. I'm afraid you're sacked.

• 1:23Michael Stevens?

  Hello, my name's Michael Stevens.

• 1:27Hannah Fry?

  I dig it, damn.

• 1:28Michael Stevens?

  That's BBC. That's like-

• 1:30Hannah Fry?

  There you go, right there.

• 1:32Michael Stevens?

  Queen's English.

• 1:33Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 1:33Michael Stevens?

  Notice how it becomes southern. And that's because that non-Rhodic commonality.

• 1:39Hannah Fry?

  Non-Rhodic? What's that?

• 1:40Michael Stevens?

  There's no R, right? Like both, both the British and the Southern Americans will drop the Rs out. They'll be like, "Yeah, I'm working down on the farm." But then a British person will be like, "I was dancin' at the farm," right?

• 1:55Hannah Fry?

  Hmm. It's, it's much smoother. That's nice. I like that. Can we do an episode on accents at some point? Because I, I've got, I've got, I've got a range in my back catalogue that I can, I can wheel out at will.

• 2:08Michael Stevens?

  As do I. I have been, never been shy to show off the range of accents I can do.

• 2:14Hannah Fry?

  That's the best possible hook and tease that we've got for, for an episode on accents coming up.

• 2:18Michael Stevens?

  That doesn't exist yet. But we're gonna, we're gonna start with questions.

• 2:30Hannah Fry?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 2:33Michael Stevens?

  Here's something strange. Your DNA contains more ancient viral fragments than genes. The genes that build our cells make up only 2% of our DNA. And for years, that is what scientists focused on. They treated the rest, the ancient viruses and stuff, as junk.

• 2:53Hannah Fry?

  But now we know that that hidden majority, sometimes called the dark genome, influences how our biology works and how diseases like cancer behave.

• 3:03Michael Stevens?

  It's a reminder that progress rarely comes as a single breakthrough. It builds gradually. Cancer Research UK plays a central role in that progress, supporting decades of research into over 200 types of cancer, work that's helped double survival in the UK over the past 50 years.

• 3:23Hannah Fry?

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

• 3:36Speaker 02

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• 4:20Speaker 02

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• 4:34Speaker 03

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• 5:09Michael Stevens?

  I want to start with this one. This is sent in to us by M.D. Solomon. If your brain constructs your entire reality from electrical signals, including the feeling of this moment right now, if we could perfectly swap your sensory inputs with someone else's for just one minute, would you still feel like you? We're going to start nice and deep here. I think first of all, is your entire reality constructed from electrical signals? That's a huge assumption to make, but we don't have to belabor that point too much. What we're talking about right now is if I switched my sensory inputs to someone else's, what would it feel like? And would it challenge my feeling of myself? I mean, I think that the closest

• 5:54Michael Stevens?

  we've been able to come to doing things like this are like skin grafts, where someone's had, you know, a tumor removed on their leg and then that flesh is replaced with flesh taken from like their butt cheek. And after surgery, when they touch the leg, they've got skin where the skin was removed, but those nerve cells used to be in the butt. So they'll stroke their leg and when they touch that new transplant and piece of their own skin, it feels like they're touching their butt.

• 6:26Hannah Fry?

  True.

• 6:27Michael Stevens?

  It's true. This happens specifically, the leg butt example happened to my friend Jake Roper, when he had a tumor removed on his leg. And they've got to replace that tissue. And you've got, I guess, like, just so much in your badonkadonk, that that's an easy place to grab more, to replace it. And the thing is, it's really trippy at first, because you're like, touching your leg and your brain is going, oh, someone's touching the butt. It's like, that, that signal is moved from your leg by the brain to, it's projected on to wherever they removed the, the nerves from. But it doesn't last forever.

• 7:02Hannah Fry?

  Right. I was gonna say, surely there's a point where your brain works it out and switches.

• 7:06Michael Stevens?

  That's right. Your brain works it out. Your brain remains plastic in so many ways your whole life. It's changeable and it'll eventually fade away and it'll go, ah, these nerves are now next to these other nerves that are in the leg, so I'm going to project those feelings to the leg area from now on. But in that case, you're, you're switching your sensory inputs from yourself to yourself. You're just changing the where on yourself it is. It always still feels like you. But if suddenly, I was feeling everything that touched you, Hannah, it would be a trippy experience. But I think there would still be a me there, experiencing these signals going, what the heck? This is really trippy.

• 7:50Michael Stevens?

  But I would still be there as me, Michael Stevens, wondering, what the heck is this about?

• 7:56Hannah Fry?

  I think for almost all of my life, that would have been the assumption that I would also have made. But I had a conversation, actually with a retired Cambridge professor about a month ago. And something he said has just really, I, I've been thinking about it almost nonstop ever since. And I think I might have changed my mind on exactly that point.

• 8:14Michael Stevens?

  Tell me why.

• 8:15Hannah Fry?

  He was talking about how we have this idea that there is a conscious version of you that is sort of assimilating all of the signals and coming up with a conclusion about where you are, who you are, what you're feeling, etc. But he was saying, actually, we don't have any firm evidence that that is the case. It may be that actually all of that is just an illusion of a conscious self. You know, in the same way that when you look carefully about sight or smell. I mean, there's all sorts of illusions that are evidenced in the way that our that our brain works. And he was saying, maybe they're like the idea of you as a single entity,

• 8:59Hannah Fry?

  sort of sitting on top of all of these electrical signals, maybe that is in itself an illusion. And then I was thinking about, there's a very famous experiment, which you and I have talked about before. There's a very famous experiment where someone presses a button, but at the same time as their brain is being monitored. And actually, the decision to press the button and the physical action that they take to press the button are offset, but not in the way around that you might imagine it. The the the cause and effect is not, oh, I think I'll press that button over there. And then the the message gets sent to your to your arm, at which point you go to move the button. It's the other way around.

• 9:38Hannah Fry?

  Your arm makes the movement and then your brain retrospectively comes up with that decision afterwards.

• 9:45Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I actually got to meet Dr. Maran, who does these experiments in in a minefield episode, and we ran this on some other science YouTubers. You try to predict the readiness potentials of their neurons, so that you know that they're about to push the button. And as it turns out, that happens before their conscious awareness that I'm going to push it. Light the buttons up, turn the button red, meaning don't push me, before they're aware that they were about to, and they become paralyzed. So, I mean, this throws into question the entire notion of is there a you? We certainly act like there is. We we think to ourselves and we explain ourselves to others as though there is a little self that's riding along, manning the controls.

• 10:28Michael Stevens?

  But it does seem more like we there there might not be a you. There's a youing that your brain does, where it looks at what it's done and what's happening, and it goes, oh. Oh, yes, yes, yes. That's what I meant to do. Thank you very much. And it might only really do that because it helps us explain ourselves to others. And as I've said before, that might be something that happened not even that long ago, that that social life amongst Homo sapiens became complicated enough and and and broad enough that we had to start being like, okay, I'm I'm an individual and you're someone else. And so, yeah, I think switching our sensory inputs so that I'm tasting what you taste,

• 11:09Michael Stevens?

  I think I'd still you-ify it, or I guess me-ify it, and I'd say, whoa, this is happening to me. But to what extent there's actually a a me, like a part of my brain that is going, uh huh, I'm just gonna pull the levers and oh, I'm getting a weird signal here from the taste buds. I don't know. I think that it's it's something you you learn. So I'm still learning about this. I've got some good books about how children are believed to develop their sense of self. And it might, we might actually get our best evidence from the way they dream. This is, I mean, this could become a three-hour-long episode.

• 11:48Hannah Fry?

  Easily.

• 11:48Michael Stevens?

  But when you look at dreams, the earliest reports of dreams we have from humans, they're different than the way we dream today. And this is something we're all pretty aware of, like dreams from ancient texts are almost always seen as they're not as fanciful. It is someone appeared to me while I was in my bed. There aren't a lot of dreams that are like, whoa, I was on the beach that I'd vacationed on years ago and and and like there was this animal that was my dog but wasn't. No, no, no, it's just like, I woke up and I saw an angel and it told me about the future. So you're still in the same place you're really you really are.

• 12:29Michael Stevens?

  And you're you're talking to people or you're interacting with people right where you really are. And that's also how children dream when they're very, very young. And it's only later that we start to become disembodied observers in dreams that go all over the place. Does that tell us something about the the learning of a you?

• 12:51Michael Stevens?

  Of a thing that can be disembodied and go and control another organism or be something else or experience things from other people's perspectives, maybe.

• 13:01Hannah Fry?

  Maybe, but I mean, there's a reason why they call this the hard problem, right? Which is literally the name of it. What is, what is it like to experience the world from inside somebody else's body? We just, it's, it's, it's a hard problem because we have, it's, it's not falsifiable, right? There's no real way you can have ideas and theories, but, but ultimately we just for now, don't know, maybe it is. I mean, I think, I think you're probably right that actually if you just, if you just swapped over the taste, for example, just the signal for taste, it would be like, well, this is a trippy experience, but actually ultimately I don't think it would disintegrate your sense of self. But if you swapped over all of it, the whole lot, I don't know. I think maybe, I think there's a chance you'd completely disintegrate. There wouldn't be a you left.

• 13:46Michael Stevens?

  Right. And we have to ask, where do I begin? Do I begin at my sensory inputs or later on in the processing? Because if I had all of your taste nerves connected to the right places in my brain, I might feel projected weirdly across space. But would I be tasting things as you do or as I do? At what point does it become my experience?

• 14:12Hannah Fry?

  Would you suddenly absolutely despise olives and love chili, you know?

• 14:17Michael Stevens?

  Right. There's probably a food that you despise that I love.

• 14:19Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 14:20Michael Stevens?

  If I was able to tap into your nerve impulses coming from you eating that food you hate that I love, would I love it or hate it? It, I don't know. It depends, it depends where the liking, that judgment is happening. Is it being done by the cells in the tongue or by the cells in the brain? We know, for example, that like color blindness can happen in, in lots of places. It can happen in the brain or it can be because of the retina itself, because of the actual cone receptors in the retina. We know that, so if I, if I had my eyeballs replaced with a colorblind person's eyeballs and it was perfectly synced up nerve to nerve by some surgeon, I would not see those colors anymore. At first I thought, well, I don't know, my body might still. Like expect to see, you know, red and green divisions. And so it might fix it itself.

• 15:05Michael Stevens?

  But color blindness can also be induced and it can be non genetic. It can happen to someone who used to be able to see the colors. I didn't know this until this morning. I thought it was purely a genetic net, a genetic thing.

• 15:18Hannah Fry?

  I know you could hypnotize people into being colorblind. That is one thing I.

• 15:21Michael Stevens?

  I did not even know that, but you could also damage someone's brain. If they have swelling in the occipital lobe, in the back where vision is first processed, can lead to color blindness and so can medications. As it turns out, um, one of the, one of the chemicals in Viagra can lead to blue, yellow color blindness.

• 15:39Hannah Fry?

  No, permanently or as a temporary? I mean, you gain one thing, you lose another.

• 15:45Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, it's a trade off, you know, it's a good life lesson. I don't know if it's permanent or not, but I'll do some experiments later and I'll let you know what I find. There's also a, a medication used for treating tuberculosis called a thambutol. And that can lead to red, green color blindness. Vitamin A deficiency can cause color blindness. Certain UV exposure to your retinas can lead to it. So even if your brain has always been aware of red and green, blue and yellow and the differences, you can lose that ability later in life.

• 16:20Hannah Fry?

  I have a question about that. Does it happen in a way that people notice it? Or because, because the thing is, this is the, the thing that I find. It gives a real insight into the hard problem is that a lot of people who are colorblind do not know that they are colorblind. It's sometimes ever, but, but often until later in life. And that I think is very interesting. That I think really demonstrates. Because, because this is something that is testable. This is something that you can recreate so that we can understand how it looks for, for different people who, who, who, who suffer from, you know, um, red, green color blindness, for example.

• 17:01Hannah Fry?

  And it's so fundamentally different to the experience of, of the rest of us. And yet you can go through your life, having conversations with people the entire time and never know that you were viewing the world in a fundamentally different way.

• 17:15Michael Stevens?

  That's right. And yet you have access to yourself and your history. So people are aware that something's changed for them. I remember there's a YouTube video you can look up where a guy who has color blindness. Talks about how peanuts and peanut butter are extremely different colors to him. Whereas to us, it might change its hue of brown a little bit. But for him, they were able to show him peanuts and he's like, oh yeah, they're green. Or whatever. I forget exactly, but it was quite different than than than a regular vision experience. And then they put the peanuts in a blender and they tell him, tell us when it changes color. And they start spinning them up and to me, it just looks like the same color, but like fast. And at a certain point, he goes, okay, now it's different. Now it's, you know, now it's become

• 17:59Michael Stevens?

  a whole different color. And I'm like, what in the world?

• 18:02Hannah Fry?

  Wow.

• 18:03Michael Stevens?

  I was plugged into his eyeballs. Or, or I don't actually know what was causing, let's, let's assume it was the retina. Cause this was a lifelong thing for him. For me, I would experience the same thing. I would notice the color change as well because different signals were being sent to my brain. But I might, I might like fix it myself as my brain went, nah, nah, nah, it's supposed to be the same. I don't know if the illusion would persist. It might be like transplanting parts of my skin. It might go, ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is not helpful. This is not what we expected. Let's fix that. But I don't know, we'll have to, we'll have to do these experiments, but it's very hard to do things like this.

• 18:44Hannah Fry?

  My brother-in-law is colorblind and, um, and so for Christmas one year, I, I made him a T-shirt. Um, where I, I did one of the, you know, the colorblind tests where you have all the dots and it's one, one color against the other. So I made him one of those and in it, it says in a pattern that he couldn't read. F the colorblind.

• 19:04Michael Stevens?

  No kidding. Okay. So first of all, did, when did he find out?

• 19:11Hannah Fry?

  I think he knew, he knew straight away. I was messing with him. We have a, um, we have a, a sort of Christmas tradition in my family of where we get each other gifts. Um, that sort of play on the other people's absolute weaknesses. It's kind of, it's quite an Irish thing.

• 19:27Michael Stevens?

  I love this. Yeah.

• 19:29Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. He got me, he got me a, a T-shirt once, um, where I'd been.

• 19:36Hannah Fry?

  I'd done a TV programme where I had hosted Have I Got News For You in the UK. And during it, at one point, I'd done air quotes and he got, someone had made a joke about whether my, whether I really was a professor while I was hosting this programme. And so he got me a T-shirt of just a screenshot of me going air quotes and just saying professor in inverted commas as though, to really call my credibility into question. So, you know, it's sort of a, it's a, it's a running thing.

• 20:05Michael Stevens?

  It's a very great tradition. I'd love to start one of those, but this, this colourblind shirt, the F the colourblind shirt, that is very similar to the shirt that's coming in the Summer Curiosity box.

• 20:16Hannah Fry?

  Oh, is it? Go on.

• 20:17Michael Stevens?

  Instead of making fun of the colourblind, which I do not support, it makes fun of dogs. And so the shirt is red. It's a red T-shirt and in white it says, no bones in here. Because of course, dogs really like bones. And if you, if a dog knew that I was full of bones, they might want to play with them. So it says in white letters, no bones in here.

• 20:40Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 20:41Michael Stevens?

  So any dog sees me, they know this guy doesn't have any bones in him. I'm not going to mess with them. But then in green letters underneath, it says, JK, I'm actually full of bones. Now, dogs have a red, green colourblindness, meaning that they won't see that part, but humans will. So I'll be telling the truth to humans, who I want to know that I have a skeleton. But to the dogs, I'll be safe.

• 21:08Hannah Fry?

  Yours, yours is a much more PC version of, or much more human centric version.

• 21:13Michael Stevens?

  It's a human centric one, yes.

• 21:15Hannah Fry?

  To be clear, I'm not anti colourblind people, just, you know, sometimes anti my brother-in-law.

• 21:19Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. All right. So answering that question, MD, I think went many directions you might not have expected, but I appreciate it.

• 21:29Hannah Fry?

  It did, but it's a really interesting question and we spent 20 minutes on the first question.

• 21:33Michael Stevens?

  That's how it should be.

• 21:34Hannah Fry?

  It should be, shouldn't it? Okay, all right. Here's, here's another question. This one's from Matthew. Matthew asks, hey, what's the deal with quantum spin? By the way, Matthew, absolutely love that you started your question with, hey, I'm here for it. What the hell is it? Why are people talking about it? And if it is just a metaphor, what is it a metaphor for? Thank you. That's one of my favourite messages ever. Okay, I have done, I'll be honest with you. And before this morning, I was quite rusty on quantum, quantum spin. It's been a while, I'll be honest. Um. Because you do, people, people use this phrase, it gets thrown around and in your head, I think it conjures up a mental image of a, of a ball that's literally spinning.

• 22:14Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 22:15Hannah Fry?

  It is absolutely not like that at all. Um. I sort of think in a way it shouldn't be called spin because, because the analogy only works really on one level. We're not talking about physical spin here. Um. It's more like a, a property of the particle that's like mass or electric charge, right? Just in the same ways you can't take away the mass of a, of an electron. You can't take away its spin either. It's, it's, it's like a characteristic of it. Um. But the reason why they've used the word spin is because it, it's all around how the particle behaves.

• 22:54Hannah Fry?

  And it's got this similarities to angular momentum, right? It's a, it's a, a quantity that gets conserved essentially.

• 23:01Michael Stevens?

  Can I just interrupt and say my favorite quote about this? I don't know who it came from, but it shows up all the time. It's this definition of, of quantum spin. So here's the quote. The spin of an electron is like a spinning ball, except that it's not spinning and there is no ball.

• 23:20Michael Stevens?

  So it is metaphor. It's, it's important to remember that when people talk about spin. It is a property

• 23:27Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 23:27Michael Stevens?

  of particles.

• 23:29Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 23:29Michael Stevens?

  But you gotta just realize there's no actual spinning ball there.

• 23:34Hannah Fry?

  There's no spinning ball there. No. Um. Unless there is a way, there is a way to get them to spin, to physically spin. The, the thing is, is that you have to remember that like electrons in particular, for example, it's like a teeny tiny little bar magnet, right? And it has this magnetic field that exists around it. And it can align with other magnetic fields that you, that you, that you impose upon it. So, um, for example, let's, you know, let's say that I've got an electric field and I have a really heavy magnet, right? Really like meaty magnet. Uh, and I put the, the, the, the electric, the electric.

• 24:15Hannah Fry?

  Field. Do you know why? I get so scared because the exact words that you use in this situation, right, field, for example, you have to be so careful to get the exact one right because otherwise, I mean, I'm literally looking at the Department for Theoretical Physics of Cambridge University out of my window.

• 24:32Michael Stevens?

  I'm over.

• 24:33Hannah Fry?

  I can feel the judgment, the war of judgment of all of those guys. So I'm going to be really careful and if I make mistakes, you can tell me in the comments. Okay. So, all right, if you put an electron into a magnetic field, then that electron can align itself with that field. It can either spin up or it can spin down essentially. That direction is a physical, genuine direction. Okay. But it only has two states. It doesn't, it doesn't like float around. It doesn't rotate like a bar magnet does or like a compass would. It's sort of, it's two states only, right? It kind of switches between, it can flip between them, jump between them. And so this is one way that you can actually make an electron spin.

• 25:17Hannah Fry?

  Because if you are careful and you slowly rotate, slowly, your magnetic field, so that you have your electrons aligning with it, you can effectively rotate an electron, right? But that's, that's the only way that you can do it.

• 25:32Michael Stevens?

  And that's different than the property of spin that we assign to particles. Yeah.

• 25:36Hannah Fry?

  Exactly. But this is one of the ways that they get, that, that, that quantum computers work, basically, is by altering, altering the magnetic field in order to, to, to impose certain characteristics on the quantum particles. And, but the numbers that are associated with spin, they sort of do make sense when it comes to rotation.

• 25:57Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 25:58Hannah Fry?

  The thing is, is that spin really does indicate how weird quantum particles are. Because if you have a spin one particle, then if you, if you rotate it 360 degrees, it returns to the same state. You, Michael, are a spin one particle.

• 26:11Michael Stevens?

  Thank you for noticing.

• 26:12Hannah Fry?

  It's a slightly larger version, right, than, than one might expect to the quantum realm. Um, a spin half particle, right, like an electron. Uh, see if you can spot this, little bit weirder. If you rotate it three hundred and sixty degrees, it doesn't go back to the same point. You have to rotate it twice, you have to rotate it seven hundred and twenty degrees for it to return to where it started.

• 26:35Michael Stevens?

  Weird.

• 26:35Hannah Fry?

  Which is, I mean, that, yes, weird it is. This is one of the reasons why Feynman says, um, anyone who says they understand quantum mechanics doesn't understand quantum mechanics.

• 26:47Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, well, it's very non-intuitive.

• 26:49Hannah Fry?

  It's very non-intuitive.

• 26:51Michael Stevens?

  So we've got all these metaphors, we use words like spin. And yet it's just kind of a thing that we may never truly understand. That, that, that said, do we really know what gravity is? Like, we experience it so often, it's easy for us to go, oh, yeah, I get it, gravity. But really, like, what's happening?

• 27:11Hannah Fry?

  This is absolutely one of the reasons why people say that the, the fundamental language of the universe is mathematics, because it becomes so difficult to translate these concepts into, into words and analogies, and you lose something in the telling. It's, it's all of this stuff that we're describing here essentially comes out from the structure of an equation and the way that different things relate to one, one another. So, yeah, there we go. I think at some point, I know this is now the second of these questions that we've said this about, um, we've got sort of a nested system here where every question we ask, uh, every question we answer reveals itself into a whole new episode, uh, which includes more questions and therefore more episodes.

• 27:55Hannah Fry?

  Um, it's sort of exponential growth, the rest of science, that's, um, that's kind of what we're going for here. Uh, but I think at some point we will do something on the very weird nature of quantum and the strangeness that happens when it comes to rotating objects. Because actually, I mean, there is quite a, quite a nice little puzzle, I guess, that we could set people be- between now and when we do a full episode on this, Michael, right?

• 28:18Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:19Hannah Fry?

  Go on, you do it.

• 28:20Michael Stevens?

  That's right, here's the puzzle. I want you to, to put out your hand with your palm facing down. And I want you to then rotate your hand such that your palm is up without rotating your arm or wrist. So no rotations allowed, but you can move your hand and you can bend your elbow.

• 28:40Hannah Fry?

  You start off with your palm facing down and your hand flapped and you need to get your thumb pointing in the air without rotating your wrist.

• 28:50Michael Stevens?

  And you can get your thumb to point the other way. So your palm is facing up. So you're turning your hand all the way over, but you're not going to do it with a rotation. You're going to do it just by moving through space. Here's a clue, the kind of space you want it to move around might be spherical.

• 29:05Hannah Fry?

  Certainly might be. Okay, should we do one more question?

• 29:08Michael Stevens?

  Let's do one more question. Okay, here's one from Sebastian. Hello, you mentioned that there's a fair amount of empty space inside atoms. If we could remove all that space, how small would we all end up being? Yes, this is a classic, the empty spaceness of things. I think it's wrong to think about the universe as being made of like tiny, tiny, hard billiard balls called particles and atoms that you could scrunch together. I mean, we get into things that small. There are particle-type behaviors and there's wave-type behaviors. There are, you know, aberrations in fields and that's really what an electron is. However, we do know that there are ways to make things

• 29:51Michael Stevens?

  much more dense. Obviously, a black hole has a density that's so, so large, its physical size is zero. It's a singularity. But let's, let's avoid that because then everything's boring. I could, I could smash the whole universe into a singularity and now it has no size. Ha ha, wow, that's small. Look at a neutron star. A neutron star is super, super dense. It's not dense enough to collapse into a singularity, but it's very dense. It's so dense that a cubic meter of neutron star weighs 10 to the 18 kilograms. What is that? That's like 10 trillion trillion kilograms.

• 30:29Hannah Fry?

  The one that I always remember is that a teaspoon of a neutron star weighs more than the Titanic.

• 30:34Michael Stevens?

  A teaspoon of neutron star would weigh about 10 million tons. Okay?

• 30:39Hannah Fry?

  It's a lot.

• 30:40Michael Stevens?

  Let's just take that as our, as our like goal here. Neutron stars are dense, meaning there's just a lot less empty space in between the matter. It is so close together. So if we could take all the matter in the entire observable universe and squish it all together as densely as a neutron star is packed, how large would this thing be? Well, I'll tell you, the math was done by Reddit user Tomer Latong, Tomer Lu Tong, okay? And as it turns out, and I checked this math by the way, the entire universe, all of its matter squeezed tightly together, as tight as a neutron star is packed, would take up

• 31:24Michael Stevens?

  a sphere about 2.9 times 10 to the 11 meters across, which is a little bigger than the orbit of Mars. That's big, but it's also way small. For the entire universe, you could fit all the matter that everything we can see is made of into a ball that's just as wide across as Mars's orbit. Everything.

• 31:47Hannah Fry?

  That's insane.

• 31:48Michael Stevens?

  Now, if you look up these kind of facts, one that you'll find all the time, especially on Facebook, is the classic, if you did that to a human, or rather, if you got rid of the empty space in a human, the whole human body would fit into a sugar cube. But using the neutron star math, I get something very different. I get that an 80 kilogram human would only be a cube two micrometers on a side.

• 32:12Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 32:13Michael Stevens?

  Much, much smaller, two millionths of a centimeter.

• 32:16Hannah Fry?

  I mean, less than a grain of sugar, as opposed to a whole sugar cube.

• 32:21Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, like a little tiny crystal of sugar. And that seems more correct to me. So basically, that's how small you'd have to be to be a neutron star. To be a black hole, you'd have to be even smaller, much, much smaller still.

• 32:35Hannah Fry?

  Amazing. Basically, not only do you have spin of one, Michael, you're also a whole lot of nothing.

• 32:41Michael Stevens?

  I'm a whole lot of nothing. I'm mainly nothing. I'm very diffuse. The matter in my body could be a lot tighter, could all get closer, but they don't want to, and I'm glad for that because it allows me to, you know... Be be be like this.

• 32:57Hannah Fry?

  I'm glad for that, too. It does make you think, though, you know, sort of seems a bit of a shame that things are kind of fixed to the size they were because if you just had like a tiny bit more empty space or a tiny bit less empty space, you could you could at will change the size of your body from like a three foot tall human, you know, and sometimes I think it would be quite useful to be like poly pocket sized.

• 33:20Michael Stevens?

  But you would still weigh the same amount.

• 33:22Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, and you wouldn't be anywhere near the density of a neutron star if you're poly pocket sized.

• 33:26Michael Stevens?

  Oh, no.

• 33:27Hannah Fry?

  But it means you could go on a long haul flight, get the cheapest possible seat, and it would be like living in a luxury villa.

• 33:32Michael Stevens?

  Right, it would still take the same amount of fuel to fly you from point A to point B, but you'd have so much more room.

• 33:38Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, petition for scientists to start working on that immediately. I think that's that's where I'm at. Okay, let's take a break. And then when we come back, I've got my little story for you.

• 33:48Michael Stevens?

  All right.

• 33:57Speaker 03

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• 34:35Hannah Fry?

  Welcome back, Michael. Frankly, I'm astonished that it's taken me this long to tell you about one of the most extraordinary coincidences that has ever happened.

• 34:42Michael Stevens?

  Oh, you've hinted at this a few times, but you've never told me the story.

• 34:46Hannah Fry?

  Okay, so in around 2017, 2018, I was working just as a mathematician at UCL. When you do mathematical modeling, one of the the things that a lot of people spend time making mathematical models of is epidemics is the spread of disease, right? Because it's it's a dynamical system. It's something that changes over time, something that is you can actually write the equations for it incredibly simply. You can teach them in an undergraduate course, and yet you can also make the models.

• 35:19Hannah Fry?

  Incredibly sophisticated and complicated, so much so that there are people whose entire careers have been in the study of the spread of epidemics. The problem was at the time, the, the, the kind of cutting edge research in the UK, this is like twenty seven, twenty eighteen, right? The cutting edge research in the UK had to be based on data. By the way, I should just add, just a quick reminder for everybody, this is two years before the actual pandemic, right? And I sort of think that the, the date of twenty twenty is probably seared into the minds of everybody, but, but we're talking before, before the, the, the actual pandemic. The data that everybody was using at that point was essentially a paper survey that had been conducted some twenty years earlier, that essentially said to a thousand people

• 36:02Hannah Fry?

  in the UK, hey, um, how many people do you reckon you were in contact with last week? Okay, so it was like, people had to recall where they'd been, they had to kind of create a record based on memory, and it was only a thousand people, and it was by that point, you know, nearly twenty years old. Um, and so, all of the academics, all of the mathematicians knew that if another pandemic were ever to come, wherever to hit, you know, anything like the Spanish flu epidemic that had, had killed, you know, more than a hundred million people around the world, um, the century before, if anything like that were to happen again, we were sort of woefully underprepared for what we actually needed.

• 36:43Hannah Fry?

  So what we decided to do, so we decided to set up this massive citizen science experiment, where we, uh, created an app that we, um, got a hundred thousand people to download.

• 36:56Michael Stevens?

  Oh, wow.

• 36:57Hannah Fry?

  And the app, like, would track people, and as they moved around, and how they came into contact with other people.

• 37:03Michael Stevens?

  Other people who had the app?

• 37:05Hannah Fry?

  Other people who had the app, yeah.

• 37:06Michael Stevens?

  Right, okay.

• 37:07Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, so we had a hundred thousand people all over the country, basically playing this massive game of let's have a pretend pandemic that we spread out across everywhere.

• 37:16Michael Stevens?

  Oh, whoa, okay, so, so the app is like spreading a little digital innocuous virus.

• 37:24Hannah Fry?

  Exactly.

• 37:25Michael Stevens?

  And you can mathematically model this beyond even the hundred thousand people to the whole population.

• 37:30Hannah Fry?

  So then, essentially, we got, we got three things from it, right? So we got this, this really, really detailed simulation of a pandemic.

• 37:40Hannah Fry?

  Um. We also got really, really, really detailed data on real people wandering around their lives and how they were moving around and where they were moving to. And we asked people questions on this app about how many people did you talk to today and that kind of thing. It's unbelievably rich dataset. And then the third thing, because this was like, we wanted to make it as big as possible, we made a big BBC programme about it, made a big documentary about it. Okay. So this programme was aired in in twenty eighteen and it was like this very big deal on the BBC. Because we were doing this big TV stunt, we needed somewhere to start our pretend virus, right? We needed somewhere to start our pretend pandemics and we needed somebody to start it. So what we did is we kind of looked at a map of the

• 38:25Hannah Fry?

  UK and we were like, right, where's it most likely to start? If we get another pandemic, where's it most likely to start? And we were like, right, it's probably going to be somewhere in the southeast of the UK, probably a commuter town of London where there's, you know, millions and millions of people who live. You sort of want somewhere that is, you know, near to the main airports, maybe between Gatwick and Gatwick and Heathrow, maybe somewhere that's, you know, nearer to the south coast, so it could potentially have come up through that way. Yep. So we picked this little town of Hazlemead in Surrey and it's sort of like the Goldilocks town, right? It's it's not too big, it's not too small, it's close to all the airports and so on. It's got this really beautiful high street, it's got this really strong sense of community. It's basically exactly the sort of place that you would want to destroy with an imaginary pandemic, you know? Right, right.

• 39:09Hannah Fry?

  That kind of place. So so the people who were in Hazlemead, they would get this special version of this app that would have this incredibly fine-grained detail. So everywhere else it was, you know, within, I think we did a hundred metres square, the app would collect your data of where you were within a hundred metres square. But in Hazlemead in Surrey, it was like extremely, extremely detailed. So we set off this whole thing, we used the health centre in Hazlemead, it was all like, you know, this this big thing. And watching the programme back, right, knowing what went on to happen, we are way too gleeful. We are way too gleeful about the fact that this virus is spreading. It was sort of, maybe not a joke, but it was like, everyone thought it was very fun and very funny, you know?

• 39:54Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:55Hannah Fry?

  And we have all of these amazing simulations and I'll send these across.

• 39:58Michael Stevens?

  All right, I'm looking at a very simplified overhead map of a street. There's grey shapes that look like buildings and there are grey lines that look like roads. One of the buildings has been labelled Gem.

• 40:12Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 40:13Michael Stevens?

  And this is day one at ten twenty.

• 40:16Hannah Fry?

  All right, so what you're looking at here, if you were only looking at it, what you're looking at here is, this red dot is me and it's my location. And it's what I'm doing as I'm wandering around in Hazlemere that day. Now, unbeknownst to me, I walked past somebody who also was running the app. And so I essentially spread the virus on to them.

• 40:36Michael Stevens?

  So what, you were patient zero?

• 40:38Hannah Fry?

  I was patient zero, yeah. Although that's quite a controversial phrase, by the way, that the idea of calling someone patient zero, because it sort of, it almost implies that there's some kind of blame that can be laid at that individual's door.

• 40:49Michael Stevens?

  I understand that, but the blame in this case is on you.

• 40:53Hannah Fry?

  It is on me, absolutely.

• 40:54Michael Stevens?

  High design of the experiment. Did you guys name this virus?

• 40:59Hannah Fry?

  No, we just called it the BBC pandemic. Okay, so we have all these visualisations of exactly what happened about how this virus ended up spreading. What was really interesting was that people who were service workers, so people who were, there's somebody who worked in a pharmacy, for instance, who ended up being a super spreader in our virus, right? Exactly as you would see going on to be mirrored later on in the real thing. And we got this incredibly rich detail of, you know, people from Hazlemere not knowing each other, not realising they're on the same train platform in London, you know, many, many miles away, and then passing the virus on from one to another. Just this really, really rich simulation.

• 41:39Hannah Fry?

  We also then did some calculations and then, based on our model, we calculated if there were no restrictions, right? If you didn't close any schools, if you didn't do anything at all. If a pandemic were to hit the UK, around 886,000 people could potentially lose their lives. Okay, so it sort of had this very big ending to it. Anyway, less than two years later, obviously, the real pandemic hit. The thing is, I think to a lot of the world, it was a real shock. But I think to epidemiologists who were studying this, they were sort of shouting from the rooftops that actually it was that something like this was inevitable. You'd already had SARS and MERS over in Asia. The thing about COVID was that it had these

• 42:24Hannah Fry?

  particular characteristics that meant that it spread so fast without us being able to keep hold of it. When the pandemic finally hit in the UK, it turned out that all of the data that we'd collected for this TV programme formed the basis of the government models. So on the UK government modelling, if you go on the kind of official websites, you will see all of this data referenced that we had collected. It ended up being absolutely fundamental to the way that we modelled.

• 42:52Michael Stevens?

  Wow.

• 42:53Hannah Fry?

  Right. But also, the predictions that we'd made with this kind of quite crude TV model that we had made, that sort of 880,000 people would end up losing their lives if there were no interventions whatsoever. NERTAG, which is one of the government groups that was assigned with making decisions, internal minutes from the governments, this is the new and emerging respiratory virus threats advisory group, by the way.

• 43:21Michael Stevens?

  That's what NERTS stood for. Okay.

• 43:23Hannah Fry?

  Their early estimates actually ended up being almost exactly the same numbers that we had come up with in the TV programme. We said 886, they said 833. And there is, I think, some evidence that had there been no interventions whatsoever, the numbers could potentially have got up that high. In the end, it was far lower. It was, you know, it's difficult to say exactly whether people died with or of COVID, but it's more like in the hundred thousands in the UK. So, I mean, that was one thing already, was that our sort of crude telly model had ended up being this really accurate prediction. Also, that our data ended up being incredibly useful.

• 44:01Hannah Fry?

  But the strangest coincidence of all was that in February 2020, there were a few cases in the UK where people had caught COVID abroad. But the very first case of domestic transmission of COVID in the entire UK was in Hazelmere in Surrey.

• 44:22Michael Stevens?

  Wow.

• 44:24Hannah Fry?

  At the exact same medical centre that we had done all of our filming. The chances of that, I mean, are astronomically tiny.

• 44:33Michael Stevens?

  Well, I mean, are they? Or did you guys just do a really good job of picking where an initial domestic case would happen? Near the airports?

• 44:42Hannah Fry?

  Right, near the ports, near London. So it's difficult to say because what I will add is that as a result of all of this, there were certain groups of the internet, of course, who were really nervous around this time, right? And not just of the internet, of people who were extremely anxious and who just couldn't quite believe that nobody was in charge, that nobody had planned this. And what had happened, that strange coincidence of us doing this so soon before and at the same medical centre, it really felt like it was compelling evidence that what we were doing was running a trial on behalf of the government who were doing this big conspiracy. So it became known as the BBC Scamdemic.

• 45:25Michael Stevens?

  Because it was just so coincidental.

• 45:27Hannah Fry?

  It was just so coincidental. And I went back through all of my notes and tried to work out exactly at what point that justification for it's near airports, it's near this, it's near this, it's near this, ended up coming in, was I just doing sort of a post hoc rationalisation of it all? And it's true that all of those things did contribute to us choosing that place. But actually, overall, the real reason why we chose Hazelmere in Surrey was because the producer's gran lived there and so we had free overnight accommodation.

• 45:58Michael Stevens?

  Wow, so it wasn't just great science that led you to that, it was just convenient?

• 46:05Hannah Fry?

  It was also just convenient.

• 46:07Michael Stevens?

  Coincidentally, that you happened to have basically predicted.

• 46:12Michael Stevens?

  What would happen? And of course, yeah, people will get suspicious about coincidences.

• 46:17Hannah Fry?

  Right. So that that sort of program was out there. There were a lot of people who were kind of very angry with us for a little while. But as COVID kind of progressed, the other program that I did with the BBC, I think, you know, is a direct consequence of this, was a program called Unvaccinated, which I think I've mentioned briefly on this show before. So the kind of concept of Unvaccinated was that, of course, there were all these people who were really nervous and anxious about being vaccinated. And so what the BBC decided to do was they they put seven people in house, seven vaccine skeptics in house, and would have me and a group of experts to go in and speak to them across the course

• 47:00Hannah Fry?

  of a week to understand what their nervousness was around. And at the end of the week, they would be given the opportunity to be vaccinated if they wanted to be. And the thing about that week, I've actually been writing about this quite a lot recently because I think I'm going to include it in a book that I'm that I'm writing. But I think that looking back at the whole time of COVID, I mean, I think all of us lost our minds, first of all. I think all of us were doing extremely crazy things. But I actually end up looking back much more sympathetic to the arguments of those anti-vaxxers in that show than I perhaps was at the time, or that the country was at the time. I don't know. I just just now that some time has passed, I'm just reflecting on it very differently. So for example, allow me to give you kind of illustrate. There was one person in that show who was called Mark,

• 47:45Hannah Fry?

  who was a who was a nurse who worked for the NHS. And his background, he had had his own sort of medical story when he was younger, where he'd been put on some medication without his consent, essentially against his will. And that had really sort of changed the way that he viewed the fundamental responsibility of of medical interventions. And he was saying that in a hospital, if you have somebody who comes in who has gangrene on their leg, or whatever it might be, and they refuse treatment, as hard as it might be to watch that person die and their choice to To be the result of their their death. In Western society, we have this this fundamental idea of informed consent.

• 48:30Hannah Fry?

  And informed consent is only informed consent if the ability to refuse is true and genuine. So his justification for not wanting to get the Covid vaccine was that he just really believed in informed consent. And so his decision not to get the vaccine was sort of him making this philosophical stand for what he believed to be right. And actually, I kind of agree with that, you know, I kind of don't have a problem with that argument at all. There's sort of nothing, I mean, I made a different choice, sure, but as in I was vaccinated. But I think that actually that's a really sound, logical argument. I I kind of agree with it.

• 49:11Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, it's it's principled and it's not based on like in America, there was so much politicization of the whole thing that that really would push people in one way or the other, regardless of of any kind of studies or facts or reasoning. But instead, it was a almost like a sport. It was my team against yours. And even if it's a penalty on my side, I'm not going to see it. And so it was it was very frustrating and and um. It's it's it's better now to look back. And I think we can see a little more objectively about what we said, what we tried to do and why.

• 49:51Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely. There was one one other girl, uh, one other woman, actually, who was who was called Chanel. Um, and she was this, uh, she was pregnant. She was just this absolutely wonderful woman, like I would happily go, you know, go out for dinner with her. She was, I really enjoyed her company. She uh was, she lived in Lambeth in South London and her and her partner are both both black British. And she said some things that I that really, even at the time, I it really sort of changed my view of things. Um, for starters, she was pregnant. She would just really cared about her unborn baby, of course. And just didn't feel confident enough that the evidence was there that it wouldn't

• 50:36Hannah Fry?

  harm her unborn child. She just wanted, it was too quick for her. She just, you know, regardless of what statistics you threw at her, she just wasn't swayed by the numbers at all, which I can completely understand that this emotional idea. But she also said something, which was that when you go to a vaccine centre, especially in, you know, somewhere like South London, you go into a vaccine centre and you have people who are dressed up with clipboards and plastic aprons and visors and there's this perspex screening between people and everyone's getting moved around and everyone's sort of feeling very nervous. And she said that going into that environment just reminds her of going into,

• 51:15Hannah Fry?

  of going to visit someone in prison. And she was sort of saying, why would I want to put myself in that environment voluntarily when it feels so emotionally triggering for me? And I really, I think now that time has progressed on that point, I just, I really agree with her, actually. I, I, I really think that she's, she's making a really profound and important point there, which is that actually, nobody makes decisions based on numbers. Like fundamentally, every decision is an emotional one. And I think that it was our team, I guess, the science team's mistake and arrogance not to recognise that these were things that were important to people too.

• 51:56Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, it, it's amazing how complicated our decisions get once you start considering all of the emotional sides of it. And you're right. I think that if a vaccine is only available in a prison-like setup, people will have a very different reaction than if it's available in a store or if it's mailed for free to them. Um, like, I think especially in America, people trust companies more than they do the government. And so if, if all the companies that had their vaccines were trying to put together the funniest commercial on TV about it and do the best deal and the coolest packaging and offering deals, then I think people would have felt a lot more trusting.

• 52:39Michael Stevens?

  Because I guess they feel like if a company does something wrong, you can sue the company. But if the government does something wrong, they're already the top. There isn't a super government you can go to. And so, you know, you can compare this to things like weed killers that might be really dangerous to our healths. But because it's sold at the store and its package looks so cool, it's like, all right. I don't know, I'm just bringing that up as one little example of of the millions of different things that weigh in our in our decisions that are not about numbers and probabilities.

• 53:09Hannah Fry?

  A lot of it actually is about trust, I think. Trust and confidence in institutions. And I think that I think there's definitely been quite a long period of time where nobody wanted to think about the pandemic at all because it was sort of the collective trauma was so difficult. And I think that that now we're sort of slightly out the other side of it. Well, we are at the other side of the pandemic overall. But but I think now that a little bit of time has passed, I think that I'm doing the job of looking back and sort of looking at my own biases at the time and looking at the the ways that I acted and felt and thought. And just trying to, I think,

• 53:50Hannah Fry?

  assess them critically and work out what I what I should have done differently. And I think that program, that unvaccinated program was one of them.

• 53:58Michael Stevens?

  So how many people on unvaccinated wound up changing their minds?

• 54:03Hannah Fry?

  I should have known this from the beginning, but of course it was zero because because you cannot just pour statistics on people.

• 54:13Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 54:13Hannah Fry?

  And then expect them to change their worldview because their worldview, you know what? This goes right back to what we were talking in the very, how we were speaking at the very start. Your lived experience in your body with your sensory inputs and your backstory and your emotional history is completely and totally unique to you. And trying to influence it from the outside, especially by shouting statistics at people is just not something that is ever going to work.

• 54:39Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, in fact, it sometimes does the opposite. It leads to reactance, psychological reactance, where people are more convinced of what they already believed because of all the evidence you're giving them against their belief.

• 54:53Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 54:54Michael Stevens?

  So so as you reflect, I mean, I'll have to read this in your book, by the way.

• 54:59Hannah Fry?

  I haven't even finished it and I'm already pitching it. Yeah.

• 55:02Michael Stevens?

  What would you have done different? Or what are your, what are your thoughts at the moment around what could have been done differently? Especially when we're talking about not just someone's personal decision, but a decision that will affect other people. And you're trying to, to, to reach them about your concerns. Or maybe, maybe the point is that changing people's minds is just not, you give, you give them the information and then we have to let people be who they are.

• 55:29Hannah Fry?

  Honestly, I think that's it. I think actually the job of an institution, and I mean an institution like the BBC here as much as the government. But, but I, I think the job of an institution is to inform rather than persuade. I think one of the things that happened during the last pandemic was that people, I mean, I think they essentially suffered from something called white hat bias, which is where people were so convinced that what they were doing was the right thing, the good thing, that they were willing to use sort of tactics of deception ultimately, of, of talking down the risks, of talking up the benefits,

• 56:12Hannah Fry?

  of pretending things had no uncertainty, when actually really there was a lot of stuff that we still didn't know. And I, I know people did it for good reason, in order to try and persuade, to persuade others, in order to try and affect change and to, I mean, essentially, you know, impact on behavior, on the way that people behave. But I think that actually in the long run, that ends up destroying and eroding trust more than it benefits in the short term. I think that's where I am right now. Ask me again when the next pandemic hits though, I might change my mind again all the, all the way around.

• 56:46Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, well, I, I will.

• 56:48Hannah Fry?

  What was your take on it?

• 56:49Michael Stevens?

  Well, I've thought, I've thought a lot about that difference, the difference between informing and persuading. I think that, yeah, persuasion just backfires so often that you've got to inform really objectively and sometimes even in, in, in totally new ways. Like I'm thinking about how in the early days of Vsauce, I wanted to talk about evolution. But you know, there are a lot of people who see evolution as a challenge to their religious beliefs. And so I just decided, you know what, I'm not going to use the word evolution. I'm just gonna talk about how successful traits organisms that that live long lives and have a lot of kids and take care of those kids well, share their traits with their kids.

• 57:34Michael Stevens?

  And suddenly you've got more of that kind of creature. And I remember walking into a mall in New York and a security guard was like, oh, I love that video. We actually watch it in church because have I told this story before?

• 57:48Hannah Fry?

  No.

• 57:49Michael Stevens?

  And he said, yeah, we watched that video in my church's small group because it just kind of shows us the the beauty of creation. And I was like, oh, thanks, man. And then, like, literally a few days later, Richard Dawkins tweeted about my video, recommending that people watch it. And I was like, see, all I did is inform people of a thing that happens, but I chose the word to allow people to not bring up their their sort of deeper opinions for or against what I was saying. I just said, look, here's the idea. And there's another YouTuber named CGP Gray. I think he said this, but I've said it so many times since that he's starting to question whether he ever said it.

• 58:34Michael Stevens?

  But I said, you need to overestimate how intelligent your audience is. People are much smarter than we give them credit for, but you need to underestimate their vocabularies. When you inform people, you need to make sure that you're careful about how you do it, because you really, it's really hard to inform without persuading one way or the other, because that's just the way language works. So it's always going to be a difficult problem. And I think, especially in an emergency situation, and especially when politics gets involved, the best we can hope for is just, I don't, I don't know, I want to say respect or something,

• 59:16Michael Stevens?

  but it's, it just seems like such a platitude. It seems like such a, well, look, if we just do everything with love. It's like.

• 59:24Hannah Fry?

  But the thing is, it's like, I don't know, sometimes the platitudes actually are also the most profound thoughts that there are. I think it's about humility. I think it's, I think it's about humility, like intellectual humility, but also sort of, I don't know, like honesty in the, in the boundaries of your own knowledge and.

• 59:43Hannah Fry?

  Ability to tell a lot of people what to do.

• 59:45Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, that's right. I think I think humility is the key word because when you come from a place of humility, you're allowing others to be themselves and make their own decisions. And I think they make better decisions that way than they do when they feel like they are having their own autonomy and identities challenged and and put down.

• 1:00:08Hannah Fry?

  Because this is it, because making your own decision doesn't actually always mean being selfish. Making your own decision to serve the greater good. Actually, I think most people do. Most people want to serve the greater good. Um, yeah, I I think that's important, right? We're not just saying, hey, why doesn't everyone just be selfish? That's not what we're saying, right? People, lots of people got vaccines and still get vaccines. Uh, you know, particularly for for things like measles in order to help sort of, you know, herd immunity to to to to help people who are not able to get a vaccine. That's a very good and useful um, argument to to take. A lot of people will do it for that that reason and that, you know, the that that reason being the dominant one.

• 1:00:51Michael Stevens?

  I mean, it's hard to say anything super definitive about like, here's what we've learned and here's exactly how we should act the next time there is a pandemic or some sort of global problem, right? Like aliens arrive and should we surrender to them or not? How do we, how do we persuade people to do the right thing? I think that ultimately, though, you're right. Sometimes platitudes are the best pieces of advice. There's a reason they are cliches.

• 1:01:20Hannah Fry?

  Reason they cliches. There really is. There really is.

• 1:01:24Michael Stevens?

  Being humble, being understanding and coming from a place of love, snooze alert, boring, but you know what? That might be the answer.

• 1:01:30Hannah Fry?

  It might actually just be.

• 1:01:32Michael Stevens?

  I think I even saw a tweet once and I I think about this a lot. This guy said something like, man, what if it turns out that like the meaning of life is just to like love each other? That would be so cringe and yet I'm afraid it might be true.

• 1:01:45Hannah Fry?

  I think I'm going to be thinking about that quite a lot as well.

• 1:01:47Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Hannah Fry?

  So anyway, listeners, viewers, love each other. Love us. We love you.

• 1:01:55Hannah Fry?

  As ever, we will be back next week with our main episode. And do send us your questions. We love to read them. [email protected].

• 1:02:07Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, send them in and stay humble, stay curious, and we'll see you next time.

• 1:02:11Hannah Fry?

  Bye bye.

• 1:02:29Speaker 04

  There we are getting a statement from Number 10 on that flight with 350 passengers on board.

• 1:02:38Speaker 05

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 1:02:46Speaker 06

  We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian. Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 1:02:54Speaker 05

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people. Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

• 1:03:10Speaker 07

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 1:03:13Speaker 05

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, and disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO. A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia. Yes.

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