Why Do We Like Staring Into Fire?

What is fire, and why does watching it hold our attention in a different way from scrolling on your phone? Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens start with the science of a flame: why it glows, what its different colours reveal, and why fire is a series of chemical reactions rather than a single substance. Then they travel back to a time before wildfires could burn on Earth, and ask how early humans learned to use and make it. Could keeping a fire alive have helped our ancestors learn to plan and cooperate? And what happens when we replace the quiet pull of a hearth with the endless pull of a phone? From candle flames to early human history and the psychology of attention, this is the story of fire, the space it occupies in our history and lives. ------------------- For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/our-research/rest-is-science 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 Chief Digital Officer: 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.

• 0:01Hannah Fry?

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

• 0:02Michael Stevens?

  And I am Michael Stevens. Today, I want to talk about fire.

• 0:07Hannah Fry?

  Yes, please.

• 0:08Michael Stevens?

  Okay, a lot of people ask, what is fire? And today, I'm going to argue that it's not a gas. It's not a plasma. It's not a liquid. Fire is the great grandmother of social media.

• 0:24Hannah Fry?

  Michael, you are genuinely one of the best people on earth.

• 0:29Michael Stevens?

  Wait until you listen to the episode before you make any kind of judgment.

• 0:34Hannah Fry?

  All right, deal.

• 0:39Michael Stevens?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 0:42Hannah Fry?

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

• 0:52Michael Stevens?

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

• 1:01Hannah Fry?

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

• 1:15Michael Stevens?

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

• 1:26Hannah Fry?

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

• 1:39Speaker 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.

• 2:10Michael Stevens?

  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 require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 2:41Michael Stevens?

  I mean, let's just begin with like what fire is. I've made a lot of shorts about fire, and this is my chance to really clarify, solidify, and calcify my stance on fire. First of all, what would you say fire is? Like, your daughter asks you, one of your daughters asks, what is fire? Is it a gas? Is it electricity?

• 3:04Hannah Fry?

  No, I mean, I think it's the energy given off by a chemical reaction, essentially.

• 3:09Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, it's a chemical reaction. So it isn't like one thing, the way gold is one thing. It's one kind of atom. Fire is a whole lot of stuff going on. And what exactly is in it depends on what's burning. So that's kind of the key. I think asking what is fire is like asking what is...

• 3:32Hannah Fry?

  Like foaming or fizzing?

• 3:34Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, like when you mix vinegar and baking soda, and you shake it up, and you look at the whole thing, and you say, what is that? We don't say, oh, that's bluba. You know, we don't need to give it one noun. We say that it's a process. It's a thing that's happening. We've got bubbles of gas, and we've got the vinegar and the baking soda mixing, and then there's some water being produced, whatever. And everyone leaves it at that, but fire...

• 3:56Hannah Fry?

  We still see it as a verb rather than a noun.

• 3:58Michael Stevens?

  That's right, but we see fire as a noun. Fire is a noun. It can also be a verb. You can fire something.

• 4:06Hannah Fry?

  You can.

• 4:07Michael Stevens?

  You can fire someone. Okay, let's walk through the steps, okay? Because fire is at least two different things, depending on where you think the fire begins and ends. For those of you that haven't watched every single short I've ever made, or don't already know what the fire triangle is, it's the three things fire needs to happen. Because fire is a chemical reaction known as combustion. And you need to have three things for there to be a fire. Or do you? We'll get to that later. Okay, so you need fuel, you need heat, and you need oxygen. Take away any of the three, just one of the three, no combustion.

• 4:43Hannah Fry?

  Which is how putting out fires works.

• 4:45Michael Stevens?

  Exactly. So you've got some fuel. Let's say it's your house. It gets hot enough, there's oxygen around, there's a house fire. How do you put it out? Well, you need to get rid of one of those three points of the triangle. You get rid of the fuel. We do that when there's a wildfire, and we start like clearing the brush and creating a perimeter around the fire where the flames just are going to run out of fuel, because they're going to hit like dirt. If you want to get rid of the heat, water is perfect for that. That's why we put water on fires, because the water absorbs so much heat, the fuel goes, ah, there's not enough left for me to react with oxygen. Guess I'll stop burning. So that's what... Even hot water will put out a fire. But remember, we talked about like wet water?

• 5:30Hannah Fry?

  And wait, unless it's like many thousands of degrees hot. Let's just, let's put limits on this.

• 5:36Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, so steam, if you used steam that was at 1,000 degrees Celsius, it wouldn't put out the fire.

• 5:46Hannah Fry?

  Thank you. Worth clarifying. Carry on.

• 5:47Michael Stevens?

  Isn't this the most practically useful podcast you guys have ever listened to?

• 5:52Hannah Fry?

  Guys, guys, guys, your house is burning down. Right, let me just, don't use steam at 1,000 degrees.

• 5:57Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, you can also get rid of the oxygen. You can do that by smothering a fire in sand with a blanket. Stop, drop, and roll. You can also use fire extinguishers that shoot carbon dioxide foam on the fire. Carbon dioxide is heavier than oxygen. It's going to go down low. It's going to starve, suffocate the fire. But there's actually a third way to stop a fire.

• 6:20Hannah Fry?

  What, a fourth way?

• 6:21Michael Stevens?

  There's a fourth way. There's a fourth point on the fire triangle.

• 6:25Hannah Fry?

  You can try and tell me now that this is actually a fire square and has been known a lot.

• 6:28Michael Stevens?

  It's never been a square, because squares don't have the beautiful geometric property where every single vertex touches.

• 6:39Michael Stevens?

  So instead, they call it the fire tetrahedron.

• 6:41Hannah Fry?

  Oh, much nicer.

• 6:43Michael Stevens?

  Okay?

• 6:44Hannah Fry?

  The fire pyramid.

• 6:45Michael Stevens?

  And so before we talk about this fourth point on the fire pyramid, the fire tetrahedron, let's talk about what happens when something burns, like a candle, okay? So I strike a match, now I've got a big source of heat. I bring that towards the candle, and the candle is a source of hydrocarbons. And they're in this like solid-ish form, right? It's a wax. And when that heats up, the hydrocarbon breaks apart. It chemically breaks apart into what are called free radicals. These are, basically, if you're familiar with molecules, when you look at these, you go, that's not a molecule. That's like, it's incomplete. It's like half a molecule. It is ready to combine with stuff. So we've got diatomic carbon, just like two carbon atoms.

• 7:30Michael Stevens?

  Give me a break. They've got free electrons. They need to combine with something, but they aren't yet. You've got things like, I don't know, carbon and hydrogen, just those two atoms bonded together. They're extremely reactive. They're radical. And...

• 7:44Hannah Fry?

  Don't you think that sort of, I always think the phrase "free radical" describes, I don't know, people in San Francisco in the 1970s, you know?

• 7:50Michael Stevens?

  Yes, very similar. So whichever analogy is going to help you, just grab on to it.

• 7:56Hannah Fry?

  As I've mentioned before on this podcast a number of times, chemistry, my chemistry knowledge is pretty limited, right? Like maths and physics, I'm all there. Biology, I can make my way around. Chemistry is ropey at best. But I remember in chemistry lessons, there was this talk about the states of the electron, right? That it's like you have these shells, which I think is actually an incorrect model.

• 8:23Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, but I think it works for kind of understanding and explaining chemical reactions.

• 8:27Hannah Fry?

  That the electrons are at different levels, energy levels, some further and some closer in towards the nucleus of the atom. And when the electrons move between those states, move between those energy levels, that's when they start emitting certain colors of light.

• 8:43Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, when they absorb electromagnetic radiation, there's a lot of ways to describe what's happening. They're vibrating more. They go up an energy level. My chemistry, my atomic chemistry is also pretty limited. But when they fall back down, they usually emit something like a photon, okay? And that might be a photon with a wavelength we can see, or it might not. It might be visible light, and we go, wow, it's glowing. Or it might be thermal light, in which case we can feel warmth, and a snake can say, wow, I see it. But these radicals are coming out in kind of two main areas. One is right out of the wick, where they actually don't have any access to oxygen. So when you look at a candle flame, you can sometimes see that right by the wick, it's kind of darker.

• 9:28Michael Stevens?

  It's like, it's very beautiful. There's like this darker region in the flame, and that's where you've got this vaporized wax, primarily made out of radicals, that haven't combined with anything yet. Down near the base, those radicals combine with oxygen, and they have so much energy that they literally release light through a chemical process called chemiluminescence, where their electrons are just like so energized, they drop down, release photons, and it happens to be in the blue wavelength. So the blue part of a flame, and the dark inner part of the flame, are gases. They're just a mixture of gases, primarily gases that are vaporized radicals, vaporized wax.

• 10:13Michael Stevens?

  But higher up, you get the classic red-orange flame of a fire. And that is where the really hot radicals are interacting with oxygen, and they're finally getting a companion to share electrons with, and they're forming carbon dioxide, they're forming water vapor. That process creates a lot of energy. Like, to break a bond, you've got to put in energy, but when you form a bond, energy is produced. And that's why the flame is so bright. The heat produced by the radicals interacting with oxygen is a self-perpetuating process. That's why fire kind of like persists. You touch the match to the flame, that's enough heat to get it started, but then what

• 10:57Michael Stevens?

  happens to those radicals and the oxygen produces enough heat to keep it going. So it just keeps eating. It's almost like alive in that sense. It preserves itself, right?

• 11:07Hannah Fry?

  Right, so this is what I was thinking as you were talking. Because actually, when you try and come up with a definition for what life is, consumption is a big part of it, being able to sort of self-sustain is another part of it. And actually, by a few different measures... Fire sort of is alive.

• 11:28Michael Stevens?

  It's like an almost life. So if you really don't want fire to count, you can say life needs DNA. It's like, wet blanket, come on. But fire, you know, fire, a flame is made of totally different molecules every second. But I'm made of different molecules every five, six years. So like, I'm just a slow flame.

• 11:49Hannah Fry?

  You're just a slow flame.

• 11:51Michael Stevens?

  We can, we can discuss what life is in another episode.

• 11:55Hannah Fry?

  I mean, there's all sorts of chemistry going on inside you. There's all sorts of combustion even.

• 11:59Michael Stevens?

  There's slow combustion going on inside me.

• 12:01Hannah Fry?

  You're just a slow flame.

• 12:03Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, it's like fire was like, guys, let's just chill out and become traditional life.

• 12:08Hannah Fry?

  I think it's the other way around. I think, I think fire looks at humans like, guys, can we speed this up?

• 12:13Michael Stevens?

  Speed it up, what are you doing? Funny enough, when I say that joke, I realize that it's, it's entirely not true. Because fire on Earth doesn't really predate life. Fire is able to exist. Combustion is able to happen on this planet because life was here first. There was a time before wildfires of any kind could even happen. Obviously, there was a time before there were plants on the dry land. But you need to have free oxygen. Those radicals need something to react with. Well, they need oxygen to react with to produce what we call fire.

• 12:46Hannah Fry?

  Hold on, is that true then? That you, that you only get, I mean, of course, you only get fire when you have oxygen. Fine. But you only get fire where there is life. Do you not see fire in the rest of the solar system?

• 12:58Michael Stevens?

  You don't, you don't need life, but you do not see fire, except I'm sure in some crazy situations that are extremely rare. You do not see fire anywhere else in this solar system. There just isn't free oxygen on any other planet where a fire can just start happening. Even early Earth had no fire. We needed to wait until life, like very early, algae and bacterias came about that were like, hey, I'm gonna poop out oxygen. And they, they gradually, over millions of years, put oxygen into the atmosphere. Once that reached about 13%, which was more than 2 billion years ago, which is like halfway through Earth's life.

• 13:37Hannah Fry?

  So for the first couple of billion years, there was no fire?

• 13:40Michael Stevens?

  There was no fire, yeah. So there were living things on Earth before there was fire.

• 13:46Hannah Fry?

  So hold on, does that mean, does that mean that fire has a birthday?

• 13:50Michael Stevens?

  The, the possibility of the chemical reaction happening has always existed. And I'm sure fires were happening elsewhere in the universe.

• 13:59Hannah Fry?

  On Earth.

• 14:00Michael Stevens?

  But, but on Earth.

• 14:03Hannah Fry?

  There would have been one day, one single day, when the first fire happened.

• 14:08Michael Stevens?

  Yes, I mean, that's true, but it depends on how we define fire. Because I'm sure we could find an isolated incident of combustion, very, very quick combustion in the early days of Earth. There happened to be enough oxygen in some little environment that it happened. But evidence for like a fire, fire, a wildfire, is much harder to find. The earliest evidence we have found of a wildfire was 420 million years ago.

• 14:36Hannah Fry?

  Right, so actually much later.

• 14:37Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, much, much later. Because you needed, you needed plants to evolve on dry land that could burn, that can be a fuel source. Yeah, and that evidence, by the way, was found in Wales.

• 14:48Hannah Fry?

  Really?

• 14:49Michael Stevens?

  Okay, right in this country, the United Kingdom. And then, we're gonna jump forward a lot, just because this fact is also very cool. The earliest evidence we have of humans making fire on purpose were Neanderthals in Suffolk.

• 15:01Hannah Fry?

  What?

• 15:02Michael Stevens?

  They found this fire pit, not Homo sapiens, but it looks like Neanderthals had actually not opportunistically found a fire, like from a lightning strike and like brought it somewhere, but had actually made it. Because we found iron pyrite in this archaeological site. And the pyrite is not naturally found there, so it had to have been carried around. And sure, like you would carry around iron pyrite, it's fool's gold, it looks cool, right? But it also is great for striking a flint to produce sparks. And we find it just around this fire.

• 15:37Hannah Fry?

  Hold on, hold on, how long ago is that?

• 15:38Michael Stevens?

  Hmm, yeah, about 400,000 years ago.

• 15:41Hannah Fry?

  Okay, right, you know what? Reasons to be patriotic, you know, Big Ben, the, the London Eye, the King, the Beatles, invented humans using fire.

• 15:56Michael Stevens?

  I'm not gonna say that you guys invented the making of fire, but as, but there's no evidence to show that you didn't.

• 16:04Hannah Fry?

  Okay, but also wildfire, right? We're not, you know, I, I know in California, things get really serious and nasty, right? And wildfires really can be absolutely devastating. But we now know that Welsh people can be like, guys, we've got much more experience in this than you guys.

• 16:19Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, thanks for starting it, Wales.

• 16:22Hannah Fry?

  That's amazing.

• 16:24Michael Stevens?

  Now, yeah, I know, that really.

• 16:25Hannah Fry?

  Potentially change our logo to just a flame.

• 16:28Michael Stevens?

  It was, you could do it.

• 16:29Hannah Fry?

  Our flag.

• 16:30Michael Stevens?

  Why not?

• 16:30Hannah Fry?

  Just make it a flame.

• 16:31Michael Stevens?

  Well, because the problem is that like next year, we might find evidence in Ethiopia that fires were being made. So that was a huge discovery. It, it happened just a couple of years ago, in December of 2025, this discovery. And, and a whole, a whole study was, was published about it. And that pushed back when we thought people started making fire by a lot. Earlier estimates were like maybe 50,000 years ago. You know, because you had, maybe you've, you've gotta like make yourself a little a bow drill, where you have a stick and a string on it, and you go back and forth and, you know, the old.

• 17:06Hannah Fry?

  And the way that they do in sort of.

• 17:07Michael Stevens?

  In movies and stuff. And in real life. But no, this discovery showed that like people were creating fires by their choice much, much earlier.

• 17:19Hannah Fry?

  So is there, okay, because that's the distinction here, right? Is that they were doing it deliberately and we can tell that they were making them themselves? Is there evidence of people using fire? I don't know, like caves with sort of blackened patches, but we're just not sure that they made it? Because you, you've kind of indicated that yourself.

• 17:37Michael Stevens?

  The earliest evidence we have for what's called opportunistic fire use, where you just find some, there's a natural wildfire, there's a lightning strike on a tree, and then a creature like takes advantage of that, is in Israel at least a million years ago. Homo erectus in this case. We find that they had a fire and had been using it for a long time with some like shells around, evidence like that, that they weren't just like, whoa, but that they were like, let's put this where it's gonna be helpful. We don't know how to make it ourselves yet. We're gonna wait for the Welsh to figure that out. But, so yeah, I mean, still, that's, that's, that's pretty incredible.

• 18:21Michael Stevens?

  And, and fire winds up being an amazingly important part of human evolution, most likely. But we're gonna, we're gonna get to that after we finish talking about what fire is.

• 18:32Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 18:33Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so we've got the, the dark inside of the flame, where you just have gases, vaporized wax primarily, that's it. In the blue part, you've got radicals that are so energetic, they're releasing chemical light. But up higher in the flame, there's a little bit less oxygen. So some of these radicals combine with each other to make soot. They just make big clumps of carbon. These are solid, okay, these are little tiny pieces of a solid, but they're so hot, they glow with black body radiation, just thermal radiation, because their atoms are moving so quickly. And that produces the orangish red glow of a flame.

• 19:11Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 19:12Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so that part of fire is an aerosol. It's little pieces of solid mixed into a gas.

• 19:21Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 19:23Michael Stevens?

  And that gas is the carbon dioxide, the oxygen, the water vapor, the, the products that are being made and the ambient air. So, you know, it's not true to say that fire is hot smoke, but, but the, the orange glowing part of it really is just hot smoke.

• 19:39Hannah Fry?

  I mean, it is hot smoke.

• 19:40Michael Stevens?

  And once it cools down enough, it becomes just the regular smoke. And the classic demo is to blow out a candle, watch that smoke trail come up and light the smoke trail way up here. Now you've put in enough heat that the soot particles start reacting with oxygen again. And now they're hot enough to glow because of that chemical reaction happening. And that feeds back down through the smoke, goes all the way back down to the wick, and the candle is lit again. Okay, so basically, if someone were to ask me what is fire, I would say it's a mix of a whole bunch of different phases. You've got gases and you've got solids. The solids are dispersed within the gases, and they're all so energetic and hot, they release light.

• 20:21Hannah Fry?

  Simple.

• 20:22Michael Stevens?

  Simple, simple. One of the best videos.

• 20:24Hannah Fry?

  I would say it's a quicker human.

• 20:27Michael Stevens?

  It's you would say, yeah. And you know what? We would both be right. So there's a great video from Be Smart about what a flame is, where he does this great demonstration of just having a candle flame and then taking a cold metal spoon and placing it way above the flame, where you actually collect water vapor. Because that's one of the

• 20:50Hannah Fry?

  Offshoots.

• 20:50Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, the offshoot. That's one of the products of the radicals combining with oxygen, H2O. Then if you put the flame in, sorry, if you put the spoon in the orange part of the flame, you get soot. Because that part of the flame is just carbon particles suspended in gas. And then if you put the spoon in the dark inside of the flame, the spoon will come out covered in solid wax, just wax that has cooled down from the vapor phase back into a solid. So it's all in there. And it's all full of energy and it's self perpetuating.

• 21:25Hannah Fry?

  So in my house, I have a fire. I have one of those wood burner things. It's sort of a middle class trophy in many ways. Having one of them in your house. Anyway, the thing that's always really noticeable is the different colors that the flames take on, depending on how you change the oxygen supply. Also depending on how, how far into the burn process you are. So right at the beginning, very yellow flame. If you try and like choke off the oxygen supply, everything goes blue. Until it gets really, really hot and then it becomes very red. But what I'm hearing from you is that the different parts of the flame

• 22:08Hannah Fry?

  that you see all together in a candle, you're pushing what's in your wood burner into predominantly those states.

• 22:17Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, that's right. So it's a really good point, too, because I'm talking about like a candle flame or a log burning, which is also what you're talking about. But it reminds me that there are different kinds of flames. There are like acetal flames where the flame is actually so hot that it does contain enough plasma that you could call it a plasma. That's when a gas gets so hot, its electrons are like, bye, I'm free. Okay, that's like what the sun is made of. Okay, but for the most part, a birthday cake candle.

• 22:44Hannah Fry?

  You're not getting plasma.

• 22:45Michael Stevens?

  You're, you're getting, you're getting some plasma. Like literally every gas contains some atoms whose electrons are more free. Okay, so where exactly we say this whole thing is turned plasma? It's up whatever you want. I mean, that's, it's not my decision.

• 23:01Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 23:02Michael Stevens?

  Okay, you can, well, you should not, but you, it is possible to microwave a flame to create a plasma.

• 23:11Hannah Fry?

  Go on.

• 23:11Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so don't do this. But if you light a little candle, like a birthday candle, put it on the tray of your microwave and then you place a little glass dish over the top of it, not touching the flame, but a bit above. And then you microwave this whole apparatus.

• 23:25Hannah Fry?

  While it's lit.

• 23:26Michael Stevens?

  The hot products of combustion will get superheated. And in that little dish, that little glass bowl you've put above the flame, you will get a bright white glob. Look this up on YouTube. There are people who have done it. And again, don't do it because it will cause a fire. It will hurt you. It will break your microwave. But inside, there's like a cloud. It's not even a cloud. It looks like a lava lamp blob.

• 23:52Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 23:52Michael Stevens?

  But it's bright white. It's like, and that's plasma. Okay?

• 23:58Hannah Fry?

  That's cool.

• 23:58Michael Stevens?

  It's like predominantly plasma. The blue light, blue light in a flame means there's an incredibly clean combustion happening. There's a lot of oxygen and it's all, it's just all combining and you're getting that chemiluminescence. When

• 24:14Hannah Fry?

  You haven't got floaty bits around.

• 24:15Michael Stevens?

  You don't have floaty bits of solid carbon that are just thermally glowing because of their heat in orange or a yellow color. It's also possible to get something so hot it turns blue.

• 24:25Hannah Fry?

  Maybe when you're sort of like closing the oxygen supply, what you're actually doing is you're preventing, I mean, because you obviously still need some oxygen in there. But maybe what it's doing is it's, it's not allowing there to be turbulence within the cavity.

• 24:38Michael Stevens?

  It could be something like that. Yeah.

• 24:41Hannah Fry?

  That makes the flame cleaner.

• 24:43Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, yeah. Now, you can also get something that's blue hot because it's just so hot. That's not what's happening in a candle flame. If something is blue because of thermal radiation, it's about as hot as it, well, it's not as hot as it can get, but it could be. Because for a reason I actually don't understand, even though I made an entire curiosity box product about this, there's a limit to what color things can change as they get hotter. As they warm up, they stop predominantly reflecting light, which is how we see most stuff. And they start just having electrons that are so excited, they thermally radiate heat out. At a certain temperature, things will start glowing red. Like no matter what they're made out of, they will become red.

• 25:24Michael Stevens?

  Then they'll become like orange and then yellow and then white and then blue. But after blue, it stops changing because of physical reasons and because of human perceptual biological reasons. We just don't see a change after that. So there really is a color of absolute hot.

• 25:43Hannah Fry?

  So wait, after that point, it, it leaves the visible light spectrum?

• 25:47Michael Stevens?

  Nope, it stays at blue.

• 25:48Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 25:49Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, it stays at, in terms of what we can see, it stays at blue. Every black body is releasing all different types of, of radiation. There's, there's X-rays coming out of it, but like not a lot. But for reasons I don't know, but, but Planck understood and explained, there's this big bump in the visual region for, for a hot body.

• 26:13Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 26:13Michael Stevens?

  Oh yeah, I wanted to also say that this kind of description of combustion, of fire, also helps explain why you can blow a candle out. I used to think that when you blew a candle out, it went out because blowing on it maybe cooled it down?

• 26:29Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, I think that's what I would have thought.

• 26:30Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, because I'm just, again, thinking about that fire tetrahedron. What, what am I disrupting? But you're actually not cooling it down. That's, maybe, maybe a little bit you are. But primarily it goes out because you've disrupted the fuel source. By blowing it, you're causing that stream of vaporized wax to separate.

• 26:50Hannah Fry?

  Oh.

• 26:51Michael Stevens?

  So that the chemical process can't jump to the next batch of vaporized wax. And then once that fuel source again becomes a straight line of smoke, you can put heat back in and it keeps going. But initially blowing it out is about interrupting the flow of fuel. I also want to say that the fire tetrahedron gives us another way to fight fires. If we're not going to lower the temperature, we're not going to get rid of the fuel or we're not going to get rid of the oxygen, we can also interrupt it at the chemical reaction stage. Because when combustion happens, you've got these free radicals. They combine with oxygen, we've got ourselves a flame. We've got this, or yeah, and we've got a lot of heat energy released.

• 27:35Michael Stevens?

  But if we can slip something in there that's more reactive than oxygen and yet when it combines with the radicals, has like a much weaker bond that puts out less energy, we can stop the fire. That is how Halon fire extinguishers work.

• 27:52Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 27:52Michael Stevens?

  They introduce these chemicals that contain like bromine and stuff like that. I don't know their chemical makeup. But they're more reactive with the free radicals than oxygen. They say, get out of the way, oxygen. I'm combining with this diatomic carbon. Boom. And also, our marriage is crap. There's no heat coming off of this. And so the whole thing just goes out. All right, so let's take a break. And when we come back, we will visit the relationship between fire and humans.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  We assess Prime Minister with high confidence it was Russian.

• 28:40Speaker 04

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 28:42Speaker 05

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 28:45Speaker 06

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

• 28:57Speaker 06

  We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today.

• 29:03Speaker 04

  Kill the president of Russia.

• 29:06Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 29:08Speaker 04

  Who is going to be able to pull this off?

• 29:10Speaker 06

  Sergeant Tom McDuff.

• 29:12Speaker 04

  Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller. We have two times readily key. Where Britain plays its strongest arm. He's the best. Against its strongest foe. Bear Hunt. Available now in full wherever you get your podcasts.

• 29:33Michael Stevens?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 29:36Hannah Fry?

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

• 29:47Michael Stevens?

  It's about aiming to spot cancer early before symptoms show and when treatment works best. The UK's Breast, Bowel and Cervical Cancer Screening Programs, developed with Cancer Research UK, save thousands of lives every year.

• 30:01Hannah Fry?

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

• 30:13Michael Stevens?

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

• 30:20Hannah Fry?

  Research like this saves and improves lives.

• 30:23Michael Stevens?

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

• 30:35Speaker 07

  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 blog 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 require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

• 31:06Michael Stevens?

  Even the opportunistic use of fire was a big change for hominid creatures. It takes a lot of work and it takes a different kind of work. Opportunistically using it, you don't even need to be a hominid to have done that. There are birds in Australia that will take advantage of an existing fire to like move a burning twig or a smoldering twig around to create an environment where they can like smoke out lizards and stuff. Yeah.

• 31:34Hannah Fry?

  To eat them.

• 31:35Michael Stevens?

  To eat them, not just to like say hello or prank them. It's for food, yeah. When, when humans started to not just temporarily take advantage of something that was burning, but try to maintain it because of its usefulness, that might really represent one of the, not maybe, maybe not one of the first, but one of the key turning points in history that led to us today. Maintaining a fire is something that takes quite a lot of labor and quite a lot of working memory, meaning you kind of have to remember what you are doing and why you're doing it. And this is something we don't see in a lot of other animals, the ability to say, you

• 32:18Michael Stevens?

  know what, today I've got to go out and find this thing that I did not instinctively evolve to want, the way like a squirrel wants to collect nuts. It's like a new idea you have. I think if I get more wood and just put it on this fire, it'll keep going. Let's go find that. And we don't have axes, we don't have chainsaws, so we're gonna have to collect wood. And also, we learned yesterday that the drier it is.

• 32:46Hannah Fry?

  It works better.

• 32:47Michael Stevens?

  Like the longer it's been on the ground and not wet, so find that kind. It's like a very complex cognitive thing. Cause I'm not talking about modern human cognition, I'm talking about Homo erectus, a hominid that, whose ancestors did not do this. So you gotta go out there and you've gotta collect this wood. And guess what happens while you're collecting wood? There are problems, there are cool things, like, oh my gosh, that's a root vegetable I could eat. There, there are things that will, you will find that will distract you and like every other animal gets distracted.

• 33:23Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 33:23Michael Stevens?

  And kind of more lives in the moment. But what we see with like later hominids is that they do a lot of things where it's like, you had to stick with that. You had to use directed attention and working memory to keep reminding yourself, no, no, no, I'm doing a different thing. Again, animals don't need to be reminded to do the things that they instinctively do.

• 33:45Hannah Fry?

  Of course.

• 33:46Michael Stevens?

  Like breathe or care for their children.

• 33:48Hannah Fry?

  Or hunt even.

• 33:49Michael Stevens?

  Or hunt. But collecting firewood is this literally like an invented behavior. And you have to stick with that. Then here's the other problem, you put in all that work where you were not collecting food, you were, you were not being safe. You could have just not been out in the woods looking at stuff where there could be bugs and predators and whatnot, where you could trip and fall. And you create a fire and it's awesome, okay? It produces warmth, it produces light, it also like might scare away predators. There's all these benefits, but like anyone can kind of take advantage of those benefits, even if they didn't help build it.

• 34:32Hannah Fry?

  Right, that's true.

• 34:33Michael Stevens?

  Terrence Toomey has written at least a couple of articles, at least that I've read, about early human use of fire and how that may have facilitated the emergence of cooperation amongst members of our species.

• 34:47Hannah Fry?

  Okay.

• 34:48Michael Stevens?

  Because you've got to sort of keep track of like, did you help with this fire? Are you like, are you gonna use, are you gonna use this? Are you gonna like do something tomorrow for me? And we see this kind of concern over fairness with like very young human children, you know, three, four years old.

• 35:08Hannah Fry?

  That's fascinating.

• 35:09Michael Stevens?

  But we don't see it with chimpanzees, okay? If, if you reward a couple chimpanzees for their activities and you give one of them a much better reward, the one that got the better reward is like, great. But if you do this with young human children, they go, well, you can have some, right? And so his argument, which I'll let you read to really spell it all out, is that fire use, which was this communal benefit that also required communal work, may have been one of the earliest times that our species had to kind of develop and exercise that. And also that people who were good at it, individuals who were good at it, had an advantage

• 35:51Michael Stevens?

  because they could stay in these communities and be accepted by them and reap the advantages of the fire. They could, for example, eat cooked food.

• 36:00Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 36:01Michael Stevens?

  Which is so much easier to digest.

• 36:04Hannah Fry?

  Mm-hmm. I love this stuff, I love this stuff. I mean, look, on the one hand, I think that when it comes to sort of this type of anthropology, this type of sort of evolutionary history, it's really hard to know concretely, one thing follows another. You know, these aren't falsifiable things that we're saying here, these are looking at the evidence and drawing connections between it. However, that said, if you do take this story at face value, these examples of where the existence of something in our environment changed our behavior, changed the direction in which we evolved in, I really love this stuff. It just goes to show how we are not this isolated entity, right? We are, we are of this earth, right?

• 36:48Hannah Fry?

  Which is like a phrase that they say in, the Uroch tribes say in, in North America. It's so clear when you describe it like that, that we are a direct result of everything that exists around us and everything that we use.

• 37:01Michael Stevens?

  Yes, we are, we, we are the children of our experience and exactly how it all happened is, is a tough thing to figure out. That's why, you know, anyone can sit in a chair and go, well, you know, we like the color blue because of, I don't know, here's the thing, you can't design an experiment to test that. So the field of cognitive archaeology, which is studying how people thought in the past or, and by people, I mean really any kind of hominid, anything that thinks really, is, is a difficult field. And actual like evidentiary statistical conclusions are hard to get at, but you can do things

• 37:41Michael Stevens?

  like you can study how a certain kind of stone tool could have been made by hand and compare, and have living humans try to make different designs that we know were made in, in prehistoric times and compare how long it takes and the benefits and can this be used to, to cut, what's the best way to, to cut meat off of a bone with this kind or this kind? And we kind of test it today and we do actually learn quite a bit. It's almost more right now about asking the right questions. So anyway, cooperation came about and as far as we know today, one of the first arenas

• 38:23Michael Stevens?

  it could have been practiced in, in a very approaching modern form would have been around a fire and, and in maintaining, and then much later, making a fire. But there's something else about fire that's very fascinating and it's the fact that fire is fascinating. We can sit by a fire and look into it and feel quiet, feel fine, just sitting next to someone else and looking at the fire.

• 38:51Hannah Fry?

  It's very relaxing.

• 38:52Michael Stevens?

  It's relaxing. Watching the ocean is similar, people watching can be the same, watching fish in an aquarium, watching birds, you know, it's, there's something strange about it. And I, I'm not gonna pretend that anyone knows where this began. You can do, you can do those like made up stories. I like to call them metonymic explanations where it's like, well, okay, because fire is so useful, we came to like looking at it. And it's like, I don't know. What we do know from, from modern psychological research is that humans have had for a long

• 39:34Michael Stevens?

  time, and we have this pull between sort of two types of use of our attention. One is directed attention, where I voluntarily will my attention onto something, solving a, a problem in front of me, doing work, solving problems on a worksheet at school. And that's pretty tiring. It's, it's not tiring in the way that like running up stairs is tiring, but it, it seems to probably tire us because it uses a lot of our brain's inhibitory processes to stop distractions. Like I can't do what I'd rather be doing, I'm doing this. And that is actually metabolically quite taxing. So that might explain why after a lot of directed attention, you're just like, oh,

• 40:19Michael Stevens?

  I'm so tired and like all I did was sit in a chair and do a podcast all day, why do I feel tired? It's because you've, you've got a lot of directed attention. Now, on the other end, there's the involuntary attention, when you're just sort of left alone to your own thoughts. This is what you might feel when you're not able to fall asleep, but you're just in bed and you're kind of like spiraling, thinking about things that you did and negative thoughts and fears and did I do that wrong and what is this person thinking? And that's called rumination. Now, both of them have benefits, which is kind of strange to say that rumination does, but there's this growing body of evidence that even depression had this benefit towards

• 41:01Michael Stevens?

  forcing us to, to face complex problems. You can't ruminate on them forever. Sometimes there's no solution, sometimes it creates a situation where you're not able to then be social and think and, and cooperate and, and be with other people. So there's this tug of war between directed attention, which is outwardly focused on like a problem, on a task and, and you, you will it, and then rumination, which is unwilled, it's focused on inside personal things and, and emotional fears. But then in between them, there's what, it's literally called this fascination. And that's when you're interested with like no effort.

• 41:42Hannah Fry?

  Oh.

• 41:44Michael Stevens?

  And that's how we use the word today. That's fascinating.

• 41:47Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 41:47Michael Stevens?

  It usually means, yeah, I'll keep watching this.

• 41:50Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 41:50Michael Stevens?

  But I don't have to do anything.

• 41:52Hannah Fry?

  You're kind of passive in the process.

• 41:53Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. Yeah. So a couple of psychologists, Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, they've developed a theory called attention restoration theory, which focuses on the benefits we get from what they call soft fascination, which is what you, you are experiencing when you just sit and look at a fire, when you sit and look at the ocean and listen to the ocean. It busies up the mind in just the right way that you don't ruminate, but you're not also having to direct your attention. You're able to sort of restore a lot of your cognitive concerns and you're ready to talk to other people.

• 42:34Michael Stevens?

  Now, soft fascination has a lot of health benefits and like we do this, it's called self-care today. Like, I just need to turn on my pink noise machine and I need to, you know, read a gossip magazine. This is something that's interesting that asks for like no effort. And it's not, it's not inwardly about you and your concerns, but it's also not like a task you have to do for work that's really directed in taxing. It's like just right there in the kind of like, I'm getting something, but it's nothing.

• 43:04Hannah Fry?

  I'm getting, I'm seeing where you're going with this. I'm seeing where you're going with this. Keep on.

• 43:08Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so let's, let's upgrade this a little bit. What if we made soft fascination more fascinating to the point where I don't actually have any more room for talking to other people and, and thinking about like nicer, less ruminating thoughts, but just kind of like being creative. What if, what if instead of looking at the fire, I played a video game? Or I, I got onto TikTok and I just scrolled through stuff. That's also fascinating and it protects us from being alone with our thoughts, but it also protects us from the cognitive load of directed attention and like work requirements. Instead.

• 43:49Hannah Fry?

  It also protects you from, from sometimes the torture of ruminating on something.

• 43:52Michael Stevens?

  Exactly. Just like watching a fire, it's, it's something, but it's kind of nothing too. Okay? However, the something is so loud, it kind of blocks out that, that chatting by the fire feeling that like for me, in my more modern life, I get this when I'm on airplanes and I have nothing to do. And I, there's like no movie looks good and I just kind of am sitting there, maybe glancing at what movies other people are watching. And maybe just staring at the pattern on the seats or the ceiling. And I started thinking about like, hmm, like I'm not ruminating. I'm thinking good thoughts, like, you know what? I could run for president.

• 44:36Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I, I know who I would choose to be my campaign manager and I could do this. And it's like, it's like exactly the kind of pleasant thing that we usually share with other people at like a campfire. So this kind of thing happens, but once you up that stimulation level, then you start getting what's called hard fascination. And that's, and that, uh, we're not totally sure what the effects are, but it definitely protects us from directed attention and, and rumination. But it doesn't leave the door open for the, the social and the, the pleasant thinking, the creative thinking. It's just a fantasy world.

• 45:18Hannah Fry?

  So one of the big differences, I think, anyway, this is again, I'm into speculation territory here. But sitting on a beach, watching, watching the ocean, being in a forest, laying under trees, looking at their, their branches swaying in the wind, or sitting around a fire and watching the flames lick up into the sky. All of those feel very wholesome, very nurturing experiences. Sitting on my phone in bed, flicking through Instagram does not feel wholesome. I do not end up feeling good at the end of it. And I sort of always wondered whether a big part of, although having said that, I do recognize

• 45:57Hannah Fry?

  that my brain is in a very similar state of not really doing anything and passively allowing information to wash over me.

• 46:04Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. I mean, you're feeling the difference between soft and hard fascination.

• 46:07Hannah Fry?

  Right. Okay. That's interesting. Cause I also wondered whether there was something about, it can't be a coincidence that all of those examples that I, that I just gave, the forest, the ocean, the, the flames are all sort of like very embedded in nature.

• 46:22Michael Stevens?

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:23Hannah Fry?

  They're all situations in which our ancestors, if they found themselves, you know, in a forest or by the ocean, or you know, in front of a fire, would have felt safe. And you know, that, that's how you live, right? Like there's this riverbed in France, which I take my daughters to, I took them there this summer. And as soon as you get there, there's this thing that washes over you that's like, oh, this is where I'm supposed to be.

• 46:48Michael Stevens?

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:48Hannah Fry?

  You know?

• 46:49Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 46:50Hannah Fry?

  And I, and I do think that there's something about that with fire, that it's like, it's, I, I, I, look, I don't have any evidence for this, but I do think that there is something about sitting around a fire that you are, you know, generation after generation after generation. You're, if, if we go with what you said earlier, right? Our bodies are the way they are because of our relationship with flames. And, and I think that there's something about your body still remembers, right? Like this is maybe you're getting a bit woo-woo, but your body still remembers because so much of your history, so much of your past was spent around a fire.

• 47:26Michael Stevens?

  Exactly. Um, so I don't know enough about it, but you can look into the biophilia hypothesis, which is exactly what you're describing, that we evolved to love nature and that it produces this calming effect because it's what we're supposed to be looking at.

• 47:42Hannah Fry?

  This argument about our connection to, to the fire, I mean, it's only really recently that we've lost it. So the ancient Greeks, they had all of these gods of, of, of everything you can imagine, right? There was like the god of the sky, the god of thunder, the god of the ocean, you know, there, there was the god of olive trees. There was the god of whatever, but there was also a god of the hearth.

• 48:01Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 48:02Hannah Fry?

  Right? And, and I think in the modern day, that sort of feels a bit like, oh, well, you let, what have you got? A god of the doorstep as well, like come on. But actually I think what that demonstrates is just how fundamentally important the hearth and the fire was to society and to culture up until extremely recent, because this would be the place that you would sit around and you would have conversations and you would discuss your day and you would tell stories and sing songs. And like, this was the place where we were the social species, not just the cognitive one.

• 48:34Michael Stevens?

  Exactly. It, it really is a fundamental part of what made us humans in the sense of what that means today. Because, I mean, we still have it today. I think the, the hearth today is still, you know, all cooking together. Cooking is one of those activities that doesn't necessarily require super direct attention. You've chopped these vegetables before, you know what pot you're going to use. So you're not, you're not using directed attention that isolates you from the world, but you're also too busy to be ruminating negatively within your own thoughts. So what are you doing? You're chatting about like what Susan next door did with your kids. You're talking, you're talking, and that's where conversations start happening. Look, don't get me started. Let's go look tonight.

• 49:16Michael Stevens?

  Let's go cook up some marinara sauce. I'll tell you all about Susan. But this is where conversations happen about Susan, about what should we do about Timmy?

• 49:26Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 49:27Michael Stevens?

  Okay. Should we, I have this idea, guys, it's called laws. What do you think? I think, I think that the, the king, bad idea. Okay. Those conversations happen when we're being soft fascinated better. Because otherwise it's awkward, we're distracted, we're scared. Just yesterday, one of our producers was saying, yeah, whenever there was something pretty serious to talk about, my dad would take me for a drive.

• 49:50Hannah Fry?

  Right. Absolutely.

• 49:52Michael Stevens?

  You know?

• 49:52Hannah Fry?

  You're doing something, but you're not, it's not requiring your attention. Or, or I think doing crafts with my girls is like, if we're sitting and drawing or doing Lego or something. So we're sort of, we're doing something. That's when, when we get the best conversation.

• 50:07Michael Stevens?

  Crafts, Lego, building, uh, cleaning, they're all, they're all soft fascination beds that we can lay in to have these conversations. But when that bed gets too fun and it becomes hard fascination, we don't have those conversations about the, the big topics. And this is something that people have danced around for a really long time. I, I want to talk about Paul L. Klein's 1971 TV Guide article. I actually, I love this article so much, I own a copy of the TV Guide it appeared in. So who was he? He was an executive in audience measurement at NBC back then. And he basically just lays out like his like executive strategy.

• 50:50Michael Stevens?

  And it turns out to be this really mind-blowing piece of insight into human nature. He's like, guys, all right, my job is to make sure that people watch our TV shows. And here's the problem everyone's, everyone's making at all the networks. They're trying to make a show that people want to watch, but people don't want to watch a good show. They want to watch television.

• 51:11Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 51:12Hannah Fry?

  As in they wanna sit around as a family.

• 51:15Michael Stevens?

  And they wanna be soft or hard fascinated. They just want something to watch. And watch is like, they wanna watch a fire. They wanna watch the TV set. And so we're just providing that to them. And the key, if you wanna win as a network and have the highest ratings, isn't to make the best show. Because that's, what we think is a good show is like directed attention focused. Like this is a show where we're going to discuss religion and politics. He's like, no, no, no, just, just like.

• 51:46Hannah Fry?

  Softer.

• 51:47Michael Stevens?

  Make it softer. And you do that by creating what he called the least objectionable programming.

• 51:54Hannah Fry?

  Wow.

• 51:55Michael Stevens?

  Give them, because this is, this is why networks lose. People turn it on and they go, I don't like this. This is not good for my kids to see. And they go, and they go until nothing's objectionable anymore. And now it's a fire in the fireplace.

• 52:08Hannah Fry?

  That's so interesting. You know, I think this is a podcast as well, by the way. I think this is a podcast too. Because I used to make radio programs that were trying to be the directed attention version of this. Where it would be like, right, the narrative needs to be completely crafted from the top to the tail. I need to like seed ideas throughout. It needs to be taking people on a journey and so on and so on and so on. And I think the thing about podcasts, like modern world of podcasting is actually people just want something in the background.

• 52:38Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 52:38Hannah Fry?

  People just want something to vaguely listen to while they're going for a drive or doing their laundry. Or like, you know, mowing the lawn. And like their brain can wander in and wander out and, and not necessarily listen to every single word of it.

• 52:52Michael Stevens?

  That's exactly right. Their brain can wander the way it wants to wander, not in, and not in a negative loop on personal emotional problems. And not in a directed taxing, like problem solving loop, but just in a free form, human creativity way. But today, something really dramatic has happened where you don't need to produce the least objectionable programming anymore. Because we all watch alone. So if I'm, I, I don't even, this isn't even my life. Like there isn't broadcast TV that I turn on with my family that might make me go, oh, my wife won't like that. Oh, my daughter shouldn't see that. Instead, I'm just watching like TikTok on my own. And if I see something really disturbing, I just watch it because this is me.

• 53:37Michael Stevens?

  You know, if I, like, there are objectionable things, like things where I'm like, I've seen it before. Or this is boring. What's the point, you know? But otherwise, I'm, I'm, I'm just kind of able to watch anything. And so I've shifted towards watching content that is hard fascinating. Because it's okay. Those hard points aren't causing me to change the channel because of the other people around. I just get stuck in this thing that like captures all of me. And I don't worry about tomorrow, but I also don't hope about tomorrow. I'm just stuck in this hard fascination feed. And you need other people looking at the screen for you to go, I'll soften it up. Fine, fine, fine. And that's where you get back into a social civilization building, human experience.

• 54:20Hannah Fry?

  And that's the thing I feel like we're all missing.

• 54:21Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 54:22Hannah Fry?

  Well, I feel like I'm missing anyway. That's, that is so interesting. That is so hard fascinating.

• 54:30Michael Stevens?

  It is, isn't it? It isn't it?

• 54:33Hannah Fry?

  It really is.

• 54:33Michael Stevens?

  So, you know, we'll try better next time to be softly satisfying.

• 54:37Hannah Fry?

  Yes, we will.

• 54:38Michael Stevens?

  Softly fascinating. Or maybe we won't. You know what? Well, maybe that's your job. You know, you guys go out there and get us some, get us the modern version of a fire to look at. That's the thing. There are so many soft fascinating things you can do, but they often feel like a waste of time. Like looking at a fire is, it's just, it's um, classic enough that we all do it. But like during the day, we don't have enough, like, we gotta peel a lot of potatoes. So let's just do this for like the next three hours. It's more like, well, no, I bought them already peeled. So like, we don't have any soft fascination activities. So we're gonna have to just be direct about it and like find a new thing to do. Or we're gonna have to like sit here and just think about our problems.

• 55:19Michael Stevens?

  I think it was Alan Watts, who was like, a lot of people think that Zen is about like contemplating truth while you peel potatoes. He's like, no, no, no. Zen is just peeling potatoes. Right?

• 55:39Hannah Fry?

  Is that the actual quote?

• 55:40Michael Stevens?

  That's the actual quote.

• 55:41Hannah Fry?

  No.

• 55:42Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. He's like, no, it's not about like, oh, in everything I do, I contemplate the, the, the big things. Or God, or the godhead, or no, it's like, I just, I'm just mowing the grass. That's where it happens. Just this morning, I watched a reel where a guy's like, oh, here's, here's what it's like to cook as a full time job. Like in the olden days. And he's like, it takes a long time to make a honey baked ham. Like I worked on this for two days and, but also I had to make this dough and I had to make jam and I had to bottle it and da, da, da, da, da. And people are all like, this is ridiculous. And I'm like, I, I know, but it shouldn't be.

• 56:17Hannah Fry?

  It shouldn't be.

• 56:18Michael Stevens?

  And not that, not that we all need to be doing that. I think there is definitely room for directed attention, please. And we need to ruminate to a certain extent healthily. But we need all of them and we need that anchor in the middle that brings us together. That's not one or the other, but it's just fascinating.

• 56:33Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, absolutely. I really, really enjoyed that. Thank you very much, Michael.

• 56:38Michael Stevens?

  Thank you.

• 56:39Hannah Fry?

  No, thank you. I'm, I'm gonna ruminate on that quite a lot.

• 56:42Michael Stevens?

  Well, don't, I mean, I mean, I mean, consider it. Ruminati is specifically when it's like bad, in like a psychiatric language form.

• 56:50Hannah Fry?

  I think that you've tapped into something that has really been bothering me a lot in the last few months about my own life. About, and I didn't have the vocabulary to describe it until you just have. Which is that I do feel like I spend my entire existence switching directly from, uh, from rumination to, what did you call it? Direct.

• 57:11Michael Stevens?

  Directed attention.

• 57:12Hannah Fry?

  To directed attention to rumination. And maybe I get a little bit of an escape for it when I'm asleep. And then if I have any social media on my phone, I'm just like, become extremely addicted to it. Have to delete it. Doesn't make me feel good. But you're, you're absolutely right that like, I know sort of instinctively that I'm searching for the moments when I'm just doing embroidery. Or just putting a Lego set together or just, you know, doing some cooking. But it's like trying to find space for those moments. I didn't have the vocabulary to know exactly what it was that I felt like I was missing until you've just described it.

• 57:47Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, there you go. It's helpful to me too, researching this because it, it shows why I enjoy and it's okay to enjoy. Like, you know what? Today, I'm just going to find all my dust jackets and put them on the books and put them on the shelf.

• 58:01Hannah Fry?

  God, you're talking, absolutely talking my language. I'm just gonna empty out a drawer and organize it and put it back together.

• 58:07Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. And it's not just about the tidiness. It's not just about having an organized home. It's about, it's about, yeah, participating in an important human activity.

• 58:16Hannah Fry?

  And, and I think, you know, if fire changed our bodies, I think not having fire might be changing it too. Do you know what I'm gonna do tonight? Even though it's like the second of September when we're recording this, I'm gonna light a fire.

• 58:28Michael Stevens?

  Do it.

• 58:29Hannah Fry?

  I'm gonna do that.

• 58:29Michael Stevens?

  Do it.

• 58:30Hannah Fry?

  All right. Thank you very much. We will be back later this week with an episode of Field Notes. Until then.

• 58:35Michael Stevens?

  See you later.

• 58:46Speaker 08

  I am a sample, long before I'm measured, long before I'm named. Each piece of me has a message, a nuanced role. When you look beyond the average, when you see where I belong, you see why I behave the way I do. When you start looking at my details, when you include my context, I start telling you the truth. I always had a story, you just needed a way to hear it.

• 59:11Speaker 09

  Every sample has a story. Learn more at 10xgenomics.com.

• 59:15Speaker 10

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple Conducted Study of Heart Rate Accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.

• 59:47Speaker 11

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.