Informing Versus Persuading in Science

Hello and welcome to the Rest is Science. I'm Michael Stevens, and I'm Hanna Frery And today on field notes, we're going to be tackling your questions. And then also, Hannah has brought something a story. I literally don't know. It is a story. You know, I noticed in the introduction then that I used my BBC voice. Did you hear it? No, I wasn't even listening. to be honest, I was just looking at my own video going, lookook at that handsome devil. So do your BBC voice again? It's just much It's a bit more formal. and I think that might be because my story is about a BBC show that I did where I accidentally almost perfectly predicted the pandemic two years before it happened. Whoops, whoops I've gotten into a lot of trouble for it I'll be honest. Wait, no doar the BBC voice again Hello, I'm Hannah Fry. Nice Yeah. I mean, it's still definitely you But it feels it feels like you're not talking to me. On the spectrum between BBC and Esseics. which is, you know, my natural state I would say that you're closer to the Essex than the BBC. let me try to do a BBC voice. G Hello and welcome to the Rest is Science. I'm Michael Stevens. Oh, that was goods. It's almost like American newscaster, really? That was very I did. I was gonna say, I think the only problem with it is that it is the accent, I'm afraid. I'm afraid you're sacked. Hello My name's Michael Stevens take day. That's BBC. That's like guy right there. Okay. Notice how it becomes southern and that's because that non rotic commommonality. Noon wrotic. What's that? There's no R Right? Like both both the British And the Southern Americans will drop the R's out. They'll be like Yeahay, I'm working down on the farm But then a British person will be like I was glancing at the farm, right? H It's much smoother. That's nice. I like that. Can we do an episode on A accents at some point? because I I've got a range in my back catalog that I can wheel out at wheel. As do I, I have been never been shy to show off the range of accents I can do. That's the best possible hook and tees that we've got for an episode on accents coming up. That doesn't exist yet. But we're gonna start with questions This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. Here is something strange Y DNA contains more ancient viral fragments than jeans The genes that build our cells make up only two percent of our DNA. and for years, that is what scientists focused on. They treated the rest, the ancient viruses and stuff as junk. But now we know that that hidden majority, sometimes called the dark genome, influences how our biology works and how disees like cancer 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 two hundred types of cancer, work that's helped double survival in the UK over the past fifty years. For more information about canancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them Visit cancerresesearchuKot org forward slash the rest is science Hey parents How do you make smarter choices for your kids college today That's where Sally can help. With Sally, you can find scholarships, funding options, tools, and guidance all in one place And if you need a loan, Sally has options for different families and different situations College is only worth it if you do it right So don't just help your kid go Help them go smarter Sally d. com slash go parents No one goes to Hanks for a spreadsheet They go for a darn good pizza Lately, though, the shop's been quiet, so Hank decides to bring back the one dollar one slice. He asks Cop pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs and help him see if he can afford it. Copilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now Hanks has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza Copilot handles the spreadheets. Learn more at M three sixty five coopilot d. com slash work I want to start with this one. This is sent into us by MD. Solman. 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 gonna 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. 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 we've been able to come to doing things like this are like skin grafts where someone's had 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 Those nerve cells used to be in the butt So they'll stroke their leg and when they touch that new transple and piece of their own skin, it feels like they're touching their butt. It's true. This happenens specifically, the leg butt example happened to my friend Jake Ropper 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 badankadk 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, o, someone's touching the butt. It's like that that signal is moved from your leg. by the brain to it's projected onto wherever they removed the nerves from, but it doesn't last forever. Right, I was gonna say, surely there's a point where your brain works it out and switches. That's right. yourour 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 legs. so I'm going to project Those feelings to the leg area from now on In that case, you're switching your sensory inputs from yourself to yourself. You're just changing the wear on yourself it is always still feels like you If suddenly, I was feeling everything that touched you, Hannah It would be a trippy experience I think there would still be a me there Eiencing these signals going, what the heck? This is really trippy I would still be there as me, Michael Stevens wondering What the heck is this about? 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've been thinking about it almost nonstop ever since and I think I might have changed my mind on exactly that point. Tell me why. 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, etcetera 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 are evidenced in the way that our brain works. And he was saying, maybe they like the idea of you as a single entity 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 round that you might imagine it Cuse and effect is not, oh, I think I'll press that button over there and then the message gets sent to your arm at which point you go to move the button. It's the other way around. Your arm makes the movement and then your brain retrospectively comes up with that decision afterwards. Yeah, I actually got to meet Dr. Moron, who does these experiments 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 conscious awareness that I'm going to push it L the buttons up, turn the button red, meaning donon'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 think to ourselves and we explain ourselves to others as though there is a little self that's riding along, manning the controls does seem more like There might not be a you There's a ewing that your brain does, where it looks at what it's done and what's happening and it goes, o, yes, yes, yes, that's what I meant to do. Thank you very much We 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 social life amongst homo sapiens became complicated enough and broad enough that we had to start being like, okay, 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. I think I'd still youify it or I guess meify it, and I'd say, Wha, this is happening to me. To what extent there's actually a a me, like a part of my brain that is going, ahuh, 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 something 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 might we might actually get our best evidence from the way they dream This is I mean, this could become a three hour long episodeily. But when you look at Dreams, the earliest reports of dreams we have from humans 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 appea 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 like there was this animal that was my dog but wasn't. 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 really are and you're talking to people or you're interacting with people right where do 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 learning of a you 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. Maybe. But I mean, there's a reason why they call this the hard problem, right? which is literally the name of it. What What is it like to experience the world from inside somebody else's body? We just it's a hard problem because we have it's not falsifiable, right? There's no real way you could have ideas and theories, but ultimately we just for now, don't know. mayaybe it is. I mean, I think you're probably right that actually if you just if you just swapped over the taste, for example, just a 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've swapped over all of it, the whole lot I don't know. I maybe I think there's a chance you'd completely disintegrate. there wouldn't be a UA. Right. And we have to ask where do I begin? Do I begin at my sensory inputs or later on in the processing? Because I had all of your taste nerves connected to the places in my brain It might feel projected weirdly across space, but would I be tasting things as you do or as I do. att what point does it become my experience? Would you suddenly absolutely despise olives and love chil, you know? Right, There's probably a food that you despise that I love. 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? I don't know.pend 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 bllindness can happen 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 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. Colorblindness 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 gen a genetic thing. I know you could hypnotize people into being colorblind. That is one thing 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 bllindness and so can medications As it turns out, one of the chemicals in Viagra can lead to blue yellow color blindness. No, permanently or is a temporary I mean, you gain one thing, you lose another Yeah, it's a trin 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 medication used for treating tuberculosis called athambutol. And that can lead to red green color blindness Vitamin A deficiency can cause color blindness. Certain UV exposure to ureinas can lead to it U so Even if your brain has always been aware of red and green, blue and yellow in the differences, You can lose that ability later in life I have a question about that. Does it happen in a way that people notice it? or because the thing is this is the thing that I find 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 often until later in life Um And that I think is very interesting. that I think really demonstrates because this is something that is testable, this is something that you can recreate so that we can understand how it looks for different people who suffer from red green color bllindness, for example. And it's so fundamentally different to the experience 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. 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 bllindness 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, ah yeah, they're green or whatever. I forget exactly, but it was quite different than a regular vision experience. And then they put the peanuts in a blender and they tell him, tellell 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 a whole different color. And I'm like, what in the world?? I was plugged into his eyeballs O or I don't actually know what was causing. let's assume it was the retina because 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 I might I might like fix it myself as my brain went naha na. 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, uh, 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 do these experiments, but it's very hard to do things like this. My brother in law is kind of blind and And so for Christmas one year, I made him a t shirts where I did one of the, you know, the colorblind tests where you have all the dots and it's 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. That's the color bllind No kidding Okay So first of all When did he find out? I think he knew he knew straight away. I was messing with him. We We have a sort of Christmas tradition in my family of where we get each other gifts that sort of play on the other people's absolute weaknesses. It kind it's quite an Irish thing. I love this. ye. Yeah. me he got me a t shirt once U where I'd been'd I'd done a TV program where I had Id hosted, Have I got newews for you in the UK? And during at one point, I'd done air quotes and he got someone had made a joke about whether I really was a professor while I was hosting this program. And so he got me a t shirt of just a screenshot of me going air quotes and just saying prorofessor in inverted commce as though to really call my call my credibility into question. So you know, it's sort of a It it's a running thing. It's a very great tradition. I'd love to start one of those, but this This color bllind shirt, the F, the color bllind shirt that is very similar to the shirt that's coming in the summer curiosity box. How is it going on? Instead of making fun of the colorblind, 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 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 Is So any dog sees me, they know this guy doesn't have any bones in him. I'm not going to mess with him. But then in green letters underneath It says, JK, I'm actually full of bones. Dogs have a red green color bllindness, 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 Y Yours is a much more pacey version of or much more human centric gph. It's a human centric one. Yes. To be clear, I'm not anti color bllind people, I just, you know, sometimes anti my brother in law. Yeah Eactly. Yeah yeah. All right, so answering that question, MD, I think went many directions you might not have expected, but I appreciate it. It did, but it's a really interesting question. and we spent twenty minutes on the first question. That's how it should be. It should be, shouldn't it? Okay. All right, here's another question. This one's from Matthew. Matthew asks Hey, what's the deal with Quantum sppin? 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? than you One of my favorite messages ever. Okay. I have done I'll be honest with you. and before this morning I was quite rusty on quantum spin. It's been a while, I'll be honest Because you do people people use this phrase it gets thrown around and in your head, I think it clunches up a mental image of of a ball that's literally spinning. Yeah. It is absolutely not like that at all 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. It's more like a property of the particle that's like mass or electric charge, right? Just in the same way as you can't take away the mass of an electron, you can't take away its spin either. It's like a characteristic of it But the reason why they've used the word spin is because it's all around how the particle behaves and it's got these similarities to angular momentum, right? It's a quantity that gets conserved, essentially. Could 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 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 It is metaphoria It's important to remember that when people talk about spin. It is a property of particles. Yeah. But you gota just realize there's no actual spinning ball there. 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 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 impose upon it. So for example, you know, let's say that I've got an electric field and I have a really heavy magnet, right? really like meaty magnet. And I put the electric field, do you know what? I get so scared because the exact words that you use in this situation R field, for example 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 Wed day. I over. I can feel the judgment, the judment 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, o. 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? 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. because if you are careful and you slowly rotate slowly, your magnetic field so that you have your electrons aligning with it can effectively rotate an electron, right? that's the only way that you can do it. And that's different than the property of spin that we assign to particles. Yeah But this is one of the ways that they get that quantum computers work basically is by altering the magnetic field in order to to impose certain characteristics on the quantum particles. But the numbers that are associated with spin, they sort of do make sense when it comes to rotation. Yeah. 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 rotate it three hundred and sixty degrees, it returns to the same state. you, Michael Ois spin one particle. Thank you for noticing. It's a slightly larger version, right than one might expect in the quantum realm a spin half particle, like an electron. See if you can spot this, a 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 at seven hundred and twenty degrees. for it to return to where it started. Weird. Which is I mean that yes Weird it is. This is one of the reasons why Feynman says anyone who says they understand quantum mechanics doesn't understand quantum mechanics. Yeah. it's very nonint intuitive. It's very non intuitive. 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 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 What's happening? This is absolutely one of the reasons why people say that the fundamental language of the universe is mathematics, because It becomes so difficult to translate these concepts into words and analogies and you lose something in the telling 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 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. We've got sort of a nested system here where every question we ask Every question we answer reveals itself into a whole new episode, which includes more questions and therefore more episodes. It's sort of exponential growth, the rest of science, that's kind of what we're going for here. 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 nice little puzzle, I guess that we could set people between now and when we do a full episode on this, Michael, right? Yeah. Yeah. Cool, you do it. That's right. hereere's the puzzle. I want you 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 You start off with your palm facing down and your hand flat and you need to get your thumb pointing in the air without rotating your wrist And you can get your thumb to point the other way. so your palm is fing 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 do it just by moving through Space, hereere's a clue. the kind of space you want it to move around might be spherical. Certainly might be. Okay, S we do one more question? 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 wouldould we all end up being Yes, this is a classic, the empty spaceness of things. I think It's wrong to think about the uniververses being made of like tiny, tiny hard billiard balls called particles and atoms that you could scrunch together. I mean, when you get into things that small There are particle type behaviors and there's wave type behaviors. There are, you, aberrations in fields, and that's really what an electron is However We do know that there are ways to make things 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 avoid that because then everything's boring. I could smash the whole universe into a singularity and now it has no size. 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 ten to the eighteen kilograms What is that? That's like ten trillion trillion kilograms. The one that I always remember is that a teaspoon of a neutron star weighs more than the Titanic. A teaspoon of neutron star would weigh about ten million tons Okay It's a lot 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 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 Commer Latong Tomer Lpong, 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 a sphere about two point nine times ten to the eleven meters across which is a little bigger than the orbit of Mars. That's big, but it's also wayay small. For the entire universe, you could fit all the matter Everything we can see is made of. into a ball That's just as wide across as Mars's orbit E. That's insane. 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 eighty kilogram human would only be a cube Two micrometers on a side. Right? Much, much smaller, two millionths of a centimeter. I mean, less than a grain grain of sugar as opposed to hosting a cape. Yeah, like a little tiny crystal of sugar. 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 Amazing. Bically Not only do you have sppin of onene, Michael, you're also a whole lot of nothing. 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 oser but they don't want to and I'm glad for that because it allows me to you know be be like this. I'm glad for that too. doesust make you think though, you know So It seems a bit of a shame that things are kind of fixed the size they were. because if you just had like a tiny bit more empty space or a tiny bit less empty space. could you could at will, change the size of your body from like a three foot tall human You know, sometometimes I think it would be quite useful to be like poly pocket sized. But you would still weigh the same amount. Yeah. And you wouldn't be anywhere near the density of a neutron star if you' polypcket sized. Oh no. 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. 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. Yeah petition for scientists to start working on that immediately, I think 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. All right ama as unpredictable you can flare less with elyiss, a once monthly treatment for moderate severe eczema. After in an initial four month or longer dosing phase, about four in ten people taking EBGLS achieved itch relief and glare are almost cleare skin at sixteen weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more cleare at one year, with monthly dosing. EBGlS Libivap LBKZ a two hundred fifty milligram per two milliliter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children twelve years of age and older who weigh at least eighty eight pounds or forty kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called a topic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin, or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. EBGLS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to EBGlS. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBGLS. Before starting EBLS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection Ask your doctor about Evlus, and visit Evglus. Lillily. com or call one it hundred Lily R X or one one hundred five four five five nine seven nine When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed spponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this shel will get a seventy five dollars sponsored job credit at indndeed dot com slash podcast That's indndeed d. com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apppply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for indndeed sponsored jobs. Michael, frankly I'm astonished that it' taking me this long to tell you about one of the most extraordinary coincidences that has ever happened. You've hinted at this a few times, but you've never told me the story. Okay, so in around twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, I was working just as a mathematician at UCL. When you do mathematical modelling One of the I think that a lot of people spend time making mathematical models of is epidemics is the spread of disease, right? Because 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 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 that kind of cutting edge research in the UK. this is like twenty seven, twenty eighteen, right? ing 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? I sort of think that the date of twenty twenty is probably seared into the minds of everybody. but we're talking before 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 says to a thousand people in the UK Hey, how many people do you reckon you were in contact with last week? 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 nearly twenty years old. And so all of the academics, all of the mathematicians knew that if another pandemic wherever to come, wherever to hit. you know anything like the Spanish flu epidemic that had killed you know more than a hundred million people around the world the century before, if anything like that were to happen again, we were sort of woefully under prepared for what we actually needed So what we decided to do is we decided to set up this massive citizen science experiment where we created an app that we got one hundred thousand people to download and the app Oh wow, would track people As they moved around and how they came into contact with other people. Other people who had the app? Other people who had the app. Yeahah. Right. Okaykay. Yeah. So we had a hundred doz people all over the country basically playing this massive game of let's have a pretend pandemic that we spread out across everywhere. Oh whoa. Okaykay. so so the app is like spreading a little digital Innocuous virus Eactly. And you can mathematically model this beyond even the hundred thousand people to the whole population So then essentially we got we got three things from it, right? So we got this this really, really detailed simulation of a pandemic. 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 through. And we ask people questions on this app about how many people did you talk to today that kind of thing? It's unbelievably rich data set And then the third thing, because this was like we wanted to make it as big as possible, we made a big BBC. program about it made a big documentary about it, o. So this program was aired 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 UK and we were like, right, whereere iss it most likely to start? If we get another pandemic, where' it most likely to start? And we were like, right, it's probably going to be somewhere in the southeast of the UK, probablyably a commuter town of London where there's 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 neare to the south coast, so it could potentially have come up through that way. Yep. So we picked this little town of Hazelmere in Surrey And it's sort of like the Goldilocks town, right? 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 kind of place. So the people who were in Hazelmeed, they would get this special version of this app that would have this incredibly fine grain detail. So everywhere else it was you know within, I think we did one hundred meters square, that app would collect your data of where you were within a one hundred meter square. But in Hazelmeere, in Surrey, it was like extremely extremely detailed So we set off this whole thing, we used the health center in Hazelman. it was all like, you know, this big thing watchatching the program back, and 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 Yeah. And we have all of these amazing simulations and I'll send these across. All right, I'm looking at a very simplified overhead map of a street. There's gray shapes that look like buildings and there are gray lines that look like roads. One of the buildings has been labeled Jim Yeah And it's day one at ten twenty All right, so what you're looking at here 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 Hazemmere that day. Now unbeknownst to me, I walked past somebody who also was running the app and so I essentially spread the virus onto them. you were patient zero? I was patient zero, yeah. although there's quite controversial phrase by the way idea of calling someone patient S, becausecause it' sort of it almost implies that there's some kind of blame that can be laid at that individual's door. I understand that, but the blame in this case is on you. It is on me.. My design of the experiment. Did you guys name this virus? No, we just call it the BBC pandemic Okay, so we have all these visualizations 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 would see going on to be mirrored later on in the real thing. We got this incredibly rich detail of people from Hazelere not knowing each other, not realizing they're on the same train platform in London, you many, many miles away and then passing the virus on from one to another. Just this really, really rich simulation. We also then did some calculations and then based on our model, we calculated that 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 eight hundred eighty six thousand people could potentially lose their lives. okay? So it sort of had this very big ending toi 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 the 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 MES over in Asia. The thing about COVID was that it had these 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 program formed the basis of the government models. So on the UK government modeling If you go on the kind of official websites, you will see all of this data referenced that we had collected ended up being absolutely fundamental to the way that we modeled. Wow. right But also the predictions that we've made with this kind of quite crude TV model. that we had made that sort of eight hundred and eighty thousand people would end up losing their lives if there were no interventions whatsoever. NerveTag, 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 addvisory group, by the way That's what Nerves did for. Okay. Their early estimates actually ended up being almost exactly the same numbers that we had come up with in the TV program. We said eight hundred and eighty six. They said eight hundred and thirty three. And there is, I think some evidence that had there been no interventions whatsoever, the numbers could potentially have gone up that high. In the end, it was far low. 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 tele model had ended up being this really accurate prediction alsoso that our data ended up being incredibly useful. But the strangest coincidence of all was that in feebruary twenty twenty 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. Wow at the exact same medical centre. that we had done all of our filming. The chances of that, I mean, are astronomically tiny. 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? Right, near the ports, near London. It's difficult to say becausecause 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? 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 center, 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 scam deemic Because it was just so coincidental. 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 hop rationalization 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 Hazemere and Surrey was because the producers' Gan lived there and so we had free overnight accommodation. Wow, so it wasn't just Great science that led you to that. It was just convenient. It was also just convenient. Coincidentally, that happen you happened to have basically predicted What would happen? And of course, yeah, people will get suspicious about coincidences. Right So that sort of program was out there. There were a lot of people who are kind of very angry with us. for a little while As COVID kind of progressed, the other program that I did with the BBC, I think as 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 is they they 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 of a week to understand what their nervousous 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 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 antiv vaxors 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, 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 with against his will. And that had really sort of changed the way that he viewed the fundamental responsibility of medical interventions. And he was saying that in a hospital, If you have somebody who comes in who has bangrene 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 be the result of their death. In Western society, we have this fundamental idea of informed consent. 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 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. is in I was vaccinated. But I think that actually that's a really sound logical argument. I kind of agree with it. Yeah, it's principled and it's not based on like in America, there was so much politization of the whole thing that that really would push people in one way or the other, regardless of any kind of studies or facts or reasoning that instead it was 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 It's it's better now to look back from C a little more objectively we said, what we tried to do, and why? Absolutely. There was one other girl, one other woman actually, who was called Chanel And she was this she was pregnant. She was just this absolutely wonderful woman like I would happily go, you know go out for dinner with her. was I really enjoyed her company. She was she lived in Lambeth in South London and her and her partner are both both Back British. And she said some things that really even at the time I It really sort of changed my view of things. For starters, she was pregnant. she 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 harm her unborn child. She just wanted, it was too quick for her. She just know regardless of what statistics you threw at her, she just wasn't swayed by the numbers at all, which I can completely understand this emotional idea But she also said something, which was that when you go to a vaccine center especially in you know somewhere like South London, You go into a vaccine center and you have people who are dressed up with clipboards and plastic aprons and visors and there's this perspepect 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 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 really think that 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 teams mistake and arrogance not to recognize that these were things that were important to people too. Yeah, 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 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 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 Be 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 it its package looks so cool, it's like, all right. I don' know, I'm just bringing that up as one little example of the millions of different things that weigh in our decisions that are not about numbers and probabilities. A lot of it actually is about trust, I think. Trust and confidence in institutions U and I think 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 now we're sort of slightly out the other side of it. well, we are out the other side of the pandemic overall 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 ways that I acted and felt and thought and just trying to, I think M assess them critically and work out what I should have done differently. And I think that program, the unvaccinated program was one of them. So, how many people on unvaccinated wound up changing their minds? You should have known this from the beginning, but of course it was zero. because you cannot just pour statistics on people and then expects them to change their worldview because their worldview you know what? this goes right back to what we were talking at 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. Yeah. In fact, it sometimes does the opposite. It leads to reactants, psychological reactants where people are more convinced of what they already believed. because of all the evidence you're giving them against their belief So So as you reflect, I mean, I'll have to read this in your book, by the way. I haven't even finished it and I'm already fitching it. Yeah. What would you have done different? O what are your thoughts at the moment around 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 reach them about your concerns. Or may 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. 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 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 For 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 talking down the risks of talking up the benefits, of pretending things had no uncertainty when actually really there was a lot of stuff that we still didn't know. And I know people did it for good reason in order to try and persuade persuade others in order to try and effect change and to I mean, essentially, you know impact on behavior on the way that people behavave. 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 way around. Yeah, well I will What's your take on it? Well, I've thought a lot about that difference, the difference between informing and persuading. I think that persersuasion backfires so often that you've got to inform really objectively and sometimes even in totally new ways Like I'm thinking about how In the early days of VSOuce, 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 going to talk about how successful traits organisms that live long lives and have a lot of kids and take care of those kids well share their traits with their kids 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? No And he said, Yeahah, we watched that video in my church's small group because it just kind of shows us the beauty of creation And I was like, Oh, thanks man. And then, like literally a few days later, Richard Dawkins I tweeted about my video, recommending that people watch it And I was like, S All I did is inform people of a thing that happens But I Chose the word. to allow people to not bring up their They're sort of deeper opinions for or against what I was saying. I just said, lookook, 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. 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 vocabulularies 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 Is this just the way language works? So It's always going to be a difficult problem And I think, u especially in an emergency situation And especially when politics gets involved, the best we can hope for is just I don't know. I want to say respect or something, 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, ye. But the thing is it's like, I don't know, sometimes the platitudes actually are also of the most profound thoughts there are. I think it's about humility. I think is about humility. like intellectual humility, but also sort of, I don't know lik honesty in the boundaries of your own knowledge and ability to tell other people what to do That's right. 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. then they do when they feel like they are having their own autonomy and identities challenged and put down. Because this is it, because making your own decision doesn't actually always mean being selfish. Making your own decision to serve greatreater good, actually I think most people do. Most people want to serve the greater good Yeah, 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? Lots of people got vaccines and still get vaccines you know particularly for things like measles, in order to help sort of you know herd immunity to help people who are not able to get advice. That's a very good and useful argument to take. A lot of people will do it for that reason and that you know that reason being the dominant one. 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 pandemic or some sort of global problem, right? L 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 ultimately though, you're right Sometimes platitudes R. D Best pieces of advice, there's a reason they are cliches.ason cliches There really is there really is Being humble, being understanding and coming from a place of love, snooze alert, boring, but you know what? that might be the answer. It might actually just be. I think I even saw a tweet once and I think about this a lot. This guy said something like, manan, 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. I think I'm gonna be thinking about that quite a lot as well. know Yeah. So anyway, Listeners, viewers, love each other. Love us. We love you As ever, we willll be back next week with our main episode And do send us your questions. We love to read them. The rest is science at gohanger. comot Yeah, send them in and stay humble, stay curious, and we'll see you next time. Bye bye