Hannah Predicted a Pandemic

Hello, and welcome to the Rest is Science. I'm Michael Stevens. I'm Hannah Fry. Today on Field Notes, we're going to be tackling your questions, and then also, Hannah has brought something. I think it might be a story. I literally don't know. It is a story. You know, I noticed in the introduction 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, look at that handsome devil. So do your BBC voice again? It's just much more, it's a bit more formal. 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 got into a lot of trouble for it, I'll be honest. Wait, no, do the BBC voice again? Hello, I'm Hannah Fry. Nice, yeah. Do you know what I mean? It's still definitely you, but it feels like you're not talking to me. On the spectrum between BBC and Essex, which is, you know, my natural state, I would say that you're closer to the Essex than the BBC. Oh yeah, let me try to do a BBC voice. Go on. Hello and welcome to the rest is science. I'm Michael Stevens. Oh, that was good. It's almost like American newscaster, really. That was very good. I was going to say, I think the only problem with it is that it's the accent I'm afraid. I'm afraid you're sacked. Hello. My name is Michael Stevens. I think you did. That's BBC. That's like right there. Queens English. OK, OK. Notice how it becomes southern, and that's because that non-Rodic commonality. Non-Rodic. What's that? There's no R, right? Like both the British and the southern Americans will drop the Rs out. They'll be like, yeah, I'm working down on the farm. But then a British person will be like, I was dancing at the farm, right? Mm-hmm. It's much smoother. That's nice. I like that. Can we do an episode on accents at some point? Because I've got a range in my back catalogue that I can wheel out at will. As do I. I have never been shy to show off the range of accents I can do. That's the best possible hook and tease that we've got for an episode on accents coming up. It doesn't exist yet. But we're going to start with questions. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Asserts UK. Here's something strange. Your DNA contains more ancient viral fragments than genes. The genes that build our cells make up only 2% of our DNA. And for years, that is what scientists focused on. They treated the rest, the ancient viruses and stuff, as junk. But now we know that that hidden majority, sometimes called the dark genome, influences how our biology works and how diseases like cancer behave. It's a reminder that progress rarely comes as a single breakthrough. It builds gradually. Cancer Research UK plays a central role in that progress, supporting decades of research into over 200 types of cancer, work that's helped double survival in the UK over the past 50 years. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash the rest is science. Ever wondered if the magic was real? Well, this is where it was made. The wonder of the Hogwarts Express, the chill of the forbidden forest, the secrets hidden in Gringotts Bank. You don't watch the films here. You feel them, every spell, every creature, every detail. Immerse yourself in the filmmaking magic at Warner Brothers Studio Tour London, the making of Harry Potter. Tickets must be booked in advance, WBstudiotour.co.uk. Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news, the Vantor agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk and drafting fixes for you. Vantor is the platform used by over 16,000 fast moving companies like Synthesia, Nando's and Granola, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vantor.com. I want to start with this one. This is sent into us by M.D. Salmon. If your brain constructs your entire reality from electrical signals, including the feeling of this moment right now, if we could perfectly swap your sensory inputs with someone else's for just one minute, would you still feel like you? We're going to start nice and deep here. I think, first of all, is your entire reality constructed from electrical signals? That's a huge assumption to make, but we don't have to belabor that point too much. What we're talking about right now is, if I switched my sensory inputs to someone else's, what would it feel like and would it challenge my feeling of myself? I mean, I think that the closest we've been able to come to doing things like this are skin grafts where someone's had a tumor removed on their leg and then that flesh is replaced with flesh taken from their butt cheek. And after surgery, when they touch the leg, they've got skin where the skin was removed, but those nerve cells used to be in the butt. So they'll stroke their leg and when they touch that new transplant and piece of their own skin, it feels like they're touching their butt. Is that true? It's true. This happened specifically. The leg butt example happened to my friend Jake Roper when he had a tumor removed on his leg and they've got to replace that tissue and you've got, I guess, like just so much in your badonkadonk that that's an easy place to grab more to replace it. And the thing is, it's really trippy at first because you're like touching your leg and your brain is going, 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 going to say, surely there's a point where your brain works out and switches. That's right. Your brain works it out. Your brain remains plastic in so many ways your whole life. It's changeable and it'll eventually fade away and it'll go, ah, these nerves are now next to these other nerves that are in the leg. So I'm going to project those feelings to the leg area from now on. But in that case, you're, you're switching your sensory inputs from yourself to yourself. You're just changing the way on yourself. It is. It always still feels like you, but if suddenly I was feeling everything that touched you, Hannah, it would be a trippy experience. But I think there would still be a me there experiencing these signals going, what the heck? This is really trippy. But 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, etc. But he was saying, actually, we don't have any firm evidence that that is the case. It may be that actually all of that is just an illusion of a conscious self, in the same way that when you look carefully at about a site or smelt, I mean, there's all sorts of illusions that are evidenced in the way that our brain works. And he was saying, maybe 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 around that you might imagine it. The cause 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. Moran, 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 their conscious awareness that I'm going to push it. Like the buttons up, turn the button red, meaning don't push me, before they're aware that they were about to and they become paralyzed. So, I mean, this throws into question the entire notion of is there a you? We certainly act like there is. We think to ourselves and we explain ourselves to others as though there is a little self that's riding along, manning the controls, but it does seem more like there might not be a you, there's a you-ing that your brain does where it looks at what it's done and what's happening. And it goes, oh, yes, yes, yes, that's what I meant to do. Thank you very much. And it might only really do that because it helps us explain ourselves to others. And as I've said before, that might be something that happened not even that long ago, that 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 input so that I'm tasting what you taste, I think I'd still youify it or I guess meify it and I'd say, whoa, this is happening to me. But to what extent there's actually a me, like a part of my brain that is going, uh-huh, I'm just going to 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 it might, we might actually get our best evidence from the way they dream. This is, I mean, this could become a three hour long episode. Easily. But when you look at dreams, the earliest reports of dreams we have from humans, they're different than the way we dream today. And this is something we're all pretty aware of, like dreams from ancient texts are almost always seen as they're not as fanciful. It is someone appeared to me while I was in my bed. There aren't a lot of dreams that are like, whoa, I was on the beach that I'd vacationed on years ago and, and, and like there was this animal that was my dog, but wasn't. No, no, no, it's just like I woke up and I saw an angel and it told me about the future. So you're still in the same place you really, you really are. And you're, you're talking to people or you're interacting with people right where you really are. And that's also how children dream when they're very, very young. And it's only later that we start to become disembodied observers in dreams that go all over the place. Does that tell us something about the, the learning of a you of a thing that can be disembodied and go and control another organism or be something else or experience things from other people's perspectives? Maybe. Maybe. But I mean, there's a reason why they call this the hard problem, which is literally the name of it. What is, what is it like to experience the world from inside somebody else's body? We just, it's, it's, it's a hard problem because we have it's not forcibly, right? There's no real way you can have ideas and theories, but ultimately we just for now don't know. Maybe it is. I mean, I think, I think you're probably right that actually if you just, if you just swapped over the taste, for example, just the signal for taste, it would be like, well, this is a trippy experience. But actually, ultimately, I don't think it would disintegrate your sense of self. But if you swapped over all of it, the whole lot, I don't know. I think maybe, I think there's a chance you'd completely disintegrate. There wouldn't be a you left. Right. And we have to ask, where do I begin? Do I begin at my sensory inputs or later on in the processing? Because if I had all of your taste nerves connected to the right places in my brain, I might feel projected weirdly across space. But would I be tasting things as you do? Or as I do? At what point does it become my experience? Would you suddenly absolutely despise olives and love chili? 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, what I love it or hate it, I don't know. It depends where the liking that judgment is happening. Is it being done by the cells in the tongue or by the cells in the brain? We know, for example, that like color blindness can happen in 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. But color blindness can also be induced and it can be non-genetic. It can happen to someone who used to be able to see the colors. I didn't know this until this morning. I thought it was purely a genetic thing. I know you could hypnotize people into being colorblind. That is one thing I... I did not even know that. But you could also damage someone's brain. If they have swelling in the occipital lobe in the back where vision is first processed, can lead to color blindness. And so can medications. As it turns out, one of the chemicals in Viagra can lead to blue-yellow color blindness. No, permanently or as a temporary... I mean, you gain one thing, you lose another. Yeah, it's a trade-off, you know? It's a good life lesson. I don't know if it's permanent or not, but I'll do some experiments later and I'll let you know what I find. There's also a medication used for treating tuberculosis called a thambutol. And that can lead to red-green color blindness. Vitamin A deficiency can cause color blindness. Certain UV exposure to your retinas can lead to it. So even if your brain has always been aware of red and green, blue and yellow, and the differences, you can lose that ability later in life. 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, it gives a real insight into the hard problem, is that a lot of people who are colorblind do not know that they are colorblind. It's sometimes ever, but often until later in life. 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, you know, red-green color blindness, for example. And it's so fundamentally different to the experience of the rest of us. And yes, you can go through your life having conversations with people the entire time and never know that you are 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 blindness talks about how peanuts and peanut butter are extremely different colors to him. Whereas to us, it might change its hue of brown a little bit. But for him, they were able to show him peanuts and he's like, oh yeah, they're green or whatever. I forget exactly. But it was quite different than a regular vision experience. And then they put the peanuts in a blender and they tell him, tell us when it changes color. And they start spinning them up. And to me, it just looks like the same color, but like fast. And at a certain point he goes, okay, now it's different. Now now it's become a whole different color. And I'm like, what in the world? Wow. I was plugged into his eyeballs. Or I don't actually know what was causing it. 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. But I might might like fix it myself as my brain went na na 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 so for Christmas one year, I made him a t-shirt 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 F the colorblind. 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 have a, um, we have a, a sort of Christmas tradition in my family of where we get each other gifts, um, that sort of play on the other people's absolute weaknesses. It's kind of, it's quite an Irish thing. I love this. Yeah. Yeah. He got me, he got me a t-shirt once, um, where I'd been, I'd done a, um, I'd done a TV program where I had hosted, have I got news for you in the UK? And, uh, during at one point I'd done air quotes and he got, uh, someone had made a joke about whether my, 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 professor in inverted commas as though, um, to really call my, call my credibility into question. So, you know, it's sort of a, it's, um, it's, it's a running thing. It's a very great tradition. I'd love to start one of those, but this, this colorblind shirt, the F the colorblind shirt, that is very similar to the shirt that's coming in the summer curiosity box. Instead of making fun of the colorblind, which I do not support, it makes you want to have dogs. And so the shirt is red. It's a red t-shirt. And in white it says no bones in here. Cause of course dogs really like bones. And if you, if a dog knew that I was full of bones, they might want to play with them. So it says in white letters, no bones in here. So any dog sees me, they know this guy doesn't have any bones in them. I'm not going to mess with them. But then in green letters underneath, it says J K. I'm actually full of bones. Now dogs have a red, green color blindness, 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. Yours is a much more PC version of, or much more human-centric. It's a human-centric one. Yes. To be clear, I'm not anti-colorblind people. Just, you know, sometimes anti my brother-in-law. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So answering that question, M.D., I think went many directions you might have expected, but I appreciate it. It did, but it's a really interesting question. And we spent 20 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 spin? By the way, Matthew, absolutely love that you started your question with, Hey, I'm here for it. What the hell is it? Why are people talking about it? And if it is just a metaphor, what is it a metaphor for? Thank you. That's one of my 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 use this phrase, it gets thrown around. And in your head, I think it conjures up a mental image 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 the similarities to angular momentum, right? It's a quantity that gets conserved, essentially. 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. So it is metaphoric. It's important to remember that when people talk about spin. It is a property of particles, but you got to just realize there's no actual spinning ball there. There's no spinning ball there, no. Unless there is a way to get them to spin, to physically spin. The thing is, you have to remember that 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, 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 why I get so scared? Because the exact words that you use in this situation, right, field, for example, you have to be so careful to get the exact one right. Because otherwise, I mean, I'm literally looking at the department for theoretical physics of Cambridge University out of my window. I can feel the judgment, the war. Yeah. And all of those guys. So I'm going to be really careful. And if I make mistakes, you can tell me in the comments. Okay. So all right, if you put an electron into a magnetic field, then that electron can align itself with that field. It can either spin up or it can spin down, essentially. That direction is a physical genuine direction. Okay. But it only has two states. It doesn't 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, you can effectively rotate an electron, right? But that's the only way that you can do it. And that's different than the property of spin that we assigned to particles. Yeah. But this is one of the ways that they get, that the quantum computers work, basically, is by altering the magnetic field in order 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 360 degrees, it returns to the same state. You, Michael, are a spin one particle. Thank you for noticing. It's a slightly larger version, right? Then one might expect to the quantum realm. A spin half particle, right, like an electron. See if you can spot this, a little bit weirder. If you rotate it 360 degrees, it doesn't go back to the same point. You have to rotate it twice. You have to rotate it 720 degrees 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 non-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? 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. It's all of this stuff that we're describing here essentially comes out from the structure of an equation and the way that different things relate to one 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. Go on, you do it. That's right. Here'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 flaps, 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 facing up. So you're turning your hand all the way over, but you're not going to do it with a rotation. You're going to do it just by moving through space. Here's a clue. The kind of space you want it to move around might be spherical. Certainly might be. Okay, so 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 would we all end up being? Yes, this is a classic. The empty spaceness of things. I think it's wrong to think about the universe is 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 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. Wow, that's small. Look at a neutron star. A neutron star is super, super dense. It's not dense enough to collapse into a singularity, but it's very dense. It's so dense that a cubic meter of neutron star weighs 10 to the 18 kilograms. What is that? That's like 10 trillion, trillion kilograms. 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 10 million tons. Let's just take that as our goal here. Neutron stars are dense, meaning there's just a lot less empty space in between the matter. It is so close together. If we could take all the matter in the entire observable universe and squish it all together as densely as a neutron star is packed, how large would this thing be? I'll tell you, the math was done by Reddit user Tomer Lutong. Tomer Lutong. 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 2.9 times 10 to the 11 meters across, which is a little bigger than the orbit of Mars. That's big, but it's also way small. For the entire universe, you could fit all the matter that everything we can see is made of into a ball that's just as wide across as Mars's orbit. Everything. 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 that an 80 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 of sugar as opposed to a whole sugar cube. Yeah, like a little tiny crystal of sugar. And that seems more correct to me. So basically, that's how small you'd have to be to be a neutron star. To be a black hole, you'd have to be even smaller, much, much smaller still. Amazing. Basically, not only do you have a spin of one, 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. It could all get closer, but they don't want to. And I'm glad for that, because it allows me to be like this. I'm glad for that too. It does make you think, though, that things are fixed the size they were. Because if you just had a tiny bit more empty space or a tiny bit less empty space, you could at will change the size of your body from a three foot tall human. Sometimes I think it'd be quite useful to be polypocket 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 were polypocket 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. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. In the UK, nearly one in two people will face cancer in their lifetime. The question is, could science stop cancer before it begins? In over the past 50 years, Cancer Research UK has helped double cancer survival in the UK. And that's proof of what research can achieve. Like take cervical cancer. Almost every case is caused by HPV, the human papillomavirus. And when scientists uncovered that link, prevention became possible. Indeed, it did by a vaccine. And it's protection that works way before the cancer itself can actually grow. After the vaccine was introduced, cervical cancer rates in England were nearly 90% lower than expected in women in their 20s. I mean, we're now genuinely at a point where this is a disease that is disappearing in young women in the UK. This is something that I really hope my daughters will never have to deal with. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash rest is science. Welcome back. Michael, frankly, I'm astonished that it's taken me this long to tell you about one of the most extraordinary coincidences that has ever happened. You've hinted at this a few times, but you've never told me the story. Okay. So in around 2017-2018, I was working, and this is a mathematician at UCL. When you do mathematical modeling, one of the things 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, the cutting-edge research in the UK, this is like 27-2018, right? The cutting-edge research in the UK had to be based on data. By the way, I should just add just a quick reminder for everybody. This is two years before the actual pandemic, right? I sort of think that the date of 2020 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 20 years earlier that essentially said to 1,000 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 1,000 people, and it was by that point, nearly 20 years old. And so all of the academics, all of the mathematicians knew that if another pandemic were ever to come, were ever to hit, anything like the Spanish flu epidemic that had killed more than 100 million people around the world the century before, if anything like that were to happen again, we were sort of woefully underprepared for what we actually needed. So what we decided to do is set up this massive citizen science experiment where we created an app that we got 100,000 people to download, and the app would track people, and 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. Right, okay. Yeah, so we had 100,000 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. Okay, so the app is like spreading a little digital innocuous virus. Exactly. And you can mathematically model this beyond even the 100,000 people to the whole population. So then essentially we got three things from it, right? So we got 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 to. And we asked 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. Okay, so this program was aired in 2018 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 pandemic 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, where's it most likely to start? If we get another pandemic, where's it most likely to start? And we were like, right, it's probably going to be somewhere in the southeast of the UK, probably a commuter town of London where there's millions and millions of people who live. You sort of want somewhere that is near to the main airports, maybe between Gatwick and Heathrow, maybe somewhere that's nearer to the South Coast so it could potentially have come up through that way. 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. That kind of place. So the people who were in Hazelmere, 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 100 meters square, the app would collect your data of where you were within 100 meters square. But in Hazelmere, in Surrey, it was like extremely, extremely detailed. So we set off this whole thing, we used the health centre in Hazelmere, it was all like, you know, this big thing. And watching the programme back, right, knowing what went on to happen, we are way too gleeful, way 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 grey shapes that look like buildings and there are grey lines that look like roads. One of the buildings has been labelled gem. Yeah. And this is day one at 1020. All right, so what you're looking at here, if you were only looking at it, what you're looking at here is this red dot is me and it's my location. And what I'm doing is I'm wandering around in Hazelmere 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. So you were patient zero? I was patient zero, yeah. Although that's quite a controversial phrase, by the way, that the idea of calling someone patient zero because it sort of 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. That's 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 as you would see going on to be mirrored later on in the real thing. We got this incredibly rich detail of people from Hazelmere not knowing each other, not realizing they're on the same train platform in London, 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 886,000 people could potentially lose their lives. So it sort of had this very big ending to it. Anyway, less than two years later, obviously, the real pandemic hit. The thing is, I think, to a lot of the world, it was a real shock. But I think to 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 MERS 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 official websites, you will see all of this data referenced that we had collected ended up being absolutely fundamental to the way that we model. Wow. Right. But also, the predictions that we've made with this quite crude TV model that we had made that 880,000 people would end up losing their lives if there were no interventions whatsoever. Nerve tag, 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 threat advisory group, by the way. That's what Nerve stood 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 886, they said 833. And there is, I think, some evidence that had there been no interventions whatsoever, the numbers could potentially have got up that high. In the end, it was far lows. It's difficult to say exactly whether people died with or off COVID, but it's more like in the 100,000s in the UK. So I mean, that was one thing already was that our crude telemodel had ended up being this really accurate prediction. Also that our data ended up being incredibly useful. But the strangest coincidence of all was that in February 2020, there were a few cases in the UK where people had caught COVID abroad. But the very first case of domestic transmission of COVID in the entire UK was in Hazelmere in Surrey. Wow. At the exact medical center 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. So it's difficult to say, because what I will add is that as a result of all of this, there were certain groups of the internet, of course, who were really nervous around this time, right? Not just at 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 scandemic. 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 its near airports, its near this, its near this, its 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 Hazelmiren Surrey was because the producers ground 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, you happen 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 were kind of very angry with us for a little while. But as COVID kind of progressed, the other program that I did with the BBC, I think 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 was they put seven people in-house, seven vaccine skeptics in a 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 nervousness was around. And at the end of the week, they would be given the opportunity to be vaccinated if they wanted to be. And the thing about that week, I've actually been writing about this quite a lot recently, because I think I'm going to include it in a book that I'm writing. But I think that looking back at the whole time of COVID, I mean, I think all of us lost our minds, first of all. I think all of us were doing extremely crazy things. But I actually end up looking back, much more sympathetic to the arguments of those anti-vaxxers in that show than I perhaps was at the time or that the country was at the time. I don't know, I just, just now that some time has passed, I'm just reflecting on it very differently. So for example, allow me to give you kind of illustrate. There was one person in that show who was called Mark, who was a who was a nurse who worked for the NHS. And his background, he had had his own sort of medical story when he was younger, where he'd been put on some medication without his consent, essentially against his will. And that had really sort of changed the way that he viewed the fundamental responsibility of medical interventions. And he was saying that in a hospital, if you have somebody who comes in who has sanguine on their leg, or wherever 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 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. And actually, I kind of agree with that, you know, I kind of don't have a problem with that argument at all. There's sort of nothing, I mean, I made a different choice, sure, but isn't I was vaccinated. But I think that actually, that's a really sound logical argument. I kind of agree with it. Yeah, it's it's principled. And it's not based on like in America, there was so much politicization of the whole thing that that really would push people in one way or the other, regardless of of any kind of studies or facts or reasoning, that instead, it was a almost like a sport, it was my team against yours. And even if it's a penalty on my side, I'm not going to see it. And so it was it was very frustrating and it's it's it's better now to look back. And I think we can see a little more objectively about what we said, what we tried to do and why. Absolutely. There was one one other girl, one other woman, actually, who was 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. She was I really enjoyed her company. She was she lived in Lambeth in South London, and her and her partner both both Black British. And she said some things that I that really, even at the time, I 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, you know, regardless of what statistics you threw at her, she just wasn't swayed by the numbers at all, which I can completely understand that this emotional idea. But she also said something, which was that when you go to a vaccine 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 perspex screening between people and everyone's getting moved around, and everyone's sort of feeling very nervous. And she said that going into that environment just reminds her of going into 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, 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, mistaken 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 will have a very different reaction than if it's available in a store, or if it's mailed for free to them. Like I think, especially in America, people trust companies more than they do the government. And so if, if all the companies that had their vaccines were trying to put together the funniest commercial on TV about it and do the best deal in the coolest packaging and offering deals, then I think people would have felt a lot more trusting. Because I guess they feel like if a company does something wrong, you can sue the company. But if the government does something wrong, they're already the top. There isn't a super government you can go to. And so, you know, you can compare this to things like weed killers that might be really dangerous to our health. But because it's sold at the store, and it's package looks so cool, it's like, all right, I don't 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. And I think that I think there's definitely been quite a long period of time when 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, assess them critically and work out what I should have done differently. And I think that program, that unvaccinated program was one of them. So how many people on unvaccinated wound up changing their minds? I should have known this from the beginning, but of course it was zero, because you cannot just pour statistics on people and then expect them to change their world view, because their world view, you know, what this goes right back to what we were talking about at the very, how we were speaking at the very start, your lived experience in your body with your sensory inputs and your backstory and your emotional history is completely and totally unique to you. And trying to influence it from the outside, especially by shouting statistics of 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 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 pitching it. Yeah, I'm going. Would you have done different or what are your thoughts at the moment around what could have been done differently, especially when we're talking about not just someone's personal decision, but a decision that will affect other people and you're trying to reach them about your concerns? Or maybe the point is that changing people's minds is just not, 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 people, I mean, I think they essentially suffered from something called white hat bias, which is where people were so convinced that what they were doing was the right thing, the good thing that they were willing to use sort of tactics of deception ultimately, of 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. I know people did it for good reason in order to try and persuade others in order to try and affect change and to, I mean, essentially impact on behavior on the way that people behaved. 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 is your take on it? Well, I've thought a lot about that difference, the difference between informing and persuading. I think that, yeah, persuasion just backfires so often that you've got to inform really objectively and sometimes even in totally new ways. Like I'm thinking about how in the early days of Vsauce, I wanted to talk about evolution, but 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, yeah, we watch 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 tweeted about my video recommending that people watch it. And I was like, see, all I did is inform people of a thing that happens. But I chose the word to allow people to not bring up their sort of deeper opinions for or against what I was saying. I just said, look, here's the idea. And there's another YouTuber named CGP Gray. I think he said this, but I've said it so many times since that he's starting to question whether he ever said it. But I said, you need to overestimate how intelligent your audience is. People are much smarter than we give them credit for. But you need to underestimate their vocabularies. When you inform people, you need to make sure that you're careful about how you do it because it's really hard to inform without persuading one way or the other. Because that's just the way language works. So it's always going to be a difficult problem. And I think, especially in an emergency situation, and especially when politics gets involved, the best we can hope for is just, I don't know, I want to say respect or something, but it just seems like such a platitude. It seems like such a, well, look, if we just do everything with love, it's like, yeah. But the thing is, it's like, I don't know, sometimes the platitudes actually are also the most profound thoughts that there are. I think it's about humility. I think it's about humility, like intellectual humility, but also sort of, I don't know, like honesty in the boundaries of your own knowledge and ability to tell other people what to do. Yeah, 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 than 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 the greater 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, particularly for things like measles, in order to help 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 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 a pandemic or some sort of global problem, right? Like aliens arrive and should we surrender to them or not? How do we persuade people to do the right thing? I think that ultimately, though, you're right. Sometimes platitudes are the best pieces of advice. There's a reason they are cliches. 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, man, what if it turns out that the meaning of life is just to love each other? That would be so cringe and yet I'm afraid it might be true. I think I'm going to be thinking about that quite a lot as well. Yeah. So anyway, listeners, viewers, love each other. Love us. We love you. As ever, we'll be back next week with our main episode and do send us your questions. We loved it to read them. The rest is science at gohanging.com. Yes, send them in and stay humble, stay curious and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.