No Such Thing As Half-Past Purple

12:00James Harkin:1887.

12:00Anna Ptaszynski:And that means that, you know, Jack the Ripper could have seen a wind turbine. That's nice.

12:08Dan Schreiber:That's the nice thing.

12:10Anna Ptaszynski:Or pick your person who was alive in 1887.

12:12Dan Schreiber:Just anyone else.

12:16Anna Ptaszynski:Queen Victoria. Oscar Wilde. All good examples. Someone say Gandhi. Gandhi would have been very young. Very young. But he would have been alive. Good point. Touche.

12:30Anna Ptaszynski:No, but hang on. I'm sorry to quibble, but you need someone who... Because Gandhi could have seen a wind turbine later on, you know, for the for the rest of his life. I mean in the 30s and 40s. He could have seen the one at Grandpa's Knob. What we're looking for ideally is the most famous person who died in late 1887. And ideally one who didn't murder lots of people. and ideally not Jack the Ripper. No, Gandy is a great point. Thank you. So are we all clear on who could and couldn't see a wind turbine?

12:57James Harkin:Oh, good. That's what this room was all about, scientific debate.

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13:37James Harkin:Stop the podcast. Hi, everyone. We'd like to let you know that this week we are sponsored by Babbel. That's right, Babbel, the most important language learning tool that you can get. And I'll tell you why, James. Between 70 % and 90 % of people who try to learn a new language just give up. And it's true. I've tried to relearn languages that I had a basic knowledge of in school, and you just give up after two weeks. Babbel is designed to make sure that you enjoy it and you want to learn more. Yeah, like the language of Atlantis. I remember you tried to speak that for a little while. It's really hard, actually.

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15:21James Harkin:Okay, it is time for fact number two And that is my fact My fact this week is that when he was a child Notable Royal Institution lecturer Humphrey Davy's favourite hobby Was to lock himself in his room And give hour-long talks to a bunch of empty chairs This is Humphrey Davy, who is one of the most spectacular names ever to have walked into this building. An absolute juggernaut of science. We're going to talk about him in a second. But one of the things he was notable for outside of his discoveries was he was an astonishing lecturer. He delivered the most amazing lectures. And it turns out not only did he have an amazing love of science from childhood, but he also just loved having a crowd of people listen to him.

16:05James Harkin:And he didn't even need the crowd. He just needed the idea of a crowd. So when he was a child, he used to go out and he used to gather kids at the local market and he would just rant at them based on anything that he found interesting. That's so sweet. It's really sweet. And then back at home, he would just, yeah, he would set up those chairs.

16:22Dan Schreiber:Yeah. I've seen children to gather at the market while you scream about, you know, electricity to them. Well, it sounds like he's a child too. He's a child too. Oh, okay. No, that is better. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

16:32James Harkin:Yeah. But he was a really, he was a, he was a science-minded child and he was always in chemicals. He was obsessed with them and he used to do tricks on his family. So for his sisters, he used to take chemicals that would be florescent and at night when it got dark, suddenly these monsters were on their bedroom wall that he painted on. So he played lots of tricks with the chemicals even as a child. That's cool. And then he kind of went into poetry, didn't he? He really loved poetry when he was a young man. and he even had some poems published by Robert Southie. Southie? Southie. But then what seems to have happened, because he's from Cornwall, there was a big shipwreck and on that shipwreck there was loads of instruments from French surgeons and stuff and then he managed to get all of these instruments and then started doing loads of experiments and then got into science afterwards.

17:24But he was into science, but this is where he started to do all of this. Gosh, that's very romantic

17:27Anna Ptaszynski:because he was from Penzance, I think. He's a very proud son of Cornwall and all this. So he went to Bristol, first of all, to start his career. And this was the really first really exciting thing. At the age of 20, he was in Bristol working for someone called Thomas Beddows. And he was working on laughing gas. And he was just the sort of young man in the room who was to a certain extent a guinea pig. He was really interested in science.

17:50Dan Schreiber:That is the best job ever though, isn't it? When all your friends are interning at their dad's printing company, you're the guinea pig for laughing gas.

17:57Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah. And he really got into it. I mean, he took a lot of laughing gas for a long time. And that was the time when he knew all these poets. So he knew Sothe, he knew Samuel, Taylor, Coleridge. This is all in Bristol. He was friends with Roger of Thesaurus fame. Yes. Wow. I know.

18:16Dan Schreiber:Do you know what? I read Roger's account of taking laughing gas because what Humphrey David did was he said, you can come to all these laughing gas parties I'm throwing, but you have to write down notes of exactly how you found it. And so he compiled this book of all their notes. And Roger...

18:30Anna Ptaszynski:It sounds dreadful. it sounds like a load of people's anecdotes about getting stoned. Oh, it's brilliant. I've read it.

18:36Dan Schreiber:Oh, is it? Yeah. Well, maybe it's more up my street than yours because it is just what you described. Yeah, okay. I suppose it's not like your mate's telling you. It's like the greatest poets of the 19th century.

18:47Anna Ptaszynski:I still think drug experiences and dreams are the two things that are terrific in your own head and then kind of... No, it's the original...

18:54James Harkin:Davey's the original Aldous Huxley, Doors of Perception. That's what he was doing. He was trying to show that your brain went into a different state of consciousness when you were on these things and what you were opening yourself up to. That's the bit I can see, Anna, you didn't like.

19:06Dan Schreiber:To be honest, that is the most tedious thing about people who've taken drugs is when they talk about the older states of consciousness. I just want to hear that they sort of shat themselves in a corner at their grandma's house.

19:16Anna Ptaszynski:If it's that, then fine. That's true, yeah.

19:18Dan Schreiber:Which is, and Roger of thesaurus fame, his account, well, here's what it is. He said, I was incapable of speaking, lost all consciousness of where I was. My whole frame was violently agitated. I panted violently and my heart seemed to palpitate and every artery to throb with violence of thesaurus fame. He uses the word violent about 19 times in his account. He hated it. Most of them loved it. He said, I cannot remember that I experienced the least pleasure from these sensations.

19:49James Harkin:Really? Yeah. Because Coleridge loved it. Davey really loved it. They got to a point where the party died down and no one wanted to do it anymore but he just kept doing it. and he went around with a sort of green silk bag that he would just fill up with the stuff and he would go for long walks and he would do it to the point where he'd pass out and wake up two hours later not realising how much he had done and then get back on the horse and do it some more.

20:16Dan Schreiber:Everyone's got that friend from uni, haven't they? Sort of ten years later, oh, you're still... Yeah. Oh, okay.

20:24Anna Ptaszynski:He did move on. He moved to London and he came to the Royal Institution and invented the miner's safety lamp. And the rest is history. Yeah. But yeah, he did loads of lectures in this very room, didn't he? And they were so popular that the traffic around here got really, really busy. And they made a one-way street so that people could get in and out. And it was the first one-way street in the whole of England.

20:45James Harkin:Yeah, the Royal Institution is on Albemarle Street, which is just outside us. And so many people were coming horse and carriage and walking and crowding to see Davy speak that they had to change the whole system so that they could just stop London coming to a standstill.

21:00Dan Schreiber:Which is actually a huge faff when you're cycling here on the way to a show and you're late. So good to know I have him to blame for my near-death experience today.

21:08James Harkin:He also, he discovered five elements, which he showed at the Royal Institution for the first time. So calcium. Biggie. Biggie. Strontium. Yes, like B-side, yeah. Barium. Barium. Okay. Unless it was named after a guy called Barry. Boron? Magnesium. Biggie. Biggie. These are huge. But he said his greatest discovery of all was not a chemical. It was not any of the experiments. It was a little student called Michael Faraday. And Michael Faraday is also one of the greatest. Ooh, good noise. Not many rooms you'd get that noise in when you drop Faraday's name. Faraday had come to a bunch of lectures that he'd seen Davy do when he was younger and he scribbled down this big booklet of ideas and so on he sent it to Davy and Davy saw so much potential that he brought him in but Faraday is also one of the great giants of this room didn't Davy have a big accident or something he was working with nitrogen trichloride which is a huge explosive and it exploded in his face and he went partially blind for quite a long time and he needed a helper and that's when he brought Faraday in to help him so this one big accident was what brought them together to work together what really gave us Faraday he was reckless I would say he he used

22:37Dan Schreiber:to shut himself in a box with the gases he was inhaling to make sure he got the most intense high possible and there was one time when he sent all of his servants away because he really just wanted to you know if you're having a big high you want to enjoy it by yourself alone and one of his servants didn't get i'm told one of his servants didn't get the memo didn't realize that they'd all been dismissed and so he came to see if humphrey wanted you know a cigar or something came and found him in this you know shut box that humphrey built for himself specifically completely unconscious asphyxiating and dragged him out and he would have died had this servant not rescued him so he did take self-experimentation to someone say quite stupid limits

23:17Anna Ptaszynski:but can we say the thing about the safety lamp where he saved a lot of lives this is incredible so miners were dying by the dozen and in fact many more than that due to something called fire damp which we would call methane where you have these pockets of methane underground that catch fire and the only way of lighting your mine underground is with candles so this is a huge problem and he spent I think it was about two weeks on the problem before designing a lamp and there is a bit of debate about whether there was a different kind of lamp stevenson of rocket fame came up with another version of one but this i mean from what it looks like this definitely was davy's invention and it's basically just a fine sort of cylinder of gauze around the light that you're using it kind of encloses the light doesn't it yeah you still get the light but you don't get the methane uh exploding even if you're in a dangerous area and uh he refused to patent it which was very exciting and i think for over a century coal miners carried these things and did not die due at least due to methane, they died to plenty of other things.

24:16Anna Ptaszynski:And what this did was it made deeper and bigger seams of coal accessible. And a lot of the Industrial Revolution was powered by miners being able to access lots more coal. So, you know, that huge change in the world was at least partly thanks to Davies' lamp.

24:33Dan Schreiber:But did any of you think that it's quite basic? It's literally all he does is put, it's like you put a sieve over a candle. That's all it is. Miners are going into mines, candles are causing explosions. And David says, you know what? If you put a sieve over this, a metal gauze, because it's metal, it absorbs all the heat. So you don't have the heat for that big explosion. And that's it. Put a sieve over it. Well, the best ideas do seem simple once they've been discovered, right? I just reckon I would have come up with that in my kitchen at some point. I'm not.

25:03Anna Ptaszynski:Are you sure?

25:05Dan Schreiber:I can't be 100%, but.

25:09Anna Ptaszynski:I just think, yeah, combining it with any utensil in your house, I wouldn't think of the sieve first of all Had we invented the sieve at this point? Yeah, the sieve was invented No, he didn't invent the sieve Because then the headline would have been sieve man Sieve man helps with coal mine stuff

25:24James Harkin:So when was the sieve around? When was the sieve? Who came first, Gandhi or the sieve? That's what I want to know

25:32Anna Ptaszynski:No one knows Can we talk about his wife as well? Yeah, of course So he married a very wealthy heiress The done thing at the time, Jane Aprice And she is responsible for a very interesting bit of his story Because he went on a very dangerous journey in 1813 So what's going on in 1813? Probably fighting the French Fighting the French Fighting the French You said that a little bit too enthusiastic I'm up for it I will serve, if called And only if it was the French Just to limit it Yeah, so there was a thing called the Prix du Galvanisme created in 1801 by Napoleon Bonaparte, which was a prize for scientific advances.

26:19Anna Ptaszynski:He had won it, and in 1813, so really, Napoleon's march on Moscow has just ended catastrophically. We're gearing up for Waterloo. It's a great time. um, Davy and his wife Jane a priest and Faraday went to Brittany to present themselves to Napoleon to pick up the The medal and the check they were arrested mistakenly when when they got there So it was this was quite a perilous trip They made but they did make it got the gong and the money and all of that But there was a really big appeal a few years ago by the Royal Society of Chemistry saying where is this medal? And it turned out that Jane his widow had been so embarrassed to have this French medal and the French money in the house that she had hurled it into the sea off the Cornish coast after he died.

27:05Anna Ptaszynski:They knew roughly where they had done it, and they spent four days diving in, I think it was 2013 they did this. Really? Or 2014, yeah. They didn't find it, obviously, because, you know, it's very hard to find. Yeah, yeah. They did look. So it still might be out there. It's still definitely out there. Wow, the Davy treasure. That's cool. Find it. Go and find it. He actually was very much against the French, though, wasn't he, Davy? I think. Good lad. Sorry. Sorry. I'll tell you what, you know what? Over the last two or three weeks, we've been talking about football every single day. And Andy has not been interested until we said that we beat France.

27:41Excited. But no, he went to the Louvre and then he wrote back to his friend saying, yeah, it's all right. It's just full of stuff that Napoleon stole, isn't it? Right. He went to, there was an anti-British play on at the time and he went and sort of sat in the back and watched to see what they were saying about us. And the main thing was there's another chemist called Lavoisier. And Lavoisier had done all this stuff about the science of heat. And Davy disagreed with Lavoisier's theories. And in the end, he managed to prove it. And when he proved it in his paper, he was just all about how the French were so dogmatic about their ideas and how we finally proven them wrong.

28:17And so, yeah, he was just like a real, he was like the Andrew Hunter Murray of his day.

28:27James Harkin:Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that it's not as foggy as it used to be.

28:39Dan Schreiber:Is it a fact or a conversation opener?

28:41Anna Ptaszynski:It's such a boomer opinion to have. I'm not saying you're a boomer, I'm just saying... Do you think? Oh yeah, that's got Daily Express article written all over it, like, what's wrong with a bit of good old British fog? And it's the immigrants' fault.

28:57Dan Schreiber:Yes, right. And you know what? The young people couldn't handle it anyway. I don't think it would be in the express because it's probably due to climate change. Oh, okay. So yeah, this is quite a few studies that have been done over the last few years and every single one shows a big decrease in fog. 2009 studies showed that in Europe there is a 50 % drop in low visibility events, which just is fog, mist, haze, all of that stuff, since the 1970s. And in 2010, the Barclay University looked at America and they found that fog has declined 33 % since 1951. What it seems is that basically climate change means that as the oceans warm, the conditions you need for sea fog, especially, you need like a cold water surface in order for the fog to form.

29:43Because it's when the warm air from the water kind of hits the land. You just don't really get those conditions anymore. So we just get less fog than we used to. And it's important. Fog is the new moss. I'm in. Fog is really important. So there's lots of crops which use fog in places where it doesn't rain so much. For instance, in California, where they make lots of lettuce or they make lots of strawberries, it's the fog which nourishes them and keeps them hydrated. And in cities, the fog can sort of move away pollutants from the air. So it's really useful there as well. We need our fog and it's all going.

30:19Wow.

30:20James Harkin:It's really important as well for London tourism. As early as the 1970s, the tourist board would urge Americans to come to England and to London in particular when it was winter so that it would be at its foggiest because Americans love foggy London. Americans write in, if you agree with this. It might have changed recently, but it certainly wasn't. It probably changed a bit recently. So don't ask anyone, don't ask anyone. Just believe it. I can see that. Like, if you're American, you come to London, and you want to see the London of Sherlock Holmes, or the London of Humphrey Davy, it's going to be like that kind of thing.

30:53Anna Ptaszynski:You know who else loved a bit of London Fog?

30:54James Harkin:Jack the Ripper. Keen, very keen. But, like, there was a company in America that did codes, still do codes. I think they were called London Town initially. They changed their name to London Fog.

31:06Dan Schreiber:But I think that's because it was famous back in the day. I mean, by the 70s, it was gone. Poor, we'd nailed it. This was the big smog, wasn't it? That was, yeah, Victorian era, start of the 20th century, bit of a disaster in London. No one could see anything. Americans flocked because, you know, Thomas Cook organized fog holidays, apparently. But aside from that, it was quite bad. And then we had the Clean Air Act in 1956, which is kind of an amazing success story, which basically sorted it out. But it was a massive issue before that. And it was particularly an issue for Hollywood, in fact, and for filmmakers.

31:38Dan Schreiber:So it wasn't just bad for filming outdoors. it would get inside film studios in London because there was so much of it and they didn't know how to get rid of it. So some films in the 1920s that were shot in London had to shoot at night because you can penetrate darkness with a light but you can't penetrate it. As anyone who's ever tried to turn on fog lights knows when they do fuck all, anyone knows that you can't penetrate fog with any light. So if you wanted to film something then you had to film it at night. So film schedules would be from 9pm until 6am.

32:09Anna Ptaszynski:Oh my God. It was mad. Alfred Hitchcock's first ever full-length film was called The Lodger, A Story of the London Fog. Oh. It was a big bit of brand Britain. Certainly London, actually. And, you know, any other big industrial cities. Because I think we might have mentioned before that London particular was a term for the fog. But there was also the Manchester Entire, you know, where you just couldn't see anything in Manchester.

32:32Dan Schreiber:Oh, Andy Burnham, stop trying to make it happen.

32:36Anna Ptaszynski:It is incredible reading about it now, just how thick the air was. So in 1901, not far from here in Piccadilly Circus, they needed to turn the lights on in Piccadilly even though the sun was shining and it was daytime. It was so foggy. You couldn't see where you were going. You couldn't see to drive around. Sometimes you would be standing by the window during the day and you couldn't read a book. I mean, it was so foggy. It was coal, basically. Every home was heated by coal. There were big coal power plants in the center of town. It was coal, coal, coal. but the cool thing was fog changed colour.

33:09Anna Ptaszynski:You could tell what time of day it was by the colour of the fog.

33:12James Harkin:Really?

33:12Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah. So yellow in the morning because people are burning coal to heat their homes and all of this and the tar in particular made it yellow. Later in the day when the industries got going, trains and ships, it would turn dark brown. None of these are nice colours. No, they're not. Okay, well, there were green fogs, purple fogs, black fogs but it was just such a mega thing.

33:33Dan Schreiber:And how precise was this? because you say to someone, I'll meet you at yellow o 'clock.

33:37Anna Ptaszynski:Definitely.

33:38Dan Schreiber:And half past purple.

33:39Anna Ptaszynski:Sadly, you can't see where the fuck you're going. But... Is this more smog than fog? I thought fog was just water, pure fog. I think so, yeah. This was smog for sure.

33:49Dan Schreiber:It was combined, wasn't it? Spooky fog. Foggy and then a lot of pollution. You do get super fog, which is even foggier than normal fog and even foggier than snow. Really? It happens if there's like forest fires and stuff because water vapour condenses onto the smoke particles and so the reason that anna's fog lights don't work is because the light goes in but then it's dissipated by all the tiny little water particles but in the super fog it dissipates it even more and so you literally can't see anything it just you're driving along there's a little bit of fog and then suddenly it just goes dark completely black you can't see a single thing and loads of accidents because of that gosh oh wow black black so you were pro fog before but now I think fog has many facets.

34:35It's like there's lots of advantages to it. So I said before that it can clean the cities. It turns out the fog is alive. And it is. It is. In what way? So there's bacteria in the fog. And if you take a thimble full of fog water, it has about 10 million bacteria, which is the same as if you took the average bit of seawater. so it's all really yes it's all really dissipated but the actual amount of bacteria in there is the same and this bacteria they eat the chemicals things like formaldehyde which is in the air which is very bad for you the bacteria can eat that and turn it into things that aren't bad for you so that's why they get kind of get rid of all of these chemicals from our air right okay you get

35:23James Harkin:things like fog catchers now humans like the crocodile hunter you get you get fog hunter so So there's a guy called Abel Cruz and in Peru, Bolivia and so on, where they don't have necessarily access to clean water. He's worked a system of nets that are up at night and they collect the fog water as it's coming through. That's how a lot of places are now getting their drinking water.

35:45Dan Schreiber:Although they seem to have had trouble scaling it up. I couldn't find anywhere that's really done it on a big scale. and so the only useful version I found of fog catchers was in San Francisco where in 2016 they worked out how to turn fog into vodka which you can buy and this is a project of a non-profit actually which claims to be trying to provide water to developing countries but took some time out to collect fog in San Francisco with yeah it looks like two goalposts with a net in between catches the fog and then collects them and then turns it into water. And the fog catcher on that project was called Chris Fogliarty.

36:23Dan Schreiber:Oh, come on.

36:25Anna Ptaszynski:Why would there be an international agreement on what fog is? There's an international definition of fog. Okay, why do we have that? Something else has to be standardised which fog is important for. So it's the strength of your fog lights in your car. So they're the same in every car in the world. To do with transport. Is it to do with shipping? It's not to do with shipping. It's to do with airplanes. To do with airplanes. Okay. Oh, so when you're allowed to fly versus not.

36:51James Harkin:When you're allowed to fly. Ah, goddammit. So that's just for aviation. You've just got to wait at the back, James, and let everyone do the work.

37:00Anna Ptaszynski:But there is this tool. So basically, yeah, that's it. Just if it's foggy, you know, you can't land safely on a runway. And they've got some tools to deal with it now. But there was a great tool invented way back when. I think this might have been before the Second World War, called the Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operation, FIDO for short. And it was designed to just clear fog off airfields so that planes could land safely. Wow. And it's basically two pipelines going along the runway and you just produce a wall of flame. Like, oh, cool. It is quite rock and roll. And it's just the standard FIDO system apparently used 100 ,000 gallons of fuel every hour.

37:37James Harkin:So it's a bit of a luxury.

37:40Anna Ptaszynski:It's a bit of a treat. more if it's a long runway. But the amount of money it saved by having a plane not crashing into the ground was probably, you know, made it useful for a while.

37:50Dan Schreiber:So that's what's reassuring as a pilot. If you're flying towards the runway and there's a huge wall of fire in front of you, you know you're good to go. It did decide a crucial thing in the 15th century. And I think you might have had an opinion about this, James, because it was in the Wars of the Roses and it cemented a Yorkist victory, It was one of the most important victories. It was the Battle of Barnet. I've gone off fog a little bit. I thought you might. Yeah, this is Battle of Barnet. And it was King Edward IV of York versus Earl of Boric, who was Lancastrian. And there was a very thick fog.

38:29Dan Schreiber:And this screwed things up in various ways. One of the ways was the armies didn't line up right against each other, which I find kind of amazing anyway, that you'd like organize at the start of battle and be like, okay, your furthest left man has to be exactly opposite our furthest right guy. And they weren't lined up. This meant when they charged towards each other, one side of the army totally surrounded the other. And we're like, oh my God, we're winning this. But the other side of that army totally surrounded them. And they're like, oh my God, we're winning this. And because it's foggy, they can't see the other side of their line.

38:59Dan Schreiber:So they don't know they're losing on the other side. This is like a do-si-do, isn't it? It was very much the country dancing of the 1400s, yes. So what happened? What is Warburter Cayley? So eventually, it was all chaos for a long time. And then eventually at one point, one of the sides, I think it was Warwick's side, sort of went off the battlefield and tried to regroup. The problem was they had in their heraldry a picture of stars and streamers. And King Edward had a son in sort of splendor. And they look in very thick fog, very similar. And so Warwick's men all started firing on themselves and killed each other without Edward really having to do anything.

39:39Dan Schreiber:And then there we go. And that led to the Yorkers being in charge for a decade or two. So there you go. Fog is your enemy, James. We should move on, guys, to our final fact. I got one more thing about climate change and things that are changing. So snowshoe hares, they have a little trick. So in the winter, they're white. And in the spring, they turn brown. Brilliant. It's for camouflage, obviously. So they can camouflage in the snow. unfortunately due to climate change the snow is not around as long as it used to be and so for a certain amount of the year they're bright white but there's no snow to camouflage and the guy who has read an article about a guy called alex kumar says that they act like you can't see them and they're thinking nah nah you can't see me but actually everyone can see exactly what's happening Wow, they are not long for this world.

40:37Dan Schreiber:If you want to see them, get there fast.

40:40James Harkin:That's like my three-year-old playing hide and seek when you walk in the room and they're hiding behind a lamp that's just literally holding it.

40:50James Harkin:Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anna.

40:55Dan Schreiber:My fact this week is that in 2024, Google was fined more than the world's total GDP. A lot more, in fact. yeah do it again you want them to double it yes okay right well they are doubling it are they they are indeed yes yes so this is a russian court which find had fine google two undecillion rubles um which is a two followed by 36 zeros as i'm sure you know it's 20 decillion us dollars if you're interested and it's for restricting russian state media channels on google services Still think it's good, Andy?

41:33Anna Ptaszynski:I've changed my opinion a bit. I did read an article about it saying it's 20 decillion dollars, brackets, 15.4 decillion pounds. Oh, great.

41:42James Harkin:Imagine being sued for amounts you've never heard of before. Yeah, it doesn't feel good. I didn't know decillion existed. There was a guy from the Kremlin, Dmitry Peskov, who said, I cannot even pronounce this number, which is weird because the Russian for undecillion is undecillion. Oh, okay.

41:59Anna Ptaszynski:So I believe it's more dollars than there are grains of sand on earth Yes Really? And the article that Anna sent round said that it was whatever underselling it was But it was doubling every single day

42:12Dan Schreiber:Yeah, so it's way more now It's way more now According to my calculation This was when I did it a few days ago So it's doubled a few times since then The current fine is 2 times 10 to the 225 rubles Oh no So if you were to take every atom in the universe, and every single atom had another universe in it, and every single atom in that universe had another universe attached to it, then the total number of atoms that you have would be nowhere near this number.

42:43Anna Ptaszynski:And that's why you've got to pay in the first 14 days. Wow.

42:52James Harkin:So are they going to do like a payment plan? What's the...

42:55Dan Schreiber:It's hard to know. I think they have to earn over a certain amount in their salary before they start. I think they just wait until the ruble collapses by so much that it's actually just about 20 quid. It did start off much more reasonable, as you say. It started off as 91.5 quintillion rubles. And yeah.

43:11Anna Ptaszynski:What was it? Was it for something? Sorry. According to Russia, they were deliberately not allowing people to see Russian news on Google searches. Yeah.

43:21Dan Schreiber:So it's, you know, it's barring a lot of Russian sites because and it was it was coinciding with the war in Ukraine and Google saying that there's a lot of misinformation out there, that it was blocking, because Google doesn't like misinformation to spread. And Google's subsidiary has gone bankrupt in Russia as a result of all these massive debts that they're being asked to pay. And they've got quite basic functionality there. But I don't think the Kremlin really minds. So we're at a bit of a stalemate.

43:44Anna Ptaszynski:So does it do fines work, is the question?

43:46Dan Schreiber:It feels like at that level, you're starting to not work, doesn't it? But they certainly have worked with the EU and tech companies. In fact, do you know who has been the only sort of barrier between tech companies and going completely insane and doing whatever the hell they want? I'm going to say it's a single person. This is my claim.

44:05Anna Ptaszynski:It's not Nick Clegg.

44:10Dan Schreiber:It's Cleggie. No, he's got nothing to do with it. It's Borgen. Do you guys know the TV show Borgen?

44:16Anna Ptaszynski:Danish detective? Or Danish prime minister?

44:20Dan Schreiber:Danish prime minister. But yeah, Borgen has been holding back Google. In what way? Well, because the character in it, who's Bridget Nyborg, who is the Prime Minister, is based on this woman called Marguerite Vesteyer. And she was EU's antitrust chief from 2014 to 2024. And she was the person who basically led the charge preventing tech monopolies. So as soon as there was any kind of like online rigging that Google was doing to rig things in its favour, as soon as there's any anti-competitive stuff, she brought lawsuits against them against google apple amazon x starbucks um ikea gazprom i feel like ikea is kind of the good guy in there actually but it's made a huge difference to them just this woman and a large team of people also in the eu yeah um but leading the charge wow there you go and prime minister of a fictional country at the same time so that's very cool um you asked whether fines work handy sometimes they do sometimes they don't i think is the answer if you fine people for being late let's say for instance you are late picking your child up from the nursery and it means that the teachers have to stay a little bit longer everyone's a little bit annoyed so you get told off or they change it so you don't get told off anymore but you get a fine it turns out people are way more likely to accept the fine and then just be late anyway and the reason is they kind of see it as an exchange of money for time yeah and people think well you know what I'm paying a little bit of a fine so it's actually no problem if I'm late because at least I'm

45:44Anna Ptaszynski:I'm paying I'm buying the right to be a bit late exactly and you're not allowed to be cross with me because you're fining me that's the idea and people are more unhappy about someone very cross from the nursery

45:54Dan Schreiber:definitely yeah especially because I've told you you can just tie her to the railing outside and leave her there as long as she has a little bowl of water that she can lick from yeah I've got a show to do in London wow

46:09Anna Ptaszynski:so this is the really interesting thing yes there have been lots of studies of whether fines have any power and it's because you know you need to calculate the cross-section between the chance of being caught and how severe the punishment is if you are caught and lots of firms especially the huge firms treat it as the cost of doing business you know well we may as well we know that they won't find us much more than this even if we are caught therefore there's no real incentive to change so i think unpredictable fines are maybe the way to go oh yeah so okay so i'm caught speeding yeah and i I got the letter through the post.

46:41Two million quid fine. Oh. I was hoping it was gonna be 10p. Yeah.

46:47Anna Ptaszynski:Well, Noah Lehmann's picked it out of the box. And it's like, I think there would be a case to be made for chaos fines where it could go really badly.

46:56James Harkin:What's the country where the fine is?

46:59Anna Ptaszynski:There's a couple, there's Switzerland and Finland, I think are two of the ones that do it. You mean proportional to your income?

47:04James Harkin:Proportional to your income, yeah.

47:05Anna Ptaszynski:Proportional to your income. And also they increase it based on various other fun factors. So you get to kind of spin the wheel. Have you been fine before recently? Bigger fine. Do you earn a lot of money? Bigger fine. So I think the biggest fine ever was a Swiss driver. This was a couple of years ago. And he was caught going at 290 kilometers an hour. So actually not that much in miles an hour. Was he going directly off one of the mountains? I think he got done for just over 1 million euros. Yeah, that's right. It was. Exactly. did he do it again don't know but it doesn't matter we've got a million euros now with the swiss government yeah so i think yeah i think that is a good case to be made for that yeah

47:47Dan Schreiber:in fact there was a guy in finland the other place that does it a guy in 2023 called anders wickloff who was only driving at 51 miles an hour so it does feel like this guy driving at 180 miles an hour it was has done a big one but what's the limit though this guy oh yeah this guy who was

48:04Anna Ptaszynski:going at 290 kilometers an hour he was actually in a 280 zone so he was only yeah you're right

48:09Dan Schreiber:um no this this was obviously in like a 31 mile an hour speed limit converted to kilometers an hour he was fined um 121 000 euros he'd been fined before in 2018 he'd been fined 63 000 euros and he'd been fined 95 000 in 2013 and he was asked in 2023 you know how he felt about this 121 grand he'd lost again um and he said look i've heard the government wants to save some money on

48:34James Harkin:healthcare so I hope my money can help fill a gap okay there you go isn't that nice yeah I mean you do read about some fines I do think like James is saying oh yeah it's worth it it's worth it to pay it I was reading a story about um a guy in Portsmouth who went around Portsmouth Cemetery with his arms in the air pretending to be a ghost going and he got fined 75 pounds Why? He was doing it while people were mourning Okay Okay

49:02Anna Ptaszynski:There's my context I'm not a monster That's, yeah But a fine feels a bit Yeah Well, what would you do? Well, write, I'd say a letter of apology Okay I think that's a good Letter of apology is another good one, you know Okay For grown-ups Yeah, for grown-ups Right, okay

49:19Dan Schreiber:Everyone's busy

49:19Anna Ptaszynski:No one's got time to write a bloody letter It's a huge pain in the arse

49:22Dan Schreiber:I suppose where there's a bank transfer Is just click of a button and you're there Exactly Exactly.

49:27Anna Ptaszynski:Having to write two sides. You're not allowed to do double spacing either. Suddenly people are thinking before they get the sheet on and run around Portsmouth Cemetery.

49:35James Harkin:But you could use up a lot of the space on the page by saying, I'm sorry, I said...

49:47That's a good point. So how much was this guy fined? £75. Okay, more or less for this fine. Roy Marsh was sitting by a boating lake in Lincolnshire when a gust of wind blew a bit of grass into his mouth and he spat it out and two enforcement officers immediately approached him and told him they'd seen him spitting on the ground. More or less is 75 quid.

50:09Anna Ptaszynski:I think it's fine for spitting. Oh, this is... Oh, wow. This is your Brucey moment.

50:14James Harkin:I think we've got something here, haven't we? This is a format. Yeah, yeah. So the room is saying more? I think more. Yeah, more. We all think more. Okay, the answer is more. 300 pounds 300? Yeah

50:27Dan Schreiber:Wow, they didn't think it was that much Sorry, did someone say more? Okay, more or less than 300 pounds A Florida priest was fined for feeding the homeless They're just paying for blood here

50:43Anna Ptaszynski:It sounds punitive The way you guys are screaming it So they're saying more in the film Less, I'll go less I'll say more More Okay, so you said more, you said more. It is more, but just to make it sort of still a bit of a competition, how much more? Two million pounds.

51:03James Harkin:Good, like 50 quid more. Dan is just closer. Oh! Because he's fined more than$500 ,000. Wow. Because a bit like this Russian fine, it kind of just went up and up and up, and he was doing it every single day for quite a few years. Why was it not allowed? It was in an area that was not where his church was. And the annoying thing was, it's the area where his church used to be. And then it got rezoned and he carried on feeding the people in that zone. And they said, you're not allowed to do it. And he got fined for every single day that he did it. And it racked up to half a million dollars.

51:39Dan Schreiber:Where's this? Where do you get fined for feeding homeless people? This was in Florida. Wow.

51:44James Harkin:Wow.

51:44Dan Schreiber:Everyone's going, yeah, that checks out.

51:46James Harkin:That's amazing. Do you know, Freddie Flintoff, when he was an England cricketer, he once got fined£2 ,000 because he was scared by a ghost. Was he in Portsmouth Cemetery at the time? Yeah. Because Portsmouth Council, they're cleaning up here. They really are.

52:02Anna Ptaszynski:Both ends of the transaction.

52:04James Harkin:No, he was in Zimbabwe at the time. They were playing a game overseas. And Mal Loy, is that his name? Do you know him, James? He starts telling ghost stories. And Freddie gets freaked out because he doesn't like ghosts. And so he runs off to his friend's room, who's called Vikram. Vikram's very religious, and the logic was that maybe ghosts won't go near him because he's very religious. So then he couldn't go to sleep. Both of them were freaked out. They then sleep in, and they're late for practice. And so they get fined£2 ,000 because they were late for practice, all because this ghost was freaking them out.

52:42James Harkin:But according to Freddy, Mal got in trouble as well and fined for telling a ghost story that scared Freddy. Yeah, that sounds fair. So you don't tell ghost stories to our key player who's terrified of them, you dick? Knowing Freddie Flintoff, I can imagine the worst spirits involved somewhere. We got to wrap up very soon.

53:01Anna Ptaszynski:Can I briefly talk about the greatest fining nation in Europe? Sure. I hate to give it to them, it's the French. They are so good at fining you for minor social infractions. It's unbelievable. So there's all sorts of people, especially on the French trains. They have very strict rules and they have lots of enforcement people. So there have been French pilgrims who were fined by police for doing some chanting in Latin at a station, having been to a cathedral. There was a middle-aged man who was fined 200 euros quite recently for just having a call on loudspeaker in a train station, not even on a train.

53:38Anna Ptaszynski:More! OK, OK. This is how the revolution started, guys, all right? It's not pretty. And five officers approached him And they said they'd Okay People just want social norms observed And quite right Okay, we'll see what you think of this one, guys Oh my god A French woman was fined 110 Ten... Ten...

54:18Anna Ptaszynski:But you have to wait, okay? There was a French woman who was fined 110 euros because her cat meowed too loudly on a high-speed train, despite the fact the cat had a ticket.

54:40James Harkin:That's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you for being here, everyone, in this amazing room. And we're going to be back again next week with more No Such Thing As A Fish from the Royal Institution. So we'll see you again. Goodbye, everyone.