DARK vs LIGHT

9:19Hannah Fry:Great question. I've got the answer for you. Because in 2012, there was a follow-up study. And in this, they not only looked at tens of thousands of hockey games across different seasons, but they also then ran these controlled experiments in high school and college students so that they would like essentially run some teams would be in black and some teams would be wearing white and then they would see how it would work out over and over and over again to see if it made a difference and they found both things were true referees call more fouls on players who were wearing black okay um but players in black were also behaving more aggressively So they like objectively rewatched these games or something?

10:02Hannah Fry:Right. Because I think that's it. When you're wearing darker colors, you're like, maybe I can get away with this. Maybe I just sort of feel a little bit like, I don't know.

10:09Michael Stevens:Okay. So these researchers are pretty confident that it wasn't just that the referees themselves thought, ah, something happened. The player wearing the darker colors probably instigated it because I'm biased against that. They really studied this and found that it truly was the fault of the players wearing the darker colors.

10:27Hannah Fry:It was both things. So they were both being accused more often and also... Oh, it was both. Yes, it was both.

10:33Michael Stevens:Wow. Okay. So if you think that's a good thing, then black wins again. I've noticed that as I've gone through my interpretations, it depends on what you think is better. Yeah. Like black and white have differences, but which difference you prefer determines which one wins.

10:52Hannah Fry:Look, I'll be honest with you. I think black wins every single time. I mean, there's the occasional one. This is in my analysis, right? There's the occasional time here and there where white sort of puts up a good fight. But almost always I'm team black. In rugby, the all blacks. Ah. New Zealand all blacks. Yeah. Terrifying. You've seen them do the hacker. Oh, yeah. Oh, my Lord.

11:16Michael Stevens:Yeah, I was going to say. And they're called the all blacks. They wear black and like silver. Yeah. Or white.

11:22Hannah Fry:Yeah, yeah.

11:23Michael Stevens:I guess we're not the two people who are going to know the answer to that.

11:26Hannah Fry:Maybe it's just all black.

11:27Michael Stevens:Maybe it is all black. They're also really good. Yeah, they're amazing. Their women's team is actually really good right now. My stepfather-in-law. Someone in your family. I feel like my mother-in-law's husband is really into rugby. Right. And he loves the women's team because they're like blowing it out of the water right now. That's cool. And he's in New Zealand, by the way. Back when Michael Jordan was playing basketball, he was so good. the Detroit Pistons had this idea of like, why don't we just really focus on stopping him from being able to do anything? Like, in fact, let's tire him out.

12:03Michael Stevens:Let's like penalize him. Let's be mean to him and like break his will and force his other teammates to do it on their own. And it was really negative. They called it Jordan rules. And in my memory, the Detroit Pistons who had this whole like strategy wore black jerseys but apparently they were more like blue red and white however in my mind they are the like angry batty looney tunes baddies yeah and then you've got like michael jordan this little guy who's like i'm just a bugs bunny over here i'm a good guy but here i'm flying but this this this association between aggression and and and black colors and And blamelessness in white runs very deep.

12:52Michael Stevens:It really does. So black wins in terms of roughness, popularity, fashion. But it loses in chess. It does lose in chess. Fair or not, though, is I think maybe up for debate. Because when you look at who wins chess games, the person playing white or the person playing black, white has an advantage. This is like a known thing. Yeah. You can even if you look at chess games and the history of chess games, white wins, you know, four to 10 percent more often. Yeah. By the way, that chance of winning is very complicated because there's two answers. It's like white wins 37 percent of the time. Oh, because of the draws, of course.

13:38Michael Stevens:Because, yes, that 55 number is if you give them half a win for a draw.

13:44Hannah Fry:Right.

13:44Michael Stevens:I see. So, yes. It took me a long time to understand this. Because they'd be like, white scores 55%. And I'm like, scores? I had to go look at a chess glossary to figure out the difference. But across chess games, white tends to win 4 % to 10 % more. It's usually like 37 % of the time, white is the decisive victor. 27 % of the time, black is. The rest of the time, it's a draw. And as the standard of play increases, you get more and more draws. But also, White's win percentage approaches 100%. Why? Because White gets to go first. White has this advantage. I want to talk about rainbow chess. Go on.

14:24Michael Stevens:Which is not a thing. My daughter says she invented it. And I don't, it's kind of like Bobby Fisher's chess 360, his like Fisher random chess. but instead of randomizing the back row of pieces for each team you put all the pieces black and white into a bag this is how she explained it to me and then you reach in and you pull out a piece and you put it where it should go on your side regardless of whether it's black or white okay so both players wind up with this randomized mix of black and white pieces and yet you both still are either black or white so some of you if you're black some of your black pieces are already on the other side of the board.

15:07Michael Stevens:That actually sounds really fun. It sounds really fun. And it means that there's a lot of like, okay, so first of all, you have to have the same arrangement of pieces. So if you've already drawn a queen, then the next time you draw a queen, you have to put it back in. Also, a pawn does not become a queen when it reaches the other side of the board because some of them are just one step away from already being there. So there's like some tweaks that she had to make to make this sort of work. I don't know if it's actually a good game. We have a lot of fun playing it, though. I think that sounds amazing fun.

15:36Michael Stevens:Now, white still gets to go first, though. So it probably still mathematically will have an advantage.

15:41Hannah Fry:I'm not sure, though, because I think that it would be, I think that the dominant thing would be the luck of where your pieces ended up. You know, if you end up with the queen on their back rank, then, I mean, game over. Or not.

15:58Michael Stevens:Okay, yeah, that's another rule that neither king can begin in check. There's a lot of rules that you have to make up because this doesn't work. But if you follow all the rules, then you get something that kind of works and is kind of fun, especially to play with a six-year-old.

16:15Hannah Fry:Yeah, that does sound very fun.

16:16Michael Stevens:But I don't know if there's something else like it. So let us know in the comments if you've heard of a variation of chess like this.

16:23Hannah Fry:When I was teaching my daughter to play chess when she was about six years old, we were like, okay, and this one is the little horsey. And then it jumps, it hops over here. Anyway, she then started calling it, that piece, she started calling it the Gala Hop. And I was like, oh, that is, this child's a genius. This is absolutely adorable. What a great name. There's a huge fly. A really fat fly. Just flew by my ear and it was like, so loud. Anyway, I went around thinking that she was a genius for a few weeks. And then a couple of weeks later, we just so happened to be watching it.

17:02Hannah Fry:This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

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17:52Hannah Fry:It shows what long-term research makes possible.

17:55Michael Stevens: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.

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19:08Hannah Fry:When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. An episode of Bluey in which they teach Bluey chess and she decides to call the horse, the knight a gallahop.

19:45Hannah Fry:Wait, so did she get it from that? Yeah, she got it from Bluey. Oh, okay.

19:48Michael Stevens:Gallahop is a pretty, it's a cute word, but it also helps you remember that the knight can go over pieces. Gallahop, yeah. The gallop and hop.

19:56Hannah Fry:Yeah, exactly. Okay, so in chess, true, the white does have an advantage. I'll concede that. But in Go, which is played by a lot of people, black moves first and is the other way around. In fact, actually, in Go, there's so much of an advantage for black that there's some rule where you have to give away a certain number of points to white. I didn't know that.

20:16Michael Stevens:I don't know Go very well, but black goes first in Go. Black goes first in Go. And has the advantage. Wow.

20:22Hannah Fry:All right, well, we've done games. Let's turn to people. But after the break.

20:40Michael Stevens:Okay, welcome back. So now let's talk about black and white, not as colors, but as names of people. Go on. We've got Jack Black, but also Jack White of the White Stripes. Let's make them fight. Let's make them fight. And so last night I did. No, I didn't. But which surname do you think is more popular? Black, I reckon. Incorrect. By a long shot, white is more popular. It's the 24th most popular surname in the United States. Okay. Black, not even in the top 100. I had to go searching much deeper. It's the 149th most popular surname. In the UK, white is the 15th most common surname. It's the ninth most common in Australia.

21:25Michael Stevens:21st in Canada. There's only 156 ,000 people with the last name Black in the US, but there's almost 700 ,000 with the surname White.

21:34Hannah Fry:Wow.

21:35Michael Stevens:Yeah.

21:36Hannah Fry:I'd much rather be called Hannah Black than Hannah White. Well, you're not called either. I know, but I could be. I could change it by deed poll.

21:44Michael Stevens:You could change it. You know, I have a - Hannah Black. Yeah, I mean, look, Hannah Black, again, why would you rather be called Hannah Black? Because it's cooler.

21:52Hannah Fry:It is cooler.

21:53Michael Stevens:Did you know that my mother didn't allow me to wear black shoes as a kid? Why? She thought that it was what, like, the violent kids wore. This was during the, like, moral panic of the 90s around, like, oh, kids are sacrificing cats at night and doing all these things because of Satan. What about school shoes, though?

22:12Hannah Fry:What color were your school shoes?

22:13Michael Stevens:They were white and blue. Okay. They were always very bright colors, very pleasing, saintly colors. And I'd go to the store and I'd be like, oh, I want these black sneakers. And she'd be like, oh, do not even do not even think about them. Bless me, Father. Because you're going to go to hell if you wear shoes that are black like the devil's thumb. And so I own black shoes now.

22:36Hannah Fry:When did you get your first pair of black shoes?

22:38Michael Stevens:I think it was about 33. I got my first pair of black shoes. Did you feel super naughty when you put them on? I felt really naughty. I hid them in my closet, even though my mom lived a thousand miles away.

22:49Hannah Fry:Have you worn black shoes in front of her?

22:50Michael Stevens:I have now. But also, as we've established, my mom has softened over time. She now allows me to say some bad words. Piss. Whoa! Yes, okay. Yeah. And I can also say the C word. Crap.

23:07Michael Stevens:And so, of course, I say it all the time around her.

23:10Hannah Fry:Adorable. In terms of the surname thing, I have a very good friend, actually, who is a doctor. She's called Dr. Black. and she was working in a doctor surgery and there's another doctor there called Dr. White. And I think, and I still think, that the two of them should set up a surgery together and call it the Grey Doctors.

23:27Michael Stevens:The Grey Doctors, yeah.

23:29Hannah Fry:It's a good joke. It's a good joke.

23:31Michael Stevens:It's a good little, it was hilarious. It's a hilarious joke.

23:35Hannah Fry:Good and evil though. Good and evil. There is those themes along those. Should we kind of go through the tally up

23:42Michael Stevens:who's winning so far? Black's winning. I think Black is winning. Yeah, I think all that white has won is chess and surname. But black has won popularity as a color. It's winning in fashion, what people wear. We should look up car colors.

23:58Hannah Fry:Car colors, white wins in car colors. And white wins actually in more than one way in car colors. Because not only are there more white cars, you're also significantly more likely to die in a black car. Oh, no.

24:11Michael Stevens:Yeah. I don't know. Okay. I don't know how you tally these up. I don't think they're each worth one point. No, we need to wait. I'd rather have an unpopular color car than a car that I die in. So... I don't know. You would look cool when you die, though. Oh, you would.

24:28Hannah Fry:Wait, he died in a white car? In a white car. Okay, so here's some stats. In 2025, white cars, there were 33 % of cars are white globally. Black is at 23%. It's the second most popular. However, if it's luxury cars... It's the other way around. So in North America, 29 % of luxury cars are black and white is second. From Monash University Accident Research Center, who were looking at crashes between 1987 and 2004, and they found white's the safest color, easier to see, perhaps. Black cars are 12 % more likely to be involved in a deadly crash.

25:07Michael Stevens:Yeah, I know. I believe it. I did actually talk to my insurance company about like, hey, we've got light colored cars. Do you guys charge less for those? And they were like, no. But it is true that the lighter color your car is, the easier it is for others to see. And you're in fewer accidents.

25:25Hannah Fry:Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. It makes sense. I'm still going black here. I'm still going black nonetheless. I think this is the reason why I just think black wins, full stop. Okay. Piano keys. Yes. Oh. There are more white piano keys than black ones. But the only interesting music comes from the black ones. Well, now, that seems a bit subjective. Come on. Twinkle, twinkle, little stars. Is that all you got?

25:47Michael Stevens:I don't know enough about music to, I don't know enough about piano to debate you on this.

25:53Hannah Fry:Bluntly, me neither. But that's not going to stop me being overly confident. Okay?

25:57Michael Stevens:I think you are giving me fuel for my final conclusion. Okay. All right. So I'll just grant you that the black keys are more interesting. They are more interesting. They are much more interesting. But there are more white keys.

26:09Hannah Fry:There are more white keys, but who cares if they're boring?

26:12Michael Stevens:Well, I think that we got to give white a point for being the dominant color on a keyboard. Sure. And then we'll give black a point because it's cooler sounding. It's more fun.

26:23Hannah Fry:Going back to your idea about light. So I was also thinking about if you shine a torch into a dark space, which wins there? Is it the brightness of the torch or is it the blackness of the space? And I mean, in an enclosed space, you know, on Earth, sure, the whiteness might win. But actually, in the universe as a whole, the universe is very, very definitely black. This is Olber's paradox, by the way. You know about this?

26:52Michael Stevens:Yeah, this is the paradox that the sky is dark at night.

26:54Hannah Fry:And why should it be?

26:56Michael Stevens:Well, at first you would say, well, why shouldn't it be? But then when you point out that there are stars everywhere, even between stars that we can see, if you look with a telescope, you find more and more stars. So there should be light coming from every direction.

27:12Hannah Fry:This should be a very well lit room, essentially. Yeah, but it isn't. But it isn't. It's black. Black wins out. The reason, incidentally, the reason it sort of essentially demonstrates that the universe had a beginning. The light hasn't been going forever and the universe is expanding, which is why blackness wins out. But blackness does nonetheless win out. It wins out.

27:31Michael Stevens:Also, there's light extinction. There's the inverse square law of light can shine and be very bright, but the further away you get, the dimmer and dimmer it appears. So ultimately, the blackness wins out.

27:45Hannah Fry:Blackness wins. I mean, look, if you are also pitting the black versus white against one another on a sort of cosmological basis, white dwarfs, which are essentially what happens when a star dies everything kind of blows off and you're just left with like the really solid, bright core. Put one of them against a black hole. I mean, there's no contest. The black hole wins.

28:06Michael Stevens:Well, if we're going to be talking about electromagnetic radiation, here's something fascinating. This morning, I thought, oh, yeah, obviously, here's a good thing to bring up. The more and more darkness you have, no problem. Right. But the more and more light you have, The more and more electromagnetic radiation you have, the closer you get to darkness. Go on. So I've talked about this before, but I have an update. Go on. So there's this concept. It's a theoretical concept, which states that, I mean, as we know, if you get too much matter in one place, black hole forms. But what if you get a lot of energy, a lot of light in one place?

28:48Michael Stevens:What happens? Should be the same thing as it turns out. And so a black hole can form if there's too much energy within one small area. And a black hole that forms not from matter but from light is known as a kugelblitz. Good name. A kugelblitz. I know I love this. And in an episode many years ago, I turned it into this really cool way to flirt with someone. Like you're not just hot. You're a kugelblitz. there's so much you're just so hot that it cannot remain stable and it collapses in on itself your

29:24Hannah Fry:hotness is there any evidence of that ever working on any human i've never tried it on another human

29:30Michael Stevens:but if you and your partner met because of that line let me know in the comments you're welcome also if that's how you guys met i've got some bad news for you go on a couple of years ago uh Kugelblitzes were studied. And again, it's a theoretical thing. We cannot make one. Okay. The amount of energy required to create one is 50 orders of magnitude higher than what we can currently achieve. But there was a paper that came out in 2024 that had this great name, No Black Holes from Light. That was the name. And the paper talks about how when you have that much light, that much electromagnetic radiation in one place, you need to start worrying about things like vacuum polarization, which is a dissipative quantum effect.

30:18Michael Stevens:I'm not going to pretend to know what all of that means, but I do trust that these people know what they're talking about. It's called the Schwinger effect. Schwinger. Yeah. And this is where...

30:29Hannah Fry:So we've got Kugel Blitzes and now we've got Schwingers.

30:32Michael Stevens:Schwinger effect. And this is the effect where I can only give you a very surface explanation, but where photons can decompose into electrons and positrons. And this process limits the potential for a black hole to form. Theoretically, we don't know one way or the other, but there's definitely a school of thought now that says that a Kugelblitz isn't possible. that before you could reach that critical amount of energy in one location, that energy density necessary for the collapse of a black hole, energy would be dissipated away.

31:06Hannah Fry:But then, but then, but then, but then, does that mean that if you have too much energy, too much light, it will stay light? It won't become dark?

31:16Michael Stevens:That's one conclusion you could draw from this. And so maybe white doesn't lose to black here. The idea being like too much black, not a problem. Too much white goes back to black. Black wins in both cases. That may or may not be true. Jury is still out. It could be that more and more light, you're just going to continue to have a lot of light. More and more black, more black. It's a draw.

31:40Hannah Fry:Yeah, but I mean, in the universe as a whole, once you kind of go to the heat death of everything, once you're kind of looking at entropy and the fact that we are tending towards disorder over time, I mean, everything's eventually going to die. I mean, there's no doubt that blackness wins.

31:57Michael Stevens:I didn't come in here to fight for any particular side. I did. You did. I did. And I'm not even really going to disagree with you. I think you're bringing up a lot of good points that ultimately darkness is all there will be. It will be the one on the field of battle at the end still standing. Absolutely. Because you've got the heat death where eventually it's the same temperature everywhere. And there isn't a useful energy differential to take advantage of to do any work. There is no light. There is no light. That's the ultimate fate of the universe. Absolutely. That's the direction we're all heading towards.

32:30Michael Stevens:Enjoy the light while it lasts, everybody. I mean, I'm going to definitely say that light does some interesting things. Sure. Energy and work mean that stuff can happen. Sure. But they're battling it out all the time, every day.

32:44Hannah Fry:That wasn't the question that was being asked, was it? It wasn't, which one do you like more? It wasn't, please tell me which of these does interesting things. It was which wins. Which wins. Which wins. And yeah, you're right. I tell you what, if we're not going in quite so depressing a direction, if we're not going to the heat death of the universe, let's look at the battles, not the wars. Okay. I still think darkness wins. I still think black wins. I found this absolutely amazing story about Chernobyl. Okay. This is in 2016. And researchers who were near where the damaged reactor was were looking at the wildlife that still manages to survive.

33:23Hannah Fry:close to where everything happened. And they found this really strange thing, which is that right close to the reactor, all the frogs are black. Oh. Right? Isn't that strange? And then you go a bit further out, some of them, you know, they sort of tend to become a little bit lighter. And then if you go far enough out away, then they are essentially back to normal frog color. Normal frog color. But the frogs all around are very, very dark, sometimes actually pitch black. and they were right it's amazing so they worked out that what's going on here is that melanin which is a pigment that you get in your skin but also in the skin of frogs it's the thing that gives you a tan color but it doesn't just absorb uv it also dissipates ionizing radiation of course right so there's all this radiation that's floating around and so essentially what's happening is that it forced this survival pressure on darker frogs so the frogs who had much lighter skin who had less of the dark pigment in in their skin already you know would die out much more easily only the darker frogs would remain and then they reckon within about 15 frog generations the pigment had sort of sorted itself into the population and there was this natural selection for darkness kind of happening in real time.

34:46Hannah Fry:And so like, but I mean, also as a person who has no melanin in my skin, you know, this is one of the downsides of the MC1R mutation, having red hair. There is no melanin. If I go out in the sun, it goes red and then back to white. I have to say, darkness wins again, right? You put me outside on a sunny day and unless I've got a bottle of Factor 50 with me, I'm over. It's game over for me. Yeah.

35:12Michael Stevens:I can put you in a radioactive fallout zone and you are going to be hurt more. I'm done. I'm done.

35:18Hannah Fry:Of course, there are. I mean, there are some creatures that have both black and white. Orcas, for example. I mean, they're pretty cool. Zebras. Zebras. Zebras. Zebras. Pandas. Pandas. They're less cool. Tuxedo cats. Pandas, by the way, side note, pathetic creatures. Pathetic. You know how much space they need to have in order for them to agree to mate? Too much. But also, if you have this gigantic land space where you're like, okay, panda, chill out, all right? Have fun. And then somebody does a little tiny track road through it that's not even taking up any space. They're like, no, no, no, no, no.

36:00Hannah Fry:You've encroached. You've encroached. I'm not having babies anymore. They are absolute drama queens. That's how I like my diary to be, by the way, when I'm writing. Say, I'm going into panda mode. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I need nothing encroaching. Okay, it's one panda, seven square kilometers.

36:21Michael Stevens:So the pair needs seven square kilometers.

36:25Hannah Fry:So I think that detailed field studies say that female giant pandas have about five square kilometers and males about seven square kilometers. and if you go anywhere near that then they're like no i'm babies thank you really yeah so they need

36:41Michael Stevens:just the two of them within their little zones and then they can come together and as long as

36:46Hannah Fry:no one encroaches yeah but not even not even anyone encroaching it's like any evidence of any building or any track nothing it's got to be like completely untouched it's a bit like you know are they just really really really want privacy they really want privacy they really need the

37:03Michael Stevens:mood to be right or it's ruined.

37:05Hannah Fry:Exactly. They don't want anyone to find out they're playing Barry White in the jungle. Yeah.

37:09Michael Stevens:Fair enough. But like, it's a lot of work for us to accommodate that. It is a lot of work. Barry White, though, didn't think about him, did we? Barry Black. Barry.

37:18Hannah Fry:Who is Barry Black? Exactly.

37:20Michael Stevens:That's a win for White, I think.

37:22Hannah Fry:It's a win for White.

37:24Michael Stevens:Here's something interesting that is kind of related that I've just been wanting to share. So it's kind of related. Like if if if darkness, if blackness is is is nothingness, like empty, then we should talk about the words ought and not. Go on. They both mean nothing.

37:41Hannah Fry:Right.

37:42Michael Stevens:Like knots and crosses. The not refers to an O. Nothing. People will call the 2000s the naughties because the year ends with the zeros. But ought a UGHT also means nothing. Give you in a sentence. In a sentence, it might be something like, well, if ought is learned, meaning if nothing is learned. And I would see these in books. I'd see ought meaning nothing and not meaning nothing. And I'm like, how it's kind of strange that ought and not both mean zero. Why are they different words? They didn't used to be different. Ought came first, meaning nothing. Not for ought, not for nothing. But there's this thing in linguistics called a faulty separation where people who are speaking to each other misinterpret what your word is and what the article is because they've been smashed together.

38:35Michael Stevens:So when someone said, I don't give an ought, it sounds a little bit like I don't give a not. Nice. And so people started to think that ought means nothing. But there's also a thing called a not. I don't give a not. I don't give an ought. They were just so similar that we wound up having not as well mean zero. The other one I've heard is a napple. Yes. There are a lot of these faulty separations. Napkin is one. I think an apkin is what it was called before. People would be like, oh, can I have an apkin? And someone was like, oh, a napkin? Sure. This must be called a napkin. I think other words like that, I've got a whole list of them and I don't have them actually here on my page, but apron, umpire.

39:19Michael Stevens:What? So it was a prom? I think so. Oh, Oh, I like that. Now, don't I mean, look this up because I only I only have the list of these words. I don't know what they originally were, but they got smashed together because of the A-N, the Anne article before them. Go on. What were the other ones? OK, you ready? Hmm. Nickname. An ick name. Apron. Orange. Umpire. Humble pie. It was humble pie. Auger. But with auger, I'm like, was it a gurr before? Could you give me auger? Auger, like a thing that you, a screw that you dig a hole with? I've never heard that before in my life. Well, you don't dig enough holes.

40:05Hannah Fry:Evidently. Or know enough words.

40:07Michael Stevens:You don't drill enough holes.

40:09Hannah Fry:On the word thing, I'll tell you what I found out when I was researching this. The word candidate. Yep. Do you want to know where that came from?

40:16Michael Stevens:Let me guess.

40:17Hannah Fry:Go on.

40:20Michael Stevens:Candidate. I've given you a bit of a clue, given that it's related to this episode. Shoot. Now I'm even more confused. I was not thinking that way, but I should have been. Where does it come from? Roman. Uh-huh.

40:31Hannah Fry:It means the one wearing white. Because if you were wearing a white toga, then you were a political candidate. Right. Yeah. Where is white in there? Candid? Because I think it means shining. Oh, does it? Yeah, like chandelier is another. Oh, interesting. Candle. Candid. Candle provides light. Incandescent.

40:53Michael Stevens:Incandescent. Oh, yeah. Candela, a unit of light.

40:57Hannah Fry:Anyway, that's all white stuff. Yeah, it sure is. I'll tell you what we haven't touched on, though. Good and evil. Because it feels like in stories, black and white do end up taking those two different sides. We've sort of touched on it a bit, but haven't really gotten there.

41:13Michael Stevens:Yeah. And in stories, good often wins. Not all the time, but certainly more often than not, stories are instructing us that good will prevail and that evil doesn't pay. Right. These are cliches. That topic, in my mind, it's like way too big to jump into when it's just supposed to be one little interpretation of a question in a podcast. But as you all know, I just finished reading The Lord of the Rings. And I also read the Earthsea trilogy from Ursula Le Guin, who, by the way, I love this. She describes herself as a irreligious Puritan and a rational mystic, which talk about like opposites colliding.

41:52Michael Stevens:Yeah. I loved it. But anyway, Lord of the Rings and Tolkien is often criticized as being just like way too black and white. You've got the like amazingly just pure Gandalf and the hobbits and like they don't even poop. And then you've got Sauron, who is just evil incarnate. And it's just it couldn't be more obvious. I don't think that's entirely fair. I think, for example, that if you really dive into like what's going on here, you see that the elves kind of made their own bed. They were the ones who were like, yeah, I want rings. Give us three so that we can stop things from decaying. We don't want anything to change.

42:30Michael Stevens:We want everything to stay the way we want. Well, Saruman even says, look, when you when you destroyed me, you destroyed yourselves. And where are they all going at the end of the book? They're not going to the White Lands. They're not going to the Black Lands. They have to all leave Middle Earth for Grey Haven.

42:49Hannah Fry:Somewhere in between the two.

42:51Michael Stevens:A new age begins, the age of man, and magic is like gone. I'm not a Tolkien scholar, but I just want to say it's a bit more complicated than that. But in Le Guin's fantasy, it's very rich. So like in The Wizard of Earthsea, the first book, there isn't a battle of good and evil. There's a battle of a wizard against a shadow. Seems like good and evil, right? But how does he defeat the shadow? I won't spoil it. But he has to embrace the shadow.

43:20Hannah Fry:As in he's got to accept that darkness exists.

43:23Michael Stevens:Not only does he have to accept that it exists, he has to name it. And what does he name this shadow that's been terrorizing the world? His own name.

43:39Hannah Fry:i think there's something quite deep in there that took a very long time to explain to my daughter

43:44Michael Stevens:because she gets the like bad guys good guys right but for the good guy to have to say i am the bad guy you're just another part of me because at the end of the day the shadow only exists because of the arrogance of the wizard in the first place and so if he runs from it and denies those bad parts of himself, the shadow gets stronger. But as he hunts it and thinks about it and considers it, it gets smaller. And so by embracing it and understanding and being conscious and mindful of his darker side, he wins.

44:16Hannah Fry:Do you know what? That is so interesting because this is something that if you go through therapy, I think that this is something that happens a lot, right, is to accept that you have a shadow side, that everybody has a darker side to themselves. And it's not like oh you have to try and repress it or imagine it's not there it's like you have to really embrace it and almost love it if that makes sense you have to have to really sort of have empathy for it because that's the only way that you can really exist as a whole complete person

44:44Michael Stevens:that's exactly what the wizard of earth sees an allegory yeah yeah the other thing that i really

44:50Hannah Fry:noticed as you were talking then when grayness right the way that we sort of think about grayness is very flat, very boring. It's almost like black and white are two extremes. It's a dichotomy, sort of an analogy for a dichotomy, but they're definitely not boring. Black and white, neither of them are boring. Grey, the combination of the two, the land in the middle is something that feels quite dead and flat. And actually, I think that there is something in this, because I think We fall into this trap quite often of binary thinking when we shouldn't, where actually the reality is everything is a process.

45:28Hannah Fry:Everything has good and bad in it. Everything has good and evil in it. The acceptance that you have both of them isn't gray at all. It's just actually a much richer version of reality.

45:39Michael Stevens:Well, yeah, exactly. And so, again, this is something that Le Guin investigates like almost in some of her stories too much. You're like, oh, my gosh, I get it. You mentioned that white light is all the colors, all the wavelengths, whereas darkness is nothing. Now, this is the opposite of what Tolstoy told us in Anna Karenina. Go on. So the famous first line there, which I'm just going to paraphrase, is that every happy family is happy in the same way. But every unhappy family is uniquely unhappy in their own way. This became the Anna Karenina principle that Jared Diamond pushed a lot, saying, look, you've got systems in the world.

46:23Michael Stevens:And these systems have a lot of parts. And every part has to work perfectly for everything to go well. OK, so goodness is this really fragile thing that can only happen in one way. But if one little thing goes wrong or that little thing or these two or these three, there's so many permutations of things in which everything goes wrong. So there you go. Unhappiness is very complex, but happiness is very simple. However, in physics, that's not true. In physics, there's just darkness and it's kind of just nothing. but white requires everything. Yeah. Wow. That's such a nice way to think of it. And at the end of Le Guin's dispossessed, can you tell what I've been reading a bunch of?

47:08Michael Stevens:There's this brilliant line. It's almost like a throwaway line where this guy goes, man, there's all these different planets and so many different kinds of intelligent beings live on them. And the sunlights on all of these worlds are all different. The stars have different chemistries, different temperatures, different sizes, different orbital distances to the planets. They're all different. And yet darkness is the same everywhere.

47:34Hannah Fry:It absolutely is. There's only one way to be dark. There's only one way to be dark.

47:39Michael Stevens:But there are so many ways to illuminate.

47:43Hannah Fry:Yeah, all right. White can have that one. I'll let it go.

47:45Michael Stevens:White can have that one. But I think that maybe they both should take a W here. I think there's another side of this, the Taoist side, which is that we need both. And I'm not a scholar of Taoism, but that's what the yin yang is about. It's about you've got the white and the black and they are inside each other and they're both necessary, but they're not combined into a dull gray. In The Lathe of Heaven, Le Guin, basically a guy creates, he improves the world by solving all race relations by having everyone just be the same color. Battleship gray. No, thanks. There isn't any judging people based on how they look because they all look the same.

48:30Michael Stevens:But in changing the world that way, a lot of the really interesting characters have gone. because they were only interesting because they were biracial, bicultural. They became who they were, their boldness, their courage, their timidity. All these interesting things about them only existed because of that tension. And by getting rid of it, the only people left are the main character because he's so boring. He realizes I am just a lump of clay and so I'm still here. But like this woman I loved is gone.

49:01Hannah Fry:I mean, it's the same as what we're talking about with entropy, you know. So the universe is interesting because it has variation, because it has like differences. That's the thing that allows for energy, allows for matter, allows for light, allows for everything. You know, without it, if you strip out the variation, all you end up with is nothingness.

49:20Michael Stevens:So you sort of need both of them. And this isn't just a Taoist thing. This is also, you find this in Christianity, when the lion lays down with the lamb. That's an important scene, not because the lion becomes lamb-like, or the lamb becomes lion-like, but because it's a lion and a lamb, both bright and burning. Some of you may have noticed I'm quoting G.K. Chesterton here. All one and a half of you. It's a wonderful essay, Paradoxes of Christianity. And he mentions this very thing, that you've got both of these powerful things together, not mixed into some undifferentiated middle that's very boring and orderly, but the complexity of the opposites together.

50:03Hannah Fry:Heaven and hell.

50:04Michael Stevens:Yeah. And I think Le Guin puts it really well in one of the Earthsea books. She has the wizard mention, look, in order to hear the word, you need silence on either side. You need darkness to see the stars. So picking just black or just white, what does it get us?

50:20Hannah Fry:I mean, sure, let's have both. But also, let's secretly know the Black Winds, okay? I'm not letting that go.

50:29Michael Stevens:I don't want to make this a podcast where Michael defends Lord of the Rings and talks about every single book Ursula Le Guin ever wrote, but it might become that. Basically, it is true that in The Lord of the Rings, you've got the good guys and the bad guys, and it's very stark. But at the same time, just like the yin yang, they they're never done. One never beats out the other. The story continues forever. Here's my notes where I've written down quotes that I really like. And I'll say that one at one point, Sam, Frodo's friend, realizes, hey, he's the one with feet like yours, right? Well, all the hobbits have feet like mine, but they realize that their journey is not like a unique part of history, that it's just a continuation of a story that's been told forever.

51:19Michael Stevens:Sam asks, do the great tales never end? And Frodo responds, no, they never end as tales. But the people in them come and go when their parts ended. Our part will end later or sooner. But the point there is that they don't even anticipate actual victory, white over black, good over evil or anything. They just anticipate that there will always be both of them together. And in The Hobbit, the most courageous, brave thing Bilbo does isn't anything except to just be courageous enough to explore both. So Tolkien himself says that when Bilbo walks down the tunnel to see the dragon for the first time, which everyone's afraid to do, but he does anyway, in going on, that was the bravest thing Bilbo ever did.

52:13Michael Stevens:The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in that tunnel alone before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait. What's really celebrated in literature, not just in Tolkien, but everywhere is more the confrontation than it is the end. I mean, the end is the, like, there's nothing else to say.

52:35Hannah Fry:Yeah, everything is a process. Everything is a process. Yeah, I think this is it, right? I do think that there is something about this that is really relevant to the way that people live their own lives. Because so often, I mean, I've been guilty of this myself and often still am actually, frankly, of like, oh, I'll be happy when this happens. As soon as I get to this bit, then my life will be, that will be the end. That will be the sort of the conclusion. I will have decided white or black, right? It's like, no, everything is a process. You don't get to cross a finish line. You have to accept that there is everything in everything.

53:12Hannah Fry:There is goodness and darkness in everything.

53:15Michael Stevens:Yeah, there is no end that you're reaching where it'll be good or bad. There's just the means to an end. All we have are those means, those efforts, the trying, the practice. Right. And the universe knows this too. What's the brightest thing in the universe? A quasar.

53:32Hannah Fry:Okay.

53:33Michael Stevens:The brightest things in the universe are quasars. What are quasars?

53:37Hannah Fry:Oh, don't test me. Go on.

53:38Michael Stevens:Okay. Well, I'm asking this rhetorically to everyone. But what is a quasar? A quasar is a black hole. Matter falls into the black hole. It can't all cram in there together. It pushes against itself. the pressures increase and enormous amounts of energies are released. And that's a quasar. Just like the yin yang symbol in the universe, the brightest light comes from the darkest depth that eats all light. It's they're all together, not separate, not mixed, but both bright and burning and dark and void.

54:12Hannah Fry:And definitely not gray. And definitely not gray. Yeah. So there we go. That's what wins. Not gray.

54:18Michael Stevens:Not gray. I love that. I love that. That should be a t-shirt.

54:22Hannah Fry:Thank you for wearing a grey T-shirt today just to...

54:25Michael Stevens:Oh, yeah, I'm wearing my... If Uranus, the whole planet of Uranus was compressed into this shape, it would become a black hole. This is its short-child radius. Very nice. Yeah, there we go.

54:35Hannah Fry:We've come to a conclusion. Not grey.

54:37Michael Stevens:You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's OmniShade technology is engineered to protect you

54:48Hannah Fry:from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer at Columbia.com to spend more time outside

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55:07Michael Stevens:Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up, and audit dread? It's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place, and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clearer visibility, faster deals. Zero chaos. Call it compliance or call it compliance. Get it? Join the 15 ,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Go to Vanta.com slash com. Why did we really go to war with Iraq? And did Saddam Hussein really have weapons of mass destruction? I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist. And I'm David McCloskey, author and former CIA analyst.

55:50Michael Stevens:We are the hosts of The Rest is Classified, and in our latest series, we are telling the true story of one of history's biggest intelligence failures, Iraq WMD. In 2003, the US and UK told the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but they were wrong. This wasn't a simple lie. It was something far more complicated, far more interesting, and far more dangerous. Spies who believed their sources, politicians who wanted the public to believe in the threat, and a dictator who couldn't prove he'd already destroyed the weapons. In this series, we go deep inside the CIA and MI6, go into the rooms where decisions were made, and look at the sources who fabricated the intelligence that took us to war.

56:38Hannah Fry:The Iraq War reshaped the Middle East and permanently weakened public trust in governments

56:43Michael Stevens:and intelligence agencies, and its consequences are still playing out today. Plus, in a Declassified Club exclusive, we are joined by three people who are at the heart of the decision to go to war. Former head of MI6, Richard Deerlove. Tony Blair's former communications director, Alistair Campbell. And former acting head of the CIA, Michael Morrell. So get the full story by listening to The Rest is Classified and subscribing to The Declassified Club wherever you get your podcasts. not grey so thanks for not being grey and thanks for watching and as always keep sending in questions because look what it does

57:22Hannah Fry:we had so much fun with this Kelsey and we hope that your 7 year old is suitably pleased that Michael and I have witted on about this for nearly an hour that's right Kelsey

57:32Michael Stevens:you've got a bright 7 year old or maybe a dark 7 year old or maybe both or maybe both but definitely not grey not grey so stay not grey and by the way, you can send questions to

57:45Hannah Fry:TheRestIsScience at GoHanger.com

57:46Michael Stevens:That's it. Thank you. And we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.