What Happened to Science? with Bill Nye, the Science Guy

29:57It's a difficult problem. Yes. But with artificial intelligence, it is very reasonable that you can create a system, a software, a computer that controls a magnetic field, not just reacting to where the plasma gets squirted, like squeezing a balloon or water balloon or something, but anticipating where the plasma will go. and then you'll be able to contain it. And then you could have fusion in Massachusetts or Northern Virginia in these power plants. And then we'd have unlimited electricity for all humankind eventually. Blah! Blah! This is instead of artificial intelligence is going to take the job of every porn actor, which is a problem perhaps, or certainly my job.

30:49Anything I've ever said can now be re-recorded with a hologram of me at any age and make me say whatever swear word you like. Anyway, with this in mind, I think these two practical applications of artificial intelligence have the potential to, dare I say it, change the world. And I saw you somewhere had said you expect to see fusion energy in your lifetime. Yeah, well, yes. And then I was thinking, how long does Bill want to keep kicking? So you said 10 to 15 years. Yeah, well. You'll be around for longer. The wife and I have agreed another 30 minimum. Okay, great. So. How long will that make you guys married or together?

31:2933 years. Love it. No, we just got married recently as these things go. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Hang tight for a second. We'll be right back. We are now going to get to the lightning round. Are you ready? Lightning round. Lightning round. Exactly. Exactly. A subscriber named David Adelberg asked, how do you maintain healthy scientific skepticism without becoming a crackpot? Well, if I understand the term skepticism, let us not confuse skepticism with cynicism. They sound alike, but cynicism is where you dismiss things without evaluating them, I believe, or you presume everything sucks going in, whereas skepticism is you evaluate evidence.

32:11And the big thing, Carl Sagan threw this phrase around, critical thinking. We want to be able to evaluate evidence. That is our dream. And so you got to be optimistic, people. Good sleep is everything. That's why Oli's science back support is made with a blend of melatonin and L-theanine for both kiddos and grownups. So when your mind won't switch off, you've got something that can help. Erasing thoughts and restless nights won't stand a chance. Find Ollie's sleep solutions for the whole family at Ollie.com. That's O-L-L-Y dot com. This summer, Prime Video takes you back before Legally Blonde, before law school, and into the world of Elle Woods in high school.

32:54Set in 1995, this Gemini vegetarian knows exactly who she is. Until her family moves from Bel Air to Seattle. Packed with iconic fashion, 90s nostalgia, and a throwback soundtrack, Elle proves one thing. Law school was hard. High school was harder. From the world of Legally Blonde, watch Elle, a new original series only on Prime Video. Watch now. Don't get anything done. You don't go into the game thinking you're going to lose. If you do, you will lose, bitches. No, you've got to go into the game thinking you're going to win. Even if everybody's taller than you are and faster and better, you still, you know, The ball is round.

33:35The disc is round. Things could happen. I'm just saying. I'm curious if it's harder to make content these days because your 2022 Peacock series, you've spoken a little bit about this. The End is Nigh. It was six episodes. You said there was a seventh that was never made. That's right. Yes. And it was about? Authoritarianism. And it was not made because? They thought it'd be, my understanding is they thought it'd be too controversial. This is before the, yeah, the 2024 election. In September, there was a big kerfuffle, I'll use that term, around Jimmy Kimmel. Yes. Being pulled from late night. He's now back on the air.

34:12What did you make of that? And I mean, we talked about Carl Sagan being pression. Did you see this coming in the media world? Well, we saw it coming with the current president and this business of Project 2025. And respectfully, that's just thoughtless. And they don't get it. And it's frustrating because the United States was built with this idea embodied in the U.S. Constitution. And people throw around the phrase checks and balances all the time, which is not authoritarianism. And it is inefficient. It is when you have everybody arguing about everything, it's inefficient. But it's also much more fair.

34:51And using rules to manage and govern things is better than using one guy's whims. I mean, Carl Sagan was worried about our relationship to science and truth in 1995, well before Trump. So do you think that this is a broader issue and Trump is a symptom of the problem or cause? Yeah, not the cause, yeah. Now let's talk about where skepticism or cynicism, as you like to put it, is high. And the skepticism is high with Bill Nye will be the name of this segment. Yes. High skepticism with Nye. Skepticism is high with Nye. Skepticism is high with Nye. Cue the inhale sound effect. Exactly. So, okay, climate change.

35:36Climate change. What are three things that people could do? Like, I mean, and is this scientifically impossible? Like this idea that human behavior change is somehow going to address climate change? Well, so, you know, I'll give you an example of top-down research-based society changes. Yesterday, I was walking down the street. What was I doing? Minding my own business. And I saw somebody go by smoking a cigarette. You just do not see that much anymore. Yeah, you see some vaping, but nobody's smoking a cigarette. I remember when I would go to comedy clubs, I'd come home. There's so much cigarette smoke.

36:15How much cigarette smoke? There's so much cigarette smoke. My underwear and my socks would smell like smoke. And so legislation was passed based on health research. And now hardly anyone smokes, at least in the States. And there was this uproar in New York City that restaurants were going to lose all this business because people, after they finish eating, they want to have a cigarette. Turns out nobody really, given the choice, they'd rather spend money on a dessert item than have a cigarette. It turned out revenue in restaurants actually went up instead of down. And this was a top-down, research-based public health thing that changed, that changed the world.

36:58So this is not impossible, everybody. We can get people excited about renewable energy that is reliable. And everybody's running around right now that has to be cheaper. It has to be cheaper than oil and gas, coal. Or it is cheaper than coal, generally. But is that the only criterion? That has to be cheaper? It could just be better. How about we just go with better? And along that line, there's all this stuff about electric vehicles, and I don't know if anybody in New York operates cars, but you've seen them. They're on the street. Electric vehicles is a better car. It's just a better quality driving experience.

37:39And so it's a combination of regulations and innovations that will get rid of or phase out internal combustion engines. Electric cars is better. Yes. Well, the electrical grid's not set up for all electric cars. Then let's fix the grid. Quit your whining. Let's address this problem. It'll be cool. Yeah, but it needs governance, Bill. Well, so my grandfather was in World War I. Okay. And by all accounts, he rode a horse. Yes. He was a chemist. You'll be shocked to learn. And he put chlorine in the canteens, in the Lister bags, to prevent dysentery. Dysentery is a disease caused by microbes that were discovered with science.

38:27All right. Anyway, 20 years later, 25 years later, when his daughter got involved in World War II, nobody was riding a horse, leastways not in the Allies. Apparently, there were German supply chains that were horse-drawn. But in general, nobody was going into battle with horses against mechanized cavalry. Change happens. Everything changed in 25 years. Quit your whining. Let's get to work, people. Space. Space. Yes. Explain what the Planetary Society does. We advance the scientific exploration of space. There's three things at least we do. We educate people. I claim our website has the best long-form journalism about exploration of the planets and cosmos you're going to find anywhere.

39:16then we advocate that we go to u.s congress especially and advocate for uh space missions to planets not for astronaut missions those are fine that's not our jam and then we want to get everybody together and not let the earth get hit with an asteroid yes big deal you guys are big into planetary defense planetary defense asteroid what is that is that department of war shit what Sort of. It's longer term than that, frankly. So if you can identify an asteroid with Earth's name on it, you got to deflect it. And that right now, if the thing's big enough to be super dangerous, you got to go out there 20 years in advance.

40:02So the DART mission, the double asteroid redirect test, was part of that effort is, let's see if we can do it. And they did. So that spacecraft had to hit the asteroid autonomously. Nobody was steering it all the way in. It had to steer itself. And it worked. That indicates that we could do it. It is the only preventable natural disaster. And so we advocate for awareness of the problem of asteroid, potential problem of asteroids. The advocacy challenge has become a bit of an uphill battle these days. Yes. There is a big budget negotiation in Washington. I'm going to spend an hour talking to your colleague, Casey Dreyer, about this on space policy.

40:40But there are major cuts that have been contemplated to the NASA budget as it relates to space science as opposed to space explorations. Can you explain? Well, you guys, exploration is a euphemism or what have you for human spaceflight. That's what it means nowadays. So people are wanting to put more money into human spaceflight and less money into space science. Yes. But doesn't space science help human spaceflight? Well, there you go. Yeah. So you wouldn't go to the moon if you hadn't sent the surveyor spacecraft, the ranger spacecraft there first to make sure the thing wouldn't sink into the dust.

41:17And so that would be, if I may, obvious. And then if you're going to have rock samples brought back from Mars with some sort of crazy rocket on the surface of Mars that goes into orbit around Mars and then hooks up with another spacecraft and flies back to Earth, you'd want to try that without people on board first. And so this is where the engineering of the scientific exploration of space enables the human exploration of space. That argument is, how to say, irrefutable. But right now, there's a move afoot, that's a pun when it comes to walking, to skip the robots and just send people there. And there is no way sending people there makes things cheaper or happen sooner.

42:07I think there's been some rollback on that because of the congressional discussions that have been happening. Well, this is what we do at the plant. We mobilize our 42 ,000 members around the world to write letters, emails, and to show up on our days of action. So we connect you with your member of Congress and your senators, and you go and meet with them with your colleagues from your congressional district, and you look them in the eye and say, hey, man, we want to – hey, woman, we want to continue the scientific exploration of space. Okay. And so, as Casey will tell you, Congress, both the House of Representatives and the Senate, has quite a pushback against the president's budget requests where they want to cut everything in half or space science in half.

42:56And so the Congress is not putting up with this. But this back and forth and these tricks with impounding the money till the fiscal year expires and all this stuff is just unprecedented. There's never been this kind of weirdness. We've talked a lot about politics here. But for me, space, I mean, it comes back to what we were talking about earlier, the Olympics, the rallying around the flag, space. It seemed like a national cause. Is space political? Yes, space is political. Does everything have to be political? Well, everybody, let's keep in mind, science is political, but let us distinguish the other P word.

43:31It's not, we don't want it to be partisan. Okay. You follow me? Yes. So people love space from both sides of the aisle. They're kooky for space. But how do you allocate your resources? That's the politics. And NASA, in the case of the United States, was created with 10 NASA centers purposefully spread out all over the place. so that no congressional district or no state would benefit, inure benefits to the detriment of other places. But still, that's an imperfect system. And as Casey will give you an earful, it's inefficient. But is that bad? Yeah. Some of the politics are also competing with, you know, not just between human spaceflight and the underlying space science, but also people looking and saying, hey, there's so much wrong on Earth.

44:21I mean, this is the kind of colloquial argument you hear all the time probably. Yeah, why explore space? Yeah, why explore space when there's so much wrong with Earth? So what's the answer? Two things. We all rely on space assets all the time. We rely on weather satellites, communication satellites, military situation awareness all the time. And we have those things because we built rockets. Everybody knows the expression black hole. Everybody knows the expression Big Bang. Yes. We have these expressions because we explored space. And I like to remind everybody, all four of my grandparents were born in the 19th century.

44:59They were born in the 1800s. They didn't know there were neutrons. They didn't know there was relativity. There wasn't a thing. But those discoveries were made during their lifetimes, and it's changed the course of human history. And so what everybody's running around, talk to Neil. everybody's running around dark matter and dark energy and for me it's kind of hand waving there's gravity in space that we don't know where it comes from and that is matter and it's dark and that's dark matter and it moves around because of some energy that you can't see and that's dark energy that's what it is but with that said I would not be surprised in pick a number, the next 30 years, someone figures out what dark matter and dark energy is, are.

45:57If there is science investment in that. Well, somebody, someplace. And I remind you, China is going to land people on the moon around 2030. And that will be a Sputnik moment. And people in the Chinese society are exploring space for the same reason everybody does. They want to see what's out there. They want to know where we come from and are we alone in the universe? Everybody wants to know that no matter what continent are under and what government they live under. It's an exciting time. And I mention this because, to quote or paraphrase Bruce Murray, the guy who was head of Jet Propulsion Lab.

46:32Okay. For the purpose of this story, let's say it was a member of Congress. Why are you building this spacecraft? What are you going to find? We don't know what we're going to find. That's why we're building it. And sure enough, we're learning stuff about the heliopause where the solar wind is held up by gravity, way the heck out there. We're learning all these extraordinary things that may lead to extraordinary innovations here on Earth. These are burning universal questions. Are we alone in the universe? Why are we here? What are we doing? The deep questions. The deep questions. I was speaking to a friend of mine.

47:08I wanted to hear a hardcore scientist. That's you. You're the hardcore scientist. Well, I'm an engineer. Yeah. Yeah, I've spent a lot of time with physics, yes. Your opinion about the chances that we could encounter life from another area of the universe. I mean, so everybody asks this. Are we too many light years apart? What are the chances that there's some evolved species anywhere in our timeline in life? Evolved species, yeah. Because he said that when he was younger, back in the 70s, you know, et cetera, 60s, 70s, there was a lot of excitement in this area. Our new telescopes might aid in that pursuit, but it seems less likely now than ever.

47:44It seems we're more isolated than ever, despite the usual UFO noise. So was that feeling and excitement just a space-age optimism emotion now replaced with cold, hard facts of our utter remoteness? No. So the pendulum swings. So everybody, what I believe he's referring to was the realization that we are broadcasting electromagnetic waves into space inadvertently. All the television shows, all the radio, many, many of the podcasts are being blasted out into space inadvertently or unintentionally. And so it's very reasonable that somebody else somewhere is doing the same thing. And you could get a signal.

48:28A radio telescope would receive this signal. That's the premise of the movie and the book Cosmos. Yes. I mean, contact. No, contact with Jodie Foster. Yeah, yeah. Contact, yeah. And so this is a very reasonable premise. But two things. One way to guarantee that you never receive that signal is to not listen. And then the other thing, everybody, what does it say about you, about us, if we stop looking up and out? What does it say about us if we say we're just going to stay home and open our parasols and not receive any of the sun's rays? It's not good. You don't want that. And from an international competitiveness standpoint, understand people on another continent are going crazy with this.

49:24They have a space program for the scientific exploration of space because they want to know more about our place within it. I love that. Health and food. What are your thoughts on the current Tylenol situation? It's silly. And, you know, the president just embraces whatever the last person he talked to told him. And so there's guys who have this spurious, incorrect idea that there's some connection between acetaminophen, which you and I can pronounce. The president had difficulty with it. Speak for yourself, Bill. Acetaminophen. No, I'm kidding. Anyway. Yes. You could learn to pronounce it. And some sort of pregnancy issue that is spurious, completely debunked, not a real thing, and stop it.

50:16And why the president chose to spend time on it with just his profound ignorance is really, it's amazing time. It's amazing. Yeah. Well, you said RFK Jr. has sent you, who I think you're referring to as having the ear of the president. Yeah. I had to cut him off after a while. He sent you a screen of texts. He sent me these long texts, these very long texts. What? Yeah. What did he text you? How did he get your number? His anti-vax dingbatitude. bad attitude. You know, I recently asked billionaire investor, healthcare investor, Vinod Khosla, what grade he'd give the Trump administration on healthcare.

50:50And for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he asked, can I give a grade lower than F? Yes, can you go below F? Yeah. So there's 8 billion people in the world. He is the, I'd go with probably one of the 7 ,999 ,999 ,999 other people. And I believe he was chosen to win the election because of his last name, but he's outlived his usefulness and now they're going to have to decide what to do. He said explicitly that everybody will be able to get a vaccine. I live in California. Absolutely not true. Not true. If you're not over 65, you cannot get a vaccine. And the challenge is not simply around the COVID vaccine, but it's the broader, like how this has spread.

51:38So I went to elementary school with a guy who had polio. You do not want polio. Polio bad. Did other people get polio in the elementary school from that guy? Well, we were not, no, we were not allowed to go swimming. Yes. Because the polio is waterborne, polio virus. But then when the vaccine was created, when I was around five, five and a half, six that summer, then you could go swimming. Do you think that there was some error made in the communication, the public health communication around COVID-19 that helped sow seeds of some of this or at least animated it further? My understanding, and I haven't done all the research on it, we didn't have enough masks.

52:24Yes. And so we said, well, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. And then that took it where masks were not effective and stuff. But if you've been to Japan, people where I saw people on dates, a couple, you could tell were on a date and they're both wearing masks. Okay. All right. That's part of their culture. I want to move into an area that's more your specialty than dating in a pandemic or health. I have two questions from children. Yes. That submitted them. I was a child for quite some time. Are you not one anymore? Exactly. I was painted myself into a paraphrased corner. Okay, great.

53:01These are two 11-year-olds who are guests on the podcast at some point. Oh, good. Here's Sophie. Hi, my name is Sophie, and my question is, what episode of your show will you always remember? So, Sophie, if you here in New York City decide you want to be a dancer on Broadway, don't tell the press, don't tell interviewers who your favorite, whom your favorite dance partner is. Or they're going to think you don't want to dance with anybody else. It's going to limit your career. Okay. So I don't have exactly a favorite episode, but I do have a favorite bit in every show. There's some bit that I just think is cool.

53:42When I got a ride in the Blue Angels fighter plane, that was cool. Getting thrown around by$350 million airplane was pretty cool. But then when I had a globe, a classroom globe with little solar panel and a little motor in the Northern Hemisphere and another little solar panel, a little motor in the Southern Hemisphere. And I tilted the Northern Hemisphere toward a light which represented the sun and the motor sped up the way it does in the summer. Solar panels get more energy in the summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Then tilted it the other way. Then the Southern Hemisphere got more sunlight and that motor spun faster.

54:25That filled me with joy. A$12 demonstration versus a$350 million airplane filled me with joy. I love that. And then the other thing is we had very compelling research back then. What is the best age to aim your science education show at? To whom? And the research said 10 years old. 10 years old is about as old as you can be to get the so-called lifelong passion for science. And that's why the Science Guy Show was aimed at that age. And I believe it's also why it has generally stood the test of time. Is a lot of stuff you find with SCICOMs, science explainers on the internet, are for much higher level science and specific science questions rather than this elementary science.

55:19Right. Last one, Dylan. Dylan. Yeah, Dylan, age 11, just over your demo for this show. The whole thing is it's not 25. Yes. Here we go. Hey, Bonai. Dumb question alert. What do you say to people that don't believe in science? Well, people don't believe in science. Everybody believes in science to some level. But I have met a couple people who actually asked me if I thought the world might be flat. The earth is not flat. Let go of that. Just remember, everybody, you would think once you present a fact or the evidence that the world is round. Look at these airplane maps. Look at Christopher Columbus's ships disappearing over the horizon and coming back.

56:05Just keep in mind, the first time you expose this person to these facts, he or she is not going to just change their mind instantly. It takes, in general, for grownups, it takes about two years. If you have somebody who strongly believes in astrology, for example, the first time you show them that it's bunk or it's been debunked, they're not going to change their minds. Ask people who were anti-vaxxers, whose kids almost died or did die from some crazy, the measles or something. The measles outbreak in Texas. Then they will slowly change their point of view. Two years. Well, that's probably pretty quick if your kid gets sick.

56:46Yeah. So just remember, your expectation may be, I showed you the world's round, get over it. but it takes people a long time. Excellent question, Dylan. Thank you. Thank you, Dylan. Okay, last question for you. You are so knowledgeable about so many things. You have said there's no such thing as asking too many questions. Yeah, that's probably true. What is a question that you have that you haven't been able to figure out the answer to or haven't wanted to ask out loud? Well, everybody wants to know where we came from. I am amazed. Both Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace just sitting around thinking about it, inferred that we must have a common ancestor.

57:28That you go back far enough in time, there was some self-replicating molecule that led to everything, all of us, and green plants and even my old boss. And so is that true? Seems like it, but don't know. And I'm also amazed. Darwin and Wallace didn't know there was DNA. Yeah. Let alone what it does. And yet they inferred all of this just by careful observation, careful thought. Just think what we're staring right at, what we can all see and have not made that great inference. I love that. Thank you so much, Bill Nye, for being here. I appreciate you. This is nothing but fun. Guys, did Bill Nye just leave me with a totally unanswerable question about like the origin of humanity?

58:21I think he did. And I definitely can't answer that, but I'm gonna keep it in my consciousness and hopefully find a guest one day on Smart Girl Dumb Questions who can answer that question. But I love that conversation with Bill Nye, not just because, you know, reminded me of like my little kid self watching Bill Nye the Science Guy, but also because I really am, despite having watched that show and reading and whatnot, a little dumb about all things science. It was never my good subject in school. I don't still understand so much of it. Blows my mind. And I became a little smarter after that conversation.

58:53Smarter about what it means when people say that we're made of stardust, which is just so beautiful. Smarter about what it means that AI is here and what that can do to unleash scientific possibility. I mean, what he outlined for energy was like bonkers and amazing in terms of the next breakthrough. And smarter and also more optimistic about what we can do in the face of huge challenges like climate change. So I really appreciated that conversation. I did think it got more political or partisan at times than most of my conversations get to, and that's not really a lot of what I'm doing on Smart Girl Dom Questions, but I thought about it a lot after that interview, and I realized, like, here's Bill Nye, the science guy, someone who has worked his whole life on this thing, on this mission to get kids to care about the scientific method.

59:37He's been methodical about it. He's been wonderful about it. He has been so successful at it, like top of his game. And then imagine all that success and then to see it dissipate and wane later in your life. That's wild. It's heartbreaking. As he said, it's the most heartbreaking thing he's ever seen. So I just think I understand where he's coming from. And whether you share his politics or not, I think it's incumbent on all of us to continue to have that scientific method in our mind as we think about the challenges that we face as a society, think about the debates that we're having as a society, and get as much information as possible.

1:00:14And speaking of information, I hope you're going to start by going right below this episode and getting the conversation that I had with Casey Dreyer, who is an awesome science geek, who is Bill's colleague, actually, at the Planetary Society. And my big question for him was kind of like UPS, like, what can Brown do for you? I'm like, what can Mars do for me? What can going to space really do for me? And we get into it in a lot of detail. It's really, really fun. And also, you might like my conversations with Sophie and Dylan, whose voices you heard in this episode, or my conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson, who apparently is Bill Nye the Science Guy, frenemy.

1:00:45I actually think they're kind of BFF. Anyways, you can find all of those below in the feed. Go check it out. Share the show with your friends. Like, comment, review all of the things. That's it for this episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions. I'm your host, Naeem Maraza. You can reach me at naeemaraza101 at gmail.com. The show was produced with Annalisa Cochran, Healy Cruz, Greg Ott. It was shot and edited by Desta of Wonder Studios. He is wonderful. Our on-site engineer was Jared Sol de Vieira. And our mixer is Johnny Simon. Our theme music is by David Kahn. I'll see you next week on Smart Girl, Dumb Questions.

1:01:17And by the way, here's a little bit more insight into Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson's relationship. Neil deGrasse Tyson took my mug because he said he has the greatest collection of... He needs more material things, that guy.

1:01:44We'll see you next time.

1:02:09space shop now and save up to 70 off during wayfair's fourth of july clearance score huge deals on outdoor furniture area rugs and more we're talking thousands of products for every style and budget plus surprise flash deals july 6 don't wait shop wayfair's fourth of july clearance now through july 6th at wayfair.com wayfair every style every home uncovered windows can make your home feel up to 20 degrees hotter stay cool and save up to 50 off custom window treatments during the 4th of July mega sale at blinds.com from outdoor shades to room darkening blinds finding the perfect fit is easy get free samples expert design help and professional measure and install services or diy with confidence and support every step of the way shop up to 50 % off site wide plus huge savings on door busters right now during the 4th of July mega sale at blinds.com