Bill Nye The Science Guy On Mastering Your Brain, The Science of Human Connection & Addressing The World’s #1 Issue EP 1471

30:01Sure, sure. Obviously. But now I've come to accept the idea that we're much better off modifying crops. Yeah. Yeah. And by we, I mean, we can feed more people more efficiently. And the reason we have 8 billion people going on 9 billion people is because we've been able to feed them. And people may not realize the first breakthrough in genetically modified crops was in cotton, that getting cotton plants that were not susceptible to boll weevils eating them. You know, I got to have a home. That's an old song. The bull weevil explaining to the farmer, he's got to eat the cotton because, sorry, dude, I need a home.

30:41Whereas the farmer's thinking, you know, it'd be better if you weren't here, Mr. Bull or Ms. Bull Weevil. So genetically modified crops, I've changed my mind. And I've gotten respect in the scientific community about it. But why are so many people, why are they against genetically modified foods and crops? So there's two things. And I think the main thing is genetically modified crops have enabled industrial farming on a very large scale, not just big, but very large. And people are troubled by that consolidation. It's kind of taken up the land from the small farmers. Yeah. And so Thomas Jefferson, again, had this vision of an agrarian society where we all lived on farms, raised our own food and lived off the 18th century grid.

31:34But that's not what people want. People want to live in cities and do stuff. And I tell people all the time, you know, I used to work at Boeing and we have a whole thing now where everybody's working at home. Everybody's working remotely, virtually. When you build airplanes that can fly close to the speed of sound with extraordinary reliability day in and day out, you can't do it at home. You need to have thousands of people come together with a plan and a giant building to build stuff. Right. That's how it is. And so I think a fear of industrial farming has led people to oppose genetically modified food in general.

32:22But there's no reason, well, there are reasons, we could modify our regulations so that giant corporations don't crush people and make their lives unlivable and so on. And the other big thing that's become representative of genetically modified organisms or crops writ large or big is the use of these genes to prevent insect attack and to enable extraordinary weed control. If you're a farmer, if you're a gardener, Weeds are a drag. You're fighting weeds all the time. So the classic example is glyphosate. Roundup is the brand name. And people love to hate Monsanto, which I can understand. Monsanto has been absorbed, everybody.

33:19There's no Monsanto anymore. And as people have pointed out, Monsanto was not as big as Apple or Microsoft or Boeing. It was down in the lower 300s of the top 500 companies. I mean, it was successful, but it wasn't like this monolith transformer crushing cities or something. And so there's two things about glyphosate. It's scary because it kills weeds so effectively. And the second thing is everybody uses it. Every farmer who wants to stay in business and compete uses something akin to glyphosate or genetically modified crops. So, you know, we in the States are all about corn, corns and everything.

34:07We're made of corn. We all eat corn. The plastic is corn. Well, you wouldn't have all this corn without genetic modifications that keep the European corn borer invasive species from destroying corn crops. And that is understanding DNA so well that you could eat, and so that this protein produces a crystal in the corn borer that kills it, can't tolerate it, or it doesn't eat it because it can see it coming in the insect sense. And so this leads to my biggest idea, my biggest idea. everybody we have to accept that humankind is in charge now we are running this planet we did not apply for this job nobody filled out a form but we are in charge now everything every one of us does affects everybody in the world because we all share the air nobody you meet and have a conversation with is not breathing.

35:17If you're a mortician, I guess, you know, you take meetings with people who aren't breathing. But we all share the air. And so when I was a kid, intuitively, you would think nature's over here. We're going to go camping in the woods. We're going to take an axe and a hand axe and got to cut our own firewood and it's going to be great. Right. And nature's over there and we're over here. But now we're all in this everywhere altogether. Right. And so what we want is to have systems of governance, systems in place that take that into account, that preserve the environment for everybody so that we can all have a high quality of life.

36:01Easy to say, not so easy to do. Right. Back to you. what have you what did you believe or not even you what was in the science community that was so backed maybe as you were getting into your show 30 years ago and over the last 30 years something that was known to be true in the world in the scientific world oh well has later oh man been involved into something else and he realized oh actually this is not true what it what is well Well, this is a cosmological thing, and I mean that cosmology. When I was young, everybody presumed the universe was expanding, and Nolly was expanding, was slowing down.

36:45There's no sound in space, just being. And this had ramifications about our place in the cosmos and what happened before. Is there any such thing as before the Big Bang? Is that even a question? But now, long about 2004, it was proven the universe is accelerating, getting bigger, faster and faster. And do you know why? Nobody knows why. So here we go. So you've heard of dark matter, dark energy? So it has some gravity. Nobody's really sure where it comes from, pulling everything apart. And I think about my grandparents, all four of whom were born in the 19th century. All four of my grandparents were born in the 1800s.

37:32They did not know there was relativity, let alone what it would lead to. And so in their lifetime, they saw relativity discovered, they saw the neutron discovered, protons proven to donate and accept in acids and bases, and then they saw nuclear weapons, and they saw nuclear energy, and they saw this understanding of the cosmos. They were around for the invention of the word Big Bang, the phrase Big Bang, and the invention of black hole. These were things that no one existed, no one knew existed in the 1800s. Just think. 30 years from now, when somebody figures out what dark energy and dark matter are, just think where it could lead.

38:19People don't know what side of the street they're on until they look at their phone and your phone depends on both special relativity, the speed of spacecraft relative to the earth and general relativity, the speed of time as influenced by the earth's gravity. Whoa, dude, just think what could happen in 30 years. What do you think people will discover about dark matter? Oh, I don't know that it's, it'll be part, it'll be quantized. There'll be particles of dark. What does that mean? Quantized? Uh, in particles. Okay. So we, You know the word electron. Yes. So electricity or electric fields are manifested or produced or come to be because there are charges in particles, particles with charges.

39:05And protons, we talk about protons like that. You can go get a PET scan, proton emission tomography. You can go, yeah. And we don't smoke, people. That was a joke. Right, right. And then we all take, it used to be called nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, MRI. Now we just call it MRI because it's clear people up. But all those discoveries led to these things that we have every day. And the promise of nuclear energy was great, but nobody is comfortable with the waste. Even people who handle the waste very well have to handle it quite gingerly. Right. Nobody wants it around. When I was taking physics back in the disco era, actually before the disco, in Motown, I was taking physics.

39:53Fusion was always 40 years away, fusion. But December of last year, people got more energy out than they put in. Fusion was done here on the Earth's surface. If we can come up with fusion energy on the Earth's surface, it will, dare I say it, change the world. And so there are, pick a number, about a dozen universities and companies trying to fuse protons or neutrons to get a tremendous amount of either heat or this crazy electric field that you can capture directly and produce electricity. It would change. If we had unlimited electricity, we could get her done. Wow. Get it all done. We could feed everybody clean water, take carbon dioxide out of the air.

40:41Are you excited about sustainable aviation fuel? Who isn't? That'd be amazing. Yes. So we talk about a shortcut. Man, if these guys and gals in South Dakota can take municipal solid waste, MSW, and turn it into kerosene. Jet fuel is kerosene, just with some stuff to keep it from freezing. And then turn it into rocket fuel, which is the same thing, just filtered, really filtered. Say what you will about Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Well, say what you will about those guys. But the ultimate goal of both of them is to use rocket fuel made from air. Take carbon dioxide out of the air, turn it into kerosene, turn it into jet fuel.

41:28That would be powerful. Oh, man. So then you could use all the airplanes you have now and all the rockets you have now and just the unlimited ways make carriers. I mean, it would just be amazing. You think that'll happen in the next 30 years? 30, yeah. Wow. But getting it for every airplane in the world in the next 30 years, that's something else. That'd be tough, huh? Yeah, but getting it for, say, an enormous number of domestic flights or Northern Hemisphere flights, very reasonable. You guys, we could just, in Silicon Valley fashion, these entrepreneurs will solve the problem. They'll have first money and some venture capitalists and angel investors and everything will be great.

42:12And I'm a billionaire, so take my word for it. Or we could invest like crazy the way people did to create, everybody's talking about Oppenheimer, to create nuclear weapons. We could invest in basic research. And everybody, we have to redistribute wealth. Everybody wants to be a billionaire. Sure we do, but everybody can't be a billionaire and still have enough for everybody. Unless we use pennies instead of dumbfragment or exaggerate. Back to you. You mentioned the universe is accelerating and expanding, right? And in that acceleration is dark matter being created in that acceleration? Don't know, man.

42:56We don't know that yet. I don't know, man. If somebody does, there's a cosmologist out there, an astrophysicist. Thank you. I don't know. I'm a mechanical engineer. What do we understand or know about the universe expanding and accelerating and our own thoughts? Oh, see, this is a great question. So is your brain expanding? are

43:21the stuff the matter of you is it spreading out in some amazing way and is there some field going between stuff in some new way be that as it may be to the woo woo people out there and I imagine you have a few woo wooists when scientists make discoveries about entanglement of photons. Do you know the double-split experiment? Double-slit experiment? Double-split. I'm talking fast. So, you guys, this is a digression, but it's worthy of everybody who, in a scientifically literate society, to consider.

44:10Have you ever looked through a piece of plastic, what have you, and seen a rainbow? Like, they have glasses. Okay. A way to explain that is light travels in waves. So when they go through these finely divided pieces of plastic or glass, they constructively and destructively interfere with themselves on the other side caused by the slits, picket fence that the light's going through. Well, here's the strange and amazing freaking thing. People, if you do experiments on light to observe waves, you will find waves. If you do experiments on light to find particles, you will find particles. And anybody, even people who hate science fiction and hate me and hate Star Trek, have heard of photon torpedoes.

45:05We have photons, can observe photons. So here's the strange and astonishing and amazing thing. If you set up a gizmo to shoot one photon at a time into the double slit, you get the same pattern. It's as though the photons know each other. I've seen this. Yeah, yeah. And this is a one thing about it is called entanglement, that somehow the photons are entangled. When scientists discover that and prove it and do these experiments to demonstrate it. It doesn't mean that you have psychic powers. That's not the same thing. It doesn't mean you can bend spoons with your mind. That's a separate, different thing.

45:51What do you mean? Just co-opting scientific terms for these woo, pseudo-scientific ideas is inappropriate. Can we say inappropriate? Sure. And taking somebody's money when you know better is also inappropriate. Sure. Sure. So there was a big article the other day about Ernie Geller. Ernie Geller? Ernie Geller. Ernie Geller. You guys are so young. So Ernie Geller is renowned for bending spoons. Okay. And he - With his mind right here. He used to refer to himself as a mentalist. Now he's kind of pulled back from that. Are you a magician? Oh, I would never say. Sure. So I've been with a couple of guys, but the notable guy was James Randi, who died a couple years ago, the amazing Randi.

46:39So you're having, you're meeting, you're at a science teacher convention, you're talking to James Randi, and he picks up the spoon from the table and he's talking to you about the spoon, and he's got the spoon, and he's talking about this, and then he holds it up and the spoon, because he just bent the living heck out of it in his magic, you can't see it kind of way. Sure, sure. finger. So that is apparently by all accounts what Uri Geller does. But people are still amazed, you know, because he's a great, terrific showman. But I mention this because when scientists discover entanglement, it doesn't mean that somebody's bending spoons with his mind.

47:21Everybody. Right. Right. Causation. I mean, correlation does not imply causation, to get all philosophical buzz phrase on you. Can you talk to me about the science of thinking? What a thought is? Man, I don't know, man. So, I spent a lot of time from time to time with brain people. Okay. I am not a brain person. Yes. What have you learned about them though? Well, that everybody is trying to figure out what consciousness is. Dr. Heather Berlin, friend of mine, is trying to figure out what consciousness is. And her old guy she used to know very well, Christoph, they're trying to figure out what consciousness is.

48:11And they can't, or they haven't, rather, not they can't, they haven't so far. Yeah. And we all want to know, and this is what philosophy is, is trying to figure out, you know, this expression justified true belief, JTF, JTB, like, how can you prove anything is true? And it gets to this ergo sumerat, I think, therefore I am. I'm thinking, therefore I must be alive. I mean, I must be here. But what goes on with our brains is so subtle and so troubling and such a freaking mess. And now we're all dealing, and I'm not changing the subject, we're all dealing with addiction. Everybody either knows somebody who's an addict or knows somebody whose life's been deeply affected by addiction.

48:59The guy in the news now, the president's on. And when you become an addict, apparently it affects your brain and you just don't think the way other people think. And it is an amazing thing. If you've been around addicts who just make up stories, who just lie, the stories are all self-consistent and they're created from their consciousness somehow, almost instantly, but it's happening apparently through chemistry in your head. And so I'm not an expert in this, but I've done a couple shows on addiction, and I've been around the brain people when they're arguing in the brain people conferences. And it is utterly fascinating.

49:43And as a skeptic, a formal skeptic, I'm a member of both skeptic organizations. I read Skeptic Magazine. I read the Committee for Scientific Inquiry. Who doesn't? Your perception is so unreliable, one's perception. What you think you're seeing in the world. You know the dress? Was it blue and white or was it golden? Yes, yeah, red or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Like your perception is, and that's just talking about your eyes. And your memory too. Your memory is a mess, man. You make stuff up all the time. And so, and you do it apparently to get through life. Like it's a shortcut through getting through life, you know, for getting through life.

50:25Have you ever had any extreme addictions? Have I? Not as far as I know, except I do like toy trains. Right. More obsession. And I do like throwing Frisbees around. Right. I'm not sure that's the same as an addiction. I think seeing people struggle with addiction is one of the hardest things to watch, especially if you love someone, if you care about someone for five years. And it's also one of the most inspiring things to watch people overcome. Oh, man. So that just shows you, is it because there's a higher power that is influencing people or is it chemistry in your brain? Interesting. Chemistry in your brain seems much more reasonable to me.

51:10And so you get in this thing everybody's talking about now, gender fluidity, and I'm not changing the subject. It's that there's a spectrum for all of this stuff. addiction, obsession, fascination with playing cards, whatever it is, there's very seldom cut and dried, very seldom a or a one or zero and or. Sure. I want to ask you a couple of final questions here, Bill. Final? No, I'm sorry. I've talked a lot. You have many questions. Oh, it's all good. Again, I want to acknowledge you for the constant impact you've made for, I guess, more than 30 years, but I'm just speaking from the show. Thank you.

51:58Yes, it's 30th anniversary. We're going to have a big party in Seattle. Don't miss it if you can. Nice, nice, nice. And acknowledge you for your commitment to bringing education and entertainment to really mostly kids that have then grown up and become interested in these types of ideas. I understand that was the modern word is intentional. We had very compelling research that 10 years old is about as old as you can be to get the lifelong passion for science. And it's probably, to me, it's about as old as you can be to get a lifelong passion for anything. When did you want to tell stories? I mean, you were a little kid.

52:33Right. Yeah, yeah. Play sports. I was interested in sports. Yeah, yeah. And so that's why it was aimed at people in fourth grade. It wasn't an unconscious, intuitive decision. It was research. Except it was intuitive in the sense that when I was a kid, I loved science and I still do. Yeah. That's beautiful. Wow. Again, I acknowledge you for the impact you consistently make. I still don't get over it. I was in, I was in, um, bio France, you know, where the cathedral is with the tapestry telling the story for illiterate citizens. And this guy can, I watch your show. What? Do you watch it in French?

53:14No, I watch it in English. that's how I learned English. And all these people, people not of my ancestry who watched the show and got it. It's just amazing to me. It's beautiful. I can't get over it. This question is when I ask everyone at the end of our interviews. I've got two final questions for you, but this one is towards the end. It's called the three truths. It's a hypothetical question. The three truths. three truths hypothetical question scenario ask out all my guests um imagine you get to live as long as you want to live science and health optimization gets you to as long as you want to live but it's the last day far in the future for your for your life in this existence and um you are unable to to leave behind any message you shared before all the content you've created books, the TV shows, all of it, for whatever reason, it has to go to the next place.

54:14It's not here anymore. Hypothetical. But on your last day, you get to leave behind three truths, three things you know to be true or three lessons you would like to share with the world. And that's all we have to remember your message by. What would be those three truths for you? I got to sort this out. Yeah. Because I got two right away. Yep. And then I have, my father and mother would say, okay, here you go.

54:45Every person is responsible for his or her own actions. You're responsible for your own actions.

54:54Common sense is not that common.

55:00And the goal, your reason to live, what you want to do, is leave the world better than you found it. Leave the world better than you found it. Were those your parents instilled those truths in you? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Who was, what was the most influential thing about both mom and dad? Well, mom, for academic achievement, she also said where you live is really important. Like, be comfortable. invest in making where you live comfortable. Because if you don't like to be home, you just, life just gets to be uneasy. And then my dad was a very good Boy Scout. I had a very good regular experience in the Boy Scouts.

55:53I got to tell you, there was no weirdness. That's good. And that movie, The Blair Witch Project. Get out of the woods, you idiots. What's wrong with you? Spend a night in the woods? Big freaking deal. Anyway, so that you can take care of yourself. You can be empowered. That would be something my dad would say. And my father was also, family's the most important thing. Your family's the most important thing. It was a big deal with my dad. That was beautiful. Yeah, well, I think everybody says that at some point. Yeah, yeah. I meet people. My brother and sister are my best friends. I mean, we make each other laugh.

56:41I meet people that don't get along with their siblings. It's just very much out of my everyday experience. And I guess that came from our parents. As weird as I claim things were, it came from our parents. Sure, sure. I love these truths, so thanks for sharing those from our parents. Again, 30th anniversary of Bill Nye the Science Guide this September, which is unbelievable. Can't say there's a third generation of people watching this show. It's a bunch of guys and gals in a warehouse in Seattle. The building's still there. That's amazing. Yeah. You have a show called The End is Nigh. The End is Nigh.

57:16Turn it up loud, people, on Peacock. Watch it. You're also a social media sensation. Sensation. You know, everywhere. TikTok and Instagram. You're just viral everywhere. So understand the deal was no bit to exceed 49 seconds. That was our informal, hilarious gag. For TV, right? Jim McKenna, Aaron Gottlieb, and me, the co-creators. And that was because that's just how we felt. We liked it. It was fun. TikTok is my jam, man. You crush it on TikTok. 59 seconds? We got 10 extra seconds. Let's go. Let's go. We'll have to do a TikTok after this. I love it. But again, I want to acknowledge you. Is there anything else we should send people to to let them be aware of and follow you besides social media, the TV show, anywhere else we can send people to support and serve you?

58:06Well, thank you. Read my show, watch my book. So I am very proud of the books I've written. They've become New York Times bestsellers, But very recently, this debate I did with this guy in Kentucky, who near as I can tell, really actually believes the earth is 4 ,000 years old. He is absolutely wrong about that. That is absolutely incorrect. And he can run off with his Australian accent impressing people who think everybody with a British accent is an authority. But the concern there are the kids. You don't want kids growing up scientifically illiterate. I mean, that point of view is just silly.

58:52And I know he was brought up with it and he really believes it. But it just crossed 10 million views. Wow. 10 million official views, which means what does that mean in unofficial? 50, 40 million. Right, right. So. Is that on YouTube? Or where is that? It's on YouTube, yeah. The kids with their YouTubes. Gotcha. But Undeniable, the first book is about evolution. And I think it'd be great if everybody understood evolution and our place in the cosmos, what I like to call our place in space. And the reason I took this job as CEO of the Planetary Site, world's largest non-governmental space interest organization advancing space science and exploration so that citizens of Earth will know the cosmos and our place within it, is because these discoveries we make in space affect us all.

59:47both practically, we all have satellite communications, weather reports that are accurate within five minutes, and global communication and so on. But spiritually, thinking about your place in the cosmos affects all of us. And if we were to discover life on another world, it would change this one, people. If we find evidence of bacterial, fossilized pond scum on Mars, it will change the way you feel about being alive. If we find evidence of life in the atmosphere of Venus, phosphine gas, there are microbes, so-called aeroplankton floating around, it will change you. If we find Europanians under the ice on Europa, the moon of Jupiter that Galileo discovered, that will change you.

1:00:35Are there Enceladusians orbiting Saturn? It will change you. So that's why I do that as a full part-time job. Wow. Now, and the other thing about space in the States, especially, U.S. especially, brings people together. People that hate each other in Congress agree to fund NASA, the best brand the United States has. NASA is the best brand the United States has. So that's why I do all these things, people. When you're in love, you want to tell the world, science! And science or the process of science, our ability to evaluate evidence, so-called critical thinking, is how we're going to address climate change.

1:01:16It's how we're going to feed everybody. Not by pretending it's not happening. It's not going to do it. Back to you. Powerful, Bill. I appreciate you being here. I got one final question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry I talk so much. You're good. I love it. The final question is what is your definition of greatness? Something that fills you with respect.

1:01:39what's everybody these days greatest of all time? The goats. Yeah. That's fleeting. This too will pass, as they say. Who's ever the fastest human, 100 meters, that guy's not going to be 100 meter champion, or gal's not going to be 100 meter champion 20 years, probably not in 20 years. Certainly not in 50 years. And so that's going to pass. But how does it make you feel right now? That person was great. what happened was great. That was a great thing, how it makes you feel. My definition of greatness then is you make it feel that something is wonderful. Fills you, everybody loves the word awesome, but fills you with awe or respect.

1:02:25Respect. I hope today's episode inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a rundown of today's show with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me as well as ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcast. If you enjoyed this, please share it with a friend over on social media or text a friend, leave us a review over on Apple Podcast and let me know what you learned over on our social media channels at Lewis Howes. I really love hearing the feedback from you and it helps us continue to make the show better.

1:03:01And if you want more inspiration from our world-class guests and content to learn how to improve the quality of your life, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter. And if no one has told you today, I wanna remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.