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- [00:01]
A
So good, so good, so good. New markdowns are on at your Nordstrom Rack store. Save even more. Up to 70% on dresses, tops, boots and handbags to give and get. Cause I always find something amazing. Just so many good brands. I get an extra 5% off with my Nordstrom credit card Total queen treatment. Join the Nordy Club at Nordstrom Rack to unlock our best deals. Big gifts, big perks.
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B
That's why you rack.
- [00:32]
A
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com hi guys, it's Naima. I wanted to say a huge thank you to anyone who's watched or listened to Smart Girl Dumb Questions in these last months. Your support from the jump has meant so much to me as I try to build this thing. I wanted to share with you that last week the show popped into the top charts on Spotify and it's also been growing on YouTube, on Apple, on Pocket Cast, on Iheart, wherever you get your podcasts. And that's because of you guys. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you for talking about the show. Thank you for sharing the show. I so appreciate it. And, and by the way, if you're on here as a lurker and you just occasionally watch or listen, hit follow or subscribe, guys, and get some of your friends to follow or subscribe too. Share it with a friend, an ex, your mom, your mailman. You know, people who want a little Smart Girl Dumb questions in their life. Thanks so much guys. And here's the episode for today. I'm going to introduce you and then I'll. What? Yes, you need no introduction. It was Diplo that needed the introduction.
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B
I kid because I love read on.
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A
I'm Naima Raza, this is Smart Girl Dumb Questions. And today my question is whatever happened to the science guys? And to answer that is none other than Bill Nye the science guy. Hi, Bill.
- [01:59]
B
Hello.
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A
Thank you for being here.
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B
It's so good to be here.
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A
Thank you for joining me. You wore a bow tie, which is amazing. And you changed bow ties right before we taped this.
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B
It's just my policy. Also, I wore a shirt. I don't wanna scare people.
- [02:11]
A
You know, that's very in These days on the runways, the blazer, the bow tie. And no, yeah, I'm not.
- [02:17]
B
I don't work on the Runway that much.
- [02:20]
A
Yeah, the demand is there.
- [02:22]
B
Sure it is.
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A
Smart girl, dumb questions. He was a 19 Emmy winning PBS show host. He since had hit shows on Netflix, on Peacock. And you have a desk job as CEO of the Planetary Society.
- [02:38]
B
Yes.
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A
Is that a desk job?
- [02:41]
B
Yes, it's walking around. It's walking around and trying to stay out of the way. That's my big job as CEO. The people that work there are so competent, so skilled, so good at what they do. I just try to stay out of the way, which is not easy.
- [02:59]
A
The Planetary Society, of course, was run once upon a time by Carl Sagan.
- [03:02]
B
Yeah, he started it with two other guys. Lou Friedman, who was an orbital mechanics guy at Jet Propulsion Lab. Yeah. See, in space, there's no sound.
- [03:13]
A
Yes. We're doing circles with our fingers for anyone listening to the podcast edition.
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B
And then Bruce Murray, who was the head of the Jet Propulsion Lab during the heyday of the Viking landers on Mars and the Voyager missions. The famous Voyager missions. Science fiction movies are based on Voyager mission. And they have the golden records out of the cosmos. Except there's no sound into the cosmos.
- [03:40]
A
If you were to shoot a golden record into space quietly like that, what would be on it?
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B
Well, let's talk about me.
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A
Yes.
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B
So I make the following claim. I was in class at Cornell University in the spring of 1977, Carl Sagan's Astronomy 102 class. And he said the Voyager spacecraft were to launch later that summer. The summer of 1977, the disco era. Some may remember or have heard about it anyway.
- [04:12]
A
Yes.
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B
And he said, don't worry, young people, we're gonna have a rock and roll record. We're gonna put Rollover Beethoven by Chuck Berry. And I certainly raised concern. And I'm gonna claim now this part could be the constructed memory that I stood up. I said, professor Sagan, you do not want Rollover Beethoven. That's a novelty record. So I said, what you want is Johnny B. Goode. Oh, so Johnny B. Goode is on the record. I take full credit. It was all me.
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A
Well, I have a lot of questions for you.
- [04:45]
B
Well, let's start with one.
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A
We'll start with simple ones. Cause the big question is really what's happened to science? Where are we today? Because you spent a lifetime educating a generation of people to love the scientific method, to love scientific inquiry.
- [05:00]
B
I love you, man. Yes.
- [05:01]
A
Yes. That's what we. We learned that from you, if you. And nowadays it seems like this is under threat. And I want to know why you think it's under threat and how we can fix it. But I want to start with something much simpler than that, which is you recently got a Hollywood star.
- [05:17]
B
Yes. It's very cool, you guys. So you Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, where these stars, star shaped stone patterns are in the sidewalk. And I've got one of them now. It's really amazing. It's amazing.
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A
Everybody says, oh, you're made of stardust.
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B
That's right.
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A
Explain that.
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B
That is, as we like to joke, a true fact as opposed to a false fact.
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A
Is it a very true fact?
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B
It's super true.
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A
Excellent.
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B
Well said. So this is an insight that fills me with reverence every time I think about it, which is most days, frankly. So stars have so much gravity, they crush protons together with so much force, they overcome the force to repel them. They fuse and make bigger nuclei than those nuclei fuse and make bigger and bigger and bigger. And then you get up to iron 56 and elements beyond that are created when the star explodes in space.
- [06:23]
A
Yes.
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B
And so this dust, the stardust, the star stuff, is thrown into space by these explosions and the mutual or the gravitational interaction with other celestial objects and then comes together presumed by gravity. And then you and I are made of this stuff. That's really amazing. And so then Carl Sagan observed, this means that you and I made of this stardust are at least one of the ways that the universe knows itself. Wow, dude, that is so out there.
- [07:03]
A
It's so trippy.
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B
It is trippy.
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A
The universe knows itself.
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B
It's really amazing because we are on Earth and we look out into space thinking thoughts about, how did we get here? Is there somebody else out there asking the same question about where they are, wondering if we are here? And all around like that. And it's on account of these interactions in the cosmos having to do with subatomic particles and gravity and whatever else might be going on. Electromagnetic radiation, strong atomic force, weak atomic force.
- [07:39]
A
I think about that all the time. Because someone recently said to me at some retreat, I was at some kind of hippie dippy. Hippie, dippy retreat.
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B
Well, she can't disclose. Yeah. Were you guys wearing clothes or was it. Were there hot toes?
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A
We were all wearing bow ties and nothing else, Bill. But we were, we were there. And someone said to us, you are more what's out there than in here. And he lifted up his phone and I am like, yeah, of course that's reasonable. That's reasonable. But it is. It doesn't feel like that these days. It feels like we are tech, like we are the future of humanity. I sometimes think is cyborg. Cause we're so connected to these devices.
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B
Oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah.
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A
But ultimately we're stardust.
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B
Ultimately, we are stardust.
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A
We are also made of our parents DNA. And your parents have fascinating stories. Your mom was a code breaker.
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B
Yep.
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A
And your father was a contractor for the US Navy who became a Japanese prisoner of war. Did I get that right?
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B
Yes.
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A
And while he was a prisoner of war, I understand he became obsessed with sundials because he had no other way interested.
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B
Yes.
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A
Yes. Because there was no other way to know time.
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B
Probably to reckon time. Yeah.
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A
And to measure, I guess. Did he want to measure time in that situation?
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B
Let's call it mark time. I mean, you don't tune out, but you all wondering, is this the day we're all going to get murdered or are we going to live another day? And is it lunchtime? And these are traditional questions. So timekeeping and observing the stars is deep within us as humans.
- [09:07]
A
And code breaking for your mom.
- [09:09]
B
Well, code breaking. So this is a big deal. She was graduated from college in the spring of 1942. And the story goes, she answered an ad in the Baltimore Sun, a newspaper. Baltimore Sun. Do you like puzzles? Yeah, I like puzzles. She filled out a crossword puzzle and sent it in and they recruited her.
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A
And who's they? The CIA.
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B
The Navy. The US Navy, yeah. If you asked her, what did you do during the war? Mom, I can't talk about it. She never talked about it. Never. And then they had a party in 1992, 50 years. 50 years after they had been sworn to uphold the Constitution and do these cool things. They still wouldn't talk about it.
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A
They still wouldn't talk about it.
- [09:55]
B
It was at Fort Myer, which is across the river from Washington in Virginia. And my recollection, it's been a while, but I think there were six other gals there. You know, there were 10,000 altogether, but.
- [10:07]
A
And they all kept the secrets, apparently. Wow. They were better back. They made them better in 1942.
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B
Well, that's. So let's talk about that.
- [10:13]
A
Yeah.
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B
At that time, everybody was doing this one thing. We are gonna win this war. That's what we're gonna do. And if we could imbue in our fellow citizens the same passion for addressing climate change, then we could get something done sometimes.
- [10:32]
A
And I think I'm gonna talk about this with you a little bit. And Also with your colleague Casey Dreier, the Chief Space Policy Officer, because space seems like that mission sometimes. And there are two times where I feel the US is really rallying towards something together, or three, I guess there's a rallying around the flag effect when there's war or an attack or something. There's a beautiful space mission where we see, like, great pictures of the telescopes or something that is catapulting America into, you know, the ethereum. Yeah. Into the cosmos. And that seems riveting. And then Olympics, like, even last year during the election, the Olympics, everyone seemed happy and on the same team. But otherwise it seems a little divided these days.
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B
Somewhat divided, yes.
- [11:14]
A
Yes, we're going to get into that, but I want to keep going with your parents for a second. Do you think, do smarter people have smarter children? And is that nature or nurture?
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B
I think the answer is absolutely without question. It depends. Whether or not someone's inherently smart or not is an ancient question, and I do not know the answer. People try to know it all the time. But when you write an IQ test, an intelligence quotient test that involves questions about property taxes or car dealership negotiation tactics, there'll be a segment of society that is excluded from that, and so they don't do as well on the test. And then one might infer that they have lower IQ when they really probably don't.
- [12:01]
A
The upstream question is, what is intelligence?
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B
Whoa.
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A
How do you. Yeah, exactly.
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B
So what are you good at? This is the thing. When you guys just look around at what people nowadays call the built environment, buildings, sidewalks. There are some people who are good at making that stuff.
- [12:22]
A
Not me.
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B
Well, there you go.
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A
Don't move into a house I built, Bill.
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B
I shan't.
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A
Good.
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B
But keep in mind there's somebody who is good at it, who has an aptitude for it. And so does that person have an exceptional intelligence?
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A
I would think so, yeah. And that thing.
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B
And then these successful sports figures are often associated with academic achievement these days. They're good at both reasoning in the abstract sense and in figuring out who's where on the basketball court or the soccer field. Soccer pitch.
- [12:57]
A
This whole show is all about that. It's like, smart about some things, dumb about lots of things, curious about everything, which I.
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B
There you go. Bring it on. Curiosity is how we all get here, people.
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A
Yes.
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B
And you know Isaac Asimov, famous science fiction writer, famously. I'm going to paraphrase it or I'm going to state it as best I can. It may be paraphrasing. He said Science doesn't begin with Eureka. Science is not. Oh my goodness. I run in circle screaming, I've made this thing. It's. Wow, that's funny. That's how science starts. An observation, something that struck you as not what you expect.
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A
A curiosity.
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B
A curiosity.
- [13:38]
A
That's what Neil told me. Neil Degrasse Tyson, when he came on the show, told me, your friend, your buddy.
- [13:43]
B
I kid because I love. Yes.
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A
Are you guys secretly arch nemeses? No. You're not.
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B
What do we do? What?
- [13:49]
A
You're not nemeses? No. You're best for your friends. You just don't podcast.
- [13:53]
B
No, no, it's. I think I claim we push each other.
- [13:57]
A
Okay.
- [13:58]
B
You know, I claim we, I won't say try to one up each other, but we try to achieve. Do an activity as well as the other guy. I claim.
- [14:08]
A
Well, one of the things that you were, you found you were extremely, I guess, good at and what you could do that I certainly couldn't do was be an engineer at Boeing. That was one of your first careers.
- [14:19]
B
Airplanes are cool.
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A
What did you work on at Boeing that still exists and flies today?
- [14:24]
B
So my main job was on 747 and 747s now are flying largely in cargo mode. I did work for a kind of about, how to say, about a week on Air Force One.
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A
Oh, wow.
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B
Well, on this one, you guys, there's many, many moving parts on an airplane.
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A
Is there a backup Air Force One, or is there just like one Air Force One?
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B
No comment.
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A
There is a backup.
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B
Well, the sort of. There's Air Force Two. There's a zillion of these things.
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A
You definitely got discretion from your mother, but yes.
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B
Anyway, so there was this little vibration in the yoke, the steering wheel, the Y shaped steering wheel. And these planes are built to engineering drawings very carefully by skilled guys and gals. But they are assembled by hand, so at least they were in those days. And so there are subtle, subtle differences plane to plane. The same way. Not every new car feels the same. So they let me design this tube that suppressed that vibration. So the vibration is a pressure wave in the hydraulic system. So you make, you determine, you infer the main or predominant frequency of that pressure wave and then you make it destructively interfere with itself. Do you follow me?
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A
Destructively.
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B
So when the sine wave's going up, you make another sine wave going down.
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A
Oh, so you basically count out, cancel.
- [15:55]
B
It out nominally at a certain frequency.
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A
Excellent.
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B
So that's what I worked on. Just took two years.
- [16:00]
A
You didn't work on the faulty door plugs that had boiled.
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B
So the door plug, kids, people.
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A
Yes.
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B
767 has plug, what are called plug doors. Those plugs have been there for 50, maybe 60 years. But you can't not assemble them right. That's still a rule. You have to put the nuts and screws and stuff in. And just notice the thing flew for months.
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A
I know.
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B
And the pressure in the cabin pushed the door, the plug against its opening.
- [16:37]
A
Yeah.
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B
But then eventually it got loose with the vibration bouncing on landing or what have you. And I laugh because nobody got hurt, but that is terrible.
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A
Did you. Did it seem impossible to you when this Boeing incident happened or you. No, no.
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B
So you guys, I'll tell you, on a major league airplane.
- [16:56]
A
Yeah.
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B
The things that go wrong are almost always maintenance.
- [17:01]
A
Yes.
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B
If things are not properly maintained and in this case, not properly assembled in the first place, that's when things happen.
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A
You went from engineering to maintaining a different kind of career, which is. You went to sketch comedy.
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B
Yes.
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A
Almost live.
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B
Yes.
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A
Was it like SNL for geeks? This is before.
- [17:20]
B
No, no, no. It was SNL for the 13th television market.
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A
Oh, excellent.
- [17:25]
B
Seattle Almost Live, as the show is called, was on King tv, which is the NBC affiliate. So here's the story. According to me, in my opinion, which, as I have to point out continually is correct.
- [17:43]
A
Yes, we know all about the golden record.
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B
Well, when Steve Martin, speaking of records, his first two albums Get Small, let's Get Small and Wild and Crazy Guy, after those first two albums, every city, it was so popular and so unusual. Every city in North America, English speaking Canada, had two comedy clubs, one or two comedy clubs. About 1977, eight, nine comedy clubs in and of themselves with this one art form were created. And so then it led to stand up comedy competitions.
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A
Okay.
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B
Steve Martin was so big, they had a Steve Martin lookalike contest. And I won in Seattle. I did not advance beyond Seattle, but I won in Seattle. And after that I wanted to do stand up myself. Like, if Steve Martin could do it, how hard could it be? So I quit my job.
- [18:43]
A
And how old were you?
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B
I was 29, which is getting up there.
- [18:46]
A
Oh, don't say that to me, Bill.
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B
But yeah, well, no, but if you're going to quit your job.
- [18:52]
A
Yeah.
- [18:52]
B
And so I never went back full time. I worked part time as an engineer for another six years, six and a half years. So I would get a job doing designing a tool, as they call it tooling. Or I worked on this, this seal for the volume knobs on airplane radios. So the pilot could spill the coffee and it wouldn't hold the plane up. Stuff like that. But along this line with Ross Schaefer, we came up with the science guy and I did the household uses of liquid nitrogen.
- [19:33]
A
Yeah. And you made stem so cool for a generation. It's cool. You just blow. You put on a lab coat, a bow tie, and you blew stuff up.
- [19:41]
B
I'd wear a lab coat all the time if people didn't make fun of me or more fun of me. Lab coat is very comfortable garment. You watch. What do you watch, a cooking show? Yeah, everybody's in their. His or her cooking jacket. Yeah, that's just a truncated lab coat. A cut off lab coat.
- [19:58]
A
If that's. I mean, I expect to see it in the fashion on the Runway that you'll be walking with the.
- [20:03]
B
You know, they do kind of have trench coaty.
- [20:06]
A
Yeah, it's very in right now.
- [20:07]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [20:08]
A
The whole Burberry. I think Burberry is basically they copy everything I do. So you make it. Thanks to Carl Sagan and your great teaching, you become an excellent engineer. Thanks to Steve Martin and his great lead supply generation of comedy clubs across the world. You have an opportunity to make it and take a bet on yourself at 29. And you make it. And you become, I think, the greatest science communicator of millennial kids.
- [20:39]
B
I love you, man. Woman. Well, I put my heart and soul into that thing. And the reason I did it, I was very concerned about the United States. I grew up here. I'm a native of the U.S. i'm a son of two patriots, two veterans. And so I got very concerned. They took solar panels off the roof of the White House, stopped teaching the metric system, created the Chevy Vega and the Ford Pinto. A car so bad that when you re entered it re rear ended it, it would explode. Undesirable generally for most cars. And so they Ford Motor Company did this analysis. You can read about it on the electric Internet where the attorneys decided it would be cheaper to pay the lawsuits than reconfigure the gas tank and exhaust pipe and backseat. It was just embarrassing time.
- [21:32]
A
Which is wild because like, you know, people are so nostalgic for the 90s right now. Everything on our TV, everything was more in the 80s. This is the 80s. But I was reading from Carl Sagan this passage from Demon haunted science as a candle in the dark. Love that he writes, science is more than a body of knowledge, it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time. When the United States is a service and information economy. When nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries. When awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few and no one representing the public interest can ever grasp the issues. When the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority. When clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties are in decline. Unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide without noticing back into a superstition and a darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in and the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media.
- [22:37]
B
So what year is that?
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A
1995.
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B
So on page 386 he mentions.
- [22:42]
A
But he talks about like 10 seconds.
- [22:43]
B
It's the guy's prescient. The guy's psychic, he's seeing the future.
- [22:48]
A
So what would he think about the world today?
- [22:50]
B
I'm not asking you to see arms akimbo and concerned.
- [22:54]
A
Okay?
- [22:54]
B
Not to put brains in his thoughts, but that would be the great difficulty. He sort of saw the problem of social media.
- [23:02]
A
I mean, there wasn't even social media Media in 1995, was there?
- [23:06]
B
There were gossip magazines and certainly a lot of gossip television, or whatever you call it, television light. And he was concerned about it, especially when you compare many of those television shows to Cosmos, his thing in 1980. And this idea that you can do your own research online and be as good at it as people who've studied whatever it is their whole lives who are exper.
- [23:35]
A
Yeah, it's kind of like everybody thinks they're a scientist now because they can Google.
- [23:39]
B
Everybody thinks they can learn all they need to know. Yeah.
- [23:42]
A
Yeah.
- [23:43]
B
Without the process. So science is a body of knowledge. Yes, yes. Silicon has an atomic number and carbon is six and so on. But it's also the process that's the big thing. It's the way of knowing the way we figure these things out. That's what's so important. That's what he called critical thinking.
- [24:04]
A
Does it keep you up at night? Does it make you very sad?
- [24:06]
B
Yes, it keeps me up at night.
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A
Does it break your heart more than any other breakup you've had in your life?
- [24:11]
B
I mean, worse than getting dumped by women.
- [24:14]
A
You mean getting dumped? Loss. I don't know. Is this bigger than any personal loss you've had in your life?
- [24:19]
B
Yes. Yeah. Oh, this is far more troubling than any personal loss. And I don't mean to go all Hand wringing, whining. But this is a really critical time. So everybody, I want you all to.
- [24:33]
A
Think medium term, which is how many.
- [24:37]
B
Years first of all, got to win or reverse things. In 2026, in the midterms, I'm not saying erase everything that's happened, but reverse the flow where it's uphill instead of. It's building instead of destroying. Then in 2028, the presidential election. Let's get all psyched up about that. Then in 2029, Apophis, an asteroid named for the Egyptian God of chaos and anxiety, will come closer to Earth than the Global Positioning Satellites, not closer than the moon. Anybody could do that. Closer than Global Positioning Satellites. And I remind everybody of the importance of the space program. And then in 2030, everybody, unless something happens that isn't about to happen, China National Space Administration will put people on the moon ahead of NASA, the United.
- [25:35]
A
States, to hang on the moon.
- [25:37]
B
Like people.
- [25:38]
A
Yeah, people. Not just walking a little bit, but hanging out for long periods of time.
- [25:43]
B
Well, I don't know about that. Landing and landing, thinking deep thoughts and picking up rocks and especially this trip, looking for ice that somehow sustains in the vacuum of space, in these shadows on the south pole of the moon. Okay, so this will be a wake up call.
- [26:01]
A
Yeah.
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B
Then by 2032, there'll be another presidential election. In 2034, the. Whatever you call it, the ice flows north of Greenland will probably be melted away, and this will affect international commerce and military negotiations when you can drive from Norway to Siberia over the North Pole. The Northwest Passage will be a real thing by then.
- [26:31]
A
I want to do lightning rounds with you on every one of these topics on lightning rounds, science, lightning. I'm going to have you redo all the sound design for my show.
- [26:44]
B
It's the lightning round.
- [26:45]
A
It's not yet, though. We're gonna first do another round.
- [26:47]
B
My bad. It's just raining gently.
- [26:49]
A
Keep those music cues for when we get there. Yes, sister. Wait, well, you know, you're doing, right now, you're doing the entry theme music for Joe Rogan, because I'm about to play a clip of Joe Rogan.
- [27:00]
B
Oh, good.
- [27:00]
A
Okay. Okay. You're familiar with Joe Rogan?
- [27:02]
B
Well, not at your level, but yes.
- [27:04]
A
Yes, Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman, two podcasters that would, you know, have different.
- [27:09]
B
Political point of view from mine, for.
- [27:12]
A
Example, but they talk about what I'll call this death of the science stud. And this is what they say. There's some. There's some bad language in it, but I'm going To play it anyway.
- [27:22]
B
Bad language. Physicists in the Soviet Union will get.
- [27:26]
A
A lot of, okay, they talk about that. And they're basically talking about the end of the science stud, right? Oppenheimer was a freak. He was so popular, et cetera. And they come back to say Einstein.
- [27:36]
B
Was a national hero.
- [27:38]
A
Right?
- [27:38]
B
There's no one like that today.
- [27:40]
A
There's no one scientist that's at groundbreaking.
- [27:43]
B
Research of theory of relativity where everybody's aware of it. There's nothing like that today.
- [27:48]
A
We celebrate people like maybe like Neil.
- [27:49]
B
Degrasse Tyson, who are communicators of science.
- [27:52]
A
What do you make of the argument they're making that we don't celebrate scientists anymore? We celebrate science communicators. We lost, the science died.
- [28:02]
B
Well, just wait for another amazing breakthrough and then we'll take a meeting again.
- [28:07]
A
Okay, what is the most amazing breakthrough?
- [28:09]
B
Well, understand what Einstein discovered. He discovered the feature of gravity and time. One word. Space time.
- [28:19]
A
Yes.
- [28:20]
B
That doesn't happen every two weeks. Everybody, he mentioned Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton was in 1640.
- [28:28]
A
They talk about Richard Feynman.
- [28:29]
B
Richard Feynman. So I saw Richard Feynman's lecture on electron spin at Caltech. I went to high school with a guy who went to Caltech who became a professor of electron microscopy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. All that aside, these people don't come around every five minutes, like, let it go, Joe. Like, let's fund science. And then the guy will or gal will emerge, not the other way around. Whining that we don't. Whining that we don't celebrate scientists is a fine thing to whine about. But understand the scale of the discoveries that you're comparing anybody to.
- [29:10]
A
When do you expect we'll see, particularly with artificial intelligence, like, the next great breakthrough in science? And does AI bring it closer to us or not?
- [29:18]
B
Yes, it will bring us closer. So here's the next breakthrough. Okay, first let me talk about the next soft through. Okay, the next soft through will be great advances in agriculture using artificial intelligence to design proteins that will be able to change the DNA of certain farm crops and make them more nutritious and productive. This will be a cool, practical application of artificial intelligence. Understanding protein folding, understanding how to use clustered regularly interspace palindromic repeats CRISPR to modify DNA to make crops more nutritious and productive. That's a soft through. The breakthrough. The breakthrough will come from the stars.
- [30:08]
A
What?
- [30:09]
B
We will harness fusion on Earth's surface. We will have fusion power plants.
- [30:15]
A
Yes.
- [30:15]
B
When I took physics lo these many hundreds of years ago, fusion was always 40 years in the future. For every year is another. Just wait another 40 years. Yeah, but you said that. Always did say that. But it's 40 more years. Well, now it's closer to 10 or 15. Because the great problem with any reasonable traditional fusion reactor has been a magnetic field that can contain a plasma. Have you heard this jive?
- [30:47]
A
No, I don't understand that.
- [30:48]
B
So please tell me it's not that hard. So you know solid, liquid, gas?
- [30:51]
A
Yes.
- [30:52]
B
Do you know plasma?
- [30:53]
A
I mean, I know the term used like.
- [30:56]
B
So it's another state of matter.
- [30:59]
A
Okay.
- [30:59]
B
And it's like a gas, but all the electrons are dissociated from nuclei of atoms and it behaves differently. It doesn't act like a gas. This is the frustrating arms akimbo thing.
- [31:16]
A
It doesn't act like a gas. It doesn't act like a liquid.
- [31:18]
B
Right.
- [31:18]
A
It acts like a plasma.
- [31:19]
B
It acts like a plasma. So the way you contain this thing and manage it is with a magnetic field.
- [31:25]
A
Okay?
- [31:26]
B
And the problem has been, as they say, I'm not in the business full time, but the hilarious turn of phrase is it's like trying to serve jello with chopsticks. It'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 get squirted, like squeezing a balloon, a 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, 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. Anything 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.
- [32:48]
A
And I. I saw you somewhere, had said you expect to see fusion energy in your lifetime.
- [32:54]
B
Yeah, well, yes.
- [32:55]
A
And then I was thinking, how long does Bill want to keep kicking? So you said 10 to 15 years.
- [33:00]
B
Yeah.
- [33:00]
A
Well, you'll be around for longer.
- [33:02]
B
The wife and I have agreed another 30 minimum.
- [33:05]
A
Okay, great. So how long will that make you guys married or together?
- [33:11]
B
33 years. Yes.
- [33:12]
A
Love it.
- [33:12]
B
No, we just got married recently, as these things go.
- [33:15]
A
Congratulations.
- [33:16]
B
Thank you. Thank you.
- [33:18]
A
Hang tight for a Second. We'll be right back. This episode is brought to you by Indeed. When your computer breaks, you don't wait for it to magically start working again.
- [33:29]
B
You fix the problem.
- [33:30]
A
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- [33:50]
B
Jack Daniels is proudly served in fine establishments, questionable joints, and everywhere in between. So no matter where you go in every bar, you'll always know someone by name.
- [34:04]
A
Jack Jack and Coke shot at Jack. Jack Daniels, please.
- [34:08]
B
Right away. That's what makes Jack Jack. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org Jack Daniels and old number seven are registered trademarks. Tennessee whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee.
- [34:20]
A
We are now going to get to the lightning round. Are you ready?
- [34:23]
B
Lightning round.
- [34:24]
A
Lightning round. Exactly. A subscriber named David Adelberg asked, how do you maintain healthy scientific skepticism without becoming a crackpot?
- [34:34]
B
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.
- [34:52]
A
Yeah.
- [34:52]
B
And the big thing. Carl Sagan threw this phrase, right? Critical thinking. We want to be able to evaluate evidence. That is our dream. And so you gotta be optimistic, people, or you won't get anything done. You don't go into the game thinking you're gonna lose. If you do, you will lose, bitches. No, you've gotta go into the game thinking you're gonna win, even if you. If everybody's taller than you are and faster and better.
- [35:19]
A
Yes.
- [35:19]
B
You still, you know, the ball is round, the disc is round. Things could happen. I'm just saying.
- [35:24]
A
I'm curious if it's harder to make content these days because you're. 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.
- [35:35]
B
That's right. Yes. And it was about authoritarianism.
- [35:39]
A
And it was not made because they thought it'd be.
- [35:41]
B
My understanding is they thought it'd be too controversial. This is before the. Yeah, the 2024 election in September.
- [35:50]
A
There was a big kerfuffle. I'll use that term around Jimmy Kimmel being pulled from Late Night. He's now back on the air. What did you make of that. I mean, we talked about Carl Sagan being prescient. Did you see this coming in the media world?
- [36:05]
B
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 this United States was built with this idea embodied in the US Constitution. Not. 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. And using rules to manage and govern things is better than using one guy's whims.
- [36:47]
A
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?
- [36:59]
B
Yeah, not the cause. Yeah.
- [37:01]
A
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. Do you like this high?
- [37:13]
B
Skepticism with Nye. Skepticism is high with Nye.
- [37:16]
A
Skepticism is high with Nye.
- [37:18]
B
Through the inhale sound effect.
- [37:20]
A
Exactly. So, okay, climate change.
- [37:23]
B
Climate change.
- [37:24]
A
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?
- [37:32]
B
Well, so, you know, give you the 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. How 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. So 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. Yeah, it has to be cheaper than oil and gas. Coal. Well, 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?
- [39:11]
A
Yeah.
- [39:12]
B
And along that line, there's all this stuff about electric vehicles. And I was. I don't know if anybody in New York operates cars, but you've seen them, they're on the street. Electric vehicles is better car. It's just a better quality driving experience. And so it's a combination of regulations and innovations that will get rid of or phase out internal combustion engines. Electric cars is better?
- [39:40]
A
Yes.
- [39:41]
B
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.
- [39:49]
A
Yeah, but it needs governance, Bill.
- [39:50]
B
Well, so my grandfather was in World War I, 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. All 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.
- [40:36]
A
What happened?
- [40:37]
B
Everything changed in 25 years. Quit your whining. Let's get to work, people.
- [40:42]
A
Space.
- [40:43]
B
Space, yes.
- [40:44]
A
Explain what the Planetary Society does.
- [40:47]
B
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. Then we advocate, we go to US Congress especially and advocate for 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.
- [41:22]
A
Yes, big deal. You guys are big into planetary defense.
- [41:26]
B
Planetary defense, asteroid.
- [41:28]
A
What is that? Is that Department of War shit? What is that?
- [41:30]
B
Sort of. It's longer term than that, frankly. So if you have an asteroid, if you can identify an asteroid with Earth's name on it, you gotta deflect it and that. Right now, everybody, if the thing's big enough to be super dangerous, you gotta go out there 20 years in advance. So 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.
- [42:16]
A
The advocacy challenge has become a bit of an uphill battle these days. Yes, there's a big budget negotiation in Washington. I'm gonna spend an hour talking to your colleague KC Dreier about this on space policy. But 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?
- [42:38]
B
Well, you guys, exploration is a euphemism or what have you for human spaceflight. That's what it means nowadays.
- [42:46]
A
So people are wanting to put more money into human spaceflight and less money into space science.
- [42:51]
B
Yes.
- [42:51]
A
But doesn't space science help human spaceflight?
- [42:53]
B
There you go. Yeah. So you can't. 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. And so that would be, if I may, obvious. And then if you're gonna 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 wanna 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.
- [43:54]
A
I think there's been some rollback on that because of the congressional discussions that.
- [43:57]
B
Have been happening with planting. 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. 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 Representative and the Senate, has quite a pushback against the president's budget Request where they want to cut everything in half, or space science in half. And 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.
- [44:59]
A
We've talked a lot about politics here, but for me, space, I mean, 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?
- [45:10]
B
Yes, space is political.
- [45:11]
A
Does everything have to be political?
- [45:13]
B
Well, everybody, let's keep in mind science is political, but let us distinguish the other P word. It's not. We don't want it to be partisan.
- [45:20]
A
Okay?
- [45:21]
B
Do you follow me?
- [45:22]
A
Yes.
- [45:22]
B
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, nor 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?
- [45:57]
A
Yeah. Some of the politics are also competing with, not just between human spaceflight and the underlying space science, but also people looking and saying, hey, there's so much wrong on Earth. I mean, this is the kind of colloquial argument you hear all the time, probably.
- [46:11]
B
But, yeah, why explore space?
- [46:12]
A
Yeah, why explore space when there's so much wrong with Earth? So what's the answer?
- [46:15]
B
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.
- [46:33]
A
Yes.
- [46:33]
B
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. They were born in the 1800s.
- [46:47]
A
Yeah.
- [46:47]
B
They didn't know there were neutrons. They didn't know there was relativity. That 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.
- [47:08]
A
We talked about that.
- [47:09]
B
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. That there.
- [47:31]
A
That's what it is.
- [47:32]
B
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 are, is.
- [47:43]
A
Are if there is science investment in that.
- [47:45]
B
Well, somebody, someplace, and I remind you, China is gonna land people on the moon around 20, 30 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 what 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, okay, they, I mean, let's, 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.
- [48:47]
A
These are burning universal questions. Are we alone in the universe?
- [48:50]
B
Why are we here?
- [48:51]
A
What are we doing?
- [48:51]
B
The deep questions.
- [48:52]
A
The deep questions there was. I was speaking to a friend of mine, wanted to hear a hardcore scientist. That's you. You're the hardcore scientist.
- [48:59]
B
Well, I'm an engineer. Yeah. I've spent a lot of time with physics. Yes.
- [49:02]
A
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? Because he said that when he was younger, back in the 70s, you know, et cetera, 60s, 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. It 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?
- [49:44]
B
No. So the pendulum will swing. 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. A radio telescope would receive this signal. That's the premise of the movie and the book, Cosmos. Yes, I mean contact.
- [50:21]
A
No, contact with Jody Foster.
- [50:23]
B
Yeah, yeah, contact. 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, and from an international competitive standpoint. Competitiveness standpoint. Understand people on another continent are going crazy with this. They have a space program for the scientific exploration of space because they want to know more about our place within it.
- [51:20]
A
I love that. Health and food. What are your thoughts on the current Tylenol situation?
- [51:24]
B
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.
- [51:47]
A
Speak for yourself, Bill. Acetaminophen. No, I'm kidding.
- [51:50]
B
Anyway, yes, you could learn to pronounce it. And some sort of pregnancy issue that is disperious, completely debunked, not a real thing and stop it. And why the President chose to spend time on it with just his profound ignorance is really amazing time. It's amazing.
- [52:11]
A
Yeah. Well, you said RFK Jr. Has sent you, who I think you're referring to as having the ear of the President.
- [52:18]
B
I had to cut him off after a while. Then he was freed of time. Text these very long texts. What?
- [52:23]
A
Yeah. What did he text you? How did he get your number?
- [52:26]
B
His anti vax dingbattitude.
- [52:30]
A
You know, I recently asked billionaire investor, healthcare investor Vinod Khosla what grade he'd give the Trump administration on healthcare. And for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He asked, Can I give a grade lower than F?
- [52:42]
B
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.
- [52:57]
A
Okay.
- [52:58]
B
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 gonna 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.
- [53:19]
A
And the challenge is not simply around the COVID vaccine, but it's the broader. Like how this has spread.
- [53:25]
B
So I went to elementary school with a guy who had polio. You do not want polio. Polio bad.
- [53:30]
A
Did other people get polio in the elementary school from that guy?
- [53:33]
B
Well, we were not. No. We were not allowed to go swimming.
- [53:36]
A
Yes.
- [53:37]
B
Because 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.
- [53:50]
A
Do you think that there was some error made in the communication that the public health communication around COVID 19 that helped sow seeds of some of this or at least animated it further?
- [54:04]
B
My understanding is. My understanding and I, having done all the research on. We didn't have enough masks.
- [54:11]
A
Yes.
- [54:12]
B
And so they 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 the culture.
- [54:31]
A
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 that submitted them.
- [54:39]
B
I was a child for quite some time.
- [54:41]
A
Are you not one anymore?
- [54:43]
B
Well, exactly. I was. Painted myself into a paraphrased corner.
- [54:47]
A
Okay, Great. These 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?
- [54:58]
B
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 gonna think you don't wanna dance with anybody else, gonna limit your career. Okay, so. So he's not giving it up. 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 when 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 little motor in the northern hemisphere and another little solar panel, little 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. That filled me with joy. A $12 demonstration versus a $350 million airplane filled me with joy.
- [56:22]
A
I love that.
- [56:23]
B
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 psycoms. Science explainers on the Internet are for much higher level science and specific science questions rather than this elementary science.
- [57:06]
A
Right, Last one, Dylan.
- [57:08]
B
Dylan.
- [57:08]
A
Yeah, Dylan, age 11, just over your demo for this.
- [57:12]
B
No, well 10. The whole thing is. It's not 25.
- [57:14]
A
Yes.
- [57:15]
B
Here we go.
- [57:15]
A
Hey Bonai, dumb question alert. What do you say to people that don't believe in science?
- [57:21]
B
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 the Christopher Columbus's ships disappearing over the horizon and coming back. Just 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.
- [58:05]
A
Two years.
- [58:05]
B
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.
- [58:23]
A
The measles, the measles outbreak in Texas.
- [58:26]
B
Then they will slowly change their point of view.
- [58:30]
A
Two years. Well that's probably pretty quick if your kid gets sick.
- [58:33]
B
Yeah. 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.
- [58:43]
A
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.
- [58:52]
B
Yeah, that's probably true.
- [58:53]
A
I mean, 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?
- [58:59]
B
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, that 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.
- [59:40]
A
Yeah.
- [59:40]
B
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.
- [59:58]
A
I love that. Thank you so much, Bill Nye for being here.
- [60:01]
B
I appreciate you. This is nothing but fun, guys.
- [60:04]
A
To Bill Nye, just leave me with a total, totally unanswerable question about like the origin of humanity. I 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, 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. Smarter 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 you know, most of my conversations get to and that's not really a lot of what I'm doing on Smart Girl Dumb 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. He'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, you know, 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, you know, I understand where he's coming from and whether you share his politics or not, I think, 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. And 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 Dreier, who is a 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's frenemy. I 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, comment, review all of the things. That's it for this episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions. I'm your host Naimarraza. You can reach me@naimaraza101mail.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 Saldivira and our mixer is Johnny Simon. Our theme music is by David Khan. I'll see you next week on Smart Girl Dumb Questions. And 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.
- [63:13]
B
He needs more material things. Okay. And, Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at libertymutual. Com Liberty Liberty.
- [64:12]
A
Liberty. Liberty Savings Ferry.
- [64:14]
B
Unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.