NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas - The Drink with Kate Snow: Bill Nye

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

The objective of Bill Nye’s popular children’s show was to “change the world.” He tells NBC News’ Kate Snow how life after his science show includes public speaking engagements and leading the Planetary Society.

Hi, everyone. This is Kate Snow. So happy to share a great conversation that I had with Bill Nye, the science guy, over a martini for my series, The Drink. The Drink is always about how people got to the top of their field. Bill Nye tells me how he tried to change the world with his popular show that taught about science. We talked about life after the science guy, too, and his latest projects. Oh, and wait till you hear about him winning a Steve Martin lookalike contest in the 1970s. Seriously. You can hear a lot more stories of success from top artists, entrepreneurs, visionaries. You can find them all at NBCNews.com slash the drink. How did you take yourself to the next level? It took just, you know, 12 quick years. We're at the Elgin Bar in Manhattan. It's so hip. It's a very cool place. It is cool.

What's your drink here? Gin martini, cold and dry. Did I say cold? Yeah, you said cold. It's cold. The drink is always about how you got here. So, Bill Nye, how did you become the science guy? Oh, oh, I thought it was going to be why did I start drinking martinis.

Well, we can go back to that. How did I become the science guy? So, when I was a senior in college, the guy who had been my freshman roommate. Yeah. I went into mechanical engineering. He went into material science. He came hurrying to my house, you gotta see this man, you gotta see this, this is amazing. They had this extraordinary new technology, cable television. So then a year later I got a job at Boeing. If you're

ever on a 747, don't worry, I was very well supervised. A whole new set of friends, people I did not know very well because I just moved to Seattle. This guy, you got to do this so Warner Brothers Records had a Steve Martin look-like contest. 1978 and I won in Seattle. So after that people wanted me to be Steve Martin at parties, then you try to do your own jokes as a stand-up, and I emphasized try. So you get into comedy. I wrote some bits for this show called Almost Live, and then one week we lost a guest. Now the story is lost in antiquity, so we had to fill six minutes.

So a guy, Ross Schaefer, who's still a dear friend of mine, said, you know, you could do some of that stuff here I was talking about, Bill. You could be, you could do science stuff. You could be Bill Nye the Science Guy or something. I did the household uses of liquid nitrogen. And that eventually parlays into? So then two colleagues worked on a show called

Seattle Today. And you can imagine you don't have to ever have seen Seattle Today to know just what happened. Yeah. Every eight minutes there's the weather. And the traffic. Traffic. And so they hired me to do a thing for Washington State Department of Ecology. So we did fabulous wetlands, clean water, filter water, home to wildlife and control floods, okay, for 22 minutes or something. And that became the template for the show that we got to do four years later. Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill. Bill Nye the Science Guy. I don't know if people realize that it really was a pretty relatively short run, right?

It was five years. We're less than five years all in, yeah. And yet you've been rerun in classroom after classroom. Oh man, it's crazy. They will in the TV. I'm from Kuwait. I watch the show. I'm from Slovenia. I watch the show. Germany. Oh, we all watch the show in Germany. What? Who are you people?

You know, when you were back doing Bill Nye the Science Guy, did you hope that you could bottle it and keep it and keep having influence on people in a positive way? The objective of the Science Guy show changed the world. That was in 1993, 92, 93. That's still the objective. Don't worry about that thumping. They're just making, they're making armor. It's a jewelry maker upstairs. This is the Elgin Bar in Manhattan. And upstairs we have jewelry makers that are banging. Who have hammers.

Which you might hear at a time during our conversation. Everything's fine. Bill Nye the Science Guy ends. Was that hard? Because I can imagine that being a huge transition in life. Like, oh, what am I going to do now? Well, that's so much. It was, by the time we did, we did 100 shows. Yeah.

And by the time we finished, everybody needed a break. After that, the jobs I was offered were still being a kid's show host or doing kids going to science centers and doing science demonstrations and that's okay but when you do the television show you had a crew for example if I'm here talking to you you don't hear the noises that you sound effects that you might hear on the science guy show without the crew crew, without the camera, it's just it's a different kind of work. You're Bill Nye, you're not the science guy with all the production. You want to go to the next level, come on people. How did you take yourself to the next level?

It took just you know 12 quick years. I, it just took years to make the transition. Looking back at the list of all the things you've done, you've done a lot of shows. You've done everything. Yes. Ish. Ish. It does kind of look like there was a period where maybe nothing was quite sticking. Is that right or not? Well, so what I did in that period, two things. First of all, I made, by my standards, a pretty good living doing public speaking engagements at universities. And that's very rewarding.

I went to Cornell. You went to Cornell. Go Big Red. Go Big Red. Right? Carl Sagan was a big influence on you. Huge influence. You took his class? Yeah, yeah, I took one class from Carl Sagan. A few years after I was graduated, he and a couple other guys started the Planetary Society, the world's largest non-governmental space interest organization advancing space

science and exploration so that citizens of the world will know the cosmos and our place within it. So when the Planetary Society said, how about you run this place? Yeah, so, okay. I thought about it for several days. I talked to all of my friends and guys like Neil deGrasse Tyson. He did the drink with me, by the way. He drank port.

Yeah, he would. He gave a speech about the sugar and how when they leave Spain, it didn't go bad. The gin won't go bad either am I right you should have some so I've it's been 11 years that's what I'm going on and so we're trying to grow the organization we had a pandemic it's more popular than ever space exploration everybody brings people together we have a divided country we have a divided world, but the red states and blue states people agree on the value of space exploration. We're all the same planet. That's right. We work to get people excited about planetary exploration.

You were around in people's lives in their formative years, people younger than me, right? And younger than you, who watched you in the 90s. A lot of those people are women. Yeah, I know, yeah. So, you know, half the people are women, so let's have half the scientists and engineers be women. Amen to that. Double the brains. My great-grandmother marched in the suffragist parade in 1913.

My mother, I think, marched in two Equal Rights Amendment parades. She might have marched in three, the stuff was going on. And so these are my people. My mom was recruited in World War II to work on the Enigma code. She was a code breaker. She was a code girl, yeah. There's a documentary about you on Netflix and I heard you say in that, that you are still trying to make your parents proud.

Yeah! Yes! They're not living anymore, but I still, I think, I'm trying to be worthy. I really am. So my mom was a code girl. My dad was a prisoner of war for four years, 44 months, almost four years. You have a new show on Peacock. Yes. The NBC streaming service. Yes. The end is nigh. It doesn't have to go down that way. Together we can save earth with science. So we made six disaster movies, but here's the twist. The first half of the show, first half hour, things get worse and worse, disaster, disaster, then I get killed.

The end of the first half hour, but the second half hour, I come back. If we had systems in place, if we respected our knowledge, if we took steps with... Science. Yes! We could change the world! And so... That's the premise. That's the premise. Here we go. Lightning round.

How many bow ties do you own? Over 500. Best advice Carl Sagan ever gave you? Kids resonate to pure science. That was the verb he used. Don't do your engineering stuff, Bill. Do pure science. What would be your advice to future scientists? Just get started. Get started on something you think is interesting and you will find your way. Bill Nye, this has been great.

Thank you, Kate.