StarTalk Radio - Decoding Science and Politics with Bill Clinton

Episode Date: November 6, 2015

Neil Tyson explores science and politics with former President Bill Clinton, from the human genome to the Higgs boson to the Hubble Space Telescope. Chuck Nice and futurist Juan Enriquez join Neil in studio, Richard A. Muller calls into the show, and Bill Nye hails our “scientists in chief.” Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. From the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and beaming out across all of space and time, this is StarTalk, where science and pop culture collide. Welcome to the Hall of the Universe. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And tonight, we're featuring my interview with President Bill Clinton.

He's an honorary member of the Geek Club, and I have evidence for that in this show. Among many other interests of his, he will talk to you about Einstein, about artificial intelligence, about the impact of science on society, and the cosmic perspective. So, let the cosmic perspective. So let's do this. So with me tonight, got my comedian co-host, Chuck Nice. Chuck, how you doing, man? I'm doing well, man. Doing all right?

Yes. And we have as our in-house special guest, Juan Enriquez. Juan, welcome to StarTalk. Oh, thank you. Thank you. He's recognized as one of the world's leading authorities on the economic and political impacts of life sciences. And so that's a whole century of new ways of thinking

about the role of science in our lives. If the 20th century were physics, 21st century is life sciences. Would you agree with that? I'd agree with that. And it's a place where a whole lot of very smart physicists are playing. You know, smart businesses is kind of redundant. We're going to bring his credentials into play in this interview because one of the proudest achievements in the Clinton administration was being in charge when they cracked the genome. And when you're president, you get to sort of basically take credit for that.

And I don't have a problem with that. That's fine. Also, under his watch, spending for the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the National Institutes of Health, these are the major funding agencies that enable scientists to conduct their research. Those all had banner years of funding over that time. And so I wanted to know where and when did the president get this deep appreciation for science? I just wanted to know. So I caught up with him at his midtown office, and the man was looking dapper. He had a three-piece suit.

He always looks good. So let's find out just how this interest in science began. In your childhood, K through 12, did that leave a good or bad taste in your mouth with regard to math and science? Good. Good? That means you had some good teachers? I did have some good teachers. I liked chemistry.

I had a good chemistry teacher in high school. But I figured out sometime in my late teens that an enormous part of the future, even the lives of ordinary Americans, were going to be shaped by these breathtaking advances in science and technology. And it would have enormous practical implications. Not everybody thinks that way. And I'm trying to figure out why not. Well, I don't know why not, because I don't think you can. I always felt, let me back up and say,

by the time I had been a governor 12 years, when I got elected president, I felt that there were basically three components to any job like that. You had to have a vision for where you wanted to go, lay out a strategy, and try to execute that. That's the one thing. Second, you had to deal with the incoming fire. When George Bush and Al Gore ran for president, they had three debates. Nobody said, what are you going to do

when the twin trade towers come down and the Pentagon's bombed? Then the third thing you have to do is try to look down the street and around the corner to imagine what's going to happen in 10 years, what's going to happen in 20 years, and try to nourish it. And for me, that was mostly trying to put money

into pockets of science and technology that I thought would matter. I thought the genome would matter. I thought the genome would matter. Strategic investments. Yeah, you just have to do it. And I figured we were trying to create a whole different future that would maximize not only the length but the quality of life and the options we would have to know things.

So I would say for me and my bias, the three big sort of science advances under the Clinton administration, one of them is the rise of the World Wide Web. Another is the Human Genome Project, of which you've written at length. And also that was when we launched the Hubble Space Telescope. I completely agree. And there's one other underlying thing, which is a fundamental respect for science, for the questions answered by science, and for curiosity. So are you saying that it is incumbent upon leaders to be intellectually curious because that is a top-down, that's the true trickle-down that we should have? Trickle-down curiosity.

Trickle-down curiosity. Okay, I like that. That we should have is that when a- Trickle down curiosity. Trickle down curiosity. Okay, I like that. So the president, I mean, he clearly knew his stuff. And he even knew his stuff about my stuff. Well, he does have the NSA on his side.

The National Security. I'm just saying. So in my conversation with him, astrophysics came up. And that's my stuff. It came up. And the man my stuff. It came up. And the man was with me chapter and verse. Let's check it out. I just wanted to know.

I never read anything about astrophysics till I got out of the White House and I met a couple of people who wrote books besides you. I met you. And I read the books and I started to say, you know, before I die, I really want to understand this. I really, really want to understand this. Okay, so you retained a childhood curiosity is what that is. When Pluto was declassified, I realized at what little I'd learned and now I've been thrown out the window.

It was a traumatic experience. It's more than that. Around that time, they reclassified the brontosaurus. So there are no brontosauruses anymore. We all grew up with brontosauruses. They found out that the head that had been assigned to the body was a mismatch of species. And so they had to throw away the entire category. Oh, my God, and all those children's books are broken. Exactly.

Yeah, so the Pluto incident and the brontosaurus incident happened within a few years of one another. It's like politics. No final victories, no final defeats. Oh, my goodness. That was awesome. My boy was shocked on that one. I can't believe you stupefied the president of the United States. That was fantastic. of the United States. That was fantastic. So the president ended with the line, there are no final victories and no final defeats. In politics, there's a lot of tit for tat, you know, and you give me this, I give you that. And you vote for this, I'll vote for that.

And science is like, does not operate that way at all. And in fact, when some of that works its way into the equation, we all get pissed off because it means we have to go through some political barrier to achieve the ends that we seek. And it's interesting because in Washington, that is how they function. So I had to ask Bill, what was his strategy in Washington for trying to advance science? Let's check it out. My main role as a governor was basically just trying to get physics and chemistry and other basic science offered to all the kids because we had so many kids in rural schools. So we upgraded the standards to try to universalize access to science. And then when I became president, of course, it was really important that

at a time when we were trying to get the deficit down and balance the budget, it was important to me that we increased investment in the National Science Foundation, that we tripled investment on an annual basis to finish the sequencing of the human genome. I got interested in particle physics because we had to give up the superconducting supercollider in 1993. In the political... Yeah, the basically members of my own party said, if you want this budget, you've got to get rid of that.

We won't vote for it. So I gave it up and I followed carefully that we continue to contribute when they moved it to CERN in Switzerland. And I followed the search for the Higgs boson and I've always regretted it didn't happen in America, but I felt good about the international nature of the science. As a scientist, I don't care who does the experiment, just move the science forward. But as an American, I wanted it here on our soil. Oh, me too. We would have discovered the Higgs boson back in the 1990s.

I mean, it would have been old news for us. Because we would have had it done. We would have had it done. And in fact, the superconducting supercollider was three or four times more powerful than even the Large Hadron Collider as currently built. So we were there, and it was right in the reach. But you couldn't explain to anybody at the time.

So Juan, obviously the intersection of science and policy, it comes down to money. It's all about the money. So somebody's got to pay for it. The taxpayer is going to pay for it. And maybe you had an easier case than the physicist did because you get to say at the end, it improves life. And the physicist says,

in the end, we will discover the Higgs boson. These have different impacts on the listener. So after the break, Bill Clinton explains how one particular scientific advance is changing the way we see humanity itself on StarTalk. We're featuring my interview with President Bill Clinton. And I'm talking to him about science. How do you advance science in America? He's a science geek.

We knew that. But what I wanted to know from him was, you can't just get stuff done unless you trade favors or you spend political capital on something you want. And so your political capital bank account has now been drawn down upon. And so I asked him about this balance between the two. And how do you get stuff done when that's the barrier that stands in your way? Let's check it out. The longer I was an adult and in positions of public responsibility, the more I realized that this was not just curiosity, that these things, knowing these things,

could make a huge difference. I mean, look at the genome, for example. So it cost us about $3 billion, and most of it was spent when I was president. And we, as I said, I tripled the annual funding. And what have we learned already? Think about it. We've learned that all people who are not 100% descendant, completely descendant from

sub-Saharan Africans are between 1% and 4% Neanderthal. Now that great discovery did not surprise. Hillary once said to me, I could have told you you were part Neanderthal all along, but it surprised her to learn that she was too. The animals find one another. But we've learned that all non-age-related differences, including gender, are rooted in only a half of 1% of our genome. That's very important for political and social reasons, psychological reasons,

for changing the way we think about whether our differences are more important than what we have in common. A big part of science is there are two kinds of, there are two ways to think about the world. You take two objects, there are people who want to know what's the same about two different objects, and then there are people who want to know what's different about two different objects. And the greatest advances of science are typically when you find similarities in things you thought were otherwise different.

Because that gives an organizing of principles and understandings of the fabric of nature. And that's exactly what the genome is telling us. Yeah, and it's interesting because most of us, this is not a political statement. You think about anything. Most of us spend 99.5% of our time thinking about the half a percent of us that's different. And with often very— That's messed up, too. Yeah, often with very destructive consequences.

Yes, yeah. I mean, you see it all over the world today. So I think if the average person knew more about science, if they could just synthesize, even if they can't do, if they could never draw the chemical symbols on there or write up the math formula or any of that, they just understood that it would matter. And then I think this genome stuff has been unbelievable. And what I wouldn't be surprised,

just the National Cancer Institute announced the other day, you know, they were gonna do this big longitudinal study on the wisdom of treating cancers based on what's in the genome rather than where it is in the body. And there are a lot of that going on now anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if within a matter of just a few years, the survival rate of virtually every cancer that's diagnosed anywhere near a critical juncture

rises above 85% just because of the work that's being done now all over America by Patrick Sun Chang and by all these Sloan Kettering, Dana Farber. Yeah, the institutions are already there. Yeah. It doesn't matter to deputize them in the way that is necessary. Yeah, and we now can, you know, that what you can do with that is stunning. And then I think, you know, there's all this discussion about whether nanotechnology can be turned into instruments of cancer killers.

I think it'd be better if it could be done in biology, if you could figure out a killer cell that's indigenous to the body, or at least can be bred in. But anyway, we'll see what happens. Now, I've got a science politics question that I've never been able to understand or even reach for. So there's a tendency in Congress for when a problem is presented, people say, oh, well, let's solve that problem by putting this money in this force to operate on that problem. So we want better science students. Let's make better science teachers. Boom.

We got that one. A goes to B. We need better science teachers. Let's make a teacher training program. And then, so there's this simplified view of a cause and effect. longer and live healthier. So let's fund the National Institutes of Health, because that's where health comes from. But I look at a hospital, for example. Every single machine with an on-off switch brought into the service of diagnosing your body is based on a principle of physics discovered by a physicist who had no interest in medicine. What happened was you have these tandem fields making discoveries, and then you have clever technologists and engineers saying, hey, I can apply that to this. And whole branches of medical discovery unfold because of the machines made available to them. How do you get people to understand the multidimensionality of the causes and effects? Well, that's partly what your program should be about. That is, you know, I believe someday...

Oh, by the way, what I just said took longer than an elevator ride to describe. Yeah, I know. What are you going to do in Congress about this? But I think there should be, when Harold Barbas was head of the National Institute of Health, and the Republicans won the Congress in 1994, many of whom thought anything the government did would mess up a two-car parade,

he brought them out in numbers to the NIH, took them into rooms, hospital rooms, put them on elevated beds, showed them movies of what was going on. He tried to explain that. And it had a huge impact on our ability to continue to get funding for these things. And I think the connections are important. I mean, every new advance seems to reinforce the point you just made, that there is still somewhere to be unearthed is a unifying theory that will merge physics, chemistry, and biology. From the beginning of single-cell organisms. I'm convinced of it. And I think that you just pick the piece that seems like the

lowest hanging fruit at the moment that would do the largest amount of good and try to run it down. That's what most people do in appropriating tax money, unless it just turns out to be politics. Sometimes with health, especially, it just depends on who's well-organized and who's not. So Juan, this is your domain. This is what you do. This is such cool stuff, right? Wait, wait. Just to be clear, Fortune Magazine called you Mr. Gene, right? And you co-authored the first map of global nucleotide data flow? Yeah, I'm a nerd. Okay, he admits it.

So tell me about the Human Genome Project. Is it all that? You know, it goes so far beyond it. What we're doing today, which is just so important, is we're changing from speaking in 26 letters of ABCs to speaking in ones and zeros and collapsing all words, all music, all images. And now what we're doing is we're beginning to speak in the language of life. So if you take an orange and it drops off a tree,

it goes kerplop, and it doesn't talk in words. It doesn't talk in digits. It talks in DNA. And it says A-A-T-C-A-G-G, which means make a little root. T-C-G-A-A, make a little stem. G-C-A-A, make some leaves. And A-T-C-G, make some oranges. Not if it's a seedless orange.

Well, that's true. But if it has a seed, and you change one in a thousand of those letters, that orange becomes a tangerine, or it becomes a lemon, or it becomes a grapefruit. And if you change one in a thousand letters, then you become me. Oh, I'm looking forward to that. I'm not sure about that. So, I mean, so the genome is something that we all heard about, but not everyone knows in detail.

And so in my interview with President Clinton at his Midtown office, I wanted to explore what thoughts he had about sharing the impact of science on our lives. Let's check it out. Let's check it out. If you look at the popularity of this program you're doing, and you reprise Carl Sagan's famous Cosmos series, you know, if you look at what he did for understanding space, it's not like we're not naturally curious. What we have to do is to help people bring their common sense to bear in developing

their synthetic intelligence, their synthesizing intelligence. It's okay if you can't break down and draw the chemistry science. It's okay if you can't do the math equations. You need to know enough to be able to put this stuff together, to have a feeling for what science and the technology that supports it can do to open horizons, not just in medicine, but the horizons of the mind. And, you know, I think that most people are naturally curious, and most people are intelligent enough to grasp what

they need to know to be good citizens and support people who do science work. And we just need to get it out there. We need the institutions partly because any public anywhere is subject to the stresses that are imposed by economic downturns are external threats, and anxieties tend to drive momentary decisions. So you have to have some permanent undercurrent that never changes, that is the baseline support for science and technology. So Carl Sagan's Cosmos back in 1980 was one of the most watched series in any subject ever, and I think it remains the most watched series in any subject ever. And I think

it remains the most watched science series ever. So you've given five TED Talks that have had millions of views. So did that give you some hope? You know, one of the neat things about today is you don't have to have a full title. You can be somebody who's got a great idea and you can get tens of millions of views. And you don't have to do it just by showing cats. You can be somebody who's got a great idea, and you can get tens of millions of views. And you don't have to do it just by showing cats. You can do it by showing cool science experiments. You can do it by having great ideas. You can do it by talking about new planets.

But mostly you do it by showing cats. You know, people might even be tired of looking at cats. And, you know, they may start looking at life on other planets. I mean, you might start looking at where does life come from? It looks like we've got cats on other planets. You're right, Chuck. I agree. I agree. I don't know. But keep going. I like your hopeful posture here. I don't know how we make science boring, right? How in the world do we take the coolest stuff in the universe? Where does life come from? How how does the brain work how large is the universe how do we make that stuff boring and how do we

turn kids off this stuff who are naturally curious and love to experiment and a lot of that's our fault right because we we haven't learned how to communicate and i think things like this and things like ted are important because they allow people to transmit ideas in a way that they get excited. So when we come back, more of my interview with Bill Clinton when I ask him, why don't we have more scientists in Congress on StarTalk? We're back on StarTalk in the Coleman Hall of the Universe of the American Museum of Advanced History, right here in New York City. And we're featuring my interview with President Bill Clinton,

under whose watch the human genome was decoded. And I always wondered, because in my conversation, I wanted to know how you prioritize what you spend money on. We know nobody wants to die, so there's a defense budget. But also, no one wants to die poor. So you'd want to have some kind of investment to assure that we live in some kind of wealth going forward. I had to ask the president, you know, how does that work? We talked about what it might take to advance science through policy.

And if you're going to do that, you have to weigh the priorities of science versus defense versus commerce. And that's a very delicate balance when you're the head of state. And so I just had to ask him, what's up with that? How do you get around this? What are the pathways to achieve these goals? Let's check it out. Do you think we're overdue to have a cabinet office of science, a secretary of science? Well, I would certainly support it. Many other countries, Western developed countries, they've got their science

officer, their science secretary is at the same rank as every other important... Secretary of State, Secretary of...all the other important things a government does, science is right there. We just had the announcement of the agreement between the United confidence that it's probably on balance the right thing to do is that our country made the most responsible decision it could make by sending the Secretary of Energy there because he actually knows what he's doing. He understands all the details of this. Yeah, yeah. Well, let me turn that around. If you look at the professions, I've done this, approximately half of all Congress are professionally attorneys. That's their profession before they ran for office.

And attorneys are like expert arguers. Maybe there should be more business people or scientists, engineers. People make hard decisions every day that are based on objective truths about the world. I love that, was it Professor Muller wrote that, Physics for Presidents? Yeah, yeah, yeah, Physics for Future Presidents. He did something that politicians are terrified to do. He said, you know, I was one of the global, the climate change skeptics, and I've looked at the data, and the other guys were right. This is real. Now, we can argue about

what the best way to deal with it is, but it is real. There's no point denying it anymore. That's another thing a scientist can do, because the discipline requires you to acknowledge that some of the things you used to believe have been disproved. Happens to us all the time. By the uncovering of knowledge. Whereas if you're a politician or a lawyer and you change your position,

it's like you have no convictions instead of the fact that, hey, look at what we know now we didn't know then. It's not weakness, it's strength. It's not a sign of shame, it's a sign of honor. So Richard Muller, he's a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He's the guy who wrote the book that President Clinton mentioned, Physics for Future Presidents, I think was the title.

And in that book, he explains the science you need to know if you're going to become a world leader and you need to make decisions. And guess what? What? We actually have him standing by live on a video call right now. So, guys, can we put Richard Miller on? Oh, there he goes. Hello, sir. Hello.

Welcome to StarTalk. Pleasure to be here. So do you agree with me that maybe we should have more scientists and engineers in Congress? And if that were the case, then perhaps you wouldn't have even needed to have written your book in the first place? Well, I believe that the people who run for office, who are elected, can learn this material. I don't think science is that difficult. The problem is that it's rapidly breaking. It's always changing, and it's very hard to keep up. We're in the middle of an energy revolution, and the president is supposed to make decisions based

on this, and it's really hard. But I think the president, I think congressmen can really learn this material. We, as professors, sometimes make it too difficult to do. We tend to make it too mathematical. It's one thing to learn material. It's a very different thing to think like a scientist because as the clip ended, the president was defending the value of changing your mind in the face of new evidence.

Yet in the political spectrum, if you change your mind, you're a flip-flopper. We can't trust you. You don't have the courage of your convictions, even if you're wrong. So there's a cultural difference in what goes on in the mind of a scientist relative to the politician.

Can you teach that? The problem is that we require our physics advisors to be politicians. They have to endorse everything that the president says. What I would like to see is a president science advisor who doesn't have to testify before Congress and doesn't have to give press conferences, but who talks directly to the president or the chief of staff, conveys the information at the highest level, can say everything he wants to say, but is not forced to play the role of a politician.

That's a wise point. In fact, the head of NASA is routinely called in front of Congress to just sort of, you know, to dance for his funding. I know science advisors and others from the past who, under both Democrat and Republican presidents, their role was to support the president's policy even if they disagreed with it strongly. And that doesn't... Yeah, that's not advice.

Yeah, that's not being an advisor. You need advice. Right, right, right. Do you guys have any comment here? Chuck? Could you please write a book called Physics for Senators and Congressmen? Because quite frankly, those are the people who have the problem.

When you have a guy named Inhofe who stands on the floor of the Senate and says that there is no global warming because I have a snowball that I got from outside. That's a real problem. Well, in fact, I have been visiting with many of the top politicians. I'm actually very good at convincing skeptics that global warming is real because I was one. It's like Alcoholics Anonymous. You want an ex-alcoholic to bring the person around. So Juan, all we have to do is clone him. I know you've got a cloning machine in your lab.

You weren't supposed to tell people that. We can clone him, put him at every branch of the government. And Richard, that's what we're going to do with you, okay? With your permission. You have my permission. Thanks, Richard, for coming in to StarTalk this late at night. Oh, it's been my pleasure. Great talking to you.

And maybe we'll reach back in for you when we need some more, when we need another jolt of confidence that maybe there's hope in this world, that objective truths established by science can actually have something to do with the politics of the world. I am enormously optimistic about the world. I think if you picked a year to be born, of all of history, the year would be 2015. All right, Professor Miller, thanks for being on StarTalk. You're welcome. When we come back, we'll hear President Clinton's thoughts on the impact of artificial intelligence on our future on StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Chuck, Juan, again, thanks for being on StarTalk.

It's a pleasure. So, as you know, we've been featuring my interview with President Clinton, and we actually got into a subject that's kind of half science fiction, half reality. And that's the subject of artificial intelligence. Ooh. Yeah. So he actually has some thoughts about this. Let's check it out.

I believe that there will be advances in artificial intelligence, which will, like any other technological advance, open up vast new possibilities for doing good and enriching human life, present us with even further threats of technology eliminating more jobs than it creates. I think it'll cause a lot of good things to happen and present us a lot of social challenges. And then in its most extreme manifestation, could actually present a threat to what we think of ourselves as human beings,

how we define what a human being is. We build machines that are faster than us. We build machines that can fly. We build machines that can calculate faster. And we build machines that can beat us in jeopardy. Well, you know, one of the things I was thinking about as I get older, and I keep meeting all these friends of mine that have two new hips and knees and all this,

is, you know, looks like we're going to have replacement parts for just about everything. But if they replace your brain, would you still be you? Well, this is... Will there be the equivalent of like a SIM card or some sort of hard drive that takes everything out of your brain if you get a new one and puts it back in the new brain? I mean, all these things are staggering. Here's President Clinton.

Take this SIM card. Go to the peace talks and I'll be on the beach. And we reload them together afterwards. Yeah, you be me. Here's my SIM card. That's a good science fiction story right there. Yeah, it is. So, Juan, there are people who express real concerns about AI, including Elon Musk and Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking.

These are unimpeachably talented, thoughtful, smart people, and they have issues. Look, the first time they transplanted a heart, they brought in relatives of the person who donated and asked those people, do you love this person? Do you feel anything for this person? Because for thousands of years, we said, gave her my heart, broke my heart, et cetera, et cetera. The most interesting experiment we're going to run the next 10 years is to transplant a mouse head. A mouse head. And then see if that mouse remembers

the route through the maze. Remember that mouse remembers to be afraid mouse head. A mouse head. And then see if that mouse remembers the route through the maze, remembers that mouse remembers to be afraid of this, remembers if that mouse transplants memories. Because if you can transplant memories, then the only question is, do you have to transplant them to a body, or can you download those memories to something else? So you're transplanting this mouse head

onto another mouse, not a human being. Just to clarify, because you don't know what he's cooking up in his lab. Disneyland has various projects. One, the more you talk about what you do, the scarier it is. I'm sorry. At some point, I'm going to have to cut you off the show because you're freaking me out. Is this where I break into an evil laugh?

I know. Yeah, that's awesome. Actually, this is the time of the show where we go to Cosmic Queries. Star Talk, Cosmic Queries. So Cosmic Queries are when we solicit questions from our fan base. Before the show,

we tell them what the topic is, and they knew it was going to be about artificial intelligence. Yes. And they're just going to ask me questions about it. I've not seen these questions. You have not seen the questions. And if I don't know the answer, I'll just say, I have no idea. And then I'll ask you for another one. Okay. And that's not going to happen. Let's find out.

So here it is. Our first query is from Mason Simpkins from Layton, Utah. All right. And Mason would like to know, how could artificial intelligence affect the future of space exploration? Ooh. Ooh, you know what would be cool for me is, like we were talking about with Bill, you just download your brain and all your memories and all your capacity to experience, put that in some robot, and then send the robot off into space. While you're on the Bahamas sipping a drink, you get to experience what that is.

Bring it back, put it in, and you get to speak firsthand about that space trip. And you don't have to then protect the human biological form from deadly radiation, from the absence of oxygen, because it's just a machine. For me, that'd be the cool way to invoke artificial intelligence in the future. That makes perfect sense. I like that answer. And it'll find me on the beach when you get back. See, that's the part I really liked. That's the part that I'm all about. That makes sense. Okay. Oh, wait, wait.

One other thing. Go ahead. So there's already a little bit of AI in the robots we've got up there now. So, for example, the rovers on Mars, it takes, like, many minutes to get, you know, to go the distance, depending on where Mars is in its orbit relative. It could be up to, like, 20 minutes, a half hour to get the signal there. So if the rover is ready to drive off a cliff, it'd be too late if you're driving the vehicle. Right.

Because you're going to say, don't go off the cliff. 20 minutes later, it gets there, it's off the cliff. Right. So it has to be able to have some sense of its environment. Like that's a cliff. Like that's a cliff. I'm not driving off no matter what the human is telling me. Up next in my interview with President Clinton,

he explains how he makes decisions based on what he calls the grandparent test on StarTalk. Welcome back to StarTalk, right here in New York City, the hall of the universe. We're featuring, of course, my interview with President Clinton. And part of his life's mission is to promote science policy in America. And there are always roadblocks. And I asked him about the disconnect between progress and politics. And it reminds me of what Jon Stewart once said, and I think it's actually traceable to Gallagher, said it decades before him. Gallagher, you know, the comedian who smashes food in front of the, okay. Watermelons primarily. decades before him. Gallagher, you know, the comedian who smashes food in front of the,

okay. Watermelons primarily. Watermelons, right. So if pro is the opposite of con, then progress is the opposite of Congress. Is that good? That is so true. That was good. And sad. It's like I laughed and then I went, oh God. So I asked Bill about the disconnect between progress and politics and how he handles that. Let's find out what he told me. In my field, just as a scientist, we view politics as a barrier between where we are and where we want to go. But, of course, in Washington, politics is the currency of interaction. And so how do you, as a professional politician, balance what is objectively true about the world with what people want to be true about the world? Yeah, there's still a surprising number of people who don't believe in evolution.

Right. And the campaign against evolution has been politically amazingly successful. I think I'm a good red-blooded American, and I will say, I don't mind that you don't believe in evolution. You just shouldn't be on a science committee making decisions that affect the entire country. Or rewriting our textbooks against where 90-something percent of the people are. Right. The same thing is true with climate change. It's inconvenient for some people, so they just disavow it.

We may be, those of us who believe in it, may be wrong about how quick the adverse consequences would be manifest. But I think with regard to science, we at least have to get those people who have no interest in it to adopt what is now my mode of thinking, the grandparent test. That is, you name me one other risk-related decision where if 95% of the experts were here and 1 to 5% of the experts were there, any grandparent would stake his or her grandchild's future on the 5%. How about this?

Suppose a guy wrote one article in one journal and said, you know, I've been thinking about these child restraint seats. And I think, you know, there's a one in a million chance a kid could snap his neck. So I recommend just throwing the kid in the back seat and letting him roll around. And 99% of people said, oh my God, you can't do that. These are working. Look at how much the fatality's gone down. Name me one grandparent who'd choose the 1%. So Juan, if we don't adjust to this, it could be the end of civilization as we know it, because the issues of science are becoming

that much more important for us to make informed decisions about. So is this something we have to evolve to become better at? In fact, you wrote a whole book called Evolving Ourselves, not relying, I guess, on natural selection. So we take it for granted that nature works the same way as it did in Darwin's time. But the cornfield is the most unnatural place on the planet because it's one plant growing in rows at the same time as it did in Darwin's time. But the cornfield is the most unnatural place on the planet because it's one plant growing in rows at the same time for our purposes and nothing else lives or dies there except what we want. And that means nature isn't selecting, we're selecting. And then the other rule that applied with Darwin was genes would be a casino. So they change

gradually and they change at random. And today what we're doing with genes is we're applying, So they change gradually and they change at random. And today what we're doing with genes is we're applying, to pick a non-controversial phrase, intelligent design. And we're saying, I want this gene here because I want this plant to grow like this. I want this gene here to cure this disease. And so we're taking control of evolution. And that's the single greatest power humans have ever had. That really is a superpower. So back to my interview with Bill, I asked him about the importance of curiosity

in driving scientific progress. Let's see where he takes this. Einstein may not have had the highest recorded IQ of any scientist, but he had the greatest synthetic intelligence. He imagined the direction of knowledge itself. And I think that was in some ways his greatest gift. He was just a kid in essence when he came up with the theory of relativity. Yeah, he's 26. Through imagination more than mechanics.

And then he had to work backward to the written theory. He imagined a new truth, and it's held up pretty well over the years. But what he wanted to do to develop an integrated theory, he never quite got to do. But I think all of us instinctively think, you know, it's probably right. We just haven't figured out how to prove it yet.

So we'll just stumble along and things will happen. And they'll all be good because they'll be advancing the ball, making life more exciting and more accessible and just changing things. I think America has always been a country about the future. And the future for a long time was just reaching from one continent to the other

and then was moving from agriculture to industry and development, then was figuring out how to take in immigrants. And each one required some sort of expansion of identity and consciousness. Getting rid of slavery was a real stretch. We're still living with the aftermath of it. The women's rights movement was a stretch.

We're still living with some of the aftermath of it. The women's rights movement was a stretch. We're still living with some of the echoes of that. The astonishing progress of the gay rights movement was a stretch for the moral order that some people had been brought up to live in. And yet we keep doing it. We keep pushing against the limits. It would be a good thing if the public policy necessary to fund science adequately could make the stretch and just say, I want to know. Don't you want to know? Coming up, Bill Nye, the science guy, gives his take on advancing science in America on StarTalk. Welcome back to StarTalk.

I'm your guide through the universe here in the hall of the universe. Chuck, Juan, thanks for being here. So we're talking about politics and scientific progress, two things that are not always aligned with one another. And no matter the subject of StarTalk, I always got to catch up with Bill Nye, the science guy, for his dispatch from wherever he is in the city. So let's hear what Bill Nye has to say about nurturing scientific progress in America. Science leads to innovation, and innovation is what keeps the United States in the game economically on the world stage. Now, the presidency is in the executive branch. It's not in the branch of science or something, but perhaps it should be.

George Washington was an avid wheat breeder, so maybe some of his work will show up in your next sandwich. Thomas Jefferson was opposed to monopolies, but came around to the idea of the Patent and Trademark Office, citing it as a spring to invention. See what he did there with spring and invention? Now, Abraham Lincoln had a patent on a system to get riverboats unstuck from the mud. It's not something we need very often these days, but just the thing should you ever swamp your paddle wheel.

Teddy Roosevelt was not only the commander-in-chief, people called him the scientist-in-chief because he was such a strong conservationist, and he was an avid burger. Commercial aviation came into its own under his watch. Is that a coincidence? Perhaps. And when it comes to Bill Clinton, he promoted science like crazy. He made sure the human genome was sequenced, and that's looking in. He made sure the human genome was sequenced, and that's looking in. Looking up and out, he made sure the Hubble Space Telescope was launched at about the same time.

To this day, he works very hard to make sure people everywhere are connected to the Internet. Leaders who advance science in America advance America. Bill, putting it in perspective as usual. For my final question to Bill in my interview, I asked him how science impacted his perspective during his time in the Oval Office. You know, the most valuable thing I had for perspective in politics in the White House was the moon rock. I was going to ask you about it. When we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the walk on the moon in 1999, NASA came in with a vacuum-packed, you know, glass-enclosed moon rock that was taken off the moon in 1969 that had since been carbon dated at 3.6 billion years old. So I asked, because I had supported the space program so strongly, I said, may I just borrow that until I leave?

You can have it back when I go. I know it's not mine, but I really did. I bet they didn't say no to that question. They did not. So when you see these television coverage of the president meeting with a foreign leader or whatever in the Oval Office, there's two chairs and then there there's these two couches, and there's always a table between the couch. I put the moon rock on the table. And for the next two years, when we'd have like Republicans and Democrats in or people on two sides of any issue, and they start really, really getting out

of control, I'd say, wait, wait, wait. You see that moon rock? It's 3.6 billion years old. Now, we're all just passing through here, and we don't have very much time. So let's just calm down and figure out what the right thing to do is. And it worked every single time. Somebody, they looked most everybody. That's a cosmic perspective sitting in the middle of your table. They were looking at an object that existed at a time they could hardly imagine. And it just gave them that little bit of space in their mind and spirit to try to figure out, okay, let's go at this one more time.

And that's what we've got to keep doing. We just have to keep moseying around both out there and in here. And, you know, if you just keep stumbling toward Jerusalem, good things happen. I mean, I may be wrong about it, but that's what I think. I just think, you know, that I'd give anything to be 20 again. I'd give up having been president and gamble on my chances in the future if I could live another 80 or 90 years just to see what's going to happen. Just to see it. Just to see it. Just to see it. It's amazing what's going to happen.

So what I like about that is, imagine how the conversation goes in the Oval Office, right? Somebody's making some argument, and then they say, this rock is 3.7 billion years old, and it's from the moon. So your argument is invalid. Whatever it is, it's invalid,

because this is from the moon, 3.7 billion years old. Juan, do you have any reflective comments before we wrap this up? You know, the Astronomer Royal of Great Britain says the universe is 100% malevolent, but only 20% effective. And that's the space where life can exist. We're beginning to understand how life is made, how life is transmitted, how life is designed. And that's the greatest single challenge humans have ever had. You've been watching StarTalk. And as always, I, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, bid you to keep looking

up.