The Jordan Harbinger Show - 724: Bill Nye | The End is Nye

Episode Date: September 13, 2022

Bill Nye (@billnye) is a lifelong champion of science who is determined to teach you something today that you didn’t know yesterday — whether it’s from a television screen, the pages of a book, or next to you at a dinner party. He can be found hosting his new series, The End Is Nye, on Peacock TV. What We Discuss with Bill Nye: The environmental changes that currently threaten humanity and much of life on Earth. How to maintain childlike curiosity as an adult. If you believe everything happens for a reason, what if that reason is just physics? What can just one individual do to make the big changes necessary for properly addressing climate change? The promising renewable energy source Bill would put his money behind. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/724 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss the conversation we had with science champion and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson? Make sure to catch up with episode 327: Neil deGrasse Tyson | Astrophysics for People in a Hurry! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you do. get your podcasts. Coming up on the Jordan Harbinger show, you want to be able to evaluate evidence critically. If somebody tells you that they're in touch with your dead ancestor and can talk to him or her and then relay to you information that she or he is giving you through this medium, be skeptical. They probably can't really do that. When someone says they can find water in the yard with a forked wooden stick, be very skeptical. And so, every single, everybody learned to evaluate evidence, we can get people to do that. We would change the world.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional National Security Advisor drug trafficker or economic hitman. And each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about it, I suggest our episode

starter packs is a little tasty treat. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topic that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Topics like persuasion and influence, negotiation and communications, cyber warfare, China and North Korea, abnormal psychology, and more. Just visit jordanharbinger.com or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, Bill Nye, the science guy returns. He's kind of the Anthony Bourdain of science. A much more polarizing guest than I expected. A lot of you are grimacing at the Anthony Bourdain reference as well. I know a lot of you guys were not happy when you heard he was coming on.

But then again, I'm a glutton for punishment, so here we are anyway. Today we'll explore some of the threats we face as a planet and as a species, especially to our environment, climate, et cetera. Also, how to maintain childlike curiosity as an adult and why that's important. Bill's always a fun, if not slightly corny show guest, and this one is a light lift, even though we're talking about potential extinction events. So enjoy this episode here with Bill Nye, the science guy. You and I ended up at one of John Levy's parties, and we, where you're not allowed to tell anybody who you are, not that that's ever been a problem for me, and you introduce yourself as William, because otherwise it's too easy. We got stuck washing

dishes. I'm a big dishwasher. I'm a fan of washing dishes. That's what you, You told me then, so that makes it may think that that's true now because it's been five years, and you told me that then, too. And you started explaining hydrophobic and hydrophilic ends of a soap molecule. Wow, right on. And I was like, I knew, I thought that was you, because I can't ask, you know. And I was like, who's this guy with the bowties, washing dishes and explaining this? So, oh, right.

It's William Nye, science guy. Yes, person. Yes, science person. Exactly. That was how we met. And so I'm glad we are able to do this again. Big fun. I want to dip in to your pass a little bit because I think a lot of people are like,

tell me about your new show, okay, thanks, bye. But I want to dig in a little bit. Did you watch? Have you been able to see it? I did. I saw the first two screeners and they wouldn't let me have the rest because they don't have them yet, maybe. At least the last one, the digital effects are not finished.

It probably wouldn't work without the digital effects, given the amount of CG that's present in the new show. Well, it's just when you have a disaster that's going to end the world and collapse, wash cities away in flood or have tsunamis that destroy the whole countries, you need digital effects. Yeah. I mean, cut us some slack. A category six hurricane with no water and no wind, no rain.

Yeah, well, it's not really the same. Yeah. And so there are category six hurricanes, everybody, but so far they've only occurred on the open ocean so far. But what if they came ashore? We could do a show about that. It's a fun show. I thought, okay, if it's really heavy CG like this, maybe it's going to be corny,

but it's actually, it's good to see things like this. And I'll talk a little bit more about why I like it later on. But you're proof that you can reinvent yourself. And a lot of people think they can't do that. In fact, one of your bigger criticisms is, he's an engineer. He's not a scientist. And then he tried writing jokes, for God's sake. And I thought, okay, you can reinvent yourself.

And you're an engineer. Applied science is a thing with engineers. So I've heard, right? You kind of need science. Yeah, so just, you know, if you want to get under my skin, everybody, just keep going with that. He's not a scientist. Okay, I'm an engineer. I took four years of classical physics. You know, they say, Jordan, they say everything happens for a reason. And that reason is usually physics.

What advice do you have for people in established careers who are looking to reinvent themselves and make what looks like a really big leap from one thing to the next? Well, the same advice I give people of all ages is just get started. You don't know where it's going to go. You don't know what's going to happen. Just get started. Do you recommend people take a baby step or is it just like, you know what, just jump in with both feet? Well, I did. I mean, I am, I was scared to debt. When I quit my day job, October 3rd, 1986, roughly, I had $5,000 in the bank. And I figured that was, I called that the end of the world money. If I didn't change anything about the way I was living, continue to go grocery shopping and get what the standard groceries. continue to go ballroom dancing, which was free in Seattle, and then ice skating, that was my entertainment. I bought the 10 skate pass. I figured if I got out of engineering for six months,

this is back then when digital processing was just really taking off for you students out there, the Vax, Vax, Vax 11780, ooh, it had almost as much power as my wristwatch. If I stayed out of engineering for six months, I'd never be able to get back in for more than six months, rather. So that was, in other words, I took a chance, but it was a baby step. I had a backup plan, which I admit I didn't execute, at least not as I anticipated. I continue to work as an engineer for about six more years, part-time. I was a part to what they call a contract engineer. A lot of guys on the internet, you know, like the guys you see on Instagram, they say, jump in, go all in, burn the ships. And I'm like, that's a dumb idea, because if your new thing doesn't

work out, which happens even if your intentions are pure and you're good at what you do, now you're screwed. And I like hearing from successful people who go, well, I kind of took a baby step, and I had a backup plan because it speaks truth to this nonsense that you should just burn the ships. When you first jump in, you don't know that you're going to be that good at it. Yeah. If I had tried to make my living as a stand-up comic, you can ask anybody else in those nightclubs in Seattle at that time. They tell you, no, he's not going to make it. Stick to physics, buddy. Yeah. Yeah, so if you're in my example, I took a baby step. I had kind of a plan. But the big thing was I took the step, the old saying, in general, writ large, people don't regret what they do. They regret what they don't do. I'm sorry I swallowed that poison to see what it tasted like. Yes, that would be a bad example. But usually it's what you don't do that you regret.

It's actually true. My friend Dan Pink, who you may know, he was on this show and he studied regret. And it turns out, I'm making up the status. as most stats are made up, but it's something like 80% of regrets are things you did not do, and only a smaller percentage is things that you have done. And it's all the stuff you'd predict. Like, oh, I wish I hadn't done this major mistake that involves relationships with people. It's rarely financial or something else like that. Why, I bite that guy's head off at that meeting when it wasn't that important. Exactly. You used to speak to kids, and now, well, now I suppose it's adults and kids, but many are the same

people who used to be the kids that you spoke to. And I assume that's because you still at least with me, you still have that trust that we gave you when we were kids and we're like, okay, maybe I should listen to him as an adult. I admire what you're doing with science education because, and I think you said this at a party, at that same party, you stand in front of a colossal mountain of ignorance and seemingly devoted your life to pushing back against it. Look, I've stood in front of the mountain. I've pushed against it. It's heavy. It doesn't like being pushed. Well, you say the word ignorance. The ignorance to me is a very specific thing. It's when you don't know. But along with it is you ignore, ignorance, ignore.

And that's what's really troubling. It's people who don't want to take the time to know where COVID comes from or what we can do about it or climate change and what we can do about it. And that is frustrating. But the reason I did The Science Guy Show was to get young people excited about science. So in the future, we would have more scientists and engineers and more scientifically literate people who could vote. vote in a way that would support science, support investment in technology and research. People who don't necessarily become scientists and don't become engineers, but appreciate its value. And that was the idea of doing the Science Guy Show. And the reason we did it, the way we did it

back then, was we had very convincing research that 10 years old was about as old as people can be to get the so-called lifelong passion for science. I think it's about as old as you can be to get a lifelong passion for anything. That's why the show was aimed at people in fourth grade or 10 years old or they're about 12. And it was in that regard successful. But we haven't done anything about climate change in 40 years. Some of that is, and this is a different show, probably with a different guest,

due to the fact that everybody who's in a decision-making position in government is older than you, not that I'm using you as a benchmark here, but that says something, given that most people in America are younger of voting or soon to be voting age, yet we have people in government that are like 80. Part of it is people have to step up. You know, people have to want to replace these older states people. The other thing we've done by accident, we've made it just too easy to get reelected. And this gets into this business of gerrymandering.

I'm not an expert on gerrymandering, but I've read enough about it to understand it. We've accidentally, trying to do a good thing at first, made it just too easy to get reelected, where you don't have to please all the people all the time. So all this hubbubly excitement about ranked voting, ranked choice, where candidates in ranked choice voting have to please more people to get elected and please more than just a minority. So I'm not saying that solves our problems, but it's a step in the right, probably a step in the right direction. And you'll notice the people who are speaking against ranked choice are people who are generally pretty controversial to start with.

They only have support from one side or the other. They rely on the tiny minority that they control with nonsense or propaganda or whatever their tiny little gerrymender district. Well, are people who are passionate and voted in primary. Sure, yes. One example. The mission seems bigger now than your show that was on when I was a kid. You know, you're not just sharing facts.

You're seemingly trying to rescue humanity from anti-science sentiment. Is that a bad thing? Yes. I like it. This show, The End Is Nye, Turn It Up Loud, Peacock, streaming. We have six disaster movies, one-hour disaster movies, where we show a very reasonable scenario or story in which the world ends for a great many of us humans. But then in the second half of the show, in this dual structure, we show what we could do about it.

So I claim that our scientific understanding of these potential catastrophes is enabling. It's empowering. Climate scientist Kate Marvel is so well known for saying, just think what it would be like if the climate were changing, and we didn't know why. Just think of Kentucky were flooded, and we had no idea why. Just think of the ice sheet in Greenland was drifting sliding down into the North Atlantic, and we didn't know why, why there have been heat waves in parts of France that had never experienced that heat and recorded history. And we didn't know why. That would really be weird. In the case of climate change, we do know why. Just think of all the power went out, all the electricity shut down. And we didn't know that there were coronal mass ejections from the sun, a big streams of charged particles that could zap our electrical grid. What if that happened? We're we didn't know why. What if we really still did not have a reasonable explanation for what happened to the ancient dinosaurs and didn't go looking for asteroids and comets that could hit the Earth? That would be bad. So that's why we made the show the way we made it.

What about those of us that feel too small, too insignificant, and feel like, well, you still feel like all these problems are our faults and they're definitely going to happen to us, but, you know, what am I supposed to do about it? It's almost like imposter syndrome, making people afraid to solve big problems. Vote. That's what I tell people. Vote. This is how we change policy. This is how we redirect our intellect and treasure for the greater good is by voting. I'm right there with you. Don't get me wrong. Not printing tickets you don't need to print because you can carry them on your phone, for example. Okay, that's good.

Hear that, dad? Thumbs up emoji. Stop printing the tickets. Or the tickets to the concert, whatever it is, because they're going to bleep or the baseball game the other day. I had it on my phone. That's good. But that's not big enough thinking. We need huge ideas, giant ideas to address climate change, to address a coronal mass, a big solar flare, or a pair of them that could turn off the electricity, an incoming asteroid. We need big ideas to deal with these things. In the show, you speak about acts of cow. Tell me about that because this is, By the way, the show is called The End is Nye.

Are you relieved someone finally used this amazing ready-made pun in your name to good use? I wouldn't use the word relieved, but a book I'm very proud of that I wrote Undeniable. There was pressure to make it undeniable. It seems like you missed an opportunity there. But it also would it be taken seriously and so on and so on. That aside, we need these big ideas, and so we show these big catastrophes to get people excited about doing something about them. The end really is nigh, if we don't, near, if we don't take steps. This is true of all six disasters that we depict. If we see an asteroid coming and we don't deflect it, if we have

catastrophic heating in the atmosphere and we don't do something about it, that'd be bad. So the act of cow is based on a story or a myth or lore where a cow in Chicago is supposed to have kicked over a kerosene-style lantern, a flame, open flame or flame enclosed in a glass chimney, as it's called. And the chimney breaks and the flame gets into the straw or the hay in the barn where the cow is and starts the great Chicago fire. It may be true. It may be based on a racial anecdote to make fun or to cast aspersions on Irish immigrants, Mrs. O'Leary's cow. But nevertheless, a small flame started a huge, huge fire in Chicago. And we, on the show, attribute that to what we call negligence to not paying attention. You leave a kerosene near straw and a cow, trouble could ensue. In each of the

six shows, we have an act of cow. And some disclosure, Seth McFarland himself has cameos in each show. The series is what happens in the future at some point with climate change, comititing the Earth, huge super volcanoes erupting, they're dramatizers, CG. But you made an interesting observation in, I think, episode one where you said, hey, there's a reason that disaster movies always start with politicians ignoring scientists. It's not an accident that every single one of those movies has the scientist as the hero and the politician as the guy who's got his head in the clouds or worse to keep it PG-13. Well, or the analog, you know, very popular disaster movie, towering inferno from many years ago, has the architect trying to get everybody's attention.

Do you realize we're vulnerable? You can't have all these people up there right now. We've had this electrical. Oh, no, it'll be fine, the building owner, a guy with an interest in keeping the party going, and that case literally. Certainly, that's what's happened with climate change, is people want to keep the party going while the atmosphere is getting filled with extra greenhouse gases, which are keeping the place warmer than it otherwise would be, especially faster than it otherwise would have gotten warm. Anyway, so this is an analog, an apocryphal turn to get your attention. You know, the show is, it has stories.

It's drama. Acting. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Bill Nye. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all the great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it's because of my network and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free. I know a lot of you think, well, why do I need that? Look, this has been probably the most high leverage thing that I've ever done for my business

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You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, back to Bill Nye. You discuss normalcy bias. You mentioned this on maybe it's episode one and two. Tell me what this is, because this concept scares me because it's something I feel, one, happens to myself a lot. Stories of kidnapping on the show where I was in the car being taken somewhere, and I was like, this isn't happening because I've never been kidnapped before.

And then I was like, well, wait a minute. If I had, maybe I'd be dead, so therefore I wouldn't have this experience. Let me maybe investigate this. Right. So it's the reason why people on the Titanic just kept ordering drinks or playing the violin or whatever, even though it was sinking. This gets into something you hear a lot these days, the frog in the boiling water. The boiling frog, right. Boiling frog where it's warm in here, but if it goes slowly enough, you keep thinking it's normal, it's normal, it's normal.

Then by the time you realize it's not, it's too late. And so our tendency is to think that things will be steady or have stasis, or are always. be normal all the time. That's our tendency. But the claim on the show is that that's not the case. Like the last time we had a big, in this example, I'm always talking about, the solar flare, this coronal mass ejection from the sun. The corona is the outer layer of a star. Our sun has an outer layer of corona. And sometimes the magnetic fields, the twists of the surface and the layers of the sun make this big jolt of charged particles shoot off, eject coronal mass of the massive bunch of particles shoots off. And if it comes toward us, these charges going by the Earth's

magnetic field caused this interaction where all our transmission lines act like relative to the Earth's magnetic field, act like big antennas. Oh, man. So in 1859, you probably don't remember. Yeah, I wasn't paying attention. The Carrington event where these telegraph wires, got zapped, and people got shocks, and by all accounts, there were fires in the telegraph offices caused by a solar flare as a shorthand. And so we can't predict very easily when solar flares will occur. And in 1859, there was hardly any electrical infrastructure for this stuff to zap. I mean, fires in telegraph offices, trouble, bad, but compare that with turning off all the electricity all over the world all at once. No more happy electronic interviews, no more television.

Yeah, horrifyingly, we would have had to cancel and try to reschedule this, which would have been impossible. Right there. And how would you reschedule? Yeah. Whose Google calendar would you get on? Refrigerators turn off. Oh, yeah. Farm machinery's off. Cars don't run. Cars, even with gas and we rely on a lot of electricity, and they have a lot of wiring that would be susceptible to this kind of thing. Gas pumps need electricity. So the people who are like, huh, I don't have an electric car. Good luck filling it up with gas, unless you're going to use a hand crank or something.

And then no traffic lights. The big thing would be agriculture and food would catch, and clean water would kill everybody pretty quick. Except the Amish. They'd be fine. Ish. My experience with, I mean, I have a lot of relatives in Philadelphia area. Amish depend a lot on the big picture, on the rest of society.

I have no more power to them. But, okay, so we don't want that to happen. And in this episode, we show, first of all, everything going to heck very quickly. And then we show what we would do about it to keep it from happening. I think it's cool. I think it's exciting. It's a little scary when you look at a category five or six hurricane that makes landfall or five of them that make landfall all at once.

An interesting thing. We shot a lot of the show in Canada, in Montreal. Famous for hurricanes. Well, so it's not. And so the audio guy said, what is most of the people on the crew were bilingual anyway, but most of them really were francophones. Like French was their first language. And the guy said, what does landfall mean? It was just cool.

You know, here in the States, we throw around landfall, hurricane landfall. We talk about it all the time. Louisiana, landfall, Florida, landfall. Sure. But he lives far enough north where, oh, landfall. Oh, oh, I get it. So not that I'm all about hurricanes making landfall and drowning everybody, but it was a cool thing to have that outside perspective. So everybody, we want to be ready for these things and not ignore the possibility.

Is this modeled on something or is this just like, hey, theoretically this could happen. The chances are minuscule. Oh, the chances aren't minuscule. Oh, the chances are not minuscule, my friends. No, we had climate scientists from Penn State at that time and Giss Giss Gett's Goddard Institute for Space. studies, named after Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry in the west, Western world, not Russia world. The Goddard's Institute for Space Studies is in Manhattan in New York City, literally above the restaurant that is the Jerry Seinfeld sandwich shop. Anyway, we had world's

foremost authorities on climate science with their computer modeling of the Earth's atmosphere and Earth's ocean to predict what would go wrong if everything went wrong. That is to say, if we keep allowing the atmosphere to get warmer and warmer and the ocean to get warmer and warmer, and the spin of the earth being spinny and spinny the way it is, we could get this system of five gigantic storms happening all at the same time. This is a computer-based, or very bad case prediction. The stats were 200,000 dead in the U.S., millions more dead abroad, but then that's the beginning, right? There's turmoil and vulnerable governments, extremist groups take over in places that are unstable. There's famine in Middle East and North Africa slash everywhere else. Super.

Yeah. You know, here in the developed world, we figure food will be showing up most of the time without much work. But in the developing world, where you have enormous populations of people living on sea coasts, half the people in the world live on sea coasts, and you get giant floods, all the farmland is flooded and the food is destroyed and rots, people are going to starve. And that would be an undesirable outcome. Definitely. That's political instability along with the death, which causes more death and more instability and war to over-limited resources. So that's the scariest part. I'll just be honest here. When the supply chain got disrupted because of the pandemic, most people I know were like,

ah, Amazon is taking forever to deliver these things that I, my gym equipment's going to take three extra months to deliver to my garage. Those were our large concerns. These people are going to starve to death when these kinds of things are. You know, in the case of us in the United States and the system of five storms, people in Florida, people in the Gulf Coast or would be in trouble, you know, South Carolina. And these are people, Atlanta is a big city. Millions and millions of people displaced. And as I say all the time, where are they going to go? Where are they going to do? And so let's address this problem, people. Let's not run in circle screaming. Let's not stick our head in the soaking wet sand. Let's get ready. One of the proposed solutions to this was really interesting.

Huge walls of wind turbines in hurricane-prone areas. That I did not think was possible. I thought this is incredible. So you said a thousand or thousand or so wind turbines, they tame the hurricane and basically turned it into just a tropical storm while generating electricity. A tropical storm is still a huge thing. Sure. But if you can take it from a five to a one, that's good. Right. But this study was done by these people who are really into it. And if we could build enormous wind turbines off the coast of the Gulf Coast on either side of Florida, let's say, you could tame or knock down a hurricane because the winds near the surface are the ones that cause all of trouble. The winds that knock the roof off post offices and all that. Those are not the ones

aloft. You can route airplanes around storms like that. I'll do it all the time. Right. But if you can knock the surface wind down, you would be able to make a big change. But such a thing requires enormous investment. It's expensive. But you know what's really expensive? Rebuilding an entire city or state because it's destroyed in a hurricane. Or deciding not to rebuild it and just trying to take in all these refugees. which is also a very reasonable scenario. You know, people in Florida, some parts of Florida, can't get liability insurance on their cars

because there's too much seawater in the parking lot too many days of the year. Jeez. And the wheels are rusting. And so insurance companies don't want to cover it, understandable. So let's make wheels out of stainless steel. Oh, fine. That aside.

When we talk about Florida, for example, being underwater, Houston being underwater, We're not talking about people snorkeling or scuba diving. We're talking about this much water on the floor everywhere you go all year. And you just won't live there. You'll leave. People will leave. And when they leave, what are they going to do when they go wherever they went?

And these are big problems I want us all to think about. It just seems interesting as well that you could tame a hurricane and generate electricity using the wind at the same time. It's cool. It's a cool idea. And there's a dad joke here that I just. can't let go, which is wind power. I'm a huge fan. Huh? See what he did there? I got two kids. It's going to only getting worse. The knock on wind is that it only works when the wind blows. Yeah, okay. But it does work

when the wind blows. Iowa gets 25, a quarter of its electricity, Iowa from wind. Texas right now is getting 10% of its electricity from wind. And so, yes, we need base load. We need better electrical transmission lines, better electrical grid that's smarter, that makes adjustments automatically and distributes electricity automatically and efficiently. So let's get started. Let's not whine about it. Let's go, people. Let's get her done. What do you think of nuclear power? It's got a bad sort of press reputation. It seems like a really good solution. Well, it does and it doesn't. Here's the problem there is nobody is sure of what to do with the waste. and this has caused all kinds of problems for NIMBY, not in my backyard.

Right. And banana, build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything, banana. That I haven't heard. NIMBY I'm up on. Yeah. And so keep in mind, three mile island when I was in college, I mean, three mile island was right after I got out of college, three mile island in Harrisburg, capital of Pennsylvania, right, the end of the runway, didn't cause any trouble. It almost did. Like it almost had this huge leak. People were freaked out.

Then Chernobyl killed thousands of people, and you can reckon that it's still killing people. Oh, yeah. With all this sloppy, thoughtless, top-down, oh, it's good enough mentality caused. And the Russian fascination with gigantism led to this huge problem for everybody. You know, that Chernobyl was detected in Sweden for the Chernobyl explosion, was the Chernobyl explosion, was detected in Sweden before people in Ukraine were allowed to know about it. It was crazy. And then Fukushima, and this is where, well, they shouldn't have built it there. But they did. Well, they shouldn't have done that with those control rods in Ukraine. But they did. Well, they shouldn't have had that

evacuation plan in Harrisburg. But they did. And so the nuclear industry has caused itself trouble. With that said, there is at least one pilot reactor being built in Wyoming that, that we'll see if it can be done on a small, manageable scale. And in the meantime, if I were king of the forest, I would be investing, and I'm not joking, my skeptical friends, I would be investing in fusion. I was going to ask about that. Tell us about this, because there's a breakthrough recently, I think.

Yeah, well, the word recent. So when I was in high school, fusion was 40 years away, and the joke is fusion's always 40 years away. And so everybody, if you're not hip, what we do with conventional nuclear power is we take big atoms like uranium and not as energetic, but still okay, as thorium, the neutrons, which fall off of these atoms through what's called, you guys know the word radioactive decay. You've heard this. The neutrons run into adjacent atoms and knock off more neutrons and knock off more, and that gets very hot. And it gets really hot when you

do it in a nuclear weapon, but it gets very hot in a conventional atomic reactor. and then you use that heat to make steam and run a turbine, just the way you do with coal burning or natural gas burning. You get hot, make steam, run a turbine. Cool. Well, the idea with fusion is what happens in stars, where there's so much gravity crushing atoms together so strongly that they, instead of being repelled, they suddenly smack together and the verb is fuse and give off tremendous amounts of heat without these particles, these neutrons, and other conventional radioactive materials shooting out. And if you could do this on Earth, you would have, pick a number, limitless heat to make electricity. And the trick is, the thing that nobody's figured out, is how do you contain

these things? How do you get them to smash into each other hard enough and contain them? And the answer roughly is a giant, amazing, yet to be figured out magnetic feel. Various researchers are closer and closer than ever. And I cannot help but wonder if we just tossed a few billion dollars at it, somebody would have either a breakthrough or enough small throes that we'd get this thing working. And then you could, if you had limitless electricity, then you could sort of solve all the problems at once. You know, you could desalinate seawater. You could pump water all over the continent and grow all the crops you wanted. You could take carbon out of the atmosphere with extraordinary machines. If you have, you had to be able to. And

this electricity. So the promise of nuclear power is let's try it on small scales and win back everybody's trust, really settle on a place to put the waste. There's some salt, domes, ancient formations where they've been stable for billions of years. We could do that. I'm down with that. But the problem has been political. But these people run around, oh, it's just cooks who don't want nuclear power. The public is very skeptical of nuclear power because of its ability to just caused so much trouble. You know, this Chernobyl thing, man. It's just, come on. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Bill Nye. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to the show. I know some of you disagree with the guests we have.

I love hearing from all of you. And I love the fact that regardless, you all have been great to our sponsors because they're the ones that keep the show going as well. You can check out all the sponsors at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. You'll find that all the codes and URLs, all those things are there. The page is very searchable. You can also search for any sponsor using the search box on the website as well. So please consider supporting those who support this show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Bill Nye. I've heard you say there are certain strategies that always get results. One, looking at the world with radical curiosity, I'm going to break this sentence into three parts. How do we develop and nurture radical curiosity? Neil deGrasse Tyson talked about

keeping your natural childlike curiosity. I'm wondering what your take is on these kinds of Well, my take is kind of the same. Where everybody starts out as a scientist, as we like to say, every little kid just asks their parents questions, question, question, why is this sky blue? Why does water run down? No, what happened to that ice? But then we get too many things going on, perhaps, or we get a lot of things going on. We, many people lose their curiosity. I've met people who've lost their curiosity, but we want to nurture that. Curiosity is what leads to identifying problems and solving them, in my opinion. We want as many people as we can get to remain curious their whole lives. The second part of the sentence, right, there are certain strategies that

always get results, being driven by a desire for a better future. Isn't everyone driven by this, though? I don't know, man. Maybe not. I sure am. My parents, my dad especially was well-spoken on this, said, you want to leave the world better than you found it. I like that. Yeah. I mean, that's what you want to do. Now, I know my, let's go with opponents or people on the other side think they are leaving the world better than they found it by ignoring or by convincing themselves or trying to convince other people that climate isn't changing, that the sun will never create a coronal mass ejection that could turn off. Or the electricity would never go out in the great state of Texas until it does, we want everybody to remain curious and to face the problems that we can identify.

Let's not ignore them. The third part, being willing to take the actions needed to make change a reality. That seems like where your new show kicks in. That seems to be the trick. You're trying to do this, but how do we encourage this in adults as well as kids? You do great with kids. The new show addresses this with adults by sort of making us feel like, wow, that would be really bad. Maybe we should do something about this.

what can we do if we don't have a TV show behind us? I say all the time, vote. Recycling is good. That's good. We should not waste these valuable materials, things that can be shredded and made back into paper, plastic that can be shredded and turned back into something useful. That's good. Yes, we should do that.

We should combine our errands and not waste fossil fuels when we use them to drive around. Yes, that's all good. That's good. But we need big ideas. We need big electrical transmission systems that are smart. We need big electrical production system. We need ways to redistribute wealth so we don't have these disparities in income, which leads to crime, which leads to sickness, which leads to misery for our fellow people. You guys, let's work together and make the world better.

I talk about this all the time, Jordan. Both of my parents were veterans of World War II. My dad was a prisoner of war for 44 months, almost four years, captured from the Pacific Theater on Christmas Eve, 1941, before everything really went crazy. It just started to go crazy. My mother was recruited by the Navy. She was one of the code girls who worked on at first the Nazi Enigma Code and then later the Japanese Navy codes, JN codes. And everybody at that time was focused on winning the war. That's all anybody talked about. That's all the music was about, all the billboards, all the posters, the recycling efforts, the rationing, all of it was to get people motivated

to win this global conflict. And they did in five years. So people, let's get going. Let's redistribute wealth. Let's address climate change. Let's get ready for a coronal mass ejection. Let's prepare coastal cities for tsunamis. Let's not pump down the Ogalala aquifer. which we depend on for our food, let's be ready for volcanic eruptions in places you might not expect so that we can have a high quality of life in the future. Let's go, people. Let's get her done. There's also a battle not just against us killing ourselves here with or being unprepared, being caught unprepared, but the battle is against cognitive dissonance. You actually said, and I think this might have been on a show we did years ago, when you have a worldview and you're confronted with evidence that

contradicts it, you got to do something. You have dissonance, a conflict in your mind. You can either change your whole worldview, which is quite difficult, especially the older you get, or you dismiss the evidence. Along with that, you dismiss the authority. Speak to that a little bit because people hear that and they go, yeah, yeah, okay, I got to be careful not to do that. And then they do it right now. They're warming up the one-star reviews because they disagree with something you said or that I've implied that I agree with or whatever. I know what you're saying, but this business of the backfire effective for people say double down. It's when you're in denial. We all do it. I mean, we all deny problems. Oh, we'll get there on time. I'm not really running late. It's going to be fine.

The train won't leave without me or whatever the heck. We all do that to some extent. But right now, this denial of the facts is getting is really extraordinary. I mean, I think we'd all agree. Red is green. Green is red. It's like crazy out there. So this is not, what's everybody's favorite word anymore, sustainable. You can't have a successful economy if you deny facts. You can't have a government if you deny facts. It was just not going to work. When I say it in those terms, everybody would agree. But what happened right now, which is fascinating for a guy of a certain age, when the internet was invented or when it came to be common, let's put it that way. It's going to be great.

In the future, everyone is going to have a vote. It's going to democratize our society. Everyone will have an equal voice on the electric internet, and it's going to be a better tomorrow for humankind. And that's not what happened because apparently the companies that enabled everybody to use the internet are commercial companies, and they wrote software to amplify advertising. And it's just led to everybody's opinion looking like it's an expert. opinion when it's not. And this expression, I've done my own research on the internet. I mean,

it sounds funny, you know, when you watch it on Saturday Night Live or something, but it's a serious thing. So what we want to do is imbue and everybody or provide educational resources for everybody to learn to evaluate evidence. And when I was in school, it might have been called logic or rational reasoning that might have been what it's called. But nowadays, the phrase that everybody uses in education is critical thinking. And that's fine. That's a good phrase. In other words, you want to be able to evaluate evidence critically. If somebody says, I heard that if you put a magnet on your car's gas line, you'll get better gas mileage. We want you to think critically about that claim. If somebody tells you that they're in touch with your dead ancestor and can talk to him or her

and then relay to you information that she or he is giving you through this medium, be skeptical. They probably can't really do that. When someone says they can find water in the yard with a forked wooden stick, be very skeptical. People who can find water do it by going to the low point in the land where the ground is wet, and they might make you think that they're doing it by some other psychic means. And so everybody learned to evaluate evidence. And this is a very difficult thing, but if we can get people to do that, we would change the world. So when someone says, we're putting extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere faster than ever, extra methane faster than ever, and the world's getting warmer. And that's why we have these extraordinary weather

events in Kentucky, these fires out west, these fires in northeastern France. And then somebody else says, oh, no, the climate's not warming. This is natural cycle. Learn to evaluate that evidence. Look at both sides of this thing. And keep in mind in that one example, it's not 50-50 in the case of climate change. It's not half of the scientists saying this and half. No, it's 97 or 98% of scientist saying one thing, and barely 2% saying something else. In that example, when it comes to preventing the spread of a very transmissible respiratory disease, and someone says masks don't make any difference at all, be very skeptical of that claim. On the other hand, if somebody says this virus came from a forest in Western China and became this extraordinarily virulent thing,

almost overnight. That also you might be skeptical of. But what are you going to do about it either way? Then there evaluate that evidence also. Just because it's somebody else's fault doesn't mean you don't need to do something about it. So one of my old things, going back to Ned Nye, my dad, sometimes you got to pick up other people's trash. If you want the world to get better, sometimes you've got to just take care of things that aren't your fault. The end of our time together is also Nye. Huh? See what he did there? Yeah, I had to. I had to. I had to say, I've highlighted that in green in my notes.

Thank you, Bill, for what you do for science and for your time today. I really appreciate it. And I wish you the best of luck. I will, of course, plug the show in the show close. And I look forward to seeing the rest. The show is called The End Is Nye, everybody, streaming on Peacock. Turn it up loud. Thanks, Bill. Now, I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before we get into that, here's a sample of my interview with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. We talk about why an interest in science serves every field of expertise from law to art what our education should ideally train us for.

Here's a quick look inside. When I heard the learned astronomer, when the proofs, the figures were ranged in columns before me, when I was shown the charts and diagrams to add, divide, and measure them. When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick, till rising and gliding out, I wandered off by myself into the mystical moist night air, and from time to time, looked up in perfect silence at the stars. It's the same curiosity you have as a kid, but I just have it as an adult. I've had it since childhood. You don't have to maintain it.

You just have to make sure nothing interferes with it. So the counterpart to this would be, oh, sir, literate one, why ruin what something looks like by describing it with words when I can see it fully with my eyes? Your words just get in the way. I'd rather my mind float freely as I gaze upon something of interest and have the writer step in between me and it and interpose his or her own interpretation. You don't know the thoughts that you're not having. What keeps me awake is wondering what questions I don't yet know. to ask because they would only become available to me after we discover what dark matter and dark energy is. Oh, man. Because think about it, the fact that we even know how to ask that question, that's almost half the way there. But I want to know the question that I can't know yet. What is the profound level of

ignorance that will manifest after we answer the profound questions we've been smart enough to pose this far. For more, including how science denial has gained a global foothold, what it'll take for the U.S. to get to Mars before China, and why it's dangerous for people to claim the Earth is flat, check out episode 327 of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Neil deGrasse Tyson. I know some of you are typing angry tweets right now about how he's not a real scientist, and I actually brought that up a few times. His publicist was like, don't ask him about that. He's going to get angry. And of course, I couldn't resist. But I will also. So before I tell you what happened there, I will ask you this.

Was Mr. Rogers really your neighbor? Or are we throwing away what he taught us as well? Anyway, Bill Nye has seven honorary doctoral degrees to my zero. So I guess we have to call him Dr. Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Dr. Nye now. Was that six or seven? But really, folks, some people think he's unqualified to do what he does because he doesn't have a PhD in the field. And I will say that regardless of whether we agree or disagree with some of his conclusions or some of the things he advocates, he really is just an advocate for science literacy. That doesn't require a PhD in the field. It simply requires being able to understand and put forth the work of others in order to bring that message to people in hopes that they gain competence. All the, he's a fraud, he doesn't have a PhD. All that sort of, frankly, nonsense. It's the results of people that refuse to grapple with actual science or disagree with the conclusion. And I respect when you disagree with the conclusion, but don't do that if you disagree with science generally. That makes no sense. You're not going to find any quarter with me with science denial and things like that or foolish.

arguments in favor of non-scientific theories and thought. I think there's just a lot of shooting the messenger here in sort of an illogical attempt to defeat the science. And look, I know he's a bit left-leaning. I'm ready for the one-star reviews from people who say they love free speech, but then go ballistic the first time they disagree with a guest's opinion that happens all the time, reminds me, by the way, if you have not reviewed the show, now's a good time to do it. You can go to rate thispodcast.com slash Jordan, or just jordanherbanger.com slash review if you need instructions. I could use your help counterbalancing all the cooks that come out whenever I do episodes like this. I will agree, though. I did say yikes in my head, possibly out loud, when I heard

redistribution of wealth. Now, look, I'm not against these things in principle, but it's a scary concept when you're talking about the government doing it. Don't get me wrong. I'd love a better health care system and a better education system. You've heard me talk about this on the show, but simple wealth redistribution is not something that seems to have gone well most of the time. I wish we had more time to dig into those topics, but I wanted to focus on science specifically as well as the other topics here. And I got to wonder, how many bow ties does that guy own at this point? And I wonder, if you're rocking the bow tie and it's part of your thing, do you get to write those off? I guess I've got some questions for next time. Big thank you to Bill Nye. Links to all things Bill

will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Transcripts are on the show notes, videos are up on YouTube, advertisers, deals, and discount codes all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. please consider supporting those who support this show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or connect with me right there on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems, software, and tiny habits. The same stuff that has honestly made me quite successful

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doing it. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. This show is created an association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Millie, Ocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's interested in science, the destruction of the planet loves Bill Nye, who knows, share this episode with him. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast.

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