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…
Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!
The science is clear: human beings have accelerated the rate of climate change over the past few centuries to the point that cataclysmic consequences are inescapable without appropriate countermeasures. And more bad news: not all potentially civilization-halting catastrophes are manmade. Supervolcanoes, solar flares, and doomsday comets are just a few apocalyptic scenarios that could hasten the demise of humanity — and most life on Earth. So what’s the good news? We’ve got science on our side to help mitigate and survive these disasters should we choose to use it.
On this episode, we’re rejoined by science champion Bill Nye, whose new Peacock TV series — The End Is Nye — takes us through these unfathomably grim doomsdays and demonstrates how we could use science to find our way to the other side of them. Listen, learn, and enjoy!
Please Scroll Down for Featured Resources and Transcript!
Please note that some of the links on this page (books, movies, music, etc.) lead to affiliate programs for which The Jordan Harbinger Show receives compensation. It’s just one of the ways we keep the lights on around here. Thank you for your support!
Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!
This Episode Is Sponsored By:
- HVMN: Go to HVMN.me/jordan for 20% off Ketone-IQ
- IPVanish: Save 73% off a yearly subscription at ipvanish.com/jordan
- Shopify: Go to shopify.com/jordan for a free 14-day trial
The James Altucher Show brings you into the lives of peak-performers: billionaires, best-selling authors, rappers, astronauts, athletes, comedians, actors, and world champions! Check it out here or wherever you prefer listening to podcasts!
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!
Thanks, Bill Nye!
If you enjoyed this session with Bill Nye, let him know by clicking on the link below and sending him a quick shout out at Twitter:
Click here to thank Bill Nye at Twitter!
Click here to let Jordan know about your number one takeaway from this episode!
And if you want us to answer your questions on one of our upcoming weekly Feedback Friday episodes, drop us a line at friday@jordanharbinger.com.
Resources from This Episode:
- The End Is Nye | Peacock TV
- Bill Nye | Radical Curiosity Saves the World | Jordan Harbinger
- Everything All at Once: How to Unleash Your Inner Nerd, Tap Into Radical Curiosity, and Solve Any Problem by Bill Nye and Corey S. Powell | Amazon
- Other Books by Bill Nye | Amazon
- Bill Nye Saves the World | Netflix
- Bill Nye: Science Guy (Documentary)
- Bill Nye The Science Guy | Amazon (Emmy Award-Winning TV Show That Ran from ’93 to ’98)
- Bill Nye | Website
- Bill Nye | Twitter
- Bill Nye | Instagram
- Bill Nye | Facebook
- How Soap Works | ThoughtCo.
- Oh Good, Hurricanes Are Getting So Strong That We Need a Category 6 | Mic
- Daniel Pink | The Power of Regret | Jordan Harbinger
- Gerrymandering Explained | Brennan Center for Justice
- Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) | Ballotpedia
- Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation by Bill Nye | Amazon
- The O’Leary Legend | The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory
- Seth MacFarlane | Twitter
- The Towering Inferno | Prime Video
- The Frozen Calm of Normalcy Bias | Gizmodo
- A Perfect Solar Superstorm: The 1859 Carrington Event | History
- Simulating a Climate-Changed Earth Atop the Seinfeld Diner | Motherboard
- Offshore Wind Farms Could Tame Hurricanes Before They Reach Land, Stanford-Led Study Says | Stanford News Service
- There Is NIMBY and Now There Is BANANA | Government Technology
- Three Mile Island Accident | World Nuclear Association
- Chernobyl Disaster Facts and Information | National Geographic
- Nuclear Fusion Energy Inches Closer Toward Reality | The Washington Post
- Neil deGrasse Tyson | Cosmic Queries for the Acutely Curious | Jordan Harbinger
- What My Father Taught Me: Bill Nye | Popular Mechanics
- Bill Nye’s Mother Was a Navy Code Breaker | Marie Claire
- Five Everyday Examples of Cognitive Dissonance | Healthline
- Critical Thinking | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- More than 99.9% Of Studies Agree: Humans Caused Climate Change | Cornell Chronicle
- Is Bill Nye a Real Scientist? Why Some Question His Credentials | Distractify
724: Bill Nye | The End is Nye
[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Coming up on The Jordan Harbinger Show.
[00:00:02] Bill Nye: 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 everybody, learn to evaluate evidence. If we can get people to do that, we would change the world.
[00:00:37] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of 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.
[00:01:04] If you're new to the show, or you want to tell your friends about it, I suggest our episode starter packs. It's 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.
[00:01:29] Today on the show, Bill Nye the Science Guy returns. He is 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.
[00:01:46] 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.
[00:02:07] So enjoy this episode here with Bill Nye, the Science Guy.
[00:02:13] You and I ended up at one of John Levy's parties 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.
[00:02:27] Bill Nye: Oh, I'm a big dishwasher. I'm a fan of washing dishes.
[00:02:30] Jordan Harbinger: That's what you told me then. So that makes it me 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.
[00:02:42] Bill Nye: Wow. Right on.
[00:02:43] Jordan Harbinger: 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 bow tie, washing dishes and explaining the soap? Oh, right, it's William Nye science guy.
[00:02:54] Bill Nye: Yes, person.
[00:02:56] Jordan Harbinger: Yes. Science person. Exactly. That was how we met. And so I'm glad we are able to do this again.
[00:03:01] Bill Nye: Big fun.
[00:03:01] Jordan Harbinger: I want to dip into your past 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.
[00:03:07] Bill Nye: Did you watch, have you been able to see it?
[00:03:09] Jordan Harbinger: 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.
[00:03:15] Bill Nye: At least the last one, the digital effects are finished.
[00:03:18] Jordan Harbinger: It probably wouldn't work without the digital effects, given the amount of CG that's present in the new show.
[00:03:23] Bill Nye: Well, just when you have a disaster, that's going to end the world and collapse, wash cities away and flood, or have tsunamis that destroy the whole countries, you need digital effects.
[00:03:35] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:03:35] Bill Nye: I mean, cut us some slack there.
[00:03:36] Jordan Harbinger: A category six hurricane with no water and no wind, no rain can be kind of like—
[00:03:40] Bill Nye: It is not really the same.
[00:03:41] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:03:41] Bill Nye: 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.
[00:03:51] Jordan Harbinger: 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 your 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.
[00:04:20] Bill Nye: 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.
[00:04:37] Jordan Harbinger: 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?
[00:04:46] Bill Nye: 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.
[00:04:54] Jordan Harbinger: Do you recommend people take a baby step or is it just like, "You know what, just jump in with both feet"?
[00:04:58] Bill Nye: Well, I did. I mean, I was scared to death when I quit my day job, October 3rd, 1986, roughly. I had five, $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, V-A-X, VAX-11/780. 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.
[00:05:56] So 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 continued to work as an engineer for about six more years, part time. I was a part of what they call a contract engineer.
[00:06:14] Jordan Harbinger: A lot of the guys on the Internet, you know, like the guys who 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.
[00:06:36] Bill Nye: When you first jump in, you don't know that you're going to be that good at it.
[00:06:39] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:06:39] Bill Nye: You know, if I had tried to make my living as a standup 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. No."
[00:06:49] Jordan Harbinger: "Stick to physics, buddy." Yeah.
[00:06:51] Bill Nye: Yeah. In my example, I took a baby step. I had kind of a plan.
[00:06:56] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:56] Bill Nye: 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.
[00:07:14] Jordan Harbinger: 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 stats as most stats are made up, but it's something like 80 percent 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.
[00:07:37] Bill Nye: Why did I bite that guy's head off at that meeting when it wasn't that important?
[00:07:41] Jordan Harbinger: 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.
[00:08:14] Bill Nye: 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. These 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 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.
[00:09:01] And that was the idea 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 thereabouts 12, and it was in that regard successful, but we haven't done anything about climate change in 40 years.
[00:09:31] Jordan Harbinger: 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.
[00:09:50] Bill Nye: 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, is we've made it just too easy to get reelected.
[00:10:02] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:10:02] Bill Nye: 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 have accidentally been 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 hubble-bubble excitement about ranked voting, ranked choice, where candidates were 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 that people who are speaking against rank choice are people who are generally pretty controversial to start with. They only have support from one side or the other.
[00:10:50] Jordan Harbinger: They rely on the tiny minority that they control with nonsense or propaganda or whatever their tiny little gerrymander district is.
[00:10:57] Bill Nye: Well or people who are passionate—
[00:10:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:11:00] Bill Nye: —and vote in primaries—
[00:11:01] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. Yes.
[00:11:01] Bill Nye: —in this one example.
[00:11:02] Jordan Harbinger: 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—
[00:11:10] Bill Nye: Yes.
[00:11:11] Jordan Harbinger: —from anti-science sentiment.
[00:11:12] Bill Nye: Is that a bad thing? Yes. So—
[00:11:14] Jordan Harbinger: I like it.
[00:11:16] Bill Nye: —this show, The End is Nye, turned out loud at 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. It's 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.
[00:11:57] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:11:57] Bill Nye: Just think if 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'd been heat waves in parts of France that never experienced that heat in 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 injections from the sun, big streams of charged particles that could zap our electrical grid. What if that happened and 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.
[00:12:47] Jordan Harbinger: 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.
[00:13:02] Bill Nye: 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.
[00:13:23] Jordan Harbinger: Hear that dad.
[00:13:23] Bill Nye: Thumbs up emoji.
[00:13:24] Jordan Harbinger: Stop printing the tickets.
[00:13:25] Bill Nye: Or the tickets to the concert or whatever it's because they're going to bleep. Or the baseball game, the other day, I had it on my phone. Bleep, bleep. 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.
[00:13:51] Jordan Harbinger: In the show, you speak about acts of cow. Tell me about that because this is — by the way, the show's called The End of Nye. Are you relieved? Someone finally used this amazing ready-made pun in your name to good use.
[00:14:03] Bill Nye: 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 "unde-NYE-able." Get it?
[00:14:11] Jordan Harbinger: It seems like you missed an opportunity there.
[00:14:13] Bill Nye: But it also would it be taken seriously and so on and so on. That aside, we need these big ideas. And so we showed these big catastrophes to get people excited about doing something about them. The end really is Nye 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.
[00:14:43] 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 of or to cast aspersions on Irish immigrants, Mrs. O'Leary's cow, but nevertheless, a small flame started the huge fire in Chicago.
[00:15:26] And we on the show attribute that to what we call negligence, to not paying attention. If you leave a kerosene near straw and a cow, trouble could ensue. In each of the six shows, we have an act of cow.
[00:15:40] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:40] Bill Nye: And some disclosure, Seth McFarland himself has cameos in each show.
[00:15:46] Jordan Harbinger: The series is what happens in the future at some point with climate change, comets hitting the earth, huge super volcanoes erupting. They're dramatized or 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.
[00:16:15] Bill Nye: 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 problem." "Oh no, it'll be fine," the building owner or a guy with an interest in keeping the party going in 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've gotten warm. Anyway, so this is an analog, an apocryphal turn to get your attention. You know, the show, it has some stories. It's drama acting.
[00:17:07] Jordan Harbinger: You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Bill Nye. We'll be right.
[00:17:12] This episode is sponsored in part by HVMN. You may have heard buzz about ketones supplements and now they can boost your workouts by helping your body use fatty acids for fuel. I'm a huge skeptic. I do not recommend most substances. I think you pee them out. I always have to try them myself, but I'm a sample size of one. So I just normally just don't even bother with this stuff. But these guys had government contracts. A lot of my friends are using it who are actual serious athletes. So I've been taking HVMN's Ketone-IQ before workouts for a few months now. I am quite sold that this is definitely doing something for me in terms of focus, appetite suppression, paired especially with caffeine. And granted, the stuff tastes absolutely horrible but that's the price of admission here. I take it like a shot at tequila at seven o'clock in the morning. Just to be clear, I'm not taking actual tequila, just these ketones that taste worse than the worst tequila you've ever had at seven o'clock in the morning. I feel much more focused, less hungry during the workouts even after. It's not like coffee because it doesn't make me feel jittery, better endurance than usual. And I don't get that slow down towards the end of my workout nearly as quick. If you're working out hard or training for something, definitely give this a try and let me know what you think.
[00:18:17] Jen Harbinger: For 20 percent off your order of Ketone-IQ, go to HVMN.com promo code JORDAN. Again that's H-V-M-N.com promo code JORDAN for 20 percent off Ketone-IQ.
[00:18:29] Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored by IPVanish. Did you know that browsing online using incognito mode—? Nah, it doesn't really do much to protect your privacy. Without added security, you might as well give away your private data to hackers, advertisers, your ISP, other prying eyes. So we use IPVanish VPN to make it easy to stay truly private and secure on the Internet, especially when I travel. IPVanish helps you safely browse the Internet by encrypting a hundred percent of your data. This means your private details like passwords, communications, browsing history, and more. It's all going to be shielded from falling into the wrong hands. You see all these data breaches online all the time, even your physical location will be hidden. IPVanish makes you virtually invisible online. Use IPVanish on unlimited devices without sacrificing on speed. So your computers, tablets, phones, even devices like your Fire Stick when you're streaming media can use it. When I'm at home or in public, I do not go online generally without using a VPN. All you need to do is tap one button and you're instantly protected. You won't even know it's on.
[00:19:25] Jen Harbinger: IPVanish is offering an incredible 70 percent off their yearly plan for our listeners with a 30-day money-back guarantee. That's like getting nine months for free. Stop sharing with the world everything you stream, everything you search for, and everything you buy. Take your privacy back today with the brand rated 4.6 out of five on Trustpilot. So go to ipvanish.com/jordan and use promo code JORDAN and claim your 70 percent savings. That's I-P-V-A-N-I-S-H.com/jordan.
[00:19:52] Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I manage to book all the great authors, thinkers and creators every single, 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 or my personal life. I've gotten to so many opportunities as a result of helping other people through knowing and connecting other people. And this is the course that will teach you how to do that. It's a free course. jordanharbinger.com/course is where you can find it. And many of the guests on the show already subscribe and contribute to the course. So come join us, you'll be in smart company where you belong.
[00:20:28] Now back to Bill Nye.
[00:20:31] 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.
[00:21:01] Bill Nye: This gets into something you hear a lot these days, the frog and the boiling water.
[00:21:06] Jordan Harbinger: The boiling frog, right? Mm-hmm.
[00:21:07] Bill Nye: 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 be normal all the time. That's our tendency. But the claim on the show is that that's not the case.
[00:21:30] Like the last time we had a big — and this example, I'm always talking about this solar flare, this coronal mass ejection from the sun, the corona is the outer layer of a star. Our sun has an outer layer, corona and sometimes magnetic fields, the twists of the surface and the layers of the sun make this big jolt of charged particles, shoot off to eject coronal mass of the massive bunch of particles, shoots off. And if it comes toward us, this charge is going by the earth's magnetic field. It caused this interaction where all our transmission lines act like relative to the earth's magnetic field, acts like big antennas.
[00:22:12] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, man.
[00:22:12] Bill Nye: So in 1859, you probably don't remember.
[00:22:15] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I wasn't paying attention.
[00:22:16] Bill Nye: 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.
[00:22:58] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, horrifyingly, we would've had to cancel and try to reschedule this, which would've been impossible.
[00:23:03] Bill Nye: Right there. And how would you reschedule?
[00:23:04] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:23:05] Bill Nye: Who's Google Calendar would you get on? Refrigerators turn off.
[00:23:08] Jordan Harbinger: Oh yeah.
[00:23:09] Bill Nye: Farm machinery off. Cars don't run. Cars, even with gas and them, rely on a lot of electricity and they have a lot of wiring that would be susceptible to this kind of thing.
[00:23:19] Jordan Harbinger: 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.
[00:23:26] Bill Nye: And then, no traffic lights. And it's just, the big thing would be agriculture and food would catch and clean water would kill everybody pretty quick.
[00:23:34] Jordan Harbinger: Except the Amish. They'd be fine.
[00:23:36] Bill Nye: 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, and 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 hack 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.
[00:24:02] Jordan Harbinger: It's a little scary. When you look at a category five or six hurricane that hits, makes landfall, or five of them that make landfall all at once.
[00:24:10] Bill Nye: An interesting thing, we shot, you know, a lot of the show in Canada, in Montreal.
[00:24:15] Jordan Harbinger: Famous for hurricanes.
[00:24:16] Bill Nye: Well, so it's not.
[00:24:17] Jordan Harbinger: Right.
[00:24:18] Bill Nye: 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 use, 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, "Huh? 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.
[00:24:53] So everybody, we want to be ready for these things and not ignore the possibility.
[00:24:58] Jordan Harbinger: Is this modeled on something or is this just like, "Hey theoretically, this could happen. The chances are minuscule."
[00:25:04] Bill Nye: 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, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, named after Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry in the west, Western world, not Russian world. The Goddard 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 spiny and spiny, the way it is, we could get this system of five gigantic storms happening all at the same time. This is a computer-based worst-case or very bad-case prediction.
[00:26:09] Jordan Harbinger: The stats were 200,000 dead in the US, 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—
[00:26:20] Bill Nye: Right on.
[00:26:21] Jordan Harbinger: —in Middle East and North Africa slash everywhere else.
[00:26:24] Bill Nye: Super.
[00:26:25] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:26:25] Bill Nye: 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 coast, 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.
[00:26:51] Jordan Harbinger: 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 is 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 happen.
[00:27:21] Bill Nye: But you know, in the case of us and the United States and the system of five storms, people in Florida, people in the Gulf coast are, would be in trouble, you know, South Carolina, these are people, Atlanta is a big city, millions and millions of people displaced. And as they sell the time, where are they going to go? What 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.
[00:27:51] Jordan Harbinger: One of the proposed solutions to this was really interesting, huge walls of wind turbines in hurricane-prone areas.
[00:27:58] Bill Nye: That I did not think was possible.
[00:28:00] Jordan Harbinger: 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.
[00:28:11] Bill Nye: A tropical storm is still a huge thing—
[00:28:14] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.
[00:28:14] Bill Nye: —for everybody but if you can take it from a five to a one that's good.
[00:28:19] Jordan Harbinger: Right.
[00:28:19] Bill Nye: 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 the trouble. The winds that knock the roof off post offices and all that, those are not the ones, or loft, you can reroute airplanes around storms like that. We do it all the time.
[00:28:48] Jordan Harbinger: Right.
[00:28:48] Bill Nye: 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.
[00:28:56] Jordan Harbinger: It's expensive, but you know, what's really expensive rebuilding an entire city or state because it's destroyed in a hurricane.
[00:29:02] Bill Nye: 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 sea water in the parking lot, too many days of the year.
[00:29:20] Jordan Harbinger: Geez.
[00:29:21] Bill Nye: And the wheels are rusting and so insurance companies don't want to cover it, you know, understandable. So see, well, let's make wheels out of stainless steel. Oh fine. Or that aside, when we talk about Florida, for example, being underwater, Houston, being under, 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.
[00:29:55] Jordan Harbinger: It just seems interesting as well, that you could tame a hurricane and generate electricity using the wind at the same time.
[00:30:02] Bill Nye: It's cool. It's a cool idea. Yeah.
[00:30:04] Jordan Harbinger: And there's a dad joke here that I just can't let go, which is, you know, wind power. I'm a huge fan.
[00:30:08] Bill Nye: Huh? See what he did there.
[00:30:10] Jordan Harbinger: I got two kids. It's going to, only getting worse.
[00:30:12] Bill Nye: 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 percent 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 efficient way. So let's get started.
[00:30:43] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:30:44] Bill Nye: Let you know, let's not whine about it. Let's go, people. Let's get it done.
[00:30:48] Jordan Harbinger: What do you think of nuclear power? It's got a bad sort of press reputation. It seems like a really good solution.
[00:30:54] Bill Nye: Well, it does and it doesn't. Here's the problem there. Nobody is sure of what to do with the waste.
[00:31:01] Jordan Harbinger: Mmm.
[00:31:01] Bill Nye: And this has caused all kinds of problems for the nimby, not in my backyard.
[00:31:07] Jordan Harbinger: Right.
[00:31:07] Bill Nye: And banana, build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything, banana.
[00:31:14] Jordan Harbinger: That I haven't heard. Nimby, I'm up on.
[00:31:16] Bill Nye: Yeah. And so keep in mind, Three Mile Island when I was in college. Oh no, no, Three Mile 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, but it almost did. Like it almost had this huge leak. People were freaked out. Then Chernobyl—
[00:31:36] Jordan Harbinger: Right.
[00:31:36] Bill Nye: —killed thousands of people. And you can reckon that it's still killing people.
[00:31:41] Jordan Harbinger: Oh yeah.
[00:31:41] Bill Nye: 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, the Chernobyl explosion was detected in Sweden before people in Ukraine were allowed to know about it. It was crazy. And then Fukushima, you know, and this is where—
[00:32:09] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:32:10] Bill Nye: 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 we'll see if it can be done on a small manageable. 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.
[00:32:44] Jordan Harbinger: I was going to ask about that. Tell us about this, because there's a breakthrough recently, I think.
[00:32:48] Bill Nye: Yeah. Well, the word recent, so when I was in high school, fusion was 40 years away and the joke is fusion is 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.
[00:33:15] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:33:16] Bill Nye: 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.
[00:33:39] 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 field.
[00:34:26] 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 throughs 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 had this electricity. So—
[00:34:58] Jordan Harbinger: Huh.
[00:34:58] Bill Nye: 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. With these people run around, oh, it's just kooks who don't want nuclear power. The public is very skeptical of nuclear power because of its ability to just cause so much trouble. You know, this Chernobyl thing, man, yes, come on.
[00:35:33] Jordan Harbinger: This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Bill Nye. We'll be right.
[00:35:38] This episode is sponsored in part by Shopify. Hear that little earworm. That's the satisfying sound of another sale on Shopify. The all-in-one commerce platform to start running and grow your business. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere. Giving mere mortals like you or me, the resources once reserved for big businesses. With a great-looking online store and tools to manage the day-to-day and drive sales. You don't need to know how to code or design to get started on Shopify. There's 24/7 support if you need help. Shopify is so popular that every 28 seconds a small business owner makes their first sale on Shopify. I love how Shopify makes it easy for anyone to successfully run their own business. Like our friend who just started selling pottery. Shopify powers millions of entrepreneurs, just like me from first sale to full scale.
[00:36:20] Jen Harbinger: Go to shopify.com/jordan, all lowercase, for a free 14-day trial and get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Start selling on Shopify today. Go to shopify.com/jordan right now, shopify.com/jordan.
[00:36:36] Jordan Harbinger: The show is sponsored in part by The James Altucher Show. The James Altucher Show has been in the top 10 of the how-to category since 2017. It's so — obviously, people live by this. The James Altucher Show has got a diverse range of topics from self-improvement, anti-aging, physics, science, politics to, I guess, you'd call it, a semi-reality show guests like Mark Cuban, Richard Branson, Tyra Banks, plus other fascinating guests like yours truly. James breaks them down like they are in a therapy session and figures out what makes them tick. Each episode is a, it's a rollercoaster story, which will not only put you on the edge of your seat, but you will also get life lessons there from. The James Altucher Show also has side-hustle Friday, where he talks to guests that make six figures from their side hustle or more. There's "I will make you a millionaire" where he helps three contestants, if you can call it that, make their first million. And the latest one Wall Street insane where you just have to hear James stories to believe them. They are crazy because James is crazy. I've known him for a while now, years, in fact, I'm pretty confident about that statement. Listen to The James Altucher Show, it's thought provoking, funny, thrilling. You're going to get lessons from each episode. Subscribe and follow The James Altucher Show, that's A-L-T-U-C-H-E-R, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcast.
[00:37:45] 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 jordanharbinger.com/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.
[00:38:13] Now for the rest of my conversation with Bill Nye.
[00:38:17] 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—
[00:38:34] Bill Nye: 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 the sky blue? Why does water run downhill? What happened to that ice? But then we get too many things going on, perhaps, or we get a lot of things going on. 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.
[00:39:09] Jordan Harbinger: 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?
[00:39:19] Bill Nye: I don't know, man.
[00:39:20] Jordan Harbinger: Maybe not.
[00:39:20] Bill Nye: I sure am. My parents, my dad especially was well spoken on this. He said you want to leave the world better than you found it.
[00:39:27] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm. I like that.
[00:39:28] Bill Nye: 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.
[00:40:04] Jordan Harbinger: 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?
[00:40:27] Bill Nye: I say all the time vote.
[00:40:28] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:40:29] Bill Nye: 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 electoral transmission systems that are smart. We need big electoral 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.
[00:41:17] 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.
[00:42:09] 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 Ogallala 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 it done.
[00:42:36] Jordan Harbinger: 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.
[00:43:18] Bill Nye: I know what you're saying, but this business of the backfire effect, you've heard people say double down.
[00:43:23] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:43:23] Bill Nye: It's when you're in denial and 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 that heck." We all do that to some extent. But right now this denial of the facts is getting really extraordinary. I mean, I think we'd all agree. Red is green. Green is red or just, it's like crazy out there.
[00:43:46] 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's 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 these, 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's 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.
[00:44:58] So what we want to do is imbue in everybody or provide education 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.
[00:45:26] 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.
[00:46:20] So when someone says, "We're putting extra carbon oxide 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 is 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 percent of scientists saying one thing and barely two percent saying something else, in that example.
[00:47:03] 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.
[00:47:41] 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 got to just take care of things that aren't your fault.
[00:47:52] Jordan Harbinger: The end of our time together is also Nye.
[00:47:55] Bill Nye: Huh? See what he did there.
[00:47:56] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I had to, I had to. I've highlighted that in green in my notes.
[00:48:01] 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.
[00:48:10] Bill Nye: The show is called The End is Nye, everybody, streaming on Peacock. Turn it up loud.
[00:48:16] Jordan Harbinger: Thanks, Bill.
[00:48:19] 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.
[00:48:35] Neil deGrasse Tyson: Walt Whitman. "When I heard the learn'd 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 look'd up in perfect silence at the stars."
[00:49:14] 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 than have the writer step in between me and it, and interpose his or her own interpretation.
[00:49:49] 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.
[00:50:00] Jordan Harbinger: Ah, man.
[00:50:01] Neil deGrasse Tyson: 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 thus far?
[00:50:22] Jordan Harbinger: For more, including how science denial has gained a global foothold, what it'll take for the US 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.
[00:50:40] 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 — 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?
[00:50:58] Anyway, Bill Nye has seven honorary doctoral degrees to my zero. So I guess we have to call him doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor 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.
[00:51:30] 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.
[00:51:59] 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 is a good time to do it. You can go to ratethispodcast.com/jordan or just jordanharbinger.com/review if you need instructions. I could usually help counterbalancing all the kooks that come out whenever I do episodes like this.
[00:52:25] 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 healthcare 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.
[00:52:53] 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 is part of your thing, do you get to write those off? I guess I've got some questions for next time.
[00:53:03] Big, thank you to Bill Nye. Links to all things Bill will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Transcripts are on the show notes. Videos are up on YouTube. Advertisers, deals, and discount codes, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. I'm at @JordanHarbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or connect with me right there on LinkedIn.
[00:53:23] 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 in podcasting and in business, and be able to maintain a large circle, both professionally and socially. The course is free. jordanharbinger.com/course is where you can find it. I'm teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty and create opportunities for yourself and for others and not feel gross doing it, jordanharbinger.com/course.
[00:53:48] This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, 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.
Sign up to receive email updates
Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you periodic updates about the podcast.