- I am here with Bill Nye,
to some the Science Guy,
to me just Bill.
- Sure, yes, Bill.
- Bill, you have a brand new
podcast out, Science Rules.
- Yes, turn it up loud, everybody.
- Make it loud, you have now, to be clear,
this is my podcast here
so the tables have turned.
Not literally, people
can't see that at home,
actually they could see it at home
because we do have four cameras here.
- Yeah, when you're driving
you want four cameras.
- You need four cameras,
how many cameras do you
have on your podcast?
- We don't have any.
- Do you feel, is that a flaw?
- No, I feel it's kind of a strength.
Radio is the most visual medium.
(laughs)
- Again, you're air tight
with your facts, Bill, always.
Thank you for coming--
- Facts, facts.
(laughs)
- Bill, do you consider
yourself an activist?
- Yeah but I think anybody
who is scientifically literate
becomes an environmentalist
and I guess that makes you an activist.
But I don't chain myself to
bulldozers and stuff like that.
- Why not?
- It seems time consuming
and I'm involved in other
aspects of the activism matrix.
(laughs)
- On this show we talked
to a lot of people
who consider themselves
activists who go out,
they see something wrong with the world,
they wanna interact with it
and change it in some way.
- Well, I want to change the world, yeah,
does that make me an activist?
- I don't know, I guess it,
what is your definition of activist?
Perhaps somebody who takes
action to change the world so,
yeah, you do it without
chaining yourself to--
- But I do other stuff.
- Well.
- I mean, yeah, I do other things.
- I don't want to make you feel defensive
but what do you do, Bill?
- I go onto TV and talk
about climate change.
- What is the most effective
way to enact change in climate?
- Vote.
- Vote?
- Here's what I think happened,
you went down to Louisiana, right?
- I did.
- And you met people who at best
were ambivalent about the activism.
- I met the whole panoply
of people down in Louisiana.
- The panoply.
- Is that, I don't know
if I used that correct.
- You might have.
- I was gonna say myriad
but I always get confused with myriad,
if it's a myriad or the
myriad so I said panoply
and I'm sticking with it.
- You met a different people.
- I met different people in Louisiana.
- People with different points of view.
- That's what I met in Louisiana,
I met people who would
consider themselves activists
who do lock themselves to pipelines
to try to stop it from taking place.
I met activists, people
who go by the rules
who go out into the
Bayou, they take notes,
they file complaints through
the local governments
to try to enact change
and then I met people who were like,
these people should just get out of here
because they don't understand
how the economy works down here
and there's sort of an inherent fight
between all three groups.
Overall most people wanted change,
wanted the betterment of that area.
But I can't say anybody figured out
exactly the best way to get that.
- Well here's the thing,
people say to me, Bill Nye,
what can I do, what can I
do about climate change?
What can an individual do?
And we all want to feel empowered somehow,
we all wanna do something.
But as I say all the time,
climate change isn't a case of
just recycling water bottles
or driving a hybrid car,
we need big changes,
we need major changes, the
word sweeping comes to mind.
But for that it's gonna take voting
and putting people in government
who are willing to address the problem,
the problem being climate change.
So as I say, there's three things we want
for everybody in the world, clean water,
renewably produced
electricity that's reliable,
and access to the internet
for everybody in the world.
And to do that it's gonna take
not burning fossil fuels
to make electricity
but getting it some other way.
When we talk about energy we're
talking about electricity,
electricity is magical,
you can have a podcast,
fancy microphones, four cameras.
- Only the best.
- Or you can make toast with
electricity, it's amazing.
- I wouldn't put those out
on an equal playing field,
there's a lot of people
who are working here
on what they would consider
as more productive than toast.
- Okay, I'm open-minded.
(laughs)
But I'll I'll bet you there's
a lot more toast slices cooked
than there are podcast cast.
- Actually, I don't even know.
For every improviser
there's 17 podcasts so.
- All right, so that aside,
this is gonna take huge
changes and it's gonna,
just technically from an
engineering standpoint,
we're gonna have to stop having
our electricity production
concentrated as strongly as it is now
and have it distributed,
solar panels on top of every Walmart
and then we need an electoral grid
that can move electricity around
the way we move mobile phone
calls around, cell phones.
And so this is doable but
it's gonna require investment.
Investment, what do you
want people to pay taxes?
Yes.
Yes, so my parents were both
veterans of World War II,
I talk about this all the time
and here's another example
of when I'm talking about it,
and they had a global problem.
they got her done in five
years at great sacrifice
and people paid taxes and
they made tanks and airplanes
and people went to war and died
for the betterment of humankind
and I'm not saying we have to go to war
and die over climate change
but we have to invest,
this is not extraordinary, and by the way,
we are in the US conducting
this in US accented English,
the US is the world's third
most populous country.
China, India, which will probably
reverse into India, China,
and then the United States,
there's a third of a billion people.
So why should we have a
libertarian or small government,
what are you talking about?
There's 300 plus million people
that are all trying to
drive and burn gasoline
and whatever else they're doing.
- Well you bring up World War II,
what's different between
now and World War II
is it felt like, at
least the stories I hear,
you have the bad guy Nazis,
which was easy for
Americans to come together.
- Well, everybody, yeah.
- Everybody can come together.
- Yes.
- Yet for some reason we
feel so fractured right now
that the idea of the end
of life on the horizon
isn't enough to pull us all together.
- well the trouble is it's slow motion,
we didn't have a Pearl Harbor
and we don't have a 9/11
and so the climate change
is a much more subtle
and slow-moving problem
but the consequences are actually,
I think you can reckon
them to be much larger
because it will affect seven
and a half billion people,
not a few hundred mil,
a few hundred million.
- Well see, and you're also,
you are often described as a communicator,
I like to put you on par with
like the great communicator,
like Barack Obama.
- Oh yeah, Bill Nye,
Barack O, sure six to one.
And the same people hate us both.
- So if we need a Pearl Harbor
to draw people's attention
to this global crisis
and somebody who is attempting
to communicate this to people
attempting to get people's attention,
I talked to a lot of other folks
in the entertainment industry,
in many different industries
who are trying to wave
the flag, sound the alarm,
get people to pay attention.
- The climate change flag.
- The climate change flag.
- Or if there were one.
- The recyclable, the renewable--
- Recycling's good.
- Yeah, uh huh, how do
you send up that flag?
- Well here's what we're
pointing out right now,
suppose you had Hurricane
Michael, Hurricane--
- We had Irene.
- Irene, yeah.
And you talked to
anybody from New Orleans,
Katrina is still this thing.
Okay, suppose we had all these storms
and we had no explanation for it.
Suppose we had all these
droughts in California
then these heavy rains causing
these flooding mudslides,
suppose we had a blizzard
in the Midwest in late April
and we didn't know why it was happening,
that would be really troubling.
But we do know why it's happening,
there's more heat energy in the atmosphere
so the atmosphere is more turbulent
and you get bigger storms,
more frequent and stronger storms.
- You talked a lot about curiosity,
how important that is--
- Yes!
I was wondering about that.
- I'm very curious about
your interest in curiosity.
But do we have a death
of curiosity right now?
- We have a weird anti science movement
and it's enabled by, first of all,
really just to point fingers,
it started with the fossil fuel industry
where they were very successful
at introducing the idea
that scientific uncertainty
about climate change
or the role of carbon dioxide and methane
was the scientific uncertainty
about the exact effects
plus or minus 2% was the
same as plus or minus 100%,
plus or minus doubt about everything.
And that's just absolutely
wrong and then the internet,
for better or for worse, has enabled
everybody to sound about the same
and people, we all look for easy answers.
So denying it is much easier
than getting to work on it.
Especially since I keep saying,
I mean, recycling bottles
is good, that's good,
driving less or more efficiently is good
but we need big, think big.
Huge, wind turbines.
- It's like a monster truck rally.
- Well yeah, well much bigger than that.
- Larger than a monster truck rally?
- And why not have, and so if I may,
I'm not changing the subject,
if I may whine and complain,
NASCAR celebrates this
80 year old technology.
What are you doing, what?
I mean, horse racing's cool, yes,
but you don't take a horse to work and it,
very, very few people take
a horse to work anymore.
So, you know, then more about me,
my grandfather was in
World War I on a horse,
he rode a horse at night
and put chlorine in the Lister bags,
in the canteens and to prevent dysentery
or do his best to prevent dysentery
but 25 years later during
people fighting World War II
they weren't riding horses,
the transportation
system was revolutionized
in a couple decades,
we can do this, people.
Electric cars don't know
where the electrons come from.
- Now do you, as somebody who--
- No, whether if they're
made. if the electrons,
if the electricity is produced renewably
the cars are of great benefit,
if their electrons are
produced by burning fossil fuel
the benefit is smaller
but it's nevertheless a little benefit
'cause you're not spreading
the pollution out everywhere.
- There is a history of us evolving
and to getting to a better place
where we can adapt to the
times but as you just said,
that what we have right
now is the internet,
we have the ability for
all voices to be elevated.
Are you an optimist when you
look at something like that
as an enabler for change?
- You have freedom of speech,
we have freedom of speech
but you cannot yell fire
in a crowded theater,
there's some rules.
So the internet's gonna get
regulated I think soon enough,
you just can't publish any
crazy thing loudly to everybody
and it sounds, well that's not,
I'm sorry, people, it's
just what's coming because
we had all this trouble
without regulation, you know.
So even if you're a broadcaster
on conventional television
or publishing a newspaper
you can't print just anything,
we have libel laws, you know,
and we have slander.
So we'll do the same
thing with the internet,
slowly, ever so slowly
there'll be trusted sources
and the dark web will
continue to web it's darkness
but we can fix this, but
the sooner the better.
- Yeah, what's our timeline here?
- Well when you talk about climate change
the IPCC, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change,
says, you know, 12 years, okay.
But, everybody, the Earth's gonna be here
no matter what we do, what we
wanna do is preserve the Earth
for us, for humans.
And the other strange thing
these people have so much
trouble understanding,
it's not that the earth used to have
more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
in the ancient dinosaur days.
It's the speed at which
we're adding carbon dioxide,
this is not rocket surgery,
people, look at the graph.
We have we have gone from
280 parts per million
to over 400 parts per
million in just two centuries
rather than two millennia or 10 millennia.
We're doing it in 10
years, for crying out loud,
let's go, people, let's get to work.
- So to make it about me.
- Good.
- My experience in seeing these
people who are camping out,
who feels this is such a dire situation
that they want to go and lock
themselves to a pipeline,
what do you say to people like that,
do you see that as effective protest?
Is that is that an inspiring
move or is that wasted energy?
- Well, does it prevent the pipeline?
- No, I think it creates noise,
I think it delays
potentially the inevitable.
- But you're talking about it.
- Yes.
- So maybe that's good.
- So there is potential energy in there.
- You're working the problem
from both ends, yeah.
But the most effective thing would just be
to have the climate
change deniers age out,
as the saying goes.
Very few climate change deniers are young.
- Not the cool thing.
- Well, you guys grew up with facts.
When the old people are no longer voting
or no longer running the government
everything's gonna change but
will it happen fast enough
to preserve quality of life
for billions of people, we'll see.
- So in the end, pray for death.
- There's a lot of evidence to suggest
that you're gonna die, Jordan,
and I don't want to shock to you.
- Don't, please don't
share any of that with me.
- There's no hurry, there's no hurry.
And you know, they said,
my dad always said,
don't miss weddings or funerals.
But you probably miss your
own funeral, probably.
- I hope not, I like to
show up for everything,
I don't wanna miss out.
- The people that make
extraordinary claims
that you don't miss your own funeral
but I'm not counting on it.
But I digress only a little bit,
young people are gonna make these changes,
they're gonna get it done but
will they get it done quickly?
That's the question.
If you're in Bangladesh and
you have to, you're displaced
and then there's a drought
in Africa and then it's just,
you know, the US military
has written extensively
about the problems associated
with displaced populations
as the climate changes, changes
faster than we're used to.
- For people who are listening at home
or who are watching on YouTube
or when this thing gets dictated
and put down into a novel and
are reading it in their novel.
- When people have trouble sleeping.
- Yeah, exactly, that's
our target demo right now.
What is the thing they can do?
If they're listing this they're
angry, they're frustrated,
they want change, they can vote.
- Vote and support candidates
that are gonna do something
about climate change.
- Science Rules.
- Science Rules.
- What are you talking
about with Science Rules?
- Everything that has to do
with science which is everything
so we have, we've got a few in
the can, that's podcast talk,
we have a neuroscientist
talking about the nature of consciousness,
we have a nuclear weapons expert
talking about what we should
do with nuclear material
and is it vulnerable to,
are we ready for the dirty bomb, no.
We have genetically modified foods,
a guy from Monsanto, ah!
- Oh god.
- And then why people live to be over 100,
we have that guy on.
- Wait there's a guy who knows?
- He's the guy, yeah
Nir Barzilai, Barzilai,
he's a cool guy and he studies people
who live to be extraordinarily old.
- And what has he found?
- Fasting seems to be the trick
and the word fasting, not extreme fasting,
just skipping a meal, like
16 hours without eating.
- That's it?
- Well, and being happy.
- Oh, well, I thought it was easy.
- Well not for you, no.
I mean, you're just a miserable jaded man.
- Bill, let's not get into
this now, for god's sakes.
- Well I feel it, man.
- I'm exuding it right now.
I haven't eaten in 16 hours!
- Both of us.
Well that's good, you're
gonna extend your life.
- But it's making me so unhappy.
