Bill Nye “the Science Guy” is an American science educator, engineer, comedian, television presenter, author, and inventor with a mission to help foster a scientifically literate society and to help people everywhere understand and appreciate the science that makes our world work. Making science entertaining and accessible is something Bill has been passionate about his entire life. Bill is a seven time Emmy Award winner and was involved in placing the first sundial on Mars.

Today, Bill joins me to share his story. We talk about the young Bill Nye and the people and events that acted as his greatest influences. He talks about his experience doing stand-up and his life during the war in Vietnam. He discusses the different categories of science and the importance of its advancement. He discusses the role of Congress in this advancement and offers his solutions for political problems. He discusses the exploration of Europa and fields a series of rapid-fire questions.

“BY THE TIME SOMEBODY’S EIGHT YEARS OLD, HIS OR HER ABILITY TO REASON IS PRETTY GOOD. IT’S THE LIFE EXPERIENCE THAT YOU’RE MISSING.”

-

“BRAVERY IS WHEN YOU’VE ACTUALLY ASSESSED THE DANGER.”

- BILL NYE

This week on Kathy Sullivan Explores:

• Bill Nye and the sundial on Mars
• Bill’s experience as an engineer
• The role of dancing in Bill’s life
• Political discussion
• The importance of the advancement of science

Mentioned Resources:

• The Planetary Society
• The Science Rules Podcast

Credits:

Inter Astra

Executive Producer: Toby Goodman

Audio & Sound Design: Lee Turner

Artwork: Ryan Field

Production by CxS Partners LTD 

First published - June 10th, 2021

AI TRANSCRIPT -

This podcast is brought to you by the InterAstra Institute, the global public square for the business of space. Join us at interaastra.space.

I've been asked if you could go anywhere in the cosmos, where would you go?

Yes.

Hawaii. Hawaii is pretty good.

Hawaii is pretty good.

I really like Hawaii.

Personal destination, personal experience. Moon or Mars?

Oh, Mars, for sure. But I gotta be able to come back. I mean Okay. These places are hostile.

Serious travel insurance required. Yeah. I am the only person to have walked in space and gone to the deepest point in the ocean. Hi. I'm Kathy Sullivan, and I'm an explorer. Exploring doesn't always have to involve going to some remote or exotic place. It simply requires your commitment to put curiosity into action. So join me on this podcast journey as I reflect on lessons learned from life so far and from my brilliant and ever inquisitive guests.

We'll explore together in this very moment from right where you are, spaceship not required. Welcome to Kathy Sullivan Explores. Before we take off, I have a gift for you. I believe that no matter where you are today, an active thirst for knowledge will help unlock your ability to live a life of meaning and happiness. So I'm sharing some lessons I've learned on my road less traveled. Over at kathysullivannexplores.com, you'll find my 7 astronaut tips to improving your life on earth. When you sign up, I'll send them to you. And also make sure you're the first to discover future podcast episodes and learn more about exciting adventures ahead.

Just head on over to kathysullivan explores.com. I'm delighted to be talking today with a long time friend and colleague, Bill Nye. Yes. As in Bill Nye, the science guy. And I should probably stop right there since that moniker is all the introduction millions of you need. Besides Bill, it would take me half the episode to come near doing justice to your resume. Stand up comic, author, educator, 7 time Emmy Award winner, and my personal very favorite item, the man who placed the first sundial on Mars. Bill, it's a delight to have you on the show.

Thank you, Kathy. I wasn't the guy who put the sundial on Mars, but thank you. I'm very proud of that little thing.

I'm gonna attribute it to you.

I was involved for sure. Well, you know, so, everybody, this is a very cool little thing to me. If you're able-bodied, that is to say if you have eyesight, and you look outside on a sunny day, the world looks a certain way. If I showed you that same interior shot, interior picture on that same sunny day, you could tell the difference between daylight and room light. And most of us have never really thought about why we were able to tell the difference, but a lot of it is the light that comes to the Earth's surface from the sky. So the sun is not the only source of light on the Earth's surface. Right. The sky, this great big blue thing, adds all this blue light.

Well, on Mars, it adds this orange light, whatever that color is, salmon. And so the geologists now you're an oceanographer, but you've spent a lot of time with rocks.

I did. I started as classical geology.

Yep. So these people, like doctor Sullivan, are just kooky for the color of rocks. They wanna know the color of the rock, and they wanna walk up to it and smack it with their rock hammer and think deep thoughts about the inside versus the outside.

It tells you a lot about where that rock came from and how.

Every rock tells a story. So, anyway, getting the colors right on Mars was of great interest. So the the trick is to look at shadows with cameras. You look at the shadow, and so then you can determine a lot of the color of the shadow comes from the sky. Next time you're out there with a white shirt or a paper serviette or whatever you got, make a shadow, and you'll see the shadow isn't just gray, but it's a little bit light blue from the Earth's sky. And most of us notice it without thinking about it. It's very cool.

Very cool. Very cool. Well, I wanna explore a number of things with you here today, Bill, and where I'd like to start is with who the young Bill Nye was. I know you were raised in Washington, DC, and your your mother had been a code breaker, one of the Goucher Girl code breakers during the war. Your dad had also served in the war, in fact, had a very long stint as a prisoner of war.

I don't recommend it if you get a chance. Yeah.

Where he

got it, sir? Like it was a real drag. Yeah.

But tell me more about who is the young Bill Nye? Tell me more about your family. Were you indoor, outdoor family? Were you a very intellectual kind of family full of books? What was your life like up to, say, middle school?

Well, I'll point out a seminal moment. I got stung by a bee, and this was traumatic. I was very concerned. I was crying How old were you? 4 or 5.

Okay.

And it was very troubling. But the way one does when you face danger, I became fascinated with bees. I spent a lot of time watching bees, and I'm gonna claim, just for the sake of storytelling, that summer. But maybe it was many summers. And I got to the point where I was convinced I was seeing the same bee coming and going from the azalea bushes, the front yard. And they fill their pollen baskets, and you don't have to know anything about it. You go, what is wow. How do they do this? And then in Ripley's Believe It or Not, which is in the Washington Post, I was a paper boy, everybody.

I'm a certain age.

Delivering papers?

Delivering papers on Sundays in Ripley's Believe It or Not. From time to time, they would run the story in various forms, but it was roughly according to aerodynamic theory, bees cannot fly. Well, you left. But

Yeah. No. It's true.

I was I was fascinated.

Yeah. I mean helicopters have no business flying.

That's right.

But they do.

I was fascinated. Even then, I was able to reason that the problem was not with the b. The problem must be with the theory. You know? Like, even then

That's a pretty profound insight if you're still 4.

Well, by that point, seriously, everybody. By that point, I was probably 8 or 9. And I'm not kidding. By the time somebody's 8 years old, his or her ability to reason is pretty good. It's the life ex 10 years old. It's the life experience that you're missing. Anyway, you know, everybody, bees, the flight of bees wasn't really understood till the 19 nineties when this computational fluid dynamics

The ability to model the wing motion.

Yeah. It's some crazy thing where their wings go backwards through this whirlpool, this vortex.

And that they sort of rotate as if you're twist holding your arms at your side and twisting them. They don't just flap like we think of in a car. Yeah.

Yeah. They don't just go up and down. They Yeah. They twist trailing edge forward. It's crazy. And they do it, you know, 20 times a second or something.

So in my family, when we were really little, my dad was an engineer. My mom was a What branch?

What branch?

Arrow. Yeah. Sort of the structures and mechanics. But it was sort of a family sport in our family to spot something new and and have my parents say, oh, that's interesting. Let's think about that. Yeah. I wonder how that and wonder with us and sort of model to us as co explorers the sort of habits of mind that help build our reason our observation powers and our reasoning muscles. Was your family like that with the talents of both your parents?

Well, my father, he majored in political science. And then because of World War 2, he ended up as a prisoner of war. But when he came back, he became a salesman. He sold advertising. He was but he referred to himself as Ned Nye boy scientist.

Did he really?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. As I said alluded to rather earlier, was fascinated with sundials because, apparently, in prisoner of war camp, they confiscated everybody's watch. Oh, they didn't know any their jewelry. Yeah. Yeah. So he spent a lot of time watching shadows of the sun, and all sorts of family myths have emerged about how much how skilled he was at mnemonics, as we call it, the sundial sundial.

Did he put a sundial in your backyard?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. My brother still has it. And so Oh, wow. Oh, yeah. It's made of bronze, and there was a guy in the Washington DC area who was a naval captain. And the people in the navy at that time were all skilled in, celestial celestial navigation.

Celestial navigation.

Yeah. Now the navy always makes sure there's several people on board that can still navigate by the stars in case global positioning is zapped by some either foreign power or the coronal mass ejection from the sun or whatever. No. For real. No.

I know. It's true. And so The ultimate backup.

He would do the calculations of the sundial table, as it's called. The the part where the hour markings is called the table. But he wasn't, you know, at your level of PhD mathematics or whatever. But he he liked it. And my mom, as you alluded to, was recruited by all accounts because she was good at math and science. And I will say, objectively, my mother was good at puzzles. That's for sure. Crossword puzzles.

She and my dad, when they were getting along, would compose limericks. It was like a thing. Wow. Family thing. Yeah. And my father my father was quite a man of letters. He was in law school when the whole thing started. And

Fascinating.

He well, he liked words. By their pronouns, ye shall know them and all sorts of He was he was a nerd that way.

So you're growing up with Ned Nighvoy, a Zionist, and somewhere along the way and I don't know if this is in your childhood or after you sort of began to move into the, you know, the performance and explaining of science. I'm curious when the shoe dropped, when the switch flipped and you realized you wanted to become an engineer, and also when the the other switch flipped and you sort of consciously decided you wanted to be the next mister wizard. Was mister wizard a childhood TV idol?

Oh, man. Mister wizard, everybody. Don Herbert was very influential on me. So Don Herbert watched mister wizard was the title of his original show. He was black and white, and it was on CBS, I believe. Now this is based on research I did for writing. I wrote a tribute, not really an epitaph, an essay about him when he died a few years ago. He started in Philadelphia, and he just thought that kids should be excited about science the way he would.

He was an actor. He was very good. Yeah. But he had a he was a

I loved his show.

You know, liberal arts educated guy with an interest in science. And so, you know, when you're in love, you wanna tell the world, as Carl Sagan often said. And so he was very influential. I like to say Don Herbert sent this country to the moon. You wouldn't have gone flying.

Well, he sure helped.

Yeah. Without Don Herbert. So, anyway, I admired him. But I wanted to be an engineer when I got a job at a bike shop. So maybe by accident, my parents gave me a very nice bicycle, a little bigger than I was, a Schwinn Continental. And by modern standards, it was a heavy bike. But by in those days, wow. It was just the 10 speed.

I remember those. They were fabulous.

Well, it's still odd. But, anyway yeah. Yeah. So I just discovered that as a disenchanted tween or teenager, I could just go anywhere on a bike. So I would by the time I was 15, I was routinely riding 50 or 60 miles a day. It was like a thing. And this is back before everybody had cycling shoes and cycling shorts and stuff, or they weren't very common. Anyway, I really like bicycles.

So I got a job at a bike shop as a mechanic. I was too young. My hands were literally too small. But I just thought bikes were cool, and there was a guy who worked there who was in engineering school at Lehigh. This was in Lehigh University Yeah. In Bethel, Mallintown, Pennsylvania. I just thought he just said, see, engineering's everywhere. Mechanical engineering's everywhere.

Mechanical and so I just thought that's cool. And then I realized that bicycles and airplanes are part of the same discipline. Yep. Mach Aero, mechanical aerospace. I went, that's for me, man. And so, in high school, I just had a really good physics teacher, mister Lang. I still email him from time to time. He encouraged me, Kathy, to apply for the AP exam, advanced placement, when it was this new thing.

Yeah. Oh, this new thing. Like, another test you can take. You know? Like

Yes, boys and girls. We are that old, Bill and I.

Yeah. But you guys, this SAT, scholastic aptitude test, then there was the PSAT, preliminary scholastic. Then there were the achievement tests. All these standardized tests, which nowadays people are attributing to difficulties. Apparently, a problem for people of color and women getting into advanced graduate programs is the inherent bias in these tests. But, man, I didn't know. I took the freaking test. He encouraged me to apply to Cornell, and I did.

And then I took one class from Carl Sagan, this famous guy, and it changed my life. And so, Kathy, you just don't know what's gonna happen. You just get started.

You never know. There are all these twists and turns on the road of life. So what was that class you took with Carl?

I took astronomy 102, the solar system.

Like freshman year?

No. As a senior. This is the whole thing. This is what I did not figure out, everybody. And when my college transcript is made public and I'm discredited as a person, the reason is I did not figure out that what you do is take one fun course. I didn't know that. I'm just taking linguistics 307. I was taking German.

I was trying to learn all this stuff that was just too much. And so it affected all of my grades. But senior year

You got it figured out.

Yes. I took I took this one class, astronomy class, for freshman or 100 level class as a senior. And by then, Kathy, I had whatever you pick a number, 6 semesters of calculus. Like, the algebra of astronomy was pretty straightforward. And it was fun. And I wrote a paper, and I got an a, and that was cool. But his way of speaking, Carl Sagan's manner, I mean, he was like a poet, you guys. I mean, he's just really something.

And so

And just extemporaneously, he was

poetic. Like it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But He's very thoughtful, and the guys see the grad students and gals that he had around were very thoughtful. You know, Steve Soter Yep. He worked on the show Cosmos, and he works for Neil deGrasse Tyson now at the American Museum of Natural History.

These people he had around him were very cool. And so I joined the Planetary Society in 1980 when he started it. I got a paper letter in the mail, people. You may remember this technology. Plant based.

And was that? And Was that was the planetary society the sort of binding thread that carried your relationship to Carl forward?

Or

Oh, yeah. Because you guys you guys really became very close, and I know he played

a not very close. Role in But he had a huge effect on me. That's for sure, man. So, everybody, this is this part of the story is not apocryphal. I started doing these TV things in Seattle because it was fun.

Wait. I wanna back you up some. Yeah. Somewhere I read that you got your comedy start because you agreed to sign into a contest for, like, a Steve Ball.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

So You gotta tell us more about that contest. You don't get away with that one liner.

Well okay. So just more about me. So just the other day, we had a reunion of my freshman dorm dormitory online like this, Zoom style. And I saw electronically my freshman roommate, Dave Lacks. I went into mechanical engineering. He went into material science. He's that he's really, like, chemistry and that sort of thing. He's another you know, Kathy, these people I went to school with, they're so freaking smart.

So, like, you hold your cell phone to your head Yeah. The impedance, it changes the dynamic resistance of the antenna. You know, it's like when you were holding the rabbit ears of an old television Yep. Yeah. The human body is full of salt water, and it changes the impedance, the way that antenna responds. So Dave is now this hugely successful engineer in this startup, and he sold his patents. And, you know, I'm some clown. But, anyway, I saw him on the TV the other day on the Zoom call.

And he freshman year, we were friends. Senior year, we'd gone separate ways in different schools at university. And he lived behind me in what's an area called College Town, creatively, in Ithaca, New York. And he said, you gotta see this guy. You gotta come see this guy. So his house had this extraordinary new technology, cable television. Woah. Yeah.

Exactly. Wow. 1977, the disco era. Yeah. So he said, you gotta come see this guy. So it was it was Steve Martin on video at the boarding house, and The Boarding House is a nightclub in San Francisco. It's still there. It's not I mean, it's as successful as ever.

I guess after the pandemic washes through, it'll be back in days. Anyway, he said you gotta come see these guys just like you. His his comedic sensibility is just like you. I paraphrase. But so then a year later, Warner Brothers Records sponsored this contest. And I tell everybody, just as an observer of the human condition in the United States, English speaking country, this and that, Steve Martin's first two albums were so influential. He just changed the way everybody thought about stand up comedy to the point where every big city, Columbus Yeah. New York, every city had 1 or 2, sometimes 3 comedy clubs.

Not just nightclubs where you'd go to see a variety show with a band, a singer, a juggler.

Dedicated comedy shops. Comedy. Yeah. Montreal, Toronto.

So I entered this contest in Seattle, and I won with respect to the other competitors. I won.

Well, you always have reminded me outwardly of Bill Murray.

Bill Murray or Steve Martin or both?

Steve. Sorry. Steve Martin. Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, well, they worked together. Anyway, I did not advance beyond Seattle. The guy who ultimately won was from Nashville, and maybe still is from Nashville. And he can play the banjo. He's like the real deal. Oh, yeah. Anyway, that got me trying to do stand up comedy.

You know, after you get last,

I did do some stand up? You actually had to perform

to Oh, yeah. Well, that no. You didn't just look like him. You had to do Okay. You were expected to tell his comedy hilarious jokes.

Was that, like, a natural thing to you? I mean, had you ever been on a large stage or any size stage before doing your your dormmates and your fraternity brothers and probably family parties. But was that a leap, or was that just like putting on a comfortable shoe?

It was very comfortable, but or and. I was a ham. You know? I was in taming of the shrew in high school. I wasn't a genius, but I was alright. And I claim that comedy or humor was valued in my family. That is a claim, and, it's hard to dismiss.

If your parents are writing limericks, that's

I think my father was very funny. He's very dry. And I claim that's part of the reason he was able to live through prisoner of war camp was Yeah. His sense of humor. And

It was like 5 years he was

44 months is the number. So almost 4 years, almost 48 months. And, you know, he was captured from Wake Island, everybody, and you've never heard of it. But you go to Hawaii, Pearl Harbor, then you go another 5,000 nautical miles, and it's just a toll in the middle of Pacific Ocean, no place. But was tactically, I guess it still is, of importance because the airplanes, the Boeing Clipper flying boat airplane would refuel at Pearl Harbor and then refuel at Wake Island.

At Wake.

And this I mean, Wake Island, you guys, is not even a mile across. And

No. It's barely big enough to hold a runway. It's a vital stepping stone.

Yeah. Have you been there?

I have not. But oceanographer that I am, I do know the geography out there.

Yeah. Yeah. And so I've talked to a couple Navy pilots who were very familiar with it because, apparently, when you're doing maneuvers out there, it's a place you're supposed to know about for emergency landing. Yeah. So I I've never

been Everything else everything else is blue, so you wanna know where those little strips are.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, anyway, all that aside, my father, I claim, was very funny. My mother was very dry, had a dry sense of humor. And so I was brought up with that. And my brother and I, my older brother, who is still older, would sit and watch The Tonight Show. No. He can't he can't do anything about it.

And so we would watch The Tonight Show, and my brother, for some reason, very much respected the monologue. So we were we were supposed to be in bed. We're not supposed to be up. But we would watch from 11:30 to about 11:38, whatever, and listen to Johnny Carson tell those first 10 jokes just expertly. You know, just his

time was fantastic.

Yeah. Yeah. So I claim I was brought up with that. And so when it was time to be on stage telling jokes, I was very comfortable. And it was it's fun. It's also crazy making. You know? I mean, I was hanging out with these guys briefly, and they were mostly men. There were a few women.

But you work 45 minutes a day. A day.

Yeah.

Yeah. Alright. And then the rest of the time, you're trying to perfect your jokes. I just never played at that high level. I remember very well when these guys like a Whitney Brown I hope someday to be the Whitney Brown. I remember when Jerry Seinfeld would come through Seattle. So in the early, early days of this technology, he had a very small tape recorder in his sport coat pocket, the inside pocket. Yeah.

And he would listen every night to his routine. And then every day, he had a list of his jokes, and he would rate whether or not they worked. A lot of the not a lot. Almost everybody else did not have that kind of discipline and did not become that successful.

Yeah. There's no substitution for doing the reps, man.

Yeah. Exactly. Doing the reps. And, of course, you know, these guys and Jerry Seinfeld, they're funny people. Their comedic timing is outstanding to start with. But

But it but it's not just altogether a natural talent. I mean, the really good ones, they work on that. They work like you build a muscle at the gym. They work on refining and honing and improving.

There's also this not apocryphal story, apparently, of Steve Martin correcting his wife. No. That no. You missed a word there. You know? I guess, like

I'll bet that went over well. Well, no.

I think it probably did eventually. I mean but the timing of every single word is important, and it takes a lot of discipline. You know? But neither here nor there.

So you start doing some of your comedy stuff, if I know the story properly, while you're still a mechanical engineer at Boeing.

So I started at Boeing, and then the guy, my boss, Dave Licey, if you're still out there, thank you for the job. It was great. He says, we want you to come work on 767, this new airplane, new at that time. And the 767 was gonna have a couple innovations, 2 engines instead of 4. Mhmm. These plug doors. There was gonna be some innovations in the hydraulic control systems, which was my thing. But I said, well, when's that plane gonna fly? Oh, you know, 15 years, something like that.

When you're a young guy

That you don't wanna hear that.

15 years? Like, is that even a number? Is that is that a real thing?

I'm gonna be I'm gonna be updating drawings for 15 years.

Exactly. So I went, wow. So I got a job offer. I also had this thing where I didn't wanna work on military things. I had this do gooder anti Vietnam war spirit. Oh, and the reason I didn't go to Vietnam, Kathy, was because I missed it by 6 months. I was 17 and a half when my number was I think this is from memory. My number was 16.

I would have been the 16th wave drafted. And then when I turned 18, it was in the 280s. So I just dumb luck, you guys. Here I

am. Another one of those little kinks in life.

Yeah. I would've joined the Air Force if it had come here. I mean, I would've. And I would've served, and I I still advocate, although I didn't do it. I think we should have a national service. I think if we all had to serve the country for 2 years, we would get along. And it would cost money. Don't get me wrong, taxpayers.

It would cost money.

Necessarily it wouldn't necessarily all have to be military service.

Oh, no. No. Heck heck no.

Environmental corps. There could be an urban kind of

corps. My thoughts. Yep. Kathy, you have a PhD. My proposal is that you'd have to do your 2 years before you turn 26 because I think you guys who are academically super achievers, there's this time when you're 18, 19, 20, 22 where you're just firing on all cylinders or spinning on all turbine blades, and you wanna keep that going. So if you're one of those overachiever academic people, we'll keep you in school. But before you turn 26 and do your 14th postdoc or whatever you guys are gonna do Yeah. You gotta do 2 years on behalf of everybody, and taxpayers will pay for it.

Yes. That'll cost money, but just think of the benefits that Inure 2 would accrue to the US if we had this wonderful idea.

Next time we're together sharing an adult beverage, we should give her our notes on what our design proposals are for this national service because

I love you, man. Same thing. I love you. No. But you guys, it's an idea that my parents just would have assumed, well, naturally, because you guys have a certain age. Everybody was involved in winning World War 2. Everybody.

And there was this huge leveling. Right? Because most of them went in as the buck private or the the lowliest lieutenant. The the banker's son and the plumber's son and the gardener's son were equal buck pirates and equal lieutenants, and you learned a lot about the humanity of people that outwardly were not much like you. Hey. So you're known many of your biographical articles and interviews talk about the resonant suppressor that you Oh, that's good. And our on the 747. My brother flew 747s for a long time.

No wonder he's fine.

I wonder if if I wonder if you felt as sad as sad as he did when they were retired.

Well, they're still making the cargo version, which is pretty you know, it's a great plane, you guys. It was Great plane. This was at the everybody and I don't know who it was back in the old days. Well, the 747 was the ultimate expression of that technology. And by that, I mean, it was the first airliner that was entirely fly by wire or fly by remote. Now so it had this extraordinary, just very cool system where oh, by the way, everybody, if you're on a 737 or an a 320 or whatever and all the hydraulic systems go out, both engines quit, you can still fly the plane with your own brute strength. It's freak it's just amazing.

It's amazing.

And the way it works is you take the energy of the air. You're flying through the air. You're moving at 500 knots or whatever the heck. And you use that energy to move the control surfaces with these little tabs, as they're called. The tabs move the control surface which steers the plane. And the mechanisms that these guys they were almost all men. There was one woman designer, Kathy. It was just really she's really good.

But they would design these mechanisms that would revert. That's the verb. So when the hydraulics went out, they revert to manual mode. And the geometry of the linkage shifts in a moment. And then you can steer the plane. Anyway, 747 was all hydraulic. It still is all hydraulic. If all the engines quit, then you can fly the plane with what's called windmilling engines.

The air going through the turbines drives hydraulic pumps, and you can steer. And so can you imagine

It's amazing stuff.

Yeah. So these test pilots take a 747 up above Washington State. So Washington State has Seattle on one side and has Spokane on the other, and in between is a huge a huge runway. Well, there's a huge runway in near Ritzville, Washington. They turn off all the engines. You're flying around with no engines on. I mean, you guys, you may think that's fine. But just let go of the steering wheel of your car for a few minutes, not your Tesla self driving, just your old fashioned car.

It's scary. But, anyway, they did it, and it worked. Anyway, so 747 was a great plane, but there was a vibration that bugged this one test pilot. My hand to the constitution, the vibration was not in every plane. There was something about the way certain planes were plumbed, the way the pipe the tubing was run. And maybe it was inconsistencies in the manufacture of these rubber bushings that would hold the tubing and or something. But it was in a lot of planes. And this one test by this British guy, it really bugged him.

This little zzzz in the yoke in the steering wheel.

Shouldn't be there.

Yeah. Because it was all pressurized. There was no it wasn't manual. It wasn't like steering a bike. It was like steering power steering. Anyway, so it's a thing they give to the young guy. You know, when you're I ran out of school, you can still do the math. And so we just made a thing that made the pressure wave destructively interfere with itself, you know, out of phase, 180 degrees.

It worked, you know, but it added weight. Ah, adding weight. Oh my you're never supposed to do that. But they my boss went okay. So it took 3 years. But, anyway, I left Boeing, and I went to the shipyard, and it was just too low tech, Kathy. It was just, oh, we'll just fill it in with weld. I will just it was just interesting, but it just wasn't what I was into.

So then I got another job at a company called Sunstrand Data Control. And this is significant in the story of Bill because Sunstrand at that now it's Honeywell. They got sold because they got sued because they were just trying to get away with stuff. You can shoot the messenger, but we had these avionics boxes, these black boxes.

The electronics boxes that go in airplanes are called avionics.

Avionics. Aviation electronics. Yep. Yep. Anyway and they didn't work. And we all knew they didn't work. And there was some amazingly subtle problem with the software, and they didn't work. And so they put them literally in plastic bags with mothballs, paradichlorbenzene.

And it's very good. Mothballs are not only good against moss, but they're good against humidity. They they soak up humidity. So they're you pack these things in moisture. You pack these things in plastic bags in this vault, and they declared them as inventory even though they didn't work. They weren't sellable. So, eventually, the company got sued. You hear different numbers.

9,000,000, 13,000,000 dollar, whatever. But I was working for these guys that I just thought were they just weren't engaged. Like, you guys, this is cheating. Come on. What are we doing here? And then, Kathy, this thing where took solar panels off the roof of the White House. Stop teaching the metric system. Created the Ford Pinto and the Chevy Vega. And I was like, what is happening to the United States, man? What is going on here? We are not leading.

We are falling behinding, and this is crazy making ing. And so I wanted I was doing this comedy on the side.

And was this the time you were also being a science explainer at Pacific Science Center?

So then, yeah, I was a young guy. So I was a big brother, United Way big brother. And through that program, I became a science explainer at the Pacific Science Center, which is still there. I'm still very supportive of the Pacific Science Center. It's no cos I, but it's okay.

It's a good place.

Anyway, well, Kathy managed the science center in Columbus for years. Like minded individuals. You know, I poured liquid nitrogen around all weekend.

It was

fun. I still feel this way very strongly, and this could also be influenced by my parents. I mean, you guys, everybody, were more aware of it than ever. But I don't know if you know what I look like, but I am the dorkiest white man you're ever gonna meet. I was brought up in a middle class house, never wanted for anything, tradition of academic achievement. Of course, my life has worked out. I mean, I should think so, Bill. That's the least you can freaking do, are you idiot? Like, I'm everybody out there, I'm sorry.

If you're born a white guy in the US, English is your first language. That's it, people. It don't get no better than that. Alright? So you better show up and do something. Alright.

Pretty good springboard.

I mean, it just doesn't you can't maybe what? Sweden? Maybe Norway? Or I don't know. Like, you can't do any better. So I really was brought up with this tradition of service or, and my mother was Well, my mother was a very active community. She did things for the community, the library and certain political campaigns that were advancing education in the Washington DC area. And my father was very active in the Boy Scouts. And you guys, I was in the Boy Scouts when it was, if for lack of a better term, just normal. I mean, there was no intrigue. There was no weirdness.

We went camping. I can build a fire in the rain. If I have to sleep out in the woods, I will do that. I watch the people on the Blair Witch Project. You're losers. I hope you all die, you idiots. Sorry. It's a that's a little mean spirited, but get out of the woods.

What's wrong with you? Anyway, so this tradition of service was a little bit in the background. And so, also, it's very rewarding. You know, everybody you ask anybody who volunteers. You know, the only thing. You ask teachers why you do it. In many ways, you feel like you get more out of it than the students do. You know?

So I wanna tee off one little bit before we go on from the Science Center and your spectacular run of Bill and I on, Kathy.

Lay it on. Lay it on thick.

Well, here's what I'm really interested in. You know, I'm I'm an aviation geek, so I, like, completely get the story of the resonant suppressor in the hydraulic system of the 747. And my brother thanks you for it having flown it for years years years. Part I want to hear about is you hold several patents as a inventive engineer, but one of them is for a ballet shoe?

Yeah. Yeah.

Tell me that.

So on the Science Guy Show, just for you pedagogy people out there, for those of you who are interested in the method of teaching, On the Science Guy Show, we divided science into 3 categories, and each of those 3 categories we divided again. So it's either physical science, physics and chemistry, what I like to call planetary science, which should be astronomy and study of the planets, which include Earth science, and then life science. And life science is either general biology, this is an elementary science everybody, general biology or about the human body. People of all ages are interested in their bodies. And so one of the shows we did was bones and muscles. Bones and muscles. Bones and muscles. And so through this, we went to the Pacific Northwest Ballet.

This ballet, which is in Seattle. It's called Pacific Northwest, but it's Seattle. And the PBS station shares a parking structure with the opera house where the ballet perform. And there are all these young women, people 19 years old, 20 years old, have all these crazy injuries. Ankle injuries, foot injuries, knee injuries. And I just was looking at it, and they haven't changed the design of the shoe in 200 years. And a woman attorney who worked with my regular attorney took interest in this. But she tried to be a ballerina as a girl, the way many girls are brought up in that tradition.

It's a great set of lessons to take just for strength and elegance and poise, whether you end up on stage or not.

Yeah. Anyway, she's, the gal is 510. She wasn't gonna be a baller. But, anyway, so I just got to talking about this, and we came up with a shoe that has a ridge to support what are called your phalanges. These are the bones at the base of your toes and the base of your fingers. And so it would work okay. But I think I tried to get people interested in it, like Nike and some other well known ballerinas who are starting their own businesses, but I couldn't really get it off the ground. It takes a tremendous investment.

And the other thing, Kathy, I think that'll happen, it'll be superseded. Pretty soon, you will go into a shoe store, whether you're a ballerina or whoever you are, and they'll we or somebody will take a scan of your foot and build a 3 d printed or additive manufactured footbed sort of right there. And it may start with ski boots and then ice skates and then work its way into dance. Yeah.

It actually also has started in orthodontia, as I I suspect you know that

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. You don't do that pasty stuff that molds to your teeth anymore. They laser scan the inside of your mouth. They get vastly more detailed representation of every little ridge and cranny, and they 3 d print the snap on plastic retainer or whatever it is you need.

It's cool.

It's amazing.

So I think my brilliant, amazing idea will be superseded pretty quickly by this better technology. But still, it was fun to mess around with. You know? It was very interesting. And so my parents, as I keep saying, were of a certain age, and I grew up with them. One Friday a month, they would go dancing.

Uh-huh.

They would go ballroom dancing. And then later in life, my mother became quite the ballroom dancer, quite very competitive. She won a whole bunch of cups, awards, competitions. So I was brought up with that, and I love swing dancing. I spent a lot of time learning to do conventional ballroom dances and now the Lindy Hop, which is everybody likes. And it's just super fun. It's the conversation without words, as we say. And so I had a great interest in dancing before the bones and muscles show, before the ballet toe shoe.

I just had an interest in it. And your dance shoes, people are dispensed this whole thing. So I have 2 different pair in the car, and then I have I don't know how many different ones in on the rack of shoes. And there's this great word in swing dancing. You want your shoes to be chromed. Oh. You put suede on the bottom of the shoe, glue to the bottom of the shoe. And after a few minutes or hours, it gets this perfect perfect coefficient of friction with the floor.

Oh, oh, I can't say enough good things.

How often do you dance nowadays?

Well, nowadays, we had a pandemic. I don't know if you heard about this.

Oh, yeah. No.

I haven't been dancing socially in over a year. It's probably February a year ago. But I'll be back because one more thing, grew up in the US of a certain age, got vaccinated. Woah. Cool. Not dead because of science. And so I very much look forward to getting back on the dance floor. I was on The Masked Dancer this year.

And you've also done Dancing with the Stars, I believe.

Dancing with the Stars where I got just the most painful injury. Wow. No. I mean, it's you guys, I'm not getting my head blown off in Afghanistan, but this thing where I tore my quadriceps tendon, wow. That hurt. Woah. Man, make your eyes water, as the saying goes. And so it took me months, really, over a year for my leg to be all that my knee to be all the way back.

But, you know, here we are. I'm very much like dancing, and that's why I got involved with that shoe.

Oh, now it all makes sense. So let's switch gears a little bit. And besides talking about national service programs, which I didn't know was a favorite shared topic, we'll have to come back to that later.

Someday.

Someday.

You know, it's all we can do. We can't right now, everybody's so divided. People can't agree on spending government money. It's just, ah, craziness.

So you've been very vocal and prominent about, as you see it, the proper role and value of science in our society. What happened in this country? I mean, I think about my parents' and your parents' generation. You know, science we mobilized the scientific vacuum of this country like we mobilized the military, and it all played vital roles in winning the war and giving us all the life of freedom and opportunity that we've known, many of us, imperfect in many ways. And now we are where we are. It's seen as just science. It's seen in some people's view as just another interest group, just another bunch of self serving individuals. It's seen you know, my whole career in scientific public service in different agencies came out of that World War 2 ethos, where we just want the best scientific and engineering minds to be on hand to advise agencies about what what guidance can science and engineering give you for the way forward or for what's possible. And I've served more Republican presidents than Democratic presidents because through most of my career, there was a deep shared trust that the science part is just the science part.

And then there are partisan or political differences of you over policies or appropriate mechanisms. But 2 +2 is 4 is not like a partisan thing. What's your sense of how that came apart? And more importantly, what's your sense of how we go forward from here? What can help put us back on better ground?

I wrestle with this problem all day every day. When you have this overwhelming evidence, for example, of climate change, and people are just bent on denying it. In that example, I offer you the fossil fuel industry, which has worked really hard to introduce the idea that scientific uncertainty about something, plus or minus 2% of what's causing the storms in Baton Rouge, Louisiana today, is the same as plus or minus a 100% and that doubt about the whole thing. And these organizations have been so successful at introducing doubt that it's really messed up everything in science. And I just like to point out everybody that article 1, section 8, cause 8 in the US constitution, written in the 18th century, refers to the progress of science and useful arts. That's a job of congress, and it goes on about what we'd nowadays call intellectual property. But that they use the word science in 17/86, I think, is of great significance. And you can't compete internationally.

Everybody's going on and on. We're in the US. Maybe you're listening in Canada. Everybody's going on and on about China and Chinese science investment and how it's gonna overwhelm the world. Yeah. Well, if you don't if we don't if people don't invest in basic research. You knew Bruce Murray. Right, Kathy?

I knew Carl and Bruce and yeah.

Yeah. So Bruce Murray, everybody, was one of the cofounders of the Planetary Society, but you would know him as the head of JPL, the Jet Propulsion Line, during the Voyager missions. These, you know, extraordinary missions with the record on the side of the spacecraft that aliens are gonna find and learn about life on Earth, and it's gonna be great.

I was there at Voyager 1's first planetary encounter. It was a stunning experience.

Oh, man. See, we're of a certain age, people. Yeah. These things launched in 1977. Anyway and they're still flying.

Outside the solar system.

And the plutonium is still hot. Yeah. It's just amazing. But Bruce Murray was renowned for saying he gets asked, why are you guys doing this basic research? What are you gonna find? And he was well known for saying, we don't know what we're gonna find. That's why we're doing this research. He referred continually to the unknown horizon. Like, you don't know what's on the other side. That's why you we'd like to think of something.

Lasers, the Internet, this Zoom call. All the none of this would be possible without basic investment and just discovering things about electrons that no one had thought of before.

And no one who was doing that work was in any way able to make these specific predictions. I often use the analogy or the distinction between hunting and farming. And some research, some r and d, research and development, has a specific aim. Can we get 10% higher speed on something? Or, like, the work you did on that resonant suppressor was in a sense applied r d. I have a problem. What can science or technical advance do to change it? But the kind of work Bruce was talking about is more like farming. You're putting you're putting seeds into the ground that will produce a crop you can harvest later, but you can't be out on the field every other day going, where's my doggone carrot? I put that seed in yesterday. Are you gonna get you 2 carrots or 10 carrots? Can I have them tomorrow? Some investments need longer to germinate, and we'll have a much less predictable array of benefits that cascade out of them.

Just talking about Bruce Murray and Jet Propulsion Lab and you, this is what we say all the time at the Planetary Society is space exploration is not partisan, generally. It brings congressmen and senators that don't get along talking about anything else. They do get along when it comes to funding NASA, for example. And NASA is, I say all the time, the best brand the United States has. You go anywhere in the world, people know NASA, and they respect it because people like doctor Sullivan here have just done these extraordinary things.

It's also a doggone good engine of talent development.

Talent Oh, man. You can't beat it. Yeah. So, you know, I have to tell everybody. South Africa has a space program. Vietnam has a space program. It's very small.

Has a space program.

It's a space program. And it may surprise you, but the the reason governments do this or invest in these organizations is because they know having all these technical people running around just brings great benefit. And then there's practical benefits, communication, weather prediction, that are done with space assets, as we call them, which is the stuff flying above us and all the ground systems that communicate with the stuff flying above us. And we all take it for granted now. People start complaining if the weather reports off 20 minutes.

It's like a hidden utility. Right? I mean, we just expect the lights go on when we flip the switch, and everything behind making that happen is invisible to us.

It's science based, you guys. It's all science. It's these are engineers, and now everybody's talking about bridges, infrastructure. Bridges are falling. But those are civil engineers. People that sit there and think about, how do you make something strong enough to last a 100 years and have cars bounce off of it? Oh my goodness. For this much money, for for so much money.

Anyone who says science has nothing to do with my life, I tend to look at them now and say, dude, tell me where you live. I live in New Hampshire. You ever get fresh vegetables in November or January? Exactly. You know? That is all the science and technology of a logistics supply chain. It's all science and technology.

Everything. So engineers, everybody. To me, an engineer is somebody that uses science to make things and solve problems. That's why I was intrigued by it. You know? Bicycles are all physics, but somebody designs them. I mean, they come out of somebody's head. And I just like to tell everybody

And it figures out how to build each piece of it.

That's right. Look around. And where do you get where do you get steel? Well, first, you dig up rocks, and then you melt them down. What? Like, whose rock? What?

Wait. Up in Minnesota? What?

Yeah. Yeah. And we all take this or the western Germany. We all take this stuff for granted. You know? And it's I'm not saying the world owes engineers a living, but there's a reason that engineers are celebrated. And you can get a job as an engineer is because these problems have to be solved. And right now, you guys, the infrastructure problem, this is a solvable problem. Yep.

People know how to do this, but it takes investment.

And persistence. I mean, these are not projects that happen overnight. They are, unfortunately, like the 15 years, 7, 6, 7 projects.

I know. But, well, if if everything were different so, seriously, Kathy, if things were different, you know, where I had been married and raising a family and living in Everett, Washington and been a Mariners, Seattle Mariners baseball fan, that would have been okay. Yeah. That would have been cool, but that wasn't where I was in life. Exactly. The other thing, the building that I worked in, it was just elbow to elbow, desk to desk to desk to desk. The phones ring, phones ring, phones ring all day. You know? I'm like Concentrate.

Yeah. Well, that building is gone, and now the Boeing Everett facility is this beautiful modern glass structure. Very cool.

Yeah. That would've been would've helped.

Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. Well, you and this is a problem talking about NASA or Jet Propulsion Lab or whatever it is. Does a guy or gal coming out of engineering school, is he or she gonna go to work at Ames NASA Ames where the buildings haven't been painted in 30 or 40 years? Or Google down the street where there's free lunch literally free or lunches included in your salary every year. What are you gonna do? I mean

Well, and it's gonna take you it it still will take you a number of years, a number that will feel like really big to you at that age, to get the spacecraft or the whatever built designed built approved at Ames. And in the digital world, your idea can

go to the next tomorrow. Yeah.

It's beta testing tomorrow, and it's it's globally on the web the day after. And, you know

We're scaling it. Yeah.

We're scaling it. Yeah. It'll take us a week. Yeah.

Yeah. So but with that said, that's also a solvable problem. Nobody else puts rovers on Mars except Chinese Rovers.

I mean, come on. Helicopters. There's a there's a helicopter flying around on Mars for crying

out loud. Freaking amazing.

It's just

The wing the tip speed is, like, Mach 0.6

or something. 24 100 RPM, dual counter rotating. It's absolutely crazy.

It runs by the way, you gotta have control systems is my old that's what I was really into was you gotta have not just the position or the speed and the acceleration and the jerk, which is the rate of change of acceleration. You also have to have snap, which is the rate of change of the rate of change of acceleration in order to get that thing to work. And we oh, yeah. Whatever. Oh, yeah. Some transistors, transistor logic. There we go.

4th or 5th derivative. No problem.

That's right. Yeah. Whatever. And and these people just do it, and we all take it for granted. And when people's phones don't work, they start complaining. I'm not saying I'm just just saying these are amazing things.

I absolutely love how young the lead designer, the lead engineer,

the lead designer, the lead designer is a

gorgeous young woman, fabulous job.

Enough to drive? Gee. What is man? And it's cool. That's those are the people that are gonna you know, about half of the patents are by people 26 years old and younger. 26 is apparently the halfway point. After that, people invent stuff, but not at the Yeah. Same rate.

So speaking of inventing things and the spectacular bright young talents that are doing so so much fabulous stuff in the space arena, what most excites you on the space frontier these days? There's this massive sort of transformation of space faring to being much more commercial. There's the disaggregating school bus sized satellites with 10 instruments on them into little things roughly the size of your laptop. And there's exoplanets, you know, planets orbiting other stars other than our sun that have now been dis discovered in the 1,000. Still planets in this solar system that we know not that much about. What are the most exciting couple of prospects that you're paying attention to in space exploration?

Well, thank you. I did not ask her to ask me this, but thank you. Fundamentally, I wanna find evidence of life on another world. This just makes me wild. I think about how it would affect us. If we were to find evidence of life on Mars so this would be drilling these core samples, these golf pencil sized pieces of rock on Mars, bringing them back to the in what used to be clearly a delta, a river delta, or maybe a swamp, a Martian wetland. Alright. You bring these back and you find stromatolites or like fossilized pond scum.

It would change the course of human history. It would everybody would feel differently about being a living thing in the cosmos. It would just be profound.

Are you so sure about that? I've wondered off of and pondered this a lot that we found alien life on another planet and that what a lot of people have in their mind's eyes,

more sophisticated organism or being.

And so when you a more sophisticated organism or being. And so when you tell them we found life on another planet, you might get that first, woah. Really? And then you say, yeah. It's pond scum. And they're gonna, yeah. Never mind. Do you really think it would be that transformative?

Yeah. But not in a weekend. It would take decades for it to soak in. Excellent point. It would take decade. For and people would, first of all, say it's disagrees with the bible or something, and then that's impossible. And then I told then they'd all say, well, no. I knew that would happen.

They they would all agree afterward. Yeah. Of course. So that's no big deal. But they're looking for life on another world or Europa, everybody. Europa is a moon of Jupiter with twice as much ocean as the Earth has. My gosh. I mean, if you have seawater for 4 and a half 1000000000 years, you can't help but wonder, are there Europanian fish people swimming around under the ice on Europa? I mean, that'd just be amazing.

And we're sending a spacecraft there. The Europa Clipper is gonna fly real close to the surface and try to figure out what's under the ice or what the ice is made of, the characteristics of the ice. It'll be amazing. And that's one thing. The other thing, and this is something that happened to me, once again, of a certain age, do not want the Earth to get hit with an asteroid. So when I was watching Star Trek in the 19 sixties, it was postulated that you'd have to have an asteroid deflector gizmo because people find asteroid craters on the Earth all the time. And if you look at the moon or Mars, man, where there's no weather or tectonic plate activity, there's nothing but craters. These planets get hit with asteroids or rocks or comets all the time.

And then when I was out in the workforce, Walter and Luis Alvarez found this layer of iridium around the world that came from an asteroid. The only way it could get there is an asteroid impact. Then people looking for oil found the crater off in Chicxulub, Mexico that was almost certainly the impact that finished off the ancient dinosaurs. And then when I was right out of school, Kathy, Carl Sagan and Jim Pollack published this thing about nuclear winter, that if you set off all the nuclear weapons on the same afternoon, there'd be this cloud that would be or dust cloud that would be big enough and persist long enough to shade the earth for months and screw up everything. And this is consistent with asteroid impact. So I into the dust cloud. You know, the ejected cone from the asteroid was supposed to be bigger than the diameter of the Earth. Like, wow, dude.

Anyway, all this came together for me. So I do not want the Earth to get hit with an asteroid. I that's a big deal. And that's gonna take space agencies around the world collaborating. It's not gonna be one government that takes responsibility. You know, do you trust whoever it is to deflect this asteroid? Are you sure it's really coming? And so on. And just finding them is an international effort. So I'm excited about international cooperation, defining and deflecting an asteroid, and looking for life elsewhere.

Those are my things. Those are my things.

Alright. So what's the state on the asteroid deflection front?

Well, you know, since all your listeners either are or about to join the Planetary Society at planetary.org, check us out at planetary.org. My favorite as an engineer is the laser bees. So, you know, people, it is really fun and, of course, quite serious to sit around and decide how you would deflect an asteroid. You set off a nuclear weapon next to it, or what does that do exactly? I

mean, now you have a 100 asteroids coming

out of here. And did you make it worse or better? Yeah. Yeah. And then what does that do? It's hot? What does that do exactly? And then do you just go out there with spray paint and make it white so it reflects sunlight in a different way and that changes its orbit? Do you go out there with a giant emergency blanket, that aluminum thing, drape it over? Or or do you send a bunch of spacecraft with lasers, and you you zap the outside of it? So it's in outer space. It makes no sound. It would just be you zap the asteroid, and the burned off material, the ablating material would have enough momentum to deflect it. That's my favorite because, first of all, it's just cool, a swarm of lasers. But it also it has this business where you could scale it.

You could send 10 laser spacecraft or 10,000 or a 100 laser spacecraft. And you could tune it like the thing is tumbling. You could at the right moments to give it the most to get the most ice to burn off or whatever. But these are all extraordinary giant ideas that we talk about at the Planetary Society. So

Join the Planetary Society.

Join the Planetary Society.

For you.

Yeah. Good. Well, you yeah. And you were on the board for years. And so the thing that's hardest about asteroids, everybody, is finding them. And as the old saying goes, it's like looking for a piece of charcoal in the dark. They're very hard to see. They're not that big, and they're moving fast, and they're dark.

But they are illuminated by sunlight, and so they're just ever so slightly warmer than deep space. So if you have an infrared instrument, infrared telescope, that's where you first find them usually. Is there about a 150 Kelvin, well, above absolute 0, halfway to room temperature? And you can find them with the right set of instruments. So we're really into that, and we give grants to amateur astronomers who go looking for these objects because finding them is the first huge step. And we like to remind people, an amateur astronomer is not like an amateur tennis player.

Amateur astronomers have turned in spectacular discoveries over

the years. Really contribute to the science. And the reason they're able to do it is exploring the sky, everybody can see it, and the instruments are expensive, but not that expensive. And the sky is huge.

It's kind of the front wave, the earliest instantiation of crowdsourcing because it goes back

That's right.

Decades decades.

That's right. Citizen science. Yeah. So having the more telescopes looking at the sky, the better.

So we're coming towards the end of our appointed time. And Ah. I'd loved when I joined you on your podcast, your technique of closing with some lightning round questions.

The lightning round. We love the lightning round.

Yeah. So I've decided that you're my guinea pig. I'm gonna try a little lightning round on you.

And so the problem, Kathy, is Bill just talks too much, but we will try.

I don't that is not an try lightning at all.

A lightning answer. Here we go.

Alright. Well, here's a easy warm up question. Chocolate or vanilla?

Oh, vanilla. I mean, I'm sympathetic to chocolate people, but to me, vanilla is genius. Vanilla is is enough to make me believe in the paranormal, a deity.

What's your top bucket list destination?

Bucket list. Oh, I you know, I'd like to go I'm serious. Like you guys, I'd like to spend some time going to back to Oslo, Helsinki, and Berlin. I've never been to Berlin. I would like to go there.

What's intriguing about those?

I know it's lightning round, but I've been asked if you could go anywhere in the cosmos, where would you go?

Yes.

Hawaii. Hawaii is pretty good.

Hawaii is pretty good.

I really like Hawaii.

Well, back to that cosmos, I guess. Let's narrow it down a little bit. Personal destination, personal experience. Moon or Mars?

Oh, Mars. Oh, Mars for sure. But I gotta be able to come back. I mean Okay. These places are hostile.

Not doing one way trips.

Yeah. You go to Mars, there's nothing to eat or drink, and there's nothing to breathe, everybody. You can't breathe. It's not like even being in Antarctica. You can't breathe.

Serious travel insurance required. Yeah. What's the bravest thing you've ever done?

Bravest thing?

Your definition.

Well, if it's anything, I think bravery is when you've, I imagine, is when you've actually assessed the danger. So quitting my job, is that I mean, come on. I was born a white guy in the US English speaking. I don't know if it's but I quit my day job, and I said to myself, if I don't make it in 6 months, I'm gonna have to go back to engineering. This is when computers were just, seriously, big mainframes were just becoming affordable for companies. I don't know. Was that brave? But one time this is in the old days, you guys. My neighbors were shooting off fireworks, and I don't know that much about them, but I think they had maybe been enjoying adult beverages.

And the garage caught on fire. And at this point in our story, I don't think I was 10. I think I was 9 years old. And I just got the garden hose, turned on the water, and put the fire out. It was in a carport, in the early days of carports. Was that brave or just, okay. What do we do? We got a situation here. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know if I've ever done anything brave compared to what my parents went through.

Yeah. Well, compared to your parents. Yes. Compared to the parents of any of us in our generation. Well, Bill, I think we've found at least 2 or 3 topics that we need to get together and continue over an adult beverage

National Service.

National Service top in the list once we're back fully in gear with the pandemic well in our rearview mirror, but it's been absolutely a delight having you on the show. Thank you so much for helping me get launched in this new endeavor called podcasting.

Oh, it's big fun. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, it's talk radio. It's not a new I mean, it's deep within us. We love talk radio. We love podcasts. We really humans do.

Thank you all for listening if you're still awake. And, Kathy, thanks for having me on.

Check out Science Rules Yep. Bill's podcast, and come on back for more episodes with us here as well on Kathy Sullivan Explorers. Thank you again, Bill.

Thank you. Let's change the world.

Thanks so much for joining me on today's mission. For more solo shows and deep dives with incredible guests, along with all the ways to get the podcast and much more, head over to Kathy Sullivan explores.com.

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