Podcast: Protect the Planet and Change the World with Bill Nye

^{[00:00:05] Dan Lambe: 
Real stories, real change. Rooted in the power of nature. You're listening to Unearthing Optimism from The Arbor Day Foundation.} 

^{[00:00:23] Dan Lambe: 
Hi, I'm Dan Lambe. Today we're joined by someone who helped an entire generation fall in love with science.} 

^{[00:00:30] Dan Lambe: 
Bill Nye, perhaps the most recognizable science communicator around, has spent decades making scientific topics fun, understandable, and urgent for audiences of all ages.} 

^{[00:00:44] Dan Lambe: 
In this episode, we'll talk through how he became Bill Nye the Science Guy, his dedication to the next generation, and why he feels optimism and action go hand in hand.} 

^{[00:00:57] Dan Lambe: 
Bill, welcome to Unearthing Optimism. It's great to have you with us today.} 

^{[00:01:01] Bill Nye: 
It's so good to be here, there with you. I'm excited for this conversation.} 

^{[00:01:06] Dan Lambe: 
You are such an interesting person, an influential person. I've got loads of things I want to cover with you in our conversation. My understanding as we were preparing for this is you were trained as a mechanical engineer, which isn't the most obvious route to public television or a children's science show. So do you mind for our listeners, just backing us up a little bit and how did you start down this path?} 

^{[00:01:35] Bill Nye: 
First of all, I had a fantastic physics teacher in high school and that, combined with some sort of mistake in the admissions department at Cornell University, I went there and majored in mechanical engineering because I liked bicycles and I really like airplanes. I think they're amazing gizmos that people build.} 

^{So then, the guy who had been my freshman roommate, senior year, he went into material science. I went into mechanical and he came hurrying to my house. We each had housemates. We lived back to back in Ithaca, New York and rented houses. He says, you gotta see this. You gotta come see this. And he had this extraordinary new technology. He had cable television, and he said, look at this guy. You gotta see this guy, Steve Martin at the Boarding House. This video that they would replay on, I guess at that time is what we now call HBO, on a loop or regularly.} 

^{And then he says, look at this guy. He's just like you. Well, then a year later, Steve Martin was so popular. How popular was he? He was so popular, we had a Steve Martin lookalike contest. A whole new completely separate different set of friends in Seattle had me, encouraged me to enter this contest. And I won. I mean, respectfully, I won. For you Venn Diagram people, it was Bill Nye and not Bill Nye, that's all it was.} 

^{But then they flew me to San Francisco and I did not win. I lost to the guy who eventually was the runner up, the second place, Mike Berman, who's still a friend of mine. And after that, people want you to do standup comedy. So I tried that a little bit.} 

^{And then I was a young guy. I was new in town, I was a United Way Big Brother, and I was also a volunteer at the Pacific Science Center. It was still there. It was built for the 62 World's Fair. That would be everybody, 1962. And so I was on weekends a science explainer, which was fun, pouring liquid nitrogen around.} 

^{So the guy who was the program director, that's everything but news at KING in Seattle. Seattle is in King County, KING television. See what they did there? Sure. I get it. See, see what happened there. Yeah.} 

^{He said, I wanna have a comedy show. So I started writing for a show called Almost Live, and one night we needed to fill six minutes. The story goes that Geraldo Rivera didn't show up. I think it may have been somebody else, but let's say it was Geraldo Rivera.} 

^{This is back when if you've written a book, you'd go from city to city promoting your book.} 

^{So Bill, can you do something? Yeah. So I did the household uses of liquid nitrogen. 'Cause we all have liquid nitrogen around, of course, most of what's between you and your television screen, your computer, your phone is nitrogen. It's very safe, but it looks freaking dangerous.} 

^{So I did the household uses, I chewed marshmallow, steam comes outta my nose, and the guy who's still a dear friend of mine, Ross Schaeffer in the writer's meeting, said, you know, you could be Bill Nye the Science Guy or something.} 

^{So after that night in 1987, I went, this is it, man. I want to be, I want to have a kid show about science akin to Mr. Wizard from when I was growing up. But I just remind everybody it took years and years.} 

^{I quit my day job October 3rd, 1986, roughly, to try this. And I had $5,000 in the bank and I figured I could go six months without doing anything, without changing anything. I had a mortgage and a condo without changing anything. I could go six months and if it didn't work out, trying to write jokes, I could go back to engineering.} 

^{This is in the early days of computers, man, if you scoot around for a year, I thought I couldn't get back on board, you know, so that's, it just took a long time.} 

^{[00:06:01] Dan Lambe: 
You were in Seattle at the time?} 

^{[00:06:01] Bill Nye: 
Yeah, my first job, my first grownup job out of engineering school was at Boeing. And I just like to remind everybody, if you're ever on a 747 still flying, I was very well supervised. Don't worry about it. Everything's cool.} 

^{Well, nose wheel steering on 737 a little bit.} 

^{You know, becoming an influencer doesn't just happen. It takes a lot of vision. It takes passion.} 

^{[00:06:28] Dan Lambe: 
And I was blown away when I was looking at your book Unstoppable and saw your rules of the road for Bill Nye the Science Guy. It was so cool.} 

^{[00:06:38] Bill Nye: 
Oh, you printed it. I love it, man. Yeah. So this objective changed the world, still the objective. And it says to produce a TV show that gets kids and adults excited about science. So the United States will again be the world leader in technology, innovation and sound management of the environment.} 

^{[00:06:59] Dan Lambe: 
Then you go into the rules of the road and talk about your vision for this. And I'm telling you, a lot of people say they want to inspire the next generation of people and kids, and you did it. Where did that belief come from? Where did that courage come from?} 

^{[00:07:17] Bill Nye: 
Well, the courage, after I quit my job October 3rd, 1986, I was still making a living part-time as an engineer. I worked as a contract engineer. So in other words, I worked in parallel. So the word courage a little bit, but the big thing that happened, everybody in a different era, it was really led by Tipper Gore, Al Gore's wife at the time, who wanted to have educational programming on television.} 

^{Because at that time, especially children's television had become sort of advertising for toys. If you were a kid watching Spider-Man, that was cool. If you could get a Spider-Man action figure, I mean, that was cool. But she pointed out as Mr. Minnow said, television was a wasteland.} 

^{Anyway, we had this idea, and I say we, it was me with my friends Jim and Aaron, who were producing on a show called Seattle Today, and they wanted to start their own company and do something cool.} 

^{We had this idea at the same time the government and all these production companies, Walt Disney, public broadcasting, were looking for the idea. We took advantage of an opportunity, I gotta say. We were at the right place at the right time when the Children's Television Act was passed.} 

^{And then a year later we had this idea, we had a presentation and we got the contract to do the show.} 

^{[00:09:01] Dan Lambe: 
Well, I tell you though, it did take a vision. It did take courage. And indeed you influenced an entire generation. As a matter of fact, when I told people around our office that I was having you as a guest on the podcast, people were excited, all kinds of excited, all different age groups, really excited.} 

^{Oftentimes they shared stories with me about their days as students, remembering teachers rolling out the TV to watch.} 

^{[00:09:31] Dan Lambe: 
I know. And even just a couple of days ago, I was talking to a team member and she said to me, these are her words: You knew something important was happening that day when the TV came out with a Bill Nye video. I thought that was pretty cool.} 

^{One woman's important is another teacher who just assumed and put on a video instead of putting a lot of energy into it that day. So all good. And it's amazing.} 

^{[00:09:58] Dan Lambe: 
I say all the time, I try to understand the influence of the show. It's sort of a fourth generation of students who are watching the show now.} 

^{[00:10:10] Dan Lambe: 
This is at a time when the internet is everywhere and there's all kinds of educational content. You can look at YouTube, for example, and learn all kinds of remarkable things.} 

^{But what may set the science guy show apart from the other shows was the discipline in the vocabulary, discipline in the so-called learning objectives. The learning objective is a technical or educator word that means something you can test at the end of the 28 minutes: You can ask the viewer, "What did you get out of this?" And then we are hoping we've worked hard so that the viewer says, "Humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time. We know dinosaurs lived because we found their fossil bones." If they get the rest of it, that's cool. But that's what we want them to get—those two learning objectives.} 

^{[00:11:07] Dan Lambe: 
I think you did a good job and you had people paying attention to science in a unique new way.} 

^{So when you meet adults who say things to you like, "You made me love science," how does that land for you?} 

^{[00:11:20] Bill Nye: 
Well, it's amazing. I mean, it's overwhelming. It's a little hard to believe, but I've heard it a lot. I just tell people I put my heart and soul into this thing, man. I worked as hard as I could for five years to create those shows. I was the head writer, I was in the on-camera department, the OCD as I like to say. I was also a producer. I did a lot of coming up with ideas.} 

^{[00:11:55] Dan Lambe: 
I'm sure you learned along the way too.} 

^{It feels like there's been an evolution of the message as well. As your audience has matured alongside you, the kids have grown up and generations are watching now, but it also feels like the stakes have changed over the years.} 

^{How intentional is this? Has your messaging evolved as the years and the stakes have changed?} 

^{[00:12:23] Bill Nye: 
Well, the science guy show was aimed or is aimed at people who are in fourth grade, people who are about 10 years old in the U.S. In Europe, it might be a different reckoning, but this is based on research. We had very compelling research that 10 years old is about as old as you can be to get the so-called lifelong passion for science. I'll stand by that. That research is accurate.} 

^{But after that, there's a lot more science to know about. You're in Nebraska, right? With the crop technology. It feeds the world. And then we have all kinds of stuff going on in space. We might find evidence of life on another world in less than 10 years. There's a lot more to know than elementary science for fourth graders.} 

^{Like the book you referred to earlier, I'm very proud of those books. They're ideas that are beyond elementary science.} 

^{So yeah, I've evolved, but through all this, what's still true is that when you become scientifically literate, when you study nature, you become an environmentalist. You become concerned about humans' effect on the environment and our future. And you especially get concerned about climate change.} 

^{[00:13:56] Bill Nye: 
If you look at the hundred science guy shows, counting the two versions, one for Saturday morning, one for PBS Saturday and Sunday morning, there's 200 shows. We mentioned climate change six times even in 1993, 4, 5, 6, 7. This is an old problem and we're doing less and less about it now.} 

^{So I am hopeful that people will turn around.} 

^{It almost feels like you're not only helping people understand science anymore, but really using it more and more as a call to action in many ways.} 

^{We are facing a lot of challenges today. There's no question about it. At the Arbor Day Foundation, we know part of the solution is nature and part of it is trees and forests—managed, healthy, thriving forests.} 

^{[00:14:55] Dan Lambe: 
You have said clean water, reliable renewable energy, and global internet access are some of the biggest levers for—} 

^{[00:15:03] Bill Nye: 
You read the book, I love you, man. Where do you see nature-based solutions like forests and ecosystems fitting into the framework?} 

^{[00:15:15] Bill Nye: 
Well, one of my favorite things is the oft-repeated phrase: trees are columns of carbon. It's really hard to believe at first, but most of what a tree is made of comes right out of the air. Trees are made of carbon from carbon dioxide. You might think that material comes up through the roots and then becomes the plant, but no—it comes right out of the air through photosynthesis and becomes the proteins and chemicals that give the tree its structure, like lignin and cellulose.} 

^{If that doesn't freak you out, what does?} 

^{So when you look at a tree, you're looking at a column of carbon that came out of the air. When we cut down an extraordinary number of trees without replacing them, you're going to have less carbon stored in land masses.} 

^{We know that science is guiding us more than ever, not only in where we plant but why we plant. I mentioned clean water. 75% of the world's fresh water supplies originate on forest lands that must be restored and protected. Thankfully, science and technology can guide us where to plant trees for the biggest impact. But it's planting, monitoring, and verifying to make sure those trees survive. So we rely on science a lot at the foundation.} 

^{[00:17:24] Dan Lambe: 
You, of course, are Bill Nye the Science Guy. Space is clearly a passion for you. Can you tell us about the Planetary Society for our listeners so they know more about the organization and how they might engage?} 

^{[00:17:37] Bill Nye: 
We are the world's largest independent space organization. We do at least three things: educate people about the scientific exploration of space; work to keep the Earth from getting hit with an asteroid—a very low probability, high consequence event, the only preventable natural disaster; and advocate for the scientific exploration of space.} 

^{We had 300 people, and the Planetary Society led 20 science organizations. We went to Capitol Hill, held a big outdoor meeting, split into groups, and convinced congressional offices to fund space exploration. They pushed back on the president's budget request, but we got funding restored. I claim it's all us—the Planetary Society.} 

^{As I said, through some sort of mistake, I went to Cornell University and took a class from Carl Sagan, which had a tremendous effect on me. Three years later, he and others started the Planetary Society because public interest in space exploration was high but government support was waning. That is still true today.} 

^{It was Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, who was head of the Jet Propulsion Lab at the time during the Voyager} 

^{[00:19:32] Bill Nye:  
And Viking First landing on Mars, landings on Mars. And Lou Friedman, who's still around, who's an orbital mechanics guy at Jet Propulsion Lab. And, uh, we have, depending on the week, 50,000 members around the world who think scientific exploration of space is cool. And they support us. We engage, uh, governments around the world and we supply educational material and we work hard to keep an asteroid from hitting us. You can join. It's a member organization. planetary.org. Turn it up loud.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
What has studying other planets taught you about how rare and how fixable some of the problems we're facing today on this planet are?} 

^{Bill Nye: 
Well, the tremendous insight, you guys. I'm so old.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
Oh, are you?} 

^{Bill Nye: 
I'm so old. I remember the, what's called earthrise. It's a photo taken by astronaut Bill Anders on the eve of Isaac Newton's birthday, also known as Christmas Eve, where he captured, uh, the moon in the foreground and the earth in the icy blackness of space. And when you set the iris on the camera for the earth, you don't see any stars. Just you don't see any stars. And I spoke with my grandparents about this image when they, they were alive at the time. And, uh, they said the thing that surprised them were the clouds. You know, when you grow up looking at a classroom globe, there are no clouds or there's a couple models of globes that have clouds, but in general, the political boundaries only, no clouds. And there, the other thing is you don't see the atmosphere. The atmosphere is so extraordinarily thin. And when you look at that image and then other images, uh, from space, you really, you really come to understand that the earth is a planet like Mars. And Venus and Saturn. Jupiter only different. The Earth is unique. It's the only place we know of that has living things. And it's because of all kinds of interacting forces on the earth. Uh, the atmosphere, the ocean, the living things all affect the ecosystem around the world. Apparently the geology that we all take for granted today includes, uh, the slipperiness of tectonic plates induced by plankton on sea floors. As these plates slide over each other, the plankton is a lubricant. It's really, you're joking me and I say plankton. Let's call itus plankton that have fallen to the sea floor. It's just the interaction of earth's systems is, is literally hard to understand. But it's also a bit hard to believe. And so when we compare any of these other planets to earth, we realize earth is unique. It's the only place we can live and we can't mess it up.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
What are some of the biggest signs of progress that you see for the planet right now? Where are some of the signs of hope and optimism that you're feeling and or learning about recently?} 

^{Bill Nye: 
Say what you will about China and, uh, the Chinese government, Chinese systems, but they are creating, uh, renewable energy systems very, very quickly. You know, they're apparently their electric vehicles are the best in the world. I'm not saying that's the answer to everybody's problems, but it's the kind of technology that could help everybody in the world. When you go to China, every building has a solar, uh, hot water system. Not 'cause they're a bunch of hippies. 'cause it's cheaper, the sun's free. And so, uh, these sort of technologies, making these technologies available to everyone in the world will allow us to do this mythic thing, which is not to do less, but to do more with less. That's what we want to do, is do more with less for more people. This is all very solvable problem in general. It involves technology. Sure. We're capturing the sun’s heat, capturing the sun's photons, making electrons move around. But to talking about the Arbor Foundation, it involves policy policies that enable forests to thrive and people who live near forests and enjoy forests to thrive. And these are decisions that we can all make. And when you ask what makes you optimistic, uh, well that people around the world are aware that this problem is important and that it's worth solving and it's solvable.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
Well, you know, the podcast is called unearthing Optimism. So we do like to bring some hope, some optimism to the conversation. We're not naive. We know there's loads of challenges for sure. Um, but you, I saw a, a speech you gave one time and you said pessimistic people don't get very much done.} 

^{Bill Nye: 
No. You gotta be optimistic.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
Yeah. Where does that come from for you? Where, what is that? Were you born that way? Did you have to teach yourself, be more optimistic? Where, where does that optimism come from?} 

^{Bill Nye: 
Some of each. You guys, there, I don't know if you heard about this. There are two teams that go into the Super Bowl. N neither one of 'em think they're gonna lose. I mean, they both, and it's not, they're not delusional. They study the film, they lift the weights, they do all this stuff. They prepare, but they don't go into the game thinking they're gonna lose. You've gotta be optimistic. Doesn't mean you are Pollyanna or tune out. It just means you pay attention and get her done.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
Well, we, we appreciate that optimism, including as, as we look at the state of science today at the Arbor Day Foundation, we feel and hear a lot of optimism and, and interest in science as, as we do our work. When people learn at a very early age, trees help clean air, clean water. But if they're also helping and address huge issues like heat, water quality, uh, air quality issues, and, um, and so we, we see that in many ways people are, it's the time for trees, if ever there was a time to be planting trees and managing forests. Now is that time you have lived through multiple ways of optimism and pessimism about science and the future. And I'm curious where you think we are right now as a community, as a society and embracing science.} 

^{[00:26:27] Bill Nye:  
Well, there's an anti-science movement here in the US like none I've ever seen. I'm of a certain age. I remember the Apollo era very well. I'm so old. How are I, I'm so old. I remember when Alaska became a state and Hawaii became a state. I was a little, a little kid, but I remember it. And, uh, in that optimism during the Apollo era, there was an international struggle, the US versus the Soviets. Somehow it became presumed that whoever got to the moon first was somehow had won. And that optimism, uh, led to success and all these technical innovations that we embrace today. Mm-hmm. And the Soviet, the former Soviet Union kind of went outta business, but, uh, in a way, but, uh, uh, the United States right now is this embraced. And science I think is kind of a shortcut. People are afraid of the future. And so they're afraid of science. Now, I'll tell you guys, there's two things that keep me in the game. There's a lot of young people doing a lot of cool stuff, but there's two things I really want first, do not want to get hit with an asteroid. Bad. Very bad. Don't want that. And we had the dark mission a couple year, two years, uh, going on three years ago, double asteroid redirect test, and, uh, deflected an asteroid. And that spacecraft had to fly in autonomously. It was too far away to guide with radio. The delay was too long. But we, we guided itself in space. There's no sound and, uh, deflected the asteroid. Then the other thing, I wanna find evidence of life on another world or strangers tell something still alive on another world. I claim that when that discovery is made, it will change this world. It will change the way every one of us feels about being a living thing in the cosmos. It will change us. And we, we do it for a tiny fraction of, of any federal budget. It is tiny. And so if we could find, make these discoveries, it would be extraordinary and it would be inspirational. And it would, it would give everybody a new respect for our place in space.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
You made a career out of engaging with young people, and you did it in such a, a, a way that was at their level. You, it's part of your rules. Uh, rules of the road is like talking to children and youth, um, as peers. And, um, and I'm wondering,} 

^{Bill Nye: 
You God, man, that's it. That's the name of the game. So everybody on the show is a peer.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
Yeah. You and I are in this together. That's Wow.} 

^{Bill Nye: 
I love you, man.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
Well, this was a part of a lot of discussion.} 

^{Bill Nye: 
Yeah. I I I love it.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
And I, I'm curious what your observations are of youth today. I mean, you've been talking to young people for many, many years. I'm curious what, where, where you see differences, where you see similarities, just what your observations are in their readiness, their eagerness to accept science to to, to be looking for solutions and be part of the, the part of the answer.} 

^{Bill Nye: 
Well, Rob, everybody, young people are very aware of climate change. Young people are very aware of human's effect on the environment. Young people are very concerned about the future. And there's always concern about people looking at their phones all day and being depressed and not, um, not being unhappy. Well, kids have been unhappy for ages. Uh, I don't mean to dismiss it, but I hearken to Dion on the Belmonts and the trouble of being a teenager in love. I mean, this is, this is an old thing. And I also take heart that Socrates, Socrates complained about the youth of his day, that they were disrespectful back when he was young, and so on and so on. So people are pretty much the same. Everyone and young people are passionate. They're energetic and they want to get things done. And that's one more reason I'm very excited about the future is the next election. And the one after that, the pendulum's gonna swing back pretty hard. And the US especially, especially will get back to work on these problems.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
I appreciate your leadership so much, Bill, really do over the years and, and the evolution of it and the authenticity that you bring to your arguments and your conversations. Uh, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go a little bit different route here for a second. We plant a lot of trees. I, uh, I have planted a lot of trees in my time. What are your connections, the nature? How, how do you explore and experience nature?} 

^{Bill Nye: 
Um, I like, uh, to ride my bike. And one of the things that I really like is when you're on your bicycle, you smell things and the smell of a forest is priceless. I, I love it. So, um, my wife and I are, are pretty good hikers. My wife is especially good hiker. And, uh, we went to, uh, Italy, the Italian Alps.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
Nice.} 

^{Bill Nye: 
Not the Dolomites, uh, the not not far from there, but I'll tell something that happened that I guess I'll never forget. We heard a cuckoo bird, you know, a cuckoo clock.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
Yeah.} 

^{Bill Nye: 
I didn't get it. That the cuckoo clock sound is based on an actual bird. Like, Oh, what? Yeah. And it's way up in the trees. We couldn't see it, but you could hear it Cuckoo. Cuckoo. It is amazing. And then you are not gonna have a cuckoo bird. You're not gonna have a cuckoo clock. You're not gonna have any of that without a forest. And you can't have a cuckoo bird on a grassland. It's not a, where they make a living, it's not gonna be there. You not much as I love grasslands. I love Nebraska.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
Understood, understood, understood.} 

^{Bill Nye: 
Uh, you gotta have a forest. And, uh, uh, I, I was, I had a very, how to say, regular experience in the Boy Scouts. I spent a lot of time camping. And then when I moved to the Pacific Northwest, I spent a lot of time camping. I went, I did a, a little bit of mountain climbing, a little bit of serious steep snow climbing. And, um, the forest is just, is priceless. I spent a lot of time there. I just, as I say, it's the smell that I really like.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
I'm a biker as well. Are you doing mountain biking or road biking or all, uh, both?} 

^{Bill Nye: 
I'm an old road guy, man. I'm a road guy. When I, I'm so old Howard. There was no such thing as a mountain bike. I mean, it, it wasn't, there was a Schwinn stingray. It's not really quite the same thing.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
No, it's,} 

^{Bill Nye: 
So I've done, you know, I've done a little bit of mountain biking, but I'm not hardcore like some people I see riding, uh, you know, we have all this right, all these right of ways. We have all this pavement that's, I spent a lot of time on a road bike. The other, uh, few, two, uh, two months ago. I rode a hundred miles. First time in a long time.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
Bill, thanks for sharing your history with us. Thanks for sharing your journey. Uh, thanks for sharing kinda your optimism for the future. Uh, I'd be remiss if I didn't end with a final question that we always love to ask, which is, do you have a personal favorite memory or story of a tree or a forest? You shared a great one with us from your visit to Italy, but is there any other kind of story you'd love to share about a memory or a experience with trees?} 

^{[00:34:03] Bill Nye:  
When I was in the Boy Scouts, we hiked around Virginia, state of Virginia, Commonwealth of Virginia. And one time we come, we came up a rise and it was a grove of, I guess what you all, what we'd call, uh, Carolina pine trees. They're kind of pine trees that produce tar for the tar heels of North Carolina University and turpentine. And, uh, that smell that we all like at the holidays, that, that smell of pine, the smell of evergreens and on the ground was, uh, all the pine needles, which have a lot of tannin, uh, acid. And it just was magical. It was like a carpet of soft needles, needles. And the thing that impressed me was it was a grove. Like these trees are in it together. They have their own microclimate. And once you are aware of microclimates, you start to see them everywhere. I mean, it starts the south facing hill. The north facing hill hillside, the top the timberline fascinated when I fir when I got out west where mountains are quite a bit higher than back east. And you hike up and all of a sudden there's no trees. Like we're done. We, this is the high as we can work right here. That is amazing. And the other thing that amazed me, especially in the Pacific Northwest, is where you see, uh, this rockfall with the people call ta, guess the Scandinavian word, talus. These broken rocks. And what breaks the rocks up Are trees that, that the roots of the trees get in the rocks and just break them apart.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
And then one last tree story.} 

^{Bill Nye: 
I guess maybe you wanted one tree story.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
That's great. One} 

^{Bill Nye: 
Last tree story. Uh, on a road trip during the pandemic, Eliza and I were driving across the country, mining our own business, going to visit her brother who lives in Colorado. He's a big skier. He lives way up there. And we stumbled on a great base in National Park. A great basin many people might describe as Nevada. It's that part of the, of the mountain west is this big, it's a exaggerated valley. Goes on for I guess in English units, three or 400 miles in each direction. And there were the bristle cone pines. Mm. These are trees that are 3000 years old. Yeah. Everybody, there's no such thing in your experience. There's no crop. You might have an oak tree that you like. You might have a sequoia, you might have a redwood even, but they're not 3000 years old. So Christopher Columbus, these trees were growing a thousand years before he showed up. Before many, many of the first Nations people managed to get to what's now Georgia. These trees were growing, they're, it is amazing. And they look like they put in the hours, man. They're gnarled. Gnarled. They have been weather beaten. But you're not stopping them. No. They're just up There. Gnarled trees on top of this hillside. A great basin, national Park. And they're not going anywhere. And tell you what human, we're gonna be here after you're gone. Yeah. Enjoy the hike.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
That's great. That's great. Thanks for sharing that. Bill.} 

^{Bill Nye: 
Bill, thank you.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
Thanks for, uh, thanks for everything you've done. Thanks for influencing. Thank you. Yeah. Honestly, thanks for influencing generations of people, introducing them to science, helping them make them advocates for the environment, advocates for science. And, uh, it's, it's great to know you. Thanks for joining us on unearthing optimism.} 

^{Bill Nye: 
Yeah,} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
Thank you. Check out the Science Guy, forest Show, whole show about forest.} 

^{Bill Nye: 
I've seen it. It's fantastic.} 

^{Dan Lambe: 
You should keep talking about trees, bill. You know 'em, you love 'em. And, uh, we love when you hear and you talk about 'em.} 

^{[00:38:41] Bill Nye:  
Thanks a lot. Carry on. Take care. Let's change the world.} 

^{[00:38:46] Dan Lambe:  
That's all for this episode.} 

^{Bill reminds us that science isn't just about facts or formulas. It's about curiosity, responsibility, and possibility. Understanding how the world works gives us the power to protect it.} 

^{Thank you for tuning into Unearthing Optimism. If today's episode moved you or inspired you, we hope you'll subscribe, leave a review, and share the show with a friend. Until next time, keep planting those seeds of hope.}