Last week, Bill Nye was at Cape Canaveral launching a prototype of LightSail—a spacecraft powered by the solar winds. This morning though, he's taken to the web for some less serious business: the lineup reveal for Austin's Fun Fun Fun Fest. In "The Science Of Fun," we get to hear the once-and-always Science Guy describe the festival's 12-chambered Taco Cannon, perfectly pronounce the name of the hip-hop group Rae Sremmurd, and, perhaps most satisfyingly of all, rattle off all nine currently touring "Wu-elements" of the Wu-Tang Clan. "It's all in good fun," Nye says. "And maybe a little silly?"

It's indeed both fun and silly. And although he was supposed to be shilling for Fun Fun Fun—which will also feature Jane's Addiction, D'Angelo and the Vanguard, and Chromeo this year—our conversation veered towards issues perhaps a little closer to Nye's heart: climate change, the NFL, and how to take a selfie. Turns out he's very serious about selfies. Here's hoping he goes to Fun Fun Fun in November and snaps one with Method Man and Red Man.

There was a lot of excitement a couple of weeks ago when Bill Nye the Science Guy finally popped up on Netflix.

Thirty of them [episodes] are there. And I'm not sure I'm going to get any compensation for that. I'm looking into it. The contract is 25 pages long and it's 23 years old. So I have to check and see what they mean by 'throughout the universe in perpetuity.' What about Europa, the moon of Jupiter? Is that covered? I don't know yet.

But if anyone can figure out what perpetuity means, it's you.

It's attorneys that do that.

There's always been a lot of Bill Nye on YouTube. There's also a lot of random science videos—regular folks conducting experiments and maybe explaining through animation their scientific theories. Is science like music, where there's so much chaos online—and the bar for entry is so low—that's it's perhaps not actually good for science?

No. No. No. Not at all. Like evolution, it's got to be bottom-up and organic. You don't want it to be top-down. You want people evaluating stuff on their own, comparing one to the other. It's hard to have too much. There's going to bad ones. And errors. There's errors in my old shows that we've tried to correct. The democratization is good. That's the nature of science. Everybody tries it. Everybody has their own opinion.

Your latest video announces the lineup for Fun Fun Fun. Is fun an under-researched science?

Maybe? Have you heard of Sebastião Salgado? He traveled the world taking striking black and white pictures of people and these primal scenes of jungles and ice. He has a famous series where penguins line up to slide down an iceberg. And it's just amazing. My perception is that these birds are doing it for fun. Being a penguin has to be a hassle—you have to swim around, eat fish and there's an Orca that might kill you. But these penguins are lined up, sliding down the ice for fun. I'm amazed.

In news about what you've called "The Science Of Music," U2 is touring right now with speakers suspended from the ceiling, so for the first time everyone throughout an arena will be able to hear the music equally. Rather than stacking the speakers near the stage or hanging them near it, as it's always been done, this is supposedly delivering a more uniform sound experience.

That sounds great. Get it? When you listen to acoustic players, there's a single source, and you stand off at a distance and you listen. Rock concerts are similar—there's Dick Dale playing his guitar really loud and the speaker projects that out from the stage. But it's cool that some engineers have recognized there's an opportunity to improve things. As the President of the United States remarked to me, if you were going to choose to be alive in any time in history so far, this is that time. Strange as it may seem, this is when the world is less violent than ever, with fewer wars than ever before. There are fewer catastrophic epidemics than ever before. So this is a great time to be alive. And furthermore, this is when people finally realized you could put speakers on the ceiling.

Even so, the things that you're often involved with—climate change, GMOs, evolution—are now as much about politics as science.

Were cigarette smoking and cancer political? Sort of, but not really. I mention this because the scientific consensus on climate change is at least as strong as the consensus on cigarettes and cancer. And yet, presumably under the influence of the oil and gas industry, the issue has become political. I'm playing the hand I was dealt.

But now you can't just be the science guy. You have to be political pundit too.

Again, I'm just playing the hand I was dealt. Should I run around saying, 'Okay, it's only a theory. It's okay if you think the Earth is 6,000 years old?' No it isn't. It's not okay at all. We can't raise a generation of people that are scientifically illiterate. You can't do that. If those guys want to politicize it, I'm going to fight it. But we need conservatives. We need two political parties. Nobody wants to watch the Super Bowl if you know what's going to happen because one team barely shows up. But you can't have one party ignoring science. This is the United States. Science is how we got here. We developed the first powered flight. We cured Polio. We do extraordinary things through science. You can't have one political party running around denying science. Nobody wants that.

"This is the United States. Science is how we got here."

So it has to go back to getting kids interested in science?

We had very compelling research back in the early '90s that 10-years-old is as old as you could be to get the so-called lifelong passion for science. If it's not 10, it's 12. But it ain't 17. That's why the Science Guy show was aimed at the ages it was.

And in hindsight, how successful were you?

It's amazing how successful we were. I can't get over it. I'm reminded every freakin' day. I went into a camping store today to buy a piece of nylon webbing for my bicycle messenger bag and the guy behind the counter says the reason he's getting his masters in biology is because he grew up on the show. Everyday somebody says something extraordinary like that.

Along with the important stuff, you've also weighed in a lot on pop culture recently, whether it's the science behind white women in their twenties on Amy Schumer, the optical illusion of "The Dress," or Deflategate.

Deflategate is classic. When you're a mechanical engineer, you take a lot physics, and that's a classic physics problem. You also take a lot of math and statistics and the really compelling thing for me were the fumble stats. The New England Patriots fumbled way, way less. Just that the league let these two guys get away with it amazes me. It matters because billions of dollars slosh around in those post-season games, and if one team is cheating, that's not good. It's not whining men complaining about losing $20 dollars. It's a very serious thing when a major league football team cheats. I sure like to watch football, but man, I don't know how long that game can last with all those head injuries. And a guy abuses his girlfriend while she's holding a baby? What in the world? Who are these people? For me, women are these magical, wonderful creatures. I don't want to abuse them. It's weird. This guy's relationship with them must be completely out of my everyday experience.

In a rough cut we saw of the Fun Fun Fun video you look into the camera and say, 'The Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothing to fuck with.'

I do. But there's a beep. Did they not put the beep in? The beep's going in, man. If there's no beep we have issues. The beep is funny. Whether it's Tina Fey, Jon Stewart, or Bill Nye, the beep is funny, because you can tell they really dropped the F-bomb. The beep is the punchline.

But you've dropped the F-Bomb on Bill Maher's show without the beep.

But in this case, we're talking about a rock music festival, not climate change or something actually important. This needed to be funnier. And the beep is funny.

Have you been to a major music festival like Lollapalooza or Coachella?

Nah. I get overrun and overwhelmed by the selfie people. It's just not my thing.

The selfie people annoy you?

They're my bread and butter. So we have a hate-love relationship. But it's sometimes a lot of work. These people take calculus. They can operate a motor vehicle, eat an ice cream cone, and text at the same time. But when it's time to take a selfie with Unclie Bill, they can't figure their phone out. But to quote Singin' In The Rain, you've got the glory, you got to take the little heartaches that go with it.

You once blogged a bunch of selfie tips, didn't you?

Yeah, I've shared them with the Planetary Society website, but if you're not a reader, I do indeed have some steps for a good selfie. First, have the lens facing you. That's key. Huge. If you don't have a self-facing lens practice, so you can find it and do it blindly. Then hold the phone a little above your eyes. Otherwise it looks like you're asleep. And with most phones you want to go left-handed. Learn to hold the phone with one hand and push the button with another. And with the iPhone, the volume buttons—either one—takes pictures. 'What, I didn't know that?' Regardless of the fact you didn't know that, it's true. And it's really important to not have your memory full or to have a dead battery. These seem like obvious procedures, but a lot of folks don't follow them.

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