When I asked if the call was dropping out, Bill Nye started smacking the table in front of him. He wanted to demonstrate how, on speakerphone, reverberations off the glass surface on which his phone was resting could make it seem like the connection was cutting out. "It sounds like we hung up, but we're just here," Nye said. Even in his new role as the United States Ambassador to Science—or perhaps it's the other way around—Nye is still a teacher. That much hasn't changed since his iconic '90s television show, Bill Nye the Science Guy, which teachers across America have plugged into VCRs atop wheel-mounted TV stands in the front of their classrooms for decades, plugging Nye into the zeitgeist as they went.

An entire generation of kids grew up loving Bill Nye. Sure, it was a break from regular science class. But across 100 episodes, Nye's enthusiasm and zaniness and curiosity were relentless as he demonstrated the pull of gravity by dropping a computer off a roof or how electrons work with an elevator mosh pit. The show was active and engaging and made the study of science seem real and important. It made Nye "the science teacher everyone wished they had," in the words of a contributor to a new documentary on the man himself.

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Bill Nye: Science Guy is an aptly named exploration of his career, which has steadily moved from a quest to get children hooked on science to, these days, trying to convince adults that they need science to make informed decisions as voters and taxpayers. The film follows Nye as he explores anti-science hotbeds like Kentucky's Creationist Museum with an empathy lacking in Bill Maher's Religulous. It accompanies him as he tries to fulfill Carl Sagan's dream of launching a "solar sail" into the cosmos, or ventures to Greenland to observe climate scientists as they study the air trapped in ancient ice to track the relationship between carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures. Outside, the glaciers are steadily collapsing. A giant piece of ice shatters and falls while Nye is explaining something on-camera.

But the film also explores Nye's complicated personal life, constructing a portrait in three dimensions of a science celebrity who has parents he learned from, siblings with a rare genetic disorder he takes care of, and problems with committing to romantic relationships that he's never quite gotten over. Oh, and he celebrates Christmas. We touched on that side of the film when I spoke with Nye this week, ahead of its premiere on Friday. But we also touched on the larger implications of his new calling.

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Along with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Nye is one of the few high-profile defenders of the scientific method who might pop up on your TV. He is the greatest defender of the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real and man-made. He is a warrior against teaching creationism in school science classes, and against the theme parks popping up across the heartland set on indoctrinating children with fanciful histories of our world. We talked all of that, along with his views on Tucker Carlson, "the Deep State," Russian interference in the 2016 election, and why America's value for science collapsed soon after the Soviet Union. No one ever said he was a one-trick pony.

Has opposition to science always been an undercurrent of American life? Are we at a low point now?

We're at a low point, I think almost entirely because of the fossil fuel industry. The industry has managed to introduce this idea that scientific uncertainty of plus-or-minus two percent is somehow the same as scientific uncertainty that would be plus-or-minus one hundred percent. And that's wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong. But this has permeated all of society, where it's very common to meet people who think their opinion is the same as scientific evidence. It's not, so they should cut it out. [Laughs]

What's underlying this worldview? Is it emotional—are people afraid of what it takes to understand more about the world? Are they just incurious?

The fossil fuel industry has worked to keep themselves in business. I've benefitted my whole life from electricity produced by burning oil and coal. I get it. But we can't do that anymore.

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The other problem with climate change in general is that it's happening in slow motion. It's such a big idea, it just doesn't seem possible that humans, this species on the earth's surface, could somehow affect the whole climate. But we are, and we do. But the fossil fuel industry hired the very same people that the cigarette industry hired to introduce the idea that the science of the carcinogenic nature of burning tobacco—of smoking—was somehow not completely verified or embraced. They went to introduce doubt, and they were successful.



And now we have these people who are in power in the world's most influential country who are anti-science, because of their direct or indirect connections to the fossil fuel industry. This is in nobody's best interests, so we'll see what happens when these legislators and their staffs realize that they have kids and grandkids that are being affected by the denial of science.

The current president is fundamentally incurious about the world. Do you think his election demonstrates that we want to withdraw from the difficult questions and settle for something simpler?

It's a real problem. I'll start with that. Keep in mind that the other side—the progressive side, Clinton—won by three million votes. It's this old-fashioned system we created, and apparently Russian operatives were able to, in judo fashion, use our own flaws against us. They were able to bring out the worst in people, and bring out a guy who, as you say, doesn't have any curiosity or respect for intellectual endeavors. This is a real problem, and it's not just a problem for progressive people like me. It's a problem for all of us.

"This lack of curiosity, this rejection of intellectual pursuits and especially of provable facts, is catching up with them."

Republicans have control of both houses of Congress and the executive branch, but their views are so out of the mainstream they're not able to get anything done. This lack of curiosity, this rejection of intellectual pursuits and especially of provable facts, is catching up with them. So the question is, will young people come of age and become captains of industry soon enough to do enough about climate change to preserve the quality of life for billions of people?



I came of age with the space program, so science and the acceptance and belief in the value of science was everywhere. It was systemic—built into society. But that waned after the Cold War was resolved, after humans walked on the moon and the former Soviet Union went out of business. Interest in science, in my opinion, waned. Because for economic reasons, what keeps the country able to compete is its ability to innovate with new technology, and technology comes from science. So in order to stay competitive, the US has to educate young people in science, technology, engineering, and math.

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The crystalizing moment in the film, for me, comes in your debate with the creationist Ken Ham. The moderator asks both of you what it would take to change your mind. You say compelling evidence. Ham essentially says nothing would change his mind. Is that the divide?



It is in his case. He is confronted with overwhelming evidence to the contrary of his view—or what he claims is his view. But it doesn't bother him, somehow. Here's a tree that's older than 6,000 years. Here's a pyramid older than 6,000 years. Here's rubidium and strontium found in rocks, and their half-life is more than 4 billion years. And he's able to ignore all that. It's a really extraordinary idea. My concern, everybody's concern, is young people. You don't want kids growing up with this silly way of looking at things.

Have you ever run into a young person who said they loved your show in the '90s, but they don't like what you're doing now?

Most people who don't like what I'm doing now say they wish I were doing more. "Bill, you're not vocal enough. You don't attack enough people. You don't participate enough. Why don't you run for president?" You very, very seldom meet a young person who's a climate change denier—somebody in their 20s who doesn't accept human-caused climate change.

"I came of age with the space program, so science and the acceptance and belief in the value of science was everywhere. It was systemic—built into society. But that waned after the Cold War was resolved."

Humility strikes me as a facet of scientific thinking. You have to be humble enough to accept contrary evidence to your hypothesis, or to think you don't know everything about the world.

That's what I told Mr. Ham. It's so exciting that we don't know. Embrace it, don't reject it. It's a huge opportunity.

Do you think that's lacking for people who would prefer to just look at the Bible and pretend that's everything there is to know?

Well, that's the shortcut: If you had a book written 50 centuries ago, you could know all there is to know. But that doesn't seem to be true. In the case of the Judeo-Christian Bible, there's nothing about rubidium and strontium, the five layers of the atmosphere, anything like that. So to me, this is sort of wishful thinking. If only there were a source you could consult for all the answers, wouldn't that be great? But this is the imperfect nature of science.

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But as the saying goes, it's the best thing we have. Democracy may be imperfect, but it's the best type of government we can get. And by the way, this is the frustration, for those of us on the other side, with the conspiracy theories. The idea there's a "Deep State." If only there were five dozen people in charge. We'd just find those people and tell them to cut it out. But that's not how it is. There's way more than five dozen people, all competing—by that I mean 7.4 billion people—all competing to have a high quality of life.

Do you think science and organized religion are compatible?

Well, of course they can live in harmony. My concern with with the answers in Genesis and Ark Encounter and Crosswater Canyon people is that the earth is not 6,000 years old. That's silly. Inane. It's ridiculous. And the evidence against that is overwhelming. So I just wish they would cut it out. Just stop it. But I think guys like Mr. Ham are so deep in now, they're very, very reluctant to turn back. It's not about religion; it's about this provable science of the age of the earth. People get a lot of community, a lot of support, from their religious peers. I understand that. The community especially. But the earth's not 6,000 years old.

"The earth is not 6,000 years old. That's silly. Inane. It's ridiculous."

Not a lot about your personal life has been made public before. Were you concerned about how it might be depicted?

Yeah. I signed an "I have no creative control" agreement, so I was nervous about that. But they treated it OK, didn't they? There's a part there in the middle where I want to kill myself, but that's just the nature of it.

You say in the film one reason you didn't have kids is you were afraid of passing on a genetic disease that runs in your family. Is that an example of how the facts can be difficult to face sometimes?

Well, I think I was wrong about my conclusion. I don't have to do the same thing my parents did. My dad had this disability, my brother does, my sister does. They both have kids. My brother has four, my sister has three. Their kids have kids. And the world keeps spinning.

Coming to grips with your health problems is very important, but just notice that everybody who's alive today got this far. Even the inferior or ugly people got this far. As we say, evolution—if it were an entity—doesn't care about whether or not you are a superior athlete. You only have to be good enough. That's it. A big idea that people miss—and it's because of 19th century English—is the expression "survival of the fittest" refers to the organisms that fit in the best, not the organisms that do the most crunches, or something. This is a big idea in science that everybody's got to stop and appreciate. There's a lid for every pot. Everybody got this far. Everybody you meet made it this far.

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You're bow tie icon. How do you feel about some other prominent bow tie-wearers, like Tucker Carlson?

He doesn't wear a bow tie anymore. He lost his nerve! The last time I was on with him, his deal was to just interrupt me. I believe that was his approach to refuting or discrediting my point of view—to not let me finish a sentence. So I took out my phone in the stopwatch mode, and I couldn't push it fast enough. He interrupted me faster than I could activate the stopwatch. It was certainly faster than every six seconds. It was more like every four and a half. So I'm not in any big hurry to go back and do his show. But [Fox News] is very influential, and apparently very influential among the people who voted for the current president.

What's the definition of science?

It's a process by which we know nature. Science is the sum of the facts and ideas that we have accumulated by means of the process. So you observe something. You have a hypothesis as to what caused that phenomenon. You design the test, you test it, you compare what happened with what you thought would happen, and then perhaps the most important step is you start over. That process has allowed us to discover the atomic number of rubidium, and the process by which living things change over time as they reproduce—evolution. And we live on a big ball, and we're one star in a galaxy full of billions, which is in turn in a universe, or a cosmos, full of more billions. We learned all that through this process.