There it is.
Hi, it's Saturday.
Busted pencils, fully leaded education talk.
Educated educators talking education.
Incredibly exciting Saturday for everybody out there on the Civic Media app, Civic Media radio stations.
Hey, and even those people that are out there downloading this some other day of the week, we appreciate you.
Love that you're listening to Civic Media.
But also, we really love that you're listening to Busted Pencils.
It's me, Dr. Tim Slecker with Dr. Johnny Lupinacci and Jacob, chairman of the board.
He is there.
Fellows, before we get to our guests, I got to check in on my, what did we say, my homies, my brothers, my friends.
You know, Jacob, what's happening with you, man?
Hey, Tim, I didn't think I was going to talk much on this one.
A little surprised.
Saturday's going great this weekend.
You know how it is, Tim.
It is Saturday, isn't it?
Well, you know, it is Saturday for those people listening to this on Saturday.
Don't drop K-fabe, Tim.
Come
on.
Anyway, yes, I'm having a good time.
I'm looking forward to this one because we've had a lot of science questions recently, at least in the time that I've been around and you guys have been saving them up.
You got someone to talk to.
Who is there somebody that Johnny and you can introduce when after Johnny says I
yeah, Johnny let's get quick But Johnny how you doing my friend over there on the west during side of
the country Hey, I'm doing all right You know you pulled me out of vacation this week for class and session and and you know it was like a it was like a cold plunge back into things and You know I'm gearing up for the fall getting excited to get back in my classroom and
you know, touch and base with teachers and friends as we sort of, you know, August our way back into the school year.
So I'm doing good.
It's been a good week.
We're still squeezing the last days of summer out of things.
And, you know, out here on the West, we're relatively free from forest fires right now, which has been a really long time and many summers.
This has been, you know, relatively, you know, smoke free summer for us.
So, you know, knock on some wood.
I'll knock on some wood here, but
Yeah, we're getting ready for fall, not letting it get here too quick.
But we've been having, as Jacob alluded to, we've been having some great conversations and interactions with listeners around one of our favorite topics, right?
Scientific consensus and, you know, navigating information.
That's
what
you pulled me out of vacation this week, you know, talking about the vast sea of misinformation, the differences between misinformation and disinformation.
And I went off on that whole tangent around scientific consensus.
So one of my favorite guests, really
one
of my favorite people, right, is here with us today.
Tim, let's not let listeners, you know, be in the dark any longer.
Introduce our guy.
Yeah, we are so excited to have him back.
Yes, he is truly a real life astrophysicist, Dr. Ethan Siegel.
Man, welcome back to Busted Pencils, our friend.
How you doing,
Nathan?
Oh, thank you, Tim and Johnny.
It's always my pleasure to come back, you know, talk with educated educators about all things education relating, even though we're on summer vacation.
Well, those of us who teach high school are on summer vacation.
Some of us are working all year round, but that's OK.
Knowledge doesn't stop.
And I'm happy to share it with you any day of the year.
Oh, man, we appreciate it.
OK.
We are there's so much to go over different things that have been happening You know since January, it's like we wake up every day and go what what really?
that's happening and You know, how do we make sense of of all of those things?
Well, you know because as Johnny was saying we did a show earlier in the week about
misinformation, disinformation, the realities, how, you know, people use emotions to confuse people sometimes to direct them in a certain way.
When the facts, if you took time to look at the facts, you might go, Oh, what's happening?
But
more importantly we're back to having conversations at least we see about you know science and uh while it depends and and that whole it depends I think is where we kind of want to start because as we're now seeing um climate change let's go right to climate change according to this administration and the environmental protection agency it's
no longer a scientific consensus fact that humans are contributing to it, fossil fuels are part of the problem.
Because Ethan, the science behind making that statement says what?
I mean, so here's the whole thing, right?
You're talking about 2025 and oh my God, there's all these like
prominent mouthpieces in positions of traditionally scientifically authoritative positions where they're now saying things that are not only extremely non-scientific but where they're in fact going against what science has established over years or decades or generations or even centuries and millennia to be
firmly established truths.
And we have to remember as individuals with brains in our heads and the capacity for critical thought that it's up to us to choose our highest values.
When we go out in the world and we make informed decisions about what we do, how we live our lives, what do we go with?
Do we just say, you know what, I'm loyal to these people and whatever they say, I'm going to agree with and loyalty is my.
value or do we say you know what loyalty is great and I'm always going to stand up for my family and my spouses and my country and and all the people who are important to me but
I'm also wedded to a higher value.
I'm wedded ethically to truth and honesty and what is real.
And if you are wedded to those things, you're not going to be drawn in by these emotional traps.
You're not going to be drawn in by this seductive.
Oh, maybe COVID-19 didn't originate from a zoonotic spillover event at a Wuhan market.
Maybe it was engineered in a lab.
then you say okay what does the evidence say and you go look up all of the evidence and you find like oh it's actually overwhelming you could just look at the genetic code of the virus and know where it came from and how and that tells us it wasn't engineered in a lab end of story unless you fall for the things you shouldn't be falling for and you're listening to emotional manipulation and you're listening to a
disinformation or misinformation based narrative, what we call alternative facts in these days and age.
Same thing with the climate.
You can say, oh, well, you know, some people say blah, blah, blah about the climate.
I'm like, yes, some people say that gravity is just a figment of our imaginations.
And some people say, if I didn't have fluoride in the drinking water, I would be astral projecting all the time.
And some people say that when you eat a potato, you have little bits of potato floating in your blood vessels.
None of that is true.
Stay wedded to reality, my friends.
Stay wedded to reality because of all the things we've ever learned in the world, science is the one thing that if you erased all of our knowledge about the natural world and how it worked, you could wake up tomorrow and you could start.
regathering all that data, all that information, doing the same experiments, making the same observations, using that scientific method, you would reconstruct exactly the same picture of reality.
You would draw the exact same conclusions.
So don't abandon our one successful method that we painstakingly developed over the entirety of human history just because you feel like you're loyal to what some dumb guy says.
Man, I was just thinking, I was like, wait a minute.
So your point, you're saying that the people who get the most votes don't have the ability to declare truth?
Come on, man.
We don't vote on reality.
We measure it.
We go out and determine what it is experimentally.
That's the whole reason we do science.
It's not goes like, oh, I have some theory and he has some theory and who knows who's right.
No, we do know who's right because we go out and we measure reality.
And a good theory as opposed to a pseudoscientific theory is something that actually makes concrete quantitative predictions about what you're gonna find when you put nature to the test, when you do your inquiry.
When you do your investigation, when you do your experiments, when you make your measurements, when you take your observations, you're going to see, oh, and I got these results.
And that's consistent with.
these sets of theories and that refutes or invalidates all of these other sets of ideas.
So you can have an idea that like oh maybe contrarian scientist Judith Curry is right and the stadium wave theory of temperatures is correct and there's no human-caused climate change and then you look at the data and say oh that's ruled out.
Next.
and
then you
say oh well maybe the universe obeys this timescape cosmology where different portions of the universe are billions of years older or younger because of the amount of mass in there and then you go and measure how does time dilation actually work in these regions of space and you say nope that's right out get out of here and then you say anything you want
Right?
This is how you do science.
You put it to the test.
We find out information about nature by putting the question to nature, whatever form it comes in, whether it's something on planet Earth, whether it's something out there in space, whether it's something in a laboratory, whether it's a natural phenomenon, you go out, you measure it, you gather data, you collect your results, you compare it with your predictions, and then you draw your conclusions based on the full suite of evidence around you.
That's the only way to do it.
Johnny, you are nodding away there, man.
Well, I love this because also what Ethan's explaining for us listeners is, you know, the scientific method.
And then the part I'd add to that is the great thing is that it's not just one person who does this.
The method itself allows for then several scientists to say, Hey, that's interesting.
Let me run that experiment.
Let me replicate that and see what my results are.
And that's how we build towards this thing called scientific consensus, where a large group of people, a mass of scientists, highly qualified experts, run those experiments and then say to us, maybe the day-to-day decision makers, here's a reality.
Here's some information you can apply to your decision making.
And it's never just one person.
Maybe it starts with one unique scientific experiment.
but then replicated.
And so we have like diverse perspectives and even diverse disciplines, like different kinds of scientists who bring their expert lens, you know, to that information.
So I'm a big fan of this, obviously, like love the guest, but also love the topic.
Right.
But, you know, as Ethan said, like, we've been doing this for a really, really long time.
And maybe sometimes a scientist might not be right because the scientific process.
helps flush that out.
So we ask questions, we put those questions to the test, and then we lean on those experts around the world.
But this is kind of like Ethan, you mentioned it's 2025.
And, and we're in these moments to you where, where someone might say, well, I don't trust.
I think I brought this up on the show recently, like, I've noticed an erosion of trust.
Yeah.
And so I just thought, like, you know, we're winding down on the first segment, so it'll probably carry us over into the next one.
But, you know, listener out there and even myself as I'm teaching about the importance of trust in my classroom, I want to kind of have a conversation about, you know, where we can build trust amongst conversations and communities and include science in that because to me it's always been such an important aspect.
Truth and trust go hand in hand
when we get
back.
I would never hit ya.
Busted pencils, fully leaded.
Education talk, educated educators.
Talking education.
Our guest, Dr. Ethan Siegel.
Yes, he's a real astrophysicist.
Check out, you know, first of all, just give him a Google while you're listening.
You can find all that.
But we will let Ethan come back and make sure he tells us about all of the things that you need to experience, Ethan Segal.
Ethan Johnny, though, kind of hit this with the trust.
And I think this is one of those issues where, from an argument standpoint, when somebody says, look, I
I just don't trust science anymore.
I don't trust it anymore.
Partially, sometimes I'm going to be like, well, that's you making a stupid decision to choose that.
And then I realize, though, that when somebody says, I just don't trust science, my
My push back on them is is usually not going to be very effective if I don't acknowledge some sense of going The mistrust you have is is valid.
Maybe we should be talking from a different point of view Just thinking about this.
How do we deal with a family member?
I think maybe is more importantly because I know we all have them who are sitting there going, you know, well, you know, it's
It's been proven that this thing over here is actually false now, and because of that now, I don't trust science.
How do you respond to my uncle?
Well, if we're talking about your uncle Tim, right, and you're saying like, well,
you're not gonna convince him by appealing to the science because you're never gonna convince him with that because he doesn't trust it.
And I would sort of ask you to sort of say, well, is he someone who can be reached?
And what I mean by that is, you can't reach everybody because, for example, you're never gonna reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
You have to come at this from the point of view of I am wedded to factual reality.
And if you can share with me what are the facts of reality and we can agree on those facts, then what we can have a conversation about is what is the best, most correct, most scrupulous way to interpret those facts in the full suite of evidence.
If you disagree about the facts of reality,
I'm sorry, like this is not a conversation where you're pulling up a seat to the table.
This is a conversation where you just said, if I don't care about facts, I'm going to live in a fantasy world where you can't...
convince me of factual reality and for that person I would say you don't want to raise waste your time on that you don't want to waste your effort right the the lesson I give to people when they encounter this and they come to me and they say what do I do I say never waste your time explaining yourself to people who are committed to misunderstanding you
and
that's true now if that's not your uncle
Right?
If your uncle, he is a fact-based guy.
He is a reality-based guy.
He does value what's real.
Then I say, then start with the facts.
Start with the facts.
And if you can agree on those facts, then you can have a sane conversation about where do we go from here.
I think there are a lot of valid reasons from what people hear about science for them to maybe not trust some aspects of it.
Because when you have incomplete information,
You're gonna draw a conclusion that may need to get revised as you acquire more information, right?
This happened a lot if you look back to the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic where we're all wiping down our grocery bags and some people are wearing goggles over their eyes because we didn't know how the virus got transmitted.
Once we learned, oh,
it's droplet based in aerosol based that change the way we approached it right when you say okay well now that we can agree on what the facts are maybe I object because
Different scientific people promote different ideas in different theories and I say well here's the thing Johnny brought up the idea of consensus where all the scientists agree on something even citing multiple different independent lines of evidence and I'll say Johnny is right when we have that when we have you know all the evidence even from these disparate looking fields all point to the same conclusion it gets harder and harder to escape it contrast
that with something like quantum mechanics if you go and ask a room full of theoretical physicists like me.
What's the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics?
You're not gonna get a consensus answer because there is more than one correct interpretation There's more than one interpretation that agrees with all the data So if you will say well, we have a scientific consensus look at the basis underlying Why we have that consensus look at what all the different people from all the different fields that draw the same conclusion are saying because chances are
you're actually gonna be confronted with a suite of overwhelming evidence where even if you say, I don't trust science, you can counter with, okay, don't trust, verify it for yourself.
If you do it scrupulously, you should draw the same inescapable conclusion as long as you're wedded to that same truth and reality that scientists are wedded to.
Yeah, you know, I think it's partially though too is that
Doubt is what's been kind of sown.
It's it's it's doubt and they'll be like, you know what?
It's just I I don't trust it's it's a doubt thing I'm concerned that I might potentially, you know be committed to the wrong information or even now to the point to where we really have a war based on people trying to say
My evidence.
My evidence.
All of this is crazy.
I think we're putting it in a great place to realize, though, Ethan, hey, look, when the facts are the facts, we got to come up and say, hey, we're going to go with the facts.
When we get back, though, Ethan, OK, I might let you get on the top ropes and get ready because I want to know what you're thinking about AI and energy because I love myself some AI.
Busted pencils.
Back in a minute.
Man, going quickly.
Busted pencils fully leaded.
Education talk.
Educated educators talking.
Education.
Our guest, our friend, Dr. Ethan Siegel, astrophysicist.
Yeah, one
of
those people.
And when you have time, he can talk to you about alternative realities, just not today because...
Or alternative universes alternative realities because I feel like sometimes yeah, there's there's there truly is like I live in my reality over here you live in your reality over here and I'm perfectly happy with the way I'm living my life Johnny you make fun of me all the time for being a paying member of the congregation of AI
I feel like sometimes I need to find an AI confessional to pay to potentially lay out there some of my my issues.
But take it away, Johnny.
I mean, help me understand where I'm going wrong.
Well, Tim, and we won't bug Ethan with too much of this, because I think, you know, I want us to be good hosts to and give some time to check in with our guy and say, Hey, what have you been up to?
Yeah, yeah, you know, I've been, you know, listening to starts with the bang and reading.
you know, Ethan stuff.
And I'm curious about, you know, habitable planets and all the cool stuff happening in science right now.
So chagrin if I came on busted pencils, and I didn't give you both full reign to rant about
what you're
most upset about at this moment.
And this is one of those things.
So we're going to hog some space right now.
Tim and I go back and forth over AI over a number of reasons.
But we've come to, you know, a common ground on, you know, understanding
how this tool might be a compliment to our classrooms and learning environment.
And even folks out there listening to their careers, to the craft or the commitment they have to being the best at whatever it is, AI is undoubtedly playing a role in that.
And over the past couple of weeks, we've gone back and forth on this.
And one of the things that's come up, Ethan, related to science, has always been in the back of sort of my
I don't know what to call it, one of my calls to education as a scientist is the health of our environment, our healthy relationships as a community and how truly dependent and interdependent we are on the natural world and how important that is.
And we might make some jokes about it, but obviously politically right now, it's not a high priority and it's almost become everyday commonplace to just diss.
to just be like, okay, sustainability, okay, the earth's, you know, carrying capacity to sustain technological growth at the rate it's going, you know, is may might be problematic to people laugh and say that's a crazy guy over there, you know, talking about this crazy stuff related to climate change or whatever it is.
But you know, it's come up.
And you hear in the conversations around AI, our dependency on technology as a
as a civilization, if we could call it that, or, you know, our humaneness on the planet.
And, and I had brought up with Tim, what about the environment's capacity to sustain these technologies?
You know, and, and listeners know, I didn't have a lot of evidence with me on that.
So I've been doing some digging recently, but I thought it might be a little bit of a topic because if it's coming up in my life, it's probably coming up in listeners lives too, when this AI stuff is coming so fast.
And the rate at which technology is, you know, and computers, high computing chips and whatnot are integrated into our everyday life.
You know, I just wondered, like, there has to be scientists asking, you know, saying things about our ability as a planet where energy comes from or how we're cooling these supercomputers, you know, it just doesn't happen because we snapped our fingers and technology is advanced.
This is wondering sort of your thoughts as a, you know, as a scientist, but also someone with their, you know, fingers on the pulse of, you know, communicating scientific fact out into these conversations.
And maybe you can help Tim and I make a little more sense of, you know, my, yeah, but Tim, the environment can't sustain this.
Okay.
I mean, so there's a lot to unpack here, right?
So you're like, okay.
I hate AI.
He loves AI.
Who's right?
And the answer is, well, for some applications, you're both right.
For example, if I'm asking.
an AI about a topic that I have very little experience or knowledge about, but that I know the training data for this AI is rich in, then the AI is probably going to give me a good result when I query it, right?
If I say like, hey AI, I have like these sets of medical symptoms, what could it be?
It might actually tell me something that goes way beyond my knowledge for what I suspect I might have.
But
I'd still want to go to a doctor to verify.
Oh, let's figure out if this is what you actually have, because I don't want to self-diagnose with something that isn't going to be correct and isn't going to help me.
If I say like, oh, I don't know that much about economics, but I want to know what are the economic projections of this thing.
And I know that AI has been trained on that data.
It can do a very good job.
On the other hand, if I start asking AI questions about like, hey, I have these ideas in fundamental physics.
And even though I don't know any math and I can't do any physics for myself, I want you to tell me like, would this be a theory of everything?
Could this take all of physics beyond the known, right?
This is example of what people are calling vibe physics and what I call AI slop because you are just getting a whole boatload of nonsense where the AI being a large language model chat bot is just feeding you everything it can to keep you engaged with it.
So.
There's good uses of AI, there's bad uses of AI, there's plenty of misinformation you can get from using AI, but as far as the environment goes, look, it's a computationally intensive thing, just like.
Bitcoin or any blockchain technology is, it's computationally intensive.
And that means it is going to use a lot of power.
So you can say, well, what kind of power use does me using AI have on the environment and how bad is it?
And it turns out, you know, as one individual person, your usage isn't going to make a whole lot of difference.
Sort of like, you know, like, well, you're like, what about having a kid versus querying AI?
Or what about like, you know,
you know the the thing is we use power it's not sustainable we're using it in a non-carbon neutral way so I would say this is just shortening the timeline for if we want to mitigate the effects of climate change you would say let's get on to sustainable power faster I can point you both because you both love evidence so much that there was a paper
published earlier this year by researchers at Harvard's TH Chan School of Public Health.
And they found that Bitcoin mining, which is very comparable to the AI used by data centers.
increases levels of air pollution harmful to human health.
They estimated that if you took about 25 Bitcoin mines, that produces as much pollution as the entire city of Los Angeles.
And it turns out that this is not really like isolated to where you are.
They estimated that 2 million Americans are exposed to higher levels of the 2.5 millimeter particles.
That's what you used to wear the N95.
masks to protect against before COVID came, where people in New York, the Houston-Austrian metro area, Northeast Texas, and the border of where Illinois meets Kentucky.
as where the biggest extra exposure to these particulates were.
They also found that if you have a Bitcoin mine in one state, it might use electricity from a power plant in another state.
And the burning of fossil fuels could result in higher levels of these particulates in yet other states.
So even if you're not talking about, oh, long term environment, climate change, right?
Air pollution matters.
You breathe that.
That's what gives you COPD and lung cancer.
So yeah.
Pollution is a real problem, but like many things
Is it the most pressing problem?
Or are we going to bury our heads in the sand about it?
Because maybe it's more important to fight genocide or fascism or just teach people to care about what's true, right?
We can't do it all.
So I think it's a problem.
I don't think it's the biggest problem associated with AI.
I think the fact that people are falling for flimsy information or misinformation or disinformation because it was just served to
them.
And it was easy to get is a much bigger problem than, Oh, no, now that AI is here, the pollution game is over.
Like, come on, man, we still didn't fix the underlying cause of climate change.
Where we get our energy from?
Well, and yeah,
That man, we got to get you on for a whole other show on that because it definitely want you to tell us what you've been doing.
But the whole idea of, you know, where are we getting our energy?
It's like, we're not allowed to have that conversation.
And it's so frustrating now to hear, you know, the current administration, and this goes for either administration is, is that I get in and go, here's the energy we like, the energy we like is now the only energy you can get the energy.
you like, you're not allowed to get that energy.
And the reality here is that, hey, we need to be understanding and researching and developing and looking at all of these ways to produce energy.
The idea that wind and solar now has, quote, been defunded makes no sense in a world that needs energy.
In that sense, we've got a whole lot.
Ethan, though, what have you been up to?
starts with the bang, all of those things, tell us all about Ethan's
world.
What's going on in the world of Ethan?
Well, I can let you know that earlier this year, I had a series of interviews published with Big Think.
Those are available for streaming wherever you can get YouTube.
They're fantastic.
I talk about the beginning of the universe and how far beyond the Big Bang we've got.
Those of you who are interested in if I have any new upcoming books coming out, November 11th is the publication date for my second National Geographic book entitled The Grand Cosmic
story.
Bam, the grand cosmic story.
And it tells the whole history of the universe from before the Big Bang to the present day and gives us several different paths we might take into the future where every time you turn the page you get a new illustration, new stats about the universe at this time.
a story about what's happening right now and you come forward 100 million years with every turn of the page.
So you start before the Big Bang, you come up to the present day 13.8 billion years later and then
off into the future.
How's it going to end?
What's going to become of us and what will happen to the rest of the universe in the far future long after we're gone?
It was a pleasure to get to write it.
I was in collaboration with Mark Garlick and John Lomburg as illustrators and it was designed by Will Lidwell.
And I'm so excited to share that with all of you.
And for those of you who are like, no, no, no, I like it simpler.
I've got something for you to look forward to.
My first children's book was called the littlest girl.
That one's out.
I wrote a second one.
We're putting it together now.
It's called the biggest boy becomes a black hole.
And so for the little girls and the little boys and everyone in between in your life, go ahead and get these books.
I'll let you know at a future date when that one's coming out.
We still need to get the illustrator on board to make the illustrations for the second one as beautiful as they were for the first.
Wow.
Man, how do you do all this, Ethan?
What in the world is going on?
I
must be so busy that my hair falls out.
Well, and again, everybody watching on the YouTube, yeah, check it out.
Four bald men with hair on their faces.
Come on, man.
This is what you call a team representing.
I don't know what we're representing, but Ethan, man, make sure, too, everybody, starts with a bang.
You want to check out all of things Ethan Siegel starts with a bang, your best place to start looking.
We're going to make sure that all the links that Ethan just talked about are in this podcast description.
Ethan Siegel, man, thanks for
busting pencils.
You know, it's my pleasure.
All of you listening out there, remember, remember it's really important that you stay wedded to reality, that you value what's true and what's real, and that when someone tells you something, if you don't trust it, go out and find the facts for yourself and verify because reality and what's true out there is independent of all of us.
But the pencil fully led education talk educated educators talking education dr. Johnny Lupin Archie Chairman of the board Jacob and me dr. Tim slecker Loved our last guest dr. Ethan Segal astrophysicist laying You know laying so much on us Johnny, but at the same time I think what what is Profound with Ethan is is that what what he
delivers with such passion and depth is actually a very, you know, sometimes a simplicity in understanding that he brings to these things.
And, you know, when we're talking about, yeah, what, you know, what's it mean to have a scientific consensus?
I think one of the things that I really heard in that conversation today is that within the consensus,
there are scientists who are still maybe arguing some stuff.
You know, that's that's a bit Tim when you know, you imagine it maybe us, you know, digesting it on a podcast or, you know, watching a YouTube video or maybe you're in a course, you're a college student or even a high school or middle school student, you know, you get bits of information that have already gone through so many levels of
you know, discussion, deliberation, testing, you know, healthy argumentation.
That's the beauty of scientific consensus of peer review, right?
Is that idea of, you know, this, there are hypotheses, like there are questions posed and say, what if this isn't true?
And this other thing is real, let's test it out and see, you know, and so
It's really important, I think, to preserve that scientific method, that process, and to see the value in the scientific consensus.
This isn't just, you know, the voice that's the loudest or the most popular, or, you know, has the most funding behind it.
You know, it's experiments that have been replicated by thousands and thousands of scientists from different disciplinary fields.
Right.
So it's so when we say scientific consensus, we say sort of like it's been tested and it's continuing to be tested.
Because certainly things we thought were real.
In the past, we science has this proof, right?
And we've talked about like the human genome project, you know, debunking racism, you know, Ethan himself's come on and talked about, you know, gender identities.
Right.
And you know, the idea that there's only male or female gender identities is, you know, is not
in line with science.
And that's not political.
That's not like a conservative view or a liberal view.
That's our like scientific consensus shows us that, you know, the science, the genetics, the biology of these things is far more complex.
And that's the beauty of science is like some scientist, right expert, you know, does that work and several other experts replicate those experiments, right and come up with findings and then they compare those findings and it's a process.
that not just you and I and Ethan or people you know that that so-called identify as educated have value and that the general world holds value and and that's a really important thing I think to remember what I love Tim about this and listeners I think you can probably relate is Ethan also reminds us of the importance of our humility no matter how expert we are you know to connect on that human level to have conversations to be real to invest in trust in one another
Right.
And to have humility, like, Hey, we're experts in some things, educated educators, talking to education.
But I don't go tell my car mechanic how to fix my car.
Right.
And I'm pretty handy with a car.
But I love his example, like AI can help a guy like me maybe narrow down some things and feel confident going in and saying, Hey, I have these kinds of problems with my car, I think it might be.
But then
the humility I have to say, hey, there's an expert who's going to do some repair.
I can extend that out there, you know, whether it's an issue you have at home with plumbing, you know, you kind of can do some AI work or some YouTubing, but have some humility and call a plumber, right?
Just same thing when we're getting ready to head back into a classroom, our highly qualified teachers.
and school leaders out there.
They're experts in education and teaching children to read, teaching mathematics.
I'm not saying just blindly trust whatever they're doing in classrooms, but have some humility.
Understand that they are experts on curriculum, experts on recognizing the strengths in your child.
They're diverse learning and partner with them.
I love that Ethan brings that.
He's real.
He's down to earth.
He's an everyday guy who knows a whole lot about science and then shares that gift with humility.
So I love having him on.
I love it's a gift to all of our listeners.
It's certainly a gift to you and I, Tim.
Just love these shows where we get to have Dr. even sequel.
Yeah, well, speaking of AI, I tried to get it to tell me that I didn't need a new hot water heater.
It said, Hey, Tim, call plumber.
And now it's time.
for your moment of zen.
Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law.
It requires that a population whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion be taught that all is right as it is.
Now here we go, dropping science, dropping it all over, riding around the town like I'm riding in my Range Rover.
Oh wait, that's a Beastie Boys song.
This is Busted Pencils.
Thanks for listening today.
And remember to grab great podcasts.
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Hey.
And don't you dare be late for next Saturday.
But all week long, make sure you catch class and sessions on Wednesday and find us on Fridays for producer Jacob's Choice.
And if you enjoyed today, well, like I said, be there on Saturday, 3 p.m.
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