 Good evening, everyone. I'm David McGowan. I'm the CEO here at WJCT Public Media And I am just delighted to see such a full house tonight and have all of you here with us It's really a treat Ira Flado is a television host and a producer an author and what can only be described as a Phenomenon on public radio. Oh Hope that's a good thing He is best known as the host of Science Friday a Role, which he has played for more than 30 years now He's won numerous awards and honorary degrees for his role in Science education and understanding. He'll please join me in giving a hearty welcome to Jacksonville to Ira Flado Thank you Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, David David and I actually go way back. I used to work with his father. That's how old I am We'll talk about that later So before we get going this evening and just a few housekeeping announcements I first want to say thank you a special thank you to our sponsors for this evening the Arthur Vining Davis foundations and Med Evidence Really appreciate their support and I also want to say a special really heartfelt Thank you to our First Coast Society members who are here this evening and to those who aren't here that group of generous supporters makes so much possible here and We really appreciate your generosity and in helping to make this event happen tonight So any of you are interested in joining who aren't already members. You'll find some material on your table. Don't be bashful They don't strike me as a bashful group. No, I don't think so. I've talked to almost everybody in this room I didn't find one bashful person We're also we are going to get to some questions tonight from the audience I or and I will chat for a while and then we will take questions So please when that time comes, please look for some of my colleagues in the audience who will have microphones and try to flag them down and And we'll get to that point in a little while But I let's start Where it all began you grew up in New York You developed a science an interest in science early. Yeah, where did that interest come from? You know, I don't know where it came from, but I do know how it Got to snowball. I mean I was kids are always I think of them as natural scientists They're curious about everything they get into trouble. They want to see how things work They take stuff apart when I was a kid. It was, you know, gee, there's a vcr Maybe a pop tart fits right in that slot, you know and and people kids are experimenting with it and I had a Had an eighth grade teacher mrs. Pfeffer real name, you know And she had a science club after school And she encouraged me and other kids to come stay after school and do these experiments in science And I kept my interest going in because what happens with kids is that even though they start out as scientists Something gets in the way Adolescence gets in the way and if you talk to scientists about what made them successful or why they continued A lot of them will tell you that they had a mentor Some people it could be mrs. Pfeffer or science teacher some people it could be their parents But someone who kept them on the road of keeping staying interested in science And continuing to follow their interest in being curious because it's all about curiosity So you train as an engineer at the state university of new york at buffalo but No wonder you're down here But in addition to the science bug you seem to develop the media bug Pretty quick you became a reporter at the radio station in buffalo The news director there before becoming a science correspondent for npr. Did you like talking about science more than you like doing it? I was terrible at engineering student I was terrible engineering student I knew that I wasn't going to make it there although I did graduate and wanted to get my degree in industrial engineering And my girlfriend at the time in college said You're awful. You're unhappy if you don't do something. We're done Basically now I had done some I had done some theater in high school So I wasn't afraid to be in front of a microphone or the public And I had done some television in high school and an experimental program But there was no theater department and there was no tv department in buffalo, but they had a radio station And so I said i'll join the radio station and see where that takes me And they were hiring just at that time the anti-war movement was going through buffalo And they wanted reporters to cover these demonstrations and things and I had no experience at that and they said we'll train you And I just happened to be in the right place at the right time Because the head of the radio station was a guy named bill seamering who then went to washington to start npr He created all things considered He wrote their mission statement And he said I'm not hiring you at npr He said I said good. Well, it's like get me out of buffalo, right? It's cold When I graduated in 71 he said you're over qualified I said, what do you mean? He said I just hired this woman named stamberg and somebody named worthheimer and And they they came in these entry-level jobs, but they never stayed there They got on the radio and I said that won't be on the radio. I promise you he said, okay so He hired me there was a staff of 35 there. They're now 835 people in npr And he introduced me to the staff and he said this is ira play-doh. He will never be on the radio I wanted to crawl under something three days later. I was on the radio Because the washington senators were leaving to go to texas and they all knew I was a great, you know I had the reporting experience and I was a great baseball fan and they said well go out and cover this sort of thing and I did my first story covering the Belated attempts then to bring the washington senators back, which they never did But they they appreciated that that science was important and they allowed me to be a science producer And after a while I worked myself up as a science reporter and created the science unit at npr If you if you ever saw the movie Broadcast news there's a scene there's a scene in the movie Where there's a somebody in the control room whispering questions in the ear of the Of the interviewer who asked the questions. That was me I I was assigned because I couldn't be on the radio To tell like my but who used to be my colleague and he was my mentor who was doing the interview Asked this question. Now here's the follow-up And if after a while bill seam ring realized this was kind of crazy So he allowed me to actually go on the radio and I did my best to lose my new york accent as much as possible Which I have failed at miserably so and the rest is history the rest is history. Well, yeah, so far So I stayed at npr um Almost 20 years and then I I went out and did a tv show called newton's apple That was me That was I I don't know that was so I wanted to get back into radio And I was listening to what was popular on the radio and talk radio had started And I I went back to npr my friends and I said I'd like to do you know a science program on an npr And they said well, how would you do this and I said I'll put it together and And they said here's the real problem is that the stations don't have national talk shows How are we going to convince them to have a national talk show? And sadham hussain bailed me out on this one Because he started the gulf war and npr started a daily talk national talk show about what happened in the war And that it didn't last very long, but the stations had a Ooh, they got a taste of what a talk show could be like and wanted one So I said remember me. I said my idea. Okay. I originally wanted it on a thursday They said let's put on a friday. It's got a nicer ring to it science fry science friday as I said, okay, and that was 1991 and So we're in our 33rd year So thank you And you know, we have huge audience have you know upwards of 2 million listeners radio and podcast listeners and our educational stuff And I always believed in educational material and early on We did we had back in the 90s in early 90s. We had the only educational material on all of npr I wanted to ask you about Education because I've heard you say that you don't need to be a missionary for science because Everyone always love it But that people don't get exposed to it in ways that allow them to appreciate it and understand it And I heard a conversation that you had on first coast connect our show this morning With ann schindler and she described her first experience as being forced to memorize the periodic table I thought you know how can we make it better? How well I'll tell you how we make it better We don't we don't try to teach kids Science like they're all going to be scientists because they're not Maybe one percent or whatever and you'll see outstanding kids who have a knack for it But we should teach science like we teach music And art we should teach you how to appreciate science. What does it do for you? Why should you learn about it? Who were the great scientists like the great artists? What did they do? What were their contributions? Why is it important to know about science? You don't have to know you don't have to learn how to titrate chemistry You know you don't have to roll a steel ball down to understand that but you can understand why it's important To learn that people learn about and why science is important Because someday you're going to be a voter and you're going to have to vote You're you know your money your tax money to pay for science research And so you should be able to understand it And if you and if and if you you know you want to become a scientist there's always that Road to you, but it's important to learn why science I think Is vital to to you know, I'm benjamin frankland. Our democracy was based on scientists Scientists scientists in the constitution. What else is you know, the the patent laws are written into the constitution As being necessary because they understood that you can't have commerce without science And you have to make you have to protect the science that's being done So that's the way I think you should be teaching science and teaching you how to appreciate and understand what it does So I think I think we all got kind of an appreciation and exposure to science In an unintended way through the pandemic. I sometimes think of the pandemic as a giant experiment In exposing us to the scientific process both the process of trying to understand the virus itself and then to develop the vaccine How do you think that experiment went and what should we learn from it? What was most interesting about that experiment is that People learned how science is done because most people think That all scientists agree with each other in fact the first letter I forgot when we did science friday those many years ago Was after a debate I had about why the dinosaurs were killed remember that asteroid theory That was brand new at that time and I had scientists who were debating whether that was real or not And a week later a postcard came in from barbara in new jersey Shocked she was shocked scientists Disagreeing arguing doesn't science know everything And it told me that we were successful Because we showed how how science really works. It's disagreements among scientists It's science is just a snapshot of the knowledge we have now and it changes as well our knowledge changes and the evidence changes And that's what happened with the cobit Covid lessons is that the public learned that as the science changes you have to change your opinion about how covid works or about vaccines or about How you do research and that you can't be stuck in one position About what you know about you know medicine. I think we've all had this experience not only through the pandemic but Through our lifetimes of trying to understand that science changes. I mean we all remember when Cholesterol was just bad and then oh wait. There was good cholesterol. What did that mean? Right many things that seemed to change especially In terms of what is good to eat and what is not right? That's a hard one. Yes, so How do we Regain our trust in science when it seems like the sands are shifting underneath us. When do we know? When it's right When do you know when science is well there is There are certain questions that science can answer and certain questions that are not scientifically answerable in other words If you want to know if god exists or not science can't answer that question because god is supernatural and not part of nature Science can only investigate what nature is And a question is only valid scientifically if you can do experiments to prove or disprove it If you can't do those experiments and that's the kind of thing that's going on in physics now with string theory, which is all part of physics string theory predicts certain things, but there's no way to test it out So it becomes sort of a religion after a while Because you can't test out religion to see if it's true scientifically and you may not be able to ever test string theory So it's something you have to let go and go on to something else Even though there are people who still work on it We have to just use we have to just teach people or constantly expose people to more kinds of scientific thinking And so people will understand that science is a process and it's not you know It's not an encyclopedia that sits on the book on the table. You open it up and say, oh, there's the answer you know, well, let's talk about an area in science that In which I think this this is an important question and that's the area of climate, right? It's an important It's important science related question Um, but it's not good state to talk about climate I mean, it's it's important in many ways and it's it's difficult because it's not like an asteroid is Out there threatening the earth that we can all understand and react to immediately. It's kind of a slow motion problem that has been gathering pace, but it's also something in which There seems to have been a scientific consensus for some time. Yes, but we've been very slow to Understand and accept that consensus. So we talk about understanding that science is changing and does change. How does The climate fit into that well science has become politicized now It's never used to be this political that you were identified by your politics about I know what you believe because you're I know what party you belong to or who you're voting for Um There's no way to do climate change to live in Florida and not see it all around you from the flooding that goes on to The hurricane intensities to and other parts of the country are now experiencing what Florida has been This week, San Diego had a rainstorm and San Diego was 90 what they called a 90 year rainstorm It hasn't rained like that 90 years Get used to that Because that's you know, the new normal when you're When you're losing all the sand on the beaches and the the the king ties are coming up more This is this is because you're sinking into the into the ocean and that's because the oceans are also rising Now when the ice is melting in Antarctica and in the south and in greenland like no one has ever seen before in these giant icebergs You can't deny what you're seeing. This is the evidence And if you trace the evidence you can trace it back all the way to a certain point in the industrial revolution Where the carbon dioxide started increasing and there's a direct link to that now If you don't want to believe that there's nothing I can tell you or present any amount of evidence If your belief system or your political system denies that People ask me what was one of the the best shows you ever did and it was a show that I did about many years ago about Um autism and vaccinations do you remember that Time where people well on my show. I had the world's smartest scientist about Vaccinations and he investigated the connections and found there was no connection He came on the program with reams of the data and stuff I had a listener call in and for the net I let her go on for eight minutes uninterrupted Giving her side of the of her ideas about why there is this connection And I wanted the audience to hear my audience to hear what this political side was and I think it was a political side Until I asked her at the end and I said ma'am Is there any amount of data that I can give you? That will change your mind There's a little pause and she said well ira I just don't believe anything my government tells me Now you cannot you know I you know I can present you with all kinds of science of politics science about climate change whatever And if you have a political or religious belief that it's going to put up a wall against understanding This is nothing we can do about that That's why you know That's why when they they pull of in election years. They pull the undecided Because the hardest thing to do is to change somebody's mind. I found that You can if they have decided and get made up their mind Is very hard very rare to get them to change their mind so So I want to stay with climate for a minute on somewhat more hopeful note. You've done a lot of programs about Technologies that are either kind of being introduced or have been introduced that offer some promise in Either mitigating climate change reducing carbon emissions and so forth What do you think is most promising from all the people you've talked to Well, there is a statistic. I think that just came out about last year was the first time That the co till level has actually dropped a little bit Not that we're out of the woods on this sort of thing But it does show that if you make up your mind Your political mind and and whatever your monetary mind that you can do something To affect the you know the future of climate change And it's and it's something that affects everybody and it's it's there and you can't deny it. It's just It's just something that unfortunately we live in an age of Of when things go crazy, then we take action almost. You know when we have mega incidents like a giant hurricane or an earthquake Oh, suddenly discovers this could be climate related. So It may take a few of those for more people to understand that Now it's rising ocean levels or the It's crazy Hurricanes and things like that are linked and might it might that's who we are unless we can change, you know leadership that Comes out and really So another topic that you've covered on your show quite a bit Is artificial intelligence, right? It's you know become a buzzword that we all have become more familiar with since the appearance of chat gpt More than a year ago now the pace of development is really quick There are some really promising applications. You did a program about some of the medical applications mammogram Interpretation and complex diagnosis and so forth There's also a lot of peril associated with it. Where are you on the promise versus peril scale? I'm leaning when I When I did the show last week on ai and in case you didn't hear it I had a researcher named Eric Topol who follows this. He's a cardiologist and he follows this very carefully and he he has discovered during looking at various studies that Shockingly computers are better at diagnosing imagery than doctors are if you give doctors or people There are 800,000 deaths every year from this diagnosis of people's illnesses A lot of that happens by reading the slides the mammograms The the the other the other kind of imaging and we what's really good at reading these things is artificial intelligence ai can pick up stuff that doctors miss whether it's tumors on a bone or Or whether it's something on your lungs or some sort of Diagnoses ai is really good at it And I really think that this is really the hopeful part of ai is is in medicine and saving a lot of people's lives and in diagnosing and We focused on one of the one of the ideas here was that your retina I got an email. I'll talk about the email I got Your retina contains so much information about things that are going on in the rest of your body That ai can find this stuff whether it's heart disease So whether it's um Parkinson's disease a lot of it Is actually reflected in your retina because your retina is actually an extension of your brain Your brain is literally just in your eyes as part of it and ai can pick up these diseases before they're ever diagnosed And so to me that that's really the hopeful part medicine Finding stuff before treating it before is really I'm hopeful I know you can distrust ai and is we have to be careful about it because also One of the one of the problems with ai is it's programmed by people And people have real biases the data they feed you have to train the ai You have to train it with case studies and things what to look for and what you decide to feed it You can be very biased and whether it's population studies It's it's that that's where we have to be careful about how we train and that's one of the biggest But you're an optimist I am I am an optimist both generally and on this topic As a journalist I'm a cynic but But I have to be hopeful about something because I'm not an optimist about climate change I'm you know because that thing climate change is moving so fast I mean the oceans are rising so quickly the the atmosphere is changing You know There are already signs that the what we used to call the gulf stream which is warms Great britain Is changing and if that goes by the water that's draining out of greenland it's cooling the water and the changes the current You know do you ever know what latitude that that uh That london is on london is on the same latitude is something like kebek So if you lose the warm from that ocean it's going to turn into canada And they're not quite ready for that snow. Yeah, you know so um It's it's it's I think that's that's a bigger threat than ai is so I want to ask you one other question That's related to climate and that is about the word nuclear nuclear is a word that a lot of people have bad associations with That's because they say nuclear But you correct them when they do that I do I absolutely But people have bad associations with that word because of nuclear weapons because of reactor accidents Right But a lot of smart people and smart people on your program said, you know, if we're gonna address the climate crisis We're gonna have to adopt a different attitude about nuclear energy What do you think has to happen for that to happen? I think we have to Make and this is where the research is headed making smaller Nuclear power plants. They're now making tiny nuclear power plants. They're smaller than the stage smaller and finding, you know There are safer ways to encapsulate it because you don't need this giant plant to make it and it can be It can be used for certain applications for example one that I See I have seen happen. I find it exciting is desalinating water We are really in a water crisis around the world And the way water you desalinate water is one of two ways one is you sort of flash It into steam and you now steam has gotten the salt is gone Or you put it through a reverse osmosis filter like you might have under your sink You know But it takes a lot of pressure to do this and a lot of electricity to do this Now there are certain countries that have said hey, let's take a small nuclear reactor and do nothing but power the desalination plan And so we can make it small enough that we we can control it and be safe enough And I'm I'm hopeful like on submarines Like on submarines the reactors on submarines are small Like on submarines and actually actually the russians have floating little nuclear power plants They're on on little boats and they're there's some actual successes with that But you're right You could take a submarine size one and make it and and and make it small enough so that You have not only created a smaller version, but you've decentralized electricity So that when you have a power grid failure here The rest of the country doesn't doesn't go out and the grid really needs to be Modified and if we're going heading toward an electric USA, which we the whole world is heading that way Then we have to make a smart grid and that's going to take work So I want to ask you a couple questions about space another Favorite favorite topic On science friday, I mean it's a time of lots of breakthroughs in space both in Astronomic research and in space flight other than space flight it seems like we're trying to Kind of recreate a feat that we accomplished 50 years ago Now we have these fantastic images that we're seeing from the james web space telescope Space telescope or as one of your guests recently referred to at the gym webby space telly from britain I've heard that one before like that kind of cute. Yeah I mean does it make sense to be putting our resources? Back into putting people in space and on the moon when we have this opportunity and unmanned space flight Yes, it does make sense because I think um I grew up as a child of the space age and it's in the 60s watching it and I I think There are There are uniting projects to do where people of all different beliefs about where life should go Well might think hey, it's great to go to the moon or it's great to go to mars and it's a great project to do And we certainly have enough resources to do it and even though we have great robotic stuff where we're looking for We're going to go to the moons of maybe jupiter or saturn and look for life in those moons because it's possible There could be there are signs of life there of the chemistry that we need for life I still think that people are explorers and they want to explore things and I think that uh, there's no reason we certainly you know, we're not the only game in town anymore Back in the 60s the us and the soviets were in a race who would then now the chinese are going to are on the moon the japanese or The israelis tried to go there a lot of people are now doing it if we don't do it Someone else is going to do it and if the government does it, you know Yilan musk or somebody else will come out or come along and do something privately But I just think we're we a lot of people think we're not alone We want to search for life. Well, I've got to ask you this because again, so it's a subject that comes up on the program Yes, where are you on that on the the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe if you just do the math Right, which is the math You know the old frank drake equation which has been updated There's so many trillions and billions of stars out there So many billions of our just in our own galaxy That the odds that there's no there's no other life out there is just Astronomical so to speak that it doesn't exist And right here in our own solar system We discovered life probably on our earth Probably originated not on the surface of the planet But way down in the oceans below where we have these sorts of These have these geothermal vents this hot water is coming up and there are Creatures living around there that define your imagination And they are so hearty That they might be things that are living on other Planets because there are other planets have oceans on them salty oceans And they might have the kind of heat that's down there that would be okay for the chemical genesis of life So I would be surprised if we don't find so you say yes Yes I'd be surprised we don't find something even and I'm glad you've gotten you on the record on that You're not the first one so I want to talk about a couple of advances in medicine again the subject which comes up often on science friday The world obesity federation which I have to admit is an organization that I didn't know existed until I started researching for this talk Says that more than half of the world is going to be overweight or obese by 2035 But we now have A real breakthrough in weight loss drugs that seem to be effective for as long as people take them But they're extremely expensive Which means that Shock Well, that's that's the question I want to ask you I mean that the drug development process appears to work In that it leads to breakthroughs on a pretty consistent basis You know what it doesn't let you know what it doesn't lead to? a cure Drug companies will make a lot of drugs a lot of money because they don't want to lose a customer They don't want to treat you for your whole life They don't want to cure you They want to treat you so that they can make oodles and oodles of money on people being sick And I've talked about this for decades Ever since I was started out as a reporter 50 years ago and I used to hang out with medical reporters They say you got to keep an eye on the drug companies because this is what they do is their stock price is what's really important and I'm looking and I talked to researchers who will tell me, you know, if the drug companies invested in this line of research Specifically we've actually talked about this on the radio They could find a cure for these illnesses, but they don't want to do that because they don't want to find a cure for this stuff Because there's no money in finding a cure for this stuff So you can have obesity drugs and whatever you're not going to find a cure for obesity because no one wants to cure obesity They want you they want to treat you for it So You know, it's not politically correct to talk about this, but it is absolutely vital that we understand what the business model of this is So Your next question was All right, now that you know where I'm coming You didn't have to ask me that one. I volunteer that one So another breakthrough in medicine has been around the krisper Editing gene editing process with a treatment for sickle cell disease Right Do you think that we're kind of at the tip of the iceberg on krisper? krisper at the tip of the iceberg It's it's a question of how to best how to identify The first cases to use it on because you like it like with sickle cell you're looking for a simple gene manipulation Diseases that that we know are caused by one gene if we fix it one or two genes. We can have a cure for that So Yeah, I'm a great believer. I think I think Diabetes is going to be cured one of these days if the drug companies ever want to cure something Talk about an industry and you know for example We do a lot of mouse studies. Yeah, we always talk about mouse studies and rat studies We have cured cancer in mice a million times We've cured diabetes in mice a million times. You talk to scientists who work on this It's a question of transferring it over to people and it's very difficult sometimes because mice and people are Don't have exactly the same systems, but they have similar systems and krisper will allow us I think to to identify more of these genetic illnesses Um, and then how to how to give it to people at a reasonable cost this this new treatment for sickle cell I do not you know, I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of dollars a person it would cost to treat these people So who's going to get it? You know who's going to be able to afford that kind of stuff So, you know, many of these breakthroughs that we've just been talking about including new drugs are actually Built on the top of basic research basic science that is largely largely publicly funded Absolutely. Do you think the public understands that? No Most of this base most of basic research Medical basic research comes from the national institutes of health which funds a lot of basic stuff They they do this They do this spade work They do this spade work for for the drugs finding out how the disease actually operates And then when it comes to a point where they understand it enough Drug company will come along and then try to then create the drugs to treat those those diseases Did they ever pay back the NIH for the I never heard of maybe a couple of cases that I don't know about But I've never heard that, you know, I never heard a drug company hold a press conference and say hey look Here's the check we're paying back your tax money That we used your basic research for But thank goodness for the NIH being able to do that And also being able to work on orphan drugs They never used to back when I started there used to be these these illnesses called orphan drugs orphan diseases I'm sorry that only affect a million people Only a million people has no money to be made and only a million people So they drug companies didn't work on them until the congress came in and gave a special compensation To work on orphan drugs so it'd be profitable for them to do that But uh, yes, I would like to you know, I'd like to see some sort of recognition That your tax money is and you you don't know it because you don't hear very much about it Your tax money is being used in basic research And basic research is absolutely vital because sometimes we don't know where it goes What's going to be the outcome could because people people hate failure Failure no one remembers who lost the super bowl or cares about who lost the super bowl, right? We only know the winners and but science is built on the shoulders of failure Failure is absolutely necessary for science to progress And so we won't hear anybody, you know, we won't hear about the We'll hear about the failures when the government gives somebody a grant and oh, they they failed The one here politicians say look and I'll be failed with this stuff Why aren't we spending money on it people have to understand the value of failure Very important and that's what we have to teach our kids when we teach them science We have to teach them you're going to fail more than you're going to succeed You're going to be like the sculptor you have to chip away at the failures in that block until the head pops out It's all that stuff that doesn't belong there and doesn't work You have to get past that and then you'll see the fruits of what you're working on But that's the kind of thing since we only teach about you have to be the best and successful and whatever and don't don't fail That's something I think we have to change So I'm going to ask one more question and then we're going to turn to your questions You recently did kind of a two-part thing on the endangered species act and I was really interested to learn that 99% of the species that have been identified through the endangered species act are actually still among us So it seems like that has been successful. The other thing that I thought was interesting is that This seems like an act that is built on the work of people As much as it is the work of government and that anyone can actually Suggest that a species be identified under the act and a lot of the work that goes into preserving species is actually done by citizens on the ground Doing all kinds of things that actually Help to mitigate against the the forces that are that are causing that species to be in danger You know there was a thing that had a lot of currency It seems to me a few years ago citizen science And I wonder if you would talk a little bit about that and what that means and and how people are participating in big science projects all over the world We're very much in science friday interested in citizen science and at times we will create a citizen science project to get the citizens citizens involved and I remember this this goes way back. I remember in especially in education. I remember back in the In the 80s being part of a school plan to teach how do you teach kids how to do science? The way we teach kids how to do science in the old days is we created these chemistry experiments like mr Wizard you pour two liquids together a volcano comes out Or if suddenly you go to the science museum and you put two liquids together and turns yellow then green and orange And that's supposedly science. That's not science Science is actually citizen science. It is going out and collecting the data Richard Feynman the famous physicist said When he was asked how do you do science? What is the definition? You come up with an idea and you collect the data to prove it or disprove it And citizen science can be something as simple as and I remember being part of these experiments How do we get kids involved in being citizen scientists? Everybody has a pond near them Or a standing water go out and take the ph reading the acidity reading at the pond And send it in to us and they created a national we we discovered what acid rain was We discovered where it was by the ph and all these kids and all these families did Collecting it together and they actually created a map of what acidic well where the acidic parts were so it's it's it's not only an educational way of teaching what science really does which is collect data But it's also a way of getting families involved with their kids and teaching people what science is all about because people You know, they don't know how science is done. They don't know how how important data is And you know back in the day when everybody didn't have their own facts Your facts and my facts when we could all agree on the data People were actually able to you know go out and collect this sort of data, which is Still going on today and we try to encourage that with citizen science projects and we'll hook up with other citizen science Projects that are going on that we're not involved with but we'll give some notice to and let people get involved You know it could be the eclipse which is coming up in april. Hope you all go see it You know that even scientists are very excited about that because even though they've seen lots of eclipses They want to go out and collect some more data So maybe they can they can get citizens involved in Looking at it and telling them what they see around the world in different places and they can Pick all the data and combine it so Let's turn to some questions from the audience I think we're gonna uh, yes, we've got one up front here. So we're gonna get a mic to you As quickly as we can sorry I was wondering what your idea sorry um, I was wondering what your ideas and viewpoints on like preserving indigenous bug species to help with climate climate change environmental health and sort of um Like saving ecosystems. We yes a very good question. How do we preserve natural species of bugs? But not only of bugs. What about plants? Right, what about cereal food cereals and things there are actually banks? Seed banks and places where people collect this data I think is one up in norway or something really cold to keep To keep them preserved for as long as they need to but it's very important because we're losing so many of these species Um, that's as climate change happens on the species are moving You know whole tree populations the vermont syrup trees are moving to canada You know because it's not cold enough in vermont anymore So besides the tourists moving somewhere else, but you know Yeah, that's an important. That's an important point Hey Thanks for visiting us I want to Your opinion or tips on just now talked about citizen science I was not aware of that There are many I would say I'm just going to use this word soccer moms um, who actually do Go and you know train kids um elementary school middle school high school But somehow they do not Have that kind of training to actually have a scientific Outlook Um, is there some tips or some some help we can give Yes, I mean they are they've been you know the city spends one billion dollars on a stadium But there's nothing spent on science Yeah, we don't I think I get to just how does a soccer mom know how to collect science stuff And you just tell them I mean collecting samples, you know, you might be able to help them find sterile Containers to put things in or if you really have a a good Project you can supply the kinds of things they need and it's it's not difficult Be able to take a drop of room water and stick it in a you know a a sterile Little test tube and send it back someplace with the date and time collection things like that, but Yes, even soccer moms Okay, I think we've got one over there You are such a good interviewer. I wondered what resource do you use to keep ahead in the science world? What do you read? What do you listen to? Yeah, it's uh It's a 24 seven job In other words, I'm constantly I'm just curious as I was as a kid I was I never outgrew this curiosity about how the world works So I'm constantly now online looking at science stories. I get I get a hundred 100 emails a day just about science leads from people who send ideas or or research papers or journals and things like that And I I read them all I'm looking for a little Stuff and I'm looking for that aha moment that goes off in my head the light bulb that will go off saying that This is something I want to look into But I just was always curious about this stuff No, and and I used to read as a kid. I used to read science news and things like that These to be the back page had a things of science side where you could send away for little science kits and things like that shells or whatever And I used to and my parents Again having a mentor they were very much in favor of me doing this sort of stuff Um But I just You know, I don't the clock doesn't go off at four o'clock on Friday. So I'm done, you know Because I'm constantly reading this stuff because I really want to know Just because it's fun to know things You know when people get satisfaction as being lifelong learners look like my audiences They want to know all the stuff And so they they they their clock doesn't go off at four in an afternoon on friday And a mind mind doesn't either so I'm constantly trying to figure out how to stop doing this sort of thing One in the back Hello. Hi Ira big fan Um earlier you had mentioned that there's really Not much you could do for people that have either, you know, political or religiously held beliefs But I was curious to know if you want people that have maybe anecdotal based beliefs into the same category and if not Are there any approaches that you have found particularly effective for helping sort of tease apart that deep emotional resonance of personal experiences from science-based evidence Thanks I'm not quite sure I understood but I think I think about trying to paraphrase the question for a minute. I think the question is There are people who don't believe in science for a variety of reasons But there are other people who maybe have an anecdotal experience that causes them to believe One thing which is maybe counterfactual or not true How can you convince people to Accept something that runs counter to their own personal experience That's a good question because you have to understand that science is not about anecdotal experience Anecdotal experience is could set off a question of science and you see it and you say hey, let's Let's investigate why we don't fall off the earth as we keep having ships go by the horizon It doesn't happen. Why is that, you know Well, then you then you create a systematic way of collecting data to prove or disprove that So if somebody has and this is how science works, you know Scientists always come up with anecdotal ideas about how things work, but you have to go out and collect the evidence So you have to tell people that's a nice that's a nice theory about something But until we can collect enough evidence and convince enough scientists That this is not going to change the way we believe how the world works Great one over here Ira as you know my son asked For us to get a picture together and I was wondering As you look for citizen citizen scientist, right? Have in please don't laugh But have you ever considered doing uh research via tick tock by a hashtag and doing a certain like numerical Number that says hey, I want to gather data on this And because that's where the younger kids are at and I was so proud of him at 16 to say hey mom get a picture But these kids are willing to yeah, they're willing to participate and that's where they live granted not all of them But anyway, that's a good question because we are on tick tock And we are in instagram and we have been leaders and we were the first show to be on Not just facebook, but We're the first show to do a podcast I mean we're on record as being the first people actually use the word podcast on a broadcast radio station network um So we're always looking absolutely with younger audiences in mind and we have a whole division We have a whole audience section of our show that's not part of the radio show that looks to get kids and other other Kids involved in uh doing stuff that we're doing so yeah, we're we're aware of that and it's it's a challenge To figure out where the next is going to be Um first, I want to thank you for being ira flato Thank my mother Thank you And actually the second thing I was um, thank you for wish for your parents, but you took care of that Do you feel that there is a correlation Between the rise of obesity and the emergence of ultraprocess? Say again, I'm sorry That there is a correlation. Yeah Between the rise of obesity. Oh And the emergence of ultraprocessed foods Well, there seems to be Certainly evidence for that You know nutrition obesity How that happens what happens is is is in rapid flux all the time But yes, there if you look at data, they will correlate You know ultraprocessed food with the rise of obesity, but you might find other things that correlate with it as well, so I I'm not ready to say that that is the cause because there's so many other causes of obesity that you know genetics whatever a kind of thing That uh, it might be one of the one of the factors Ira, I'm a car nut and my question is what is the sustainability of electric vehicles? Can our infrastructure handle them? Can we reproduce them sufficiently? Do we have the power to plug them in and when we have to dispose of all of that stuff in them? Can the world survive those heavy metals? I do car reviews. I test electric cars. I love them, but Your head buddies of mine say not a chance you'll you'll find me buried in one, but never driving one Wow what a question Because it has so many different questions in it How do I answer? Let me go backwards and just say I've driven a Tesla for six years So I have a lot of experience with an electric car and what it does what it can what its limitations are We are moving I don't think heavy metals are going to be You know The research into battery technology is moving very rapidly a lot of different kinds of things That will be possible to use as as battery material may not be You know the kinds of the kinds of materials lithium whatever we use today may five years from now may not be The forefront of where electric cars are do we need? Do we need to create a new charging system? Is there enough electricity around? There is if we know how to use it correctly, you know if we know how to make it if we if we know how to Uh take hydrogen out of the water and we're using you know that kind of thing It's there. It just needs a cohesive program, you know like Finland one in four cars in Finland I remember with the story there was this crazy story this week about cars in chicago that were freezing over electric cars Obviously these people never drove an electric car before because they allow that to happen to your car You have no experience with it We all all of us who drive electric cars know about the shortened range in the freezing weather or whatever And what you didn't see like I have to do my journalism rant on this for a second That's an awful story the way it was covered because it was one Even if it's true about that charging station, that's one charging station in 30 000 What about going to another one and see if they had the same problem or two or three of them? Let's make n greater than one You know that sort of thing I was just living at this Not only that it shows the rapid rise In in electric cars is outpacing people's knowledge about how to use them correctly The reason you see these crashes happening in these electric cars is people are not driving them like they were told to drive them I mean if you look per million miles accidents Let's say a tesla versus a gas car There are four times more accidents In a gas car than there are in a tesla in electric cars four times because believe it or not A computer is better driving than you are Just like a computer is better at analyzing maybe data on a A mammogram it's better at doing certain stuff than people are But I think getting back to your question directly. I think yeah, you know, we are it's inevitable. This is going to happen We are heading toward an electric society It's going to happen. We will you know all your car my car It's all going to be plugged in as part of a system Where my solar panels now already I live in new england and connecticut already feed massachusetts And rhodiolin when there's an outage They buy my electricity from my battery and my solar and they pay me at the end of the year So not only not only do this in california and other places So all our cars hooked together are going to be a giant battery that's on the grid And the car and the batteries that run our our help on our solar panels That's we're all going to share this electricity It just takes time to learn how you know how to use a gas engine versus a buggy whip and It's just it's a it's a learning curve over here Hello Two days ago. I drove across the florida board georgia border Just a few miles to a place called the neutral zone where they film Star Trek continues extra voyages because they didn't finish that five-year mission, you know And while I was there, I met chris dewan Who is the son of james dewan of scottie of the beam me up scottie? And I asked him so i've heard that your dad's remains or have been shot up in a rocket and he said yeah They're on the space station right now and I said Well, didn't we just hear that the space station is going to be In a ballad decade. So what's going to happen with his remains? He's like, I don't know And then of course that makes you think about other things on the space station. So, well, what do we know? Well, they're using the space station as we do for a lot of things to make money So if you want to put something you want to fly something and you want to pay for what? Thousands of dollars per kilogram to put your stuff on the space station That's what they'll they'll use it for and they'll and I imagine They'll you know, they'll do a lot of other things To make money in space put stuff on the moon put your ashes on the moon. We'll put it into orbit Uh, those kinds of things. They're they're all money-making things. So we're gonna see As as private industry, you know, which is what it's made to do is to make money As we'll find ways of making money even in space. So Now that's that's how it works In the back Okay, I'm I've been given up an opportunity. I feel compelled to ask on behalf of my sister Who's not here tonight? She's a really big Aliens fan. She's a nut And I don't know if you were following the david grush congressional hearings the intelligence officer Who doesn't say that he saw anything but says that he has talked to people who've seen things And so he um, I don't know. Uh, the aoc was part of it matt gates. Um, It was a bipartisan congressional hearing Did you did you hear anything about that? Are you following any of it? I follow the hearings. We actually did a show on this I with an author a couple of weeks ago about Aliens and outer space and what it would what it would take and The science so so far as He used to like the quote carl sagan extraordinary Claims requires extraordinary evidence If you want to prove something like that But what I found more interesting about whether his point was about whether we have aliens have visited us or not Is that we are now at a point where we can see if aliens live on other worlds I mean we have these we have these exoplanets an exoplanet is a planet that lives outside of our solar system Lightyears away, but our technology is good enough now to actually look at the at the solar system of these other planets And at the planets themselves And look at the atmosphere. I mean if you were out there and looked at earth Or you actually would look inside our solar system. You would look for the signs that things were alive Does it breathe? You know, there's their air What's the composition of the atmosphere made of is there oxygen there? Is there methane what the signs of life that living things make? And he his point was we should be spending more attention on Finding the aliens out there than looking for them here Because it's probably more a more fruitful effort to do that Then to look for them here. I'm not saying there. I'm not I'm agnostic on any of this stuff I don't know, you know, I've seen enough weird things in science in my experience I'm not willing ever to say that aliens are not here or have not ever been here But you need evidence really good evidence to prove that they are here or they're out there And I I I will give airtime to someone who comes on with good evidence Hopeful evidence, but it has to be some pretty good evidence like I did when cold fusion came around And there were really good size Scientists working at some of the top universities in the world doing experiments in cold fusion and getting positive results and I gave them airtime You know as I did I gave some airtime. I remember it to a conference at MIT About people who were abducted Claiming they were abducted and I don't spend a lot of time on it But our audience is interested in discussing these things Because we are sort of a like-minded audience like to talk about science fiction and the possibility that science fiction may be real And so let's let's talk about it as a topic of discussion so I'm you know, I will I will talk about things that people think I'm crazy to talk about sometimes Because I don't what we do on science friday is not an interview show. It's a discussion show And when I have guests that come on and I talk to I talk with them I'm saying, you know, we may go veering off to the side about something else that you bring up But if it gets too far out, I'll reel it back in But we want to have a discussion like we're sitting around your coffee table or having a beer someplace So there's no there's nothing out of bounds there when you discuss those kinds of things But take a couple more, but uh, sorry. Yeah, go ahead Hi every friday when I listen to your show. I hear something that makes me go Wow, that's so cool I wonder what boggles your mind Wow, how do I limit that? Um But thank you. First of all, then then we're doing our job right if you say that Because that's the kind of my my My aim when I started in this business was to create something you'll say at the dinner table Guess what I heard on the radio today Then I know that you've had that light bulb moment What I what I love to talk about is stuff we don't know And most of the stuff that we don't know is we don't know what 96 percent of the universe is made of I mean, how do you know about anything if you don't know what 96 percent of the universe is made out of And specifically it's dark energy and dark matter Which we have recently that we knew about the The dark matter longer than we've known about the dark energy discovered that relatively recently within the last few decades And having scientists come on to tell you Well, I don't know what that is or this is what it could be and whatever That means that means is all this physics that hasn't been discovered yet to try to explain this And that means we have hardly scratched the surface of finding out what that stuff is So that's what I look up at the sky at night and say look everything we see It's only four percent of the universe anything that we can actually see is only four percent And that blows that blows my mind and and I like it when a scientist will come on perfectly speaking about this And and I've had this I actually took this piece of tape out and I kept it I remember talking about this issue with a scientist who was studying something like this dark energy dark matter And I said to him So what practical value does this have? A little pause and he said absolutely nothing I said, thank you, you know, you've made my job here This is it. I was on the big bang theory a few times and The last the last time I was on there. Thank you last time I was on there The the writers write really heavy-duty science into some of these episodes that goes way over the head Of a lot of the people watching it But they take the chance that there'll be enough people who understand what they were talking about And then the last episode that I was on there was talking about this That uh, why I can't remember what it wasn't Sheldon was the Leonard Leonard had come up against a problem at caltech Where his research has run into a dead wall and is he going to be funded anymore? This is a big stuff that scientists really talk about the public couldn't care less They want to see what's going on and you know in the kitchen there But the other people who are interested in this the writers and at the end of the show They ended the show at the grave of Richard Feynman Quoting Richard Feynman who said we do science not because it goes anywhere, but we do science for the sake of science And that was and that was their coda that they put at the end of the show For people who want to understand why you know science leads to dead ends and how science for the sake of science someday might help So that's what I like to talk about Hi, good evening. Um, mr. Flater. It's a pleasure to hear the voice behind or see the face behind the voice We hear every friday a quick question. I grew in the 80s where we had mr. Wizard where He would do something and and us 80s kids would be like wow And then we wouldn't ask why wow, but it would just happen And that continued through the 90s and then the pandemic happened And unfortunately a political party, which i'm not going to get political political party pushed against science and Question science and sort of villainized science like how they're treating dr. Felt you right now as a scientist I'm curious. How do you see the role as a scientist? We're going to continue to happen in our country and do you personally feel attacked pushed against Questions or ridiculed we're being a science post pandemic Well, I'm not a scientist and I don't even play one on the radio. That's just what that's let's get that straight Do I feel I don't feel no I do I feel an obligation to talk about science? Yes, do I feel that it's important that we talk about it? Yes I also feel that scientists should be more vocal in support of what they do You know I grew up I'm a I'm a child of the 60s where we had scientists like Barry commoner rent president in the environmental movement And paul earlick and these people used to go on the tonight show along with carl sagan And they were very visible and vocal about the importance of science And I don't see enough of that going on now because what happens is that scientists Serious scientists who do that get cast by their own other scientists as giving up on science You know Oh, you're no longer a scientist because you're aren't talking on the radio or you're on television or something Your work doesn't mean much anymore And we need more scientists who are not afraid to face those slings and arrows And talk about the importance of science whether it is Climate change which is we need to talk about more or any other kinds of scientific issues I'm always looking, you know for scientists who are And I had scientists on the show I've had scientists who've chained themselves to doors of institutions to get you know to get their message out and so if we get more scientists who can feel comfortable with being scientists and also You know defending science, I think especially in this political season And have more people back them up. I think that's the kind of stuff we could use So ira you have you've worked in public media for a long time You've also worked in commercial media CBS and CNBC and others How is public media different and Why is it valuable? Good question. Um Let me see if I can attack this from a certain angle Public media will support stuff that corporations may not want to support for a while Public media and you folks who support public media understand that to do science the basic science is important Because it's basically important for the country for our society Businesses need an excuse to make money for supporting something. They need an audience. They need need somebody to buy a product. They need some sort of Justific monetary justification Well, you know what that doesn't that doesn't help a lot of times when we're talking about science Doesn't help when we're look at look at the podcast industry, for example podcast industry is Is a was a bubble that's now being burst a little bit because Podcasts are dying because the businesses realize they're not getting the return they need on this to make it worthwhile Well in public broadcasting people who support public broadcasting don't need that giant return They just need to interest people. That's why it's important that people support it like I do like you do Um as opposed to the commercial interests. Yes Okay What should kids like me be trying to learn about now for the future what you should be learning about Now now oh learn how to think critically In other words, you know, that's the problem the problem with science is we call it science You should we should call it critical thinking because it's basically the same thing Learn how to listen to what somebody is saying or what you read online and question it You should question everything that you know that is of interest to you And find the evidence that would support what they're talking about And whether that evidence comes from people who know what they're talking about or whether it comes from someone who's just doing some wacky podcast to get clickbait You know So critical thinking You learn that and it will you learn critical thinking it'll serve you the rest of your life Especially outside of science You know, even when you're trying to figure out what kind of insurance you need So with that I want to extend again a thank you to our sponsors for this evening med evidence and the art of Riding Davis foundations and to all of you for being here this evening. Thank you and for your support You have some surveys You have some surveys on your seats or on your tables and I ask you to fill those out before you leave So that we can continue to make these events better and I want to of course reserve my Special thanks for ira flato ira. Thank you so much for being here in jacksville. Well, they're all that you do I want to I want to say I want to thank david for inviting us and thank you all for coming Because when you show up with 300 people show up an event like this You demonstrate how important what these people do at public radio do and I applaud you and support your efforts To keep them going with your donations is very very important that you do that