Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast Extended Classic: The Salt of the Earth (Part 1) About this episode Neil Tyson and Eugene Mirman explore how salt has been a critical ingredient in history and the development of civilization. Now extended with 12 minutes of Neil and Bill Nye in the Cosmic Crib talking about evolution, Ivan the Gorilla and how bees fly.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
0:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History, where I also serve as the Director of the Hayden Planetarium. My co-host this week is Eugene Mirman.
0:35 Eugene Mirman? Hello.
0:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Eugene, I love having you here.
0:37 Eugene Mirman? I love being here Neil.
0:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Thank you. Sometimes I go into your place where you have your Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival.
0:43 Eugene Mirman? Exactly.
0:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And sometimes you come in studio with us.
0:45 Eugene Mirman? I do. Sometimes I will travel uptown.
0:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Good to get you out of your digs down there. You know, this week's show topic is all about salt.
0:55 Eugene Mirman? I know.
0:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, because you read the notes.
0:57 Eugene Mirman? Oh yeah, the listeners don't know. I was informed beforehand. So yeah, we're talking about salt.
1:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's the white stuff that we all take for granted.
1:06 Eugene Mirman? Yeah.
1:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And, you know.
1:08 Eugene Mirman? I don't take it for granted. I think it's amazing. It's changed lives. It was a currency at one point, probably.
1:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, well, we're going to get into that. This whole show will orbit the subject of salt.
1:17 Eugene Mirman? Great.
1:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And of course, it's really cheap now. I remember when I was a kid going to the store, salt was like the cheapest thing on all shelves. You can get a, I'll tell you how old I am, you can get a little box of salt for 10 cents. And I thought, it can't be. You know, 10 cents? What? And it's still cheap, even though it's more than that today.
1:34 Eugene Mirman? Romans would be furious to hear this. I am like, that seems reasonable.
1:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you know, in the past, yeah, it was rare and valuable commodity, a strategic commodity, even.
1:44 Eugene Mirman? You could use it as a weapon. Maybe not. That might be the one thing. Is that one of the 14,000 uses?
1:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, well, one of them was that you can pour on the wounds of... Uh, who's the guy in the movie?
1:54 Eugene Mirman? Um. Of, uh, someone who, I don't know. I mean, I know that.
1:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck Norris.
1:58 Eugene Mirman? Chuck Norris? If you put it on Chuck Norris, it's, was it put on to help him or to hurt him? Cause doesn't it sort of clean? Does it have like a cleaning power?
2:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, well, it's, it's, it's, it's a disinfectant, not a, it's an antibiotic. I mean, it prevents the growth of, of microbes on it too. But we'll learn all about that.
2:14 Eugene Mirman? Yeah, I don't want to ruin the whole thing.
2:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just so that we're on the same page, the salt that we normally think of and chat about is, uh, table salt is sodium chloride.
2:21 Eugene Mirman? Mm-hmm.
2:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Uh, sodium is an element on the periodic table. If you remember that mysterious chart of boxes in your chemistry class. Chlorine is also there. You put them together, you get sodium chloride. By the way, sodium is highly explosive.
2:35 Eugene Mirman? Yeah.
2:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And reactive in the presence of water. And chlorine, each of these will kill you separately.
2:40 Eugene Mirman? Really?
2:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And together, it's some of the most.
2:42 Eugene Mirman? Delicious.
2:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's the.
2:43 Eugene Mirman? If you put sodium in water, it would.
2:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And essentially, you, you want to get out of the room when you did that.
2:48 Eugene Mirman? Because, uh, it creates.
2:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It reacts violently with the water.
2:51 Eugene Mirman? I hope that no one listening is off doing that.
2:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's hard to get a slab of sod- sodium.
2:55 Eugene Mirman? Is it hard to get sodium? Do you have to break in somewhere? Does McDonald's have it?
2:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I don't, I've never looked. I, I, I don't know. And chlorine is stuff that keeps your, your, you know, swimming pools clean and, and it's, it's quite the disinfectant. You put it together, it's table salt. And it's, it's a testament to the extraordinary diversity of what the elements on the periodic table do for us when brought together as, as molecules.
3:17 Eugene Mirman? Yeah.
3:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I mean, molecular chemistry is a whole different thing from atomic chemistry. It's a whole other world and.
3:23 Eugene Mirman? I doubt it. No, you're probably right.
3:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, it's the same world, but different, different, different rules. Uh, different rules. And I happen to know as an astrophysicist, you make every one of these elements in stars.
3:34 Eugene Mirman? Mm-hmm.
3:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They're forged in the centers of high mass stars that later explode, spreading their enriched guts across the galaxy, out of which you then make planets and people and salt. Just in case you were wondering.
3:47 Eugene Mirman? I was gonna say, is, is this table salt the firm an exploding star? And yes, it is. Good to know.
3:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The ingredients of table salt come from exploding stars.
3:56 Eugene Mirman? I'm glad recipes don't say one quarter spoon exploding star.
3:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. So what we got here, you know, uh, salt, what's funny about salt is that it's, uh, you know, you go to farms, I don't know if you've been on a farm, if you're a city person, but like
4:09 Eugene Mirman? Yeah, I've been on the farm.
4:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There's salt licks. And when I was a kid, I said, ew, who'd want to do that, you know?
4:14 Eugene Mirman? Yeah.
4:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so these, these huge herbivores that we sustain on farms, they, they, they, they need salt. They've got to lick salt as part of their daily diet. And, you know, I said, you know, this, this topic's too big for just me. And what I decided to do was bring in an expert, I invited to my office, Mark Kurlansky. He's, he's the author of the book called Salt, A World History.
4:39 Eugene Mirman? Not to be confused with that movie. With Angelina Jolie, where she is not salty.
4:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, let's check out that clip, uh, my first clip of my interview with him, just to find out what, what role salt has played in human history.
4:54 Eugene Mirman? Sure.
4:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's hard for anyone today to imagine that salt was so highly valued as it once was. What happened? We throw away salt today. Salt is 25 cents in the store.
5:09 Speaker 02 Well, to begin with, salt didn't have a great deal of value because most civilizations started off being hunter gatherers and not agricultural. And hunter gatherers don't really need salt. So the basis of the importance of salt is that we all need sodium and chloride for our bodies to function. But if you're on a mostly red meat diet, you will get all of the salt you need without having any additional salt. But then what happened is that civilizations moved to agriculture. Now there's a whole bunch of problems. Salt is needed for caring for the properties in the soil. It's needed to raise livestock
5:50 Speaker 02 because other mammals, just like us, need sodium and chloride. And before the age of refrigeration and freezing, you really couldn't have a food trade without salt. You know, if you were a dairy farmer and you produce milk and butter and things like that, you could sell them to the immediate area. Not too good even there in the summertime. But if you made cheese, which is preserved with salt. You could throw it on the wagon and ship it all over the world. The same was true of meat and fish and vegetables. And basically, the entire food trade depended on salt. And
6:30 Speaker 02 in pre-industrial society, that was a very large part of trade. So it's not an exaggeration to say that without salt, you couldn't have an international economy.
6:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What you're saying is, back then, any food you ate from afar was salty.
6:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, any foreign food or anything that shipped any kind of distance was salty. People used to eat a lot more salted food than they do now. And it was much saltier. Bacon, for example, the bacon we eat now is sort of salted in a token sort of way because it's kept in the refrigerator. But if you're going to salt bacon so that it can survive without being chilled, it has to be much saltier than that.
7:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, salt was a preservative?
7:12 Speaker 02 Salt was the leading way to preserve food. There were some other things, such as smoking. Smoking doesn't work that well unless you use a little salt also. And there was burying in the ground, which also needs a little salt. So, most anything you tried to do to preserve food involved salt.
7:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Eugene, do you bury your food in the ground?
7:32 Eugene Mirman? I do, I do, with salt. That guy sounds like a saltist. Like, I believe him that it's important, but it's like, it's a little suspicious.
7:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And there are other salts. It's not just sodium chloride. There's like saltpeter. It's a major ingredient in gunpowder and other explosives. Baking soda.
7:47 Eugene Mirman? Good. I was hoping that salt could be a weapon.
7:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Sodium bicarbonate. I mean, it goes on and on and on. But we've got to end this first segment. And we're coming back. And when we come back, I have a special guest who can speak to the role of salt in ancient cultures. This is StarTalk Radio. Welcome back to StarTalk. I'm your host, Mr. Grant Tyson. And welcome again to Eugene Mirman. Eugene, you tweet. Is it at Eugene or?
8:12 Eugene Mirman? Yeah, it's at EugeneMerman.com.
8:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Eugene Mirman.
8:15 Eugene Mirman? I might have been beaten by just to be just at Eugene.
8:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, yes, that's too bad. Sorry about that.
8:19 Eugene Mirman? Oddly by sting.
8:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so just our topic today is salt. Who would have thought that salt could be so important in the history of the world? And I could not do this alone, and not that I don't love you Eugene, but I had to bring in some more ammo here. And so
8:34 Eugene Mirman? Really, because I am a salt expert.
8:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We comb the halls of the American Museum of Natural History, where we have an entire department of anthropology. And guess who I found there? I found Peter Whiteley. Peter, welcome to StarTalk Radio.
8:47 Speaker 03 Thanks very much. Great to be here.
8:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're an anthropologist specializing in North American natives.
8:56 Speaker 03 Native North Americans, yes, especially the Hopi and Zuni and other pueblos in the Southwest.
9:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because I brought you on, because salt is not just something you put in your diet. Salt was, is a strategic commodity for people who can't just go to the grocery store and pick it up.
9:10 Speaker 03 Absolutely. Well, in the southwestern pueblos, it was very much of a commodity that people traded back and forth, and that goes back three or four thousand years. So in the particular places where they find it, like Zuni Salt Lake, or the Mansana Salines, east of the Sandia Mountains, they found examples of that salt three or four hundred miles away in the archaeological record.
9:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Hundreds of miles. So they would go get it?
9:35 Speaker 03 Absolutely. And for example, Hopis still have a salt pilgrimage that they go on to the bottom
9:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Still, as in 2000, to this day?
9:44 Speaker 03 Yes.
9:44 Eugene Mirman? Which one of us will tell them about Costco?
9:46 Speaker 03 And very recently, they used to go to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and they still go to Zuni Salt Lake to get salt.
9:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, so that's right, because those of you who are up on your geology know, you might ask, well, where does salt come from? Where's a good place? Well, one way is salt water, right? You get a salt water, either a huge lake that had become salty over the years, or ocean. And all you need is to corral off a piece of it, and let the sun
10:15 Eugene Mirman? Corral a piece of the ocean. Oh, I see what you're saying.
10:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You let, you'd let a tide bring in some water, and it comes out, but you trap some of the water as it comes in. And some lakes are large enough that they became salty over the years.
10:28 Eugene Mirman? Salt lake for one, just to figure it easy.
10:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just a low hanging fruit there, yeah?
10:35 Eugene Mirman? Yeah.
10:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so-
10:36 Eugene Mirman? The Baltic Sea, a big lake.
10:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So there are ways to actually make it. And in my interview with Mark Kalansky, uh, that we're slotting into this show, uh, he tells us some stories about how you find salt and how you make it and where you get it from. So let's check it out.
10:54 Speaker 02 The cheapest, most efficient way to make salt, if you live in a sunny climate, is to just take seawater, dam it off into pounds and let it sit there in the sun. And eventually all the water will evaporate. It may take a year, but you have a lot of different holding tanks which you rotate. So there's always one that's at crystallization. This is a very efficient, very old way of making salt that hasn't changed in thousands of years and requires very little investment and attracts beautiful birds.
11:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Does that mean all salt is sea salt?
11:28 Speaker 02 No, although the majority of table salt is sea salt, which is something Americans don't understand because in America it's not. Americans eat mostly rock salt. There's only a few places left that produce sea salt in the US. That wasn't always true, but for one reason or another, most of the sea salt places have gone out of business and-
11:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I don't know the difference between rock salt and sea salt. How do you just make rock salt? Don't you need a seawater to make rock salt?
11:55 Speaker 02 No, you need a place underground that has salt and a shovel.
12:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you mine the salt?
12:02 Speaker 02 Yes, yes. Or, well, there's two ways of doing it. The salt deposits that are under the earth, you can either go down there and mine it like you would any other mineral, or you can flood it and pump the water out, which will come out as brine and then evaporate the brine like you would sea salt.
12:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so what you're saying geologically is that the minable salt was once salty water deposit where the water had evaporated and left the salt behind?
12:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, most likely these are all places that were ocean at one time. And there's huge deposits in North America and in Europe and in Asia. There's salt under most of the Great Lakes area going, you know, all the way from the plains to upstate New York.
12:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Remind me, are the Great Lakes salty or not? At what point are you big enough to become salty?
12:53 Speaker 02 Well, bigger than the Great Lakes.
12:56 Speaker 02 I think at the point at which you're an ocean. You know, this is something that hasn't ever been completely worked out about why seas are salty. It's a little bit mysterious. But the Great Lakes, although there are salt beds under the earth all around the Great Lakes, the Great Lakes are fresh water.
13:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Peter Whiteley, I got you in this show from the American Museum of Natural History. Your Hopi Indians would, so they wouldn't create salt by drying up salt water. You're telling me they actually found salt in the mountains?
13:27 Speaker 03 Well, yeah, the bottom of the Grand Canyon and then of the Salt Lake that's not too far away from Zuni Pueblo, about 50 miles away.
13:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the Great Salt Lake in Utah?
13:35 Speaker 03 Uh, no, not that one. That's even further away.
13:38 Eugene Mirman? Salt Lake Two?
13:39 Speaker 03 This is a junior version of that.
13:42 Eugene Mirman? Was it also called Salt Lake?
13:44 Speaker 03 It's called Zuni Salt Lake.
13:45 Eugene Mirman? Okay, well, as long as they add in.
13:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I have an embarrassing urban story to tell you. I was flying to California and we're flying over Utah, but I wasn't thinking that at the time. I was just looking out the window. And so this huge white area, and I said to myself, wow, that looks like a salt residue, like from a lake that might have been there. That looks like, of course, we're flying over Salt Lake City. I mean, I deduced from first principles of science that that was the Great Salt Lake. But it was obviously that, I mean, once I thought about it, but there I was pumping my geological knowledge into.
14:24 Eugene Mirman? Is that how you fly over the Grand Canyon? You're like, this is a very, very big canyon. It feels almost grand in its canyon-essness.
14:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So other great deposits, so we have obviously the Great Salt Lake in Utah. You have your Salt Lake Two version, yes?
14:40 Speaker 03 Right.
14:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And of course, the Dead Sea in Israel.
14:43 Eugene Mirman? Yeah, where you can sit up in.
14:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Uh, yes.
14:48 Eugene Mirman? You can sit in it. Like, it's so salty, you can sit in it.
14:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Have you tried walking on it, though?
14:53 Eugene Mirman? I, I'm oddly, it's weird, I can walk on it. I didn't want to spook people when I was there.
15:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You don't want to fool people into thinking
15:03 Eugene Mirman? By magic.
15:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're someone other than
15:04 Eugene Mirman? Yeah, I can walk on it, but it's purely scientific.
15:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You chose not to. So, what gets me is that, of course, it's called the Dead Sea because there were no fishes in it. But that's more a measure of the fact that they didn't have a microscope. Because there are microbes everywhere, wherever you have liquid water in the world. So, it's a scientific limitation that it got called the Dead Sea. And also, of course, you, there's a, near Detroit. Four hundred million years ago, there is a, Michigan at the time was warm. And there was a shallow sea. And when the water dried up, it left one of the world's largest salt deposits. And so, mining continues to this day in those mines.
15:39 Eugene Mirman? In Detroit?
15:42 Eugene Mirman? In near Detroit?
15:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Near Detroit, yes.
15:44 Eugene Mirman? Yeah.
15:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the shafts go down more than a thousand feet below the surface, just to get the salt. I mean, this is extraordinary, the extent that people go to, to recover this stuff. So, you're a hopi tribe, so they would get the salt, they knew they needed the salt?
15:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly. And they would, they went off on long expeditions, which were really ritual pilgrimages. Some of them, especially to those two places I've mentioned, they have to go through all sorts of ritual preparations. And it's associated with an initiation, and so on. So, it's a very arduous trek down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
16:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But somebody had to, somebody had to go that far to begin with, and find it.
16:23 Speaker 03 Right.
16:24 Eugene Mirman? And then they passed the information along. Are you saying it's basically like a salt bar mitzvah?
16:29 Speaker 03 And if you like to think of it that way, yes.
16:31 Eugene Mirman? I would like that. And I'm going to, and I'm gonna tell people, that's what you said.
16:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And that's your next gift at the bar mitzvah?
16:38 Eugene Mirman? Yeah, exactly.
16:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, not the eighteen dollars, but packets of salt.
16:43 Eugene Mirman? Exactly.
16:43 Speaker 03 But the information that you're referring to was widely known and shared among prehistoric peoples in the greater southwest. So, they all knew where those places were. And they, you know, sacralized it, too. There are salt deities associated with those places. Goddesses and gods and so on.
16:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To sacralize is to make it a deity. I like that word. That's my first time I've heard that word.
17:01 Eugene Mirman? It's the first time I've heard it.
17:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Sacralize.
17:03 Eugene Mirman? But it's not gonna be the last.
17:04 Speaker 03 Maybe I just invented it.
17:05 Eugene Mirman? I'm gonna hear it later when I tell people about it.
17:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, he just said he might have just invented it.
17:10 Eugene Mirman? That's fine.
17:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, I mean, my list here is long about all these cultures going back thousands of years. You know, the Chinese in 6,000 B.C. would harvest dry beds along the salty, how do you pronounce this, Lake Yuchin?
17:22 Eugene Mirman? I like that you're asking me. No, Neil, close, though. That sounds fine. Sounds fine to me.
17:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Celts were mining rock salt in the Austrian Alps as far back as 700 B.C. I mean, this goes on and on. Peter? Yeah, it's global. So what gets me is how people know that they need the salt. Why did they know they need the salt, but the people who are getting scurvy for not having vitamin C didn't know they needed vitamin C?
17:51 Eugene Mirman? They eventually found out. I mean, it's trial and error. Everyone's dying and then it's like, oh, we should get some salt.
17:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Actually, we got to wind down this segment, but when we come back, let's learn more about where salt comes from and what its effect is on the history of cultures in the world. Its geopolitical influence knows no bounds. I'm here with Eugene Mirman, my favorite stand-up comedian, one of my favorites.
18:13 Eugene Mirman? No, too late.
18:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And Peter Whiteley, anthropologist, American Museum of Natural History. We'll be right back.
18:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your host. You know, you can find StarTalk on the web at startalkradio.net. Not only that, you can download us as an iTunes podcast. And we are in the Twitterverse. What other handle but, of course, at StarTalk Radio. Co-host this week, Eugene Mirman. Eugene, good to have you back in studio. And you know, we're orbiting the show on the subject of salt.
18:52 Eugene Mirman? Yes.
18:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And an interview that I conducted with Mark Kurlansky, author of Salt: A World History. And we got into discussing, that's a book about everything about salt, stuff you never thought existed or was true.
19:04 Eugene Mirman? About salt.
19:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? About salt.
19:06 Eugene Mirman? The secrets of salt.
19:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The secrets of salt.
19:07 Eugene Mirman? The working title of that book. No one but me knows that.
19:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So he and I discussed some surprising cultural beliefs involving salt. Let's check it out.
19:18 Speaker 02 I have spent a lot of time working in Haiti, so I already knew that salt was used to cure zombies. Which might be-
19:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To cure zombies or kill zombies?
19:26 Speaker 02 No, to cure zombies. Yeah, because salt takes away evil.
19:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so in a ritualistic way, salt has-
19:33 Speaker 02 You can tell if somebody has been zombified, you can bring them back to normal with salt.
19:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And how do you apply the salt? You sprinkle it on them with a salt shaker?
19:42 Speaker 02 I'm not sure, I have to say, I haven't done it. But, there is this association with salt preventing evil and curing evil, because it stops rotting. So, in Japanese theater, the stage is sprinkled with salt to chase away bad spirits. And, there are a lot of examples of salt used for that. Salt, in many cultures, is brought to a new home for good luck.
20:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What's with the salt over the shoulder?
20:10 Speaker 02 The problem with spilling salt is a Middle Eastern thing, comes up a lot in Judaism and in Islam. And that is related to the ability of salt to preserve things. So it seals a bargain. So, for instance, in Judaism, salt is a symbol of sealing what's called the covenant, the agreement between God and Jews. So, if you spill salt, it's like the covenant has been broken, and so you have to do something about that. So you get rid of it, chuck it over your shoulder. If you look closely, in the painting of The Last Supper, you will see that there is a spilled salt cellar on the table by Judas.
20:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I never knew that.
20:53 Speaker 02 That table's got all sorts of interesting details in it.
20:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Eugene, did you know there was salt?
21:00 Eugene Mirman? I did not know that.
21:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Of The Last Supper?
21:02 Eugene Mirman? I didn't know that you could cure zombies with salt. And I wonder how it's ever been tried practically.
21:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, plus, I mean, but it's good to know, because of all the apocalypses, the asteroid, you know, we can deflect an asteroid. Virus, we can find a cure, but the zombie apocalypse, that was gonna be an unbeatable one. But, but salt is it.
21:19 Eugene Mirman? I was- When he was gonna say, "I'd use this for salt," I was really hoping that somebody would think that salt could get you pregnant.
21:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
21:25 Eugene Mirman? But you can't have everything.
21:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We have in studio one of our special guests, Peter Whiteley. He's a curator of ethnology, I think is the official title there, at the American Museum of Natural History. He's a cross-department colleague of mine, actually. And thanks for coming in. He's an expert on
21:43 Speaker 03 Thank you.
21:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? the culture of the Hopi tribes and other sort of southwest Native American cultures. And apparently, salt was a big deal to them.
21:51 Speaker 03 Absolutely, yes. Because since they have to go so far to get it, it achieved a great deal of importance in their culture.
22:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So more than just the nutritional value of the stuff?
22:03 Speaker 03 Exactly. So it became symbolically valued, and there are deities who are named after salt. There's salt goddesses and salt gods and such.
22:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So there's the Epsom salt deity, I guess.
22:15 Speaker 03 I don't think I heard about that one.
22:18 Eugene Mirman? How far would they walk? Did you say 50 miles or more?
22:21 Speaker 03 50 miles and more. The distance to Grand Canyon from the Hopi mesas is about 100 miles.
22:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So why not just move there? I mean, the Native Americans were known to be nomadic in many ways.
22:32 Speaker 03 Well, that's right. There are some folks
22:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I would move to where the salt was. Excuse me. That's what I would do.
22:38 Eugene Mirman? That's a good plan.
22:39 Speaker 03 There are, of course, Native peoples who live at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, like the Havasupai. And in the past
22:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You say that like that was just so obvious that what an idiot
22:47 Eugene Mirman? Some people do. But there's not room for everybody, so some people like to walk. Plus, it's like, if you move there, then you get rid of the spiritual meaningfulness. That's why we don't live at Disney World, we walk to it.
22:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
23:00 Eugene Mirman? Or it would have no meaning to it.
23:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I guess. The pilgrimage gives it meaning.
23:04 Eugene Mirman? Exactly.
23:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There you go. Well, this goes way back. I mean, it was a commodity for a while. Was it also a commodity among the Native American tribes?
23:11 Speaker 03 Absolutely. So even today, you'll find Zunis who bring Zuni salt to Hopi, and they will exchange it for the same measure of ground blue cornmeal. That goes back a long, long way.
23:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Again.
23:23 Eugene Mirman? And that's a symbolic thing that they're doing.
23:25 Speaker 03 Well, it's a nutritional thing, too, but it represents the contributions that each have to each other's.
23:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They haven't found Costco.
23:33 Eugene Mirman? Well, no, what I'm asking is this is more of like a spiritual, like a recognition of each other's value more than it is like, we need blue cornmeal. This is the only way we can do it.
23:43 Speaker 03 Well, that's right. And there's a special celebration of this particular kind of salt that hopis call it by a particular term, baeng, which means literally water salt. And that's something that they value more highly than what you get from Costco.
23:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You know, it's weird, you look back, you look back, Chinese emperors had a salt monopoly. And the Venetian government controlled the price and export of salt through its ports, through the lagoon. And the Erie Canal was called the ditch that salt built because it was financed by a tax on salt. I mean, it's amazing. Just you go down this list and, and, and, and do you know Romans salted their vegetables and hence the word salad? Salad for salt? And, and, and, and the salary comes from the word salt?
24:28 Eugene Mirman? You now have reached where it sounds like it's like an Illuminati conspiracy about salt. Where like, did you know everywhere in history, salt was there making decisions?
24:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It was there.
24:37 Eugene Mirman? Voting for the president, salt.
24:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? When we come back, more of my interview with Mark Kralansky, the author of Salt, and my in-studio guest, Peter Whiteley. We'll be right back. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm here with my co-host Eugene Lerman and a special in-studio guest, Peter Whiteley. He's a curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History. And today's topic is salt. Salt as a cultural geopolitical force.
25:14 Eugene Mirman? Yeah.
25:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And I have slotted in here an interview that I had in my office with Mark Kralansky. And he wrote the book, Salt: A World History. And he told me how salt contributed to the science of geology, which I hadn't thought about, but in retrospect, clearly that would be the case. If you care where your salt is, you're going to learn about what Earth did to get it there and what you're going to have to do to get it from the Earth. And also what role salt, what role geology played in devaluing salt itself. So let's, let's check another clip out from that interview with Mark Kralansky.
25:47 Speaker 02 The whole science of geology grew up on salt. Geology was basically the science of finding salt.
25:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just a sec, how does the need for geologists to help you find salt compare with the need for geologists to help people find iron or any other valuable ore?
26:05 Speaker 02 Well, it's very much the same thing. It was a very valuable ore, and that's why this science grew up looking for it. Until the beginning of the 20th century, and then a discovery was made that there was a relationship between salt and oil. The reason for this relationship is that very solid deposits of salt, which are called salt domes, are impenetrable. So, organic material that pushes up against salt won't go any further and it'll be trapped there, and that's how oil is made. When this was discovered, originally in Pennsylvania and then in Texas, the science of geology
26:47 Speaker 02 became about looking for salt so that you could find oil. And went back to all of these places in the Middle East where salt domes had been discovered and found oil. And today, geology is very much focused on finding oil.
27:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But that only values the oil, it doesn't devalue the salt?
27:03 Speaker 02 Well, it did devalue the salt because it stepped up the search for salt. And it was discovered that there was just much, much more salt in the earth than anybody had ever imagined. Just these huge, huge deposits. I mean, from Ireland, across northern England into Scandinavia, from eastern France, across Germany and Austria into Poland, you know, from Detroit to Syracuse. It's just huge. So, that, for one thing, lessened the value of salt. But, at the same time, refrigeration and freezing were being developed. Which is actually my next book.
27:45 Speaker 02 I'm working on a book, a biography of Clarence Berzai. Clarence Berzai ruined the salt industry by developing commercial freezing.
27:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, Peter, do these Native American tribes, do they, part of the salt was nutritional, but also to, was it, it was also to preserve food over the winter months, and, but there are other ways to preserve today, and, and you, you studied the relatively recent history of these tribes, why are they still doing it the old fashioned way? Just put them in a condo and give them a refrigerator?
28:16 Speaker 03 Well, they, they like the way it tastes, they like that, that particular kind of salt that I was talking about, but of course, they have many other methods of preserving meat and fish and so forth in, in the past, as well as in the present, so you'd get, get deer meat and smoke it, or dry it, or clams and salmon and halibut on the, on the northwest coast, they spent many hours drying these in smokehouses and so forth, especially, especially for that purpose.
28:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I, I have in-laws from the Pacific Northwest, and, you know, there's a whole culture of the dried, the dried meat, and it tastes great, and it's very, and it's very high calorie, actually, and so you don't need much of it to, to keep you going through the day.
28:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's great stuff.
28:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, the, what I find interesting is just how salt had all these secondary effects on the rest of the conduct of cultures, and that's extraordinary, and, and is, what I, what I wonder, though, is, has salt been devalued in the, in the Native American community because of its, the full access? Are those deities still operating in the cultures? The deities you spoke of in an earlier segment?
29:24 Eugene Mirman? Because of all the salt domes in Europe.
29:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
29:26 Eugene Mirman? It was like, they're all over France and Ireland.
29:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, that was like, like, the, like, the, the military map of, of Napoleon.
29:33 Eugene Mirman? Yeah, yeah, had all the salt, and then also in Detroit. I'm glad they have something, even if it's salt.
29:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Napoleon's last stand in Detroit.
29:41 Speaker 03 I think traditionally oriented people still pay attention to those things, and again, they do value the, the native salt more than the commercial salt, very much so into the, into the present.
29:51 Eugene Mirman? Is it, is it actually a better quality?
29:53 Speaker 03 I think it tastes better, and Hopis talk about it, there's Pasquale, much more flavorful, much, much sweeter than the commercial salt.
30:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It sounds like you speak Hopi, we'll have to get back to that after this segment.
30:05 Speaker 03 A little time.
30:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's a little bit, I will, will, and you speak Klingon, don't you?
30:09 Eugene Mirman? I speak Russian.
30:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We'll get back, when we come back on StarTalk Radio, more on the topic of salt.
30:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm here in studio with Eugene Mirman and a special guest, an ethnogra-- curator of ethnography. Did I get that right? Yes. Yes, Peter Whitley at the American Museum of Natural History specializing in southwest-- Native Americans of the southwest, the relatively recent history that they've enjoyed. And this topic is salt and what role it's played in cultures and how they've treated each other and how they've developed. And we also have clips from an interview. We have the last of several clips of my interview with Mark Kralansky, the author of "Salt: A World History." Why don't we start off with that clip where he talks about salt
31:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? not simply as being important for your survival, but it was so important for survival that in fact it became-- Some people married it. It became a strategic commodity. Let's check it out. Tell me, the history of war and salt, is that a book unto itself?
31:25 Speaker 02 In many ways, actually, because salt was also used to cauterize wounds. An army that didn't have salt was in trouble. But you get examples like the Union Army in the Civil War. The Union Army had a strategy of preventing the South from getting salt. They couldn't get northern salt because there was an embargo, and wherever they found a salt work, they destroyed them. Sometimes they went back repeatedly and destroyed them. So that the South was in desperate shortage of salt during the entire Civil War, which created a food shortage in wintertime.
31:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow, so the control of salt became a major military tactic?
32:04 Speaker 02 Yes, and salt has often been regarded as strategic in British government policy. It tells you something about the British government. They were always more concerned with salt as a strategic commodity than they were with it as a commercial commodity. Queen Elizabeth I warned the English people of their dangerous dependency, exact quote, "dangerous dependency on French sea salt."
32:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, salt of yesterday is oil of today.
32:34 Speaker 02 That's right. You know, when you look at salt and oil, there's a great lesson there. It's actually one of the secret reasons why I wrote the book. What you think is valuable and what you're willing to fight and die for, is it really valuable? Value is an illusion and it shifts all of the time. And I am absolutely certain that someday, oil will be worth about what salt is worth today.
32:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Some wishful thinking there.
33:00 Eugene Mirman? It's certainly possible, but it doesn't mean at the time, you shouldn't go to tons of wars over oil and salt.
33:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I liked, I'd forgotten that, yes, you can use salt to quarterize wounds. And of course, Rambo did that.
33:09 Eugene Mirman? I still do it. If I get into a knife fight, I go right to some salt.
33:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, was it Rambo? No, no, he actually took the gunpowder out of a bullet. And ignited it in the wound in his side to quarterize the wound. So that was, that was the manly thing that he did.
33:22 Eugene Mirman? Yeah, I wouldn't do that. I would just put salt on it. I'm not a lunatic.
33:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So this goes way back for the military. The Roman army was sometimes paid in salt. And the origin, origin of the world's sal- of the word salary.
33:34 Eugene Mirman? Mm-hmm. Salary, salad.
33:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And salads.
33:37 Eugene Mirman? All of it, all of it.
33:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah. And, and, and of course.
33:40 Eugene Mirman? Sally was a very salty lady.
33:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And of course, the expression is he worth his, worth his weight in salt, you know?
33:46 Eugene Mirman? Right.
33:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And what's odd, because when I first learned of salt, I had heard that it like gave you high blood pressure and killed you. So when someone said he's the salt of the earth, it's like, ooh, you must not like the person. I came way out of, out of sync with when, when all of this was, all this vocabulary was established. And of course, one of, one of the major causes, there's several of course, but one of the major causes of the French Revolution was the salt tax. We never talk about that because we can't even picture it. We can't even think about it.
34:14 Eugene Mirman? I think we can picture it.
34:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Did you know that the French prisons were full of people convicted of salt smuggling?
34:20 Eugene Mirman? Salt smuggling? Oh, trying to avoid being, salt taxes?
34:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what we do that today.
34:26 Eugene Mirman? There was also, tea was also very important. I mean, I, I, I guess I think it's perfectly reasonable that salt was so important.
34:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? One of the first things they did at the end of the revolution was to spend the salt tax. And of course, famously portrayed in the film Gandhi, but what Gandhi actually did was one of his steps to fight for India's independence from Great Britain was the. He was concerned about his policies concerning salt and then the, what was that? That March to the Sea where he made salt without the oversight of the British and that was viewed as almost a, as a strong act of defiance. And here we look at it and say, what's he doing? He's making salt. What do you care? British? It's like chill out.
35:05 Eugene Mirman? Let him have some salt. Whoever consult, controls the salt controls the world.
35:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's right.
35:10 Eugene Mirman? A movie I'm going to be working on.
35:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Peter, we're running short on time. Any concluding comments you have about this whole business?
35:18 Speaker 03 Well, I think that, that concept of salt being a strategic resource is very widely present. I'm thinking, for example, of some societies in Papua New Guinea where there are specialized salt producers and salt makers. They have a, you know, they'll be, they'll have a high role in, in the local hierarchy and they get to be responsible for trading salt in a very controlled fashion among different groups of neighboring tribes.
35:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So it's, it's still going on. It's still there.
35:44 Speaker 03 Absolutely.
35:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Still there and, and, and like I say, would be interesting if oil one day became the salt of the past.
35:52 Eugene Mirman? Yes. And I can't wait for a new thing to replace it that we go to war over. I just hope I get to control it.
35:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, we got to wrap up this first hour of StarTalk. There's a lot more to discover in part two of our show about the science of salt. And in that second hour, that's when we get into the health considerations of salt and what it means to us physiologically. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. Eugene, thanks for being in this first hour and Peter Whiteley, thanks for joining us in this first hour of StarTalk Radio. StarTalk is brought to you in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. As always, I'm compelled to tell you that until next time, keep looking up. Neil deGrasse Tyson signing off.
36:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? When we come back, I'll be in the Cosmic Crib to talk more about evolution with Bill Nye the Science Guy, who just wrote a bestselling book on the subject called Undeniable. Stay tuned.
36:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Bill, thanks for coming into the Cosmic Crib.
37:01 Bill Nye? It's so good to be in the crib.
37:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The Cosmic Crib of StarTalk is just my office. It's code for my office at the Hayden Planetarium. I'm here with Bill Nye, a recent expatriate from Los Angeles, now live in downtown Manhattan.
37:15 Bill Nye? Yes, sir.
37:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, welcome to New York.
37:17 Bill Nye? It's great to be here.
37:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And I was just browsing the New York Times and your name showed up on the bestseller list.
37:24 Bill Nye? Check me out.
37:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is your first time, I think, on the bestseller list?
37:26 Bill Nye? Yes, it's my first time, yes. I hope, maybe there'll be more times, but that's pretty good.
37:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, congratulations, making the bestseller list.
37:35 Bill Nye? Thank you.
37:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the title of the book is Undeniable. And I was happy to read a galley of the book and offer a blurb for the book.
37:47 Bill Nye? Very nice, but it's an excellent.
37:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? May I read my blurb? Do you have a copy of the book?
37:50 Bill Nye? I have a copy.
37:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I want to read my blurb, just to set the stage here. I love Velcro noise.
37:56 Bill Nye? I came here by bicycle, riding through Manhattan, enjoying the adventure.
38:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You are that green.
38:02 Bill Nye? Well, in line with that, the bicycle's faster.
38:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It can be, yeah. Here we go.
38:08 Bill Nye? And I like the challenge. It's like a video game, the stakes are really high.
38:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, a video game where you could end up dead, not anyone else. Here's my blurb for Undeniable. The subtitle of it is "Evolution in the Science of Creation," my blurb, and I'm honored that it was the top blurb.
38:25 Bill Nye? And it is the shortest one, which I know is the source of pride.
38:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I never want to be the longest blurb on a book jacket.
38:30 Bill Nye? Heck, no.
38:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? With his charming breezy narrative style, Bill empowers the reader to see the natural world as it is, not as some would wish it to be. He does it right, and as I expected, he does it best. Bill!
38:45 Bill Nye? I love you, man!
38:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Bill!
38:47 Bill Nye? It's really nice. I put my heart and soul into this thing.
38:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, that's good. So, what I liked about the book was that, unlike many other books that tried to be expository in some scientific topic or another, you didn't even go there.
39:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're just sitting down with you on the couch and you're telling sto- Uncle Bill is telling stories.
39:09 Bill Nye? Well, this is the thing about first-person stories. First of all, this is how humans find patterns and remember things, is based on stories. Uh, you did this Cosmo series, I think.
39:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I've heard of it, yeah.
39:19 Bill Nye? Full of, full of stories.
39:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Full of stories, yeah. Storytelling was a big part of that.
39:22 Bill Nye? It's, it's very important. And then the other just feature of this, if I say in the book, "I remember when I met the gorilla named Ivan," the reader can't say, "No, you don't." "Yeah, I do. Yes, I do. Remember when I met Ivan. Yeah." And, uh, so that gives it a property that-
39:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a great sentence too, by the way.
39:43 Bill Nye? Uh, well, yeah, unlike many readers of this book, Ivan was a mountain gorilla. I don't know how many mountain gorillas-
39:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I would say most readers of the book.
39:51 Bill Nye? Yeah, well, it's not clear how many mountain gorillas have enjoyed my book, but Ivan was an influential guy for me because he, you could tell that he was unhappy in the, or not, uh, he was bored, I think is the word, in the Tacoma enclosure, in Tacoma, Washington. But he had it kinda going on, feeling pretty good. When he was in Atlanta, he had girl gorillas digging his gorilliness. And you could tell in his posture, in his, uh, manner.
40:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But this is a gorilla that you observed in two different zoos.
40:26 Bill Nye? Two different zoos. One of them wasn't really a zoo. Uh, it was, uh, from the old, the bad old days.
40:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The kind of facility where Planet of the Apes derived.
40:35 Bill Nye? Yeah, right.
40:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Where they break out and take over, okay?
40:37 Bill Nye? And so, my claim, uh, in this, in this one passage, which is a bit of a digression here, uh, is that your posture, your gait, your, uh, your manner is deep within us, no matter, it's common to our species.
40:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Did you feel that you had a special capacity to observe this, being a primate yourself?
40:56 Bill Nye? Well, that's the other thing. Then we, we changed the subject to, uh, VIP. Now, Vip is a gorilla at the Woodland Park as we record.
41:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I didn't know you had all these primate relationships out there.
41:06 Bill Nye? Well, we'll go with that's two. Then my old boss, I'm not sure where he would fit in on that tree.
41:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
41:12 Bill Nye? We thought about an old boss joke in every chapter, but we held back from that.
41:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wisely, I would say.
41:18 Bill Nye? Editors and I. But Vip looks at you. He sits next to the glass. And he's got an acre, or pick a number. He's got a hectare out there. We could wander around and be gorilla and eat raw things and do stuff. But he sits right by the glass and he stares at you. He stares at you. What's the deal, man? What's the deal? My people are behind the glass. And we're big and strong. Look at you. You're skinny. I want to break you over my knee. And I'm a vegetarian. But he's just thinking.
41:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So this is the thought bubble of the gorilla's head?
41:59 Bill Nye? Yeah, you can see it in his eyes. And so
42:03 Bill Nye? I met an actress who plays the orangutan in the Planet of the Apes movies.
42:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Which one?
42:10 Bill Nye? The wise old orangutan. And she apparently goes to, by all accounts, goes to the Woodland Park Zoo, sits there with the orangutan.
42:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And where's Woodland Park?
42:19 Bill Nye? In Seattle, sorry. The Seattle Zoo. They take a meeting. And they look at each other. They paint together. They do things. And I asked her, "Is Vip still there?" And she said, "Oh, he's mean." So that's just an independently confirmed account. But neither here nor there. The book I consider a primer, or primer, on evolution. It's very important for everybody to realize that living things make more copies of themselves than can succeed.
42:52 Bill Nye? We reproduce more than are going to live.
42:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, humans don't really do that.
42:56 Bill Nye? Well, there's 7.2 billion of us right now, and our natural proclivities.
43:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And there was a time, actually, when you'd have seven kids and three were two of them.
43:05 Bill Nye? Well, not only that, there is a technical and important point. Many, many, many more eggs are fertilized, human eggs are fertilized, than become people. And this is an important point when you're gonna start passing laws and prosecuting people based on their eggs not attaching. And so, it's a, it's, it's an important thing to understand. And by the way, the religions who make certain claims about their understanding from conception wouldn't have anything to say if it weren't for not to per science and microscopes. Then the other thing, another thing about evolution that's really important for people to understand is sexual selection. That is to say...
43:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We don't, we know it's sexual selection.
43:49 Bill Nye? Well, but you, but people...
43:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Of all the things you have to define on this show, I think that would not be one of...
43:53 Bill Nye? No, but I mean, it's selection within a species. And why do you do it? What's the point? If you're a dandelion, or a sea jelly, or a barnacle, why do you bother with it? Why don't you just pop yourself off like any self-respecting bacteria?
44:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I've never been a barnacle.
44:07 Bill Nye? Yeah, it would have been a big change for you. And so, these are just important things to understand, and then I go on about...
44:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What's the value of sexual selection is?
44:17 Bill Nye? Uh, well, apparently, the best theory right now is your enemy out there, if you're a meta-organism, multicellular organism, your enemy is not lions and tigers and bears, which can, of course, can be troublesome. Your enemy is germs and parasites. That's what'll kill ya. And to show you how deep this fear is within us, look at Ebola, how people...
44:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah.
44:44 Bill Nye? And quite reasonably terrified. And so, along this line, understanding the process of evolution allows us to craft medicines and medical procedures that allow our species to succeed. It allows our species to succeed specifically to us and to our crops and farm animals and everything else that we depend on. Evolution is the main idea in all of biology.
45:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And, but, your title is very confrontational.
45:12 Bill Nye? Well, we did...
45:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's not, "Oh, here's an account of evolution, it's undeniable." "Yeah, go on, meet me outside."
45:19 Bill Nye? We, that's exactly right.
45:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're ready to like, have a fight.
45:21 Bill Nye? Yes, but not...
45:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But by the way, the book does not read that way, but the title does.
45:26 Bill Nye? Thank you, I think.
45:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The book is very breezy and informative at the same time, and those two words are hardly ever in the same sentence.
45:34 Bill Nye? I love you, man. So, we did have, I did step inside for a fight with the guy in Kentucky.
45:43 Bill Nye? And I took him on-
45:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Tenham.
45:44 Bill Nye? Lectern to Lectern.
45:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The head of-
45:47 Bill Nye? The Answers in Genesis-
45:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Creation Science Museum now?
45:51 Bill Nye? Yeah.
45:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
45:52 Bill Nye? And the word museum, I'm always, I always have difficulty with. There are no artifacts there.
45:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
45:57 Bill Nye? It's just animatronic robots and, and some dioramas.
46:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Theme parky.
46:03 Bill Nye? It's complete theme parky.
46:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Mm-hmm.
46:05 Bill Nye? And they, I think, are unabashed about that. And where they, where they may have crossed the line is now you have to testify to your Christian faith, even though, by the way, the debate was about, what I, my understanding of the Bible was about the Old Testament, that the Jesus guy never got involved. And then, um-
46:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Jesus.
46:24 Bill Nye? Yeah, J- Jesus, right.
46:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? When spoken in Western English language.
46:28 Bill Nye? And then, and then the other thing is you can't be gay, you can't be homosexual to work there. And you can do that, apparently, if you have a private, or they're, they're trying to make it so you can do that. But you can't take tax dollars and do that. So we'll see what happens to them.
46:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So your book, you're happy with how it's come out?
46:45 Bill Nye? Oh, man, I'm just very pleased with it. And-
46:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, every chapter is a story of some kind or another.
46:50 Bill Nye? Yeah, that's right. That's how we-
46:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I feel like I got to know you better by having read it and-
46:54 Bill Nye? You're still talking to me.
46:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
46:56 Bill Nye? No, I worked really hard on it, everybody.
46:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And your opening sentence is what?
47:00 Bill Nye? Oh, yeah, yeah. And this is true. I do remember very well watching bumblebees. And just thinking, I mean, a bumblebee is a small thing, uh, by human standards, but just compare the size of their wings to how small they are. How in the world is this possible? Furthermore, in Ripley's Believe It or Not, they stated categorically that bumblebees should be unable to fly. They are aerodynamic misfits. And I remember even as a kid thinking, dude, Mr. Ripley, they're flying.
47:35 Bill Nye? The problem has got to be with the theory, not the bee. And it's interesting, it wasn't even till, pick a number, 15, 20 years ago, that people really understood how bees fly. It's quite an extraordinary motion. And bee wings are very different structurally from bird wings, very different structurally from bat wings, yet they have converged on solving the problem of flight. And this is another evolutionary principle, which I cover in the book.
48:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So all the big evolutionary elements are there, but told through this storytelling style? So people would acquire a comfort level, I think, with the topic?
48:13 Bill Nye? Well, I'm hoping.
48:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And maybe go on to more advanced books, would you imagine?
48:17 Bill Nye? Yes, sure. Or just have a deep understanding, and especially an appreciation, for the process that was discovered by Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin. They didn't make it up, they found it in nature. And that is a worthy thing, and it fills me with reverence, to know that we are part of this extraordinary process that goes back four and a half billion years. And speaking of four and a half billion, I am very proud of the timeline. I think I have a good way to try to get your head around deep time.
48:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Deep time, time deeper than anything the human experience has recorded.
48:52 Bill Nye? Yes, and speaking of time...
48:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're done here. Bill, thanks for being in the cosmic crib.
48:58 Bill Nye? Thank you.
48:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? As always, and like I say, I bring greetings from the entire StarTalk community, so welcome to New York.
49:05 Bill Nye? Thank you, it's great to be here.
49:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Previous Women in Science, with Summer Ash and Emily Rice – StarTalk All-Stars Next StarTalk All-Stars at NY Comic Con – The Science of Science Fiction Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
