The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 310 - James Burke

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Sept. 12, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:20:58

Edition 310 - James Burke

This time we catch up with world famous science broadcaster and writer James Burke...

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	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
	Thank you as ever for all of your emails and for bearing with me.
	We are into the storm season in the UK now.
	We had one last night that rattled a few things and put down an awful lot of rain and I think there are more to come.
	But none of this is anything compared with the experience of places like Florida in the teeth of Hurricane Irma.
	I've been monitoring public radio coverage of the storm and its aftermath and public radio saying that some people may be without power in Florida for another week, maybe more, which is unimaginable for a lot of people in a modern society.
	Disruption to water too, and of course people who lost their lives and property.
	My thoughts are with you all and we will explore on this program in the future the changes that may be happening to our weather and the enormity of them.
	That is a topic to come but like I say my thoughts if you're in Florida or any of the states affected definitely with you.
	Lots of shout outs to catch up on on this edition of the show.
	Then a very special conversation with a very special man, his name James Burke.
	If you live in America or the UK, you may remember James from his amazing groundbreaking science series on TV, series like Connections that made headlines around the world and turned him into a star.
	Nobody explains science.
	Nobody talks about the future and how it might shape up like James Burke.
	He's 80 years of age now, isn't seen much on TV these days, but since I interviewed him, the number of people who said, James Burke, wow, he was the best.
	If he's new to you, in the conversation that you're about to hear, recorded at his home, I think you will discover why.
	We played some of this on the radio, but you're going to hear the whole conversation exactly as recorded, and no commercials, no interruptions, no nothing on this edition of The Unexplained.
	A very special man, one of my heroes, and I know they say sometimes you should never meet your heroes, but I'm really pleased I met James Burke, and I think you're going to hear why very soon.
	Sorry, this edition is a little bit late.
	I took a few days off just for a variety of personal reasons.
	I just needed to get a break.
	And first of all, went up to Liverpool to scatter the ashes of my late father, which I've been, I don't know, I haven't been able to do before now.
	It's a couple of years since he died, and it's only now that I felt able to go up there and actually do it.
	And, you know, his ashes were claimed by the tide and swept back towards North Wales, where the Hughes family started.
	So in many ways, a circle is complete.
	I know there are some of you who don't like hearing me talk about myself and stuff that's going on in my life, but I think a lot of people are going to relate to what I have just done and what that feels like.
	And that's why I mentioned it.
	And Liverpool, once again, was very good to me in the days that I was there.
	And then I spent a couple of days on the south coast at a place called Boscombe, which is a little surfy place near Bournemouth.
	And that was nice, just really quiet chilling out.
	I haven't had a big holiday overseas for years, and maybe one of these days I'll be able to afford to do that because I'd like to be able to see some continuous sunshine.
	But it was nice to go to the south coast again and see some familiar places.
	All right, before we get to James Burke, then let's get up to speed on shout-outs.
	Lots of them to do.
	Janine, thank you for the photograph you sent me.
	It was taken at Tower Bridge in London.
	There is definitely a woman's figure in the bottom of the shot, and she seems to be out of scale and out of time, out of era.
	It looks odd.
	I don't know what it could have been.
	It might just be the reflection of somebody coming past, but I don't know how you could have got the picture that you got.
	Thank you for it, Janine.
	James Wafer, good to hear from you.
	James, another James in Reading, a place I know very well.
	Thank you for the donation and the comments, James.
	Chris in Wakefield, Yorkshire says, I'd really like to hear an episode where you're self-indulgent and interview guests on a subject that you yourself have an interest in.
	Well, you know, that goes for most of them.
	Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing the show.
	You know, most of the stuff I do, I pick the guests because I have a real interest in what they're up to.
	And some of them I put on because it may not necessarily float my boat, but it might be something that you would be interested in.
	But I think, you know, unless you have a stake in it yourself, it's very hard to do a show like this.
	So I get your point, Chris, and, you know, I might do this, what you suggest at some point.
	Russ says, serious question here, and I think this is the question of the moment, really, from Russ.
	Great question.
	Says, if reincarnation is real, and that has been proven in many studies, as you say, Russ, when you reincarnate, you bring your soul back with you.
	So how can a medium communicate with what used to be you?
	That's a very good point.
	And I guess the only way to explain that is the you that you are now and the me that I am now have an existence here, and we deposit that on the other side when we cross if we do.
	And if we come back, then part of our essence returns and part of what was us and will be recognized by people as being us remains over there.
	I don't know.
	But I think it's a fabulous question and it needs to be asked.
	I'm trying to work out who I could put that question to and get a sensible answer.
	Colin in Sutton Coldfield in the Midlands, UK, suggests spontaneous human combustion that was always in the newspapers in the 1970s here, Colin, doesn't get talked about much now.
	I don't think we've had a case for a long time, but a good thing to do.
	Thank you.
	Monique in China, an Australian in China, thank you for your fascinating email, Monique, and your suggestions about Australian topics.
	And you've got to tell me more about the book that you're putting together, too.
	Scott Cody, good to hear from you.
	Scott liked Andrew Bassiago, a lot of people did.
	Sandy Rogers, thank you for your email.
	A RAF in Staines, near London, says that edition 309 was one of the most interesting editions for some time.
	The only suggestion I wish to make is that when you interview two people at some length, you split them into individual Editions.
	Well, I'll try to do that, but sometimes in terms of the amount of material that I've got, it kind of works out that way, that I want to put two people on one show to make sure that I give full value.
	But thank you, Raph.
	Janet P. in Amherst, USA, says I've had some time-slip experiences, and I've read them through, Janet.
	Thank you for those.
	I think they're more interesting than you say.
	I think you're understating them.
	They are fascinating.
	Andrew Ross, kind comments and suggestions.
	Colin in Maidstone, Kent, wants to hear Stephen Greer back on this show.
	Thanks, Colin.
	Gunther in London, fascinating email about the famous Ariel School UFO landing case in Zimbabwe.
	I've tried to, I've been trying to find experts on this for a while to do a really good show about it.
	And the search continues.
	Thank you, Gunther.
	Derek, it's either Berkeley or Berkeley.
	I think it's Berkeley in Gloucestershire.
	I should know this.
	But originally from Liverpool, like me, says, I listen to your podcast as I drive around South Wales as a shop checkout engineer.
	I've just done the run from Fishguard to Tenby, which is a beautiful run for the far west of Wales, Fishguard, where the ferries to Ireland go from.
	Tenby, a resort that I know from family holidays, very beautiful.
	In the way southwest of Wales.
	He says, I'm always pleased when an unexplained download appears overnight.
	It sees me through the day.
	Thank you, Derek.
	Ismail Karamka, nice to hear from you and your suggestion of Rupert Sheldrake.
	Paul in Washington, UK, suggesting Steph Young, who we had on the radio show.
	And also a man called Paul Sinclair.
	I'm on to this.
	We're getting in touch and we might put him on the radio show.
	David Bloom, thank you for your email.
	Jace in Doncaster, good to hear from you.
	Luke has some points for me to put to Andrew Bashiago when he's on next.
	We'll do that.
	Nicola in Rufford, Lancashire, good to hear from you.
	Rich Mariner, thank you for your email.
	Amanda, thank you for the documents that you sent.
	Jason from Stanwell, which is about as close to Heathrow Airport in London as you can possibly get.
	I have to drive past that.
	Many days of the week, Jason, know it well.
	Josh in Circleville, Ohio, good to hear from you.
	And Blankenship in San Francisco, thanks for your email.
	Brian in Philadelphia, I'm getting on to your suggestion, Brian.
	Thank you.
	Brian, another Brian but with a Y, in Calgary, Canada, says, I love the work that you do, and I hope you don't change a thing, including the weather reports about the UK.
	I'd like to hear an episode about Sasquatch, and you make a suggestion, which I'm also getting on to.
	Thank you.
	Martin in Nottinghamshire says, hi, Mr. H. I think I've said it before.
	I'm very skeptical, and usually I listen purely for entertainment, but I like it when I press play with prejudice, only to be turned around by the show.
	The episode with Sue Blackmore was a perfect example.
	Keep up the great work, Howie.
	Thank you, Martin.
	Gina in Brisbane, Australia.
	Thanks for your email.
	Gina wants to say that I love your show and not to worry about the people complaining that you interrupt too often, express your opinions too much, or share too much about yourself.
	She says that's what makes you relatable.
	Thank you very much, Gina, in Brisbane.
	Zach, a rock radio host in New York City.
	Nice to hear from you, Zach.
	Chris says, dear Howard, you are the best goddamn podcaster on the bandwidth.
	Please, can you give my son, Ezra, born at 4 a.m. on the 6th of September, 2017, a shout-out?
	I would be delighted to do so.
	Ezra, welcome to the world and welcome to the unexplained.
	Chris says, me and my partner listen, and inadvertently, Ezra has listened since conception.
	I guess he has.
	You were played through some of the labor as well.
	We think you're great.
	Thank you very, very much.
	And some suggestions to Chris and Ezra.
	Welcome to this world, Ezra.
	And, you know, we're all counting on you, Ezra, and all the people coming along to make this world a better place.
	Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell, by the way, my webmaster, a creative hotspot for all the work that he does on the shows.
	And thank you to you.
	If you can make a donation for the show, it is absolutely vital, really, to allow it all to continue.
	So if you can do that, please do go to the website theunexplained.tv, and that's the place where you can send me an email or make a donation to allow this work to continue.
	And as I said on the last show, it's perfectly true.
	If you think about the cost of a Starbucks coffee or coffee from one of the big chains, what is it now in the US?
	$3.50 for a cup of coffee, basic one.
	In the UK, something like £2 or more.
	So if you can donate a portion of that to the unexplained, even just a couple of dollars, believe me, it would help the work that I do here.
	Right, let's hear the interview that I did with the great James Burke, a pioneer of science broadcasting in UK, and for my money, and possibly by the end of this, yours too.
	The greatest.
	James Burke.
	James, it is a pleasure, let me tell you personally, and for my audience around the world to be here and talking with you.
	And thank you very much for making time to speak with me.
	Not at all.
	I'm looking forward to it.
	So I read a few biographies of your life and times online before we sat here and did this.
	And I stopped reading them at one point because I realized that you've been there as a constant throughout my life, from the late Apollo days all the way up to today through all of the series and the impact you made on America.
	So I really turned off the computer this morning, stopped looking, and I thought the best thing that we can do is have a conversation about what has been and is a truly remarkable life.
	Well, I'm not sure about how remarkable it is, but it was certainly full of its ups and downs, yes.
	But that is part of the rich and very tapestry of working in broadcasting, I guess.
	And that's what keeps us fresh.
	If you get knocked about a bit, I'm sure you've found this too, James, working at a much higher level than I ever will.
	But, you know, it's how you react to the bumps that defines you.
	Well, I suppose really it all started with a bump because, I mean, I had never any intention to go into broadcasting at all.
	I was in the early 60s living in Rome, running a language school, interpreting, translating, working on an Italian dictionary and on an encyclopedia of art and getting bored.
	And I was on a bus with a journalist pal and he said, there's a British television company looking for a director reporter and I said I don't know how to do that and he said they don't know you don't know and I said well if the bus stops at the next bus stop I'll get off and make an appointment so it did and I did and I got to this appointment and these charming English people said do you speak fluent Italian and I said yes because I did and they said well we have to test you I said yes and they brought an Italian film crew in and said speak to them so I said to these guys look
	I don't know one end of a camera from another, and this is all rather silly, and I only came as a kind of joke.
	And they said, don't be daft, it's very easy, we'll teach you.
	So the English people said to them, does he speak Italian?
	And they said, perfectly.
	So the guys said to me, well, you've got the job, and we want you to go to Sicily tomorrow to do a story about the mafia.
	So I went off with this film crew.
	Talk about being bumped.
	I went off to Sicily with this Italian film crew, who were brilliant, as all Italian film crews are, and we made this hilarious movie about how you cannot do a film about the mafia, because either nobody turns up, or they miss the bus, or they arrive with a sore throat.
	But there are all those sort of classical soprano stories about how I was not able to turn up to help you with your movie.
	So we made this very funny film, which got a prize, and it was brilliant because the Italian film crew were brilliant.
	Do you think, James, that you got that job so easily because nobody else wanted it?
	I'm sure you were brilliant, but I'm just wondering whether that was a factor.
	I don't think they, well, it might have been that, but they very wisely didn't tell you that they wanted you to do a film about the mafia in advance.
	No.
	Anyway, so, I mean, I knew we went on working together, this company and I, and I just stayed one step ahead of the sheriff, because sooner or later they'll either catch you and you lose a job, or they don't catch you and you succeed.
	So one step ahead of the sheriff has been the story of my life, really.
	Okay.
	So it's a bit of a leap, though, working for a jolly TV production company in Italy and making a film that gets recognised about the mafia.
	How do you manage to get yourself into the BBC?
	Because, as you say, you were not a journalist.
	You were not a broadcaster, a trained broadcaster.
	But then, who is?
	We all get our seasoning in different ways, I guess.
	But the BBC's always been rather big on qualifications for things, hasn't it?
	Well, yes and no.
	I mean, as it happens, once I was inside the BBC, I discovered that all the people who were doing the most interesting work had fallen backwards into the BBC.
	And all the people doing the accounting and administration were people who had gone through the proper channels to get into the BBC.
	And as usual, the most interesting talent is usually that which doesn't follow the rules.
	And, I mean, I got into the BBC because after I did the work with the Italian lot, I got a call from Tomorrow's World, which used to be a sort of science and technology programme, saying that they needed a reporter, a director in Italy, to do some stories.
	And would I like to?
	And I thought, well, why not?
	And my first story was, how do we stop the Leaning Tower of Pisa from falling over?
	Well, it never did, of course, to this day.
	And that wasn't an April the 1st, an April Fool joke.
	No, it wasn't.
	It was a genuine five-minute story about how you stop, if you wanted to stop the Leaning Tower of Pisa falling over.
	And it happened to be a science programme.
	I mean, I was interested in broadcasting because, as an ex-teacher, it's the same sort of thing, as you know.
	And the BBC had just set up its science division for the first time to deal with science and technology for a mass audience.
	And they were deliberately hiring humanities graduates who didn't understand a word about science because any humanities graduate who, if a humanities graduate can understand it, anybody will.
	And, you know, we had no choice.
	We had to go to physicists and chemists and, you know, astrophysicists and say, say it again slowly, please, you know, and then repeating it back to them, saying, have I got it right?
	again you know gradually learning on the job as we all do but I thought that was a master stroke by the BBC they put all the scientists in the arts programs and all the arts people in the science programs and that way I think you know they were assured that people A would be learning on the job because if you didn't you couldn't and B that they would be speaking plain English because you know an engineer dealing with the Mona Lisa isn't going to talk engineer speak and an arts graduate you know dealing with with a physicist is going to have to speak plain English.
	Does it surprise you James that today and I do a lot of interviews with people who are involved in science and my background is arts you know I'm a politics graduate and then I took another course in journalism but I know very little about science although thanks to people like you I have a great interest in it.
	But I find that even though this many years has gone by people that you interview who are scientists in the main apart from the ones who are mega stars like Michiu Kaku who was on my show recently and Brian Cox and all of those people who are stars for their own persona but most of them find it difficult to be able to string together a narrative that somebody like me will understand.
	So I have to keep saying as you probably will have had to have kept saying those years ago does that mean this?
	Yes.
	Well I mean you know ever since Descartes and the birth of specialization the name of the game in science has been to learn more and more about less and less.
	And the more successful you are the more the smaller is your niche and the more esoteric is your vocabulary until finally you're so clever nobody but you understands what you're talking about.
	And it seems to me that's the highest accolade in science.
	So they're pointed the opposite way.
	I mean people like you and me are pointed wider and wider.
	They are pointed narrower and narrower.
	So I'm surprised, usually surprised, to come across a scientist who is fluent in plain English about his or her subject because their entire training is to push them the other way, which is good because otherwise people like you and me wouldn't have a job.
	Somebody has to do the interpreting rather like you interpreting in Italy all those years ago.
	Science is a language of its own and you have to listen to the words, I guess, and come up with what you think they've said.
	Fire it back to them and you hope to God when you're interviewing them they say yes that's what I meant.
	Most of the time they do.
	Most of the time what we do, what I do is before I go near them is to read their work and then try and find out what it is they've, what they mean by what they've written.
	And two things happen then.
	A, I'm closer to understanding what they're trying to say and kind of closer to being able to say it in ordinary English.
	And second of all, once a scientist knows you've read his work, you're his friend.
	So there are no barriers.
	And anyway these days there are very few barriers.
	But when I began in science and technology, they were very suspicious about broadcasting because it wasn't being done.
	It hadn't been done before and they weren't quite sure why it was being done at all.
	Why does the public need to know about my work?
	Because the whole ethos that exists now of public access just didn't exist when I started in broadcasting.
	So there was a giant barrier, what used to be described by Snow as the two cultures that would never meet, you know, the arts and the sciences.
	And so quite often you'd speak to somebody, even quite eminent people in one branch of science or the other, and they would say, why should I bother to tell you these things?
	They actually use those words.
	In those days it was too early to say, because the public requires you to.
	So you had to mutter something about it's fascinating and it's interesting.
	And now, you know, they don't do that anymore because happily there is a massive public interest in this subject and they know it.
	And one day down the road, who knows it may affect their funding.
	But you still come across people who say, oh, I don't understand why you're talking with me.
	Nobody's possibly going to be interested in this.
	It's so esoteric.
	You still get a little bit of that.
	But as you say, with mass media, the internet, and everybody knowing everything these days, the science community understands that they have to explain themselves to an extent.
	That's true, but right from the beginning, I always found that the greater the brain, the more generous the brain.
	People at the top of their field are like fountains.
	They just keep coming out with it, and they give it to you.
	It's only the second raters that will deny you what they know, because if they give it to you, they've got nothing left.
	So quite early on in any relationship with those people, they were either going to give you the lot or they were going to give you nothing.
	And you learned eventually to smell that and keep away.
	But in the situation where, and we've all been in that situation in different ways, you get to somebody's abode or you're talking to them on the phone, however you're doing it, and you find they're not going to be very forthcoming or forthcoming at all.
	And you know that you have to drag it out of them somehow.
	What do you do?
	Well, I, in those circumstances, tend to read their work and extract what they were going to say to me from that.
	And indeed, in the second half of my career, I stopped talking to people like that because once you learn enough of their language, they say far more in print than they ever would do to you on a microphone.
	A, because they're not very good at talking about it anyway.
	And B, because it's easier to be dense and accurate and full of information in print than it is on the radio or on television.
	So it's many years since I've actually talked to scientists and technologists now because the stuff they write is accessible, so accessible.
	I mean, the wonderful thing, I remember once, years ago, saying, one day it might be possible for me to sit on a mountain in Italy and do all my work.
	And now I sit in the south of France half a year on a computer and I go into the University of California libraries and I have what I need in two minutes sitting on my computer, the text, the whole bit.
	But I watched an edition of your Connections series where it was remarkably foreseeing.
	The foresight in there was amazing because you predicted the world in which we now live.
	And I checked the date on this thing and it was a long time ago.
	And you talked about the personal agent.
	You called it the agent.
	We would now call it the internet, tablet, whatever it might be.
	That would basically organize your world.
	And the network to which the agent was connected, which we now call the internet, would know everything about you.
	Every friend you had, every phone call you'd made, every connection that you had made, it would be aware of.
	And you said in that, and it was...
	And we all use it.
	Do you use that technology, by the way?
	No, right.
	Okay, well, a lot of us use it these days because we have to.
	Not necessarily because we absolutely love it, but it's just because it's expected.
	But you said that this is how things are going to be.
	And you say, you basically came out of that description and you said the equivalent of, well, goodo or is it?
	Well, that's because you always try to end on a cliffhanger, don't you?
	If you don't say goodo or is it, they won't watch the next one to find out what they are.
	But it was a big, relevant question.
	Yes.
	Well, of course it has turned out to be or is it, hasn't it?
	I mean, if you look at what's going on with social media now, nobody would have ever wanted much of what is happening, had they realized in advance.
	But they didn't, because you don't.
	You say, excuse me, this is an empowering piece of science and technology.
	We always want it.
	I wrote a book once called The Axe Maker's Gift, all about how we take on technology because it solves the immediate problem.
	We don't think about the problem it then creates.
	I mean, a silly example, a silly example.
	The typewriter comes out in the late 19th century, solves a massive problem of very, very, very fast-growing commerce and paperwork buildup by allowing it to be typed.
	It brings women out of the kitchen into the office and it boosts the divorce rate.
	Nobody foresaw the divorce problem at all.
	And we do that again and again with technology.
	So we shouldn't be surprised then, I guess.
	I had a conversation on a radio show very recently with a technology expert, and we were discussing Elon Musk and the words of Elon Musk that artificial intelligence and robotics were going to become, in his view, and he's a very quietly spoken man, for a man who's got so much money and so much power, he's very, very understated.
	But he said effectively that we need to have checks and balances in place.
	Probably too late for that, I think, but who knows.
	Otherwise, this will be a bigger threat than Kim Jong-un in North Korea.
	And I don't think, and because there aren't people like you around on television now doing what you did in the way that you did it, the public is aware of this.
	That may be true.
	It depends how you think.
	See, I happen to think that, and I'm writing a book about this now, I happen to think that technology, science and technology are going to take a radically different route in the next 20 or 30 years.
	Up until now, if you think about it, we have been very, very Good at using technology above all to solve the problem of some kind of scarcity or other.
	Whether it's a scarcity in trade or money or gold or food or clothing or whatever, we've innovated our way out of problems throughout history and we've become extremely good at doing that.
	And we regard science and technology as something that does that for us.
	It's a tool to solve these problems.
	And the problems are always immediate problems.
	How do I eat tomorrow?
	Answer, invent the plow, or whatever it is you do.
	I think the most recent product of that extremely successful way of approaching problems by innovating a way out of them has produced nanotechnology.
	And nanotechnology is going to change absolutely everything in a way that makes all our attempts to solve the present problems irrelevant.
	Including the one of, for example, as you cited, whether or not we need checks and balances that some of us may not like on the internet and such stuff.
	I think these problems will all become irrelevant because I think the whole of society within 50 years will be, the fancy word would be destroyed, will be radically altered beyond belief.
	Because one of the things that nanotechnology can do, will be able to do, and they have already done it, they've taken the very first step, is to manipulate atoms to make molecules and molecules to make stuff.
	So you throw dirt, air and water into this machine, and it does a Star Trek for you.
	It makes a cup of coffee or the Mona Lisa or a piece of lead or a brick or eventually if you put the bits together a car, whatever you want.
	And we've started to see from almost nowhere, I thought, a very embryonic form of this in 3D printing.
	Yes, 3D printing is a kind of crude version of it because you have to have the material in the first place.
	Working at the atomic level, you don't need.
	You just need dirt, which contains 99% of the material that we use in everyday life, in everything.
	So what that does, of course, it means that you can live anywhere on the planet.
	You have no footprint because there is no waste.
	You have no energy problems because you spray any object.
	This has already been done in the lab.
	You spray any object with effectively what are solar cells and you turn any object into its own power source, a car or a house or whatever.
	So let's say you live on your iceberg in Antarctica.
	In your iceberg in Antarctica, in your house, which your nanotechnology fabricator will make for you, you make your own food, you make anything you want.
	You have no need of a community at all.
	You have no need of a job because you don't need money because anything you want, you can have.
	So what happens to society as a whole?
	What happens to the cities?
	What happens to our value systems?
	What happens to the whole infrastructure of work, pleasure, of consumerism and everything else?
	Well, there is no society.
	None, none.
	And we have absolutely no experience in our history of how to deal with this, and we're doing nothing about it.
	We're plowing ahead with the same old 19th century answers to our problems.
	And the problem is also, as we have observed with recent technological breakthroughs and milestones, is that the general public turn around and say, have we been able to do that?
	I can't believe we've got there.
	So what you're talking about is perfectly feasible and is likely to happen and may happen way before a lot of people expect.
	Well, the best guess among physicists is about 40 years.
	Call it 50.
	I mean, that means that some of the people listening to us now will live in this new society, which will be changed more than at any time since we left the caves.
	So do you believe that it's a good thing that you and I are the ages that we are?
	No, I'd like to see it.
	But then you'd always like to see tomorrow, wouldn't you?
	I would, anyway.
	And it's a great pity if you die before tomorrow, but I guess we all have to at some point.
	Because the human race has had an innate ability for as long as it's been around to navigate its way out of problems.
	The problems have got more complicated.
	We've got nuclear power now, and there's a bomb connected with that, and all of the things.
	And the internet is a marvelous thing, but has massive downsides.
	But we've always been lucky, and we've always been artful, and we've always been able to create our way out of the situation.
	But what we're talking about here is perhaps something that is literally beyond our ken, beyond our wit.
	It's an entirely new paradigm.
	It's an entirely new model inside which we will be living.
	We cannot have had any experience.
	it'll give us the training we need to do what we have to do to handle this thing.
	I mean, we really ought to...
	Why aren't they, do you think?
	They're too stupid.
	Is it because they're on five-year electoral cycles, most of them?
	You betcha.
	I mean, I don't mean politicians are stupid.
	I mean the system is stupid.
	The system encourages you to think five years max, or even less.
	And especially in commerce, you know, it's the next bit of profit that matters or loss, whatever it is.
	But it's all extremely short term.
	And we've always been like that, and we've always innovated our way out of any problem that ever came along.
	But this is different.
	This is quantifiably different.
	It's a chasm facing us.
	Are you a betting man?
	Sort of.
	Okay.
	What would you give us as odds for getting through this?
	How good are the chances that we will survive and thrive?
	I think there will be a period of extreme turbulence.
	I don't know how long it will last, but we will not be ready.
	And there will be extreme turbulence.
	Social turbulence, because people who have no need to work because there is no need for money, because anything they want they can have.
	What you do, I mean, think about those people who sometimes win the lottery.
	The first thing they do is the worst thing.
	They spend a lot.
	Well, the worst case was that woman whose name I forget in the 60s who won a lot of money and she said, I'm going to spend, spend, spend.
	And so she did, and her life became a disaster.
	Yes, yes.
	Usually people who make an enormous winning that on the lottery, their lives are ruined by it.
	And I think this will be the equivalent of that.
	And I think it'll be a generation or two before we settle down.
	Boy.
	Does it worry you?
	Because it sure as hell worries me that we don't have James Burke on the television now or writing now In newspapers that I pick up every morning, warning us about this because there is a freight train coming towards us and we're doing zero about it.
	Well, yeah, that's true.
	But thank you.
	But there are plenty of other people out there, I'm sure.
	But who's doing it?
	I mean, we're doing it in a small way now.
	I'm a flea bite in the firmament, but at least we are talking about it.
	The big, for my money, in terms of what you're discussing, people like you and me doing these kinds of things, the mass media now no longer do what we used to do.
	I mean, it's really going to make me sound quaint, but when I'd started in television and broadcasting back in the 60s, the aim was to educate and then inform and then educate.
	The educate's gone.
	All mass media does now is amuse.
	Amuse.
	Do you watch television?
	Very little, because there's very little, I think, worth watching.
	Well, I'm going to say I watch the news bulletin, and most of it, I have to say, is, apart from the occasional recycled Discovery Channel program, most of it's trash, I think.
	The only hope I have is on the internet.
	I mean, the chances of the internet producing what we're discussing, you know, soon, already indeed with smartphones, anybody can make a documentary.
	The shots may not be brilliant at the beginning and the script may not be brilliant at the beginning, but there are thousands of extremely talented people out there who have never had this form of access before and who will come out and show us wonderful things.
	They will, and I think they are, but how does the general public differentiate between them and the idiots who are, they're probably not deliberately doing it, but they're not telling us the truth?
	Things that they don't understand, they're misinterpreting, they're putting false information, fake news, whatever you want to call it out there.
	This is the difficulty isn't it?
	It empowers people, but it also allows people who maybe should not be empowered to produce material that other people see.
	True, but we've always managed to learn how to identify those kinds of people over the centuries.
	And I think there's no reason why we've stopped having that ability to smell something rotten when it's rotten.
	So you're very optimistic then.
	Well, pessimists jump out of the window and are no longer involved.
	So you've got to be connected.
	Otherwise, what is the point?
	Let's wind you back to this career of yours because you managed to tread the line in a way that nobody else has, I think, between what we used to call light entertainment and science.
	It's a very clever thing to do.
	Did you consciously decide to do that?
	No, no, no.
	I joined the BBC in 65 when it was opening up this new science and technology division almost exclusively to show stuff on the mass channel on which such stuff had never been seen before.
	What was on the mass channel at the time was light entertainment and either you did it that way or the mass audience turned you off.
	So it came out of my teaching career that, you know, if you bore the class, they won't listen.
	So the first thing I did, and other people too of my generation, was just do things.
	I'd take your suit and tie off.
	Do things in a pullover.
	I mean, that's that.
	You laugh at that now, but in those days, I mean, it wasn't that long before I started that radio announcers wore suits and black tie in the evening.
	When I started work as a radio journalist in Liverpool, my news editor said to me, do you know what this thing is?
	I mean, he was quite a hard man.
	People were harder then.
	He said, do you know what this is?
	I said, yes, of course, it's a tie.
	He said, yeah, why haven't you got one round your neck?
	On the radio, yeah.
	On the radio.
	So, first of all, A, the BBC wanted to reach out to a mass audience, and therefore things needed to be more relaxed.
	It seems to me that when you're broadcasting, you always have to make your audience feel comfortable.
	Don't surprise them by all means, but don't surprise them in a way that makes them feel either ignorant or vulnerable, because they'll put the block down immediately.
	So being casual and relaxed, both in your language and in your clothing on television back then, was a way to do this.
	So it was self-evident.
	That was the way you had to go.
	Because, you know, you wear a suit and tie.
	A number of people will be nervous because they think, this is too hard for me, and they'll stop listening.
	But you were also willing to do things that other people wouldn't do.
	I mean, look, I grew up in the Blue Peter generation, and I was a big fan of John Moakes, who we sadly lost.
	You probably knew him.
	You know, I thought he was brilliant at interpreting things for kids.
	He didn't talk down to us, and he was willing to try stuff.
	And I did, on his inspiration and your inspiration, I did things like ridiculous things.
	And the BBC made me sign disclaimers for them, like climb an industrial chimney and broadcast from there and do a live piece from a glider, which you're legally not allowed to do, but we did it.
	You did stuff, and others didn't.
	Well, you know what they say, somebody had to.
	It's all part of a career build, isn't it?
	I mean, part of the reasoning that I did those things was A, to lower the discomfort level of the audience when dealing with a subject like science and technology about which they felt they didn't know enough and weren't intelligent enough to understand.
	But you went into the NASA vomit comet, didn't you?
	Didn't you do the weightless thing?
	Yes, I did.
	But all those things were deliberately done in the sense that it was yet one more way to try and make the audience relax.
	It's only when the audience is really relaxed that you can hit them with hard stuff because they feel confident and relaxed and it's easier to learn in that way.
	So it was all deliberate.
	The vomit comet was a different thing.
	We nearly didn't go because we were the first, apparently the first broadcasters, American or British, who had ever asked to be in the Vomit Comet.
	And usually when you go to people like those, you expect them to say, I'm afraid not, you're not qualified, and besides which you're not an astronaut, blah, blah, blah.
	But you've got to try.
	We have to explain to our listener who may not know.
	I'm sure the whole world does now because they watched you on the telly.
	But the Vomit Comet is the way, is a plane in which people who want to be astronauts or experience weightlessness, they go up and they perform a maneuver that allows for just a minute or so, I think, you to become weightless and float around, which you did.
	Yes, I mean, it's a modified, it was a modified 707.
	And what they do is dive it and then pull out very tight and as it were, fly over an arc.
	And during that arc, up equals down and anything inside the plane floats.
	And it's between 45 seconds and a minute.
	And they said, well, yeah, I mean, nobody's asked us to do this before, by all means.
	And we couldn't understand our luck.
	So we got on board and I did my piece of camera about doing it and what it felt like.
	And then, and of course the BBC camera crew were desperate to do more.
	And the cigar chomping colonel who was flying the airplane said, well, I guess you guys want to go back down again and have to go somewhere.
	And we said, well, actually, no.
	And he said, ah, well, I could stay up here for another four hours if I'm supposed to do another four hours.
	And we said, do it, do it.
	So we had four free hours without having to film floating in zero gravity.
	And you actually wanted to do that?
	Oh, you're kidding.
	And when I got back down, I was interviewed by a local radio station and the guy said to me, what do you think?
	And I said, it was the second most exciting thing I've ever done.
	And he moved on to the next question.
	They do call it the vomit comet, though, for a reason.
	Well, you either do or you don't.
	And I mean, that's a fact.
	In weightlessness, you either vomit or you don't.
	And we didn't.
	So that was all right.
	Sounds like amazing fun.
	I interviewed last week an astronaut called Stanley Love, Stan Love, who's done 305 hours in space.
	This is a statistic that will stay with me forever.
	And effectively a third of a day in space walks.
	And he was saying that he massively enjoyed this.
	But there seems to be an attitude, whether you're a broadcaster or Stanley Love an astronaut, you know, you have to want to try things, not only because it's an experience for you and the tapestry of your life, but because it will bring your viewer, listener, reader along with you on the journey.
	Well, that's the point, you see.
	I mean, as I've just been saying, you know, if the audience is relaxed and happy and confident and not concerned that this is going to be difficult, they're going to enjoy it more.
	They're going to understand more.
	And one of the tricks of the trade is to do something, and they know you're taking a risk, so they're lying back and seeing how difficult it's going to be for you.
	Well, you slipped them the information that they would have thought was too difficult for them.
	Did you consciously...
	Look, we are...
	You were an entertainer.
	Not only were you an informer, but you were a great entertainer, are a great entertainer.
	Did you make a decision to do that?
	Did you want to get noticed?
	No, no, I fell backwards into television.
	I mean, it was...
	Well, no, I mean, my first thought was it's better than real work.
	It always is.
	I mean, my mother, alas, died sadly believing I had never got a real job because she didn't regard television as a real job.
	Broadcasting, all broadcasting, is tremendous fun and excitement.
	And I mean, you spend your entire time learning and passing on, having new experiences every time, even if it's only talking to new people every time.
	You get to give an opinion now and again.
	You get a lot of writing and a lot of shooting a film to do, and those are very enjoyable things to do.
	So, I mean, I think it's been one giant holiday as far as I'm concerned.
	Did the BBC allow you to have an opinion?
	Oh, yeah, you're allowed to have an opinion about things like Copernicus and Descartes and Newton.
	You may not have an opinion about what the politicians said yesterday.
	So there's plenty of that.
	It's all about balance.
	So tomorrow's world, which had the country riveted, we then, of course, were thrust into the Apollo era, and that's when I came into this world and was watching television and remember you.
	Because you reminded me, I'm actually people connected with you in many different ways, but I had a great English teacher when I was a little kid called Mr. Smith, Gordon Smith.
	He's no longer with us, but he had a voice like yours, and he inspired somebody from my background to do things like read Steinbeck eventually and think that I really could go to university when people, you know, from Liverpool.
	They didn't.
	So I was grateful to Gordon.
	You were my Gordon Smith on the telly in a way.
	But Apollo was important because, of course, man was going to the moon and it was charting the whole journey.
	But somebody had to help us through that process.
	And you were the man who explained.
	That's what you learned to do.
	You explained the stuff.
	Patrick Moore was there, and I remember Cliff Mitchell Moore, wasn't he?
	He was the wonderful Cliff Mitchell Moore was fronting the programs originally.
	And they'd crossed to you to say, you know, what is an EVA?
	Yes.
	Well, at the beginning on Apollo, first of all, I was on Tomorrow's World before Apollo.
	And again, once another example of the way I fell backwards into things, the man running of Tomorrow's World at the time, now dead, I came back from holiday and he said, what do you know about rockets?
	And I said, pointed one end, fire the other.
	And he said, no, no, what do you really know?
	And I said, you just heard it.
	And he said, well, then you're in deep doo-doo because you're going to be covering Apollo.
	And I said, why?
	And he said, well, because the bosses asked me if there was anybody on my team who knew about space.
	And I said, yes, his name's Burke and he wrote the book.
	And I said, why did you say that?
	And he said, I couldn't be seen not to know.
	So you got the job.
	So do something.
	So I phoned NASA and said, send a thousand books.
	And I spent weeks mugging it all up.
	And I stayed one flight plan page ahead of the audience for about the first three missions.
	But after that, if you do, I mean, as you know, all broadcasters do this, you do enough hard work, you learn it, and you know what it's all about.
	And NASA were very, very positive.
	I mean, if you turned up knowing something about it, they did everything for you.
	It's the guys who came in saying, I don't know, and I don't care, who's this boring astronaut I have to interview?
	They didn't help them at all.
	But we got all the help we could ever possibly want from NASA.
	And it made our job easier.
	And if we needed an astronaut, one was provided.
	So that was a marvelous period of my life and of broadcasting for me, too.
	I remember seeing some video of you with Jim Lovell on 16.
	You were close to the launch site of Apollo, as close as you could get to the launch pad of Apollo 16, which I think was the last, was it the last Apollo?
	17 was the last.
	Okay, it was the penultimate mission.
	And there you are talking to Jim Lovell like he's your best pal.
	Well I had known Jim for a long time, you see, because I met him first in 66, 67.
	So I'd known him for four or five years.
	And also, A, I had also done two or three programs only about him because he was on the one that blew up Apollo 13.
	Remember the one that blew up on the way to the moon?
	And he was made available for people who wished to interview him afterwards and nobody from the American networks asked.
	And I never thought we had a chance and I said, well, we'd like to.
	And they said, okay, you got him.
	And I was able to spend several hours with him just talking about that mission.
	Marvelous guy, still a marvelous guy.
	statuesque man wasn't he?
	Very, very In the film here, they're picked up after splashdown and they're brought back to the carrier's deck.
	And as they come out, everybody's cheering and they meet everybody, starting with the captain of the carrier, who is in captain's uniform, and who's Jim Lovell.
	They gave him the job of playing the role of the captain of the ship.
	Oh, how lovely is that?
	I didn't know about it.
	I've seen the movie several times.
	Well, that's him.
	as a captain.
	Apollo 13 I wanted to talk about because it was the first time, well, apart from before the Apollo mission started properly in one of the proving missions, of course, there was the terrible fire in which Gus Grissom is the only name I can remember from the team of three astronauts who sadly perished in the most awful way in a test because they used oxygen inside the atmosphere.
	So the public first became acquainted that things can actually go wrong.
	But Apollo 13, you know, I was a boy, but I remember vividly not so much the specific programs.
	Yes, I remember your presence, but I remember the feeling because I'd been brought up on Thunderbirds and, you know, and reading books about how great this all was.
	I had an action man with a little space capsule.
	I've still got it.
	So I loved all of this.
	And suddenly, in my little life, came the notion that this might end very badly.
	And that's a really hard thing for a kid to take on board.
	And we turned to you to explain what was going to happen and what we hoped the outcome might be.
	What was that like?
	Well, we approached it as you would, as any broadcaster would.
	I mean, first of all, you had to be right on top of what was going on and you had to be, you know, there was no way that you could not understand what was going on.
	So an enormous amount of research was going on behind it all.
	But we also prepared a one-hour obituary in case.
	And, you know, when they came back into what's called Earth interface, where the spacecraft hits the top of the atmosphere on its way back to Earth and becomes incandescent for a number of minutes, there is a period of up to four or five minutes in which they're out of radio contact.
	So you don't know if they're alive or dead.
	If the explosion had damaged the heat shield on the capsule, they were dead.
	If it hadn't, they would come out.
	And they were a minute late.
	So for a minute, I was thinking about how we segue into the obituary.
	And then they came out.
	And we went into the splashdown and all that stuff and everybody cheering.
	In fact, the world said, thank God.
	Yes.
	So you're always operating at two levels at once.
	The emotional level, where you're, as you know as a broadcaster, your palm is sweaty and you're trying to make sure you don't make any silly mistakes and you're listening to them while you're talking to the audience and blah, blah, blah.
	That's an emotional stuff.
	And on the professional side, you know, you know that you've got to shut up in the next five seconds because he's going to say something and you know that you may have to go into an obituary and all that kind of professional stuff.
	So Apollo was two things at once.
	It was a tremendous emotional ride and it was a wonderful test of one's professionalism because there was nothing worse than talking while an astronaut was saying something in the moon.
	And you had one ear, half your brain, saying, shut up as soon as you hear him say anything.
	And structuring your sentences so that if you had to, you could shut up with one second to go.
	done this yourself I'm sure.
	Well in a very trivial way only on I mean, look, this is about you, not me, in a major way.
	But I used to do the live.
	One of the things that I guess we've both experienced is the division between being a hard journalist and doing light entertainment.
	I got asked to do voiceovers on television entertainment shows.
	I used to do the British Comedy Awards.
	And the nominees, the recipients of awards, would come from their table.
	You've been at a Zillian award ceremonies, you know how this works.
	And because I was a journalist, they used to allow me to ad lib from notes the little bit of commentary that covers their walk to the podium.
	No more.
	And no more.
	And you have to stop the microsecond as their mouth opens to say thank you so much to my mother, everybody who's made me what I am today.
	And if you crash that, you're finished.
	I never once crashed it, and I still don't know how, but you had that magnified a zillion times.
	It was worse because there was no way we could see their mouth.
	And even if there were pictures from the moon, you couldn't see their mouth.
	But you got those little beeps, though, didn't you?
	Well, sort of.
	No, I think later on they didn't do the beeps.
	And they did the beeps only from...
	And thank God, when Armstrong went down the ladder and put his foot on the soil and said, that's one small step for man, thank God I was either breathing in or taking a cup of coffee or something and said nothing.
	Can you imagine talking over that, you know?
	You know, my parents, I remember them being glued to all of the Apollo coverage.
	But the first real memory, the thing that hit me in the solar plexus was that Apollo 13 thing because we all had to have explained to us.
	And you did the explaining.
	And I seem to dimly remember that some of the gambits that they were coming up with up there for self-made solutions because they had to improvise with whatever they had to allow the air to be scrubbed and cleaned for long enough for them to get back.
	Good memory.
	And well, it was also in the movie, of course, but I remember it vividly from that.
	And you actually made, I think, some of those things, or you demonstrated those things.
	You produced them in the studio.
	And what we did, we stayed online, well, not online, because we weren't online in those days, but we stayed in telephonic, constant contact with NASA.
	And as they were doing things, we were getting somebody in the studio, model makers and things, to copy what they were doing so that we could say, this is what they're doing, and then show it to the audience.
	You know, with the right kind of talent around you, you can do anything like that.
	But at any stage in that return, and there was that slingshot around the moon that would propel Them back on a natural tradition as if they were born on a tide.
	At any stage, that craft could have split apart, they could have suffocated, anything could have happened.
	And I guess you face that whole thing of having to explain: well, nobody who signs up for the Apollo program does so without knowing that it may end like this, and it's the peak of most of their lives, of all of their lives.
	We ran the whole thing with an obituary ready.
	At all times.
	At all times, because as you say, it could have happened at any time.
	They could have not come round the moon.
	I mean, they could have crashed on the other side of the moon.
	We wouldn't know until they just didn't turn up.
	So, as I said, you were running everything at the emotional level and at the professional level at the same time.
	And what was the feeling like?
	Because I can remember what the feeling was like in our little house in Liverpool, when that silence on re-entry passed and they were spotted.
	The camera zoomed in.
	I think it was one of the first to be covered in colour from what I recall.
	Yeah, coloured shoots.
	Some awful American NTSC picture quality, but you could see it.
	And you knew that they were coloured shoots.
	And there they were.
	And it was almost like that first moment on the moon where you had a bunch of people around the world about to turn blue who could breathe again.
	It was like that.
	I'm afraid my reaction at the time was I went from the emotional to the professional because, you know, as soon as the shoots were visible, they were alive.
	And I had to say to myself, if they're alive, how do I say what do I say next?
	And what's happening next?
	And how do we fill in until they're in the water and blah, blah, blah.
	So really, you're too busy thinking about how to do the job.
	And the real risk and the danger of that is to open your mouth and say something that completely trivializes or cheapens or undermines this amazing thing that you're seeing.
	I guess finding the right words is immensely difficult.
	I suppose so.
	Yes, I don't know.
	That's something I don't like to think about.
	Because if you think about it, the genie might be out of the bottle, I guess.
	Okay.
	There are people who say, and I interviewed one of them recently, that the moon landings never happened.
	What do you think about all of that?
	Because they're saying that today, and they are allegedly some of them coming up with new evidence.
	No, I think that's a lot of rubbish.
	I mean, conspiracy theory is usually rubbish.
	The simple way to work out whether there was a moon landing or not is to measure how long it took the signal to get from wherever it came from.
	And that old business about, you know that movie, I forget what it was called, Capricorn One, where what they did was actually set up something in the Arizona desert and pretend that it...
	Yeah.
	Well, the simple answer.
	And the story is blown when an engineer says, hang on, the signal can't possibly get here that fast.
	You know, they're on Mars.
	So there are very simple ways to find out that what went on on the moon actually happened.
	But what about all the list of factors that people still cite to me in interviews, that the flag apparently flutters on the lunar surface?
	And by the way, in the photographs, where are the stars?
	Oh, pass.
	I mean, it didn't flutter.
	And you can't see the stars because that's the camera not seeing the stars, not you.
	And you're not there to see the stars.
	So the camera was just not registered.
	The camera's not good enough.
	And the flag was on a spring, I think.
	And the flag's on a spring.
	And the other thing was the flag fluttered.
	The flag fluttered also every time the thing took off to go away.
	And when there was a blast of exhaust plume that would flutter anything.
	So I don't think, no, that's nonsense.
	If you've been given the chance back then, because they tell me that the optimal age to go into space is not 25, as most things seem to be.
	It's a little older because of your bones and what have you.
	So apparently to be a little older is a good thing when you're talking about going into space, which is why people like Nigel Hembest, my friend, the astronomer, is paying Richard Branson to be one of the first to go up there.
	And I think he's in his 60s.
	He'd probably hate me for saying that, but he is.
	Do you regret the fact that perhaps you never had the chance and you haven't lived and neither have I in a generation where spaceflight is routine?
	Of course I'd love to go into space.
	I did some time on the Vomit Comet, so I know what it's like.
	It's tremendously exciting.
	But I'd like to have gone into space and then come back to broadcasting, because broadcasting is much more interesting than going into space.
	You could have broadcast from space.
	You could have had the best of both worlds.
	I'd still like to come back to broadcasting.
	You had your own series.
	I know we're leaping backwards and forwards a little chronologically, called The Burke Special.
	And that was a marvelous opportunity to take science and cool stuff and look into the future for a light entertainment.
	I think it was Thursday evening audience.
	It might have been Wednesday evening.
	But it was, I remember it being a bit of a highlight of the week because it was entertaining.
	And I remember you did all sorts of stuff that people hadn't done before.
	You were talking about perception because I went to my school the next day and told the joke that you told.
	And you might remember the joke.
	It was about how our minds are geared to complete, incomplete things.
	So you told a joke at the beginning of the show, and it was a shock.
	It was eight o'clock at night.
	You said, what's the difference between a bad marksman and a constipated owl?
	And you said, no, a bad marksman, thank you.
	Nearly very worrying then, a bad marksman can shoot but can't hit.
	And everybody laughed.
	And I thought that was the, at my age then, it was the most daring thing I'd ever heard on TV.
	Well, that show broke a lot of ground.
	Above all, as far as I'm concerned, from a professional point of view, the hardest thing was I did it all without a script.
	I mean, I wrote the script and then I reproduced the script in every word, which of course you'd have to do so the director knew where you were going next in order to direct the cameras.
	The material, what I was trying to do at that time was to really kind of, I suppose, inch towards what the internet does now.
	We had an ordinary audience of ordinary people and they became involved with it.
	So it was an interactive kind of thing for the first time ever on television.
	And the problem there was, of course, you didn't know the audience until they turned up and you hoped that the lady you chose would turn out to be whatever she was supposed to be.
	I mean, if you asked her to do something, you'd hope that she would do it.
	Or if it was something she couldn't do, that she couldn't do it.
	And it was hair raising because, you know, they're real people and they would react in their own real way.
	But did it help that you had years of grounding with the people who would come to be in your audience?
	They were coming to see you.
	You could modify what they did.
	But I mean, there was one moment, for example, where I had to throw something unexpectedly to a woman to talk about how the brain works so that you catch something when something comes towards you.
	And I had to deliberately throw it to somebody not expecting it.
	And we went onto what was then called a video disc and watched in very slow motion while she suddenly realized something was coming towards her and she had to catch it.
	I had no idea what she would do and if she dropped it, the whole show was blown and she caught it.
	Now that you can't deal, no matter how professional you are, you can't talk your way out of that.
	When you've built up this thing about how amazing it is that this woman can do this and then she doesn't.
	Thank God it never happened.
	Never.
	But it was digital.
	No.
	No, nothing went that wrong.
	No.
	There were things that you could talk your way out of, but nothing as obviously as bad as that.
	And after five years, I fell off because I think I'd had enough.
	But it was always surprising and sometimes shocking, and I think people loved it, which led you to doing big film series that got you an international audience.
	Yes, the BBC, I think, the BBC typically waits until there's no risk whatsoever before they hand you the millions to do a big show.
	And I mean, the wonderful thing about the BB in those days was they said, would you like a big series?
	And I said, yes.
	What would I say?
	No.
	And they said, well, come back tomorrow of half a sheet of paper.
	What's it about?
	And I said, you know, I remember saying half a sheet of paper.
	And they said, if you can't say it in half a sheet, you can't say it.
	And I went away and had a really bad night trying to think up how to say what I wanted to say on half a sheet of paper.
	And I went in the next day and said, this is it.
	And it's called Connections.
	And they said, okay, here's the money.
	You don't do that anymore.
	The money's not there anyway.
	But that attitude isn't there anymore, I don't think, in broadcasting in general.
	Because for the day, for the time, it was a very expensive series.
	They took you to all the places.
	So there you were.
	I think, didn't you do the Sistine Chapel?
	Yes, you were everywhere.
	Everywhere.
	And at 10, one hours, and it's two years' research and one year's filming with two film crews filming simultaneously and me going back and forward.
	I never forget at one point I took a Concorde from Bahrain to London and got the next Concorde to New York to meet the other film crew.
	And the director said, what kept you?
	Very funny.
	But that cost a lot of money.
	And was it recouped?
	Because it was a big hit in America.
	Yeah, they sold it everywhere.
	But they took a risk.
	But then they took a risk.
	The Brits found it complicated, though.
	Your mind moved at 1,000 miles an hour.
	It was very, very, I loved it.
	It was very, very clever.
	And you were darting from idea to idea.
	It was ahead of its time, I think, in a lot of ways.
	The Americans got it.
	Do you think the Brits did?
	I think until, I don't know how many years ago, let's say 20 years ago, throughout most of my career with the BBC, there was always an element of British society that admired the specialist and admired the slow and careful and dense speech of the specialist.
	And there was a feeling that what I was doing was charlatanism.
	I remember going back to Oxford and saying to somebody who stayed on to teach what I was doing.
	And he said, I've seen you doing it.
	You should be ashamed of yourself.
	Because no self-respecting academic would teach like that.
	Did they think you'd sold out?
	Yes, they thought I'd sold out.
	And the Americans did not have that kind of stuffy attitude.
	And I got a much more receptive audience in America than I did in England.
	I mean, it didn't do too badly in England, but it was very successful in America.
	It was parodied by not the nine o'clock news.
	How did you feel about that?
	You know, there's no such thing as bad publicity.
	So fine, as long as they don't spell the name wrong, whatever they say is okay.
	So the world was changing.
	You came to the end of a money-spending series that was massively ahead of its time.
	I mean, the program that you did about what has become the internet.
	I mean, now it's prophetic.
	People should be showing this on television now so we can all understand that we can sometimes predict the future.
	But when all of that came to an end, what happened?
	All of what came to an end?
	Well, when you ceased to do that series.
	The predictive type of series?
	Well, I mean, I went on doing that kind of thing after I left the BBC for Discovery and PBS for another 20 years.
	And effectively, I just went on doing the connective type of thing because I'd established myself as what is now called a connectivist thinker.
	I have to say, like everything else, I fell backwards into that too because connections was partly inspired and all the rest of my work since then by this lovely footnote in a very academic book by a chap who's now dead who was a senior professor in the States on the history of technology.
	And he wrote a fascinating thing about how the introduction of the stirrup in Europe in the 9th century meant that you could put your feet in the stirrups and therefore hit the enemy with your lance and not get pushed off the back.
	So this became what was known as shock troops and they won everybody.
	They creamed everybody.
	So kings set up ranches and said, grow me some big horses, because the bigger the horse, the harder you hit.
	And this set down the basis for the feudal society.
	And I rang this guy and said, Professor, you don't know me, I'm a BBC nobody, but I've read this footnote of yours, and it strikes me that one could approach the whole of history like this.
	Would you mind?
	And he said, I stole the idea, you steal it.
	And I said, you stole the idea, Professor?
	And he said something that profoundly affected the rest of my life.
	He said, young man, you don't think we're born with ideas, do you?
	And from then on, I stole everywhere, as we all do, because we are not born with ideas.
	We adapt.
	What?
	We adapt.
	We adapt and survive.
	So does it irk you when I know you carried on writing and you carried on doing work for America for a very, very long time where they massively appreciate you, that people here, and I read it today on the internet, and you appeared on a radio program, I think, about a year ago, where they were asking the question, what happened to James Burke?
	Well, you know, I mean, sooner or later, the curtain comes down.
	I mean, you know, it's often said, you're never deader faster than on television.
	You know, and the second you finish your final program, the next day some kid starts watching television for the first time and you never existed.
	And if you don't face that, you live a life of rancor and sadness for the rest of your life.
	It doesn't bother me at all.
	I'm writing.
	I still go and do a bit of lecturing.
	I'm doing actually, as it happens, some stuff for the BBC in the next year or so.
	So, no, I mean, you know, I had a good bite at the cherry.
	But this mad World in which we live that sometimes makes me despair, and I'm not alone.
	And I've grown up with it.
	It needs someone to interpret it.
	I remember reading in an old, it was an ITV guide, they used to produce this book of the year every year, ITV, whatever it was.
	And they said, Alan Wicker, and God rest his soul, was the, did you know him?
	Oh, no, I didn't met him.
	No, never met him, but he was his idiot on TV.
	Alan Wicker is the ambassador of the intelligent viewer.
	They would never write that about anybody now, you know, because it would probably alienate people or they wouldn't understand it for a start.
	But we've got no one, it seems to me, to interpret and look ahead anymore.
	And that's why I think the world is a slightly scary place now.
	You may be right, yes.
	And I don't know whether television and broadcasting in general is the place where that kind of person is going to thrive anymore.
	I've been working for the last 10 years on something that I hope will go online and let people do it for themselves called a knowledge web, which is a kind of interactive thing on the screen of your computer.
	It looks like a spider's web, but it moves.
	At the center of the screen is a node, somebody's name, like Newton, and then lines radiate out to all the people who are very important in Newton's life.
	If you click on one of them, he becomes the center of the screen, and the key links between him and the people who influence him and so on appear.
	And you can go on passing out and out and out through that web.
	There are, at the moment, 2,600 people in the web and about 30,000 links.
	So it's pretty exhaustive in terms of how many journeys you can take on it.
	You could take journeys on it forever.
	And ideally, of course, one day it would be, you know, the monster that New York.
	One day it would have the sum of human knowledge on it.
	The thing being that it's easy, using that, to find, to take journeys through knowledge which are constantly surprising and which do for you what programs like mine used to do on television, but you can do it yourself.
	What do you think about research at the moment in areas like consciousness?
	People believe that they are starting to understand more about this great enigma of why we are alert and aware and why the world is like it is.
	Is that worthwhile work to do?
	Well, knowing how the brain works is probably the most important thing we could ever do.
	I, once upon a time, I made a program called the Neuron Suite about how the brain works years ago.
	And I interviewed a guy who'd got a Nobel in brain neurophysiology.
	And he said to me, anybody who tells you he knows how the brain works is lying.
	It's by far the most complex thing in the universe, the universe as we know it.
	And I mean, for example, a silly new thing.
	A few months ago, there are billions of things called glial cells in the brain, which used to be thought of as a kind of glue, the building infrastructure, on which the communicating cells rest.
	Now they discover that these things create their own signals.
	So all of a sudden, the brain is immensely bigger than we thought so before.
	And the brain already has, I mean, the number of ways a thought or a signal can go through the brain is bigger than the number of atoms in the known universe.
	And everybody's got one.
	And we're not, we're scratching the surface at the moment.
	So I don't know whether we'll ever know how the brain works, because it may simply be too complicated to know for us.
	You may understand how a bit of the brain works.
	But the more bits you connect, the harder the job it is to comprehend what it is.
	And I think there may come a point where, risk this, only a computer will understand the human brain.
	There's a thought.
	Well, there is a thought, and that takes us back to the beginning of this conversation.
	Do you believe that there are other life forms in the cosmos, and perhaps some of those are more intelligent than us?
	Billions.
	There's a wonderful thing called the Drake equation.
	I once met him, a wonderful guy in California, astronomer.
	And I can't, I won't reproduce the equation, but basically it says, if our sun, if you find the number of suns in the cosmos that are exactly like our sun, and divide by a thousand, and then the number of those suns that have planets around them, as we do, and divide that by a thousand, and then how many have a planet like ours at this distance from them, and divide that by a thousand, and go on divising each thing by a thousand until you get to life.
	There are probably several hundred million civilizations in our galaxy alone, and there are millions of galaxies.
	If we're the only ones, I would be very surprised.
	You might have been asked this before, and I totally understand why you might not want to answer it.
	What do you think happened at Roswell in 1947?
	Nothing.
	That's a very good answer.
	Thank you.
	You know that there is a whole industry of books and appearances and lectures about that.
	It seems to me that the idea of unidentified flying objects of any kind flies in the face of the size of the universe.
	I mean, nobody, nobody is going to bother to go from somewhere on the universe to us to find out what it is we are or look at us or whatever.
	Why would you bother?
	My guess is that whoever they are, they're already here.
	They may even be listening to this conversation between you and me.
	And they don't take a form of anything in our physical world.
	That means of communication is something so far beyond us that we don't even know that they're communicating.
	If you had said to somebody in a medieval field that one day a little box would put you in contact with somebody on the other side of the world, they would have said you're insane.
	So I think the form of communication that exists between these civilizations out in the galaxy and us, the distance between those technologically, is so great as to be incomprehensible to us.
	So it's not GeeWiz shock, it's actually just something that at the moment is beyond our comprehension.
	Yes, yes, that's right.
	It's beyond our technology.
	I mean, God knows what will happen if one of them ever turns up.
	I mean, turns up in the sense it makes manifest itself.
	But what about those who tell me regularly that various governments, including our own, know all about this and are keeping it secret?
	Technical term, cobblers.
	Translation from English to American, rubbish.
	Time travel, would you like to be able to do it?
	Yes, of course I would.
	Yeah, of course.
	What else?
	Yes.
	I'd love to be able to travel back in time just to see how wrong we are about it.
	Because if you think about the past, every single thing they said does not mean what we think it means.
	Because every word you have, comes out of your mouth, has attached to it what's called a semantic tag.
	It has meaning to it, levels of meaning.
	So the word love has levels of meaning.
	None of the modern levels of meaning are anything like remotely what Chaucer's would have been in the 14th century when he said, I love you to some bird.
	He didn't mean remotely what I mean.
	And that goes for every word we utter.
	So the most important thing about going back to the past would be that I would not understand a single word they say.
	I mean, I'd understand it, but I wouldn't get the meaning.
	Because when somebody said, give me that at once, I might say no, and then I'd be dead.
	Because he'd say, give that to me at once implies, or I'll kill you, in their society.
	So.
	It's a double-edged sword then.
	That's the most, from my money, it's the language I'd be most interested in back then.
	If I could transport you back to a time in your life that was the best, and a time that we all have times in our lives where we think, well, that's the essence of me.
	And that was my absolute zenith, my peak.
	It might be now, for all I know.
	But if I could take you back to a time, where would you go?
	I think probably the landing on the moon.
	I think that that was the greatest test of what I can do.
	And the greatest opportunity to express in terminology that required a certain kind of ability.
	And the ability above all to work, as I said earlier, at two levels at once, the emotional and the professional.
	So all in all, I think that was probably the best time.
	After getting married, that is, of course.
	Exactly.
	I'm glad you said that.
	I'm sure there's at least one person who's going to be very, very pleased you said that.
	Right answer, as they say.
	What about our coverage of the exploration of Mars, which is nearer than most people appreciate?
	If you listen to people like the guy who runs Mars One, Bas Landsdorp, or you talk to NASA, this is all happening within the span of the next 15 or 20 years, beginning to happen.
	How should we cover that?
	How should it be covered?
	Should it be special programs like you used to do, or should we be filtering it into the media right now?
	Well, I think probably filtering it into the media right now.
	I have to say, however, that my experience with Apollo and my life since then leads me to believe that travel to Mars or indeed any other planet in the solar system is a gigantic waste of money.
	I mean, what we learn from traveling to Mars or Ceres or Pluto that substantially improves the quality of human life, intellectual and physical, I don't know.
	I mean, going to the moon, I think was important for society because it was the first.
	It'll never be repeated.
	There will never be another first in space.
	The next first in space is when somebody contacts us from out there.
	And until then, I think we have so many problems to deal with on the planet that we would spend our money better doing those things.
	Above all, stuff in Earth orbit, for example, from which you can do many, many, many, many good things.
	And yet NASA are talking about the Moon at the moment as being a kind of way station to go elsewhere.
	Well, that's NASA's raison d'estre.
	I mean, without space, NASA doesn't exist.
	So, of course, they're working on that.
	I mean, that's called trying to persuade your political friends to help you.
	And I don't blame them, but I do think it's a waste of money.
	Do you believe that there's a secret space program?
	Has that ever been mentioned to you?
	I wouldn't know what would be secret about it.
	Well, work for defense organizations at the lowest level and at the highest level, perhaps work with other civilizations beyond this.
	Well, I don't think a civilizations beyond us is likely to be around.
	The rest of it, I think, is tons of stuff.
	I mean, if you look at the early development in stealth, you know, the stealth programs are going on for years without anybody knowing about them.
	So I'm sure that advanced projects are in the hopper right now.
	External civilizations?
	No, no, I don't think so.
	I don't think that's in anybody's control or gift.
	It's going to turn up and happen, and when it does, alas, I probably won't be here.
	Well, I hope you're here for a good, long time, because I think today we need you.
	But if, and you've been very kind to allow me to come to your home and speak to you for so long, if I had money that I don't have and will never have, and I said, James, I've been talking with Elon Musk, and he said, Howard, I'm going to bankroll anything that you want to do.
	And I said, James, I've got millions of pounds here.
	I'd like you to make a series of importance for this generation and a book to go with it.
	What would you do?
	Would you want to do it for starters?
	Well, I'm doing a book anyway, and doing the film.
	The great thing about filming these days is thanks to stuff like computer-generated imaging, you don't have to fly around the bloody world to do stuff.
	So I would like to do a series about, above all, the social ramifications of nanotechnology, because I think, as I said before, it's going to change everything, and the sooner we start to think about how we handle it, the better.
	So if you had all that money to give me to do it, that's what I'd like to do.
	Thank you.
	Sounds to me like you've enjoyed your life and there's much more of it to go.
	Enormously, would you have done any of it differently?
	No, I don't think so, because so much of it, no, indeed, all of it was accidental, really.
	So there's not much I could have done to change the way things happened.
	But I've enjoyed it all tremendously because, as I said earlier, it was far better than real work.
	Last question, promise.
	I've interviewed, been lucky enough to interview several times the great Sir Patrick Moore.
	And a lovely man, and he always struck me as some people said to me before doing interviews with him, oh, you know that he's a very difficult man to interview.
	I never found him that way.
	I find him utterly charming and slightly vulnerable.
	How did you find him?
	I found exactly the same.
	But he had, in broadcasting, which is how I knew him all the time, he had this unbelievable talent.
	You could say to him, in the middle of something going on, and as you know, you have the gallery in your ear, and they'd say, we need you to get on the phone and talk to somebody to do an interview later on today.
	Hand over to Patrick.
	And you're blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And you just hand over to Patrick and you say, Patrick.
	And Patrick picks up where you left off and carries on as you would have done.
	And at some point, somebody, you or the floor manager, holds up a number like 20 or more like four.
	And exactly four minutes later, he'd stop talking.
	I mean, to the second.
	That's a skill.
	I never met anybody who had it like Patrick.
	And my other favorite thing is the very first time we got pictures back from the moon, he stood upside down to look at them because he was an optical astronomer.
	That's lovely.
	I remember phoning him up once.
	I was on a local radio station in the south, covering Selsey, where he lived for his life.
	And a storm had blown down part of his observatory.
	And I was very worried for him because I thought, this is terrible.
	But Patrick Moore loses part of his observatory.
	And he was very stiff, upper lip and British about it.
	He was absolutely fine.
	He had dealt with quite, well, you know, it could have been worse, could have been worse.
	No, he was an extraordinary character.
	Extraordinary.
	Well, thank you very much, James, for allowing me to come to your home and have this conversation with you.
	You said that you divide your time between a home in London and France.
	What do you like about being there?
	The weather and also, no, the weather, really.
	I mean, my work is on a computer all the time, so it doesn't really matter where I live, but it's nice to walk out of the computer, walk out of the computer into good weather.
	Do they recognise you there?
	No, of course they don't.
	That's the other good thing.
	Because I have to say, when I phoned you this morning just to say, James, I'm coming to see you, as you know, this afternoon, and I'm really sorry that I haven't had a chance to phone you before now just to say thank you, and I'm looking forward to it.
	The voice that came down the phone to me was that voice that told me that man had landed on the moon.
	It's quite remarkable.
	That's my voice, I can't change it.
	But when you phone people up and things, and when you go places, do you get recognized still?
	I don't know.
	People don't say.
	And as I said before, I think at my age, you know, people who recognize me would have to be over 50-something.
	40-something.
	And as I said to somebody, I said to somebody the other day, half the people don't know who I am, and the other half think I'm dead.
	So I have a pretty quiet life.
	Well, I think it's time we corrected that notion, James.
	And thank you for being such a gracious host today.
	Great, great pleasure.
	Thank you.
	Thanks to James Burke for being a wonderful host, and it was incredible to be able to spend time with one of my heroes.
	Thank you very much indeed for your part in my show, for getting in touch with me, for the donations, for everything that you do for me.
	If you want to get in touch, go to the website theunexplained.tv.
	You can connect with me there, send a donation or an email about the show.
	More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
	I am back in the saddle and raring to get going.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	I am in London.
	This has been The Unexplained.
	And until next we meet here, please stay safe.
	Please stay calm.
	And above all, please stay in touch.
	Thank you very much.
	Take care.

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