This Week in Space 96 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
On this episode of this Week in Space, we're taking a look at the world of space TV programming with Jeff Step, producer of the Unexplained. With William Shatner, stay with us Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Tweet. This is this Week in Space, episode number 96, recorded on February 2nd 2024. It's Space TV.

00:27
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02:05 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Hello Rod, that's my stage name, by the way, mr Immaculate, just one of them, yeah.

02:11 - Rod Pyle (Host)
We can't say the other ones on a G-rated program. Today we are going to be joined by Jeff Step, who is a friend of the show and a friend of mine and one of the Titans of Nonfiction Programming for Space and Science Television, which is an increasingly challenged area, and it's great that there are people like this still involved so that we don't start having to see all our science programming look like swamp people or something. I met Jeff while I was doing a quote expert appearance on quote on the History Channel's William Shatner's Unexplained and also I don't think he does Ancient Aliens but shows of that ilk, and he's one of the good guys that keeps his kind of programming on the rails, which is not always an easy task, as we'll find out. A couple of housekeeping memos First up. Twit needs your help and we want to keep our show in the air and Twit available to all. So you can help for just $7 a month by joining Club Twit and we thank you. I also want to thank everyone who participated in the Twit annual survey. You helped us in our continuing efforts to refine and improve the great programming across the Twit network which used to support by joining Club Twit. But I already said that. So, as my countryman from Wales might say, okay, I'm going to get blasted for this one, dario Chela. Dario Chela, which is, I think, thank you in Welsh, which is where my family came from, but I've never been there, so I'm sure I mangled it.

03:35
And now it's time for the trademark bad dad space joke this week from regular listener, contributor and good friend and author and humorist, martin Lawler. He's one of the smartest guys I know. He's got a very impressive intellect and he could spin a good joke, which is sometimes rare for the show. Hey, tarek, yes, rod. Why was Gemini 10 scared of Gemini 7? I don't know why. Because Gemini 789. I love it. I love it. That's pretty good, isn't it? Yeah, it took me a second. I went damn, that's clever. And he didn't get out of a book. That was him.

04:16 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I saw where you were going and I was there for it, you know. So I got to say Really, I didn't see a comment, I read it and I was like wait, what, oh, I get? It. Yeah, that's like a classic dad joke that has a nice space twist to it. So why was 6 afraid of 7? Right, because 789.

04:37 - Rod Pyle (Host)
All right, my dad never told me that joke. Actually, my dad didn't tell jokes. That might have been the problem. All right, it was always. We invite you to contribute to our space jokes, which are usually lame, but that one wasn't send your best or worst to us and don't forget to do us a solid. Make sure to like, subscribe and all that podcast stuff, because it's free and we love you and we need it Now. Yes, headlines, here's the big one Starliner at last. Question mark.

05:07 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Wow, still on track. Is the news there which?

05:13 - Rod Pyle (Host)
track, though. No, I beat up on Starliner. It's not fair, but it is it's really late. I would like to see him fly.

05:23 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, and so so the latest news which came out over the last week is is that NASA and Boeing have basically put out a status report to say that Boeing is still shooting for mid April. That's kind of the end of the status report is what is what this update was? But, they, but but. As, as our listeners might recall, starliner's first crewed flight has been delayed for years, after an initial failed uncrewed test flight and then a second successful test flight several years later. That was then followed by the discovery of lots of other issues in both the parachute system as well as, apparently, an entire interior lined with flammable tape that they had to then go in and remove. On the wiring correct, yeah, on the wiring, yeah, yeah, and, and so. So they've been hard at work to fix all that.

06:18
Nasa actually said, and I quote, that teams have made a significant progress in resolving technical issues identified during the agency's flight certification process, and those are the issues that the tape around the electrical wiring or along the interior, this, this, this, this, the connectors I don't remember the name of them offhand now, but that the some of the the vital connectors in the parachute lines, that that that link it to the capsule itself. They weren't. They weren't rated to hold the capsule up with like one parachute down. That was like a key safety need that they needed to do. So they've got all that fixed.

06:54
In fact, since we last spoke about this, they've they've had some successful parachute tests with the new and final design, which is really encouraging. They were perfect test that nothing went wrong at all, which is always great to see. And so the crew capsule is getting ready to kind of get all of that, that work closed out and they're still looking for like a mid April launch, which is nice because you're not seeing the last few updates we've had. That launch date was like slipping and slipping. Until at the last one it slipped to April. So now they're still sticking to that, which is good, and so we've got about three more months rod, I think, to see how close they're going to get and hopefully before this summer astronauts will fly and you know Sonny Williams has been waiting for that for quite some time.

07:44 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So, as a guy who's written press releases for a living before, when people say significant progress, that always worries me because that's like that could be, like me saying we've made significant progress in improving the quality of our jokes and our podcast. But I think, with all eyes on Boeing for this, at least on the space side now, they're probably working very hard to get these problems resolved, because a couple of them I mean, you know, problems with parachute shrouds. Spacex had the same thing with the Dragon, but it wasn't the same type of problem. As I understood it, it wasn't that the materials weren't rated properly, it's that they were behaving in a way that they didn't foresee. If you're talking about flammable tape or underrated parachute shrouds, that's, you know, kind of a big QC issue for the engineering up front.

08:31 - Tariq Malik (Host)
But yeah, the parachute issue was about these components called soft links, which is like where the lines are connected between the parachute and the capsule itself, and it just turned out that those lines that they had used on the last flight were not rated for the weight load that they needed them to be, so they had to redesign that. They've done that, in fact. The last parachute test was reported earlier this month as being a success and on the tape side they removed like 4,300 feet of this tape inside the capsule, 17 pounds and all, and tape's not a heavy thing.

09:05
That's not a lot of tape to remove from the spacecraft and replace with something new. So they really want to make this go correctly and NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams. They've been waiting for years for this. I think it's a 10 day flight that they're going to do for this first flight and we'll see how that goes.

09:30 - Rod Pyle (Host)
What's up? The Japan Slim Lander, which managed to set down inverted but did manage to set down and operate for a bit, had rovers and we didn't hear much of the news about this. But the rovers I was surprised to find out a couple of days later did deploy too many rovers, a hopper and a driver and have been working. But I believe night has either fallen or is about to fall on lunar surface right.

09:53 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, that's right. So this was like a big, a big success and it's probably taken what I think is the space photo of the year so far. I know it's it's we're only like a month in. But these little what are they called? They were? They were two of them, these landing vehicle, one and two that they the lunar exploration vehicle pardon me, one and two that, as slim the, the, the moon lander was, was approaching it like popped them out so it ejected them before it landed. And what we found just over the last week is that they released these nice little, cute picture of their mommy lander sticking their nose first in the dirt like a, like a dart, like a lawn dart on the moon.

10:38
Wow, so, that is so odd, it's so weird because it's it's so easy to like laugh at it and like make jokes and yet, and yet the picture is just amazing that it fell in a way that it could take the picture of the, of the slim lander, and then in the next few days the lander woke up and took a bunch of pictures and other science all around it, all around it. And just in the last couple of days before we recorded this is when the lunar night descended, the two week long lunar night on on the landing site where slim is. And so that is kind of it for now for the lander. So a lot of drama around this.

11:18
This landing, you know, was it a success, was it not? I think we can say that it was now for sure, because it it did wake up, it did do science, it did do all the things it needed to do to prove the technology. These little daughter probes worked pretty well, it seems like, and while they don't have the heaters that you would want to get through the lunar night, it will be interesting in two weeks time, the lunar night, 14 days, to see if they wake up again, because I think we would all like that to happen.

11:50 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, in the waning days of the Cold War, we would have just wrapped the little rover around a chunk of plutonium yeah, that's right which would give off heat, but it's in short supply these days. Did the hop or hop, do you know?

12:01 - Tariq Malik (Host)
No, I don't know about that. I know that the the the initial lander, the SOARQ is, you know did its its little landing and like photo, photo mission and they they the image it looks like. What it did show, though, is that when the slim probe landed, it slid a bit on its nose like it landed and then kind of skid it up is what they think is is happening. So it was really helpful in that, in that sense, to understand, like, what happened, but I hadn't heard if the little hopper did his hoppy thing yet.

12:37 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, that's a robust piece of hardware that can land on its head and be okay, all right. And finally, weird exo moons. That's right. So are they there? Exo moon is back.

12:46 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Are they? Are they? It's like is Pluto a planet or not? You're talking offline about that, but now it's like is there an exo moon or not? And this is something that's been going on I kid you not for almost six years.

13:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So let's define exo moon as a moon around a planet, not in our solar system.

13:04 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's right. Think, think Pandora. Pandora in Avatar is a moon around a gas giant. And so scientists are looking for these kinds of exo moons, around exoplanets, because perhaps they might be suitable for life as well or help us understand how planets form, because the only big moon that we've seen is the one around, around Earth right, so around with with a habitable system nearby. And in 2018, some astronomers found what they thought was the first ever exo moon, and it was a satellite of a planet around the alien planet, kepler 1625B, which is like a Jupiter size world, about 8,000 light years from Earth. And how would you know and that was really exciting it was. It was discovered by the Kepler space telescope and or spacecraft right, because Kepler was like a dim, dimmable instrument.

14:00
And but only then. It's kind of been cast out for now, because in 2022, another set of scientists, which included the original researcher, david Kipping, in astronomy at Columbia, said that they had found a second one there. And yet now people are saying that perhaps they weren't moons, that they they, they don't exist at all, and yet another study is now saying that maybe they actually are there. So the big, the big question right now is that is this a really an exo moon or is it not an exo moon? And so there's another team of astronomers that are led by by researcher Renee Heller at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, who says no, both of these exo moons around this planet don't exist.

14:48
And now Kepping, the original discoverer and his colleagues have produced this other paper that says no, they are perfectly valid exo moon candidates, and he thinks that they've shown it convincingly. And he says, and I quote so so what do I think is really going on? And why? Why didn't they get a moon? It's what he told us. Okay, very good, it's exciting, it's. It's. It's the next big debate to exo moon or not, I think in space right now.

15:18 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So all right, very good, we will be back after a few moments to meet up with Jeff step. Stay with us and we're back with Jeff step. Mr extraordinaire, jeff, thanks so much for joining us. We appreciate you coming in, thanks for having me, Rod.

15:34 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
It's good to be on the other side of the chair for once.

15:37 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I was going to say I have such pleasure now being able to put you in the hot seat for a change, instead of me stumbling over my legs, which is well less said about that the better. So if you would just give us a brief rundown of what you do now and how you got there, because you have an interesting career path and an interesting forward trajectory and I'd love to hear a little bit about it.

16:00 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
Yeah, so what I do now is I produce and write documentary television for sort of whoever will hire me. Right now I'm working on a show called the unexplained with William Shatner for history on linear TV, and I've been doing shows like this for a long time. I started producing maybe back in 2010 on through the wormhole with Morgan Freeman, which was for science channel and an amazing sort of old school format of talking heads and B-roll and some tech demos. But the first show where we really got to do real science and talk about real science without having to sugarcoat it or simplify it too much, and that just sort of kickstarted me. It's funny I've worked on maybe three or four shows. That is like title plus octogenarian celebrity, and I'm on my way.

16:54
Yeah, Rod Pyle, we're getting there. I've done Morgan Freeman, I've worked with Lawrence Fishburne and William Shatner at this point, so it's a hallowed ground on which to tread with these guys and they're all great and fun to work with. But it's just. It's funny when you look at your career and you think how did I get into this sort of format? Here I am.

17:16 - Rod Pyle (Host)
You mean how did I get into the television presenter senior citizens home? I can say that you can't. So, to be clear, you worked with science channel, history channel. Have you worked with Discovery?

17:28 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
I've done a Discovery show, a different, not the sort of science talking head doc format. This was more of a. This was called Hard to Kill with Tim Kennedy, which was we take this guy, former SEAL, you know hardcore alpha male person, and throw him in a bunch of you know survival scenarios and you know we like we tossed him out of a helicopter in Alaska into a frigid lake and, you know, watched him try to survive stuff. Please don't do that with me.

17:54 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I heard that's the sequel right For the series Watch Rod Float and Die.

17:59 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah.

18:01 - Tariq Malik (Host)
No, I was. I was taken, jeff, by your point about octogenarians and I'm curious if you feel that that is just a coincidence of the science programming that you've helped bring to the public, or if there's something in the gravitas of the spokesperson that gets people to maybe trust what you're telling them you know is real. You know, in this day and age I guess we're all talking about what's real and what's not when it comes to news in general. But it seems like trying to get people to understand what, the what, the true facts of a science you know concept that you're trying to relate in a given show on the unexplained, that that can be kind of tricky. And is it just because it's William Shatner or Morgan Freeman there? Or is it really just kind of a mix of both attention and then the concept itself?

19:04 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
I think it's really a consequence of the type of media that we're producing for linear television and the sort of environment that we're in today and the people who watch that programming. Right, it's history channel is not doing shows for Gen Z, is barely doing shows for millennials. Right, it's really trying to hit, you know, gen X, baby boomers, and these are the you know, although they may be 80 or 90 years old today. You know the fish burns and the Shatners and the Freemans. They were in their prime when these people were in their prime, and so they inherently trust them and bring eyeballs to the screen.

19:42
Oh, you know, if you say I'm watching a show called the unexplained, okay, great, but oh, it's hosted by William Shatner, it's all about space and mysteries and the world. Oh, that's cool, right? So that for some reason, has become the way to do linear television in this space is you have to have some celebrity cachet. Even the Natio Show with Will Smith, right, it's always got to be an A-lister because they think that's the only way people will watch, and in some respects they're probably right.

20:14 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Can I ask you what your first science show you ever saw was? For me I was probably 321 contact on PBS when I was a kid, where you would get some science lessons there. But I'm just curious if there was one that you recall being somewhat formative, to expose you to space or science or something.

20:34 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
I think in elementary school we had to watch the Voyage of the Mimi, I don't know. Oh yeah, Ben Affleck is a child or a teenager, I can't remember exactly if it was in it and the only thing I remember from that show is that there's one episode where they're talking about hypothermia and the two people have to share a sleeping bag, essentially naked. That's how you stay warm.

20:58 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Because skin contact is the best heat conductor.

21:01 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yes, Do I have to do a tarik, or can I choose my target?

21:06 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
It depends on where you're at. If he's the only guy around, you might want to get close.

21:11 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, we're both large and burn a lot of calories, so that could work.

21:15 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I wanted to be on that ship so bad as a kid.

21:19 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, you guys get a room.

21:22 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
But I'd say, after that, real television, not just something you're shown in school, probably Nova would be the standard.

21:32 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Oh, nova was amazing. So I started with watching. The first memory I have of Science TV is watching Venevambran on the Tomorrowland show, the social how much older I am? Talking about rockets going to the moon, which was really. It was cool, but I sort of cringe at how long ago that was.

21:51
So speaking of long ago, I don't talk about it much on here, but I did have a brief career working with History Channel also starting with a show called Brute Force Weapons of War back in the 90s, and it was what was noteworthy to me was it was just it was like the first big move past Ken Burns television. I love Ken Burns, everybody loves Ken Burns, but you've got to drink a lot of caffeine to stay awake during those slow camera crawls over stills. So this was when Civil War Journal came out, a company called Greystone. They picked up the pace. You know. They found an economical way to do what Burns was spending a lot of money doing and doing well, and then that kind of that was actually right. When the Adolf and Eva channel became History Channel, the A&E sort of became history. So at the time it was really popular and it wasn't a hard sell.

22:48
But it seems like and I'm working up to a question, I promise it seems like we've sort of turned this corner away from, obviously, broadcast television and then cable television and now we're into streaming television, where attention spans and formats and venues have changed to the point that they're unrecognizable. So the question I'm trying to work up to is what? What to you from what you see when you look out, there is the current state of science, and there I use the word educational programming, and how does it compare to years past? And where is it going? Because it's tough to keep an audience anymore.

23:27 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
You know as to where it's. We'll start at the end. As to where it's going, I think that's a tough one to predict because I remember when Amazon, you know, first started selling books, people like, oh, no one's going to read anymore, all the bookstores are closing and the other brick and mortar places are closing but reading is, like, still as popular as ever. So I think you know, a lot of times we think, oh, this medium is dying. You know, no one's watching linear TV anymore, no one's doing science content, and that's sort of true. But I also think it's just changing forms. And one of the things personally I think that we need to do as people who make longer form content, we need to stick to the strengths of what that content can be and can do. And to me that's storytelling. Right, there's a really good. You know there are really good science people on TikTok, right, they're doing interesting stuff. There's also really bad stuff, but there's good stuff too. Same thing with YouTube. You know Vsauce or Chris Gazogger, you know any of these more and sort of smaller, shorter form content places. Those are all great, but they don't lean into what has always been long form strength, which is storytelling.

24:37
And one challenge I think that a lot of these streamers and linear TV networks face today is trying to, is getting caught in trying to produce stuff that they're not good at, right. Oh, we have to make this new show for these new people, this new audience, this younger audience. You know, it has to be more like YouTube. It has to be more like TikTok. No, don't do what you're bad at right. Michael Jordan shouldn't have gone to play baseball. He was good at basketball. In fact, he was really good at basketball. He should have just stuck with it and he learned his lesson. And I think TV can do that too.

25:10
And to get to your point about the broader landscape, you know, curiositystream is really the only place where you're getting like that's the type of content documentary, educational content that lives there. You see some stuff on Netflix, you know, and on Apple TV, and every streamer sort of has its prestige blue chip nature series, but that's, I think, the majority of the science. Content you get on places like that are the our planets and the you know one strange rock and all these kind of nature series, because they're about earth. You can show cute animals, you can show pretty pictures of vistas, and with space content. It's really hard because you can't anthropomorphize a galaxy. You know it doesn't have a mama bear and a baby bear that it can shove it. So it's a long-winded way of saying I think the content will continue to be made and not disappear. But the form you know is sort of TBD Well, and that and that's an interesting observation.

26:12 - Rod Pyle (Host)
You were talking about books and you know we sort of for us wayward, under-earning authors who've got a bunch of them sitting out there slowly rolling onto the backorder shelf. We rolled into the pandemic thinking you know, this is horrible but maybe people will start reading again. And I had four books released in 2019 with great hopes. A couple of them did okay, a couple did less, less spectacularly, and then you know, we were all kind of waiting with bated breath and there was sort of this, this ghost of a spike at the beginning of the pandemic and then it sort of flattened out. Ebooks did take a little bit of a spike, physical books not so much, but they're really in trouble now. So you go back to publishers today and they're just like they're. They're tear streaming down their faces. We can't move books except for that handful of A-list but A-list authors out there. So traditional books are kind of suffering.

27:08
I don't know about CuriosityStream.

27:10
I've heard things coming and going, what we do see, which is kind of a weird outlier for me, and this isn't really related to what I'm saying, but I don't know if you've ever seen any of Isaac Arthur stuff.

27:19
He has a channel on YouTube called Futurism, science and Futurism, with Isaac Arthur and he's a friend of the show and the president of the National Space Society as well. He does these hour long things on like Dyson spheres or warp speed travel or crazy aliens that dress funny and it's him talking with an hour of cut and cover. You know pretty pictures, but it's 45 minutes to an hour and he gets between half a million and a million views and it's a real head scratcher to me because I've done stuff that six and seven minutes for the organization that they're trying to get you know a thousand views. So it's bizarre. You know you're talking about the information still sells but it goes into various different venues. But that one was a shocker to me because I had been told as an older guy. You know everybody is saying no, it's got to be three minutes or less or six minutes or less. Here comes this guy slowly talking through an hour and people seem to love it and it must drive the network's nuts trying to figure out what's next.

28:27 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
Yeah, it's weird how those things catch fire. You know it's the same was true with any sort of product, or you know, food or trend. You know, like the ice bucket challenge. You know, sometimes something just takes off and there's no way you can really predict it.

28:42
And I think the trap that a lot of content creators fall into is trying to. They say, okay, someone did X and it was successful, I'm going to do X, so it's going to be successful. The truth is it's not right. It's never. If you try to ape something else, it's not going to be as good. So my philosophy is when I can do what I'm passionate about and try to convey that passion and make it interesting, if you build it, hopefully they will come. You know, if it's one viewer or a million, I don't think you can really make content trying to do that. You know it's like the commercial back when viral videos were a thing. You know everyone's like oh, we're going to make a viral video for our product. Like you don't make a viral video, right, a video becomes viral, right? Well, this?

29:32 - Rod Pyle (Host)
is like when all the studios were saying let's make the next Blair Witch because it was a cult hit and we'll make a cult film. And you can't set out to make a cult film. It's a defiance of the whole definition, right?

29:44 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, if Tommy Wiseau tried to make the room on purpose, you know, then it would have not been the same. You know, sort of cult classic. You have to just do something full heart and then just hope that people come to it. And I think back to your point, rod, about how this. You know Isaac Arthur was his name. You know how he has so many views and other videos seemingly shorter, don't? I think it's just how do people find this stuff? You know it's so hard. I have a hard time with all the streaming services and all those stuff online, like I don't even know how to find content. You know there's no TV guide for the 10 different streaming services, basically. Remember TV guy? Yeah, we used to have the paper copy Paper We'd thumb through, you know, like looking down and see the big gray box with a movie was going to be blocking.

30:38 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And highlight it, so that you knew that that was what was going to come, you know.

30:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
AI is going to do that for us. Hold on, Tark. We're going to take a break.

30:45 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We'll be right back after this short break.

30:47
Go nowhere. Well, yeah, you know, I wanted to ask Jeff about the unexplained and where the decisions go like, how they point you to, how you're going to write. I mean, you've been around, for you know it looks like what? Six seasons now, which is crazy, you know, for for mining, just like these crazy stories that are that are around us, and like you know, just in the six season alone, which was, you know, back in 2023, you were looking at presidents and Vikings and monsters among us I think is the last one there, and I'm curious if it's like a playground to get to pick your subjects or or, or how you, you select what type of story you're going to bring to your viewers to both educate and then, hopefully, entertain them as well.

31:38 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
The process for selecting what episodes we're going to do is pretty, pretty top level. It's mostly between the upper management at the production company Prometheus and, and history. It's a. It's a dialogue, you know. History will say we want X number of shows, and so then usually the company will submit a certain number of title ideas or just concept, you know, conceptual ideas and history will say, oh, we've already got two shows in the works about the pyramids, let's skip it. Or you know, oh, jfk really rated for us, you know last year, let's do something on JFK. It's a back and forth, you know. And then to me you know I'm not usually involved in those decisions, those have already been made. I often get a choice of you know, hey, here's the 10 shows we're doing per season, which ones look interesting to you? And you know, me and the other producers will sort of portion them out amongst ourselves in kind of a diplomatic way. I have a follow up.

32:31 - Tariq Malik (Host)
that is a little embarrassing because I've been wondering it since the show first came out, and that's the X in the name.

32:41
And having a nice well well, I mean, like these days it seems like everything has like an X to make it super edgy. And you've got SpaceX and also X, which I guess is what Twitter used to be. And I'm just curious, if that was ever like in the conversation, was, you know, hey, we've got SpaceX and everything is going great for them, so we'll just, we'll just go X for explain here in the title. But I apologize if it seems pedantic, it's just, it's something that I've been thinking about since the show first came out.

33:12 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
Honestly, I don't know the answer to where the title came from. That was before my time. I came on in sort of the second part of season one after the show had already they did, I think, eight episodes prior to that, but I don't know. I think it's a great title and I think it works better without the E.

33:28 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah.

33:29 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, without the E and with the capital X, and I can vouch for. If you look at old Pope magazines from the thirties and forties, there was a lot of X's in there and I think that came from X-Ray, because back in the day X-Ray was a big, mysterious thing, even though we knew what they were. X-rays, ufos, aliens and, you know, giant rockets were a thing. And certainly when I was a kid, half the black and white, awful low budget science fiction movies had X in the title. Rocket Chip X was one of them, or X-One so. And so the man with the X-Ray eyes. I mean, that was big and I always wanted X-Ray eyes for obvious reasons. But we won't go there. So, yeah, I know you were waiting for that.

34:12
So Jeff ignore Tarx snarky laughter at me. It's old history, but you know, entertainment versus education. So again back when I was getting into reality, then called documentary TV, tlc was the learning channel and others were trying to do basically entertaining school and television, and it was a mission that slammed right into a brick wall of no people want to be entertained. And now of course that's just the facto for all of us. So you know, when you're creating these scripts and trying to frame up a show, how do you parse out the value or the amount of volume cranking you do on education versus entertainment, versus whatever else you got to put in there?

35:01 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
It depends on the show you're working on, it depends on the network you're producing it for and certainly the production company that is making the show, because ultimately you know they're going to be the guardians of the content that comes out of their company. But I will give you a more specific, specific answer than that, just saying it depends. It's really tough. I think one of the hard lessons I had to learn very early on and wormhole not as much on wormhole but still is that most people don't care and you have to sort of accept that.

35:34 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Excuse me, don't care about.

35:37 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
Don't care about, sort of. Let me rephrase that it's not that people don't care, it's just that they come to television not to be talked at, even if what they're being talked at is really, really interesting, there's always got to be some sort of cheese to wrap the medicine in, and you know, that's what a mentor used to say to me a long time ago. And you have to give a lot of cheese, honestly. And you, just as much as you, and I and the people you know watching and listening to this, would love to just sit and listen to scientists talk 45 minutes to an hour. We're sort of the outliers, you know, and just because we really like it and we are interested in it doesn't mean that a million or 10 million people are going to also be interested in that. So you have to have a realistic attitude and most of that is trying to shoehorn in as much of the education as you can, but realizing it ultimately it's an entertainment medium and Just you have to kind of focus on that.

36:47 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That's an interesting observation because when I was first doing radio, as a follow-on to the whole authoring thing, we have a talk station LA called KFI that I was working on and you know I was trying to be what I remembered in the old days as Mr Science and finally the like. The GM of the station Called me up and said we have to have a talk and I was like what did I do? She said you have to understand, this is entertainment. And I said but you're a news station. And she said no, we're an entertainment venue. I was like, oh okay, I get it now. So I guess you're kind of in the same boat.

37:22
I hate to step on Tarek's next question but but I will. How are topics chosen and researched? Because you come up with some really fascinating stuff and I have to say I Am stunned. I mean I research junk for a living, for articles and books. I am stunned at the stuff you guys come up with in the depth and with you research it on those schedules, because your notes when I get them are really great. I mean they're astonishing. Thank you, how much work you do. But how do you pick the topics?

37:53 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
I'm usually given a list of what topics were doing that season and I'll get you know. Say, there's On unexplained mysteries of the universe, the series that I'm doing now. There's me and one other producer and so we will divide and conquer. You know, hey, sun episode is something I'm really interested in. Can I have that? And you can have Venus or something like that. So the topics are sort of culled from a larger list.

38:18
Before I get involved in the show, by the time I come on, I'm given sort of a list and I choose and then it's. Then it's really up to me and my my AP and my co-EP and our researchers to say, okay, you know, our title is Dangers from space. Okay, that could be a lot of stuff, right. How are we gonna fill that out? And that's when we start brainstorming and it's a very, very collaborative process. But you think in terms of six acts right, so we need six stories, sometimes just five, and you know they can connect. They don't have to connect. We just think, okay, what are the obvious? Low-hanging fruits? Okay, asteroids, right. How about CMEs? Or, you know, aliens comes up. You know that's right.

39:06 - Tariq Malik (Host)
They are. They are gonna kill us all. Right, if science fiction is told, told us anything?

39:10 - Rod Pyle (Host)
No, it's pandemic astroidal spores. You know, it's true.

39:14 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I think that's called a pan spermia. Right, right Rod.

39:19 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, it depends on which spores you're talking about. But okay, just ask your question, Don't be weird.

39:24 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, you know, as a bit of a follow-up to the, to the, I guess, how the sausage is made for this show. Well, we haven't asked about what it's like working with William Shatner like yet directly. We talked about it a little bit in the beginning, but the guy is captain Kirk. He was TJ Hooker when I was growing up too, and and and I'm wondering what what it's like to work with someone like that. It sounds like you've had a lot of experience obviously in your career working with Stars to get those messages across, and I'm wondering if his Kind of status as as not just a sci-fi icon, but someone who's actually flown in space, rod he is actually flown in space on a rocket.

40:06 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Hey, I give the rocket guys a lot of the other ones.

40:09 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I If that, if that, for folks who don't remember, he launched on Blue Origins, new Shepherd in in 2021. If I'm just curious, if if you were a big fan of Star Trek before you started walking, working on the show, or or just his, his work there, and if, well, you're assuming he's a big fan of star. I'm assuming. I'm assuming, I'm just asking.

40:35 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
I don't think.

40:35 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I ever got to meet him Jeff.

40:37 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
So I was never a huge Star Trek fan, not because I was not a fan, I just wasn't something though I was interested in growing up, sort of. I've come to it more later in life. But with Shatner in particular, I mean he's a true professional, I mean really like it's. And same same thing goes with working with Morgan Freeman too. They're very similar in that they are incredibly smart and They've been around a long time and they know what they're good at and they know how to do it and you sort of just have to let them Do their thing.

41:13
You know Shatner particular, you'll write something. You'll you'll write a you know half page, stand up to open the show and you think, oh, this sounds like Shatner. And then you listen to him and watch him do it and it's just magical. I mean the little intonations, the things that he makes funny, that you didn't even realize we're funny, kind of tongue-in-cheek. You know it's, it's really a wonder to watch and it just happens instantly. You know the camera rolls and boom, he's.

41:42
He's the guy he is, and behind the scenes very generous, very generous personality, does a lot of charity work. I actually got to go to this charity he's involved in I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but it's a horse rescue in in downtown LA or not, or sorry, like south of downtown LA, he's very involved in philanthropy and took us out to like a nice lunch when we first started on the show, and so you know to To get answer your question about Shatner, it's. It's everything you would hope, hoped it would be. You know you want to work with people who are Sort of will hold you to task, right? I think you don't. You don't want someone who's just like boning it in and doesn't care what you do or if your words are good or not. You know he'll. He'll question you about things and say, why are we doing it this way, or what is this background, and you want someone like that to work with.

42:37 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, this is kind of off topic, but years ago I was dating a woman who had a horse up in Burbank in a big stable they have up there when a lot of rich people hang out, including mr Shatner and his horses. But I remember seeing him there one day from a distance. I mean there's this kind of electron cloud of people around him but I could see over their heads and he was sitting astride his magnificent mount and he does the thing which maybe a lot of people could do. I don't know from horses, but he would kind of like do that Thing they used to do in westerns and and think to the horse I suspect, okay, walk sideways, okay, walk backwards, and the horse would like do this perfect stuff With the slightest of physical commands. And I've never really understood that whole human horse bond, but it was pretty remarkable. But that's not my question.

43:26
My question is you know, pursuant to what we were talking about earlier, we're kind of getting the point where the age of the gatekeeper seems to be diminishing in media. So when I was a kid, for news it was people like Walter Cronkite and Frank Reynolds, you know where the big network news stars. Where you guys were coming up, it was probably other people. Sorry, I'm getting pinged here, um I, but in book publishing it was the editors or the publisher themselves.

43:58
And with the emergence of what we call it mass created media, I guess you no longer have to be a media company to make media. Obviously, you can just be a person. They may or may not be a particularly responsible gatekeeper, which is something that's creating a problem. Also, algorithms that select material that's going to feed you what you already want. If you're looking for entertainment, that's great. If you're looking for news and facts, it's not so great. So I'm kind of casting a wide net here. But do you have any thoughts on the whole idea of the gatekeeper, because you kind of are one and you may be one of the last ones, or is it self-selecting that people will seek them out?

44:37 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
I don't know if I really am a gatekeeper. To be honest, I think I'm still the one trying to store the castle and I think a gate is only as good as its guards. You know, and a lot of the gates that we have in traditional media the guards aren't always so good. It's a tough, it's easy. It's not easy to green light a nature doc, but it's easy in the sense that you sort of know what you're going to get. You're going to get beautiful pictures, stories of animals that you can tell and anthropomorphize, and people are going to like it.

45:10
With science content and engineering content, it's hard to visualize what you're going to get and it requires a bit of understanding of certain things about how the world works and how the universe works to even understand what you're being given. I've been given a note on a show that asked me what the difference between a sun, a planet and a moon was and part of me was like wow, I got to step back and try not to like just jump out the window. But it makes you realize that before it even gets to an audience it's got to get through a lot of layers of management and people. You know executives and approvers and gatekeepers, like you're saying. So I'm all for the gatekeepers getting younger. It's not to diminish the people who are doing their jobs well, but it's a space where space is hard to understand. So I don't think we should have no gatekeepers at all. It should just be a free for all, because then, I mean, an algorithm is basically a free for all. Let's get real.

46:36 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It's not doing anything smart.

46:38 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
It's designed to make you click and make you angry and just keep your eyes hyper focused on your little screen. There's nothing like how are we going to provide the best content or the most truth content, so I think that's reflexively gone in the wrong direction. There needs to be some curation. But as to who is doing it and where, I think there's an opportunity to maybe find some new avenues to get people like people who do understand the space and the science space, to try to reach an audience All right?

47:16 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, I think I know what Targ's next question is going to be and I can't wait, but first we have to take a break. We'll be right back. Targ, I think you have a really cool question to ask. I can't wait, is?

47:28 - Tariq Malik (Host)
this, the one that you highlighted. I was going to ask a different one, but no, no, no no, it's all right.

47:33
It's all right. So I was thinking about just a lot of the subjects of the show, jeff, and I'm just curious. I'm just curious if you get a lot of conspiracy fan mail and if there's any ones that stand out about the subjects that you're covering you know, about asteroid apocalypses or whatnot From, like, your reader base. I don't think Jeff, or I don't think Rod and I have gotten any from our conspiracy show Surprisingly light yeah, I think because you cover so many different like deep dive, like secrets and like investigations if you get a lot of that kind of feedback and if they've led to new gems for future episodes over time.

48:25 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
Personally. Honestly, thankfully I haven't received a lot of stuff communicated to me, but I've, and we do get mail and email and never really phone calls. But people come in with some really weird stuff, you know, and I can't say that it's ever generated an actual TV show, but yeah, it happens. I mean it happens all the time. This is the same network that shows ancient aliens. You know, curse of Oak Island, you know unexplained is a bit more down to earth, I would say, than a show like aliens. But you know the audience is, there is some crossover and you're going to get, you know you're going to get some interesting, interesting ideas and people with experiences, and you know.

49:16 - Rod Pyle (Host)
You know, when you open that email and it's in all caps, in like 18 point font right. You know this is going to be one of those you need to do coast to coast AM and then you will get cool emails.

49:29 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
George has been an expert on the show before, so does he.

49:33 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I mean it's interesting because the first hour you can kind of control a little bit because George is at the helm, right. But the second hour you know if you're doing an interview they open it up to the calls and that's when it gets really interesting.

49:46 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
Yeah, it's easy to laugh, you know, at a lot of the people. I'll go ahead and shame me. Yeah, no, no, I you have to do it. It's a bit cathartic, you know. But then there is something you have to realize that these people are connecting with what you're making in a way that's very strong, and you know that's why something like AlienCon is super popular now. Oh my.

50:08 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Lord, yeah.

50:09 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
Right, and you've been there. You understand it.

50:11 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, you go to a regular space conference and you're lucky if you get maybe 900 people. You go to AlienCon and I think it was 9,000, right, 3,600, of which were jammed into Von Donnecken's talk in the large auditorium, which was, you know. I mean, it was interesting. If you don't know about Von Donnecken, but if you ever read the books and stuff, you already knew it, but they were just riveted by what he had to say. I mean, it's quite a thing to see. You're right, these people are really engaged.

50:41 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
As someone who it's a tough, a tough tightrope to walk sometimes, because as someone who wants to be an arbiter of truth and believes in rationality and logic and everything in the universe happens for a reason and you know there aren't little green men on Mars it's hard to put a lot of that into the show, knowing that you're going to have to kind of dial it back later because of who the audience is. So on the one hand, you don't want to just make a totally BS made up show. Like you know, aliens built the pyramids and created Earth and all this stuff but at the same time there are people who are interested in that idea. So one thing that you and X unexplained does well, and the other shows on history and from Prometheus, I think they are okay with living in the question. It's not like they're saying okay, here's what happened. This is definitely the truth. What they're saying is it's probably not how it happened, but it's okay to say could it have happened this way? And you know that is anathema to a lot of really scientific years.

51:57
But the truth is you have to exist in that space if people are going to watch this kind of programming. You just have to be open, and most of our experts on the show are generally open to saying, okay, I think it happened this way. My training has taught me that it happened this way, but could it have happened another way? And if you contain the idea and often by doing that you reinforce what's actually true, because you can say, well, if it happened this way, if this conspiracy, alien sort of thing happened this way, well then why didn't this happen? Or why didn't this happen, why don't we see this evidence? So to just blow it off and say, oh, that's stupid, that's just, you know, these people are conspiracy theorists, crazy people. It's doing a disservice to the argument. Let them make the argument and then you can then present the facts that you know in a way that says, hey, yeah, that's perfectly valid opinion to have. But what about this?

52:54 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Right. Well, and I should clarify you know I keep saying you work for the History Channel, you work for Prometheus Television and do a stellar job of it and actually of the various producers I've worked with. From them I've been really impressed with the top quality and years ago I think I don't know, I think it was third or fourth season of Ancient Aliens out of the 115 seasons you guys have done. I'd gotten an inquiry and I was.

53:24
You know, I was in the middle of writing a very heavy science book and I thought, oh, ancient Aliens, that's kind of weird and all that. So I didn't do it. And then the next time I didn't do it, and then I think I worked with one of you on unexplained and after that I was so impressed with the caliber of your research, the responsible way the questions were asked and the sound nature of it that I thought, oh, these are the same guys do Ancient Aliens. I've been turning this down for no reason and it was just a real pleasure to see that quality and level of integrity in the work, because it's not always the case, as you kind of alluded to. Thank you, you're welcome, tarek.

54:07 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I this is, of course, jeff this week in space and there is no dearth of space tales and mysteries. You know out there and I know that the show is explored quite, quite quite a good many of them and I'm wondering what, what you see as the greatest untold mystery still right for space. And I don't want to put you on the spot or anything there, but you know, you know some. But I'm just curious if, if, if you feel that there's one big mystery that you would like to see answered, like in 2024, this year what?

54:41
what would that be? To hopefully help our, our gay, help us rest our minds a little bit, if there's anything like that, that, that, that.

54:51 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
I mean the. This is not like a very unique question or mystery, but the fundamental mystery to me is are we alone, right, are we? It's obvious that life in the part of the galaxy and the solar system and even the universe that we know is, is quite rare or requires some very special conditions to exist, but it it's just unfathomable to me to think, with the trillions of galaxies and stars and planets, that somewhere at some point there hasn't been another an attempt. You know, and so the dream is that is probably for most astronomers and and normal people. You know, like I don't. I don't necessarily need to know that there are little green men running around somewhere, right, but just, are we? Is this the only way life works? Like, do we go through prokaryotes and eukaryotes and then, you know, eventually get to humans? Or is there some other way, you know, someplace that's done it better? Is there something beyond who we are? You know, we sort of think all we're humans were the pinnacle of evolution, but you know we're going to be gone way, way before the earth is gone and before most of the animal kingdom is gone.

56:03
So what's next? So that to me would be whenever, it's not going to question. It's going to be answered in 2024, you know. But we continue to get hints and you know JWST obviously is helping us find exoplanets and even start to analyze some atmospheres and hopefully the habitable world's observatory when that launches in a few years, get to get this even closer. It's this incremental step. You know it's unlikely unless you know close encounters of a third kind show up on our doorstep. That we're going to know instantly. But the biggest mystery is has to be are we alone? I mean, it just seems so improbable, yeah.

56:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, well, and related to that, I want to point out to our listeners that Jeff wrote a lovely article for the current issue of Ad Astra, which is available in a bookstore near you or to all members of the National Space Society on, I guess, broadly, how will we know life when we see it out there, and can we? Well, we would be able to communicate with it, and it was a really thoughtful, well done articles. I knew it would be, and in the next issue of the magazine we do, because you just brought it up, we have a former doctor who's written an article on how life might start elsewhere, with different chemistries and different types of stars and all that and it's interesting and I had to back a lot of chemical formulas out of it.

57:27 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
But it looks pretty good now on Tarek's advice.

57:32 - Rod Pyle (Host)
My question for you, sir, is here's it. It's a big one, so feel feel free to take a swing at the ball wherever you want to plant it. What's the future of the kind of TV you're interested in doing? What are you going to do next, and what's your next article, fred Astor, going to be about?

57:54 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
The future of the TV that I'm doing. I currently it's hard to see it not evolving into something new. We're getting to the point where this type of format I think is it needs a bit of a refresh. Now what that looks like, I'm not totally sure. I mentioned at the top of the show, I think, people who do long form content. We need to lean into what long form is really good at.

58:23
It's telling stories and we're just it's not going to be a YouTube thing, it's not going to be a TikTok short. It's got to be a story and we have to figure out how to tell those things. And it may involve some sort of hybridization of scripted and unscripted. That's something that's always been and it's been attempted a few times. Rod Howard had that Mars series and there's been a couple of others like that which I think can be really interesting. But then the trick you run into there is like so you're not doing either a thing perfectly. It's like you have half a scripted thing but it's not enough money and it's not enough time, so it's not quite right. And then the unscripted thing is like trying to kind of shoehorn into the scripted part and so it doesn't quite work the way you think it might.

59:16 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It felt like a bit of a pebble in your shoe watching it.

59:18 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
for me anyway, yeah, but it's like, how do you do something in that vein? That, to me, is something I want to explore. I think I just want to make content that people are interested in. People think, oh, nobody watches Science TV or nobody. Well, that's not true. There is an audience for anything. If people tune in to watch women sitting on balloons for fun, there's got to be a niche audience for what we do and we've got to find a capture of those people, because you see them in forums and on Reddit and just in comments and people you meet on the street.

59:59
Everyone I talk to when I work on these shows. Every civilian I meet, they're fascinated by this stuff and said, oh my God, I could listen to that all day. Or I used to get high and watch Wyrmhol and just think, wow, this is the coolest thing on earth. And so those people exist. And the tricky part is, of course, how do you find them for outlet? How do you monetize it? And that's what scares me a little bit. It's like, are we going to have to start relying on philanthropy? Just people like the Gates Foundation or something sponsors a series because no strength Streamer is going to take it on, because they're afraid to lose money. Maybe we have to start thinking of these things as loss leaders. I think it's just the fact of life there. But yeah, I would personally just want to make stories. I want to make content that people are interested in watching for more than just a few minutes.

01:01:01
My specialty is interviews. I've done dozens I don't know, maybe hundreds at this point of interviews. It's really smart, really interesting people and a lot of that doesn't get into the shows that we make just out of necessity. I would say a heavily used expert in one of our shows I don't know three minutes and 43 minutes of a show, 10 or 15 times a show for 10, 20 seconds at a time. An interview itself is two hours, so that's 60 times the material that appears on screen that we just don't use. So I have some stuff in the works that is going to be trying to showcase more of that kind of thought expertise, because I've interviewed Nobel Prize winners and it just seems a shame to be like well, sorry, alien's real. What else do you know besides that? So hopefully I'll be able to announce a little more about that in a month or two, but that's, I think, where I'm headed.

01:02:06 - Rod Pyle (Host)
All right. Well, we'll be all ears when that comes, and I want to thank you for coming here today to talk about this stuff. It's an interesting topic and one that's definitely a moving target. Please, speaking of what you're up to next, where can we keep track of what you're doing and where do we see it?

01:02:27 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
The best way is just to go to my website, jeffstepcom. My newer ventures will have their own websites linked to them. Not going to link them right now, but yeah, I keep everything posted there. It's very simple, basic site, but that's where you can follow me. I'm not a huge social media person not because I don't enjoy reading memes and scrolling through weird stuff, but I think overall, I think it's just not the way I like to communicate with people. I prefer a little more direct contact. So yeah, jeffstepcom.

01:03:05 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So you're not dying to become an influencer, is what you're saying?

01:03:09 - Jeff Stepp (Guest)
LA is plenty of those. I'm not nearly pretty enough or athletic enough to do anything like that.

01:03:18 - Rod Pyle (Host)
You can't step outside a liquor store without tripping over a snoring influencer on sidewalk. By the way, to our listeners, anybody who's got any comments, thoughts, questions about this, please feel free to send them along to twist. At twittv, that's TWS. At twittv on old fashioned email we do answer your emails because we love you. Tark, I would never leave you out of this. Where can we keep an eye on your unbelievably cool and impressive life?

01:03:46 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, as always. Thank you, Jeff, also just for an amazing talk, but you can find me at spacecom, as always, fighting that space.

01:03:54
Good fight and well, and, and this weekend we'll be watching the AX3 crew return from the international space station and splash down and getting ready for the pace launch to study tiny microorganisms in the ocean from space with NASA. And, as Rod is alluding to with his prod, you can watch me play Fortnite and hopefully and fall out and everything at space. Tron plays New Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle update this weekend. Woo, exciting, but that's not about space at all.

01:04:24 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So sorry, oh, I'm sorry, not at all there for a moment. Okay, and don't forget to drop us a line I already said that and check out spacecom Tark's turf, the websites, the name and, of course, the National Space Society and NSSorg. Both are good places to satisfy your space like cravings, because that's all we do and all we think about new episodes of this podcast Publish Every Friday and your favorite pod catcher. So make sure to subscribe, tell your friends and give us reviews. We love reviews, especially when they're good ones. We like those the best.

01:04:57
Don't forget, you can get all the great programming on the Tweet network ad free on club twit, as well as some extras only available there, and we'll learn Tark's secrets, scary as they are, for just $7 per month and you've you've heard Leo talk plenty on on his show about the tough times facing podcasters, so please stand up and be counted and join club twit, because we need you. You can also follow the twittech podcast network at twittech on Twitter and on Facebook, and twittechtv on Instagram. Thank you very much, everyone and we will see you next time.