Seth MacFarlane’s Scientific Influences | StarTalk
Seth, I called you into my office. Yes, I gotta talk to you because you want me to help you clean up. I clean up the office. Uh, I got at some point I had to find you and talk to you about the science and Family Guy.
Yeah, yeah, you just have to watch a few shows and it's in there. It's in there deep. When I was a kid, I was, you know, I was— I was in a church choir, went to Sunday school, and I went to uh, regular school. And you know, my parents believed in exposing me to everything and letting me figure it out for myself.
Eventually, I said, "Oh, well these guys are, you know, making these assertions and these guys are making these assertions, but these guys are backing it up with something. These guys are offering evidence, and so that seems a little more trustworthy." Okay.
Um, and so I was kind of drawn to science because it seemed that it— you arrived there derived from your own curiosity. Yeah, yeah, interesting. I actually wasn't a great science student in school. I think you don't— it's not that you don't have to be, you just have to enjoy it.
Yeah, whether or not you're good at it. And people try to equate the two, but I don't think that's a prerequisite. Okay. Yeah, it's— it's, and then you know, obviously I discovered the original Cosmos and Carl Sagan.
At the time, you saw the original Cosmos. Did you have any idea that you would one day be executive producer on the next Cosmos?
Didn't occur to me. Didn't occur to me. Was— was not something that ever crossed my mind. During your early flatulence humor with Peter Griffin, you're not thinking, "I'm going to executive produce Cosmos one day."
Yeah, that was wonderful. Yeah, so Seth MacFarlane, so he created Family Guy, which started as like a college project at Rhode Island School of Design. And also, he's the creator of Ted one and two. And many people don't otherwise know or it's hard for them to imagine that he was co-executive producer of Cosmos: SpaceTime Odyssey.
What Seth was saying there is just a perfect example of how we should approach life and knowledge in general— fart jokes, fart, fart jokes. There is a scientific paper written by someone at the University of Michigan that claims that farts make everything funnier.
How does— and by the way, that's wrong because I've been to dinner with some people.
Well, but look, Seth, as he described in that, understands the difference between scientific and non-scientific knowledge because he was exposed to it. And he uses it all, both the scientific part and the non-scientific artistic part. It's the best way to live life.