yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Seth MacFarlane’s Scientific Influences | StarTalk


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

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.

More Articles

View All
Derivatives of sin(x) and cos(x) | Derivative rules | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
What I’d like to do in this video is get an intuitive sense for what the derivative with respect to x of sine of x is and what the derivative with respect to x of cosine of x is. I’ve graphed y is equal to cosine of x in blue and y is equal to sine of x i…
Turning Hog Fat Into Candle Light | The Boonies
[Music] In the Ozark Mountains, Joe, Ray, and Leo have managed to trap a 200lb feral hog. They must work quickly to process the animal to ensure nothing goes to waste. “A lot of people might wonder why I’m not helping him. Sometimes it’s better with only…
Inside Japan’s Earthquake Simulator
This is the world’s largest earthquake simulator. It’s called E-Defense. Its huge shake table can support a 10-story building and then move it in all directions with the force of the world’s most destructive earthquakes. E-Defense has conducted more than …
LIVE Office Hours with Sal (Monday, May 2nd)
Hello AP Calculus students! This is Sal Khan of the Khan Academy. As we all know, the AP Calculus exams, both the AB and BC exams, are coming up this Thursday, May fifth. I’m sure you are buzzing with as much excitement as I am. In case you didn’t alread…
Visual understanding of regrouping decimals
What we’re going to do in this video is explore place value involving decimals, and in particular, we’re going to think about how you can regroup value from one place to another. This is going to be very useful later in your life when you start doing some…
Example estimating from regression line
Lizz’s math test included a survey question asking how many hours students spent studying for the test. The scatter plot below shows the relationship between how many hours students spend studying and their score on the test. A line was fit to the data to…