Lies They Tell You In High School

How to Actually Use the Lies They Tell You In High School Archive

I spent way too long trying to track down full episodes of this show before I figured out where everything actually lived. The program ran on National Public Radio for a few years and Bill Nye himself hosts it, basically going through common misconceptions people pick up during their school years. It is not complicated material but finding it can be unnecessarily annoying if you do not know the landing spots. The original episodes are scattered across a few different archives. The most reliable source I have found is the Wayback Machine, which has snapshots of the old production company site with downloadable MP3s. There is also an official page on Bill Nye's own website that lists episode summaries with direct audio links. Neither is particularly well organized, which is probably why people end up frustrated. Episode titles follow a pattern like "Lies They Tell You About [Topic]" and run roughly fifteen to twenty minutes each. Topics covered include things like the Great Wall being visible from space, humans only using ten percent of their brains, blood being blue inside your body, and a bunch of other science myths that somehow survive into adulthood. The show does not just debunk them, it explains where the misunderstanding actually comes from, which is the part that makes it useful rather than just a list of corrections.

I tried downloading episodes through iTunes at one point and ran into a problem where about a third of the files were missing or corrupted. The audio quality on those was fine, but the files themselves would not play past the first minute. I ended up going directly to the NPR affiliate station pages instead, which host complete and uncorrupted versions. The workaround was simply searching for the episode title plus "KQED" or whatever local station picked it up, since these shows get carried regionally and the downloads tend to be cleaner there. The deeper problem people miss is that the show was produced in segments that sometimes aired out of order. If you are trying to follow along chronologically or by topic, you will find that two episodes about the same subject exist in different seasons. The production team reused the same format across multiple runs, so searching by subject matter will give you duplicates with slightly different angles. I just treat them as alternate versions and skip the ones that rehash the same ground. Another thing that is not obvious from browsing the episode list is how dated some of the information is. The show ran primarily in the late nineties and early two thousands, and while the core misconceptions it tackles have not changed, certain follow-up science has advanced past what the episodes cover. For example, an episode on how vaccines work does not address anything from the last twenty years of research. It is still fundamentally correct, but it is not going to be the most current explanation available.

If you want to use this for teaching purposes, which is what a lot of people end up doing with it, there is a practical limitation you should know about. The episodes are too short to stand alone as a lesson. They work best as a discussion starter, maybe ten minutes in where you pause and have people identify which claim in the episode surprised them. Trying to build a full curriculum around it runs into the problem that half the episodes are eight minutes long and the other half push toward twenty. The pacing is inconsistent and you will waste time filling gaps. I recommend pairing each episode with a supplementary reading or a short lab activity rather than expecting the audio to carry the whole lesson. The debunking format itself is engaging because it starts with something people already believe, then shows them why that belief is wrong. That structure does the heavy lifting for you, but it still needs support material to become something more than entertainment. For self-directed learning, the show works fine on its own. The production value is decent, Bill Nye speaks clearly, and the misconceptions are genuinely common enough that you will probably encounter several you had no idea were myths. The main downside is accessibility. Most of the older audio files are MP3s encoded at lower bitrates than modern podcasts, so if you are listening on good headphones they will sound thin. It is noticeable but not a dealbreaker.

The episode list itself is not centralized anywhere official anymore. What exists is a combination of the Wayback Machine archive, Bill Nye's site, and various fan-maintained spreadsheets that try to compile everything. None of them are complete. I end up checking all three when looking for a specific episode, usually finding it on one of the less polished sources. It is not ideal but it is the reality of trying to access archived public radio content from that era.