Dr Karl’s How Things We Work wants to demystify ‘godlike technology’ and make the world less scary

Dr Karl Kruszelnicki wants to talk about the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. Specifically, he wants to talk about the conspiracy theory that it was all faked.

“One of the arguments put forward is that President Nixon made a phone call to the astronauts on the moon, and (the conspiracists) said, ‘That’s impossible, you can’t make a phone call through the air, you had to have done it through wires back then,” he explains to The Nightly.

“Yet, we had wireless communications in the Vietnam War, in the Second World War and the First World War. These people genuinely did not know that we had wireless communication where you could talk to another person without wires, through the air in World War I.

“Therefore, because they think we only had wireless communication recently, we couldn’t have had communications with the moon.”

Dr Karl is trying to demystify what he described as “godlike technology” in his new series, Dr Karl’s How Things Work.

The show is exactly what the title describes, it’s a docuseries that explores how A becomes C through B or, more accurately, how A becomes G through B, C, D, E and F.

The first episode features Dr Karl taking audiences through the steps of how recycled toilet paper is made. Others look at cricket balls, ginger beer and cheese.

But the most evocative one may be the one that’s focused on chocolate and was filmed primarily in a Haigh’s chocolate factory in South Australia. You can almost smell the rivers of lustrous liquid chocolate through the screen.

For Dr Karl, the excitement of the Haigh’s factory was less about the copious tasting opportunities (although he definitely partook in that, too) but about the science behind the salivating treat.

“Now, it turns out there are six different grades of crystalline forms of chocolate,” he says. “The most delicious one is number five, it melts on your tongue, and then the others, like number one and two, they’ve got the mouth feel of candle wax.”

The process to get to number five is through tempering, a word familiar to MasterChef and Bake Off viewers which involves heating chocolate up to a certain temperature and working it. In that state, you get chocolate that not only melts in your mouth but has that desired crack and gloss.

“The skill needed to try to get the chocolate into crystalline state number five, and to do it consistently and make it delicious, that’s astonishing,” he recalls of the artisans who made the Haigh’s truffles.

“It’s not magic, it’s just technology combined with the fact that we humans can do wonderful things.”

The foundation that formed Dr Karl’s approach to the show and why he felt the need to do it now are three concepts he argues do not compute.

The first is our primeval thinking, based on 200,000 years of human history in which, for most of that time, the majority of people died before they were 20 years old. The second is we’re still beholden to what he calls “medieval institutions” of power that dictate how we live.

“For example, there’s enough money in the world for everybody to get a universal basic income, but the money is tied up, varying from year to year, between 10 and 60 billionaires, who have as much wealth as the poorest 50 per cent of the planet,” he says.

The third is that “godlike technology” we fear because we don’t understand the mechanics of how everything works.

“With all of this massive information that we have, have we gone into a world where people are more rational? No,” he says. “We have gone into a world where people deny that vaccines work, they reckon that COVID viruses were made by a consortium of Venezuela, China and the US to bring down the world’s population as part of the Great Reset. They deny that we went to the moon, and they deny that climate change is happening.

“Part of the reason people get sucked up into these conspiracy theories is we live in a world where it’s so complicated.”

But when you break things down, and it is mechanical and cause-and-effect, when we understand how things work, the world is a little more knowable and a little less scary. We can calm our under-siege lizard brains and start thinking about things from a place of insight instead of fear.

Dr Karl’s How Things Work is on ABC TV and iView