Let’s Make America Smart Again, with Fareed Zakaria

In the first episode of our special edition Cosmic Queries series, “Let’s Make America Smart Again,” Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Chuck Nice welcome CNN’s Fareed Zakaria to break down the impact of immigration on science and technology in America. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Find out more at https://www.startalkradio.net/startalk-all-access/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and this is StarTalk. Joining me today is my co-host is someone who is no stranger to StarTalk radio, professional comedian Chuck Nice.

• 0:37Chuck Nice?

  Hey Neil, how are you? I like the fact you put professional on the end of that.

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, sorry.

• 0:43Chuck Nice?

  That was very, very kind of you.

• 0:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It might be the first time I've done that.

• 0:45Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 0:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You finally pay your rent off for your comedy.

• 0:48Chuck Nice?

  Clearly, clearly, I am paying my mortgage from comedy now, and somehow you got that information.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got that. I'm very pleased to hear that. Today, we're talking about immigration policy. Specifically, the contributions that immigrants and descendants of immigrants have made to science, technology, engineering, and math in this country. Now, you know, I'm not going to do that alone. I'd hardly do any of this alone. So, to help us out, we brought in special guest, the one, the only, Fareed Zakaria.

• 1:20Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exclamation point.

• 1:22Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have an exclamation point, like born with your name?

• 1:25Chuck Nice?

  Well, I was hoping...

• 1:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It deserves one.

• 1:27Chuck Nice?

  I was hoping to be called professional, something or the other. But I guess I'm just Fareed Zakaria. I feel like I'm a professional, but something.

• 1:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For the next, for the next 40 minutes, you're our professional, right? So, Fareed is an Indian-American journalist and author, and he's also host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS.

• 1:48Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I assume...

• 1:50Chuck Nice?

  I'm a fan. I like the, you know, the encore. Yes, without a doubt. That's something that deserves to be said in stereo.

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't you go, right? GPS. Yes. He also writes a weekly column for the Washington Post. So, Fareed, thanks for joining us. And we've been friends for a while, so I didn't just pick you up off the street.

• 2:09Chuck Nice?

  Long time, yeah.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right. So, so, I did some homework on you, and you have an extraordinary academic pedigree.

• 2:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To be doing what you're doing. So many pundits out there, they're kind of self-made, they're, you know, they did a little bit of their own reading and they, they have strong opinions and people love hearing, you know, vociferously voiced opinions and you always have this sort of calm voice and you have all this academic substrate there, so.

• 2:38Chuck Nice?

  Isn't that always the case, though? Isn't it always the guy who has an extensive and impressive academic pedigree?

• 2:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They don't have to scream at you.

• 2:47Chuck Nice?

  They're the guys that are just like, "Okay, so you feel that way, huh? Oh, good for you." Like, those are the guys. It's always the guy who doesn't know anything that's just like, "I'm telling you now, this is the way it is!" Like, yeah.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  I think of myself as a lapsed academic, maybe a little bit like you. I mean, I don't know if you still consider yourself a practicing professor.

• 3:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In my mind, I am, whether or not, in practice, I mean, I try.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  The profession would regard you as such, is it?

• 3:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I look forward to that, give all this up and just go back to the lab and then you'll, you'll never find me again. So I want to just explore this. I, what I bring to the table for you to react to is the fact that science in the United States, which really came of age in the 20th century, um, with the, uh, there are many drivers, but let's take, for example, the formation of the National Science Foundation, but there were earlier indications, go back to Abraham Lincoln, who in 1963, when he clearly had other priorities, okay, he signed into law, that created the National Academy of Sciences, recognizing what role science was playing in Europe and how important it was, saying, "Hey, we, get me some of that for our country."

• 3:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he also created the land-grant college system, so he had tremendous foresight into the role of science and technology as a fundamental driver of everything the United States would become. So now I look at, uh, I'm closer to physics than I am, uh, biology, of course. So I look at things like the Manhattan Project, so crucial to what became 20th century, um, uh, politics and science, and it landed us where we became, where, where we were for the entire second half of the 20th century. And most of those scientists were foreign-born nationals. And, and so, what, what, from your, from your worldview, how, could you just explain?

• 4:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How this works, just...

• 4:43Speaker 02

  You know, it's fascinating. You're absolutely right to focus on the beginnings because we think that America was always the most scientifically innovative country in the world. You know, we look at the Nobel Prizes and we take it for granted, 5% of the world's population, we get about 75% of the world's prizes. And that doesn't even count Obama's Peace Prize, which I regard as kind of a weird one, in his first year of office.

• 5:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Come on, it's like a lifetime achievement award.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, at age 25.

• 5:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At age 25. It's, you know, it's like, you didn't really earn this, but we gotta give it to you just because we like you.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Exactly. But if you look at the early 20th century, 1910, 1914, I forget the exact date, Germany had won more prizes in science, Nobel Prizes in science, than Britain and the United States put together. So the US becomes a powerhouse in science, basically for three big reasons. The first is the destruction of Europe.

• 5:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Basically, World War I, World War II, Great Depression, the place gets flattened, all the universities shut down.

• 5:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With the last man standing.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  With the last man standing, and particularly Germany gets destroyed.

• 5:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Germany was the scientific superpower. Second, we take in all these immigrants. People forget, even in the 30s, with all the restrictions, 100,000 Jews came in from Europe, many of them scientists, as you say, many of them worked on the Manhattan Project. After that, of course, the door opens even wider. And the third is massive government funding. So let's think about it. Europe ain't destroyed anymore. Government funding is down to half what it used to be. Our only hope, frankly, is that we keep taking in the best and brightest in the world. Otherwise, you already see the world catching up. You already see that, you know, Japanese scientists win Nobel Prizes routinely, that you now have the Chinese getting in on the action. So we have to recognize...

• 6:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's just the beginning there.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  We're 5% of the world. We want to make sure that we're not winning just 5% of the Nobel Prizes.

• 6:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. Well, that's, I mean, that, that, that very fact then is enabled only if you then not only have access to, but mutual interest in coming to the world's greatest talent. And the world's greatest talent isn't always in your country, because everybody's human, and innovation is not, um...

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Nobody has a monopoly on...

• 6:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not, not, innovation, it's just a matter of opportunity. to express it.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  And and you know what I've noticed something Neil as you probably know um I was for a while a trustee of the college I went to Yale. And there was a lot there are a lot of government.

• 7:02Chuck Nice?

  You see the way he did that.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  But listen, the.

• 7:04Chuck Nice?

  You know what I like about the way the Fareed just did that too. He was he was like a it was like a a subtext. You know what I mean.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Small college in your head.

• 7:12Chuck Nice?

  Like a little little afterthought, you know.

• 7:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Footnote.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  So here's the point. Yale is private, of course, a lot of government cuts to public universities, some of the great public universities in America. And we noticed that we were had access to better and better scientists who were.

• 7:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  While that was happening.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Well, because the University of Arizona is cutting funding, you know, Michigan State is cutting funding. So um Berkeley, you know, now it actually happened less at Berkeley than anywhere else, but what I was struck by. I mean, being a New Yorker, being in the world that you and I are Neil, I thought we wouldn't have to offer these guys more money. No, the scientists only cared about would they have good labs and good colleagues.

• 7:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Because they wanted to be around other smart scientists. They wanted to be able to have graduate students who were good. So it makes me, I mean, the point you're making. People will come to where other smart people are. That's the magnet that attracts you.

• 8:02Chuck Nice?

  You know what's funny is that what you just said is just a fact of human nature. When you want to do well, when you want to win, when you want to be the best. Then your own personal gain tends to take a backseat. To the accomplishment of a greater goal. For instance, sports stars who'll take a salary cut so that really good players can stay on their team. Or they'll give up being the number one guy on the team to go be in a team effort where they're pretty much guaranteed a championship. This is this is part of the way we think.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  I'm going to tell your agent that you voluntarily agreed to take a pay cut. Be at the right comedy club.

• 8:42Chuck Nice?

  Two things are going to have to happen. One, uh you're gonna have to tell my agent to get me paid first.

• 8:49Chuck Nice?

  And then you can tell him I'm willing to take that pay cut.

• 8:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Fried, I hadn't fully, that was like a missing piece of my total worldview of this, that it's not just simply come here because you're being persecuted there. It's come here because there are other really smart people here and then the resonance of this intellectual, um, uh, uh, community will not only benefit you, but it'll benefit all of science. And, and any good scientist is, will tell you, I want to see science grow, even if I'm not part of it, because there's a curiosity that we all carry to this frontier and whoever can move it, that's great.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Exactly. I mean, you find that one of the things the Chinese were having difficulty, they've been trying to recruit back some of the best and brightest.

• 9:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That we trained here.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  That the United States trained here. And they will find, they would say to them, we'll build you the biggest lab, we'll, we'll give you unlimited research funds. What the, a lot of Chinese professors were saying is, we don't have the best graduate students. We want to work with the best graduate students and those people are at Berkeley or Harvard or, now that's changed. Now Beijing University and Tsinghua in particular have superb graduate students. And so you're beginning to see all, many of the best and brightest go back to China.

• 10:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, when I go back to, uh, again, the Manhattan Project, I go back to the Apollo Project, each of those had sort of military motivations. Uh, I mean, we don't like remembering Apollo as military, but NASA was in response, of course, to Sputnik and the threat that, that, that we perceived by that. But you look at, uh, you look at, there was, of course Einstein came over, like you said, this whole flux of Jewish scientists. Then after the Second World War, we build our space program on the back of Werner von Braun, for example. And now you have all these people, Enrico Fermi. We have labs named after this guy, Fermi Labs, okay? He's Italian, his wife is Jewish, and all of this is going on, and we say, this is America?

• 10:48Speaker 02

  That's exactly right.

• 10:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not even being fine toothpicked for what that is, it's just, of course.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  And of course, to just emphasize one piece of this, massive government funding. People don't like to point this out, when you talk about-

• 11:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think all government funding is bad.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  You know, then you say, "Oh, the government shouldn't pick winners or losers." So, look at the microchip industry. The beating heart of the computer revolution is the microchip, right? Texas Instruments basically invents it. And then the US government, through the Air Force, buys something like sixty to seventy percent of all microchips produced. The cost initially is one thousand per microchip. It goes down to thirty dollars per microchip because the government keeps buying it. You know, it basically allows for scale, which then drops the price. Exactly the same thing that people are trying to do in the solar industry or the wind industry.

• 11:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are the people in the government who are doing this, they have this foresight? Are you telling me this?

• 11:45Speaker 02

  Oh, we have-

• 11:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Normally give that much credit to government officials.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  I think we have, if you look at DARPA, which is the agency in the Defense Department that does this, this-

• 11:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, recently interviewed the head of DARPA for StarTalk, yes.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Really good.

• 11:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  Agency, and then, and there was ARPANET, which is the precursor to the Internet, was in fact, you know, came up, the Defense Department in fact invents it. GPS is part of the Defense Department.

• 12:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  You know, I think, I think that the main thing we have to realize is, you have to throw a lot of resources at the science, it's expensive, basic research is the most important, but you also need the development of technologies. Of course, you're gonna miss lots. Of course, some companies like Solyndra will go bankrupt. But you know, if you think about it, the same time the government made a loan to Solyndra for about six hundred million dollars, it made a loan to Tesla for six hundred million dollars. Now, what happened? Solyndra went bankrupt, Tesla has gone up ten thousand percent.

• 12:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Guess who made all that money? The private sector, the shareholders, and Elon Musk. So, when the government loses the money, we, the taxpayers, take the blame. But we don't get the upside, that's just the nature of it. But it doesn't mean that it doesn't work for science.

• 12:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We do get the upside in the sense that if the government- births an industry.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The industry has tax base that comes back to the government.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Exactly. And and and each scientific invention produces a new one.

• 13:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  You know.

• 13:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, and just for the record, StarTalk was birthed by the government. On a on a National Science Foundation grant. They believe

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Section.

• 13:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in what we were trying to do.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  That's so that was a little more like the Solyndra one, right?

• 13:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep.

• 13:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought we were doing OK. I don't know. You know, you go, I just I'm looking at our notes for this, that apparently, um, you know, of course, Benjamin Franklin, let's go back to him, one of the first great scientists of the of the United States. Uh, he, I mean, I, he wrote books on research and electricity. So he's he's probably, he might even be been a better scientist than founding father. I mean, if you look at what his record is and what he discovered in the books that he had published. But regardless, uh, he he, his parents fled England because of religious persecution. And he's here, and so he's basically an immigrant, his immigrant lineage, which would have been easy back then, I guess.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Pretty cool. That see, the thing is, though, uh, doesn't really count when you're when you're not brown. Yeah, I'm just saying, like, you know, it's just the way it works.

• 14:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's get to that. There are rules.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  There are rules.

• 14:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's get to that. So so so so so Fareed, uh, let me be devil's advocate here. So we have these, I could cite all the the famous scientists of the 20th century that shaped modern, uh, you know, we have Werner von Braun from Germany, who birthed the, he he basically designed the Saturn V rocket that got us to the moon. Because he had that knowledge and uh, and and awareness from his, from developing the V two rocket. And that's basically the first ballistic missile. It left Earth's atmosphere, found its target, fell on the target.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's that's a ballistic missile.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  V two being the rockets that the Germans developed and and and rained on London in 1944.

• 15:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct, correct. Although rain would be a little too delicate a word for what these things did.

• 15:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah, they fall out of the sky supersonically. So it's not it's not like.

• 15:18Chuck Nice?

  Not a whistle.

• 15:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, no, you do not, it's just, you're walking and then the block explodes.

• 15:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's how that.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  My dad was a graduate student in, in, in London in nineteen forty fi- uh, five. And was having coffee with a bunch of his friends in a cafe. Um, he was, and they said to him, stay for a while. He said, no, I gotta get back. I gotta get some work done. He walks out and he turns his back and a V two rocket hit the cafe. Everyone there, every friend of his died. If he had just stayed when they told him, just have one more cup of coffee, he would have, he would have been dead.

• 15:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man.

• 15:47Chuck Nice?

  Damn, yeah.

• 15:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

• 15:49Chuck Nice?

  Then we'd be having this conversation.

• 15:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. No, or I think of it the other way.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  That's how.

• 15:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How many others might I have been having a conversation and not him?

• 15:55Chuck Nice?

  Not him.

• 15:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because they would have had to say.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 15:57Chuck Nice?

  And did he ever, did he ever use that as a motivated faction to, factor to get you to do your work? Let me tell you something, that would do it. Yeah, you know what? I got back to work and I'm alive.

• 16:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  You know, the different people are different. My dad had, had a tough up, upbringing as a self, self-made man and he always said, I went through stuff I don't want you to ever have to go through.

• 16:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh, uh huh.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  That was his attitude.

• 16:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let me just complete this list. Uh, Steve Jobs, as we know, um, uh, he, he, his, his family lineage is traceable to Syria, if I remember.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Right, so his actual father was, was a Syrian immigrant.

• 16:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Syrian, and, uh, Elon Musk, a South African, uh, Bavarian.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Sergey Brin, Google is.

• 16:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Google, right, all of this, all of this. And so, so.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Not to mention all the real, I mean, the scientists, these are what we're talking about.

• 16:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just the entrepreneurs.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Right, we're just talking about the entrepreneurs.

• 16:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so now.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  The real scientists.

• 16:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Devil's advocate. Um, this is a list of people any country would want.

• 16:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, do you say, yes, you can immigrate? If you have these kinds of ambitions, or if you're gonna, if you're gonna, we'll, we'll let you in if you go get a degree in, in engineering. I mean, is that, is, is that the devil's advocate posture here that has not yet been resolved in this conversation?

• 17:12Speaker 02

  So, there's no question, we should take any of those kinds of people. I mean, there's, I think Michael Bloomberg had the idea of, if you get a PhD in, in science, you should have a green card stapled to your degree when you get it.

• 17:22Chuck Nice?

  Makes sense.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  That makes a lot of sense.

• 17:24Chuck Nice?

  Makes sense.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  There's no question.

• 17:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There was also, also, um, Newt Gingrich. Very strong posture on that.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  And I think that, you know, that seems to me a no brainer in one of the parts of immigration reform one hopes eventually will get to. The harder question, as you say, is we've taken lots of people who are not like that. That's called the family unification policy. I think we've probably taken too many that way and too few who are skills and brain based. But, you know, there's also something to be said for the sheer drive that low skill immigrants bring. Obviously, in the right numbers and in a way that they can be integrated, but the biggest problem for a rich country is you lose that drive, you lose that hunger. I mean, you know, we all have children and the more fortunate the parent circumstance, the kids are going to be great.

• 18:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fat and lazy.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  They can't have the same drive, right?

• 18:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  United Arab Emirates has a similar problem. It's a very wealthy country, but who's going to clean the laundry and who's going to...

• 18:23Speaker 02

  But some guy who comes from, you know, Mexico or Guatemala or Honduras who's willing to risk everything, abandon, you know, home culture and come here to wash dishes.

• 18:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to do that.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Sixteen hours a day, that's a good, some kind of drive and energy. And by the way, that person might end up doing something remarkable. His children might end up doing something remarkable.

• 18:45Chuck Nice?

  The real thing you have to keep into mind is the children of those people tend to be the ones who have that same drive. But they are also educated here in America, which gives them a distinct advantage when it comes to...

• 18:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bigger drive than American with the same American education.

• 18:59Chuck Nice?

  There you go. So what we're doing is we're creating better Americans.

• 19:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If there's a policy that says, "We'll stop all immigration, evaluate it and say, 'Okay, here is the proscenium through which you'll walk, if we judge that you will be the right person for this.'" Is there a risk of that abuse with that? That kinda happened 100 years ago, didn't it? The Northern Europeans, not the Southern Europeans. There was a lot of judgment being placed on who was worthy and who was not.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  I think the big danger is that we think we can identify talent and drive and ambition and creativity, and those are complicated things. So, yes, we should do more skill-based, we should probably do a little bit less family unification, we should get the balance right, we should...

• 20:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't mean immediate family, you mean extended family.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Exactly. But by the way, I mean, again, in the old days, in the 19th century, one person from a village in Sicily would come and then bring the whole village.

• 20:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, right, right, right.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  So, we have done that and we have managed to absorb it, and that is partly what has given this country the kind of diversity and richness it has. But, you know, in terms of balancing the numbers, maybe more skill-based, maybe less of this, as you say, extended family unification. But I really think it's important to remember, we don't know when we take in a 10-year-old kid, what that kid is gonna be. Whether they may, he or she may be a poor Guatemalan, that doesn't mean that, you know, talent is sprinkled evenly throughout the planet. And you might be getting amazing people, even though they look like they're poor peasants from, you know, places that are not doing well in the world.

• 20:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, one other question, before we get to the queries.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  No worries.

• 21:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You solicit these from...

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Yes, we have queries from all over the internet, and any incarnation where you can find StarTalk.

• 21:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent. So, just one other quick thing, just to extract it from you, because I love having you here, because it's like, this is good. So, there's the flip side of this that no one in America talks about. If we are so great that everyone wants to come to us, that's a brain drain for other countries.

• 21:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're getting the best of other countries, sort of sucking their intellectual capital into our borders. If we get a stronger world, we'll be less capable to do that even if we wanted to.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  So the way I think about this, Neil, it's a very good question. As you can imagine, having grown up in India and come here, I would hear this often. People would say, "Why are you leaving India? You know, your country needs you." But here's the truth. I actually do think talent is sprinkled throughout. There are millions and millions of talented Indians. I'm not that special. What's special is the environment that this country has created where smart and talented people can flourish. There's another way of putting this. There was a member of parliament, an opposition member of parliament, who stood up one day at the Indian parliament and asked the then-prime minister, Indira Gandhi, he said, "Madam Prime Minister, can you explain to me one question? I notice when I look around the world, Indians seem to do really well everywhere except in India. What does that tell you about how you run this country?"

• 22:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, there's no answer. There's no good answer.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  It's all about creating an ecosystem where talent can flourish. It's the problem in India or China or Africa is not that there aren't talented people. It's you haven't created the ecosystem that lets them flourish.

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know about the Einstein project in Africa? Looking for the next Einstein, black Einstein, basically.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 22:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:46Chuck Nice?

  In Africa?

• 22:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Africa, right. It's very cool.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  I have no doubt in my mind that there is somebody as talented, you know, in terms of raw intelligence, he or she exists.

• 22:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  The question is, can you create the ecosystem that let Einstein do what he did in Germany and...

• 23:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a Gary Larson comic. Did you ever see this? There's Einstein playing basketball, right? And they said Einstein had a promising career as a basketball player until an ankle injury turns him to the books.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  Wow, who knew there was already a black Einstein?

• 23:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what do you have, Chuck?

• 23:19Chuck Nice?

  Well, we got our cosmic queries. So let's just jump right into it since we already set up the fact of where we get these. The first one that we always take is from a Patreon patron because they support us financially and...

• 23:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just put them to the top of the list because of that?

• 23:34Chuck Nice?

  Right to the top of the list. They pay, they go right to the top of the list, kind of like...

• 23:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not even ashamed to say that.

• 23:38Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I'm not. It's like Congress and lobbying.

• 23:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know. We have lobbyists for the show. Yeah, you get their lobbyists for the show. You give me some money. Patreon supporters, you're all lobbyists.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  I say drain the swamp. Let's hear, let's hear from the, let's hear from the freeloaders first.

• 23:53Chuck Nice?

  Drain the galaxy. We're gonna drain the galaxy. All right, here we go. Here's our first from Renee Douglas and says Renee's from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania says, why is it important to you that the United States lead the world in science? She's speaking to you directly, Neil.

• 24:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 24:08Chuck Nice?

  Are you just rooting for your own team, so to speak? Uh, or is there a better reason?

• 24:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I think it's natural to root for the home team.

• 24:17Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 24:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you don't want to do that to the point of waging war, I think. That's my opinion in that regard. But you root for the home team and I grew up in the United States in the second half of the 20th century.

• 24:29Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 24:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which had a lot of problems of its own, you know, a hot war, cold war, uh, civil rights movement, campus unrest.

• 24:37Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 24:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, but in there we were going to the moon and we all knew that that required innovations in science and technology. We knew this. And so I would be upset if that, that sense of inventing a future were no longer, uh, happening on the soil in which I was born. I would be upset. However, I'd be even more upset if it didn't happen anywhere else in the world.

• 25:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah, I wanted to have been the one who discovered the Higgs boson in a Texas super collider, but it got its budget cut in 1993, having judged, well, what's the value of this? Because I, my view is peace had just broken out in 1989 and when peace breaks out, who needs physicists as far as anybody thinks? So the Higgs boson gets discovered in, in the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. It's a European collaboration. We're part of that collaboration, but we're not the leader, not the, the major leaders.

• 25:34Chuck Nice?

  Not the quarterback.

• 25:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, we're not the quarterback.

• 25:35Chuck Nice?

  Just on the team.

• 25:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the team, we're on the team.

• 25:37Chuck Nice?

  We know that is very un-American.

• 25:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To not be the quarterback.

• 25:41Chuck Nice?

  Oh, you know, we're supposed to be the quarterback.

• 25:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're supposed to be the quarterback.

• 25:43Chuck Nice?

  We're supposed to.

• 25:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So as a scientist, we're all delighted, but as an American, uh, so that's just, I'm just being honest with my feelings there.

• 25:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if it, as long as it happens somewhere. If the whole world closed down, then we're all moving back into the cave together.

• 25:55Chuck Nice?

  Dark ages.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  But by the way, it does matter to American economics.

• 25:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it does.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  Basically, the way you get economic growth is two things. How many people do you have and how much productivity do you have? In other words, it's the the number of people who are in the workforce, labor, and it's productivity, how productive is each of those people? And productivity arises only through technology, technological innovation, and science.

• 26:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, exactly. And just to be clear, you can, uh, the, this is a slightly controversial statement, but I want to be very frank about it.

• 26:27Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 26:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, the times when the arts grows economically, in almost every case I've seen, it's because they have been touched by technology and science.

• 26:37Chuck Nice?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 26:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That enables it to occur in some innovative way.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  And there's a mutually reinforcing thing. The arts feed creativity, which allows, I mean, there's these wonderful stories about Einstein when he would get stuck on a physics problem, he'd stop and he'd go and start playing his violin. And he said that it would unlock something in his head, in his mind, that he couldn't understand. So ideally, you have a kind of, you know, a symbiosis of creativity.

• 27:00Chuck Nice?

  Right, right. All right, let's move on. Um, I love this. Chrissy Borden says this. What does the scientific community think or hope is the next big discovery on the horizon that would be really wonderful if it happened here in the United States?

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Gosh, there's so many things happening that are extraordinary. I mean, I think that if you look at some of the most dramatic, um, the new frontiers, I think, are, uh, are in biology. So if you're my, my eight-year-old daughter is here because she's a huge fan of Neil's. She's sitting outside and.

• 27:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's cutting school, I might add.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  She's cutting school for this, this counts as school.

• 27:35Chuck Nice?

  This counts as school.

• 27:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This counts as school, all right.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  We were talking, she was talking about the brain episode that she was watching about, that Neil did on Nova Science Now.

• 27:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nova Science Now.

• 27:44Speaker 02

  And if you think about how mapping the brain is going to transform our understanding of the brain, what happens, uh, you know, to medicine and just to knowledge, this is actually, in a weird way, it's uncharted territory.

• 27:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Just beginning to understand.

• 27:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The best of the frontiers are just that.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  And then you have.

• 28:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Scary, but, but. Even more exciting.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  You marry it to the revolution in in big data where because the brain is going to produce. I mean, the the the volume of data is going to be so large that only the new supercomputing.

• 28:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brain invented big data.

• 28:12Chuck Nice?

  Yes, it did.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  Exactly. So it's it seems to me that's the one, but there's so many. I mean, physics.

• 28:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I and I I agree for read the the uh brain neuroscience neuroscience as a frontier. Uh also, of course, AI, which is related, uh related, can will we have autonomous robots that can think for themselves without having to just solve a problem that you hand it. So that's a.

• 28:37Chuck Nice?

  They'll come up with their own problems.

• 28:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Robot, will you solve this problem? Solve it your own damn self.

• 28:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is self determining.

• 28:46Chuck Nice?

  I'm sentient now, Neil.

• 28:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. All right.

• 28:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What else you got?

• 28:52Chuck Nice?

  Let's go to, uh, you know, I gotta do this, Neil. Uh, because I've seen quite a few of these questions come across. And so I'm reading Ben Nuffelkamp's question.

• 29:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 29:05Chuck Nice?

  As a representative to for all of you who have written this type of question. Not only for this show, but another show that I co-hosted with Bill Nye on a similar type of subject. Neil, why does StarTalk have episodes that either have nothing to do or vaguely encompass astronomy, physics, or other science? If I wanted liberal politics, you'll like this part for read, I'd just turn on CNN.

• 29:35Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so the reason I the reason I read that question is because this is not political what we are talking about.

• 29:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we're talking about just the world as a better place, whatever. And however you slice and dice that politically.

• 29:47Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 29:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's people's own motives, but uh there's some fundamental reality that has to matter here before that conversation even happens.

• 29:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 29:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But but I can address that. I can say I can say. I could enter this world naively as a scientist and think, oh yeah, science, let's just do science. But then you wake up and realize that any science that happens is embedded in a political system.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 30:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not an island.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I have to beat some of my colleagues over the head who cry foul when NASA spends money on something they don't think they should spend money on. The space station or on the manned program, which has always been a controversial path of spending relative to pure research. And I go to my colleagues and I say, you are treating NASA as though it's your private funding agency when it was born in a Cold War environment and there are geopolitical mission statements that NASA fulfills and you are not the only one in town that it serves. And in fact, the science budget of NASA historically has never been, it maxed

• 30:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  out at about 35%. The long-term average is around a fourth. And all the rest goes to geopolitically driven decisions for what NASA does in this world.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  And if you think about, you know, the point we were making earlier, if American science, if the reason where the forefront of global science is, you know, the three things I talked about, Europe got destroyed, two world wars, we took in lots of immigrants, and then we spent lots of government money on it. Those are political issues. And so if you want to create great science, yes, you have to have great scientists, but you've got to figure out, how do you get them? How do you create an environment where they flourish? How do the ideas get?

• 31:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All of that is embedded in a political system that's got to recognize that in order to make wise decisions regarding it going forward. That's all. That's, it's not more complicated. I mean, it's complicated, but the drivers of it are simple.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  And it's not more political than that. And by the way, this used to be totally bipartisan. It was Eisenhower who set the spending max. Eisenhower was spending 3% of GDP on basic science. Reagan increased the spending. It is recently that we have gotten into a situation where everything is political.

• 31:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Of course, Lincoln was Republican.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  This used to be bipartisan.

• 32:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not only that, of course, under President Nixon, we formed the Environmental Protection Agency. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

• 32:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  NOAA. Right. So, you're right, Fareed. When I look historically, there's a lot of co-mingling of political platforms that are in the service of science. And historically, even the National Science Foundation has been bipartisan, although the motives were a little different, you know. So, and many would complain that the R and D spending under Reagan, a lot of that went to Star Wars, which many in my scientific community objected to. But at the end of the day, even if the motives are different, science gets done.

• 32:41Chuck Nice?

  So, science is political, but we are not politicizing it. So, that's the, we're not coming down on one side or another. We're coming down on the side of science.

• 32:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One could, if there's a political side that doesn't like science.

• 32:54Chuck Nice?

  If it's anti-science.

• 32:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It can tell you the consequences of what it is to be anti-science. That's all.

• 33:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're listening to StarTalk Radio. Stay tuned. More up next.

• 33:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back. Here's more of StarTalk.

• 33:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fareed, I want to hit one thing. When I was in graduate school, at least half of everyone in the sciences and engineering were foreign nationals. And at that time, they would come, get their PhDs, their masters, and stay. As the rest of the world rises up, and as America fades, we become less of a carrot for those very same graduate students. And I've seen many of them go back to their home country, to China, to India. Will there be a point when they won't even come here as graduate students? Because those fully trained PhDs now train their own graduate students. And then we have this reverse flux of the intellectual capital of the world.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  It's a great question. My own sense is it'll be a long time before that happens because the one thing that the United States still absolutely dominates is higher education. If you look at the lists of the top twenty universities in the world, eighteen are American, top fifty in the world, thirty-six are American. And it it's hard to design a a really superb world-class university. Because there's lots that goes into it.

• 34:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can't do that overnight.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  You can't do that overnight. Harvard and Yale and Princeton have huge advantages having been founded in the seventeenth century.

• 34:36Chuck Nice?

  Huge.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  They have lots of money, they.

• 34:37Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, they're called endowments. They compete.

• 34:41Speaker 02

  Huge. And I'll tell you the, I'll tell you one piece of it that I wonder about, um, when you look at a place like China. At at the heart of Western science has been the ability to question authority. For the graduate student to tell the professor, you're full of it, your your ideas are wrong. I remember reading a story.

• 34:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Outdated, or I got a better idea.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  Niels Bohr used to begin his lectures.

• 35:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Physicist.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Great physicist from the turn of the century, used to begin his lectures in Copenhagen. He'd tell the students, I want you to, I want to start by telling you. You must approach this lecture by assuming everything that I say might be untrue, might be, might be falsifiable. In other words, that sense of really being willing to challenge authority. That is not yet true in in a place like China. And I wonder if there's a cultural barrier, which will mean that it takes even longer for that to happen.

• 35:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've thought a lot about this and, except I came to it from a less noble angle. When I see little children in malls, if there's a toddler just steps out of a a stroller and the parents say, get back in the stroller, he's like, no.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an American kid.

• 35:46Chuck Nice?

  That's right. And normally, and normally they're white.

• 35:50Chuck Nice?

  Just saying, not too many black, not too many black kids talk back to their parents. Just letting you know.

• 35:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so if it begins that early, just that.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  It's in the, it's in the culture.

• 35:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's in the culture.

• 36:00Chuck Nice?

  It is in the culture.

• 36:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's in the culture. You mentioned skateboarding, middle schoolers.

• 36:04Chuck Nice?

  Also, it's also something else that you talked about, we had a conversation a long time ago, about, um, the fact that in other cultures, you may not see the aspirations to do things that we, that we take for granted in this culture. When I grow up, I'm gonna be an astronaut.

• 36:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right. What do you want to be when you?

• 36:20Chuck Nice?

  What do you want to be when you grow up?

• 36:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in other countries. unreachable goals are actually tamped down.

• 36:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 36:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas here, it's like, oh, isn't that, that's cute. Go ahead. Right.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  But I, but I do want to emphasize this. Important to remember, these are not God-given advantages the United States has.

• 36:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, they're not.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  And we can lose them very easily if we don't maintain the culture of openness and creativity.

• 36:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't want God shed his grace on thee. What, what are you?

• 36:43Speaker 02

  Well, I, I do think there needs to, there needs to be a greater focus on science. You'll like this. I, one of my favorite lines from one of Tom Friedman's books, the New York Times columnist. He was in China and he was noticing, you know, Bill Gates was, happened to be there. And people were going crazy over Gates because he was this computer whiz. I mean, yes, he was also very rich, but the combination. And he said, I guess I've realized the problem, the difference between China and India is in China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America, Britney Spears is Britney Spears.

• 37:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  You know, we, we venerate pop icons. They turned geeky computer scientists into pop icons.

• 37:19Chuck Nice?

  Oops, you've done it again, Fareed. Okay.

• 37:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There, give me another one here.

• 37:23Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. Uh, speaking of what Fareed just said, here's Bob Longmire from Facebook who says this. Given the current political climate, how do you suggest we help advance scientific literacy with people who view science through a negative political lens? Very, very good question.

• 37:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fareed, how, what is your solution here if, I, I'm trying to get people to understand what science is and how and why it works. And they're swept up into a worldview that does not allow that in. That's, what do you do in the world of politics? What has the world done in the history of this exercise?

• 38:02Speaker 02

  You know, it's very frustrating, um, because it's not just an assault on science. It's an assault on expertise. It's an, it's an assault at some fundamental level on knowledge. And I think there's, there is a tendency to say that all this knowledge is either biased or opinionated, or you have your facts, I have my facts. No, you can't have alternate facts. You can, you can disagree, you can draw your own conclusions on the basis of those facts.

• 38:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How much of that isn't fed? It's fed by the fact that in politics and in religion, people are, there is, there isn't that absolute right or wrong, and so people are accustomed to arguing what they want to be true. Now you add science to the mix and they feel like they can have the conversation in the same way.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  But you know, I think it's coming at a populist moment where people think that all the experts get everything wrongs. I was reading the New York Times recently, there was an article about Steve Bannon, Donald Trump's chief strategist, who's having everybody read a book called The Best and the Brightest. This is a book about how the smart Kennedy advisors got America into Vietnam. And the, the, the moral of the book is meant to be, the way he sees it, all these experts were disastrously wrong.

• 39:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Disaster.

• 39:13Speaker 02

  In fact, if you read the book, what's interesting is actually what it points out is all the, the political advisors were overconfident, arrogant, they were not listening to the real expertise of the, of the historians, the people who understood Vietnam, who understood China.

• 39:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the cultures.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  The cultures. It was, it's actually a story about expertise that was ignored because people had a political lens, which was anti-communism, which they filtered everything through.

• 39:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 39:39Chuck Nice?

  Wow. Wow. That makes perfect sense. Ah, okay.

• 39:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, what else you got?

• 39:44Chuck Nice?

  All right, let's move on, shall we, to Ann Colway. And Ann says, love star talk, do you foresee the future of international collaborations changing as a result of the new, frankly barbaric policies that have been put in place? Now, this is maybe, when this comes out, this will have changed, but as of now, there is still a

• 40:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As of the recording.

• 40:07Chuck Nice?

  So-called, as of this recording, there's still a so-called immigration ban that was in place, and then a federal judge said no, and that's where we are at this juncture.

• 40:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I'll make a statement and I want Fareed to react. Scientifically, uh, when we collaborate internationally, we do so at international conferences, if they don't happen to be in your department or in your country, you're, you can still collaborate because you get to get there. We create these occasions

• 40:32Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 40:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where there's an intellectual discourse, and there're workshops, there're international conferences and the like.

• 40:38Chuck Nice?

  Have your own like science date.

• 40:41Chuck Nice?

  Know what I mean? It's like you got your own thing.

• 40:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so I I've been on multiple papers where there are international collaborations with it. And so, so I can say that I don't require there to be immigration.

• 40:55Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 40:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Me to still collaborate, the internet enables that.

• 40:58Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 40:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  International conferences enable it.

• 40:59Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 41:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, uh, so, so Fareed, what do you say if all the world is, is this fertile landscape of communication, then who needs immigrants at that point?

• 41:12Speaker 02

  There's no question that you can do more electronically than you ever have been able to before. But, uh, you know, again, it comes back to, do we want the United States to be the center? The place where people meet. I remember after nine eleven, there was a period where there was similar kinds of, um, you know, pauses and immigration slowdown and increased vetting.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  A lot of scientific conferences were canceled that were going to be held in the United States and they held them in Europe. They held them in China. Now, if we, you know, if we keep doing this kind of thing. You, you know, it's not the end of the world, but it certainly will mean that. Center of mass will shift and frankly, the Europeans are more than happy to pick this up. There's a French presidential candidate.

• 41:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just read about this.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  He's, he's, he said, you know, I just want everybody to know, anyone who finds that they are having difficulty doing science in America. Come to France, we will give you, we'll roll out the red carpet for you. And that's the French.

• 42:06Chuck Nice?

  Let me tell you something, and that, that alone.

• 42:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a wake up call.

• 42:10Chuck Nice?

  A huge wake up call to everyone in this country. That is like Ryan Gosling talking to your wife at a cocktail party. And says, listen, if this a-hole ever, if you ever get tired of this jackass over here. Hi, I'm Ryan Gosling. You're more than welcome to come over and have coffee.

• 42:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I had.

• 42:30Chuck Nice?

  Let me tell you something, you're gonna start treating your woman a little differently.

• 42:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had a similar, uh, earlier thought when I was, I read this news article about this attempt to get ready for the next asteroid so we can deflect it out of the sky. And by the time I got to the bottom, it was Russia organizing it. Asking who's with them to make this happen. And I said, and I felt like, wait a minute. I was just so expecting that it would be us inviting others to participate.

• 42:57Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I realized that this, if when you fade, it's not a cliff. You just sort of slowly disappear and everyone else rises up and they and they have conversations at their table.

• 43:07Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 43:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whether or not you're invited.

• 43:09Chuck Nice?

  Right. And I love the fact that you said when you fade, it's not a cliff. It is indeed a slippery slope. And when people use that metaphor, they need to take in mind exactly what the visual is. It is a forty five degree angle where you are slowly sliding down. Clawing it, but it's not getting any traction. You're just sliding away. So that's what it is.

• 43:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Out of view.

• 43:30Chuck Nice?

  Out of view.

• 43:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got to have one quick one, if you got a quick one.

• 43:33Chuck Nice?

  Okay, here's, here's a quick one. Uh, and this is for Fareed. As terrible as things, as things are, could better relations with Russia improve? Science and space exploration?

• 43:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. Look, we should have good relations with Russia. We should have good relations with China. We should have good relations with all these countries. Uh, the problem is, you know.

• 43:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They have space ambitions, each one of them.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  When Russia invades another, uh, its neighbor, when it annexes, uh, parts of another country. You know, something that basically hasn't happened for decades and decades. And it contravenes international order, you've got to do something about it. So. There's got to be a way, and we, by the way, managed to do this even during the Cold War.

• 44:11Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  To cooperate, but also have certain rules of the road that matter. But I think that.

• 44:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, just right there. Wait. So I, I, I don't want you to go quickly past that. While we were still in Cold War with Russia, we had the Apollo Soyuz Joint Space Program. And this was like the early signs that maybe we can be friends. So just because there is transgressive behavior in the world from one country to the, to another. Should that, that should not have to stop what might be science or space collaborations.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  I think, I think in fact, it's all the more reason to do it. Cause you know, you want to build as many bonds as you can between countries. We, we, we don't work better in isolation. There's this wonderful book by Matt Ridley about the. You know, why did human beings manage this extraordinary rise for, you know, from being just, just animals? And the most important thing he points out is whenever we encountered diversity. We, we flourished, you know, just even scientifically. Uh, but as human beings, we, the more we can encounter the other, the more we can collaborate. With people who think differently, look differently, study differently. The the end product is better.

• 45:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's who's the the wit of 100 years ago who said, there's no greater pain to the human spirit than the prospect of coming up with a new idea?

• 45:24Speaker 02

  I haven't heard that one, so I think we're going to say it was Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  You can take it.

• 45:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so what you say is, I think, can be clearly demonstrated, but there's the the soul speaks differently about who you want to hang out with. We want to create the the the homogeneous bubble.

• 45:43Speaker 02

  But that's why you want to get past your comfort zone and into that into that area of unfamiliarity.

• 45:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's hard. It's it's against it seems to be against human nature to welcome in the people who look different from you and sound different from you and think differently from you and have a different religion or political ideology.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  We've been part of the same tribes for thousands and thousands. If you think about it, for most of human existence, we we grew up, we grew old and died one mile from where we were born.

• 46:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  And now we're saying all these people who come from.

• 46:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Abandon that and embrace the whole world as your tribe.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  And and and even though those tribes are not sending you their best, they're sending you criminals, they're sending you rapists.

• 46:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It sounds like it's time to end.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  I think that's.

• 46:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're out of time, Chuck.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  I'm talking about the tribes. I'm talking about the tribes.

• 46:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks, Chuck, for co-hosting today, and thank you to our special guest, CNN. What do they call you guys?

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Anchors.

• 46:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anchors, CNN anchor, Fareed Zakaria. You all know his show, GPS, and don't miss it.

• 46:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for listening to StarTalk Radio. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Many thanks to our comedian, our guest, our experts, and I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Until next time, I bid you to keep looking up.