Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast The Toll of War with Irwin Redlener About this episode How will the war in Ukraine impact future generations? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson learns about disaster relief and helping child refugees with co-founder of Ukraine Children’s Action Project and pediatrician, Irwin Redlener.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Thanks for joining us on this episode of StarTalk. In this episode, we talk about the war in Ukraine, its effect on not only the adults, but especially the children. Not only the children who still have parents, but children who are orphaned, children who are war amputees, children who have been emotionally stressed by this war and what possible consequences that might have on their lives and the lives of the country as well. All that in this episode of StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk,
0:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we're going to feature a one-on-one conversation with a friend of StarTalk, Erwin Redlener. Erwin is a, is the kind of doctor we all wish we had, the medical doctor, but he's way more than that. And for this topic today, we're going to talk about the toll of war, the toll that that takes, not only on civilization and culture
1:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? and everybody in it, but we're going to focus in particular on children. Because Erwin Redlener, those of you who have listened to every one of our podcasts would have heard him several times in the past. He's a pediatrician and co-founder of the Children's Health Fund. Also, co-founder of the Ukraine Children's Action Project, about which we'll hear much more in the coming minutes. And I also have here from his resume, founding director of Columbia University's National Center for Disaster Preparedness. Find our interview with him in our archives, learning what that's all about. And is author of a book, The Future of Us:
2:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What the Dreams of Children Mean to 21st Century America.
2:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh my gosh, Erwin, welcome back to StarTalk, dude.
2:20 Irwin Redlener? Thanks, Neil. Always a pleasure to be with you.
2:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Listen, you just got back from the Ukraine. I mean, if not hours ago, certainly days ago.
2:28 Irwin Redlener? Yeah.
2:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What... Tell me about war and its impact. I mean, there's enough written about, "Oh, the armies took this, and we had, they advanced on a hill, and we, and we, or this thing was destroyed," and there's less talk about just people and just being displaced and being harmed and the death and the destruction and the bloodshed. So, I'm just curious, what were you doing there specifically?
2:59 Irwin Redlener? Well, this is our fourth trip there, I mean, us, meaning Karen Redlener, my wife, who's the co-founder with me of Ukraine Children's Action Project. Our fourth trip there since the most recent invasion by Russia of Ukraine's landmass. And we'll get into that later. But I think what we discovered, first of all, we got there on a Sunday evening, and the next morning, maybe 11 hours after we arrived at the hotel, the air exhumance went off in Lviv, where we were, and announcements were coming across the hotel's PA system, "Go to the basement now." And we went down through the basement, the electricity was off by that time.
3:43 Irwin Redlener? We spent five quality hours with some colleagues who were there actually at the hotel to meet with us. But we were living the experience, not the destruction part of the experience, but the fear and uncertainty part of it with everybody else in Ukraine. And I think the main way of looking at this is that when you actually visit the place that you're reading about in the newspaper, whether it's a big disaster, some other trauma, whatever you're doing, there's a little bit of a gap, maybe a big gap, between the abstract, what you're reading about,
4:28 Irwin Redlener? what you might be seeing even in television news clips.
4:33 Irwin Redlener? The gap between that and the reality of the experience. And for me, as a pediatrician, who's now visited children's wards in Lviv multiple times now, meaning that I've actually made what they call rounds, walking through the wards of the children's hospital in Lviv, where many children have been transferred from the front lines, the battlefields in eastern and southern Ukraine, to relative safety in the western part of Ukraine, in Lviv. And, you know, it's like, I've seen a lot, Neil. I ran a pediatric ICU, a big one in Florida, years ago.
5:16 Irwin Redlener? I've seen, I've started two child abuse neglect programs. I've dealt with children in adversity and extreme poverty for my entire career. But walking around the wards of the children's hospital in Lviv and seeing children with traumatic amputees from being in the wrong place when the missiles were falling, near Maripool in Ukraine. And I saw an 11-year-old girl recovering from severe head injuries, who also happened to watch Russian soldiers murder with pistols her parents right in front of her. So at some point, we'll get a fair amount of healing of the physical injuries that
6:01 Irwin Redlener? she suffered. But I'm not sure that in a normal, full lifetime, she will ever come remotely close to recovering from the psychological trauma she saw.
6:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, yeah, this is an emergent reality. I think that our emotional health, you know, growing up, we all heard about, are you shell shocked, right? Or are you not, coming from Vietnam? But I don't know that there was an entire sort of branch of professional healing given unto the emotional stability of people who've been in war, especially children.
6:35 Irwin Redlener? Well, it's happening much more than it was in World War II or Vietnam with respect to troops. And secondarily with respect to the families of troops, but really not even completely enough there. But in terms of civilians in a population, the civilians in Iraq who became the secondary casualties of our excursion there, or the population of Vietnam when we're there, um, no, we don't pay any attention to that whatsoever. So being there is a, is, is a pretty remarkable experience from that point of view. And you know, these, uh, the children, before the war, there were seven and a half million children in Ukraine, the child population.
7:19 Irwin Redlener? Five million of them, two thirds have been displaced. Either half of them, uh, been displaced within Ukraine itself in the western part. Half of them became part of the refugee population, most of which are in Poland, but many other countries as well. These children were A traumatized and B experiencing long-term educational disruption.
7:48 Irwin Redlener? And for Karen and me, that's, that's really a double whammy. That is very difficult for children to get over. So you think about two thirds of the country, which would be equivalent to about 50 million children in the United States, being suddenly displaced by war. Um, you know, to try to calculate how we're going to deal with that and preserve the dreams and aspirations and potential productivity of these children in the future. It's actually not clear. So our foundation is focused on those two things. The, the Ukraine Children's Action Project.
8:29 Irwin Redlener? Yes, the Ukraine Children's Action Project is actually focused on this primarily, but not entirely, this double agenda. First, that we're interested in how can the psychological trauma be addressed by Ukraine in general? And how can we make sure that children are not missing school while they're waiting for the war to end? And by the way, I would like to note that there was just some recent reports about educational achievement of American kids after the pandemic, where there's been a dramatic,
9:09 Irwin Redlener? terrifying drop off in educational capabilities and where children are in the school system at this point. So pandemic, which had many children out of school for a long time, especially in cities like New York, is taking a toll on where children are educationally. And imagine that happening in large scale with a lot of this physical trauma on top of it.
9:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So obviously, you're treating physical trauma first because a person can die without proper treatment. But the, what about, and then the emotional trauma, you have to see how that manifests, right? As time goes on, presumably there'll be a whole scholarship that will rise up around, like you said, we don't, you don't know what to do about it, right? And so you have to need clever people, inventive people, people who have thought about it in other ways, perhaps, all coming together to try to develop some kind of plan for this. What about sort of the supply chain of food and nutrition and medicines?
10:17 Irwin Redlener? Right. So what it, what turns out to be is the case that the large international organizations, International Red Cross, Save the Children, UNICEF, are very, very good at meeting the initial needs, the, these are called the humanitarian needs, protecting children, making sure that everybody has enough to eat, that they're getting acute medical care. What they're kind of lousy at, I hope nobody strikes me down for this, is paying attention to the massive psychological trauma and educational continuity.
10:53 Irwin Redlener? And you know Karen is actually on the working groups for education and mental health for children that's been organized by UNICEF. So she's in the mix and talking to these agencies. And it's like not enough on their radar. So they're getting millions and millions of dollars, Neil. It's not clear where the dollars are going with respect to those two big issues that I've I've been talking about.
11:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So it's not so much that they're bad at it. I mean, I don't ever remember that being in their mission statement, or is it? And I just missed it.
11:29 Irwin Redlener? It's it's not really in their mission statement. They are really focused on the more dramatic immediate needs. You know, here's food for children in refugee camps. Here's
11:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Here's water.
11:42 Irwin Redlener? Here's medical care that they might need. You know, that's that's the case.
11:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So how did you actually, you didn't just book a Delta Airlines flight and land in Ukraine? How did you get into Ukraine?
11:52 Irwin Redlener? Well, we actually booked a lot Polish Airlines flight. And we did that because a very close friend of ours for many, many years, Joan Baez, the iconic American folk singer.
12:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Folk singer, yes.
12:08 Irwin Redlener? In recent years, she's taken up portrait painting and she's gotten spectacularly good at it. And one of the things she did, she painted a portrait right after the war started of President Zelensky of Ukraine. And she called me up and said, I just paid this portrait, I'll send you. And and said, what what should I do with the, what should I do with this to help the the cause? I said, why don't we make prints? Print up them as many as you feel like and we'll sell them. And we'll use the money to help the effort in Ukraine. She printed up 250 copies, sold them for $515 a piece, raised about $125,000. And said, okay, here's the money, what do we do with it?
12:52 Irwin Redlener? And that prompted me to want to go there to Ukraine and actually meet with organizations on the ground, the International Medical Corps and Doctors Without Borders and many other organizations. We decided that that money would go to the International Medical Corps.
13:10 Irwin Redlener? But once I got hooked like that, Karen and I got hooked.
13:15 Irwin Redlener? We couldn't leave it. We couldn't stop. That was the first visit that we made there in April. In May, we set up a new not-for-profit foundation, the Ukraine Children's Action Project. And we've just come back from our fourth visit there. And Neil, it's been, it's been amazing. We've met with the mayors and the governors of Lviv city and Lviv province. We've put the mayor of Warsaw, Poland, on our advisory group. We have very close friends now in government and also the major agencies that are working there. And we're able to both deliver things to children and families, but also serve as advocates. How are we going to scale up what we do? We're a tiny organization.
14:01 Irwin Redlener? But we have a, you know, we're so, what's the cliche? We're hitting above our weight here because
14:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Boxing above your weight.
14:08 Irwin Redlener? Boxing above our weight, punching above our weight, yeah. And we can influence, and we do influence, people to help figure out how to scale up what we're doing. For example, we're working with members of the Ukraine parliament. We've just developed with the team at Columbia University, a online program to train teachers how to deal with classrooms full of traumatized children. Almost finished. It's going to be translated into Ukraine and to Polish. And it's going to be available in Lviv and Ukraine. But parliament of Ukraine is interested in scaling it up so that every teacher in Ukraine
14:51 Irwin Redlener? has access to and may be required to take this particular training program. This is like advocacy in action. We're not just talking about it or writing about it, which I try to do as much as possible. But it's part of our mission is to get things scaled up or influence people to scale up.
15:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And by the way, I hope you're keeping very good notes because this sounds like a playbook for any future such conflict where you have traumatized, physically injured children that are like refugees or otherwise in warfare. Because I don't know that the species
15:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Human beings are mature enough to not have war ever again. So to the extent that you are inventing solutions here, the record of that will be of immense incalculable value going forward.
15:46 Irwin Redlener? Yeah, well, to that point, we're actually keeping very detailed notes. And I like the idea that you called it a playbook because I think that's what it will be. You know, there's an assumption that the big international NGOs, you know, non-governmental organizations and governments have already absorbed this. You know, I was in, the first big disaster I went to was 1976, which was a massive earthquake in Guatemala. And I saw things, I mean, I couldn't believe it. I was in Ethiopia in the eighties during the famine there. And it's the same over and over again. The immediate needs are, you know, pretty well met,
16:30 Irwin Redlener? but nobody has been paying attention to the psychological trauma. And what happens to children who don't go to school for a couple of years? You know, I spoke to, if I could just add, I spoke to a nine-year-old girl with her family. They were Syrians in a refugee camp in northern Greece in 2017. And like I was, I mean, a pediatrician, a grandfather. So I was talking to them through a translator and I asked the nine-year-old girl, what do you want to be when you grow up? Beautiful, young Syrian kid, looked much like my then-nine-year-old granddaughter. She says to me with a big smile on her face, I want to be a doctor.
17:14 Irwin Redlener? And even to this day, I feel like it's tough talking about this. She says to me, you know, I want to be a doctor. I know she hasn't been to school in three years. I know that she's likely to be in that refugee camp, a sparse, horrible place in the middle of nowhere in Greece. She's likely to be there for another decade. And I'm thinking the chances of this kid becoming a doctor are essentially nil, as opposed to my granddaughter, who could be whatever the hell she wants to be. And I think that kind of disparity, that fundamental inequity, like in addition to what you were saying, Neil, that war is always going to be inevitable, like major natural disasters.
17:57 Irwin Redlener? We're living with war for as long as we can see, far into the futures we can see. But so is the inequitable treatment of children in our world. And that's something I've just been dedicated in trying to figure out.
18:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We've got to take a quick break, but when we come back, more of my one-on-one conversation with Dr. Erwin Redlener when StarTalk returns.
18:34 Speaker 02 I'm Joel Cherico, and I make pottery. You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com. Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
19:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're back, continuing my one-on-one conversation with Dr. Erwin Redlener. Let's get right back in.
19:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Erwin, tell me about the emergent technologies, the communication technologies, you know, the Starlink satellites, the internet, social media. Are these helpful or not in trying to recover some sense of a social-cultural development?
19:33 Irwin Redlener? So the shorthand for that is normalcy. We're trying to establish normalcy, starting with the idea of children not being damaged by the ongoing psychological trauma that they're receiving, and especially getting children back to school. So the role for technology is huge, and we're already deploying it in the training for teachers who deal with psychologically affected children. And we're dealing with the issue of educational continuity by just buying and distributing a lot of tablets, and upload it into those tablets are the full curriculum.
20:16 Irwin Redlener? I mean, in the summertime, Ukraine had to divert some of the funding for education to the military for obvious reasons, as a result of which every fifth grader did not get the textbooks they need. And we were going to buy textbooks, but they said, can we possibly get tablets? We said, of course, makes total sense. So we're distributing them like crazy now, as many as we can buy, which depends on how much money we can raise. And this is what we're doing. So children will be holding in their hands technology. Their teachers will be, their mental health providers will be, and their parents will be.
20:56 Irwin Redlener? And I think that technology, Neil, is key to being able to do something substantive and enduring for the children that really need it in Ukraine, and also the ones who were refugees outside of Ukraine.
21:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you've been trying to get inside kids' heads forever, trying to see the world through their lens. In your book, The Future of Us, What the Dreams of Children Mean to 21st Century America, what was the major theme there that drove the contents of the book?
21:31 Irwin Redlener? Well, by the way, it was a theme that...
21:35 Irwin Redlener? Came very powerfully to us in Ukraine a week and a half ago. It is that one of the, you know, children develop from infancy and they develop, you know, how to meet their basic needs. They, they need to identify themselves as individuals, separate from their parents, all that happens. But the greatest gift that children have is the ability to dream, to aspire, to have a vision of the future. And this is what I think is so damaging when we deprive children of the ability to dream and then manifest those dreams. And the first half of that book, The Future of Us, is all about these
22:18 Irwin Redlener? children, you know, homeless kids in Brooklyn. One kid told me he wanted to be a paleontologist, a 10-year-old gaunt impoverished child. I said, "Do you know what that means, William?" He said, "Yeah, a guy who looks for dinosaur bones." I said, "Right, how do you know about that?" The kid on the back of our mobile medical unit where I'm treating him reaches in his pocket, picks up, picks out a yellowed newspaper clipping from the New York Times about a paleontologist out west. Somebody had given him this. It was yellow, it was
22:55 Irwin Redlener? old, but he, he hung on to that. He clung to it. And again, you know, was William able to become a paleontologist in our wildest imaginations? I don't think so. And that's the tragedy of children living adversity. But anyway, here's what happened in Ukraine. So we went to, so I told you the first day we were there on a Monday, the bombing started in Ukraine and, and the capital.
23:26 Irwin Redlener? In the capital and in Lviv where we were. And, um, you know, the sirens were going off. We kept going down into the shelters and stuff. But on Thursday, we had a meeting at an orphanage in the outskirts of Lviv. On Monday, when the bombings had started, the staff brought these children into a shelter. I mean, they could hear and see the smoke and the explosions. It was pitch black. There was no electricity and there was no cellphone service for the adult staff. The kids cried that first Monday for five hours straight. So Tuesday, Thursday, three days later, I'm up there at the orphan. It's a beautiful sunny day.
24:10 Irwin Redlener? And I said I wanted to speak to the children. They brought a dozen kids to see me, to visit with me. My usual MO, I said to the kids, I threw a translator. I'd like to know what you'd like, how old you are and what you'd like to be when you grow up.
24:26 Irwin Redlener? And these are kids now orphans who had come from a completely bombed out town in eastern Ukraine. And they say, I want to be a program, a computer programmer. I want to be a builder. I want to be a manicurist. I want to, some kid said to me, I want to be a jeweler. I said, no, my ring broke. I wonder, would you help me if you were a jeweler? Absolutely. I'm going around. There's two kids who want to be singers. And I swear to God, and I have it on tape, so you don't have to trust my words here. But I get to the last kid, a really adorable little 11 year old girl. What do you want to be when you grow up? She says, I want to be president.
25:10 Irwin Redlener? I said, president of Ukraine, she says, just for emphasis.
25:17 Irwin Redlener? And I'm, I'm blown away, you know, it's like, this is what I wrote about in this book. These kids with dreams in the face of the impossible adversity. And what a crime against humanity for us to allow these dreams to be smothered eventually by our inability to manage the adversities they live in and live with. So this is, I guess, if I had to define what I've been doing for these last 50 years, it's been trying to come to grips with that. And initially, I was really, you know, I'm a doctor, I was doing healthcare and all that, which is great.
26:00 Irwin Redlener? At some point about, I don't know, 10 years ago, I said, this is, healthcare is not enough. I care about the success of these children. And by the way, the success of children is greatly related to the success of our society.
26:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, yeah.
26:17 Irwin Redlener? Our productivity, our ability to read, to create happy, comfortable, productive communities depends on how we manage the adversities that many children live with, in my opinion. So that's where things are, and that's where it all came back to me in stark language and feelings.
26:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so the, the concept of that book was, in a way, sort of a baptism for you to think about how to even embrace this problem, or how to, how to, how to think about the problem before you even come up with a solution, if there is one. Yeah, the solution is, can we all get along, right? The adults, all right? Uh, the kids are not the ones out there fighting each other, it's the grownups.
27:04 Irwin Redlener? Yeah, and fighting each other all kinds of ways, it's not just war. Think about what's happening in the United States. You know, we're dealing with a very, very divided society, Neil. And, you know, if, how do we make progress on the things that really matter if we're storming the Capitol in an insurrection? If we're, you know, we're fighting with each other, we're antisemitic racist factions that are armed growing up here? And it's like, we, we don't have the mental space, in some ways, to really get to the root of what we need to do, which is something we all have to work on. I think we all can work on. But it's a big challenge.
27:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Let me ask you about another part of your expertise. One of our, as I said at the top of the show, one of my interviews with you were about your role as a disaster preparedness expert and disaster, not just, oh, we're talking about disasters on a level that most people do not think about.
28:08 Irwin Redlener? Fortunately.
28:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Where the transportation grid is taken out, you know, the water supply, the, on a level where, oh, my gosh, what are the next steps? When you see the destruction in Ukraine, such as what would occur in most war zones, how does all that get rebuilt? I guess it has to end first, but who's making it end? And once it ends, do you rebuild? Do people move back in? I've never even thought about that.
28:41 Irwin Redlener? So I just, I have a talk that I've been giving lately to medical students and so on and other groups. And part of that talk is about the recovery of Ukraine.
28:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's the word I was looking for there, recovery.
28:57 Irwin Redlener? And, you know, a couple of months ago, President Zelensky said it's going to take $750 billion to manage the recovery of Ukraine.
29:08 Irwin Redlener? I think it's going to be double that. But whatever it is, the reason it's so expensive is obvious. We're talking about full cities that have been absolutely leveled.
29:21 Irwin Redlener? And there's the physical issue of rebuilding the cities, fixing the highly damaged infrastructure from the electrical grid to the fuel supply lines and everything you can think of, the transportation modalities, everything. But then there's the human elements of recovery, which again comes back to what do we have to do for the people that have been psychologically traumatized? If we have kids that are not getting educated, you know, Ukraine only has about 18% of its population that are children. We need really all of them to be fully functional. But if we have so many of them damaged and have had their education disrupted, what's going to happen with that? We have to do a lot of remediation.
30:05 Irwin Redlener? Of children who've had psychological trauma and educational disruption. So there's a lot of human issues involved also. But like you said, Neil, step one, stop the damn war. We've got to get this war to stop. And you know, there's, there's growing, let's say, controversy about what needs to happen here. So for many Ukrainians, including the president, we just wanna, we just wanna beat the Russians into submission. And I can totally understand that. What was, was once a war for territory is now a war of pure terrorism. There's no other reason to be bombing the capital and to be bombing places like the Veep,
30:48 Irwin Redlener? where people have gone, have gone to be safe. So it's a terror war at this point. So you can imagine that if you were Ukrainian and your city was destroyed and friends and family killed, you would not be looking for negotiation. On the other hand, if you're in the United States, if you're a leader in one of the Western European countries that's pouring a lot of money and arms there, you do not have an inexhaustible compassion and ability to support a never-ending war with the Russians until they're completely, completely beaten. And I think we're gonna have to face that controversy at some point.
31:31 Irwin Redlener? But whatever it is at this point, for me as a pediatrician, whatever it takes to stop it right now is what I would like to see. Because every day brings more destruction and more death, et cetera. So I'm not looking at this geopolitically. I'm looking at this as, as a doctor who cares about children. Right. So forgive me, but that's, that's where I'm coming from.
31:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We gotta take our second and final break from this conversation. One on one with Erwin Redlener on StarTalk.
32:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're back for our third and final segment in my one-on-one conversation with pediatrician and co-founder of the Ukraine Children's Action Project, Erwin Redlener. Let's get right back in.
32:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, is there any knowledge or insight from children in the Second World War who were displaced? I mean, a lot of cities were bombed out across multiple countries. Surely there's some scholarship on that, some research?
32:56 Irwin Redlener? You know, it's a complicated research question. And whatever little research was actually done, very little of it, close to zero, was actually understood, adopted, and put into play in any modern war. It's amazing to me. I would shudder to think what's going on in Syria, in Iraq, and Vietnam, still. I mean, we don't learn from past experiences about much of anything. You and your book have brilliantly talked about some of the great advances that we've made. The timeline was... It's one of the things I was really... I just was staring at that, Neil, because like, maybe there's hope for us, is what
33:41 Irwin Redlener? I'm thinking. But when it comes to advances in the human condition, and by the way, we have eliminated a fair amount of poverty and hunger in Africa, but there's still a billion kids that are hungry every day with food insecurity and so on. So, the progress that we've made technologically is significantly, significantly greater than the progress we've made on the human level. And, look, this is... I don't know, and you know far better than I do. Is this just a condition of our species? Is this what we basically have to live with? Or die with? I don't know. I'm asking rhetorically, but this is where we are, as far as I'm concerned.
34:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, there is the promising data on the fact that fewer people today are living in poverty than in past decades, and more people are living longer. There is some sort of blunt...
34:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Statistics that do point in a positive direction. The war in the Ukraine, I mean, you mentioned my book. In the chapter on conflict and resolution, I did the calculation, right? In the Second World War, between 1939 and 1945, 1,000 people per hour were killed in the service of that war. You just take the total death toll, divide it out, you get 1,000 per hour. So whatever we were living with back then,
35:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I think in almost every metric, it was much, much worse than whatever we're contending with today. It's just hard to see it and feel it that way because we're, you know, we don't live for 200 years, right?
35:33 Irwin Redlener? No, of course.
35:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or whatever we do.
35:34 Irwin Redlener? Yeah.
35:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And we don't have the longest of views on which to analyze this. But what hope do you bring? I mean, I'm almost in tears hearing every place you've been in the past 50 years. You know, like you said, I only saw photos of that earthquake, okay? And, you know, like you said, there's this gap between your awareness that something is real and whether you feel that that something is real. And that gap makes all the difference between being a dispassionate observer and being a participant. So to just see this list of places you have been to, to witness,
36:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? how do you wake up? What are you, looking at the world, what positive thoughts can you possibly summon? For yourself and for us, the viewers out here?
36:34 Irwin Redlener? Well, there's two huge things, actually, two huge things. And I get this question mostly from my relatives. But when I, when I hear an 11-year-old orphaned kid from a destroyed city in Ukraine, now living in an orphanage, say that she wants to be president, or the kid behind her says he wants to be a computer programmer, I say, man, oh, man, if these kids can sustain a dream.
37:05 Irwin Redlener? A real dream, given what they're experiencing, the least I can do is try to keep my spirits up. And the other factor, I must say, is the existence of my grandchildren.
37:21 Irwin Redlener? I feel like I don't have a choice. I'm not going to sit around sulking when my, my six year old grandson was here hanging out a couple hours ago. And that, my oldest is eight, is twenty-two now, actually. And they give me the strength and also the inability to get too despondent about everything. But, but the big thing is really the sustaining of dreams by children in adversity is, is like a freaking tonic to me. The other thing that's made me think a lot is the speed in which we make progress. Yes, there's less poverty, including less poverty in Africa. There's less poverty in the United States in children.
38:06 Irwin Redlener? But it's taking so long. When I was, my first job was in East Arkansas, in nineteen seventy-one, I was the director of a clinic in the Six Forest County in America there. And it was rife with, it was, it was overrun with racism and poverty. I would go on house calls and be, be followed at night with these guys in pickup trucks and the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council with, with gun racks in the back. Yet I was, you know, I was a Kennedy Johnson kid. So I would tell the staff and everyone that would listen that, you know what, ten or fifteen years, we'd be done with racism in America and we
38:50 Irwin Redlener? would end child poverty and everyone would have healthcare. That would take maybe, I thought in nineteen seventy-one, maybe ten years, maybe fifteen. And here we are. I'm at the end of my life, Neil, and we still have what we see around us. I, I don't understand how that could be. And I have a son that's a doctor, wonderful young guy, Michael. And I'm telling you, his wife also a doctor. I tell my kids, my actual children, not the grandchildren. I'm leaving you a mess. I'm sorry. I'm sorry my generation didn't make the things happen that I thought was gonna happen a half a century ago.
39:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, well, the arc of progress has has been described, whatever is the slope of that arc, you'd still rather be living today than forty years ago, for sure.
39:42 Irwin Redlener? No, no argument.
39:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No argument there. And I'm reminded of a few lines from a poem by Langston Hughes, where he says, "Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die,
39:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? life is like a broken winged bird that cannot fly."
40:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And...
40:03 Irwin Redlener? Well, I'm getting the chills from you reciting that verse, and I think I'm gonna make that into something I could hang on my wall.
40:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Langston Hughes. So you're our, you're not a dream catcher so much as a dream enabler, perhaps? A dream documenter, which we need, we all need that.
40:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Erwin, thank you for this, I think your third appearance on StarTalk, and we look forward to many more, maybe as progress, reports on not only but so many of your other fascinating projects, just trying to make a better world for especially those directly affected, but in the end, for us all. So it's been an honor and a delight.
40:45 Irwin Redlener? But look who's talking, Neil. You've been trying to make a better world since you learned how to speak and, you know, your contributions to our society, I'm not just saying this, it's like, it's amazing and inspiring to me, so thank you for the opportunity.
40:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just trying to get people to look up. All right, all right. Dr. Erwin Redlener, thanks for being here. This has been a one-on-one conversation with someone who's at the center of the challenges we face in this modern world, when grownups can't get along, and the real casualty there is the next generation, who really have our future in their hands, or not so much their hands, but in their dreams. And it's kind of our obligation to them to make sure they don't get squashed in this glorious, beautiful world we call Earth. Neil deGrasse Tyson, keep looking up.
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