StarTalk Radio - Let’s Make America Smart Again, with Fareed Zakaria

Episode Date: March 10, 2017

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/ Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And this is StarTalk. Joining me today as my co-host is someone who is no stranger to StarTalk Radio, professional comedian Chuck. Nice, Chuck. Hey, Neil. How are you? I like the fact that you put professional on the end of that.

Oh, sorry. That was very, very kind of you. That might be the first time I've done that. Exactly. You finally pay your rent off for your comedy. Clearly I am paying my mortgage from comedy now, and somehow you got that information. 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! Yes! Exclamation point That's right Do you have an exclamation point, like, born with your name? Well, I was hoping Because it deserves one I was hoping to be called professional something or the other, but also host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria, GPS. Right.

I assume. I'm a fan. I like the encore. Yes, without a doubt. That's something that deserves to be said in stereo. 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. Yeah, yeah. Right, right, right. So, I did some homework on you, and you have an extraordinary academic pedigree to be doing what you're doing. So many pundits out there. They're kind of self-made.

so many pundits out there. They're kind of self-made. They did a little bit of their own reading and they have strong opinions and people love hearing vociferously voiced opinions. And you always have this sort of calm voice and you have all this academic substrate there. Isn't that always the case though? Isn't it always the guy who has an extensive

and impressive academic pedigree? They don't have to scream at you. They don't scream. They're the guys that are just like, okay, so you feel that way, huh? Good for you. 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.

I think of myself as a lapsed academic. Maybe a little bit like you. I don't know if you still consider yourself a practicing professor. In my mind, I am, whether or not in practice. Whether the profession would regard you as such. I look forward to that. Give all this up and just go back to the lab, and then you'll never find me again. So I want to just explore this.

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, there were 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, 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, get me some of that for our country. 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, I'm closer to physics than I am biology, of course. So I look at things like the Manhattan Project, so crucial to what became 20th century politics and science. And it landed us where we became, where we were for the entire second half of the 20th century. And most of those scientists were foreign-born nationals. And so what, from your worldview, could you just explain how this works? You know, it's fascinating. Shane, how this works, just... 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. Come on, it's like a Lifetime Achievement Award. At age 25. At age 25. You didn't really earn this, but we got to give it to you just because we like you. 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 Prize in science, than Britain and the United States put together. So the U.S. becomes a powerhouse in science basically for three big reasons. The first is the destruction of Europe. Basically, World War I, World War II, Great Depression, the place gets flattened, all the universities shut down. With a last man standing. With a last man standing, and particularly Germany gets destroyed.

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 Japanese scientists win Nobel Prizes routinely, that you now have the Chinese getting in on the action. So we have to recognize we're 5% of the world.

We want to make sure that we're not winning just 5% of the Nobel Prizes. Wow. Well, 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 some uh nobody has a monopoly on innovation it's just a matter of opportunity to express it 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 from that you see the way he did that? But listen, the point is, you know what I like about the way that Fareed just did that? I dropped it. It was like a subtext. You know what I mean? A small college in New Haven. A little afterthought. A little footnote. Right there.

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 had access to better and better scientists who were... Wow, that was happening. Well, because the University of Arizona is cutting funding. Michigan State is cutting funding. So, Berkeley, you know.

Now, it actually happened less at Berkeley than anywhere else. But what I was struck by, being a New Yorker, being in the world that you and I are, Neil, I thought we were going to have to offer these guys more money. No. The scientists only cared about would they have good labs and good colleagues 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.

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 back seat to the accomplishment of a greater goal. For instance, sports stars who 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 a team

to go be in a team effort where they're pretty much guaranteed a championship. This is part of the way we think. I'm going to tell your agent that you voluntarily agreed to take a pay cut

to be at the right comedy club. Two things are going to have to happen. One, you're going to have to happen one uh you're gonna have to tell my agent to get me paid first and then you can tell him i'm willing to take that pay cut so freed i hadn't fully uh that was like a missing piece of my total world view 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, the, 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 scientists is, we'll 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. 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. That we trained here. That the United States trained here. And they were fine. They would say to them, we'll build you the biggest lab, we'll give you unlimited research funds. What 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. 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. So when I go back to, again, the Manhattan Project, I go back to the Apollo Project. Each of those had sort of military motivations. I mean, we don't like remembering Apollo as military, but NASA was in response, of course, to Sputnik and the threat that we perceived by that. But you look at, you look at you look at, 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.

This is America. That's exactly right. It's not even being fine-toothed for what that is. It's just, of course. 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 government funding. I think all government funding is bad.

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. Texas Instruments basically invents it. And then the U.S. government, through the Air Force, buys something like 60% to 70% of all microchips produced. The cost initially is $1,000 per microchip. It goes down to $30 per microchip because the government keeps buying it.

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

I normally give that much credit to government officials. I think we have, if you look at DARPA, which is the agency in the Defense Department that does this, we actually recently interviewed the head of DARPA for StarTalk. Really good. Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency. Agency. And then there was ARPANET, which is the precursor to the internet, was in fact, came up, the Defense Department in fact invents it.

GPS is part of the Defense Department. Right, he stole that name. I think that the main thing we have to realize is you have to throw a lot of resources at this. Science is expensive. Basic research is the most important, but you also need the development of technologies. Of course, you're going to miss lots. Of course, some companies like Solyndra will go bankrupt. But if you think about it, at the same time, the government

made a loan to Solyndra for about $600 million. It made a loan to Tesla for $600 million. Now, what happened? Solyndra went bankrupt. Tesla has gone up 10,000%. Right. 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. We do get the upside in the sense that if the government births an industry, then the industry has tax base that comes back to the government. Exactly. And then each scientific invention produces a new one. Yes. And just for the record, StarTalk was birthed by the government on a National Science Foundation grant. They believe in what we were trying to do.

So that was a little more like the Solyndra one, right? Yeah. I thought we were doing okay. I don't know. You know, you go, just I look in our notes for this, that apparently, you know, of course, Benjamin Franklin, let's go back to him, one of the first great scientists of the United States. He wrote books on research and electricity. So he might even have been a better scientist than Founding Father. I mean, if you look at what his record is and what he discovered and the books that he had published.

But regardless, 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. See, the thing is, though, it doesn't really count when you're not brown.

What's up with that? I'm just saying. That's the way it works. Let's get to that. There are rules. There are rules. Let's get to that there are rules there are rules let's get to that so so so so so far read uh let me be devil's advocate here so we have these i could cite all the famous scientists of the 20th century that shaped modern uh you know we have one of them braun from germany who birthed the he he basically designed

the saturn 5 rocket that got us to the moon because he had that knowledge and, uh, and, and awareness from his, from developing the V2 rocket. And that was basically the first ballistic missile left earth's atmosphere, found its target, fell on the target. Right. That's, that's a ballistic missile. V2 being the rockets that the Germans developed and, and the Germans developed and rained on London in 1945. Correct, correct. Although rain would be a little too delicate a word for what these things did. So, yeah, they fall out of the sky supersonically.

So it's not like... Not a whistle. No, you do not. It's just you're walking and then the block explodes. Right. Okay, that's how that happened. My dad was a graduate student in London in 1945 and was having coffee with a bunch of his friends in a cafe. They said to him, stay for a while.

He said, no, I got to get back. I got to get some work done. He walks out and he turns his back and a V2 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 been dead. Damn.

Then we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Then we wouldn't be having this conversation. Right, right. Or I think of it the other way. That's how sad.

How many others might I have been having a conversation and not him? Because they would have had to say this. And did he ever use that as a motivated 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. You know, different people

are different. My dad had a tough upbringing. He was a self-made man and he always said, I went through stuff I don't want you to ever have to go through. That was his attitude.

Well, let me just complete this list. Steve Jobs, as we know, his family lineage is traceable to Syria, if I remember. His actual father was a Syrian immigrant. And Elon Musk is South African, Bavaria, Canada. Sergey Brin, Google. Google, right.

All of this. All of this. And so. Not to mention all the real, I mean, the scientists. These are all we're talking about. We're trying to. Just the entrepreneurs. We're just talking about the entrepreneurs.

Okay, so now. Real's advocate um this is a list of people any country would want so do you say yes you can immigrate if you have these kinds of ambitions or if you're gonna if you're gonna well we'll let you in if you go get a degree in engineering. I mean, is that the devil's advocate posture here that has not yet been resolved in this conversation? 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, if you get a PhD in science, you should have a green card stapled to your degree when you get it. Makes sense.

That makes a lot of sense. Makes sense. There's no question. It was also Newt Gingrich with a very strong posture on that. And I think that, you know, that seems to me a no-brainer and one of the parts of immigration reform one hopes eventually we'll get to. The harder question, as you say, is we take in lots of people who are not like that. It'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 kids. Fat and lazy. Say it. Say it.

They can't have the same drive, right? Right, right. The 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... Right, right. But some guy who comes from Mexico or Guatemala or Honduras who's willing to risk everything, abandon home culture and come here to wash dishes... Just to do that. ...16 hours a day, that's a good sort of drive and energy.

And by the way, that person might end up doing something remarkable. His children might end up doing something remarkable. His children might end up doing something remarkable. The real thing you have to keep in mind is the children of those people tend to be the ones who have that same drive. Right. But they are also educated here in America, which gives them a distinct advantage when it comes to it. Bigger drive than American with the same American education. There you go. So what we're doing is we're creating better Americans.

You're listening to StarTalk. Stay tuned for another segment. Welcome back to StarTalk. Here's more of this week's episode. 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 kind of happened 100 years ago, didn't it? Northern Europeans, not the Southern Europeans. There was a lot of judgment being placed on who was worthy and who was not. 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... You don't mean immediate family. You mean extended family. Exactly. Of course, immediate family would come over.

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. Yeah, right, right, right. 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 going to be. what that kid is going to 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. So one other question before we get to the queries, you solicit these from. Yes, we have the queries from all over the internet and any incarnation where you can find StarTalk. 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. 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 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 will say why are you leaving India? 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? Right. Yeah, there's no answer. There's no good answer.

It's all about creating an ecosystem where talent can flourish. It's the problem in India or China or Africa. It's not that there aren't talented people. It's you haven't created the ecosystem that lets them flourish. You know about the Einstein project in Africa? Looking for the next Einstein. Black Einstein, basically. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. In Africa? In Africa, next Einstein. Black Einstein, basically. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah.

In Africa? In Africa, right. It's very cool. I have no doubt in my mind that there is somebody as talented, you know, in terms of raw intelligence,

he or she exists. Yeah. The question is, can you create the ecosystem that let Einstein do what he did in Germany and Switzerland?

There's a Gary Larson comic. Ever see this? There's Einstein playing basketball. Right. Right. Right. And it said Einstein had a promising career as a basketball player until an ankle injury turned him to the books.

To the books. Became a physicist. Wow. Well, who knew there was already a black Einstein? You know. So what do you have, Chuck? 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.

You just put them to the top of the list because of that. Right to the top of the list. They pay, they go right to the top of the list. Kind of like Congress. You're not even ashamed to say that. No, I'm not. It's like Congress and lobbying. Okay.

You know? So we have lobbyists for the show. Yeah, they're lobbyists for the show. Yeah, you give their lobbyists for the show. You give me some money. HR supporters, you're all lobbyists. All right. You get access. I say drain the swamp.

Let's hear from the freeloaders first. Drain the starts. Drain the galaxy. We're going to drain the galaxy. All right. Here we go. Here's our first from Renee Douglas. Renee Douglas 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. Are you just rooting for your own team, so to speak? Or is there a better reason? So I think it's natural to root for the home team. 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, which had a lot of problems of its own, you know, a hot war, cold war, civil rights movement, campus unrest. 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 sense of inventing a future were no longer 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. Right. So, yeah, I wanted to have been the one who discovered the Higgs boson in a Texas supercollider, but it got its budget cut in 1993, having judged, well, what's the value of this? Because my view is peace had just broken out in 1989.

And when peace breaks out, who needs physicists as far as anybody thinks? Who needs physicists, as far as anybody thinks? So the Higgs boson gets discovered in the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland as a European collaboration. We're part of that collaboration, but we're not the major leaders of it. We're not the quarterback. We're not the quarterback. Just on the team. On the team. We're on the team.

We know that is very un-American. To not be the quarterback. You know, we're supposed to be the quarterback. We're supposed to be the quarterback. We're supposed to be the quarterback. So as a scientist, we're all delighted, but as an American, so that's just, I'm just being honest with my feelings there. But as long as it happens somewhere, if the whole world closed down,

then we're all moving back into the cave together. Dark ages. By the way, it does matter to American economics. 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 number of people who are in the workforce, labor, and it's productivity,

how productive are each of those people. And productivity rises only through technology, technological innovation, and science. Yes, exactly. And just to be clear, you can, the, this is a slightly controversial statement but i want to be very frank about it ahead 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 that enables it to occur in i think there's also a way and there's a mutually reinforcing thing the arts feed creativity which allows for you 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 mind that he couldn't understand. So ideally, you have a kind of symbiosis of creativity. Right, right. All right, let's move on.

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

She's cutting school, I might add. She's cutting school. This counts as school. This counts as school. This counts as school. All right. She was talking about the brain episode that she was watching that Neil did on Nova Science Now. Nova Science Now.

that she was watching about that Neil did on Nova Science Now. Nova Science Now. And if you think about how mapping the brain is going to transform our understanding of the brain,

what happens, you know, to medicine and just to knowledge. This is actually, in a weird way, it's uncharted territory. Oh, yeah.

Just beginning to understand. The best of the frontiers are just that. And then you have... Scary, but even more exciting. You marry it to the revolution in big data,

because the brain is going to produce, the volume of data is going to be so large that only the new supercomputing... The brain invented big data. Yes, it did. Exactly. So it seems to me that's the one, but there's so many. I mean, physics...

Yeah, and I agree, Fareed. The neuroscience as a frontier. Also, of course, AI, which is related. Will we have autonomous robots that can think for themselves without having to just solve a problem that you hand it?

They'll come up with their own problems. Robot, will you solve this problem? Solve it your own damn self. It is self-determining. I'm sentient now, Neil. Yeah. All right.

What else you got? Let's go to, you know, I got to do this, Neil, because I've seen quite a few of these questions come across. cross and so i'm reading ben uh nuffelkamp's question okay 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 star talk 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, Fareed, I'd just turn on CNN. Okay, so the reason I read that question is because this is not political what we are talking about. Well, we're talking about just the world as a better place, whatever.

And however you slice and dice that politically, that's people's own motives. But there's some fundamental reality that has to matter here before that conversation even happens. Right. But I can address that. Go ahead. 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. I'm not an island. 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 demand 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 maxed 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. And if you think about the point we were making earlier, if American science, if the reason we're at 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? 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. 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. Of course, Lincoln was Republican. This used to be bipartisan.

Not only that, of course, under President Nixon, we formed the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA. Right. So you're right, Farid. When I look historically, there's a lot of commingling 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. And many would complain that the R&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. So science is political, but we are not politicizing it. So we're not coming down on one side or another. We're coming down on the side of science. One could if there's a political side that doesn't like science. If it's anti-science. We can tell you the consequences of what it is to be anti-science. That's all.

You're listening to StarTalk Radio. Stay tuned. More up next. Welcome back. Here's more of StarTalk. Farid, I want to hit one thing. More of StarTalk. Farid, 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? 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 20 universities in the world, 18 are American, top 50 in the world, 36 are American. And it's hard to design a really

superb world-class university because there's a lot that goes into it. You can't do that overnight. You can't do that overnight. Harvard and Yale and Princeton have huge advantages having been founded in the 17th century. Huge. That's huge. They have lots of money. I was going to say they're called endowments. That's a huge advantage.

I'll tell you one piece of it that I wonder about when you look at a place like China. 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 ideas are wrong. I remember reading a story. Your ideas are outdated or I got a better idea. Niels Bohr used to begin his lectures. A physicist.

A great physicist from the turn of the century. He used to begin his lectures, a great physicist from the turn of the century, used to begin his lectures in Copenhagen. He'd tell his students, I want to start by telling you, you must approach this lecture by assuming everything that I say might be untrue, might be falsifiable. In other words, that sense of really being willing to challenge authority, that is not yet true 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. 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 stroller and the parent says, get back in the stroller, he's like, no! I don't want to be a American kid. That's an American kid. Yes, it is. And normally they're white.

No, stop. I'm just saying. No, no, no. Not too many black kids talk back to their parents. Just letting you know. So if it begins that early, just the kind of...

It's in the culture. It's in the culture. It is in the culture. It's in the culture. You know what you mean? Skateboarding, middle schoolers. It's also something else that you talked about. We had a conversation a long time ago about the fact that in other cultures, you may not see the aspirations to do things that we take for granted in this culture.

When I grow up, I'm going to be an astronaut. Right, right. What do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to be when you grow up? And in other countries, unreachable goals are actually tamped down. Whereas here, it's like, oh, that's cute. Go ahead. Right.

But I do want to emphasize, it's important to remember, these are not God-given advantages the United States has. And we can lose them very easily if we don't maintain the culture of openness and creativity. We don't want God shed his grace on thee? What are you? I do think there needs to be a greater focus on science. You'll like this. 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 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 difference between China and India is in China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America, Britney Spears is Britney Spears.

We venerate pop icons. They turned geeky computer scientists into pop icons. Oops, you've done it again, Fareed. Okay. Give me another one here. All right, here we go. 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. Fareed, what is your solution here? If 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. What do you do in the world of politics? What has the world done in the history of this exercise? You know, it's very frustrating because it's not just an assault on science. It's an assault on expertise. It's an assault at some fundamental level on knowledge. And I think there's 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 disagree. You can draw your own conclusions on the basis of those facts. How much of that isn't fed? It's fed by the fact that in politics and in religion, 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. I think it's coming at a populist moment where people think that all the experts get everything wrong

I was reading the new york times. Um 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, uh got America into vietnam and the the the moral of the book is meant to be how the smart Kennedy advisors got America into Vietnam. And the moral of the book is meant to be, or the way he sees it, all these experts were disastrously wrong. Disaster. In fact, if you read the book, what's interesting is actually what it points out is all the political advisors were overconfident, arrogant. They were not listening to the real expertise of the historians,

the people who understood Vietnam, who understood China. The cultures. The cultures. 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. Right. Wow. Wow. That makes perfect sense. Okay. Chuck, what else you got? All right, let's move on, shall we, to Anne Colway.

And Anne says, love StarTalk. 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. in place. Now, this is maybe when this comes out, this will have changed. But as of now, there is still a recording. As of this recording, there's still a so-called immigration ban that was in place. Then a federal judge said no. And that's where we are at this juncture. I'll make a statement and I want Fareed to react. Scientifically, 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 okay where there's an intellectual discourse and their workshops their um international conferences and the like so you guys have your own like science date it's a science day you know what i mean it's like you got your own thing. You got your own thing. And so I've been on multiple papers where there are international collaborations with it. And so I can say that I don't require there to be immigration for me to still collaborate. The internet enables that. These international conferences enable it. Okay.

Okay. So, Fareed, what do you say if all the world is this fertile landscape of communication, then who needs immigrants at that point? There's no question that you can do more electronically than you ever have been able to before. But, 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 9-11, there was a period where there was similar kinds of pauses and immigration slowdown and increased vetting. We didn't call it extreme vetting. 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 keep doing this kind of thing, it's not the end of the world, but it certainly will mean that the center of mass will shift. And frankly, the Europeans are more than happy to pick this up.

There's a French presidential candidate. I just read about this. He said, I just want everybody to know, anyone who finds that they're 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. Let me tell you something. And that alone should be 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. Let me tell you something. You're going to start treating your woman a little differently. I had a similar earlier thought when I read this news article about this attempt to get ready for the next asteroid so we can deflect it out of the sky. 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. Right. 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 have conversations at their table whether or not you're invited. 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 45 degree angle where you are slowly sliding down. You're trying to slide down. You're clawing it, but it's not getting any traction. You're just sliding away. So that's what it is. Out of view. Out of view.

We've got time for one quick one, if you've got a quick one. Okay, here's a quick one. And this is for Farid. As terrible as things are, could better relations with Russia improve science and space exploration? Yeah. Sure. Look, we should have good relations with Russia. We should space exploration. 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. The problem is, you know, they have space ambitions. When Russia invades another, its neighbor, when it annexes 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, to cooperate, but also have certain rules of the road that matter. But I think that ultimately... Wait, just right there, wait. So 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's transgressive behavior in the world from one country to another, that should not have to stop what might be science or space collaborations. I think, in fact, it's all the more reason to do it because you want to build as many bonds as you can between countries. 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 animals. And the most important thing he points out is whenever we encountered diversity, we flourished, you know, just even scientifically. But as human beings, the more

we can encounter the other, the more we can collaborate with people who think differently, look differently, study differently, the end product is better. Who's 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? I haven't heard that one, so I think we're going to say it was Neil deGrasse Tyson. You can take it. Yeah, so what you say is, I think, can be clearly demonstrated, but there's the soul speaks differently about who you want to hang out with. We want to create the homogeneous bubble.

But that's where you want to get past your comfort zone and into that area of unfamiliarity. It's hard. I think it's hard. 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. We've been part of the same tribes for thousands and thousands. If you think about it, for most of human existence, we grew up, we grew old and died one mile from where we were born. Right. And now we're saying to all these people who come from.

Abandon that and embrace the whole world as your tribe. And even though those tribes are not sending you their best, they're sending you criminals, they're sending you rapists. It sounds like it's time to end this episode. I think that's. We're out of time, Chuck. I'm talking about the tribes. I'm sending you rapists. That sounds like it's time to end this episode. We're out of time, Chuck. I'm talking about the tribes. Thanks, Chuck, for co-hosting today, and thank you to our special guest, CNN.

What do they call you guys? Anchors. CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria. You all know his show, GPS, and don't miss it. 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.