Panel Discussion of 2017 Outlook
ZAKARIA: One week down, 51 to go -- 2017 came in like a lion; will it go out like a lion or a lamb? We have assembled a terrific panel together to gaze into the future and tell us what they see. Tina Brown founded The Daily Beast, edited magazines like The New Yorker and Vanity Fear and now runs Tina Brown Live Media, which brings us Women in the World and lots more. Ian Bremmer is the Eurasia Group, a global political risk consultancy and the author of "Superpower: Three Choices for America's Role in the World." Neil DeGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, is the director of the Hayden Planetarium and the host of the terrific StarTalk podcast, which is also now a book. And Bret Stephens is a Pulitzer-Prize- winning foreign affairs columnist for The Wall Street Journal. If you're unimpressed by that -- those resumes, there's...</s>BROWN: I am so optimistic about medical breakthroughs. I think we hear so much about the, sort of, sexy tech companies, you know, Uber and Amazon and Facebook. But the really exciting things are about the nexus between technology and medicine and all the amazing breakthroughs. So we now have -- F.T. just this week reported on these new drugs that are preventative, which really have an effect on AIDS. We might see the final nail in the coffin on AIDS in the next couple of years. Even though we have 36 million people who are HIV-positive, these new preventative cures are really going to be extraordinary. We've got new diagnostics in terms of, you know, genetics, cancer with immune therapies. We have, you know, so many new things happening -- Alzheimer's and depression. I think that these things are going to get stamped out, sort of, starting, in a way, throughout this year.</s>ZAKARIA: And unlike companies like Uber and the tech revolution in San Francisco, they don't deny anybody jobs. People in the Midwest can be...</s>BROWN: Well, and they actually save lives, right, which is incredible. So I'm excited about that.</s>ZAKARIA: All right, Neil, I'm sure you can one-up on the, sort of -- on the optimism about science.</s>TYSON: Don't get me started here. Hold me back.</s>ZAKARIA: That's why you think it's very important to have big science projects like the mission to Mars, things -- you know, you want to go big everywhere?</s>TYSON: Well, if you go big, what happens is -- if you go big and audacious, you can attract the best people because you're challenging them to the limits of their intellectual abilities, which people like to have happen. So, for example, if we went to Mars and we announced that, what do you need? You need, like, the best engineers of all stripes. You need biologists, if you're looking for life. You need chemists if you want to till the soil. And there will be patents; there will be innovations; there will be discoveries all along the way. In Mars, you might want to extract the water from -- submerged in the soil. There won't be much, but someone who wants to do that might invent some device that you bring back to Earth and extract water from the deserts of Sahara. But if you told that person, "I need you to get the water out of Sahara," that might not excite them as much as doing that on Mars. So if you want to -- from my experience and my read of the history of innovation, if you want to turn -- if you want to transform a sleepy country into an innovation nation, the large projects tend to galvanize everybody's energy and everybody's capacity to think about the future. All right. Meanwhile, back on Earth, what are you...</s>BROWN: Yeah, I want to stay on that one...</s>TYSON: OK, good. Let's stay there. We can stay on that...</s>STEPHENS: Well, I mean, two things: starting at home, I actually think, despite all the discontent with the election of Donald Trump, the fact that you have a Republican president, a Republican house, a Republican Senate, means you're actually going to get policies through. And that -- I don't think it's irrational exuberance around the market and 20,000. I do think you're going to get tax reduction on corporates. I do think you're going to get some regulatory pull-back on things that will help industry. I absolutely believe that we're going to spend more on infrastructure. And I think that, at the end of the year, people are going to be looking at the United States as still having a robust economy. Boy, we need that in 2017. The other thing I would say that makes me optimistic is that, in a world where leadership from politicians is seen as lacking and lacking in trust, that we're going to find new leaders born out of adversity from very unorthodox places. It will be, you know, sort of, individuals, young people, your new Malalas, that people haven't heard of before, that are going to capture the -- the imagination. They're going to inspire and they're going to make a difference. Some will be private-sector; some will be public intellectuals; some will be religious figures. But I think 2017 is going to show that the diversity of the human spirit actually is going -- it makes much more of a difference than the traditional organizations and institutions that we feel constrained by.</s>ZAKARIA: You showcase a lot of these leaders, who happen to be women, in your conferences.</s>BROWN: Absolutely. I mean, I think that's one of the I things that I'm extraordinarily optimistic about as well. And, you know, I think that the women are absolutely charging ahead in the most fabulous way and particularly younger women, too. And the millennial young women, I think, who are, kind of, a little smug, thinking, you know, that a tweet is a vote, now are realizing that a lot of things are in danger and a lot of things are in peril, and actually will bring forth a lot of very energized -- as you say, sort of, out of adversity, some incredible young leaders are going to come forward.</s>ZAKARIA: All right. We are going to tease to Bret Stephens. That is, you have to stay with me to find out what Bret Stephens is -- is excited about and worried about. We're also going to talk about other things. Don't -- don't go away.