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jasper, 2019 and one of the few things in life that's better than you ever think it is are grandchildren. do you get to spend enough time with them? >> no. and i was spoiled during covid because new york city was hit so hard that chelsea and my son-in-law mark and our grandkids moved up to a guest house next door to our house for

the duration of covid and they would come over in the morning and my then jasper was a seven-month-old toddler. charlotte and aden would bust in the house to tell us to stop whatever we were doing and we were going to play. they wrote plays that hillary and i role played. and it was a great experience in my life. so i got addicted to spending time with my grandchildren and watching their evolution. so by definition. they are getting busy now and if you haven't already noticed, at some point, things happen that are more important than spending time with your grandparents and

then you have to fit yourself into their schedule, which i am happy to do. it's been a great joy. >> so, mr. president, we have had a lot of interaction over a long period of time. one of the tough things for me in january of 1993 was knowing that i was older than the president of the united states. it's a shock, i was one month older, but i would like to take you back 28 years and this was august 29, 1996. we set forth on a journey to bring our vision to the country, to keep the american dream alive for all who are going to work for it, to make our american

community stronger, to keep america the world's strongest force for peace, freedom and prosperity. do you remember that when you said that? president clinton: yes. >> that was at the convention, 1996. and we are so lucky, it was 12 years ago in the exact same room, almost the exact same time that president clinton was here setting a mission and vision for us at this time and the words from that day are probably even more poignant today than they were then. let's look at a couple of clips from you from 12 years ago. president clinton: everybody is

younger. still more diverse and still more open to immigrants and best place for r&d. it's a great mistake to write this. we have to get out a denial and back into the future of this business. >> that optimistic view, do you still share that optimism today? president clinton: what i said was, it is more true today. any time you spend all your time trying to settle past grievancees or trying to instead of figuring out how to make common cause or a shared future we all want, i think you are in trouble. and we have been through a

period for any number of reasons, the political rewards of grievance-based politics and essentially name calling and being negative have been so immense that nobody could give them up. knowing all along, including members of the mainstream media, not just the right-wing media, knowing all along if you didn't give them up, it put our system and our country and our kid and our grandchildren's future in peril. and i basically i think that's what this shabang has come down to. it's not tribalism. we are all triebles. we can't build identities except with reference to other people

to other identities. and like, you know, we are in the basketball playoffs now. one of those teams, you can't be for the other. it's a zero-sum game. there is inclusive tribalism and the big political benefits comes from tribalism. but it is a potential, endless disaster because our capacity, if we cooperate to solve every challenge we face including the things we have done so much wonderful work over the years is unlimited. but we can't do it unless we work together -- that requires us to work. we have all these differences, but what we have in common and so much more important that we work on that i think is the key

question facing not just the united states but so many countries in the world today. >> so over the years, you have done so many things to build what i would call the social capital of our country pulling us together. and when we look at it from a financial standpoint, the g.d.p. of our country, the gross national product, which is the largest in the world is around $27 trillion. our debt is around 34 trillion. the total financial assets of our country that you measure financially real estate, factories, hornets investments, is around $139 trillion. but all of these pale in comparison to what is the estimated and social capital of

a country that you worked most of your life to build health, education, et cetera and the tribalism you are talking about here is the risk to that social capital you spent your life building from that standpoint. and so let's maybe start with the first element that you spent a lot of time and that's health care. most of the people in this room, mr. president, i don't remember -- they're too young to remember that in 1995, when we tried to accelerate medical research and said, ok, if there's a treatment that works, we don't need to get it to phase three, get it to cancer patients. there was one leader that signed it into law fast track for cancer patients, and that was yourself.

[applause] >> and many of the people are too young to remember, but if you want to know why did we have a vaccine in a year, not in 10 years, we had a march in 1998, a half of million people in washington and around the country came together and they had been trying for decades to increase the n.i.h. budget. and within two months you signed into law, the doubling of the n.i.h. budget, something that could not be done for two decades and the incremental benefits for our society now totals $500 billion. i want to thank you. every single person on the planet has benefited from that decision you made.

[applause] >> so through the clinton health access initiative, through others' initiatives, you long focused on improving public health globally. what is the most important lessons you have learned that can make us more effective in creating solutions? president clinton: first of all, there are problems that you know with the tools at hand, you can solve. then there are problems that you know with tools at hand, you can alleviate and not solve. and then there are those that you don't know how to deal with because there aren't enough medical breakthroughs. you have to figure out what kind of issue you are dealing with. when i started on working on

aids for example, we made a couple of decisions. first that, i wasn't bill gates and didn't have all the money in the world and i did know a lot of people and put together pim that could solve problems. the first vision is we would not go into a country unless the government welcomed us but we would not decline to go into a country just because i disagreed with the government. if they were willing to protect the integrity of public health work. and were they not willing to ask us to do anything that was corrupt, i would go anywhere. and i cut a deal with the united states government and george bush was president and everybody followed it, i never did anything they didn't know what i was doing and they didn't object

to what i was doing as long as it was all transparent. and then we just started working on ways to do things faster, cheaper and better. the first thing we had to do was to realize we had a traditional system which has served america and the western world very well of giving a fairly extended patent for the development of new medicines because it requires a lot of advanced money to develop this medicine and you have to give people a chance to recover their investment. but in the case of aids, it put us in a terrible position because there was so many people who had it around the world and people were dying like flies and we needed to do something to speed it up. in the middle of this there was an argument of poor people can be trusted to take a drug that

has to be taken three times a day and pharmaceutical companies move out, and all these issues. and nelson mandela and i found ourselves working -- it was a joy. he had more than a decade to live then, we had a great time, but we were trying to put together a system that would address the cases with more aid, but also not allowing the patent laws to be so severe that huge numbers of people would die before we could get any medicine into country a, b or c. and there was an exception in the international patent arena for such cases so you could save lives. so we just -- i just kept trying

to work with everybody in figuring out ways to do things faster, cheaper, better and we came up with the clinton health access initiative. we would find a way to do things faster, cheaper and better. even now after all these years, 30 million lives have been saved and half the people on earth getting aids medicine get it from contracts we negotiated and 80% of the children on earth get it. and all we did was to figure out how to maximize production. we helped generic drug companies in india and south africa become more efficient. we worked on supply chains but i never dreamed and all we were

doing is give us more money. and one reason public health has gotten so much money is that people know that it has dramatically improved the efficiency. and you had a lot to do with that too. and how we make investment decisions. i think it's going to be much harder because of the challenge with climate change, the overlap of health and climate problems and after years and years and years public health being the adequately funded program, i think there is a lot of competition for money and a question about whether this new sort of divisive nationalism is going to undermine a commitment to public health.

you keep wondering when we get to quit. and the answer is never. i mean, you got to show up. [applause] president clinton: any way, that's what i have learned, you can't quit and keep looking for answers and can't do it without cooperation and cooperation between the private sector and public sector and civil society and cooperation ruers lines that would otherwise divide. if you want to save lives, it has to become your number one priority. >> mr. president for 31 years at the milken institute we put up slides reminding everyone that 50% of all economic growth can be traced to public health and research. and partnership and initiative that you launched in conjunction

with president bush, people that had the most incidents of aids and h.i.v. were subsahara africa. you had countries at one time median age was 15. a woman had 95% chance of passing aids to their child when it was born and the work you have done, today that passage of passing it is down to 2%. [applause] >> the children of the world now have been born without aids and we are about to see for the first time in history the doubling of life expectancy in one generation and that partnership, those initiatives you launched changed the world and we are seeing it today. and today's there is a potential

if you have have -- hiv-aids, you have to take three pills a year to bring it under control. and you talked about it. let's see another clip from 2012 on the future of america. president clinton, 2012. president clinton: a lot of you got here into these chairs because of your exroorld ability, because of your assistance or whatever. every single one of us had somebody some way that helped us. we had a teach esh, or somebody that gave us a job in the summertime or somebody that helped us get into a university or our first job out of school, something. we all had that. >> so talked here about a mentor.

and one of the other initiatives you focused on is education. and so i thought i would put up a quote from two people spanning 30 years. one, a person you have just mentioned on the stage, nelson mandela. let's see what he had to say on the day he was sworn in as the leader of south africa. the importance of education. education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. and on the stage a few days ago was elon musk and let's say what he said about education. you can learn anything for free. m.i.t. almost has all of its lessons online. starlink improves the people's standard of living around the

world. can you think of a mentor, a teacher that had to put you and gave you the energy as a young boy? president clinton: yeah. -- first of all, my sixth grade teacher he died at 90 and i was governor then. and once a year, she listened to me speak and was frail and in a body brace. but on the last day of my career in elementary school, she said i can -- can't tell whether you are going to become governor or a permanent prisoner. [laughter] president clinton: and i said why? she said it is entirely dependent on whether you learn

when to listen and when to talk. but you keep getting them mixed up. so she had a big impact on me. and i loved her very much. i had an eighth grade science teacher who taught me the most important lesson i have ever known. arkansas teachers were the second poorest in the country. so he was an ex-coach and they got a reputation for being dumb. thm guy was really smart. and he said, this is the last day of school, you know, five years from now you aren't going to remember anything you learned in eighth grade science. if you don't remember anything else, remember this, i guess i

should say, he wasn't a convention neal handsome man and coke-bottle glasses and had a beak nose and he chewed cheap cigars in a plastic cigar holder and he kept getting heavier and couldn't afford to buy new clothes. and he knew this and his wife was beautiful and sister-in-law who was our history teacher. [laughter] president clinton: he said this has been 63 years. you remember anything anybody told you 63 years ago. he said you won't remember what you learned in eighth grade science. remember this. every single morning, i got up

and go into mill bathroom and throw water in my face and shairveg cream on and i shaved myself and i looked in that. vernon, you're beautiful. [laughter] president clinton: every single person wants to believe they are beautiful. that they matter. if you remember that one thing, it will take you a long way, veer bait im, word-for-word, that's what he told me 63 years ago. so i think you could say he had an influence on me. it's pretty good advice. how far did you get telling people how ugly they are? [laughter] president clinton: we should mrf

children around the world, this is an area we should be focused, the clinton foundation on. for people, you can google it. we spoke about chai, the clinton health access initiative which alan schwartz chairs today. but the clinton foundation really had three airyas of focus and if you go to the website you'll see them. one of them is really education. when you step back and look at these areas, of education and health equity. today as you know, the country has changed dramatically in demographics. and only 9.5% or less of americans today that were not born here were born in europe,

compared to 75% 60 years ago. so getting our diverse population into clinical trials is important. but how have you looked over the years at education and the challenges we've had in education over the years, and let's talk, you've had so many initiatives in this area, getting books to kid so they could read, etc. as you think back, what were the most effective in terms of education and maybe what were the least effective things you worked on? president clinton: first i should say, before i became president, i was governor for 12 years. that's the longest i ever had a job in my life, until i went to work for my foundation. and i spent an enormous am of time in the classroom and when i

took office, a national expert said we had the worst schools in the country. we had 370 school districts in a little state with only 2.5 million people. when i left office, same guy said that the most improved schools in america were in arkansas and south carolina. so i cared about this a lot. my daughter just gave an award to her elementary school principal who she stayed in touch with all this time. she loves this woman. so what did i learn? i think first of all, it's a mistake to assume that any people can't learn. that well over 90% of the people can learn, well over 90% of what

they need to know to triumph in the world. secondly, they'll learn more if it's interesting. so you have to really devote a serious amount of time to make that learning enterprise interesting and worth the time. and i think that's important. and thirdly, i think that there have to be an enormous effort made to keep people in school through high school and then to make interchangeable the avenues after high school, whether they are four-year universities or community colleges or various vocational efforts. so that we can establish a flowing system of lifetime learning that all of us will be

able to access. that's what i think is most important. but the most important thing is, not to give up on kids before they get started. and then the second most important thing -- [applause] is not to let people use economic and social and other disadvantages as an excuse not to learn. you know. the last thing i'll say, there was more than 20 years ago, way more than 20 years ago now, when i was a governor and reading all this material, there was a fascinating study done by the woodrow wilson school at princeton. and they studied all these kids, and this is back when the first

drug gangs were prominent, all the violence was going on in the 1980's, people were feel degree spare. and they studied all these kids. who had done well in spite of everything. and i'll never forget, the thing that -- the profile that made the greatest impression on me was a young black man who was one of four brothers, both of his parents were drug addicts. his grer took him in. she couldn't possibly manage them all. and ironically they live in harlem where my office is today. but the -- so -- but this kid was going to college and his three siblings were in prison. so he -- the study found -- they studied a dozen people like

this, rich to poor, they somehow all did well. and what the guy concluded who did the study was that there were no systems that solved all problems. so you had to have, for people who are highly at risk, at least one person who really cared about this young man or woman at a critical point in their lives. and this kid was going to college while his three siblings were in prison because when he was in grade school, he went by this man's newsstand on the streets of new york every day going to and from school and the guy made him show him his homework when he came home at night and made him prove when he went to school that he'd done his homework. he was the only male influence.

he said -- and he was self-aware, the student was. he said, this guy cared whether i lived or died. and my older siblings, they didn't know that. and he said i'm convinced that they were as smart as me, they'd have done well, if they just had one person. who cared whether they livid or died. interesting. [applause] mr. milken: mr. president, one of the things you launched in your education effort, one of the greatest logos, i don't know if you thought of it or someone else thought of it on your fawndation team, but it was two -- it was too small to fail. as you might know, the most important period of time in education, the highest rate of return, is 0-6. by the time you're 15, you have

to invest three times as much money to get the same results, and by the time you're 25, and by the time you're 30, you have to invest 10 times to get the same results. and he won a nobel prize for this work. at one time, i was the largest investor and we had 2,200 early child care. so i read this thing. too small to tail. i don't know if you -- to fail. i don't know if you create all the logos or not but early language, learning from birth, young children, almost 60%, when you go to that site and study it, of children, start kindergarten unprepared, mind their peers in critical language and reading skills. and you now, 1.4 million children you p provided books to their families.

160,000 parents, now was that your idea? too small to fail? president clinton: no. i wish i could take credit for it. i love it. it's one of my favorite projects. but it came out of work that my daughter, chelsea, leads with the team of our people who work with preschoolers. but it's been an incredible experience. i mean, we -- we have all kinds of partnerships that we work with and try to help succeed. but my favorite, i think, is the coin operated laundry association. think of this. and enormous percentage of lower income parents, they don't have

a washer or a dryer at home. they have to go to the laundry. and most of the time if they've got little kids, they've got to drag them along with them. and it's just a lot of dead time. so we got with the laundry folk they thought it was excite, they thought it would improve their business if they create a learning center in every laundry. i've got one about two miles from my house. in chap qua -- in chappaqua, new york. this has been one of the most exhilarating things we have ever done. and we've got them in juvenile courts in milwaukee. we've got them all over the country. all kinds of different settings. and i think it's really -- i

think it really works. it helps a lot of them in effect to make up for lost time early, as you point out. it's a lot easier to do it when they're 3 or 4 than later. my daughter's -- my daughter and her friends did that, not me. mr. milken: we have to get the e address of some of these coin-based laundry, maybe we can see it at work and reproduce it. it's interesting. in singapore, the number one extracurricular activity for kids is robotics and coding. coding to make the robots move. what you've done with early childhood education is so fantastic. i'd like to switch, when you talk about partnership, one of the things you have done over the years is create these partnerships. and it's been amazing. one of the ones that was most effective was with the american heart association.

and working with schools. 30 million children leading healthier lives. how did you and the heart association team up? president clinton: i didn't die when i had a heart problem. [laughter] so, you know, in 2004 i had thid up on me. i avoided a heart attack by the narrowest of margins. then i went to the hospital, columbia presbyterian, i had a quadruple bypass. i didn't have an option. it was crazy. i was both saved with and almost killed by the fact that i ran a lot when i was in the white house and then afterward. so when i got -- i should have

noticed when i got out that i couldn't run any distance anymore. but if i get about three quarters of a mile, i couldn't breathe. i'd stop. walk. everything would be fine. and i'd go run again. and i should have known i had blockage, and dumb me, i didn't. so the nice thing was, i lost a lot more weight for a lot less effort than i had before. i was really trim for my daughter's college graduation. and i nearly killed myself. [laughter] but afterwards, i wanted to do something. the american heart association contacted me. and i said look, i want to do something but i don't want to make public service announcements and all that, something that'll be gone with the wind. i said let's set up something that will systematically change the way kids are raised and

reduce the likelihood of type ii diabetes and its attendant consequences, one of which is a lot of heart attacks and strokes. and that was at the time probably the biggest public health problem young people had in america. type ii diabetes. and it was diabetes and its consequences were claiming, at the time, over 20% of all the medicaid spending, that's the government's program for poor people. it was horrible. so anyway. we did. and we got all the major soft drink companies, led by pepsi and coke, but a lot of others too, and they -- they joined together and with no tax, no soda pop tax, no nothing, they

agreed, we did get a waiver from the justice department, from the antitrust division, so we didn't seem to be too much collusion, and they helped us set up a program that cut calories going to kids in schools from drinks by 90%. 90%. without -- literally no laws, no taxes, no nothing. i -- i'll never forget, i said i know you guys have to sell stuff and you have to make money with these vending machines in schools. but if what you're doing giveus a a lot more customers that have their legs cut off at the knee by the time they're 35, it's not a very smart investment. and you may think that's a joke but when we had katrina hit the gulf coast, i was at an

unbelievable housing development in biloxi that had been built by a good friend of hillary's and mine, dorothy hight, who was head of the negro council of women until she died on the job at 98, you know, with her boots on. but anyway she built this housing unit and they had all just paid off 30-year mortgages when katrina came. so they found themselves homeless and in a fight with the insurance companies about whether it was covered. but the spokesperson they picked was this beautiful, articulate woman in her mid 30's who was already confined to a wheelchair because she's lost one leg that had been cut off at the knee because of the rampant spread of type ii diabetes, which is the kind you get from live, not the kind you're born with.

so anyway. long winded way of saying, this is a really big deal. and you have to find partners like the coin operated laundry association, you have to find partners like the people who came to help us after katrina, who started helping. and we have to prevent these things from happening. because we are -- we can't keep doing this. we have a negative population growth rate. and a lot of people are in categories where the life expectancy is not increasing. so if you get to be my age, michael's age, we still have -- we're in a sector that's as high as if we were japanese. but the death rate of americans under 65 has increased.

since we all know that the most important thing we can do is make sure every person as young as possible has a fully loaded ar-15, we're killing a lot of people at a young age under the guise of their freedom. and so -- which i hate. but anyway. [applause] this is out of balance and we have to do something about it. and i think the earlier the better. mr. milken: many people might wonder, where does your energy, persistence, and everything come from? it was december 31, 1993. you had not been president for a year and i'm in las vegas for new year's at a barbra streisand

concert at the m.g.m. and this was prepay-per-view. and when the concert ends and we're celebrating new year's, there's this woman with more energy than anyone i ever met who is, after the show is over, she's been there, she's up dancing, etc. we're in the dressing room. and she's talking to lawyerie, my wife, and myself. and barbra, quincy jones was with us. such unbelievable energy. that woman was your mother. december 31, 1993. the same woman that went to new orleans, to nursing school, with her energy, and one week later,

i read she passed away from cancer. talk to us a little bit about your relationship with your mom. president clinton: well, first of all, my mother fell in love with barbra streisand. late in life. mr. milken: so did my mother, i want you to know. president clinton: so they became friends at my inauguration. and i've got this picture of them walking off the stage, holding hands, from behind. and barbra streisand, somehow loved my mother, and she called her every week, once a week, every week, without fail, until she died. and so, for the rest of my life,

any time somebody says something negative about her, it's my position -- about being a temp represental -- a temperamental generalus or something, i said, until you're a temperamental genius you shouldn't attack her, because she treated my mother so well. my mother grew up in a fairly poor family in hope, arkansas. she had a tough life. her father -- my father, her first husband, died in a car wreck before i was born. then my stepfather, whom i genuinely love, was an interesting man, but the drank too much. and he caused a lot of trouble. for her. and she just kept surviving. she was widowed three times.

and she was married four times. and her last husband was a wonderful man who remained my friend until he died. but he -- but i'll never forget seeing her, i was trying to call my mother and the day she died, the first time i had gotten her on the phone, which, she was in las vegas the whole week. i said where have you been? she said, son, i'm having a good time. i didn't come out here to sit by the phone. [laughter] and she knew she was dying. she was a nurse anesthetist. they tried to get her to take

some -- various kinds of transplants because the cancer had spread from her breast to her bones. and she said no, i'm too old. i shouldn't take any of this technology or any opportunities away from young people. i've had a great life, i'm going to ride it out. and so i tried to get her to come to the white house for what i knew would be her only christmas at the white house. she said, you know, bill, i'd like to do that but i have got to go to vegas, the try sand concert. that's my number one priority. now if you can get me home, if you can get me home so i get there, i'll be there. i said mother, i'll take you home. so she came and i flew her home. we're sitting in her house on january -- on like december

27th. and i said -- she was writing a book about her life. and she knew. by then she was getting two transfusions a day to stay alive. so she looked like a million bucks but she was actually weak, you know. i said, what am i going to do if you don't finish this book? she looked at me and she said, you're going to finish it, of course. but she said, i know you. do not -- it is my book. so you can't change it. unless you find an honest, factual mistake. or unless you think i have been too mean to somebody who is still alive.

[laughter] i don't like being mean to people who are still alive, you don't seem so mean if they're already dead, you're just telling the truth. [laughter] so those are your instructions. she was amazing. mr. milken: mr. president, my father died of cancer in 1979, of melanoma. your mom died from a complication of breast cancer. and what you did in 1998 and set into motion, both of them today would have had longer lives, and we thank you for that and thank you for joining us today. [applause] president clinton: thank you all very >> saturday, former president trump speaks to supporters. our live coverage starts on c-span and online at c-span.org.

>> american history tv, saturday on c-span2, exploring the people and events that tell the american story. at 2:00 p.m. eastern, lauren thompson with her book "friendly enemies," talks about despite prohibitions against it, federal and union soldiers fraternize. at 3:00 p.m. eastern, remembering the korean war. alert korean war veteran and medal of honor recipient -- a late korean war veteran and medal of honor recipient. and at 7:00 p.m. eastern, the american history tv series congress investigates, looking at historic investigations that led to changes in policies and law. this week, the 1987 hearings on the iran affair, examining the

clandestine operation of selling missiles to iran in exchange of the release of hostages in lebanon with proceeds going to rebels in nicaragua. exploring the american story, watch erican history tv, saturday on c-span2. find a full schedule on your program guide or watcne anytime at c-span.org/history. sunday on "q&a," the author of " master, slave, husband, wife," recounting the story of two slaves and their journey of self emancition in 1848. >> there has been enslaved in -- they are husband-and-wife enslaved in georgia, and they decide to flee for freedom, not with any underground railroad, which doesn't reach where they

are in georgia, not by hiding and traveling by night, but they go out in the full light of day, disguised as master and slave, with ellen posing as the master and william playing the role of the slave, so that story group three from the beginning. sunday night on c-span's "q&a." you can listen to all of our podcasts on our free c-span now app. c-span is your unfiltered view of government. funded by these television companies and more, including charter indications . -- communications. >> charter is proud to be recognized as one of the best internet providers, and we are just getting started, building 100,000 miles of new infrastructure to reach those who need it most. >>