>>Tom Brokaw: First of all, I'm very happy
to be back at the Google Zeitgeist conference.
The last time I was here, I was with Yvon
Chouinard. Many of you may have remembered
his presentation, and they asked me if I could
match it and I said, "There's only one guy
in the world who could rise to that level
and it's my friend Ted Turner."
I want to just say at the outset that I sometimes
have to be a little careful about how I introduce
Ted because we have a strong personal relationship
and I have such an affection for him.
I was introducing him to a fusty New York
audience one time and I was trying to give
him a hard sell and I got kind of carried
away and I said, "I just want you to know
over the time that I've known Ted Turner,
I really have come to love him in every conceivable
way."
And he got up and said --
[Laughter]
-- "That's not true that he loves me in every
conceivable way."
He said, "His wife wouldn't like that and
my girlfriends wouldn't like that, so I don't
want you to think that."
The fact is that there is no more celebrated
or accomplished American in my lifetime than
Ted Turner in so many ways. We first knew
him as a champion sailor. He then, of course,
was the inventor of CNN, which reformatted
American journalism and journalism around
the world. A philanthropist.
An entrepreneur in sports and in movies, in
entertainment.
He is, as well, one of the great philanthropists
of his time with his work with the United
Nations Foundation.
I've always thought a metaphor for Ted really
was the 1979 Fastnet race.
Some of you may not be aware of it, but it
was 605 miles through some of the worst weather
in the North Atlantic. Ted stayed at the wheel
all night long of his sailing ship and won
the race. Other ships went -- other yachts
went down, lives were lost, but Ted prevailed.
He stormed -- he's sailed through a lot of
stormy seas since then, of course.
So I want to begin, Ted: You've -- you've
managed a lot of risk in your lifetime. You've
given the world examples of enormous enterprises
and daring ventures.
Are you an optimist right now or a pessimist?
>>Ted Turner: Can't afford to be a pessimist.
I was on the Calypso underwriting one of Captain
Cousteau's programming trips down the Amazon
and it was just when Reagan had been elected
president and he had just called the Soviet
Union "the evil empire."
And that will be probably the last thing that
a person says before the bombs drop will be
calling somebody an evil empire. You've got
to be very careful who you call an evil empire.
I don't think -- it's like burning the Koran.
That's not a good way to make friends and
influence people. And I believe that -- I
believe, as an optimist, that what you want
to do in life is make as many friends as you
can. And that's the reason why we should do
away with war, because now with globalization,
we're doing business all over the world and
you don't want to bomb your customers, you
know?
[Laughter]
That's --
[Applause]
I found that to be the case with CNN.
I mean, we were doing business in every country
in the world, including North Korea. I think
we were the only company in the world that
was doing business everywhere. And I just
 -- we couldn't go to war with anybody without
bombing our customers. So I became a man of
peace because I want to protect my customers.
>>Tom Brokaw: Let me ask you about journalism
and cable news especially, 24-hour cable news,
and the impact that it's having these days
on the domestic political discourse in this
country and the way Americans see the world
as a result of the prism that is presented
to them not just through cable news but the
symbiotic relationship between cable news
and the Internet.
>>Ted Turner: Let me finish the first question
because I didn't get --
Captain Cousteau. I said, "Captain Cousteau.
I'm getting discouraged."
He said, "Ted, even if we knew for sure that
we were going to lose, what could men of good
conscience do but keep working to the very
end to save humanity?"
And so that's my look. I cannot -- I hardly
 --
Every now and then I'll harbor a pessimistic
thought, but we've got to remember this -- this
is -- this global climate change situation
and the nuclear situation, these are the greatest
problems that humanity has ever faced, and
we really aren't that -- we haven't had much
time to equip ourselves for them.
The Industrial Revolution only started 200
years ago. The age of flight and nuclear weapons
are just a little over 50 years. We really
 -- we're being asked to deal with the most
complicated problems and we don't -- we haven't
had enough time to get the social structure
worked out.
So we're having to learn so fast.
I like us. You know, I know we're hairless
apes, but I still like us. I mean, I -- you
know, I think we're pretty cool.
>>Tom Brokaw: You like the big challenge.
>>Ted Turner: And I like gorillas, too, and
bonobos. I think it would be a real shame
if we killed them all.
>>Tom Brokaw: We'll get to that in a minute.
>>Ted Turner: So anyway, basically I'm an
optimist.
>>Tom Brokaw: All right. But let me ask you
about television news and the Internet and
the ability of people to --
>>Ted Turner: That's a big question.
>>Tom Brokaw: You're a big guy with a big
view of the world.
>>Ted Turner: Yeah. Well, I think -- I think
because of the competition and the fact that
the news -- there's only so much really important
news every day, that -- and with the proliferation
of news channels all over the world, not just
here in the United States, there's tremendous
pressure to get people to watch these channels
so they can sell advertising for a higher
price.
So they go to more sensational -- to me, trivial
 -- programming and I think it hurts us because
we need good solid information now more than
ever.
And my greatest regret in life, other than
the failure of my marriages, was losing control
of CNN, because if I still had control of
CNN, I would have the courage to stick with
more important news and more international
news and try -- because we're not going to
make it through this difficult time without
good information.
We're going to have to mobilize all of our
institutions: education, government, philanthropy,
and business.
Our major institutions worldwide are going
to have to mobilize because these problems
we have right now are global problems and
they can only be solved by everybody in the
world working together.
I mean, and if we don't -- if we fail, we're
going to have a hard time looking our grandchildren
in the eye because we do really have the information
that we need to handle these problems.
>>Tom Brokaw: Are we pandering to fear right
now and some people say we're dumbing down
America, the way we --
>>Ted Turner: Yes, I think so. I think so.
I think at a time when we need the best information,
the most accurate, that we deal with complicated
issues in a mature, adult way. We're playing
with the future of our existence.
>>Tom Brokaw: But there are economic consequences,
as you --
>>Ted Turner: There are. Short-term economic
consequences.
That's another thing. I don't think -- I'm
not -- the country with the biggest GDP doesn't
mean squat to me. The country that does the
most good is what counts as far as I'm concerned.
Hell, I was worth $10 billion. I've given
myself almost into the poorhouse. A combination
of --
>>Tom Brokaw: Oh, no. Wait a minute..
>>Ted Turner: -- of stupid business deals.
>>Tom Brokaw: My beating heart. I know.
[Laughter]
>>Ted Turner: Well, if I had the $10 billion
that I had for a few moments 10 years ago,
if I had that, I mean I would have put another
billion dollars in the United Nations Foundation
by now, at least.
Anyway, you know, when Gates and Buffett came
out with this thing and said, "You know, we
should all give half our money away," hell,
I did it 10 years ago. You know, been there,
done that. Where do we go from here?
[Laughter]
>>Tom Brokaw: You gave it to the market, however.
You gave it to Time Warner AOL, not to social
causes.
>>Ted Turner: Right.
[Laughter]
>>Ted Turner: I've seen it from both sides.
[Laughter]
>>Ted Turner: I've had the most interesting
life. I really --
>>Tom Brokaw: No one here will dispute that.
>>Ted Turner: I'm not going to say any more
than that.
>>Tom Brokaw: What are you and Boone Pickens
up to?
>>Ted Turner: Well, we hit it off together.
We agree about the energy situation on most
points. And although natural gas has kind
of taken it on the chin in California, it
turns out these old fuels like oil -- well,
the problems we have in the Gulf of Mexico
and the explosion there, I mean, it's even
 -- it's not safe to deal with coal, and the
miners are getting killed all over the world.
I mean, nobody's ever been killed by solar
power, I don't think.
And I'm building a 250-acre, $100 million
 -- I'm partners, junior partners, with -- and
we're building one of the largest solar arrays
in the world in New Mexico. It's going to
power 9,000 homes. And I'm excited to finally
get into alternative energy in a major way.
And I intend to make a little money, too.
>>Tom Brokaw: What do you think of the people
who just refuse to believe that, if not global
warming, even global climate change?
There are prominent members of the United
States Senate, for example --
>>Ted Turner: Yes.
>>Tom Brokaw: -- James Inhofe from Oklahoma
 --
>>Ted Turner: But, you know, there are people
who don't believe in God. You've got to go
 -- you've got to hope that you can convince
the majority to go along with what's intelligent.
And if we can't, then we fail. And if we fail,
we'll pay the consequences.
And already, a billion people go to bed hungry
tonight in this world, out of our 7 billion
people that are here, and they're paying the
consequences of our mistakes.
We've got to stop doing the dumb things and
start doing the smart things.
>>Tom Brokaw: What are the principal dumb
things that we're doing?
>>Ted Turner: We're not stabilizing the population.
Half the women in the world still don't have
equal rights with men.
We need to -- if we're going to stabilize
the population, the best way to do it is to
educate the women and give them equal opportunities
with men.
It's the half -- the population is only growing
in the half of the world where women don't
have equal rights with men, where women are
treated as slaves.
Now, you can look back. In 1900, only a hundred
years ago, none of the women in the world
had equal rights with men, and today half
the women in the world do.
That's huge progress.
A hundred years ago, we abolished slavery.
We do not -- you know, not on any kind of
scale, we do not have slavery. We have -- you
know, we can pat ourselves on the back for
a lot of good things that we've done.
On the other hand, we have not abolished nuclear
weapons yet. We're working on it. I mean,
one way to end the whole thing in an afternoon
is push the button in Moscow or Washington
and --
>>Tom Brokaw: Or Pakistan.
>>Ted Turner: -- we could blow ourselves up.
I mean, we already have designed, built, implemented,
installed, and armed a situation where within
30 minutes the majority of the people in the
world are dead.
Now, is that smart?
[Laughter]
>>Ted Turner: Is that real -- why -- and we
refuse to -- at the United Nations, the presidents
of all the countries at the U.N. agreed unanimously
that we should get rid of nuclear weapons.
Well, why aren't we doing it?
That's what I call dumb.
Because we know what we want to do. And everybody
wants to do it. The Chinese have figured it
out. The Russians have figured it out. We've
figured it out.
I mean, these things don't make us safe, they
make us more dangerous. These things are to
blow ourselves up. Why do we want to blow
ourselves up?
I mean I know some people might want to, but
I don't think the majority do.
[Laughter]
>>Ted Turner: God help us if we do. Then let's
go ahead and do it. Hell, I --
[Laughter]
>>Ted Turner: It would be less work.
[Laughter]
>>Ted Turner: This going around trying to
save the world, boy, is a big job.
[Laughter]
>>Tom Brokaw: Well, you're the man for it.
>>Ted Turner: I'm not saying be pessimistic,
but, you know, don't -- get good odds, you
know, if you bet.
The trouble is, who's going to be there to
collect when the bombs go off? Nobody.
>>Tom Brokaw: So share with this audience
your exchange with President Obama when he
was just a candidate.
>>Ted Turner: I talked to him.
>>Tom Brokaw: And tell us about it.
>>Ted Turner: Well, I told him I'd help him
any way I could and I wouldn't ask anything
in return.
He said, "Well, you don't need anything."
[Laughter]
>>Ted Turner: He was right.
>>Tom Brokaw: You just heard your friend Jim
Wolfensohn and Professor Roubini talk about
the position of the United States in this
global economy, especially against India and
China.
>>Ted Turner: I don't see it that way.
>>Tom Brokaw: All right.
>>Ted Turner: I see India, China, and the
United States all in the same basic boat.
If we don't deal with the survival issues,
stabilizing the population, feeding everybody,
working together, doing away with war and
conflict, getting rid of nuclear weapons,
if we don't do those things, the rest of it
is not going to matter.
You know, when you're dead, it doesn't matter
whether you're a Chinaman or an Indian.
[Laughter]
>>Ted Turner: What I want to do is see everybody
be alive.
And what we just need to do is start acting
like intelligent, educated, decent, kind-hearted
human beings.
>>Tom Brokaw: You see much evidence of that
in the political culture in this country today?
>>Ted Turner: Ah, um ...
[Laughter]
>>Ted Turner: There are some things that -- there
seems to be a lot of trivialization and not
a spirit of working together. I think we -- I'd
like to see the parties try and work together
to deal with our common problems instead of
being so polarized. I think we're getting
nowhere.
And the fact that we have gone nowhere as
far as, at the federal level, as far as our
energy policy, I mean, it is just very disheartening
for me to see us in the position, basically,
we were after Kyoto 10 years ago. We haven't
learned. That's one things that Boone Pickens
and I do definitely agree on. And that's why
we've done this sort of program four different
times. It's kind of like Mo and Joe and Curly,
the Three Stooges.
>>Tom Brokaw: Ted, I know of your personal
commitment to energy and rearranging consumption
practices in this country and where we go
from here. But at the same time the two of
you live very large. You've got homes, airplanes
and other things. And that's become kind of
the model for this country for a lot of people,
which is who's got the most money, who's got
the most toys at the end of their lives, they
win.
Does that fight against the idea of trying
to have a more conservative-minded country
when it comes to energy consumption and proportion
in our lives?
>>Ted Turner: Yes.
>>Tom Brokaw: But you're not prepared to change?
>>Ted Turner: Yes.
I'd change. But I -- for instance, I couldn't
have come down here if I didn't have a plane.
[Laughter]
>>Tom Brokaw: You could have been with me
running through the Salt Lake City airport
and getting on terminal D9 and getting on
the last flight to Phoenix, but that wouldn't
have turned out too well probably.
>>Ted Turner: You know, It's -- overall, I'm
sequestering more carbon than I'm creating.
[Laughter]
>>Tom Brokaw: But how do we get the country
to think about proportion and use and appropriate
size -- vehicles, housing --
>>Ted Turner: Well, in all fairness, appropriate
is defined to some degree by who's defining
it. You know, what might be appropriate for
 -- that's one of the problems. We don't all
want to live in exactly the same size --
>>Tom Brokaw: Oh, of course not.
>>Ted Turner: -- apartment and whatnot. They
tried that in Russia, and it was pretty boring.
>>Tom Brokaw: But the dialogue about what's
appropriate and whether you can live --
>>Ted Turner: There were no individual houses
built in Russia during the Soviet Union time.
>>Tom Brokaw: I understand that, but --
>>Ted Turner: All just flat, all the same
size, all the same shape.
>>Tom Brokaw: But to be perfectly wonkish
for just a moment, in France and in Germany
20 years ago and in the United States the
average size of the house was about the same,
about 1400 square feet or 1500 square feet.
We went up to 2500 square feet. McMansions
populated --
>>Ted Turner: 60,000 square feet.
>> Tom Brokaw: And all the way up. And now
they're beginning to come back down again.
>>Ted Turner: That's because of the economy.
People would -- and you -- you've been all
my houses.
>>Tom Brokaw: Not all of them. I'm trying
to work my way through as many as I can. A
lot of them.
>>Ted Turner: I haven't been extraordinarily
wasteful in the size.
>>Tom Brokaw: No, no. They're appropriate
homes.
[Laughter]
[Applause]
There are just a lot of them.
>>Ted Turner: Appropriate for a billionaire.
>>Tom Brokaw: Right.
>>Ted Turner: Barely.
>>Tom Brokaw: One of the essential truths
in the military culture is that you don't
want to fight the last war. But we always
are fighting the last war on the same terms.
If you apply that to where we are in the world
 --
>>Ted Turner: It's time for the last war.
Period. Why don't we make the war in Afghanistan
the last war? Let's get out and get out and
stay out. Of everywhere.
>>Ted Turner: And what do you think about
Islamic rage? Do you think it's real as a
threat to this country?
>>Ted Turner: I'll tell you one thing. I try
to make friends, not enemies. And the best
way to make friends is to be friendly. And
I've been all over the world. And, for the
most part, I made friends. I made from Fidel
Castro to Gorbachev and Vladimir Putin and,
you know, the Chinese.
I --
>>Tom Brokaw: Do you have any friends in the
Islamic world?
>>Ted Turner: I do. I do. We have representation
on both the board of the Nuclear Threat Initiative
and the United Nations Foundation from the
Islamic world. You bet. You got to have.
>>Tom Brokaw: But how would you deal with
the objective reality that there are, in the
Madrasahs in India or in Pakistan, especially,
and in Afghanistan and other areas of the
Middle East and Somalia, a very narrow view
of the world about how a young Muslim, for
example, should live his life, primarily,
which is to join Jihad against the western
world?
>>Ted Turner: And every one of those countries,
those groups, none of them are for equal rights
for women either, are they? I don't think
so. Not a one.
>>Tom Brokaw: No.
>>Ted Turner: And the rest of the world is
heading towards -- so we're headed towards
a world where women have equal rights with
men. The question is will we get there before
we destroy ourselves?
Because I think, when women do have equal
rights with men -- I've been advocating for
years that only women should be able to serve
public office anywhere in the world for 100
years. And if we did that, we wouldn't -- war
would end. There would be a lot more money
spent on healthcare and education and a lot
less on the military. And it would be a much
better, more peaceful world with women running
it for a while. And men could do everything
else.
You know, they could be in education and science
and business and -- just politics. Let the
women -- give them something to do.
[Laughter]
Let them deal with it. Ha-ha. I -- I would
rather have my mom run the world than my dad.
[Laughter]
>>Tom Brokaw: That's a whole other subject
that we probably don't want to get into here.
If you were starting over now as an entrepreneur,
given all the technology --
>>Ted Turner: What would I do? Energy. Energy,
my man. 30 years ago I would have said plastics.
But --
[laughter]
Energy. Clean renewable energy because everybody's
got to have it and quick. That's one of the
things that we fail to do it at our peril.
And every day that we wait -- the sunshine
is right there. It's just waiting to be tapped.
All we got to do is capture it and distribute
it, and our energy problems are over. You
can put solar panels on top of a little hut
in Africa and give people lights so their
kids can get educated. That's -- you know,
we got to -- everybody's got to be educated,
too, in the new world.
>>Tom Brokaw: You and I once talked about
this one night after a day of fishing. I asked
you about what made you the greatest sailor
in the world when you were sailing. And you
told me I thought a fascinating story. You
said that you lost more races than you won
when you were a young man. You lost a lot
between the time when you started sailing
competitively until what? You were at Brown
when you were a freshman?
>>Ted Turner: Right. Broke through.
>>Tom Brokaw: And then you began to win.
>>Ted Turner: Yes.
>>Tom Brokaw: Is that a lesson for life for
you?
>>Ted Turner: Absolutely. Keep trying. Keep
working at it. Never give up. Quitters never
win. Winners never quit.
In the first five years I had the baseball
team, we came in last every single year in
our division, setting a record that stood
for all time for the most consecutive losses
in divisional play. And then after that we
turned it around. And we won, like, 19 straight
divisional titles, which set a record in all
sports for the most wins of anybody. You bet
your ass, buddy! We weren't losing in the
beginning. We were just learning how to win.
The trouble is you got to live long enough
to start winning, you know?
[Laughter]
>>Tom Brokaw: Well, you were the most successful
sailor this country's ever had. And then you
walked away from it.
>>Ted Turner: I did that because I was neglecting
my family. And CNN had just started, and I
figured if I wasn't there to work hard with
CNN, that I'd go broke. And that would not
be good.
>>Tom Brokaw: And you almost did go broke.
>>Ted Turner: I came within a gnat's hair.
>>Tom Brokaw: You're going to go Newport tomorrow
to sail for the first time.
>>Ted Turner: In a long time.
>>Tom Brokaw: What's the race?
>>Ted Turner: It's the 12-meter race. They
invited me to come back, kind of like an old-timers
deal.
>>Tom Brokaw: The boats will be different
now because they'll be wired in a way that
they weren't when you were sailing.
>>Ted Turner: Yeah, but it's the same old
boat that I was racing in -- the American
Eagle, which I owned in '69 and '70. And I
raced it, so it will be like coming home.
It's even the same color.
>>Tom Brokaw: And the crew will say: Ted,
the computer printout says this is what we
ought to do." And the wind direction, according
to the computer is --
>>Ted Turner: Yeah, I'll do it.
>>Tom Brokaw: You're going to do it that way
or the old way?
>>Ted Turner: Combination of the two. But
I'll be rusty. And I'm racing with guys that
have been sailing all the time. So I probably
won't do too well. But I'm going to be out
there anyway.
>>Tom Brokaw: I heard from a mutual friend
of ours, Tom McGuane, who covered sailing
for "Sports Illustrated" at one point, described
when the computer began to take over sailing
and people were measuring the wind and where
they should tack and so on, you instead would
walk in and look at the charts and say, "We're
going to tack right there."
And one day you said to me there was something
that you had when you were on the wheel that
you could be 20 seconds ahead on a given course,
and then one of your crew members would take
over, hold the same course and they would
catch up until you got back on the wheel again.
Is that about life as well, the touch that
you have and the intuition that comes with
a lifetime of training and something that
is just, if you will, codified in you? Does
that make sense?
>>Ted Turner: Hmm-mm.
[Laughter]
Too complicated.
>>Tom Brokaw: Are there things that you do
that you know that are just intuitive --
>>Ted Turner: Yes.
>>Tom Brokaw -- that grow out of your life
experiences and who you are?
>>Ted Turner: Yes. I think a lot, and I spend
my time with intelligent people. I don't spend
my time with a bunch of dumb dumbs.
You know, I want to get smarter all the time.
And because I think it's really important
for our survival for us to be just as smart
as we can possibly be right now. And that
means we got to be thinking all the time.
And I'm thinking all the time.
>>Tom Brokaw: We want to bring on stage now
a friend of yours, Mikkel Vestergaard, who
has an eponymously-named company in Switzerland.
Come up, Mikkel. Mikkel's company produces
products that are not only profitable but
socially responsible. For example, how to
avoid malaria, how to make water cleaner in
a simple fashion.
And he works in the free market. But also
he has a very strong association with a lot
of the NGOs around the world, including one
with which I'm closely associated called the
International Rescue Committee. Mikkel, share
with this audience, A, quickly, your core
business and, B, how it evolved into a company
that is doing well by doing good.
>>Mikkel Vestergaard: Thank you. And let me
start by just mentioning what an honor it
is to be on stage with both of you. It actually
reminds me of the first time I met Ted, he
talked me into racing sailboats. And I'm learning
now what an expensive hobby it is.
But, to answer your question, we've really
built the entire company around the opportunity
that there is in making the world a better
place. And in the rising understanding that
there's neither controversy nor conflict between
doing business and doing good.
For us it means, in practical terms, that
we have, for one, built our entire innovative
platform around developing technological breakthroughs
for the most vulnerable people in the most
extreme situations. You mentioned malaria.
What we've done there is developing fiber
technology that kills the mosquito on impact
when it lands on a bed net. The opportunity
to save millions of lives is easily understood,
but is also a huge economic contributor when
malaria would otherwise rampage through African
villages leaving survivors too sick to work
or too sick to go to school. The water filters,
as you mentioned, is something I'm very passionate
about. The world seems to have sort of dropped
disease eradication since small pox was eradicated
in the '60s and '70s. So we, together with
the Carter Center, teamed up for the Guinea
worm eradication program and developed a water
filter that has become so successful that
the guinea worm is the first disease to be
eradicated and the first to be eradicated
without the use of a vaccine. We have only
four countries left.
So we're doing all these innovative technologies.
We're also very much involved in assisting
and getting the products out there by integrating
infectious diseases, communicable diseases
like cancer and diabetes and climate change
and food security.
So the point is this really: That there is
a huge opportunity for private companies to
get involved and to invest. 90% of all health
investments today benefit only the 10% wealthiest
on the planet while, obviously, only 10% of
all health investments is available for the
other 90%. And, as a result, the -- to give
a good example, the drug available for river
blindness was developed for chlamydia. And
that's just one example. The larger picture
is that the average -- the best measure of
human welfare is average life expectancy.
That's 80 years in the richest countries and
it's 40 years in the poorest countries. That's
an intolerable gap. But it's also an opportunity
for companies to get involved.
I think, if I can end the response to your
question on more provocative note, I think
that companies who don't understand how to
get involved in an opportunity like this,
one way or the other, probably won't be around
in 20 years from now.
>>Tom Brokaw: The U.N. Foundation, which you're
a principal patron of, has a relationship
with the Vestergaard Company as well and providing
these kind of materials around the world.
Is that a model for the future do you think
of public/private--
>>Ted Turner: Certainly a model. It's a model
cooperation. I think we're going to -- the
problems are so great today that it, whenever
we can, cooperate with each other and work
together, we can many times have economies
of scale that make it work better. That's
why I gave the billion dollars to the United
Nations instead of the Red Cross. I believed
that the United Nations is the hope for the
future because that's all of us working together.
At least that's the objective. And that's
what we do. And we work together with dozens
of corporations, dozens and dozens of NGOs
and with the majority of the countries in
the world we have projects with.
>>Tom Brokaw: Let me, Mikkel, ask you about
some political realities. One of the kind
of undertold stories in the world today, in
my judgement, is the presence of China and
Africa and in the extracted industries. I
mean, they're everywhere in mining and forestry
and taking advantage of the extraordinary
natural resource riches of that country. There's
not much evidence, however, that the state-run
Chinese economy in Africa has a big social
conscience about what they ought to be doing
for the population. Is that an overstatement
on my part?
>>> Let me start by just answering the first
question that you also asked Ted about role
of U.N. Foundation. Because I think there's
something that the U.N. Foundation does very
well that I just want to mention. And that
is the partnering with the private sector.
For us it's the epicenter of where the private
sector partners with the U.N. I gave the example
of a long-lasting net that was invented for
malaria control. What the U.N. Foundation
brought to the table was understanding the
value of integration. That was the second
thing that came together that made us have
these big strides in malaria.
By integrating measles vaccination with bed
net distribution, we were able to distribute
mosquito nets not $5 a net but $1.30 a net.
That was really a brain child that came from
the U.N. Foundation. And with those two we
are now, together with United Nations Foundation
and other partners, sending out more than
100 million mosquito nets to Africa in 2010,
which will -- which we're confident will reduce
the malaria burden to less than half in more
than 20 subsaharan African countries. So massive
breakthroughs there that has happened with
the U.N. Foundation as the epicenter with
the linking of the private sector and United
Nations.
To answer your other question on China and
Africa, I think there are great parallels
with what Europe and U.S. has done in the
past in Africa and what China is doing now.
I think we remain optimistic that a more long-term
sustainable partnership attitude can be developed
from China that is less about extraction and
more about investment.
>>Tom Brokaw: Are they open to a dialogue
on that?
>>Mikkel Vestergaard: That's my impression.
>>Tom Brokaw: Ted?
>>Ted Turner: When we started the U.N. Foundation
just a little over ten years ago, there had
never been a private donation from a corporation
or NGO to the United Nations. And, in fact,
when I tried to give the billion dollars to
the United Nations directly, they had to say,
"We can't take it because we can only" -- "our
charter only allows us to get money from other
sovereign states." Only governments could
fund the United Nations.
And so we went ahead and created the foundation
to work parallel. We didn't know whether it
was going to work or not either. It was an
absolute billion-dollar experiment. But it
did work, and it is working. And after only
ten years, we have dozens of partnerships
all over the world. And I think it's made
 -- it's making the world a little better
place because the more we learn to work together,
the better we feel.
You know, if you have ever been married -- and
I have many times -- [ Laughter]. It's -- when
you are getting along with your wife or your
husband, when you are working together in
a positive way, you feel so good. While you're
fighting, it is miserable. You know, how many
people would rather fight with their wife
than get along with her? Nobody, right?
And how many people want to bomb somebody?
I never find anybody -- we're bombing everybody.
But we can stop, and maybe we will. I mean,
it is a possibility.
>>Tom Brokaw: Final note, this audience I'm
sure is curious, do you carry a cell phone,
Ted?
>>Ted Turner: Not personally but I have friends
close by that have them.
[ Laughter ]
>>Tom Brokaw: On that note, thank you all
very much.
[ Applause ]
