Speaker 1: You're listening to Comedy Central. What a back I got tonight.
Speaker 1: He was the thirty ninth president of these United States.
Speaker 2: He's here to discuss how his non profit organization, the
Speaker 2: Carter Center, is nearly eradicated the guinea worm disease. Please
Speaker 2: welcome back to the program, President Jimmy Carter.
Speaker 1: Nice to see it. There them die, So here you are.
Speaker 1: Here's what I didn't realize.
Speaker 2: Okay, So you have this thing that you start in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty six, Carter Center goes and they say this,
Speaker 2: this guinea worm is a problem. Explain very quickly what
Speaker 2: it is because I can't do it justice.
Speaker 3: Guinea worm if you drink board out of a filthy
Speaker 3: water hole fills up in the radio season and then
Speaker 3: stays dry, it doesn't have any fresh for water. Then
Speaker 3: you drink the guinea worm eggs, and in a year's
Speaker 3: time it goes to a worm about thirty inches long,
Speaker 3: and then it's things inside of your skin epidermis, and
Speaker 3: then it creates a soul, a big sword, and it emerges.
Speaker 3: It takes it thirty days to come out, and it
Speaker 3: destroys muscle tissue and leaves you.
Speaker 1: A cripple and terrible pain, horrible.
Speaker 3: Pain, almost indescribable pain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so this is I have.
Speaker 2: A lot of times when a movie is coming out,
Speaker 2: they'll send me a little something like a nerf ball
Speaker 2: with the name of the movie on it.
Speaker 1: Your people sent me a dead guinea world. I'm bed
Speaker 1: it's dead. Can we get that over here? This is
Speaker 1: what it looks like. It looks like.
Speaker 2: That is the thing that comes out of people's oftentimes
Speaker 2: their feet, yes, their feet are their toes.
Speaker 3: Feet toes. The first time I saw it, one was
Speaker 3: coming out of a nipple of a woman's breast.
Speaker 1: Unbelievable and just terribly terrible paint.
Speaker 2: Now in nineteen eighty six, when you begin this program,
Speaker 2: how many cases of guinea worm are occurring throughout Where's it?
Speaker 1: Where? Did they mostly have? Asia? Africa?
Speaker 3: Three three countries in Asia and seventeen countries in Africa
Speaker 3: Sub Sahara, Africa. We found guinea worm in twenty three thousand,
Speaker 3: six hundred villages and we had three and a half
Speaker 3: million cases.
Speaker 1: Three and a half million cases. That's what we found
Speaker 1: this year. Now we are nineteen eighty six to now is.
Speaker 3: That's not going to do the last year we had
Speaker 3: five one hundred and forty two cases.
Speaker 2: Five hundred and forty two from three and a half million.
Speaker 3: Right, and five hundred and twenty one of those cases
Speaker 3: were in South Sudan. This year so far we've just
Speaker 3: had seven cases all of them.
Speaker 1: And here's the country. But here's the thing.
Speaker 2: So we always think about, well, these types of scourges
Speaker 2: that that hit these areas, and we have to develop
Speaker 2: the right medicine and the drug.
Speaker 1: We have to create some sort of prayer. How was
Speaker 1: this solved?
Speaker 3: No medicine will prevent it, no medicine will cure it. Right,
Speaker 3: for ten thousands of years, they wrapped the guinea worm
Speaker 3: and when it came out around the stick and put
Speaker 3: some tension on it so it would come out in
Speaker 3: twenty days instead of thirty days. So you had to
Speaker 3: suffer three weeks instead of four weeks. And so we
Speaker 3: found that if you pour the water through a filter cloth,
Speaker 3: the kind of won't rode in the tropics, and we
Speaker 3: provided that then it screens out the guinea worm megs
Speaker 3: and then you can drink your filthy water without the
Speaker 3: guinea worm meigs and you don't have a guinea worm.
Speaker 3: So that's what we have.
Speaker 1: Education.
Speaker 2: You went there and they showed, now were they resistant
Speaker 2: to that type of thing, changing thousands of years of how.
Speaker 3: They were because the medicine men were making a lot
Speaker 3: of money treating it by putting on the stick in
Speaker 3: Twition war. And also they thought that the pond was sacred.
Speaker 3: If it hadn't been for the pond, the ancestors wouldn't live,
Speaker 3: their village wouldn't be there. So we were insinuating that
Speaker 3: the disease came out of our sacred pond. So then
Speaker 3: if you if you hold up the glass and put
Speaker 3: and have a magnifying glass, you could see the little
Speaker 3: things swimming around in there. So we convinced them that
Speaker 3: these were Alian people Adian things in the pond. So
Speaker 3: they let us provide the filter cloths. But we had
Speaker 3: to go to every single village on earth that had
Speaker 3: the disease. So we feel that we've have prevented about
Speaker 3: eighty million cases of guinea worm since we first started.
Speaker 1: Unbelievable. It's just with just with the gaugees. Now did
Speaker 1: they h.
Speaker 4: Do they?
Speaker 5: Now?
Speaker 1: Do they do?
Speaker 2: They now create the gauds themselfs Like how does that?
Speaker 2: You got to keep going through there?
Speaker 3: Upon gave us a special filter that wouldn't brought in.
Speaker 2: The tropics, and that's the thing that you have to get.
Speaker 3: So we it had to be wolven by people that
Speaker 3: make parachutes. Wow, we're it's wolven together.
Speaker 1: You've ironic kid. I mean, do you now you got?
Speaker 1: You got? You know Bill Gates is out there with malaria.
Speaker 1: Do you ever see him?
Speaker 2: You rib him a little bit, you'd be like, hey man,
Speaker 2: how's it going with malaria?
Speaker 3: Well, we work on Mlario of tennison.
Speaker 1: I'm not kicking guinea worms, but for about twenty five.
Speaker 3: Years now, well we don't, right it because we get
Speaker 3: a lot of money from the Bill Gates Foundations.
Speaker 1: Oh that's what I meant. I met the very good
Speaker 1: people and that's what I'm doing.
Speaker 3: I really I hadn't want to Bill Gate's greatest ad briers.
Speaker 2: When you you go in there and you've earned their
Speaker 2: trust in what are there other things that you want
Speaker 2: to accomplish?
Speaker 1: These villages or some.
Speaker 3: Of the same people. We go out into the jungle
Speaker 3: and in the desert areas where nobody else wants to go.
Speaker 3: They call these neglected diseases because nobody they really oftentimes.
Speaker 2: Diseases of sanitation diseases of simple twenty first century twenty cents.
Speaker 3: One of the worst cases. It comes from from filthy
Speaker 3: eyes where flies gather around your eyes. It's called for coma.
Speaker 3: So the number one cause a preventable blindness cataracts called
Speaker 3: more but this so coma is worse. And when you
Speaker 3: go into a Masaia village or a Dinco village and
Speaker 3: you see little children in the distance, you think they're
Speaker 3: wearing eyeglasses, and then you get closed. It's a regal
Speaker 3: flies that stay on their eyes all the time. So
Speaker 3: the eye gets infected and the upper allead turns inward
Speaker 3: and every time you blink your eyes and then they
Speaker 3: slices the cornea flies. You have to get rid of
Speaker 3: the flies, and so we teach the kids how to
Speaker 3: wash their faces first of all, which they've never tried before,
Speaker 3: so we have to teach them. And we also have
Speaker 3: found out that in certain parts of Africa, a woman
Speaker 3: is absolutely prevented by taboos from relieving herself in the daytime,
Speaker 3: so they have to hide and urinate or defecate. So
Speaker 3: we decided to try an experiment in Ethiopia, so we
Speaker 3: taught them how to build a latrine and outdoor a toilet.
Speaker 3: It only cost about a dollar if they do their
Speaker 3: work themselves. So we thought we might have one hundred
Speaker 3: of thousand. We've just finished two million, three hundred thousand
Speaker 3: latrines in Africa.
Speaker 1: God wow. So that's incredible.
Speaker 3: So I've become famous as the number one latrine builder
Speaker 3: in the world. I'm not famous for peace between Israel
Speaker 3: and Egypt.
Speaker 1: But maybe they'll change the name from John to the Jimmy.
Speaker 1: You never know what what like the forty second President
Speaker 1: of the United States.
Speaker 2: Is annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting now and it's tenth
Speaker 2: year kicks off this Sunday. When I first welcome back
Speaker 2: to the program, President Bill Clinton.
Speaker 1: All right, I said, thank you. I tell you something.
Speaker 2: I'll tell you this and I'm gonna say this, and
Speaker 2: it's it's nice you were here to witness it. I
Speaker 2: live this every day, just the the ovations.
Speaker 1: You're good too, But thank you.
Speaker 4: I do this.
Speaker 6: When I see you at home, I'm all alone, Planks,
Speaker 6: look at you just can't help ours.
Speaker 2: Exactly ten years a Clinton Globe Initiative.
Speaker 1: So you have this thing all planned out.
Speaker 2: You've got these tremendous speakers, all your things in order
Speaker 2: something like this Ebola epidemic jumps up. It probably represents
Speaker 2: the confluence of all the various things that you can
Speaker 2: do at Clinton Globe Initiative. How agile can you be
Speaker 2: when something like that arises?
Speaker 1: Can you address it? Even at this year? So yeah,
Speaker 1: we are.
Speaker 6: We're going to have all the people from the World
Speaker 6: Health Organization and the UN and the Doctorates without Borders,
Speaker 6: partners and health all these people are going to come
Speaker 6: together and talk about it. The United States has note
Speaker 6: a lot. President Obama's gotten some money through Congress, and
Speaker 6: the Pentagon's committed a good bill of a bit of
Speaker 6: money and resources. Look, this is an emergency because nobody
Speaker 6: knows how to cure this. Right, we know that almost
Speaker 6: five thousand people have been infected. We know that more
Speaker 6: than two twenty six hundred have died. Almost certainly more
Speaker 6: than that have been infected. The problem is as compared
Speaker 6: with previous outbreaks of Abolo, which were in remote rural areas,
Speaker 6: this is hit in some urban areas and when it
Speaker 6: got into Nigeria and the Congo, there are a lot
Speaker 6: of people there and there are just so many bodies
Speaker 6: brushing up against one another every day it increases the
Speaker 6: risk you have to isolate and care for a lot
Speaker 6: of these people can survive if they get proper care quickly,
Speaker 6: and we can stop the epidemic and let it burn
Speaker 6: itself out if we can isolate everybody that's infected, but
Speaker 6: we's going to take a herculean effort.
Speaker 2: Is the idea too, Since you have people on the ground,
Speaker 2: you know, if organizations that are not as familiar with
Speaker 2: the local and provincial authorities down there, you know, one
Speaker 2: of the big issues is trust that the local communities
Speaker 2: are very frightened by this, justifiably, so they may not
Speaker 2: necessarily trust outsiders that come in the United States coming in.
Speaker 1: How is it that the can your organization.
Speaker 2: Build through those more local authorities and build the.
Speaker 6: Trail going to need We can in Liberia, where we're
Speaker 6: very active and where we've been there, you know, from
Speaker 6: the beginning of President Johnson's totally tenure. But in other
Speaker 6: countries they will have to work with the local health ministry.
Speaker 6: So I'll have to work with the local people, which
Speaker 6: is why it's encouraging to me that we may have
Speaker 6: an African coordinator who will have I think a lot
Speaker 6: of credibility working with the overall UN Coordinator and the
Speaker 6: World Health Organization and everybody else. I think buying large
Speaker 6: doctors without borders deserves an enormous amount of credit because
Speaker 6: they have put their lives at risk and put everything
Speaker 6: into it. So many people have gone there to serve.
Speaker 6: And now that Partners in Health is going into partners
Speaker 6: in Health is my partner in Africa, and they've done
Speaker 6: a lot of work in Africa. They have a very
Speaker 6: good name. We're gonna, I think, see a big ramp up,
Speaker 6: and I think in Librarria, I saw a news story
Speaker 6: which said just interviewed people on the street who were
Speaker 6: really thrilled at the American government and the military were
Speaker 6: going to invest in doing this. We've been working in
Speaker 6: Africa with the military since I was president, and there's
Speaker 6: an Africa Command now and they're very well organized.
Speaker 1: I expect this to get Africa. That's how old is that?
Speaker 1: In twenty years? Is that? Well?
Speaker 6: We first of all organized the training program in West Africa,
Speaker 6: and then after I left office, they turned it into
Speaker 6: a separate command, so they've been working about seventeen years.
Speaker 1: Think right, unbelievable.
Speaker 2: Well, it's nice to see that the infrastructure paying off
Speaker 2: in the future. When we come back, we're going to
Speaker 2: figure out how to fix the other parts of the
Speaker 2: world that are broken.
Speaker 6: Let's do it.
Speaker 5: Welcome back to our conversation with soon to be formerttenant
Speaker 5: of the White House. I've got one more question for you.
Speaker 5: There's a personal question. It's a little bit selfish. I
Speaker 5: look up to you because we share a lot in common.
Speaker 5: We both have parents who are black and white, both
Speaker 5: half African, South Side of Chicago, South Side of Africa.
Speaker 5: In and around race. When you are a person who
Speaker 5: has a platform, when you are in a space where
Speaker 5: you are engaging with people, it is often difficult to
Speaker 5: navigate and skirt that line between speaking your mind and
Speaker 5: sharing your true opinions on a race, whilst at the
Speaker 5: same time not being seen to alienate some of the
Speaker 5: people you.
Speaker 1: Are talking to.
Speaker 5: You know, because if you are a white person who's
Speaker 5: speaking about race, then you are just a person who
Speaker 5: is interested in race. If you are a person of
Speaker 5: color we're speaking about it is like, oh the black
Speaker 5: things started again. So the question, and I've always wanted
Speaker 5: to know, is how did you navigate that? Because we
Speaker 5: watched you do it, but I always wanted to know
Speaker 5: how you navigated that three or two terms.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: My general theory is that if I was clear in
Speaker 4: my own mind about who I was comfortable in my
Speaker 4: own skin, and had clarity about the way in which
Speaker 4: race continues to be this powerful factor in so many
Speaker 4: elements of our lives, but that it is not the
Speaker 4: only factor in so many aspects of our lives. That
Speaker 4: we have by no means overcome the legacies of slavery
Speaker 4: and Jim Crow and colonialism and racism, but that the
Speaker 4: progress we've made has been real and extraordinary. If I'm
Speaker 4: communicating my genuine belief that those who are not subject
Speaker 4: to racism can sometimes have blind spots or lack appreciation
Speaker 4: of what it feels to be on the receiving end
Speaker 4: of that, but that doesn't mean that they're not open
Speaker 4: to learning and caring about equality injustice, and that I
Speaker 4: can win them over because there's goodness in the majority
Speaker 4: of people. I always felt that if I really knew that,
Speaker 4: and I just communicated it as clearly as I could,
Speaker 4: that I'd be okay. Another way of saying this is
Speaker 4: there's not been a time in my public life or
Speaker 4: my residency where I feel as if I have had
Speaker 4: to bite my tongue. There have been times in my
Speaker 4: public life where I've said, how do I say this.
Speaker 1: Diplomatically?
Speaker 4: How do I say this as you've indicated in a
Speaker 4: way that it's received. Yes, right, So there have been
Speaker 4: very few instances where I've said, well, that was racist.
Speaker 4: You are racist. There have been times where I've said,
Speaker 4: you know, you might not have taken into account the
Speaker 4: ongoing legacy of racism in why we have so many
Speaker 4: black men incarcerated. And since I know that you believe
Speaker 4: in the Constitution and believe in justice and believe in liberty,
Speaker 4: how about if we tried this now. Some might say, well,
Speaker 4: you're not speaking and fully truth to power because of
Speaker 4: that diplomacy. But you know, I don't think that trying
Speaker 4: to appeal the better angels of our nature, as Lincoln
Speaker 4: put it, is somehow compromise. There may be times where
Speaker 4: you just have to call things out and name names.
Speaker 4: But the challenge we face today when it comes to
Speaker 4: race is rarely the overt klansman style racism, and typically
Speaker 4: has more to do with the fact that people got
Speaker 4: other stuff they want to talk about, and it's sort
Speaker 4: of uncomfortable, and it's somebody not getting called back for
Speaker 4: an interview, although it's never explicit or it's you know,
Speaker 4: who gets the TV acting job, the actress who doesn't
Speaker 4: quite look the part, and what does that mean? And
Speaker 4: in that environment where you're not talking necessarily about cut
Speaker 4: and dride racist behavior, but rather about the complex ways
Speaker 4: in which society is working these issues through, you know,
Speaker 4: trying to reach folks in ways that they can hear
Speaker 4: I think is important. And I would add everybody's got
Speaker 4: a different role to play. You know, if Chris Rock's
Speaker 4: doing stand up, then there's a benefit to him doing
Speaker 4: something that is different from the President of the United
Speaker 4: States doing something. For one thing, you know, he doesn't
Speaker 4: have to edit his language quite as carefully because I
Speaker 4: am still subject to, you know, some restraints on those
Speaker 4: seven words George Carlin talked about and say, I can't
Speaker 4: use those as a general proposition because a lot of
Speaker 4: children are watching. I try to I try to comport
Speaker 4: myself in a way that my mother would approve of.
Speaker 5: Well, I just want to say thank you so much
Speaker 5: for being on the show, thank you for being an inspiration,
Speaker 5: and most importantly, thank you for giving me an opportunity
Speaker 5: to see what I would look like after eight years
Speaker 5: of the toughest job in the world.
Speaker 4: You know, I will say that I resent how young
Speaker 4: and good looking you are because I used to think
Speaker 4: of myself in those terms and it's been downhill for
Speaker 4: quite some time. H. Thank you, thank you, thank you
Speaker 4: very much, appreciate it.
Speaker 2: We're talking with Senator Joe Biden, maybe Senator Joe Biden,
Speaker 2: perhaps President Biden.
Speaker 7: Are are you Well, I'm going out to see whether
Speaker 7: or not anybody but me thinks they should be president.
Speaker 7: So I've been going out around the country, Uh, going
Speaker 7: to a lot of those red states as a as
Speaker 7: a Democrat and see if I can gain some support,
Speaker 7: raise some money and uh. And that's what I'm doing.
Speaker 2: I've always said, and I've always heard, as Delaware goes,
Speaker 2: so goes the nation.
Speaker 7: Well, actually, actually, in terms of presidential elections, we have
Speaker 7: never had a president. But in terms of presidential elections,
Speaker 7: with one exception, that's been the case.
Speaker 1: Is that true.
Speaker 7: That's absolutely true, because it's voted the way the nation
Speaker 7: is voted, almost the same percentage of the last.
Speaker 2: You know, what I would do for Delaware as a
Speaker 2: reward for that, by the entire state indoor carpeting, because
Speaker 2: here's the.
Speaker 7: Thing, somebody's already done.
Speaker 4: It.
Speaker 1: Is that true? I can literally? So that's what that is?
Speaker 2: That soft cushy feeling when you're deciding to do something
Speaker 2: like that, Do you have to go out and immediately.
Speaker 1: Hire the whole coterie of consultants? Is that the thing?
Speaker 2: And do they immediately tell you the essence of you
Speaker 2: that has made you a popular politician?
Speaker 1: Lose?
Speaker 6: That?
Speaker 2: Is that the advice that they give is to Doesn't
Speaker 2: it strike you the Hillary Clinton is now they're saying
Speaker 2: to her, let me suck you dry of any rough
Speaker 2: edges so that you can be palatable like cottage cheese.
Speaker 3: Well, let me.
Speaker 7: I've not hired any of the so called big feet
Speaker 7: out there. I went through that twenty years ago. And
Speaker 7: what I've decided to do. Look, I've noticed one thing.
Speaker 7: Those folks have made it good, bad, and different. Have
Speaker 7: had a group of people, half a dozen people with
Speaker 7: them for twenty years or more, loyal to them, that
Speaker 7: took them to the dance, They stayed with you.
Speaker 1: Who would do any of them destroy people?
Speaker 2: If they destroyed people, who would make phone calls to.
Speaker 1: Exactly know what they have to do?
Speaker 2: Does it give you pause that for being in the Senate.
Speaker 2: It seems so frustrating because the Democrats right now are
Speaker 2: reduced to I'm gonna hold my breath until you stop
Speaker 2: bringing up these names.
Speaker 1: Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 2: Does that make you give you pause in terms of
Speaker 2: getting into the national arena.
Speaker 7: Well, that's the reason to get in. I mean, part
Speaker 7: of my frustration is I've been doing this a long
Speaker 7: time and I've convinced that you cannot change the direction
Speaker 7: of the country in the next two elections. In the Senate.
Speaker 7: You can't get it done. And that's the honest to
Speaker 7: God reason why I'm out looking to see if I
Speaker 7: can get the nomination. And besides, as one staff member
Speaker 7: told me, so, there's great benefits. Look at the vacation
Speaker 7: time a get.
Speaker 1: Nicely done. Sir.
Speaker 2: You may end up going against a Senate colleague, perhaps McCain.
Speaker 7: Perhaps First well, John McCain is a personal friend, a
Speaker 7: great friend, and I would be honored to run with
Speaker 7: or against John McCain because think the country better off,
Speaker 7: be well off, no matter who what I mean, did
Speaker 7: I hear with you know John McCain, and I think.
Speaker 1: Don't become cottage. Cheez my friends, say it.
Speaker 7: The answer is yes, I hope John. I wanted John
Speaker 7: to run with John Kerrey last time out, and I
Speaker 7: asked him to do that.
Speaker 1: Boy.
Speaker 2: I would love to see politics be shaken up in
Speaker 2: a way that just completely blew out the ramparts of
Speaker 2: parties and shad would be a wonderful situation. Was so
Speaker 2: we like to say, whether it be any den of Republican,
Speaker 2: I like the parent, thank you for coming by.
Speaker 7: I know you're on recess, on recess just like grade school.
Speaker 2: I'm excited by yourself and napping a little sippy cup
Speaker 2: and beyond your wife.
Speaker 1: Senator Joe Biden, thank you so much for combob bit shall.
Speaker 7: Explore more shows from The Daily Show podcast universe by
Speaker 7: searching The Daily Show wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 6: Watch The Daily Show week nights at eleven.
Speaker 1: Ten Central on Comedy Central.
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