Well, thank you very much for getting up early and being here and look forward to a good conversation. So we're very honored today to have a former vice president, United States, and a former Nobel Peace Prize winner as well, former winner of the Academy Award. And you've won a lot of other awards as well. In fact, let me ask you about this. You've been vice president, United States. You've won the Nobel Peace Prize without lobbying for it. Who would do that? You won the Academy Award for your picture on the environment. You've been a senator, vice president, member of Congress. Why are you so driven at this point to worry about climate change? You've done so many things in your life. I mean, climate change is an important thing, but let some other people do. Why are you so driven on this subject?
First of all, a minor detail. I always give Davis Guggenheim credit for the Academy Award. He was the director I have visiting rights to the Academy Award. But why am I so driven? Well, when I was very young, when I was a college student, first of all, I had no idea that climate was going to be take over my life to the extent that it has. But I had in my last year in college, a course under a man now recognized as one of the greatest climate scientists of all time, Roger Revelle. And he opened my eyes to the issue and educated me. And it was like a window opening on to the future. And everything that he said at the time has come true. Unfortunately, he designed the first experiment to measure CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere. And David Keeling, a scientist who created what's called the Keeling Curve, that's the bedrock of modern climate science. Anyway, I was first introduced to the issue back when I was very young, 20 years old, and later when I got to the Congress, well, I kept in touch with Professor Revelle and I stayed close to him. When I was elected to Congress, I started asking, What are we doing about what we call global warming then? And the answer was crickets. Or, you know, nobody had really heard of it to any extent. I finally got permission to hold the first congressional hearing in the House on climate, and I invited my professor to be the lead off witness. And I naively thought that his statement would create the same epiphany for my colleagues on the dais that a full college course had created for me. And that did not happen at all. And in the aftermath of that hearing, I first asked myself the question, how can how can I recreate the aha moment that I had and explain this in a way that takes this great scientist's message to others because it's so critical. David And it's the kind of challenge where once you pick it up, you really can't put it down because it's such a threat. It has to be dealt with.
All right. Let's assume that's true. Why do you think do you have any doubt? I have doubt that this problem is going to be resolved in my lifetime. Well, that's a different question. But but let me ask you about this. Why do you think so many people in the world we have 8 billion people on the face of the earth. Why do you think so many people are going about their lives not worrying about this issue? And some people think that climate change is not man made or man caused. Why do you think it is that people either don't blame humanity for it or they don't really think it's happening?
Well, I think there are a couple of sets of reasons. First of all, it's a complex issue and it plays out in a in the global dimension over time spans that we're not geared to dealing with very easily. We respond immediately with alacrity to the kinds of threats that our ancient ancestors survived. But when we have to use our reasoning capacity, we can certainly do that. But it takes more time. And the second reason is, you know, there's an old saying, I'm sure you've heard it, that if you see it, it's a tendency saying if you see a turtle on top of a fencepost, you can be pretty sure it didn't get there by itself. And the fossil fuel industry has spent many, many billions of dollars on an information strategy with falsehoods larded into it to try to convince people that it's not real.
Let me ask you a question that has been on my mind for many years. You ran for president of United States in the year 2000, 25 years ago, a quarter century ago. You lost by maybe some people would say 530 some votes in one in Florida. Or you could say one vote in the Supreme Court, depending on how you look at it. Why did you not go complain about that or say, hey, I've been the election stolen. Thousands of voters in Broward County who are Jewish voted for Pat Buchanan, who was widely thought not to be, let's say, pro Jewish. So you had a pretty good grounds for protesting. Why did you ultimately just make a speech saying, look, the system goes forward and I congratulate the winner and I'm going about my business? Wasn't that hard to do?
Well, yes, but what I really did was what Winston Churchill said about the American people. They generally do the right thing after first exhausting every available alternative. Right. And I did exhaust every available alternative, save one that the outcome of which would have been certain. There's a provision in the Constitution. Don't you have an original copy of the Constitution, David? I have some original copy. Thank you. Seriously, I'm not trying to butter you up, but you have done so much to safeguard the treasures of America's heritage in case there is a very little known provision in the Constitution that if you get to a complete deadlock in the Electoral College, then it goes to the House of Representatives. And it's a strange mechanism where each state has one vote. The Republican Party completely dominated that election. So if the country had been dragged through that for six months or whatever without any outcome, and then the outcome when it came was a foregone conclusion, it seemed to me that that was the right decision to make.
What was it like presiding at the Senate here opening the ballots? And you have to read that you lost. And that's not a pleasant experience, right?
It wasn't the most fun experience I've had.
No. So you came very close to winning in 2000? As close as anybody could come without winning. Why didn't you run in 2004? I mean, the incumbent wasn't that popular at the time. Did you ever consider running again?
I did. I thought that I might when 911 happened, it changed things up quite a bit. And at that time, I began to get very involved in business activities and in climate advocacy. And I decided that it was best not to run.
Another time. I ran twice. I ran for national campaigns, too, For president, too for vice president. And that's a lot. So when you were a young man, you decided to go to Harvard College and your father was a United States senator from Tennessee. You went to Harvard and your roommate was Tommy Lee Jones. And what, he was more famous at the time?
Well, he was a great football player at the time and a great student actor. And we remained great friends to this day.
So after you graduated, most people in your generation, which was my generation, figured out, how can I not go into the Vietnam War and how can I not go into the military? Obviously, some people did and they deserve credit for it. But you enlisted, you volunteered. You didn't wait to be drafted. Why did you enlist? And didn't that cause a lot of concern on your family's part?
Certainly on my mother's part, Yes. There were really two reasons why I'm an only child. No, I had one older sister. She. She died of lung cancer. When? At the age of 48, July 11th, 1984. I was 38 at the time. She was my best friend and protector. In any case. I was raised in two places. My father was in the Congress, House and Senate. So I spent a lot of time in D.C. as a child. But every summer and Christmas and my spiritual home was in Carthage, Tennessee, and that's where my draft board was. And I couldn't imagine walking down the street and seeing a family whose son had died in Vietnam and them knowing that I had used some connections to get out of it. There was another factor I have to add, that helped to clarify the issue for me, and that is my father was a leading opponent of the Vietnam War and I was immensely proud of him and his reelection was coming up and getting out of Vietnam did not seem like the most honorable thing for me to do, and it didn't seem like the most beneficial thing for my dad either. So I decided that the right thing to do was to go ahead and volunteer. I went in as a private and went to Vietnam, but it didn't help his election.
Well, you don't know the counterfactual. He could have lost by more. Okay, so after you got out of military service, you went to divinity school. Were you thinking of being a preacher or something?
I was not. I was raised in a churchgoing family. But at the age of 21, I felt very strongly the moral dilemma of being opposed to the Vietnam War, marching in opposition to the Vietnam War, and then how could you go and be a part of it? I had my reasons, and I thought they were sound and valid, but I worried about it. You know, when you're that young, you can build these things up in your mind. And I thought that coming back to the US after the war, it would be healthy and good for me to have a structured environment where I could explore the ethical questions that I had focused on.
So you didn't complete divinity school. You went to journalism school for a while. And I don't know. I thought you went to journalism school.
No, I went to when I came back from Vietnam, I got a job $95 a week working as a cub reporter for the Nashville Tennessean. You may have known John Siegenthaler, a great editor who was my mentor. And then I went to divinity school at the same time. And as a journalist, I benefited a great deal from Siegenthaler tutoring. I became an investigative journalist and got into corruption and local and state government corruption in local and state government. It's hard to believe, I know. But even even back then, it occasionally appeared to two councilmen. I got indicted. One of them was convicted. The the lawsuits I was in, I was a witness in a couple of trials, and I saw, oh, boy, this law thing. I need to know more about this. My parents were both lawyers, so there was that. But I decided to go to law school, continued to work at the newspaper, and I thought that I would maybe be Fred Graham. Do you remember Fred Graham? He was the Supreme Court reporter, first for The New York Times and CBS. He was a kind of a role model for me in those days.
But you didn't complete law school?
No, because at the end of my second year, the congressional seat in my home district came open. There was a surprise retirement. John Siegenthaler I came home from law school to drop off my books and then go to down to the paper to work at night. And I got a call from Siegenthaler that Joe Evans was the congressman's name. He'd been there for 30 years. He's going to retire. And I packed up and just started running for Congress on the spur of the moment. I surprised myself in some ways as somebody who did finish law school, I can tell you, you didn't miss anything. I always felt I always felt guilty about not finishing it.
Don't feel guilty about that. So you get elected to Congress and then you take on an issue that people didn't understand what you were talking about. Then something called the information superhighway. What was that? And did people make fun of you talking about that all the time?
No, they didn't. In my later political career, I suffered some attacks that were based on some misleading because you people said you had said you invented the Internet. I never said that. But but they successfully accused me of doing that. I'll tell you how the how that idea came about. David. When I was a student, I really focused intently on the interaction between government and the media and our shift from the printing press through radio and television and onward was really something that I focused on a lot when I was a very young boy. I had learned from my father, who was the author of the Interstate Highway Bill, that our problem after World War Two. One of the problems was we had these little two lane roads, but after World War Two, everybody bought cars and trucks and we couldn't have. All the traffic. And I went to the. He took me with him to work as some dads take their kids to work. I remember when they voted to make the interstate signs green. I remember when they voted on the width of the lanes and. But what he described to me was a conflict between the expansion of the number of cars and trucks and the limitation of the infrastructure. What I later learned about computing was that the. Exponential increase in the processing of information was outpacing the twisted copper pairs of wires that were built for telephone communication. So what we needed was an information superhighway so that those working with computers in different locations could work together and communicate. We built a demonstration network, the National Research and Education Backbone Network. I passed legislation to put $1,000,000,000 a year into high performance computing and the fiber optics. Corning was the only business that supported me in those days. They make the fiber and the algorithms for the switches, and I found it utterly fascinating.
All right. So you were a successful member of Congress. You then ran for the Senate. You got elected to the Senate. And then in 1988, you ran for president and you didn't win.
I was 38 years old. And in some dictionaries, I'm told if you look up the word hotspot, you'll see a picture of my announcement speech.
So 38 years old, you didn't get elected in third place on the Democratic side. But so you considered running again. Dukakis was the nominee. He lost fairly decisively to George Herbert Walker Bush in 92. You thought about running again and you cited not to. Why did you not run again? You know, you were older and you had more experience. Why don't you run not run in 92?
In April of 1989, one of my children had a very, very serious act.
Your son, my son almost lost his life. And the recovery was quite lengthy. And the stress and strain on the family, of course, in a car. A car hit him. He was hit by a car, went to your beloved Orioles in Baltimore. And after the game, I hate to tell you, I was rooting for the Red Sox in that game, but but afterwards, he was hit by a car. It was a it was a devastating experience in so many ways. I was worried when I got to him that he had died. He's everything turned out great. He's fantastic. And he's an actor or played it full recovery. No, he he he advocates for electric vehicles. He's head of a group called the Zero Emissions Transportation Association. It's the main group representing EV manufacturers, batteries, lithium miners, etc.. All right. So but anyway, when when the 92 campaign approached, I was still as a dad in the midst of taking care of my family.
All right. So then Bill Clinton gets the nomination for president and then he he's a Southerner, obviously. And did you ever think he would pick another Southerner to be his vice presidential candidate? And did you think twice about ever becoming vice president when he asked you?
I never expected that he would pick me, no, because the tradition up until that time had been in both parties to balance the ticket geographically, ideologically and so forth. And Bill and I were from neighboring states in the Upper South in the same part of the ideological spectrum. We had advocated for a centrism approach at the Democratic Party and never thought he would do it. But I was at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro chairing the Senate delegation on climate when I got the call, and I still didn't think it was very serious, but we had a terrific set of conversations. And then did I did I think twice about accepting that invitation? I did, actually. But my conversations with Bill went so well that I'm glad that I did it.
All right. You served as vice president for eight years. Then you decide to run for president. And we talked about the fact you came as close as anybody can come without winning and decided not to run for president again. But you got immersed in the private sector and you won on the board of Apple. What was your qualification to be on the board of Apple?
Well, good question. But I had become friends with Steve Jobs when he was at his first tour at Apple. And I was a young congressman who one of the sponsors of legislation to ease his donation of computers to schools. And we became friends. And I had worked on networking issues and technology issues. When I became vice president, I got a commitment from President Clinton that I would handle technology and the environment, and he kept his word on that. And I was deeply involved with the industry.
