Welcome back to Explorer, I'm Ted Danson.
Chelsea Clinton moved into the White House at the age of twelve, and grew up in the national
spotlight.
She is now a wife, and a mother of two, has four academic degrees including a doctorate
from Oxford, and she is the vice chair at the Clinton Foundation, which is improving
the lives of millions of people all over the world.
Please welcome my friend, Chelsea Clinton.
Thank you Ted.
I'm very excited to be here with you on Explorer.
Yeah.
Me too.
This is neat.
Usually, we're in a room full of your parents, and my wife Mary Steenburgen, who's known
you since forever.
Forever, literally.
So I'm very excited just to have you and me talking for a second.
When people ask me about the Clinton Foundation my eyes cross because you guys are in seventy
countries, you're impacting millions of people and you're doing so much.
Take us through what the Clinton Foundation does.
The Foundation started to try to help more people around the globe access life-saving
medicine to turn their HIV from a death-sentence into a chronic disease.
And so I really am incredibly proud of the work that the Clinton Health Access Initiative
has done to help now more than ten million people access life saving medicine including
hundreds of thousands of kids across the world who may not be able to have those drugs without
the Foundation's work.
So from that, came the work that we do to help combat childhood obesity, here in the
United States, to empower women and girls around the world, to try to fight the elephant
poaching crisis and we do lots of different work but it all started from this early idea
of what can we do to change the way we think about a problem and hopefully to then find
a solution.
I think we have a photo of a young man named Basil.
You wouldn't know this looking at him, when he looks so healthy, but he was born HIV positive,
his parents both had died by the time he was only a month old, he had stage four HIV and
he also had tuberculosis and no one thought he would survive, much less, become a healthy,
thriving little boy or now, a teenager.
And so Basil is one of the hundreds of thousands of kids around the world who get pediatric
antiretrovirals through drug contracts that the Foundation helped negotiate and there
are more than ten million adults who also get their lifesaving medicine through work
that the Foundation helped do in Cambodia and really around the world.
And so whenever I get discouraged I think about Basil and I think about all of the kids
and the adults whose lives have been literally saved through the work that we do and so we
just have to keep doing it to hopefully have the privilege of knowing there are even more
Basils out there who will benefit from our work.
That's great.
And thank you for sharing that.
I know that your mother has worked very hard to change what's happening to the elephants
in Africa and know that's a big concern of yours.
Will you talk to me about that?
Over the last few years, my mom and I have worked intensely on this issue to support
really the work of the big conservation groups, but also groups you may not have heard of
that are working in places like Tarangire, the picture behind you, to save the African
Savannah, African forest elephants because we are facing a crisis, we lose 96 elephants
a day to poaching, and if that rate continues, my children or grandchildren will grow up
in a world without elephants.
And we know we need to continue to do more to support the rangers who are on the front
lines.
We've had more than a thousand rangers killed by poachers in recent years, and this is not
only a moral issue and a conservation issue, it's also a security issue.
That's interesting.
Don't buy any kind of ivory.
Don't buy ivory.
Write your congressman, your senator, because if you care about terrorism around the world,
as we say we do, this is a connection to that.
There's a reason why Interpol and the FBI, various parts of our military, including the
marines, have all been engaged in anti-poaching efforts.
It is because they understand even better than I do, how connected elephant poaching
is to terrorism and to real threats against people who live in Europe and the United States
as well as clearly the people that are living under those threats and that terror everyday
in East and West Africa.
We know al Qaeda North Africa, multiple terrorist groups use ivory to help lubricate the supply
chains of trafficking and people and guns and to fund their terror which is horrifying
for the population they terrorize, but also a real threat to us here in the United States
given the increasing consolidation of terror networks around the world.
I think I'm used to thinking of Clinton Foundation and Africa, all around the world, where do
we see you, the Clinton Foundation, in this country?
So our largest program is through a partnership with the American Heart Association called
the Alliance for a Healthier Generation and the Alliance really sprung out of my father's
heart scare which you may remember.
Yes.
And when he was on the precipice of having what his doctor said would be a catastrophic
heart attack.
But out of that, he reached out the American Heart Association to say, what can I do on
heart health? and I think he thought they were going to say like please be the poster
child for why men need to go to the doctor, because often when men have chest pains they
don't go to the doctor and sometimes that can have tragic consequences.
The symptoms look different.
And the symptoms look different for men and women and they said yes, please do that, but
what we really need help with is childhood obesity.
So in 2005, the Alliance for a Healthier Generation started working and now we're more than thirty
five thousand schools, working with more than twenty million kid's lives, trying to help
the schools kids are going to be healthier environments, have healthier lunches, have
physical education, get back into the classroom and into kid's daily activities.
That's great.
Thank you so much. .