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Jan. 10, 2019 - Dr. Oz Podcast

40:53

Anderson Cooper on the Greatest Lessons of His Career

He’s a world-renowned journalist. In this interview, Anderson Cooper sits down with Dr. Oz and reveals what inspired his incredible career on the front-lines of some of the most dangerous war zones in the world. Plus, what he’s learned from his reporting that changed his life. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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	I like being in a position where it's just not my job to shove my opinion down people's throats.
	I know it's very popular in cable news especially now, but I think our viewers are smart enough to know what they think about something.
	I think people want facts.
	People want actual facts and information.
	There's plenty of opinion out there.
	There's blogs.
	There's every other cable station.
	I think people just want facts, and if you give them facts, they can make up their own mind.
	I don't want to be another person who's just yelling on cable TV.
	I think there's enough of that already.
	Hey, everyone. everyone.
	I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
	We're here with Anderson Cooper.
	Anderson, one of the things that I found really cool about getting you involved in the show was that, in your own words, there are two correspondents that really seem to have remembered Katrina.
	And we've talked a lot about all the hardships that went on in New Orleans and Mississippi during the hurricane.
	But for most of America, it's just sort of moved on a little bit.
	And I'm going to use this as a jumping point to talk about you as an individual because I'm fascinated by the fact that you're able to find the pressure points, especially emotionally for many of us, the lessons we can take away from what we see on the tube.
	But what is it that got you to stick to New Orleans?
	You know, I just...
	It was those days after the storm, immediately after the storm.
	You know, I was in Baton Rouge when it actually hit.
	I ended up in Meridian, Mississippi, where my father was born, for the tail end of the storm.
	Went down to Gulfport the day after, and found myself in Waveland on Wednesday after the storm.
	The storm was on a Monday.
	And, you know, just seeing fellow citizens lying dead in the streets, and as you saw, you know, their bodies uncovered, seeing a family drowned in their own living room...
	And no immediate aid, no immediate someone picking them up, someone even putting them in a body bag.
	I was stunned.
	I'd seen a lot of that overseas.
	I'd seen a lot of it in wars, and I was in Rwanda in the genocide in Africa, but...
	To actually see it in the United States was stunning.
	In media, we tend to move on in television.
	You see things and then you go on to the next big story.
	Thankfully, CNN has allowed me to remain committed to it.
	I just think it's wrong that there are invisible people in the United States and that there are people who don't get access to television and people whose lives aren't told.
	We can't stop people from dying.
	We can't stop terrible things from happening.
	But we can at least notice and remark upon and bear witness to the passing of our fellow countrymen.
	And the fact that so many people, their lives disappeared and they lived good lives and they just were forgotten.
	And I just find that continues to haunt me to this day.
	But even going beyond New Orleans, and I'm struck in particular in your case for this, you wrote a great book, Dispatches from the Edge, because you live on the edge.
	Now, the great truths of life are often found on the edge.
	Great artists do their most creative work when they're depressed often.
	But something about you and your quest for truth in life has taken you to places where most of us don't want to go for vacation.
	Yeah.
	And I actually read it, I assume this is a true story, that when you graduated from Yale and you had trouble getting a position, you just got a little handy cam and went out and traveled to wars.
	Yeah, a friend of mine made a fake press pass for me and I decided to start going to wars.
	Because it really was, you know, I was really interested.
	My brother committed suicide a year before and I was really struggling with issues of why do some people live and others die?
	Why do some people, you know, what makes it possible for some people to survive and not others?
	Did my brother commit suicide?
	And why am I okay?
	So I wanted to go to places where people were dealing with life or death issues.
	And when you yourself are struggling with questions of life or death and things like that, it's very hard to be around people who are not going through that.
	And I wanted to be around other people who were You know, where the daily conversation was about life and death and where it was okay to talk about, you know, death and life and some of these questions.
	And I found in war zones a place where, I don't want to say I felt comfortable because they were terrible and I was often miserable, but, you know, real things were being talked about, real things were being discussed.
	And I found...
	I found it rewarding to go, and I found myself able to go.
	And once you start, once you find that you can, I'm sure it's like a doctor, once you find you can operate, you feel, you know, once I found that I could go to these places that other people wouldn't go to, I feel an obligation to continue to go because other people aren't.
	What's the answer to the question you first posed?
	I mean, why is it that some survive and some don't?
	You know, I'm not sure I still have the answer for that.
	You know, I think some people have, there's an internal will that some people have, and it's inexplicable.
	I mean, why is someone born, you know, why in a family of five people is someone born who goes on to greatness and others who end up in prison?
	You know, I mean, there's societal factors involved, but I think some people have a will to survive, a will that propels them forward even through things which make others stumble.
	And And so I think there are lots of people, whether it's, for some, that will is a belief in a God.
	For some, it's a belief in family.
	Whatever it is, or a belief in yourself, I think having that will, that drive, is essential.
	So let me throw out that concept, because I deal with death all the time, obviously.
	And as a physician, you always blame yourself.
	Because you actually don't ever know if that small little thing you did differently would have made a difference.
	Yeah.
	So you try to come to grips with that and you deal with suffering and folks try to bounce back from what seems like bad luck.
	And I do think luck is a question.
	But God does come disguised to us as our lives.
	And I've always been impressed at how some folks take the pain and suffering that they've had and Sort of rallied around.
	There was a great priest we had on, Richard Rohr.
	He's a very radical Catholic theologian.
	And he said, you know, people talk about suffering like they're having pain and all, but suffering is really about acknowledging that you don't have control.
	That there's some things beyond you.
	And the real question is, how do you deal with it?
	I think that's so true.
	You know, in the wake of something terrible that happens to any of us, you know, in the wake of, for instance, my brother's suicide, I kept asking, you know, why?
	Why did he do this?
	Why did this happen?
	And for me, the years after that, going to wars, was really a process of learning to live in a world where there isn't any why, or where you cannot answer that question why.
	And so there are questions that do not have answers.
	And as a journalist, you know, we hate to hear that.
	But, you know, I remember going to Rwanda in the genocide and asking...
	You know, Hutus who had killed their neighbors.
	You know, why did you do this?
	Why?
	And none of the answers they could give made any real sense.
	I mean, none of it really got to the core.
	And I think there's some things which, you know, there's good and there's evil.
	There's, you know, there's hope and there's hate.
	But there's some things that just don't have answers.
	And learning to accept that and live in that world, I think, is a process that we all have to go through.
	One of the things about New Orleans that struck me when I went back this past week to do the footage for the show was walking through an airport that had changed from being a makeshift morgue slash first aid triage area.
	It looked like a mass unit when I was there the first time.
	You had to go by that baggage claim where people literally were laid out.
	They were laid out like skis.
	I still find it shocking to me to this day.
	There seems to be a very thin veneer between civilized life that's so safe and organized and what happens when a hurricane hits or, you know, your brethren in the same country like Hutu started You're so right about this.
	We dangle by a very delicate thread.
	And I think we like to pretend that the thread is stronger than it really is.
	And we all like to think, well, we're civilized.
	If push comes to shove, I wouldn't resort to doing X, Y, or Z. But the truth is, when the electricity fails and the lights go out and it starts to get hot and you start to not know where your next meal is coming from...
	People change very quickly, and you end up, you know, we are all capable.
	I mean, the one thing I've learned in wars is we are all capable of anything, and that cuts both ways.
	We're capable of horrific acts of brutality, and I've seen those, but we're also capable of remarkable acts of generosity and kindness, and thankfully, we see those as well.
	And when I realized that, when I learned that, I found that to be very...
	I'm not sure empowering is the right word, but when you realize that we all can make choices, and we all have horrible things within us as well as great things, and it's a question of choice.
	Who do you choose to be?
	What life do you choose to live?
	What decisions do you choose to make?
	But I no longer see a great difference between those who fail and those who succeed.
	I think the line is very thin.
	After 9-11, and I was in New York when the planes hit, there was a sense of quietness across the city.
	I remember driving, and I live in New Jersey, so I stayed in the city for the first day because we were waiting for trauma victims, and of course there weren't any.
	People don't realize it frequently, but people died or they lived.
	There weren't a ton of people in the middle.
	There were some burn victims that came to the hospital.
	But for the most part, you felt very frustrated because you wanted to help, and there was just no way to do it.
	So I remember getting in my car, and they closed the bridge.
	So we sat there for an hour and a half, two hours, in this parking lot of tens of thousands of cars.
	Accessing this big bridge leaving Manhattan.
	No one saying a word, no one honking, no one making noise.
	There was actually a sense of bliss, crazy as it seems, of peace that happens when you face tragedy and you refocus on the more important issues in life.
	A thousand years ago, our ancestors were primarily focused on finding food.
	That's what true stress was.
	The rest of the things we get all worked up about now, I don't think is nearly as important to us as we often make it to be.
	You're in the news business.
	Does it frustrate you when our attention seems to become so rapidly spread over such mundane little topics?
	You know, absolutely.
	It's difficult when you realize what people, you know, the shows that do the best are shows often that, you know, are focusing on absurd topics and ridiculous people who really have no impact on most people's lives, on celebrities and people who really aren't contributing anything.
	But, you know, People want diversions from their lives and people's lives are stressful enough and they don't always want to see that on television.
	And I certainly understand that.
	But I think the remarkable thing about what I do and what you do and the power of television for me is that I mean, especially with Americans, they are incredibly open and incredibly caring once you inform them about something.
	And, you know, they can care about people on the other side of the planet who, you know, have no real relevance to their daily life.
	But if you tell them the story of those people in a way that, you know, makes somebody walk in their shoes, Americans are incredibly open and giving and will take, I mean, I think they're probably more than any other population on Earth Are willing to kind of remove themselves from their own lives and put themselves in other people's shoes.
	And I think that's a remarkable trait and something I see a lot.
	One of the challenges that our nation is going to face is dealing with Iraq.
	And you've done a lot of reporting from Iraq.
	How do you move our nation from thinking about Iraq as a win-lose war and thinking about it more in the context that probably has to be thought of as a long-term project where you're trying to understand people very different from you who don't necessarily want to do things the way you want them to do it?
	Yeah, I mean, part of the problem is that there are multiple timetables.
	I mean, there's a political timetable in Washington, which is, you know, this constant drumbeat of, you know, a decision.
	We have to see benchmarks.
	We have to see progress or a lack of progress when we have decisions have to be made.
	There's a military timetable, which is very different from the Washington timetable.
	And certainly there's Iraqi timetables.
	Thomas Friedman wrote about this recently.
	I mean, you really in some ways have to reconcile all these different timetables, and I'm not sure that's possible.
	I don't know...
	I don't think any of us knows what the next six months hold in Iraq.
	I think anyone who pretends to is fooling themselves.
	But forget about the political issues here.
	What I find, I'm of Turkish origin.
	And by the way, when the war started, the first thing that I did was call my parents, and I was just curious what was happening, and they were horrified.
	Mm.
	Because living in that part of the world, and my ancestors controlled Iraq as part of the Ottoman Empire, there was no way you're going to tame that area, certainly to behave the way you want to behave.
	Maybe on their own terms it might have worked.
	How do we get our populace to appreciate that?
	And I ask this in part because we're...
	We've got so much goodwill fundamentally around the world, but we've blown so much of it recently.
	And I hate to think that we're blowing it quietly, not fighting back.
	That's what hurts me most about Iraq.
	It is true.
	I mean, certainly a lot of the goodwill that America had, even immediately post 9-11, has been squandered.
	And how that comes back, I don't know.
	I mean, things change over time, and just as it has been reduced, I guess through leadership it can be reversed.
	But...
	Iraq is such an—I don't know.
	It's one of those things that's so hard to see what the end result is, where U.S. troops go, how America sort of gets its role back in the world that it had prior to the involvement.
	When we come back, I'm going to ask you a couple questions, the fairly pointed ones.
	One, I want to ask about the debates, because you have the ability, I think, to pull out, especially a young generation's perspective on what our nation needs to do.
	I'm also curious about how you view journalism done on television versus print and how you make that delicate transition.
	People recognize you when you go to do stories.
	Does it change the way they behave towards you?
	It does.
	It's interesting.
	It cuts both ways.
	I mean, I used to really like being a fly on the wall and being able to blend in with any group I was with, you know, whether it's...
	I went out with a group in Detroit of neo-Nazis once, and I remember we went out to Pizza Hut for dinner, and literally they were wearing Nazi armbands and, you know...
	You actually would fit right in there.
	Well, I asked for a table in the rear because I was like, I really don't want to be seen.
	But I do think as a reporter it's important to be able to blend in with any group.
	I'm not one of these people on cable news who's making moral judgments and yelling my opinion.
	I believe very much in just telling other people's stories.
	So in some ways it's Having people recognize me has made that more difficult.
	You arrive and people have an idea formed about you, whether it's good or bad.
	And you have to kind of overcome those initial thoughts or whatever feelings they have about you based on what they've seen on television or read.
	And so in that way, it's another hurdle you have to overcome.
	It makes just kind of being a fly on the wall more difficult.
	The flip side of it is that It allows you access to things which previously I couldn't get.
	I was in the war in South Lebanon, and I needed a chopper ride to try to get into Beirut and was able to get the lift on a Marine Corps helicopter that probably I would not have been able to get previously.
	Do you ever read Joseph Campbell?
	Of course, absolutely.
	In fact, when I graduated college, in a rare moment of confusion, I asked my mom for advice because my mom is not the most practical person on the planet, and I normally wouldn't ask for advice.
	The last time I had asked her for advice was in high school when I was going for a job interview, and her advice was to wear vertical stripes because they were slimming.
	And so in desperation after college, I asked her for advice, and her advice was follow your bliss, which was stolen from Joseph Campbell.
	So I'm glad she wasn't watching Montel Williams, because God knows what advice she would have given me.
	But Bill Moyers was doing the Joseph Campbell series.
	So yeah, I'm a big fan of Joseph Campbell.
	When he talks about the hero, they're born to unusual circumstances.
	You are the son of a very well-known woman, Gloria Vanderbilt.
	You go through a wonderful educational process, and then you start running into troubled waters.
	You lose your brother.
	You decide to go off and travel to war zones.
	Do you see your destiny that clearly?
	Do you see yourself sort of rising up?
	What's out there for Anderson Cooper?
	Well, I'm certainly no hero.
	I'm just sort of Finding my way through, you know, stumbling my way along.
	So I wouldn't presume that, but I do think that...
	Let me just interrupt you.
	That sort of is the hero journey.
	I think there's a little bit of hero in all of us.
	I think in this day and age, one has to be a hero just to kind of get through life, you know...
	I've never really thought too far ahead about where I'm going.
	I never had a five-year plan.
	I wouldn't really know how to make one.
	I could have never predicted five years ago that I would be doing what I'm doing today.
	To me, I set out when I was a kid to lead an interesting life.
	That was really my goal.
	When people used to ask what I wanted to do, I would say I want to lead an interesting life.
	I didn't want to end up at a certain age sitting at a desk and Not feeling like I had fulfilled all the yearnings I had and the potential I had and my interests.
	And I was interested in traveling and going to wars and reporting and all these things that I have been very privileged and lucky to be able to do.
	I certainly hope I'm able to continue that.
	How long I'll be able to continue the pace that I have now, I'm not sure, because it definitely takes its toll.
	I'm constantly on the move, and that definitely is hard.
	Although if it's a chi driver for you, if it gives you energy rather than saps your energy, then it's the kind of thing, and I see it all the time, you do too, in folks that have the ability to withstand tremendous stress because for them it's actually a building process.
	Yeah, that's true.
	I mean, for me, I'm trying to incorporate it into a life, like a healthy life, in terms of, you know, I'm now much more aggressive about working out every day.
	And, you know, if I know I'm going to be in Iraq next week, I'll do...
	You know, two workouts a day this week in order to try to kind of make up for missing a week in Iraq.
	But it's, you know, it's hard to eat right on the road.
	It's hard to do all that stuff, which as I'm now, you know, 40, I'm thinking more and more about.
	Body's your temple, absolutely.
	Just to follow up on that one point, though, you are for many Americans who don't feel like they have a voice in the process.
	A sense of connectiveness.
	You show emotion when you report pieces.
	Do you feel that you're a new generation of reporter?
	I think I'm one of the less emotional people out there, to be honest.
	I'm a wasp.
	I was raised in a wasp household where we crushed all our emotions as deep down inside as possible.
	And, you know...
	So it's odd to me that I sort of have this label of the emotional guy, because frankly, there have been one or two instances in the wake of Katrina where I got emotional, but every night on cable TV, I look around these other channels, and there's people screaming and yelling, and It seems like, I just find it interesting that people who exhibit the emotion of anger and hostility every night are not labeled as the emotional person.
	They're labeled as, you know, whatever, the angry guy.
	But honest, genuine emotion, you know, the occasional...
	I think it's just rare to see honest, genuine emotion in a news program.
	And so I do focus on human stories.
	If I have the option of talking to a politician or talking to a real person, I'll talk to a real person any day.
	And I go to New Orleans a lot.
	I try not to talk to politicians down there.
	I try to focus on real people.
	So in that way, I do try to, I guess, touch on true emotions that people are going through.
	But in terms of myself, it's interesting to me.
	Literally all my friends laugh about it because I'm one of the least emotional people they know.
	Perhaps so, but you have an authentic emotion to you.
	When you're looking at a tragedy unfold, people want to get past the numbers because, frankly, that's not the story.
	The story is what happened through the process, and you have the ability to tease out those emotional clenches.
	For me, it's not about overall numbers.
	The number is horrific.
	It's about...
	Telling an individual story.
	How do you tell the story in a genocide of a million people being killed in Rwanda in a month?
	You can't tell that story.
	You have to tell the story of an individual, of a family who was killed, and through that one story, show the larger picture.
	That, for me, is the way I've tended to tell stories.
	If I can't shift gears a little bit to politics, it is, for me, a wonderful opportunity for America to see the candidates for the next election, the general election in 2008, through these YouTube debates that you're hosting.
	You already hosted a Democratic one, the Republican one, I think it's in November.
	Right, November 28th.
	So, how did that come about?
	What was your thought process, and why YouTube?
	You know, I don't know exactly.
	It's like the name of my program.
	I'm not sure exactly how it came about.
	I was sort of, you know, summoned in and they said, you know, we're developing this thing with YouTube and would you be interested in it?
	And I jumped at it.
	I mean, you know, we all watch YouTube.
	It's a fascinating thing.
	You know, I was skeptical at first.
	I wasn't sure how it would work.
	work, but once I actually started to watch the videos that people made and were sending in, there was a personal quality, an intimacy to it that you just don't associate with the political process at all, and you don't associate it certainly with the presidential debate.
	And so, as soon as I started watching the videos, I understood immediately this could be a really fascinating evening.
	And even the night we were doing it, one of the first things I said to the candidates was, look, I'm not even sure this is going to work.
	None of us are sure this is going to work, but it's certainly the wave of the future.
	And I think it was successful and I think any...
	Debate from here on in, it's going to be hard not to have some sort of viewer-generated content in it, because it does provide a relevance and an immediacy that you can't get in any other way.
	Just for the few folks who don't know what they are, can you just describe how the debate's organized?
	It was a debate.
	We had all the Democrat candidates, about 50 or 60 of them, on the stage.
	And anybody in the world could submit a 30-second video via YouTube asking a question to any of the candidates or to all the candidates.
	We got about 3,000 for the Democratic candidates.
	And you just go to YouTube.com to make the videos.
	The only rule was they had to be 30 seconds or under.
	And other than that, we left it up to people's creativity.
	And people were wildly creative in what they came up with.
	Who picked the questions?
	Myself, the executive producer, David Borman, and one or two other political types.
	And we wished it was a process where everybody could—there could just be an online vote for which questions you wanted to have asked.
	The real reason why we couldn't do that is because, frankly, the candidates and their campaigns would start to manipulate the process.
	They would basically try to stack the deck— With questions that they wanted people to ask.
	And so we felt, you know, we're not there yet.
	We're not at the point where online voting works well enough to be able to...
	I think that is certainly the next step, someday, where you can have an online voting system where everybody will be able to vote, oh, I want the candidate to answer this question, and that will happen.
	I remember one question about, do you pray to a god?
	And one of the candidates answered, I was just praying that you'd call on me.
	What was the most shocking question for you?
	There were a lot of surprising questions.
	There were people who were asking about the minimum wage and then asked each of the candidates if they would work in the White House for the minimum wage, which I thought was interesting.
	There was a guy who was talking about, what are you going to do to protect my babies?
	And then he reached off camera and brought out this assault rifle, and that was his baby that he was talking about.
	And so I thought that was really an interesting twist on what you thought it was going to be.
	The future of media is not going to just be on television, obviously.
	I'm just curious about your vision for how Anderson Cooper is going to be accessible to people who don't happen to tune in to CNN at 10 o'clock at night.
	You know, first of all, I don't even know how long I'll last in this business because, you know, things change very quickly.
	Or your replacement.
	My replacement, yes.
	My younger, better replacement, whoever that will be.
	Guaranteed to be younger.
	You know, no one knows, and that's what makes it so exciting right now.
	I mean, there's so many different platforms and potential platforms that...
	At this point, you just kind of have to try to get yourself out on as many different platforms as possible and see which one kind of sticks.
	It's sure going to be interesting to see, trying to figure out, well, how do you get people who are no longer at home for a 6.30 newscast?
	How is it that you reach them?
	The reason I'm particularly curious about it, and getting back to the debate question, is that frequently we've got people who are able to create their own content, and they can stay within that very narrow confine, because they can't be faulted for.
	That's what the general sense is.
	If I don't make any mistakes, I might win.
	So people play not to lose.
	It does seem that a lot of these viewer-generated questions, if they're asked in that context, it's very difficult to step away from them.
	We have one person asking about assault rifles, the other one asking about how you can prevent Columbine or Virginia Tech.
	How do you reconcile your answers to both those questions?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And I think, you know, obviously the difficulty is in following up to make sure that they do answer the questions, because as we all know, politicians are very adept at sidestepping any question they don't want to answer.
	But I do think there's an intimacy to the way these questions are asked via YouTube that you don't get anywhere else, and sort of propels somebody to try to at least respect it enough to actually answer the question.
	Yeah.
	I've always sensed that the biggest debates that you have in life are the ones around the family table.
	And when people argue very vehemently against your perspective, they're speaking from the soul about what's bothering them.
	And you know, sometimes you reach a reconciliation, sometimes you don't, but you still love each other at the end of the day.
	I sense, and I'm a healer, that's my day job, that that's not the debate anymore in America.
	That the key issues that we need to start to address, and I'm going to pest you about healthcare in a second, are the ones that we just play to.
	We angle our responses.
	We debate without getting anything substantive done.
	Why do you think that the political process has degenerated to that level?
	Or do you think it always was that way and we just weren't aware of it?
	Well, I think it often was that way.
	I mean, look, you know, we all like to think that there was this golden age of television news and this golden age of politics when real debates happened.
	I mean, back if you read, you know, in the 1800s, the vitriol and the dirty campaign tactics, you know, we have a much different view of history, I think, than it really was.
	In the golden age of television, you had three broadcast networks, overwhelmingly, you know, white middle-aged men telling America how it was.
	And in truth...
	It wasn't how it was.
	It was a very slim view.
	Newsrooms weren't diverse at all.
	There weren't people of color in them.
	So I think now you have access to more information than ever before.
	But it's true.
	The debate format doesn't necessarily work to really get at core issues that are really important.
	It's a lot of fringe issues that are used as wedges to divide electorate.
	Issues which are not necessarily going to impact people on a daily basis, but which push buttons.
	And I think that's what politics today is about.
	It's about soundbiting and pushing buttons and trying to figure out a way around that to get to core issues like healthcare is a very difficult thing and not something which I'm not sure we do a very good job of in media.
	When I come back with Anderson Cooper, I want to ask you about an idea I have that might help address that.
	I'm curious what your take would be on it.
	And I want to talk about health care in particular.
	Health care is one of those debates that we've been playing around with for the last 25 years or so.
	And I was impressed early on in this presidential term when Social Security was raised as a possible topic.
	And I remember asking the leadership in the White House why it was they raised Social Security when, from my perspective, how are we going to pay for Medicare and Medicaid and healthcare in this country is a much bigger issue.
	And they said, you know what?
	Social Security we can figure out.
	We actually think we know the right answer.
	We can debate about how we get there, but it's just a matter of running the math tables and you'll know what the answer is.
	Health care is such a big problem, we don't think we can find a solution that readily.
	And I hear health care being talked about in the election right now, but I don't actually hear substantive answers.
	And I interviewed Michael Moore in June, just when the movie was coming out.
	How'd that go?
	Actually, you know, it's fascinating.
	He's most of the time talking about diets, but I really enjoyed him.
	And I must say, I came into the interview not knowing what to expect because I had very mixed feelings about Michael Moore.
	I felt that he was overstating issues in some of the movies, but on the other hand, he had a very effective way of getting me to think differently about problems I thought I knew the answers to.
	And one of the biggest challenges I find in health in general, but it's probably true in most walks of life, is when you think you know the answer, you don't listen anymore.
	And so he got me to start thinking.
	And in Sicko, where he actually hammers a bunch of things, but what he really hammers is us, as Americans.
	Because it's not the insurance company or the drug company.
	Yeah, maybe they have issues as well.
	But how are we tolerating this as a people?
	That's really a litmus test for our population.
	What do you think is going to happen in healthcare in this debate?
	Honestly, I don't know.
	I mean, I think it's one of those issues that it always scores the top of, you know, when they do polling, of what issues do voters care about.
	It always scores very near the top.
	And yet it does not seem to be, ultimately, an issue which either politicians truly address or which...
	I'm not sure when voters go into the polls that that is actually what they vote on.
	And I may be wrong, but it seems like if it truly is the number one issue or the second issue, which it often is in these polls, why hasn't there been some sort of More concerted effort among the population to demand some sort of solution one way or the other.
	I mean, I certainly think you can make the argument there are a lot of vested interests.
	There are insurance companies, there are medical associations, there are many different groups and lobbyists for various causes, and that's one of the areas where it doesn't get traction.
	But I think anytime someone does try to come up with some sort of solution, I think it's very hard to have an actual discussion about the facts and about the true core problems without it becoming sort of sidetracked by other issues.
	I'm not sure why that is, whether that's an intentional attempt by lobbyists and the like to sidetrack things.
	But if it really is the core issue, which so many Americans seem to say it is, I don't have an answer.
	It would seem to me it would be more forthrightly addressed.
	I mean, all the candidates now will say that they have a plan and you can go to their websites and find out their plans.
	But it's not something that really fits into a soundbite very well.
	And we live in an age where often that's all one gets on television.
	Well, let me throw an idea out to you.
	See what you think, because you're playing in these waters all the time.
	I had the opportunity to go out to California before the last gubernatorial election there, and I was the host for the summit that Arnold Schwarzenegger had on healthcare in California.
	They brought in a lot of the big players who had all the ideas out there, and after hearing a bunch of people testify, they weren't testifying, they were just speaking in this circular group that had been created.
	But what I came away from this meeting realizing is that our biggest enemy was nihilism.
	It was a profound, deep-seated belief by leaders of industry, the workforce, union leadership, pretty much everybody involved in the process, that it just can't be solved.
	Now, one thing I was impressed by is the governor said, you know, that I'm going to do this.
	This train is leaving.
	You can get on if you want, but you can't stop it.
	And that, I think, has signaled to some extent what's happened in California.
	Do you think that might be the best tact for a presidential candidate to say, you know, I don't have to give you all the answers.
	I think we know what the best practices are going to be.
	I think there are people who are a lot smarter than me who might be able to figure out the nuances of this, but I guarantee you that we will have meaningful legislation in my presidency that will change the way we practice health care in this country.
	I think it's easy for a candidate to say that.
	I think for them to actually deliver on that when you have a Congress that perhaps they don't control, that has other interests, that has other agendas, and you have all these lobbyists who certainly have other agendas.
	Were it that easy, I think, I mean, let's hope that is.
	Let's hope it is a question of just one person standing up and saying, you know, I'm going to do this, this is going to happen.
	I I do think, you know, in a case where certainly the war in Iraq sidetracked other issues, rightly or wrongly, whether you support it or not, it has become the elephant in the room that has kind of made everything else at least seem to fall away.
	Maybe it is just a question of a strong leader standing up and saying that they're going to make it priority number one.
	We'll see.
	How much do you think nihilism colors that response?
	I do think that there is a sense of this is overwhelming.
	This is beyond help.
	This is beyond fixing.
	But as we've seen problems, which seemed once intractable, the war in Northern Ireland, solutions can be found.
	It's a question of leadership.
	It's a question of pull of will and of, you know, parties actually getting together and people making concessions.
	This is a country where we don't like to make concessions.
	We don't like to.
	Give anything because we feel we have to protect every little thing we have gained.
	And I think that's, you know, somebody has to start to give in order to get anything.
	We're guns and butter.
	But part of the issue, I think, is that we've put a lot of our emphasis in organized medicine, and we really haven't gotten Americans to realize that the biggest savings we could ever make for our health care system, in fact, the only way we'll actually ever be able to gain the health that a wealthy society must have is to do it ourselves.
	Well, Well, and also preventative medicine, I think.
	Which is that.
	Right, exactly.
	You look slim, you work out, you're going off to Iraq, you work out an extra...
	I'm trying to, I'm trying to.
	But that's actually a challenge for most Americans, and it seems easier to look elsewhere for the solution.
	Well, of course.
	It's easier to point fingers, it's easier to lob grenades at other things rather than see what we in our own lives can do to try to fix something.
	Isn't that what a leader does?
	I mean, a visionary, and I agree there's a fine line between having a vision and an hallucination.
	But, you know, other people can see your vision.
	But isn't that what a leader does?
	They instill a sense of confidence that you can make a difference?
	I think so, absolutely.
	When you do the debates, there are spin rooms, right, after the event?
	Ridiculous.
	It's the most ridiculous thing in the world.
	It's the most honest thing in politics because at least they literally label it what it is, a spin room.
	It's basically a room where the supporters of all these candidates hang out and basically just spin.
	Even before the debate is finished, there are people in there saying, my candidate won, my candidate wiped up the floor with everyone else, even before the whole thing is done.
	It's one of those things.
	I don't understand why any reporter actually goes in there to try to get some actual information because you're not going to get anything other than just pure spin.
	I once went in after I had hosted a Rock the Vote forum the last election around for all the Democratic candidates.
	And this Italian reporter started asking me this lengthy question about Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories.
	And I was like, why is he asking me this in the spin room?
	And then I realized that he thought I was General Wesley Clark, who at the time was running for president.
	And I almost answered as General Clark, because I knew how Clark would answer, but I decided not to.
	How do you keep your personal politics out of it?
	You know, I really don't have a problem with that.
	I like being in a position where it's just not my job to pontificate and to shove my opinion down people's throats.
	I don't...
	I know it's very popular in cable news especially now, but I think our viewers are smart, especially CNN viewers.
	I think they're smart enough to know what they think about something.
	I think people want facts.
	People want actual facts and information.
	There's plenty of opinion out there.
	There's blogs.
	There's every other cable station.
	I think people just want facts, and if you give them facts, they can make up their own mind.
	I think we have an incredibly educated electorate.
	I just don't think I need to add my opinion into the mix.
	I frankly think it's much more interesting to try to have a forum for people with diverse opinions and actually kind of explore different opinions and walk in other people's shoes.
	It's not the most popular thing in cable right now, but I think it's important.
	I don't want to be another person who's just yelling on cable TV. I think there's enough of that already.
	For sure.
	I must say, there seems to be, and maybe it's a healthy thing to have this perception, that a lot of folks who are conservative think the media is very liberal, and a lot of liberals think the media is covering up.
	Oh, absolutely.
	I mean, every night I get emails from people who say I'm a stooge of the Bush administration.
	I also get emails from people who say I'm a communist who hates America.
	So if I get like 50-50 of those emails, I feel like at least, all right, I must be doing something right if I've alienated about half my viewership in each direction.
	Let me ask you about your personal decision to pursue television versus print.
	I mean, you've read a book, which is very well done.
	You can write, and you can't do television.
	How do you compare the two medias?
	You know, it's like exercising different muscles.
	I like being able to do it all.
	I like being able to...
	I like the discipline of writing on a weekly basis.
	I used to write a column for Details Magazine, and that really led to me writing a book, which just getting in that discipline.
	And I think writing in television is something a lot of young journalists don't focus enough on.
	I think the most important thing for a young...
	The person who wants to be a reporter, if they want to be on television, is to learn how to write and to find your voice.
	I think, you know, once you find your voice in television, but also in print, then you can do anything you want.
	Because in television, the way it is for most people is, like, there are some just anonymous writers out there who are writing for people on television, and that's why everyone on TV kind of sounds the same and sounds cheesy, you know?
	And they all have this fake, cheesy chat.
	It's all written by other people.
	There's just...
	The same people.
	Right, it's written by the same people, literally, and if you just are yourself, people respond.
	The issue of fiction comes up sometimes, I see, when I read about you.
	Would you ever write fiction?
	Yeah, I'm not sure I'm that good enough of a writer to write fiction.
	It's a whole other sort of discipline that I've never really even attempted.
	You know, I'd like to maybe write another book someday, but the last one took so much out of me that I'm not sure I've really recovered yet.
	It'd be wrong to conclude an interview with you without talking a bit more about New Orleans and the perception that I have anyway that they may be right in New Orleans when they ask us or they say to us they think America's forgotten them.
	Do you think we have?
	I think certainly a lot of the country has moved on, and people get...
	Understandably, people have problems in their own lives.
	There's a lot of other issues to deal with.
	There's a war going on.
	There are many issues to deal with, and it doesn't seem like there's progress on the ground.
	It doesn't seem like...
	It's the same stories over and over and over again.
	So I get why people...
	Elsewhere in the country are sicker of hearing about it.
	I totally understand, you know?
	But frankly, I can guarantee you, as sick as most people are of hearing about it, the people who are living there are even sicker to be living through it.
	And I just think it's important to not give in to that feeling of like, I'm tired of hearing people whining.
	These are not people who want handouts.
	These are, I think as you said, these are people who want to hand up.
	And, you know, someone to just reach out a hand and help them because this will happen again.
	There will be another storm.
	There will be another terrorist attack.
	There will be something in another part of the country.
	And how we treat New Orleans, how we treat the Mississippi Gulf Coast is a litmus test for how we will respond the next time.
	And if we're failing there, we're going to fail the next time.
	So that's why I think it's important to not just move on from it, to remember it and to keep the stories alive and to keep focusing on what progress and or what progress has not been made.
	So in your...
	I've had a fairly large experience traveling through New Orleans.
	You probably picked up a few things that the average person sitting at home who hasn't really thought about New Orleans much in the last year or two might be able to do to help.
	What should they do?
	Well, I'm a big believer.
	I mean, the best success in New Orleans has been because of volunteers.
	Church groups have gone down.
	There are students who have gone down.
	There are people who have volunteered a week or two weeks or months at a time in some cases.
	I think people can go down and volunteer.
	They can find groups that really do seem to be making a difference.
	There's a group, the St. Bernard Project, I've been focusing on lately, that really seems to be able, in a very small way, make a difference.
	And you can contribute directly to those groups.
	I think a lot of people feel if you contribute to one of these big aid agencies, the money just kind of no one knows where it goes, and that adds to the frustration.
	If you can actually see progress because of the money you're giving, I think that makes a big difference.
	There are a few people who raised the possibility of finding a particular group, but that takes work.
	It does take work.
	It takes work.
	There's no doubt about it.
	There's websites.
	I mean, Oprah's Angel Network has stuff on her website.
	But there's also just a matter of going down to New Orleans.
	I mean, New Orleans is a great city.
	This is not all a sob story.
	This is a city which is vital.
	It has come back in many ways.
	The French Quarter is cleaner than it's ever been before.
	I used to go down to New Orleans as a kid and smelled of beer and urine.
	It no longer is I know, exactly.
	Some of the best restaurants in the world are in New Orleans right now.
	I've had amazing meals.
	I've had great nights there.
	I go there for weekends just for fun, and there's a lot that's still so great and vibrant about New Orleans, and people should go and spend money there.
	And you mentioned that people approach you.
	It happened to me, too, and they say, thank you.
	Thank you for coming.
	It happens to every single person who goes down there, a tourist reporter.
	People are appreciative of people who go down and see for themselves that the city is coming back.
	Anderson Cooper, thank you for being so authentic, so real.
	Thanks for waking us up.

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