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Jan. 22, 2019 - Dr. Oz Podcast
38:12
Bill Kurtis on the Evolution of Journalism and His Career

In a previously recorded interview, Dr. Oz sits down with Bill Kurtis to explore his vast career, and reflect on the stories that resonated in his own life. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I covered the Manson trial back in 1970. There were 12 of us, three networks, three local stations, or four in Los Angeles, AP, UPI. We'd go out to the hall outside the courtroom, and they didn't have TV inside, but we would call in our stories.
O.J. Simpson had 3,000.
So that really tells it all.
Hey, everyone. everyone.
I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
He's had a wonderful career within media, spent four decades educating us in many different ways, but he's also looking at some of the broader problems we face as a nation.
Sustainable beef farming is an example, but other areas of interest of his have included how to resuscitate communities that may have been left out in the cold, and how to create programming that's viable, interesting, and for that reason, successful.
Bill Curtis, thank you for joining us.
Thank you, Dr. Oz.
Good to be here.
I'm curious, you were born in Florida, raised in Kansas.
How'd you end up in media?
Well, my dad was in the Marines, so that's how I was born in Florida, very early on.
And he moved around, but he was from Kansas, so we wound up in Kansas, and there I was in Independence, Kansas, town of 10,000, with one radio station, 250 watts.
So when I was a sophomore in high school...
Is that 250?
What's big or small?
Small.
About as small as you can get.
And high school, 16, I kind of had a deep voice.
You have a great voice.
Very memorable.
Went down to the local radio station and got a job.
And from that point on, except for marine reserves, why I've been working in radio, never any formal training, but you just use your voice, and it's done very well for me.
So by the time I got in and out of law school in 1966, I had 10 years experience.
So it was a big decision, law or media.
Now in those days, media wasn't the media we know today.
There wasn't really even a stable news network.
By 66, yes, we were covering the Vietnam War.
Yes, they had covered the civil rights movement.
But basically, they were learning the tools.
And the radio guys, the Murrow guys, were transitioning to Cronkite and the TV guys.
So it was a hard decision whether to stay in law.
And then, as I was studying for the bar, a tornado came through town.
And somebody asked me...
This is in Kansas.
In Kansas.
And asked me to common substitute for them.
And so I went out.
I was on the air.
The tornado was sighted.
I gave the alarm.
It blasted through Topeka, the capital of the state, most destructive to that time.
And CBS saw me, and it was terrible for the community, but my big break in the media.
So I said, God is showing me a sign.
Do not practice law.
And I've worked 30 years for CBS. And you went to Chicago, and then ultimately to New York.
Yes.
So how is media different now than it was 40 years ago?
And I ask you, because, you know, interestingly, we were talking to Anderson Cooper recently.
Yes.
You know, he's a very different kind of news deliverer than what I grew up with.
And we're sort of talking about how the way that the media portrays information has changed, in part because the American people look for it in different ways.
They do.
The proliferation of media.
First of all, we didn't have any cable when I started in.
So now you have four, at least, 24-hour news networks.
There are now, this is interesting, twice as many women going into television news as men.
Is that right?
Yes.
This is Northwestern University and all the other studies.
You say, why?
I don't know.
That's very interesting.
So guys should go.
It's a good place to meet women.
The numbers are your side.
And they're having trouble actually finding male anchors.
Is that a shock?
Yeah.
But here's a good example of how it's changed.
I covered the Manson trial back in 1970. There were 12 of us.
Three networks, three local stations, or four in Los Angeles, AP, UPI. We'd go out to the hall outside the courtroom.
They didn't have TV inside, but we would call in our stories.
O.J. Simpson had 3,000.
So that really tells it all.
The media has become a force to be reckoned with, which can change news stories.
Also, it's the notion, which I'll argue against myself here in a moment, of the white male anchor being replaced by someone like Anderson, who is in the field, loose, talking to you rather than delivering from on high. talking to you rather than delivering from on high.
Now, Charlie Gibson at ABC is now ruling the roost among the network anchors.
Right.
But I think it's a product of his older audience.
Anderson Cooper has a younger audience.
Yep.
Everybody wants the younger audience if you're in the advertising business.
But today, you talk about media, new media.
You have radio, you have satellite radio, you have a combination of internet and radio.
And if you don't have that combination, you're really not very much with it, if you will.
And television is almost an afterthought.
You know the conversation going on at local television stations is whether there will be broadcast over the air television in the future.
Won't it all be over your computer?
There's something to be said for a limited number of channels.
And although there's four cable news channels and the three big networks still exist, there's still much fewer choices than going to the web.
So there's, I would think, some value of a communal approach to delivering news.
I mean, for good or for bad.
When Walter Cronkite gave you the news, that was the news.
That's what happened.
And maybe we were perhaps naive in seeing it that way.
There was this community experience.
I think Network News was born during one of those Kennedy assassinations when they blew away all commercials for four days.
We all sat in front of the television set and shared that experience.
It used to be conventions to see our political process at work.
Remember when you listened to the World Series?
Yes.
In the classroom?
Yes.
No more.
I know.
I remember that.
I still remember that.
I was in Delaware and the Orioles were playing.
I think it must have been the 1969 or 1970 World Series.
And I remember they would break the class.
We would actually...
Oh, it was great.
Yeah.
And engage in the afternoon.
So there are some nostalgic elements to that, but there's, I think, some pluses to having the plethora of news outlets, because you get to hear the news in many different ways.
What were some of the biggest mistakes that the news media made in the 60s and perhaps 70s in delivering information?
What could have been done differently?
Well, we learned then.
For instance, don't turn your lights on during a riot.
Yeah.
We were building the rules in those days.
CBS had a blue book, and it was literally written by the guys out in the field and the executives.
For instance, in an interview, we're used to doing reverses, which is using one camera, and you will move it to the other side, and reverse questions are asked not during the interview, but after the interview.
We got in trouble for that, because...
It's different.
One way, but not the other.
So, here, let me give you four or five things that we learned.
Chasing someone down the street makes them look guilty.
It's called an ambush interview.
I always say it, I hope he's guilty.
Because he looks guilty, and we make him look guilty, but it's entertainment.
Actually, Mike Wallace started that.
He stopped it.
We did an investigative report looking at the techniques used.
He stopped it, and it's no longer really in vogue, especially for young reporters.
We learned, and Larry Craig's problems with his bathroom sex scandal would be a good example.
We learned that you can entrap very easily.
That if you set yourself up...
And in the slightest way, encourage someone to commit a crime.
You're not really observing a crime.
You're encouraging it.
So you have to be very careful.
And a number of those techniques.
So those are things that...
What do you love the most about what you see today in news media?
The immediacy, all around the world.
And we have become, with qualifications, sort of the venue of truth, if you will.
If something happens, even the wildest and most remote event, you go immediately to your television set and you expect to see it.
Right.
So that's terrific.
Don't you feel that sometimes we create news?
I get very frustrated when I see us focus on material is mundane.
It just has no impact to benefit anybody.
Yes, here's the drawback when you have so many outlets, is that you can make the mundane seem important.
And during that time, and now the Jay Leno example during Paris Hilton, I mean, he used it on his show.
Here is Paris Hilton.
We have her coming out of the house.
She's just about ready.
We're going to cut away for a bulletin from New York.
But we'll stay on this story of Paris leaving her house to go to jail.
Cut away to tell us that Peter Pace has resigned and is being replaced as chief of staff.
And we'll have more on that in the evening news.
Right now, let's get back to Paris Hilton.
Who is just getting in the car.
And there is the mass following her along.
That's crazy.
That's insane.
So now there is a survey that is going to be studying the amount of substantive, especially international news, that we are not getting.
And there are some people who feel we are the least informed people in the world.
And you've seen it.
You go overseas, and what do they lead with?
What happens at the United Nations?
They're in tune.
You come back here, and you think it's a different country.
It is remarkable, actually, when you look at how different our perceptions are of what's going on in America from what other people think is going on in America.
And, of course, our perspective on overseas events are always biased by who we are.
That's not unusual, but I don't think we're getting the kind of robust information.
There's this shield or a filter that seems to have to pass through the, quote, establishment.
Now, the alternatives are out there in the form of blogs, but, boy, you have to hunt for them and go to your special ones.
Since you've got so much perspective on it, what do you think was the biggest story in the latter part of the 20th century?
Well, Walking on the Moon, of course.
We forget that.
Actually, I completely forgot that.
Yeah, 1968. 69. 69, of course.
You know why I say it?
Because it's my wife's birthday.
Well, 68 was perhaps the biggest news year, because right here in Chicago, we had riots with King's assassination.
Then we had Bobby Kennedy assassinated, followed by the Democratic Convention just a few blocks away from the studio.
That was a fulcrum, a turning point for the war in Vietnam.
And, of course, Nixon went on to be elected.
You have Watergate to follow.
Mm-hmm.
So those are two.
I live in that world.
But you certainly couldn't say...
I would not measure the volume of news about a single story against the importance of that story.
Good point.
For instance, you know, Paris Hilton...
Lindsay Lohan.
We are obsessed by celebrity news.
It's as if we've been taken over not only by fast food, by over-salted, over-sugared, over-processed.
It's entered the media information stream.
That's a great point.
Do you feel, speaking of over-salted, over-sugared, which is a great metaphor of what's going on, do you feel that the media biases the public?
Or do you think that's overstated by the right and the left?
Bias carries a meaning that connotes having a particular bent, a kind of side, one side that it's leaning toward.
I don't think that's true.
I think it's the volume and the editorial choices that would point us toward listening to, let's say, Paris Hilton.
Instead of what's happening in Iraq, or a backgrounder on some other serious stories, that really is the problem.
There's a lot more where that came from, but first, a quick break. - We were with Bill Curtis, someone I've been a fan of for my whole life, and I can say that literally, and rapidly becoming a fan in his new someone I've been a fan of for my whole life, and The newest one on media is New Explorers.
Tell me about it.
Well, it's a PBS series, still running in many quarters.
We did about a hundred of those shows.
A science adventure series.
We were doing global warming 15 years ago.
Is that right?
Before anybody cared.
And we sounded the alarm.
We went to every country in South America, 8,000 feet down in the Atlantic to the Pacific, seam that runs around the country.
And so we were sort of the junior high to Nova's high school.
And people are still using the videotape when there were videotapes instead of DVDs.
And so it was probably the best stuff I've done.
But you got some governmental support for the endeavors.
We did.
The DOE, Department of Energy, put a lot of money into education.
And right here in Chicago, we had the big museums all participating, buses down to the headquarters of the base camps, and they're still using the tapes.
So are the kids in our high schools and middle schools now still getting programs made of this nature?
Some of it, yes.
But, you know, the technology has changed.
We've failed to keep up.
The technology now must be delivered, I mean, the material delivered on the Internet.
So you can just download everything.
It's really remarkable, the access that they are having to science.
I don't know why the scores continue to trail, but...
I'm not sure all the kids...
I think the scores trail because some kids are doing okay, but a lot aren't.
So I suspect some kids aren't getting the programming.
Let me segue, because I want to talk a little bit about some of your current endeavors, but do it by talking about Vietnam.
So in 75, you were posted in Saigon.
How did they do that, by the way?
They just call you up and say, hey, by the way, you have a ticket tomorrow, coach class to Saigon.
I was a correspondent out of Los Angeles for CBS News.
And by 75, I really had come back to Chicago.
And we saw the North Vietnamese coming down the coast.
So I thought that I would slip in and do some Chicago-connected stories over there.
We in Chicago were sending money from the Catholic Archdiocese for the refugees.
Mm-hmm.
So I made it two weeks before it fell and was able to do a variety of things from orphanages to a flight into Phnom Penh.
One of the last babies of the orphan lift, I put on the plane, had a crew shooter as she came off in Chicago, went to a family in South Bend.
And she's now 32. Oh, you're kidding me.
And it's Miss Saigon.
She had a great voice.
She wanted to sing for the president.
All of a sudden, one day, she called me and said, not long ago, I want to go home.
And, wow.
And so I said, well, go home to find your biological mother?
Yes.
Well, you know, that's common for adopted children.
So we took out a search over there by taking out ads in Vietnam.
And looking for her family.
And lo and behold, we had someone come forward.
So now, we're in the process of matching DNA. That is so cool.
To see if it pays off.
Oh, that's so interesting.
You forget about their adults now.
It's a generation and a half ago.
Oh, you know, and the kids there, you know, when I went back in 80, most of the country was under 25. So they could care less about the war.
Right, exactly.
They're on the computers and English and making money, and they're, you know, the most industrious people in the world.
Extraordinarily, extraordinarily.
So you go through this incredible career, really one of the leaders in journalism in the nation.
And for a lot of folks, you have plenty to talk about and write about for the rest of your career.
Instead, you take these lessons that you've learned and you start a cattle company.
What was that all?
What in the world?
What is going on?
Chicago Tribune says, Wild Bill has gone crazy down there.
And they're right.
What happened?
Well, I had backgrounded myself through the New Explorers on global warming and sustainability and the environment and all the problems we have.
So I wanted to do something.
I hit 65. Mm-hmm.
And I'm now 66 and had the bulk of my career behind me.
And I made a discovery.
I'm an investigative reporter.
I had bought a ranch in Kansas to restore the prairie and hold it.
And then I discovered this new health food.
A package, new...
Nutrition that had all these remarkable properties.
And it was strictly like you would review the data on these things.
And it was grass-fed beef.
I said, beef?
Cattle?
And as I started looking into how we're raising cattle today with hormones and antibiotics, and how everything can be reversed to a positive simply by feeding grass, leaving them on the pasture, I said, I've got to do this.
So I stepped out of a role of a neutral observer, which I'd been all my life.
I said, I'm going to do something.
I want to get in the game.
And so this journey for me was spiritual and led me to this product that we call a tall grass beef.
It is good for the environment because the cattle never leave the pasture.
They fertilize next year's crop.
It's good for the family farmer because really our herds are small that we buy from.
It's good for our health.
Just eliminating the grain, the corn, the growth hormones, the antibiotics is a great start because now you're creating the right kind of fat.
It has essential fatty acids in it.
Omega-3, Omega-6 in the right balance.
CLAs, conjugated linoleic acid, which now are the darlings, and we don't have the final reports on them, but they're thought to be cancer fighters.
So what percentage fat is the tall grass beef that you make?
We're lean.
We're much leaner, of course, than a corn-fed animal.
And that's what makes corn-fed animals taste good, of course.
It started 60 years ago, during World War II, when the government had a surplus of corn, gave it to the ranchers, ranchers fed the livestock with it.
And in that 60 years, the agribusiness, the beef industry, has completely turned on its head.
Now most of our cattle in the fast food and steaks come from giant feedlots, 250,000 at a time down in Texas, and our process into this enormous kind of feed bin that we go to the trough every night.
The percentage of fat were much lower in saturated fat, lower in cholesterol.
The amount of time that it takes to get a cow to the age of slaughter in a regular process versus these tall grass processes.
Regular feedlot, they harvest at 14 to 18 months, usually around 14 months.
The economics are good for the rancher and for the feedlot operator because, you know, you can move more cattle.
And that's on volume, how they make their money.
For us, it's longer.
It's 18 to 24 months.
But we leave them on the grass and they mature naturally, which means they develop marbling naturally.
You have to leave them there.
So it's a little more expensive.
But that's why.
A little more expensive, meaning that the average person wouldn't want to buy the extra?
No, they do.
We're developing a market, and a lot of people are willing to pay simply for the health benefits.
And, of course, one challenge was the taste.
In the past, grass-fed beef has had kind of a bad name because it hasn't tasted very good.
It's like a wild animal.
Right.
And we found that it was the genetics.
We so crossbreed our animals that we're coming up with new species all the time.
Well, we have gone back to select the original English breeds with line breeders from Montana down to Florida that while the rest of the country was moving in one direction, they said, we're going to maintain this.
So our genetics go back to those original cattle that came over on the Mayflower And we find that all cattle evolved on grass.
A lot of people don't know that.
I didn't know that at all.
And they thought they evolved on corn, for God's sake.
So we find that the right genetics enabled them to fatten tenderly on grass and rather quickly on grass.
And we use ultrasound, just like you do, and the cardiovascular, you know...
And we'll put that wand on the shoulder muscle of a calf, about 900 pounds.
We get a readout on a computer that we have back to pick up into the stall.
And we can see a living ribeye steak and count the marbling that is developing.
And our CEO, Alan Williams and Matt Cravey, PhDs, chews all our cattle like that.
I thought you were actually figuring out which strains are genetically the best and breeding for those.
Well, we do.
We have two streams.
So we're breeding for those.
And then we send the semen back to individual ranchers so they can raise it our way.
But we also buy from these people who are acceptable protocols.
So thankfully my wife Lisa's not here.
She's a vegan, but she's not against capital punishment.
So she'd come after you.
On both counts.
It's hard to argue that beef is healthy.
I understand the argument of why this beef is healthier than normal marbled beef that we have.
But let's move away from the pure health issues which we can debate ad nauseum and talk about the economic viability of this process versus what's conventionally done.
We've been pretty aggressive on the program in arguing that the conventional way in which we grow beef in this country It's wasteful.
It's the biggest source of potable water use.
There's a lot of methane released into the environment, which is a pollutant that we don't deal with.
It also sends the wrong economic incentives down the path.
If we took away all the subsidies to go into the process, the price of a pound of meat would be upwards of $90.
I've seen in several large reports.
So I wonder if what you're doing is a more sustainable way for this nation to grow meat.
We're limited only by the amount of grass in the country.
You can concentrate cattle in the paddocks and the feedlots and grow more.
But they're not as healthy.
It's bad for the animals in the humane condition.
It's not good for the environment for all the reasons that you have listed.
And economically, we're not that far apart.
You're right.
$200 billion in a subsidy goes to corn farmers, primarily to keep the price of corn cheap.
Now it's being thrown to the winds by ethanol.
$200 billion?
Yeah, yeah.
And a $400 billion package farm bill.
We've got to change that.
Otherwise it will perpetuate the wrong kind of food that we are.
And we've got to break that.
So what's the argument for keeping it?
None except making money.
And there are powerful lobbies and special interests out there that want to write it.
You know, it goes back to Roosevelt's New Deal.
And they threw money at farmers because they wanted to keep eating during the Depression.
But the five big staples, corn, cotton, sugar, and the problem is, the plan was, they were going to switch that when they were stable again, but they never did.
Of course, when you have the money coming in, you don't want to let it go.
And now, we're still paying the richest farmers to do nothing.
And we're holding falsely up these markets.
And so, grass-fed beef has to be given a chance.
Now, we're not asking for a subsidy.
We get nothing.
We're out there creating a market, growing the grass, and we're solar farmers, and putting the cattle on that meat.
And, you know, your vegan wife should rethink, because she's right not to eat red meat, as you and other doctors recommend.
But if you study the grass-fed benefits, I think a lot of people are looking for it, because she needs protein someplace.
We grew up, you know, Lauren Cordain and the paleo diet, very strong on the diet that says we grew up on.
Nuts and berries and wild game.
That's all grass-fed.
And that our bodies are still craving it, but the diets have changed.
We've taken out the omega-3, which is associated with freshness, for shelf life.
We have to get back to fresh foods and what our diet demands.
We have a lot more questions to get to, but first, a quick break.
Let me broaden the discussion now.
You mentioned earlier on that 15 years ago you started to sound the alarm on global warming.
Yet there's still a debate out there about whether this is even real or not.
Is there any debate in your mind?
Not in mine.
99% of all the scientists then agreed that we're creating these problems.
You know, there are a few, but it's almost like a science debate on how much or the effect of it and what it's going to be.
For instance, I saw a report the other day that methane has actually gone down.
Why?
I mean, we have more cows than ever.
Why is methane going down?
We just don't know a lot of the answers.
We need a Manhattan Project, a task force.
To one, get everybody on the same page and let's agree on something.
And then let's do something about it.
I'm selling carbon credits of my ranch.
You are.
A prairie that has not been plowed has more diversity in plants than a rainforest.
Is that right?
It has more carbon in the biomass under the soil, roots that go down 10, 15 feet, than a rainforest.
So it should be preserved, and we can sell those credits.
That's wonderful.
You've traveled all over the world, gathering up insights of the nature that you just mentioned.
And you've tried to bring back some of these insights with action steps.
And I wanted to just pepper some of these ideas out there for listeners who are figuring out how to make their arguments intellectually for themselves as they figure out how to help with this debate.
So a lot of folks say, you know, I'm going to go buy a Lexus, you know, with an electric motor, or I'll figure out some way of using less energy.
Good, bad, worthless, the essential goal for the future.
What do you think?
Every little thing you do, you must downsize.
We must all downsize.
Somebody gave me an Audi to drive for six months.
They had everything on it.
Supposedly, sort of the luxury car of SUVs.
The minute I had to turn it in, I went and bought a Volkswagen.
It had almost all the features.
It was smaller and drove easier.
Got better mileage.
And I felt better about myself.
I downsized.
Just being smart about the food we buy.
You know, the organic section in most supermarkets is growing at 20% a year.
People want to eat healthy.
And so they are choosing the right foods.
If you'll notice, everything seems to be changing to green.
The nice thing is that it is now the new black.
That's great.
You have to be in.
And you're in the Green City here in Chicago.
We have rooftop gardens and soon to have, hopefully, solar panels.
So the more we buy those items, the more there will be and the cheaper they will be.
It's really, you know, you act locally.
But more than that, you act individually.
It's a change in heart.
I am afraid that we won't have enough action...
Until there is a real crisis.
Now we're having crises like Katrina, which carries a message.
Like a drought in the West, another message.
But there are people who say, well these are seasonal, climatic surprises here and there.
And it may be It may be.
But the scary thing for me was Lonnie Thompson, who was an ice core scientist out of Ohio State.
He played a big role in Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth.
And he said...
What's an ice core scientist?
He goes to glaciers and high elevations of mountains, drills a well, and comes out with an ice core, and then measures the amount of carbon dioxide within the bubbles caught in the ice.
He's now back 200, 400,000 years, maybe even further.
At the beginning of the industrial age, let's say we had a one reading of carbon dioxide.
When they started measuring it in 1958 in Hawaii, let's say it was up to 2.5.
It's now 3.5.
He said it's going to double in 20 years, maybe less.
At what point in there does the system restructure itself?
Those are the most frightening words I had heard.
Restructure.
I mean, I like breathing oxygen.
I don't know about you, but are we going to turn it all on its end?
To me, that's what's frightening.
Now that you've gotten fear as a primary emotion from most of the listeners, including me, let's talk about what makes sense to lobby for.
Nuclear power, good or bad?
Good.
It's clean.
And it is possible to have safe nuclear reactors.
I'll let you read further on the internet on that.
We developed it.
And we sold the technology to Japan.
But France has done it all over the country.
And it is possible that when there is a problem, instead of it bursting in a leak of radiation that goes out like Chernobyl...
Incidentally, I was the first American reporter into Chernobyl...
Is that why you're glowing now?
Yeah, I am.
With two heads, six fingers.
That the plant actually shuts itself down instead of blowing up.
People don't know about that because people are crazy against nuclear power.
I mean, it absolutely is a code for a lot of people.
Trigger point.
Well, there's a good friend of mine, Admiral Skip Bowman, who actually had Admiral Rickover's position as head of nuclear weapons for the Navy, sort of the nation's leader in the military for this process.
And now he works in this endeavor.
I've learned a lot about it from him.
It seems like that should be where he puts an emphasis.
You mentioned France.
75% of all France's energy is nuclear.
Yeah.
So, since we've got a lot of pretty smart people who think it makes sense, and some smart people think it doesn't, I understand that, but since there are a lot that think it does make sense, why do we make no progress on it?
Why hasn't there been a nuclear plant built in this country, what, 30 years?
Well, it's the lobby, and it's the fight against it, and it's emotional.
But I think we've got to come around to clean, environmentally sustainable sources, and that's one for me.
You mentioned ethanol as a source for energy, good or bad?
Short term, because it takes so much fossil fuel to produce the ethanol.
What it will do is make us not dependent on foreign oil.
Right.
But people should remember that phrase.
We're trying to get away from foreign oil, but this actually is not that good for the environment.
The switchgrass.
Do you know much about that?
I know a lot about switchgrass.
That's what I feed the cattle.
Oh, you do?
Okay.
And along with big bluestem and all the native grasses.
It's good.
If we could go to that as a biofuel, that would be terrific because we wouldn't be taking corn, which could feed the world, and using it as our fuel.
So of all the things that I've mentioned, with the exception of using less, which I think categorically has to be number one in most people's minds, where would you put your bet as the best solution to reverse this alarming increase in carbon dioxide?
My favorite is solar, solar power.
I'm making my ranch a sustainable ranch, a model ranch.
Solar, now, cells can be worked in as shingles.
So you can run your air conditioning, you know, and your television set from solar power.
You can get on the grid, we can start generating our own electricity and our power to contribute to the whole source.
And bring down the use, the need for giant plants to generate so much.
The fear, of course, is China.
China's going to go oil.
Right.
That's going to pollute the world.
Yeah, it is.
But the coal that they're using now is quite the...
I've been impressed at how much media attention there is now on the quality of life drop in China due to native pollutants.
When I was there, I didn't find any environment at all.
Well, there were, you know, now you're on probably one and a half billion people.
They are in every corner.
And where they're not living, they're cultivating.
Right.
So what do you think is going to happen?
Why would they listen?
We've spent 50 years not listening to the world complain about our practices of production of products and our energy consumption.
Why would China listen to us now?
Aren't they going to argue that just like we were going through an incredible growth spurt for several decades, they have to go through that spurt before they can get smarter energetically?
Yes, and most of the problems are coming from the developing world.
And they say, you got yours.
You know, how can you now ask us not to get ours?
Right.
A lot of them are smarter than we are and may be jumping over us to the alternate sources of energy.
China won't listen to us.
It will take a catastrophe to convince them, I'm sure.
Define catastrophe.
Loss of life.
Paul Ehrlich, population bomb, which has not really turned out just a little bit, but he and his wife were predicting a famine of 400 million in the world.
We're having a famine.
We're not going to be able to feed everybody.
It's going to take something like that.
The planned parenthood of one child in China actually worked.
And they can't afford...
If they said, okay, you can have two children, that's three billion people in the course of nine months.
That's serious.
Well, if you look around the world and you've traveled far and wide, who do you think does it best?
Who's got it worked out that's not perhaps already in the very advanced stages of Western civilization, perhaps sort of an intermediate economy?
Well, France, certainly for energy.
You look at some of the younger one and highly educated countries, Brazil is good.
You know, Brazil is already into an ethanol, not from corn, but from the switchgrass and biofuel.
So if it's economically viable, if they can make money on it and clean up at the same time, that's the key.
Look at grass-fed beef.
We've got to make money to be successful.
But we can make money and we can make more.
And as soon as the rest of the restaurants learn that they can charge more for this product, they're going to embrace it.
For most folks, I think it's price insensitive.
I bet you most folks do it just for the novelty, as long as it tastes good.
Yeah.
But there is a whole group that wants to eat healthy, and they will seek us out.
We're in Swedish Covenant Hospital.
Hospital?
You are.
Yes.
We're in the Cancer Treatment Center on the North Shore.
We're at the Northbrook Junior High School.
These people are dedicated.
They've been convinced by their nutritionists that they will see the end result being positive, even to better grades.
Yes.
But you think others will do it?
I think so.
Everybody is looking at us.
And what does organic mean then?
Just no antibiotics and no hormones?
And no herbicides used on your pasture for three years before you can be categorized organic.
It's a little difficult for us.
We have some noxious weeds that we have to spray for.
So we fall into the natural category.
Everything else organic except for the herbicide used and pesticide.
Talk a lot about some of the challenges that this country faces.
Last question to Bill Curtis.
What are you proudest of that we've accomplished over the last 40 years of your career covering this nation?
The longevity, the extension of life.
And that's in your bailiwick.
And we have to wake ourselves up in terms of our own health.
But I think consciousness now is rising like a tide.
The natural movement.
of healthy food is going to waft over us until we'll look at the old days as crazy.
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