0 everything. >> i'm not wasting it. i'm eating the entire thing. if i bought it and threw it away, sure. it's the same as going grocery shopping at the beginning of the week for seven days. you should have better things to get mad about. >> keep living the dream. we can't wait to see what you come up with next. that's it for us. we'll see you one hour from now at 10:00 p.m. eastern for "ac 360 later." thanks for watching of the piers morgan starts now. president bill clinton. nothing is off the table. i asked him the hillary question. who do you think might make the better president? your wife or your daughter? what do you think of ted cruz talking and talking? and most of his party thinks he's crackers. >> once in a while i'm extremely grateful for your british roots. i couldn't have said that with a straight face and pulled it off. >> what he really thinks of vladimir putin. >> smart and remarkably -- we had a really good, blunt relationship. >> how blunt? >> brutally blunt. >> and you heard bono give the world his best clinton. >> i felt like a rock star on that occasion. >> how's the former president to return the favor? you do a pretty good bono impression. this is your chance, mr. president. this is "piers morgan live." good evening. no better person to explain what's going on in washington and the world for that the matter than bill clinton, the former commander in chief is honest, blunt and fascinating. every year he brings his star power to new york city for the annual meeting of his clinton global initiative and he's made a bit of a tradition of sitting down with yours truly for an in-depth interview. last time i spoke to you was this event last year. incredibly influential around the world and puts you in great position as someone with two terms as president and one of the great statesman of the world to make an assessment of where the world is right now. turmoil. a little conflict. what's your take on where we are? >> well, first, all of the problems are probably being intensified by the economic challenges we face. quite apart from the agonizingly slow recovery from the financial collapse. there's a global job shortage. you mentioned it. all of these young people, when the arab spring began in tahrir square and you were there. i don't believe i've ever seen a group of young people who were more impressive. the way they spoke. their grasp of things. they had used social media to pull each other out. a lot of them didn't have jobs. there were nowhere near 400,000 jobs for university graduates produced for the egyptian economy. unemployment among young people in greece is over 50%. it's almost 50% in spain. in the united states, our unemployment rate is about 7.3% but our workforce participation rate is lowest it's been in decades and a disproportionate number of the jobs are at the lower income scale which is why there have been such a big increase in food assistance. working people and working families and their children are qualifying for this now. so i think that aggravates all of the political problems. let's start with that. secondly, i think power has become more diffuse. it's harder to have a tone deaf stayed unresponsive government survive in the age of social media. and the ability of people to go into the streets and it's very difficult to repress. if you look at brazil where one of only two rising economies where inequality decreased in the last decade, they still had all these demonstrations in the street. the president did a heck of a good job. she didn't beat anybody up. she said, you know, if you have democracy, you want more of it. you get prosperity, you want more of it. we do have continuing problems. let's be honest about it. now, what do you want to do? she tried to bring people in to a decision making process. when people started demonstrating against mr. assad, he started killing them. you've got the mess we've got now. so i think that economic crisis sets a stage for discontent. the dispersion of power presents new challenges to people and we're going to have another 25 years or so of the struggle that i talked about often when i was president between the forces of people trying to put things together and the forces of people trying to take things apart and it's now occurring at a more granular level across the world. it's frustrating to people that think there ought to be some magical answer to all of this. you have to do the best you can and realize we're in the process of creating a world that is different and potentially dramatically better than any one we've ever known before but there are severe challenges and the tools at hand for people that we put in positions of leadership are not quite as effective as they used to be. >> president obama has to at the moment trust three people who as they would say you wouldn't trust with the family's silver. start with iran. that's always a big talking point. christiane amanpour interviewed president rouhani and stroke a conciliatory tone in the fact he admitted there had been a holocaust which is something that ahmadinejad would never admit to. >> translator: any crime that happened in history in humanity including the crime the nazis created toward the jews is reprehensible. whatever criminality they committed against the jews, we condemn. >> what did you make of that? how important is that concession? do you see a shift with america? how much do you trust him? >> first of all, i think it's interesting commentary on the world in which we're living that admitting that the holocaust occurred qualifies as being a moderate. i mean, in other words, if you get into the fact based world, there's something to it. at least we can have something to talk about. i was hoping and i think the president was, that the opening of the u.n. would give them a chance to, you know, maybe even do more. this is eerily reminiscent of what happened when the last president was there. he spoke and i spoke. i went out in the audience and listened to his speech. but he still didn't feel like we could meet or really do anything. so i think we just had to keep working at it. but i don't think president obama has to trust anybody. i think you just deal with people and you see what happens and you go forward. i feel the same way about the russian effort to get the syrian government to declare, disclose and then hand over their chemical weapons. >> something sounds to good to be true, it usually is too good to be true. can we believe that vladimir putin with his own self-interest for russia is orchestrating this huge maneuver to remove all of assad's chemical weapons and it's just going to happen? >> we don't have to believe it. we just have to see what happens and make the most of what happens. you work for the best, prepare for the worst in this business. but i think it would be a terrible mistake not to take advantage of the opportunity and, you know, look, mr. putin is very smart. >> you know him better than most people. >> i do. >> what was he like behind closed doors away from the public? >> smart and remarkably -- we had a really good, blunt relationship. >> how blunt? >> brutally blunt. i think the right strategy most of the time but it's frustrating to people in your line of work, you should be brutally honest with people in private. and then if you want them to help you, try to avoid embarr s embarrassing them in public. sometimes they do things which make it impossible for you to keep quiet. but by in large i found all of the people i dealt with appreciated it if i told them the truth. how i honestly felt and what our interests were and what our objectives were and they also appreciated it when i didn't kick them around in public for as long as i couldn't kick them around. that's my experience. >> did putin ever renege on a personal agreement he made to you? >> no, he did not. >> behind closed doors he could be trusted? >> he kept his word in all of the deals we made. but here's what i want to say about that. i think there are two things going on here. first of all, it's clear that the president's threat of force to enter into here prompted him to take -- there was some sort of conversation and he said is there anything we can do to make this go away and apparently secretary kerry said, yeah, make the chemical weapons go away thinking that was the last thing on their mind probably and they said, let me see about that. what does that tell you? a, they didn't want america to weigh in. they had been shipping arms to the syrian government. they got iranian military in there. they've got lebanese hezbollah in there. secondly, they have rested muslim populations and have to be apprehensive about al qaeda groups getting into the mix in syria. chemical weapons are not like other weapons. you keep the chemicals over here and then if you got a sophisticated military you put them in a warhead and you launch them somewhere. you can use those chemicals in a lot of ways. they cannot possibly want these huge stores of chemicals being in syria not knowing what's going to happen five years, ten years from now. he may have honestly reached a decision that it is not in russia's interest. secondly, he may have concluded -- i think rightly, that he could ride this anti-american horse only so far and in the end it won't put a single russian to work and it won't increase the life expectancy of russian males which has now dropped to 59 or lower. it will not restore the vitality of the russian health care system or economy. and, you know, russia still has the same decision they had to make after the end of the cold war. if you -- as long as they have plenty of oil and gas and they can sell at a high price, they can pretend that a 19th century z czarist view is best. it's a loser. the russians are smart, creative problems. >> did you talk to him on the phone? >> we did for st. pete ursburg. i think they implemented it. when i see him or i have -- when hillary was secretary of state, i sometimes had indirect contact with him. i had a good relationship with him. they should be building a 21st century economy built on the incredible brain power of their people and their facility in all of these information technology areas. if every year there is a contest to solve computer problems. every year i checked over the last ten years, there have always been at least two russian universities in the top five. they are good at this. why would you build a future based on wasting natural resources and pushing your neighbors around and trying to make sure america is miserable in the middle east when you could rebuild a future that would allow russia's population to expand instead of shrink and allow their influence to be global because it's based on things that are real and tangible and help people. i think this may be the beginning of a different strategy for them. do i know that? of course not. do i think -- >> but worth trying? >> yeah. you should try everything. you should always work for the best. never shut anything off. it's not necessary to trust somebody to take them up on a good offer. just pay attention to what's going on. >> when we come back, his wife hillary and the presidency. would you want your wife to go through the rigors of the presidency knowing what it's like these days? the brutal toll it takes on you? and later, the man you unforgettable man that played the sax on tv has another rock star moment. your daughter informed me, all of us, that you do a pretty good bono impression. this is your chance, mr. president. ♪ with the spark cash card from capital one... boris earns unlimited rewards for his small business. can i get the smith contract, please? thank you. that's three new paper shredders. 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[ female announcer ] today, cisco is connecting the internet of everything. so everyone goes home happy. the clinton global initiative draws the a-list every year. some in the audience had questions. gina davis who played commander in chief, the first lady president of the united states. >> she's my president. i always tell her that. >> i think she has a very pertinent question for you, mr. president. >> the high point of my life was after the show when i saw you and you said my president. i said, well, now i can die happy. my administration was much shorter than yours. really the only difference. i people understand the scale of cgm and the powerful focus on women's empowerment and women's economic empowerment and not only in separate discussions about that but including women in every topic that's discussed. can you just share with us a little bit about why you think that's so important? >> sure. first of all, the reason cgi has done so much is i'm not doing it. even our foundation is not doing it. when we showed the film yesterday on our foundation and how we try to define what we were about, i said i had gone out of my way never to actually get any kind of help for what we do out of cgi. our foundation helps if we're asked like haiti working group meetings now we do a lot of work there so i'm very active there. but this is a metaphor for the way i hope the 21st century will work. that is this is an incredible network that's constantly shifting, constantly growing and constantly learning and the most important thing i think cgi is doing now besides holding the meeting and getting right people here is helping people to develop commitments with a better chance of success and then helping them to keep those commitments. so now you've got all of these people getting together working together who would otherwise never have done so before. that's important. why do we decide to include girls and women in all this? because first of all it's mor e morally the right thing to do. second, the world has 7 billion people. we're going to 9 billion. and the countries growing most rapidly are ones least able to handle the growth and all over the world the only strategy that works to build a sustainable population culturally and religiously in every region is to put all of the girls in school and give all of the women access to the labor market. for example, saudi arabia has done a brilliant job of getting young women in institutions of higher education. for several years there's been more women than men in college. they're still underrepresented in the labor force. japan is caught in a demographic trap aggravated by the fact they don't take immigrants but they can buy themselves 20 years to work this out if they would get even participation of women and men in the workforce and they could come roaring back. so there's one of the wealthiest countries in the world. if you go to where we do all of this work in africa or southeast asia or latin america, it's obviously going to be very important. our family is real interested in >> talking of women in the workforce, how do you think would make a better president, your wife or your daughter? >> day after tomorrow, my wife because she's had more experience. over the long run, chelsea. she knows more than we do about everything. [ applause ] there was a time in her childhood when i thought maybe she thought she did when they didn't and now it's highly embarrassing because she in fact does. i feel like i'm going to school every day when we have conversations. >> i met your wife for the first time and your daughter actually. she looks fantastic. she looks completely reinvigorate and seemed on fire with ideas and it screamed to me one thing. i'm running. can you put us out of our misery? >> no. but it should have screamed to you something else. real life is a healthier existence than politics. >> right. [ applause ] >> look at wes clark. he looks like he could still swim for west point. there's something to be said for real life. >> would you want your wife to go through the rigors of the presidency knowing what it's like these days? the brutal toll it takes on you given how well you both are? she said only this week that you and she get to be at home together more than we used to. we laugh at our dogs. we watch stupid movies. we go for long walks. normal every day pleasures. that goes out the window if you go back to the white house. >> well, the answer to that question is i want her to do what she wants to do. i think it's too soon for her to decide both because she just is getting used to being a private citizen again. she has a book to finish. and because we don't know what kind of shape the country and the world is going to be in. i think quite unhealthy for our democracy and for our decision making process that we all insist on now running permanent presidential campaigns. barack obama had not taken his hand off the bible, taken the oath of office, before all this stuff was launched. now, the republicans have been out for eight years. i get that. there's 12, 15 people that want to be the nominee. i understand that there's going to be stories about this. but to turn this into a permanent thing is a bad deal because america needs to be concentrated on things like how do we implement the health care reform law? if we implement the health care reform law and it works and we spend relatively less than we were spending on health care, that is if we continue the low inflation rate, how will we see that some of that money that's freed up will be reinvested in the american economy to create more and different jobs? the reason incomes are stagnant in america today is, a, there aren't enough jobs, and b, we're not changing the job mix. the only way to raise the median income -- i support as you know repeal of the tax cuts for high-income people. i don't mind paying more. i think those of us who have more should pay more. we're returning to the distribution of the first decade of this new century where 90% of the gains go to 10% of the people and half of the gains go to 1% of the people. the only way you can change that is if you have what happened in my second term. it's the only time since the late '70s when median income, the one in the middle went up. you got to have more jobs and change the job mix. >> when we come back, i'll ask president clinton what he thinks of ted cruz's marathon dialogue to stop obama care. most of his party thinks he's crackers. what is the way -- >> once in a while i'm extremely grateful for your british roots. i couldn't have said that with a straight face and pulled it off. my customers can shop around-- see who does good work and compare costs. it doesn't usually work that way with health care. but with unitedhealthcare, i get information on quality rated doctors, treatment options and estimates for how much i'll pay. that helps me, and my guys, make better decisions. i don't like guesses with my business, and definitely not with our health. innovations that work for you. that's health in numbers. unitedhealthcare. ♪ ♪ ♪ [ male announcer ] build anything with the new toyota tundra. toyota. let's go places.