mr. clinton: i apologize for being tardy up here, i didn't get the memo about where i could stand and listen. i'm very grateful to all of you. i want to say that i working on this childhood obesity issue for more than a decade. i want to thank all of the private sector companies. i listened backstage to all the remarks. i have been to the middle east and to asia. to participate with no one in the participating burgeoning health problems they are having there. i am glad that companies, where possible, are trying to work themselves out a part of their job by giving their children healthier future. i want to thank the schwartz foundation and the johnson foundation for working with us. i will say more about larry soller, the president and ceo of pha, and my good friend, dr. howell wechsler. i am very glad that all of you are here. and glad that, in this sort of -- how do i say it -- unusual times -- [laughter] mr. clinton: you recognize that this is no place for alternative facts. [laughter] and i don't mean to be funny. this is still a major public health crisis. the lives of millions of young people are relying on the decisions we and they make. and your commitment to help people live their healthiest and best lives is profoundly important. i also want to say that tomorrow, as you all know, you're going to hear from pha's honorary chair michelle obama. and i want to thank her for what she has done in that position and what she has done in the white house. i will never forget -- [applause] mr. clinton: when we started the alliance for the healthy generation in 2005 after my heart surgery, there were not that many groups working on the childhood obesity issue. there weren't that many people saying -- you know, we are about to have epidemic levels of type 2 diabetes. and the attendant consequences and heart troubles, stroke, some , and premature, among other things, blindness and amputations and that human heartbreak is going to be staggering. and i have to say, i was amazed that we couldn't generate more interest for it. but when she got in and she spoke to a whole younger generation of people, i am just an old white guy in a suit. i'm boring. and she asked our group, the alliance for the healthier generation and the let's move campaign, you could see the landscape open up. and more people were being willing to write about this or talk about it or educate people about it. so i am very grateful. and i'm glad that when she left the white house, she didn't leave the cause. i will never forget when the american heart association asked me, after i had my quadruple bypass surgery in 2004, to get involved in helping them. and i wanted to do it. because i felt i had been given an incredible gift by dodging a massive bullet, which i continued to bob and weave around for a while. i had two more procedures. i was 1% of the people who had that surgery with the fluid buildup on the lungs. 10% of them but only 10% of that 10%, the fluid buildup doesn't go away on its own. it is like peeling an orange off of your lungs. and then, i lost the vein, which happens to a lot of people who have quadruple bypass surgeries. so they went back in and took out one of my arteries. they have given up for dead because there were two w a curves and it. and they put two stents in. i got to watch that on television. that was a real hoot. the doctor said, are you going to watch this? and i asked if i was going to live through it and he said yes. i said, you bet i do. [laughter] the good news is that i was saved by modern medicine but the bad news was that i had no business being on that operating table, if i had the right diet and lifestyle over my life, i wouldn't have been. and not everybody can be as lucky as i was to get to the table on time and have no damage. and a lot of people don't have the annual checkups. but everybody should have access to a decent healthy diet and reasonable exercise programs. and to fundamental checkups. so when they asked me to help, i said look, i will be happy to help but i don't want to just do public service announcements. let's do something to try to come to grips with this childhood obesity problem. because otherwise, we are going to have terrible problems. and you can already see it in parts of the population, when the heartbreaking stories came out in 2016 about middle-aged, noncollege educated middle-class people being the first group of americans where the life expectancy was going down, we learned a lot. we learned that even then, the economic circumstances where objectively better than that of african-americans, hispanic americans and native americans. so that there was a deep, emotional and psychological component to what was going on. and the life expectancy was going down. i have been doing a lot of work in another part of my life with our health management initiatives to try to help communities deal with the opioid crisis. but there is no question that there is a convergence between all of these things and the rising rates of type two diabetes and all of the consequences that are going to flow from it. so i said, let's try to get these people through their lives in better shape. you know -- there's something to be said for second chances. and public health is about giving people second chances with their lives. so we did it. in march of this year, when i was 70 years, six months and one day old, i became the oldest person in my family for three generations. i come from a family where the men don't live long. and where the women haven't either, until you go back to my maternal great-grandparents who lived into their mid-70's. they looks like something straight out of american gothic. [laughter] mr. clinton: they lived in the country. they got out of the sunshine, they went to bed with the sunshine. they ate little. they had no vices. little late for the rest of us on that line. they were wonderful but we've got to do better. and i'm so grateful for the opportunity we have had to do this work. and we tried very hard to actually stop and revert the tide of childhood obesity. and the first time i started talking about this, there were two groups of people. those who didn't realize it was a big problem, so they had no clue what i was talking about, and those who knew it was the biggest unrevealed public health crisis in america, who thought i was tipsy for thinking that we could actually stop it and reverse it. a goal like, let's stop and reverse childhood obesity for all of you who work in this area know that it is easy to state but hard to do. it is like changing a culture. and this is about not just a dietary thing, but it is the way our society works with economics and food consumption and other things. it is like trying to turn the titanic around before it hit the iceberg. the problem is, every person you deal with is a potential titanic so you have to do it over and over and over again. and some things work in some areas and don't in others. so when we started, we started with a school. because children spend most of their time outside their home there. our healthy school program in 2006 -- it seems like a lifetime ago -- it was launched in 13 states. it has since grown to become the largest effort to prevent childhood obesity in schools and now it has helped to build better school environments for more than 20 million students in more than 35,000 schools. and now we have 2600 out of school fights in every state. the district of columbia and puerto rico. then, we started worrying about the food itself. and before the new food guidelines came into place, we worked on replacing unhealthy foods brought by contractors with different kinds of food that would be healthier. and we did this work with the beverage industry, which is now fairly well-known, that we met with the american beverage association, coke, pepsi and dr pepper, snapple, and others to produce joined us. they are now more than 120 of the nations leading food and beverage health care and technology companies involved with us in some form or fashion. so, what you're doing here is really important to me. i think it is never as interesting as a knockdown, blood on the floor fight. but the truth is, in the world we live in, creative cooperation involving diverse partnerships of people who live different lives and know different things are the best mechanisms for solving complex social problems. everybody who works for me -- there are not many but there are a few -- they are all starting to laugh now because they know exactly what i'm going to say -- i realized that a good, old-fashioned, knockdown fight is so much more emotionally satisfying. look, i am from the right rural working-class. i'm the first person in my family to go to college. i get what is going on out there. i understand all of this tribalism, but it is a dumb way to run a railroad. it may be emotionally satisfying in the way that eating bad food gives you a sugar high and leaves you hungry shortly afterwards. it doesn't work. what works is what you are doing here. and the reason the people who are here with me are rolling their eyes is because they know what i'm about to tell you. do you know what the exhibit is at the clinton presidential center right now? extreme bugs. [laughter] do you know what my staff gave me for christmas last year? two, not one, but two ant farms. so i can have one of my desk at the presidential library, one in my office in harlem. why? because i am telling them that the most important political book written in the last 10 years that would have made as much healthier as citizens is el wilson's "the social conquest of earth." it is less than 250 pages long and he is a double pulitzer prize winning microbiologist who taught me that the combined weight of all of the ants on earth is greater than the combined weight of the number of people. that is quite a number of ants. [laughter] why my telling you this? [laughter] because here is the conclusion to the book. i will save you the purchase price. of all the species that have earth, weited our know that there are hundreds and thousands of them. they are sadly disappearing at the most rapid rate in 10,000 years but he says the most successful species that ever lived, if you define success as -- we had repeated chances to be wiped out but they failed and here we are. we are still around. the most successful species are ants, termites, bees and people. not the biggest and not the strongest. and he says, what do we have in common? these are all of the species that are known as the greatest cooperators. they found ways to work together to solve common problems and build stronger futures. and he says that people at the greatest cooperators but their great strength is our great curse. we have a conscience and consciousness. and we know it. so it makes us arrogant and we think we are smarter than we are, so we tend to slice and dice ourselves in ways that, in the end, threaten our ability to escape one more existence threatening challenge. the climate change thing gives me a kick. no one doubts the question that is not numerically verifiable that more than 99% of the scientists say this is an existential threat to the planet. so now, the new position is saying "i'm not saying they're wrong, but they might be wrong." i'm just saying. we just have the coldest march in new york in 100 something years. i was pleading for global warming to come back. [laughter] i get it. we can name all of these jokes. you name me one other threat -- every parent in this audience. that youne threat wouldn't take seriously if you thought the odds of doing this were more than 90% better of doing that? putting a child in a safe seat in the backseat, there is a 100% chance your child will crash a collapse unless the car completely collapses. people say that is crazy. throw the kid in the back seat and let them roll around. nobody would do that, right? but that is what we are doing on climate change. we are throwing the kid in the backseat and letting them roll around. and that is what i want to say about this public health issue. the reason this is working is because of the cooperation of complex groups of people who are different. it is an inclusive, cooperative network. i remember, actually, admitted after he came to work at the alliance for a healthier generation that he rolled his eyes when he heard about the soda pop agreement. it is like, i'm in public health and you expect me to believe that coke and pepsi and dr pepper and snapple and all of these actually agreed to cut the sugar out of their drinks in schools? this is an unscented ties version of the message. look, i know you don't want to give all of these people diabetes because you don't want all of these people sitting in wheelchair is in their 30's, they will not be buying many soft drinks. i know you don't want that. that is the necessary conclusion of when a kid goes to school and gets 50% of their calories from heavily sugared drinks. we have to do something about it. surely, there is a way you can make money in a different way. i never ask anybody. we cut the price of the eight -- aids drugs around the world and i never asked people to lose money. i say it is not sustainable. can they find a way to make money in different way? and they did. they got sugared drinks out of the schools. they went to fruit flavored water and smaller portions of milk, smaller portions of juice. and two independent surveys have concluded in the last few years that the alliance for healthy generation brokered agreement has reduce calories from drinks in schools by 90%. i mean, that is a big-time number, right? why? because it turns out, if you really have people working in good faith and they share the same goals -- we would like our children to live as long as possible -- and if you're totally cynical, we would like them to buy soda pop in their 30's and 40's as well as today, when presumably they will have more money, and by then we will have solved this problem and we can't let them die or be maimed, it just makes sense. so the larger point i want to make is we can do this in a big , way. we are now working with the beverage industry to reduce total consumption of beverage calories, nationally. by people of all ages, everywhere, by 20%. by 2025. we have, as i said, we have negotiated an agreement with food manufacturers and purchase organizations. and we have seen total sales of healthier products. just with the tools we have byked with, have increased $130 million, 70% increase over where we started. we actually got involved in health insurance and got employers and insurers to offer, at no extra cost, the coverage of trips to the doctor and dietitian by children of covered workers who had obesity problems. and they were almost 3 million kids now who are covered by more than 50,000 networks that are actually able to go to the doctor and to a dietitian and become part of an organized group and it is part of the health insurance model so that there is a cash flow reimbursement scheme. we made an agreement with mcdonald's to serve healthier food. and there were 21 million more low-fat milk jugs and an 100% increase in apple juice boxes. but the most important thing was, all of the other fast food people started improving their health care, too. we can do it together. this work and that of the partnership for a healthier america, again, i will say both of them show that networks of cooperation undertaken in good faith by people who share the same goals will work in most places. if you have to regulate, you can regulate at the end and figure out the most efficient way to reach the goal, faster and better. and it is not just in this space. coming up to the 10th year of the clinton global initiative, when we were meeting every year, we got an independent big data at the data that we had kept over 10 years. when we started, two thirds of them involve partnerships, one third were go it alone. by the end, well over 90% of commitments involve multiple partners. we found they not only, on average, met their goals, they exceeded their goals. i will give you two examples because they kind of relate to what we are talking about with children. president obama gave a speech and said the country needed 100,000 more trained stem teachers. it was obvious given the politics of washington that he was not going to get a federal appropriation to pay for it. so the carnegie corporation got two dozen partners and said we will do 20%. we will train, fund, and place the teachers. that was right after the president asked for it, about 2011 or 2012. last week in new york i went to their latest meeting. they are now 280 partners and they will have more than 100,000 stem teachers they train and place in our schools and did not cost the taxpayers anything. [applause] when the ebola epidemic broke out, we got others interested in getting adequate medical supplies out there. if you are a public health worker, you have to change your clothing constantly and burn it and do all that. so to kick off at cgi we had a dozen partners send 100 tons of medical equipment. did not cost any taxpayers anything. within a couple of months, they sent 500 tons. just 24 to 30 partners who got together and said i can do this, i can do the other thing. all committed to the same goal. we should not have to have a calamity to do the right thing. those of you trying to avoid calamity and create happiness an d opportunity and success should be able to get more partners to do more positive things. i want to thank all the companies that are doing this. knowing full well that a better job they do depending on the business they are in, they may cost themselves some business, and meanwhile they will meet nothing but skeptics who will try to find some example of where they did not achieve what they said they were going to. and they are doing the right thing anyway. but this is really important. this is a major economic issue for america. if this works, if we keep doing it and making more and more progress, we will have a healthier workforce. we will have lower health care costs than would otherwise be the case. we will have higher productivity than would otherwise be the case. that will generate more profits, higher incomes, more new businesses, more hiring, more everything by taking what is arguably from an economic point of view the biggest public health problem out. if we don't get a hold of the epidemic of the opioid epidemic and heroine and fentanyl and all that, it will be bigger. but right now have a long way to go to catch up to the aggregate impact of this. the concentrated impact of the opioid epidemic is worse because more people die quicker. but this is still a public health problem that affects the largest number of people and impairs the learning capacity. for example, the growth capacity of the largest number of our children. so, i came here more than anything else to say thanks. and to say i believe more strongly than i did 10 years ago that partnerships between diverse partners are still the best problem solvers. several years ago, a distinguished journalist wrote a book called "the wisdom of crowds" and he basically said you could fill this room with social science studies proving decision-makers -- diverse groups make better decisions than homogenous ones, for lone geniuses. if i could snap my fingers and instantaneously a person in this room with the highest iq would appear and we took this person off to a cushy little suite and give them what they wanted for two days and baby them and made them happy, and the rest of us were stuck your drinking stale coffee and eating cold rolls, and you fed the same 10 questions to the genius, we would make better decisions. it is proven over and over and over again. so i want to encourage you to continue. we need to develop more examples of corporate engagement. both the alliance for health and -- healthier generation and the partnership for healthy america are trying to do that. our two organizations have involved 400 plus companies in making some sort of commitment to children's health. the robert wood johnson foundation, and i want to thank them, has supported our work. they asked us and give us a little money to figure out how we could deepen our cooperation. so, we came up with this idea of a business fund which would give every company a chance to provide all children and families with whom they are in contact, either as employees or customers, the chance to make choices that lead to the healthy -- healthiest possible lives. under this business fund, which they -- the robert wood johnson foundation -- are going to fund , i think, quite generously to start out, these two organizations will develop new and innovative solutions to get even more kinds of partnerships with companies. and to involve nongovernmental organizations. so we will have better coordination across the field. one of the things i learned, for example, in our alliance with communities all across america through our health matters initiative is there are a lot of things that peripherally affect childhood obesity. like some places have no out of school play places. one place that looks like ideal is jacksonville, florida, because it's a city-county government. is the third biggest open space -- urban space in america geographically, but the problem is you are walking downtown one minute, and one minute you are out in the country. somebody that should be driving 35 is all of a sudden driving 70 and have the second or third highest pedestrian death rate in the country. if everybody knows that in jacksonville, that will impede people walking. that will have an impact on this. so this idea of having community-based diverse solutions is really important. so, that is what we are going to do, and thank you to the robert wood johnson foundation for providing the money for them to do it. i would ask the ceo of our alliance for healthy generation and the ceo of the partnership for a healthy america, who just told me he was a much younger brother of a guy who was my friend in law school -- [laughter] i looked at him and said you are too young to be the brother of anybody i went to law school with. [laughter] he said they have a prolific family and they strung it out. i would like to ask them to come here so we can celebrate this. we are going to start with $1.5 million and see what we can do. thank you to the robert wood johnson foundation. thank you to the companies that will work with us. i was glad to listen to the previous speaker. i really like what they do because every person who does not get diabetes is one less customer for them. there will be plenty of people with type one diabetes and other conditions. they will be just fine. they are out there trying to save these kids lives. that means a lot to me. i have been to the middle east and shanghai with the company because they know globally this threatens to gobble up the future of children by the millions. we are all going to do this together. we now have a new mission actually. hal and larry and our groups are -- our two groups are going to involve the private sector more. we will come up with more projects. we are going to do more to empower all of you, and we are going to be able to do it and afford to bring in more businesses and more ngo's thanks to the robert wood johnson foundation without him we would never have done any of the things we have done in america's schools. thank you very much and i would like to ask you to give hal and larry at hand. [applause] president clinton: thank you. thank you. let me just say one final thing. i'm in washington, d.c. there is still massive disparities, massive in the impact of childhood obesity, type two diabetes, and you know it. so i ask you don't get discouraged. the good news is in their heart of hearts nobody wants to see any child die. or be maimed or have their future robbed. i think it is so easy to get caught up in all this stuff. it is easy to get caught up around here. over our long married life, one of the greatest little adages hillary has burned in my brain is that life is not a dress rehearsal. and so we don't have a day to waste. don't give somebody else a day on some unproductive thing when you can take this day. you came to washington. don't leave without renewed energy. when michelle obama asked our foundation to help with what she was doing, and i realized they were calling the campaign "let's move," not "move away," i thought maybe we should make that the national motto and put it on the capital and the white house. "do something." [laughter] do it. i could make 50 jokes out of this but i won't. [laughter] this is a big deal. don't ever devalue your potential to make a difference. don't ever assume someone will not help you. and don't ever forget we now know that inclusion, diversity and creative cooperation lead to better results. that would be you. make sure they know. thank you. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] we go live now to the brady press briefing room at the white house for today's briefing with sean spicer here he has been away for a couple of days. "the wall street journal" writing for the past few days he has been working in a back office under a different title, navy commander. as a navy reservist totals his duties working a few weeks in the year in the press office of the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. sean spicer expected at the briefing this afternoon. there was some doubt other that would happen. it's now possible for my surrogates to stood up podium that she said one thing would be to cancel all future press briefings and handout written responses for the sake of response which drew a from the white house correspondent association, jeff mason saying