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CNN Live Event/Special

Ted Turner: Captain Planet. Aired 9-10p ET

Aired September 28, 2019 - 21:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[21:00:00]

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He had a kind of reputation of being a sort of wild man.

BILL GATES, CO-FOUNDER, MICROSOFT: Somebody who was doing more wild stuff than almost anyone.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He's unafraid.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Captain Outrageous, the mouth of the south. He thinks it, he says it.

ANDREW YOUNG, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO THE U.N.: He could tell you to go to hell in such a way that you'd look forward to the trip.

JANE FONDA, ARTIST AND ACTIVIST: It was not what I expected at all.

SANJAY GUPTA, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Nobody expected it.

AL GORE, FORMER U.S. VICE PRESIDENT: The sheer grit and determination and his boldness, he has guts.

GUPTA: A brash billionaire businessman whose every move was always part of a bigger plan.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He can anticipate problems he can see around corners.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Not just one corner, many corners.

GUPTA: It started with an idea so audacious, so unthinkable.

KATHY CALVIN, PRESIDENT AND CEO, U.N. FOUNDATION: Nobody believed he could pull it off.

DANNY JOHNSON, MANAGER, FLYING D RANCH: Absolutely crazy, absolutely crazy.

GUPTA: Except once in a lifetime, a guy like him comes along, Ted Turner.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He wanted to save the world. TODD WILKINSON, AUTHOR, LAST STAND: Save everything.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Save everything.

GUPTA: It's all part of saving everything.

TED TURNER: There you go. I think I'm getting it.

FONDA: We're fast approaching the tipping point.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now, the question is do we rise up?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That is pretty dang cool.

TURNER: Wow. Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play, where seldom is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day.

GUPTA: It is quiet.

TURNER: But you thought it would be louder, but it's not.

GUPTA: No, it's not.

TURNER: It's pretty quiet.

Did you hear him do that?

GUPTA: Yes. What did he say (ph)?

TURNER: That sounded pretty much like, mm, didn't it?

GUPTA: Yes, that's exactly that sound.

This is all for you part of protecting the planet, having these bison here like this, doing what you've done, right?

TURNER: Yes.

GUPTA: Honestly, when I first heard the bison idea, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. How did this 80-year-old billionaire end up on a ranch in Montana and how exactly were bison going to help save the planet anyway?

The story starts a long, long time ago, long before the world first came to know Ted Turner.

TURNER: We're by now driving, trip it, lower the pole.

GUPTA: He sailed on to the scene in the 1970s as Captain Courageous, a bare-chested businessman who won America's cup.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: WTBS, great American television.

GUPTA: By that point, a young Ted had already leveraged his family's business to buy a struggling T.V. station, turning it into the first satellite super station. And with his signature arrogance, he bought a losing baseball game and branded it America's team.

TURNER: Come see the big league team of (INAUDIBLE). Hey, we're in Atlanta.

GUPTA: He liked to win, take risks and he could convince you of anything.

TURNER: A lot of times, people give up just when they're on the verge of succeeding, you know. I just never quit.

GUPTA: Ted was born Robert Edward Turner III in Cincinnati, Ohio, 1938. If you've heard anything about his childhood, you've heard it was difficult. Ted's father was known to treat him harshly both physically and emotionally.

Then came the loss, Ted's sister developed lupus and died at the age of 17.

TURNER: that's what I would say was the great tragedy that occurred in my family, and had a big influence on all of us.

My mother survived it, but she was never the same. My father didn't last too much longer after that, just a few years.

GUPTA: What he means is that his father, the man Ted Turner most wanted to please, killed himself.

FONDA: Everything with Ted started back when he was a little boy.

[21:05:00]

He spent his childhood outdoors. He became a fisherman. He became a hunter. Ted found solace in nature.

YOUNG: When you live on the land and you develop an appreciation and a love for nature, and you realize its value.

WILKINSON: What motivates Ted is that he's so devoted to saving nature because it's a way of saving himself. He's able to help himself heal from the trauma.

TURNER: Tragedy that occurs in your life can either wreck you or make you stronger, but I determined to be stronger. I knew that's what my sister and father would have wanted me to do.

GUPTA: So, yes, I heard you want me to call you Mr. Turner, is that right?

TURNER: No, call me Ted.

GUPTA: Did you grow up watching western movies? Did that appeal to you, the western movie? Was that part of it, the cowboy, the rustic sort of character in those movies?

TURNER: I'm not really a cowboy.

GUPTA: You're not a cowboy?

TURNER: I don't have any cows.

GUPTA: So you're a bison boy?

TURNER: That's right.

GUPTA: Bison boy.

When did you first start thinking about bison?

TURNER: When I was a little boy, about ten years old, I read National Geographic Magazine, it had an article about bison and then it said how close they came to extinction. I decided then that if I could, that I would do what I could to help bring the bison back.

GUPTA: It's hard to separate the image of the bison from America. It's a national symbol. The U.S. government estimates 30 to 60 million roamed North America in the 1500s. By the end of the 1800s, just a few hundred wild bison remained.

So what happened to all the bison?

TURNER: They were killed.

GUPTA: This has been a long, a longstanding thing for you.

TURNER: Lifetime.

GUPTA: A lifetime.

And so starting with just three bison, Ted began quietly pursuing that childhood dream.

TURNER: Watch out, you're about to step in the poop.

GUPTA: But back to my original question, how do these bison help save the planet?

When you were thinking about saving the bison, was the larger picture that this could help save the planet?

TURNER: Save everything. It's all tied together. You have to save the environment if you're going to save the species.

GUPTA: Save everything?

TURNER: It's on my bumper sticker.

GUPTA: It's an audacious task. How do you approach that?

TURNER: I had to make a lot of money first because ranches are not cheap.

GUPTA: Owning a baseball team, basketball, starting this media empire, that was your mindset even back then? I'm going to earn this to immediately give it away and help save the planet?

TURNER: I thought it was the right thing to do. I've always wanted to do what the right thing was.

GUPTA: To do the right thing would be an uphill fight with everything at stake.

TURNER: Something could go wrong. There could be an accident, miscalculation, and we might end up destroying the world.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[21:10:00]

REPORTER: And we begin today with breaking news.

REPORTER: We have breaking news right now on CNN.

REPORTER: Let's get back to the breaking news this hour.

GUPTA: History in real-time.

REPORTER: The Amazon forest continues to burn.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN HOST: Let's get some more now with the United Nations, is calling a humanitarian catastrophe.

REPORTER: We could see the people below trapped on Sinjar Mountain.

GUPTA: Moments we'll never forget, thanks to one idea from one man.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: 24/7 cable news, he changed the world.

GUPTA: Ted Turner.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: We're following the breaking news out of Haiti, the largest and most powerful earthquake in the region's history.

REPORTER: This just in, a plane has crashed into one of the towers.

REPORTER: There has been a second explosion.

REPORTER: There's nothing subtle about the horrors of this war.

REPORTER: President Reagan has endorsed German reunification.

REPORTER: The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated.

REPORTER: The rescuers are making progress literally by inches.

REPORTER: Liftoff of the space shuttle mission.

REPORTER: Obviously a major malfunction.

REPORTER: Ted Turner has been at the cutting edge of every major movement of our time.

TURNER: I dedicate the news channel for America, the cable news network.

GUPTA: At 6:00 P.M. on June 1st, 1980, Ted Turner changed the face of television.

DAVID WALKER, CNN HOST: Good evening, I'm David Walker.

LOIS HART, CNN HOST: And I'm Lois Hart. Now here's the news.

GUPTA: Starting the world's first 24-hour cable news network, CNN.

GATES: Ted was a huge risk taker. He upset the rules of the cable T.V. business.

TEDDY TURNER, TED TURNER'S SON: We don't watch an hour of news a day and it's painful and you're going to put it on 24 hours, nobody is going to watch that.

TURNER: I felt that America needed an in-depth voice in what's going on in the news.

REPORTER: Here's what's happening at this moment.

CALVIN: It was being called the chicken noodle network. It was such a bold idea and nobody believed he could pull it off.

TURNER: So far, everything we've done has been right, and this is going to be right too.

YOUNG: Everybody wrote him off about CNN, but he was right, and everybody else was wrong.

TURNER: I'm willing and have been willing all along to risk everything that I have to provide that service. We're going to provide it come heck or high water.

GUPTA: For Ted, CNN was a platform to show the world what was happening in every corner of the globe.

REPORTER: This is a CNN special report.

GUPTA: But there was always a larger message as well, a message to look around, care about the environment, don't sit it out.

TURNER: My good friend and a man who needs very little introduction, Captain Cousteau.

GUPTA: Ted's own Captain Planet was a captain himself, Jacques Cousteau.

What kind of guy was Jacques Cousteau?

TURNER: Wonderful, he believed in saving everything, so we hit it off from the very beginning. [21:15:02]

WILKINSON: Ted, of course, had seen Cousteau's documentaries and also had seen him profiled on a number of T.V. specials. Ted agrees to start green lighting some original episodes, environmental documentaries.

GUPTA: There's a story, you're on the Amazon on his boat, Calypso. This is in the early 1980s.

WILKINSON: Cousteau invites Ted down to the delta of the Amazon, and they go down there and Ted takes his sons.

RHETT TURNER, TED TURNER'S SON: I was about 13 or 14, and that was a really great experience to be in Peru and Brazil on the Calypso.

BEAU TURNER, TED TURNER'S SON: From piranhas to these beautiful porpoise that inhabit the Amazon, it was a spectacular trip.

WILKINSON: And the boys go to sleep and Ted and Cousteau are out on board the deck.

GUPTA: And he's telling you, Ted, coral reefs are being destroyed, bellwether species are being lost, icecaps are melting, there are fresh water droughts. What did you think at that time when Jacques Cousteau was telling you that?

TURNER: I was concerned and I resolved to do whatever I could to help it.

GUPTA: He basically was saying, enjoy the time that you have because it's already too late. We passed the threshold, the beginning of the end has started. When you're having that conversation with him, he also says, Ted, you worry too much because --

TURNER: I don't feel like -- that I worry too much?

GUPTA: He said, Ted, you worry too much.

TURNER: He worried more than me. He was a full-time worrier.

JACQUES COUSTEAU, FRENCH EXPLORER: Mankind can expect from exploiting the Amazon, maybe very little, maybe a lot. I don't know.

WILKINSON: Ted said, Captain, I came down here to be inspired, and this is all bumming me out.

TURNER: And being myself very ecologically-minded --

WILKINSON: What do you want me to do? And he said, you need to use your reach through CNN to affect people's lives and to educate them.

GUPTA: Have we passed the threshold?

TURNER: No, I don't think so. I'm very hopeful. I'm a human being, and I like being a human being, and I like the other human beings that I know. But we have to work hard.

GUPTA: But how to get people to care, how to get people to realize that the environment could and would become our greatest and most pressing crisis? Sure, Ted Turner could convince just about anyone of anything, but to save everything?

He started by surrounding himself with like-minded people.

GORE: I'm Al Gore and I've known Ted Turner for 45 years. He certainly does have an ability to see beyond the horizon. He shares the passion that I feel for solving the climate crisis.

GUPTA: Ted and Al Gore met in the 1970s, long before Gore's Oscar- winning documentary on climate change.

GORE: Temperature increases are taking place all over the world.

He also has used his resources and passions to conserve land and to save the bison, all of those concerns are connected to the climate crisis.

GUPTA: Doctor Gro Harlem Brundtland was also one of those people.

GRO HARLEM BRUNDTLAND, FORMER NORWEGIAN PRIME MINISTER: The evidence of the scientists --

GUPTA: Norway's first female prime minister and the chair of a report called Our Common Future delivered in April 1987.

BRUNDTLAND: When we started on this, climate issues were not on the agenda at all.

In the longer term, this can only result in disaster.

WILKINSON: It was the first true global document that really stealed the focus of the world.

GUPTA: Cousteau issue had a dire warning. Brundtland's report had backed it up, and Ted, he was more resolved than ever.

TURNER: I'll be remembered for what I'm remembered for. If we don't straighten up the environment, nobody is going to be remembering anything.

GUPTA: Make the money to buy the land, to save the bison and restore the earth as it was, as it should be.

By the end of the decade, Ted was set to make another move that would change the game completely.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[21:20:00]

GUPTA: It's like going back in time, I think, isn't it?

TURNER: Well, it is. That's true.

GUPTA: Standing here on Snow Crest Ranch in the American West, it's hard to imagine what these wide open landscapes might have become without Ted Turner.

This looks like this is just the way it should be, but a lot of this wouldn't be here without you, pretty close to being extinct, these bison.

TURNER: They're certainly a lot safer now that there's more of them.

GUPTA: Ted's bison herd is now the largest private herd in the world, 50,000 strong and spread out over 15 of his ranches. Getting to this point though took a steep learning curve.

JOHNSON: What you're looking at here is 30 years of letting nature take its course, and Ted having the vision to make this happen.

My name's Danny Johnson. I manage the Flying D Ranch for Ted Turner and I've been with him for 25 years.

I find it's about 113,000 acres, roughly 175 square miles.

GUPTA: Ted bought the Flying D Ranch outside of Bozeman, Montana in 1989, a crown jewel, he thought, where his childhood dream could finally be realized.

JOHNSON: This has always been historically a cattle ranch. And converting it to bison, people are worried about bison not staying on the property. They were worried about their own livestock.

[21:25:01]

They were worried about disease transmissions.

WILKINSON: He alienated a lot of local people. It was an audacious thing to say, I'm going to replace all the cattle with bison.

JOHNSON: Absolutely crazy. Absolutely crazy.

GUPTA: When these cattle ranchers and other people came to you and said, Ted, this is cattle land, why are you doing bison here?

TURNER: It's bison land. The bison were here before the cattle. The cattle came over from Europe. The bison were already here.

GUPTA: Ted was battling perception on a personal front as well. His public image preceded him.

TURNER: It's really hard for me to face anything without offending somebody. So what I'll try and do is be totally democratic and try and offend everybody.

REPORTER: Riding into town was the sharp-tongued media mogul and his movie star bride. GUPTA: They thought he was a loud mouth. They thought he was full of himself. Because he was married to Jane Fonda, they thought he was some sort of liberal.

FONDA: My name is Jane Fonda. I met Ted Turner in 1989, and I've loved him ever since.

Frankly, he's the kind of guy that can sweep you off your feet. In the first date we had was I flew up to Montana. He drove me around, got lost. He wasn't familiar enough with it, and it was breathtaking.

He knew all the flora and fauna. I was just stunned.

GUPTA: But the rookie bison rancher still did have a few things to learn.

For starters, the cattle days had done a number on the Flying D.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It was used much, much harder, a lot more livestock on the property. Bison use the land differently. Where cattle on a hot summer day might be loafing in a riparian area, which would compact the willows and (INAUDIBLE) root systems, bison would prefer to be on a hill top, catching the breeze and seeing the vista up there. They're always on the move. They're a sharp-hooved animal, so instead of compacting the ground, they're actually slicing ground with their hooves, allow seeds to take root.

GUPTA: They're such majestic creatures and it just feels like the way the earth should be. A natural environment like this actually means that the grass is going to be different, the way that they graze. The soil is going to be different because of the grass that's growing in it. And as a result, it's grass like this that's actually pulling carbon dioxide out of the air. So these bison can actually help save the planet.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The whole ecosystem's come back together now. It's all in balance, it feels like. To see this vision now with all these bison, lush green grass, I didn't have that vision 25 years ago at all. Ted did. Ted saw it.

GUPTA: Saw around the corner, envisioned the change, all parts of saving everything.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That is pretty dang cool.

GUPTA: Ted eventually won over some of the Montana Cowboys.

Now, it was time for the rest of the world to take note, especially the next generation.

CAPTAIN PLANET: I am captain planet.

TURNER: A little cartoon character that does good rather than going around blasting people. It's the answer to Rambo, Pat.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, it's Mighty Mouse of the '80s. TURNER: He uses his mind rather than guns.

LAURA TURNER SEYDEL, TED TURNER'S DAUGHTER: He got the idea that he needed to educate youth about issues of global importance. So he thought, well, why don't we have an eco superhero?

TURNER: I'm really proud of Captain Planet. We can't win without the young people, and we can't lose with them.

CAPTAIN PLANET: My work here is done, but yours is just beginning, planeteers.

JOHN R. SEYDEL III, TED TURNER'S GRANDSON: I was just five or six years old I've been watching this cartoon. It didn't just talk about fake, made-up problems but real problems. If it wasn't the DNA in my system already for conservation, Captain Planet did it in a way where it was perfect.

JENNIE TURNER GARLINGTON, TED TURNER'S DAUGHTER: We always knew that we would be part of a quest to save the environment.

CAPTAIN PLANET: The power is yours.

GUPTA: While Captain Planet was reaching a new audience, Ted's own planeteers, his children and grandchildren, were learning from the superhero himself.

B. TURNER: He's kind of always been Captain Planet, you know.

L. SEYDELL: We would be reprimanded for not turning off the lights or the T.V. whenever we left the room, and, I mean, it was serious business.

R. TURNER: We would go fishing and spent time together everywhere where we could get outdoors as quickly as we could.

GUPTA: In 1990, Ted gave his planeteers a way to step up, starting the Turner Foundation.

[21:30:00]

The family has since funded $400 million worth of environmental projects.

T. TURNER: Dad doesn't do anything small.