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tv   Charlie Rose  PBS  April 11, 2016 12:00pm-1:01pm PDT

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>> rose: welcome to the program. we begin this evening with thomas campbell, the director and c.e.o. of the metropolitan museum of art. >> we have this amazing college of specialists, so there's a great brain trust there, an amazing resources to conserve and study works of art and really go deep in understanding them. then, you know, we are fortunate to be-- we can tap into income streams if we-- if we work hard at it, that allow us to do very ambitious projects. so particularly the scale of the exhibition program and the publication program is really incomparable. there is no other museum in the world doing as much programming as we're doing. >> rose: and we conclude this
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evening with "the wright stuff." his new book is called "the wright stuff: from nbc to autism." >> we've had 8,000 genom science, that 6,000 are on a scientific portal at google. nobody has ever done this with any kind of disease or condition. people have done hundreds, they've done a few, but never this. and we're trying on take and put together, move groups that look and act similar in terms of their genetic formation together. and then we can start breaking those groups down and get into pharmaceutical companies to look at that when they see the makeup of this group, and we have all of the gino typing. >> thomas campbell and "the wright stuff" when we continue. >> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by the following:
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>> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: thomas campbell is here. he became the metropolitan museum of art's ninth director in 2009. he was previously a curator in the museum's department of european culture and decorative arts, specializing in tapestries. he made strides to expand the contemporary modern collection. the met recently sperred into an eight-year agreement with the whitney museum to occupy its recently advocated building on madison avenue. the new space opened to the
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public on march 18. i am pleased to have thomas campbell at this table for the first time, although we have talked at his museum. welcome. >> charlie, thank you. >> rose: it's good to have you here at the table. so in seven years, tell me the things that you think are important that you have learned running this won place-- i thint as evolution. we have the largest college of curators in the world, all working hard to different kinds of research and projects. so when i became director, i think, first and foremost, i wanted to sustain that activity-- the great exhibitions, the great publications. at the same time there were clearly things that we needed to be aware that the world is changing around us, technology is a big issue. we need to really make the step from analog to digital, think
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about reaching audiences that way. i think it was also time to think again about audiences, you know, how we welcome people, how we address people, how we reach out to different audiences. so there's been a lot of thinking about accessibility, along with digital. and we've been thinking about what it is to be an encyclopedic museum. you know, we are the largest encyclopedic movement in the world, covering everything from the antique world to contemporary. but there are gaps, of course. so how do you go about filling in, you know. >> rose: and that's a huge challenge. >> it's a huge challenge, yeah. >> rose: talk about digital for a second, and accessibility. what do you offer digitally to someone who lives in alaska? >> in alaska. now, you can go online. you can see we have records, something like 400,000 works of
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art. some of them are very basic, but almost everything has got something. most of them have got images. and we've really been putting a lot of time expaefort into creating cross-collection publications, short videos with curators talking about works of art, or the latest kind of webisoad, is called the artist project, and we have artists talking about the famous-- their favorite works. and it's short, just two or three minutes. but it's a wonderful kind of gateway drug to, you know, thinking more about the collections and seeing with freshize. >> rose: i mean, that's one of the things i'm proudest about on this particular program, people who can't get to new york, you know, because of our archive of 25 years, because we've had people like you, as well as artists and curators and all those exhibitions. we can give them a chance in our archives to see the magnificent
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of what's taking place. >> that's exactly it. so our original mission was educational, and it used to be very much focused on the physical visitors to the museum, and that's doing fine. we had over six million last year. but online, just as with your archives, we now have something like 35 million visitors to our web site alone, and then through social media-- facebook, twitter, instagram-- we're reaching tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands more. and i think that it's a very exciting moment because we're all-- i think everyone in the museum industry, the cultural industry, we're realizing that now we have a global audience and how can we meaningfully engage them. it's an exciting moment. >> rose: in writing about you, calvin tompkins said in choosing campbell the trustees were banking on his clear-headed vision on how to balance the
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met's scholarly interkt its fund-raising needs, and its obligations to a vast and rapidly chag audience. they were also empressed by his quiet self-confidence. does that ring true to you? >> i was a scholar, and probably other people have to say the rest. i mean, i went to-- i came to the met in '95 because my predecessor, philippe, had built it up into this engine of scholarship. it had the funding. it had the spaces. critically it had the sophisticated audiences that really wanted these great exhibitions. for me as a scholar in my field, european tapestry, i saw it as this great place to go and realize that, to share my passion with other people. and when i became director, that was very much kind of-- i've done that. i was happy to go on doing it, but now what i want to do is allow my colleagues to go on doing it and take it out
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further. >> rose: did you decide, did you say, look, philippe was who he is and had those dual roles there and, therefore, what i have to do is define my own identity as a leader of the met? >> i think it's-- it's evolved. i'd been there as a curator for 13 years, so i saw what i thought was working really well, but i also had my own ideas about areas that might be evolved. for example, we have taken different departments and to some extent they work very independently of one another, because art history, curing the last 30 years of the 20th century was all about going deep, deep, deep into individual subjects. but i think towards the end of the simpry, we began look outside of each area, and i saw there was a potential to, if we could get the departments working more creatively together, there was a real
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opportunity to open up new narratives. so just to give one example, a couple of years ago, we did a show called "the interwoven globe "that looked at the textile trade from asia to europe, and then on to america, drawing textiles from our asian department, our european department, and our american department, and telling this amazing narrative about how these precious objects were brought over land and by sea all around the world, and the kind of the narrative, stylistic influences, the cultural influences that this-- this trade, you know, played a role in back in the 18th and 19th centuries. and i think there's-- we've got a whole lot of projects like that now going on. i think there's great potential that we're unlocking. >> rose: is there a constant battle as there is in most institutions between having the requisite funds and budget and
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at the same time, making sure that we are true to the acquisition and exhibition and care of art? >> yup. it's a delegate balance. we're a big institution. our operating budget, net operating budget is about capitol hill 300 million. and we get about 10% of what from the city, gas, steam, electricity. the other 90%, we're raising ourselves. it either comes from our endowment or missions or membership or fund-raising. so we're an ambitious organization, and we're always having to balance our ambitions with our-- with our-- you know, with the possible. >> rose: does it affect you in terms of the acquisition of some priceless piece of art that belongs at the met? >> yeah, acquisitions are always a challenge. the prices are crazy.
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especially in the contemporary market. and we can't possibly go in and compete. but in fact, what we've always depended on is the generosity of benefactors. so something like 85% of the met's collection came as gift, and that's-- you know -- >> 85%. >> 85%. and i'd say the chemistry that makes us so successful is the interface between passionate and knowledgeable curators and conserve tors, and passionate and knowledgeable collectors. because they get such pleasure from working together. and those long-term relationships very often result in, you know, generous benefaction. >> rose: a friend of mine once said to me that his great friend, a collector, who was deciding where his collection should go decided on the met. so my friend said to him, "why
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the met?" and he said, "because strength goes to strength." >> yup. hard to argue with that. >> rose: that's basically-- and people want to make sure that it's going to be protected, handled well, exhibited well, you know, and be a power to bring in other things. >> exactly. and resonate. >> rose: yes. >> of course, the big story three years ago was the promised gift of leonard lauderd. >> rose: i wasn't thinking about him but that's a perfect example. >> that's a collection that would have been very significant in a number of museums. >> rose: he had a connection with the whitney and many thought it might go to moma. >> whitney, moma, boston, or the national gallery. but i think after thinking hard about all the options, i happy that -- >> boy, are you happy. >> with his classical collections, his african collections, his 19th century french collections and his collection of the art,
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20th century art and photography, the cubism influence, it was an incomparable-- it was an incomparable context. and, of course, that's-- yeah, that's the card. that's our ace card. >> rose: let me talk about the met in terms of its power and an institution. what can you do and what arguments do you make that we can do, at least in our mind, better than anyone else can do? >> well, we have this amazing college of specialists. so there's a great brain trust there, an amaidsing resources to conserve and study works of art, and really go deep in understanding them. then we are fortunate to be-- we can tap into income streams. we work hard at it, that allow us to do very ambitious projects. so the-- particularly the scale of the exhibition program and
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the pub i hadication program is really incomparable. there's no other museum in the world doing as much programming as we're doing. but i think there's also something very special about new york. you know, we've got this educated, ambungous, edgy, critical community. they're critical. they're always pushing, always pushing. i think the good thing about that is they keep us on our toes all the time. and new york is this international city. we're part of this global dialogue. ung there's something very special about all these factors. >> rose: tell me about the push to modern and contemporary art. >> what we're trying-- the met was set up to be an encyclopedic museum, but famously, it pulled back from collecting modern in the early 20th century. >> rose: how did it pull back?
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>> well, for the first 35, 40 years it had artists on the board, and it collected the art of the day, the hudson river school, whistler sergeant, of course, mao, old masters. but around 1905, 1910, the art that was coming out of france, particularly, cubism-- it was just too radical. and the leadership of the day-- and, of course, it was a much, much smaller institution at the time-- just felt it wasn't for them. and so they famously pulled back. >> rose: didn't like it? didn't appreciate it? >> didn't like it. didn't appreciate it. all the things that were being said-- it was too wild, it was untamed. y we pulled back. we stopped collecting for a period of 20 or 30 years and that's the period that moma
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and the whitney and guggenheim are created. the met gets back into collecting modern art during the second world war. we had an exhibition of d that got the museum thinking again. and in the years after the second world war, we actually really got back in, jackson pollack and a couple of years after it was painted. henry geldzaller in the 60s got a whole program going, did an exhibition in 1969. and so we've been building up the collection. but it-- it's pretty-- it's patchy. there are areas of strength and areas of weakness. and i think that the moment has come when, you know, our-- it's clear that our audience is-- they really want to see modern and contemporary art at the met in the context of historical collections. so we're not competing with moma or the whitney or the guggenheim. we're doing something different. >> rose: you're offering in context-- >> this bigger context, yeah. and so when i was appointed
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director, it was clear that this is one of the areas we-- you know, we really wanted to focus on. and i've bn taking steps to do exactly that over the last few years. building up a program, building up the staff who can develop a meaningful program. now occupying the-- taking over the old whitney building and further down the line, planning to remodel or rebuild the wing in which we show our modern collections. >> rose: here's what calvin tompkins said about you. campbell's slog through galleriegalleries and art fairsd biledges, studied the auction market, talked with ayersts and dealers and curators and concluded that something extraordinary was happening. >> i mean, i think something is happening, don't you? >> rose: yes. there's this amazing-- you know, there's an amazing interest and
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focus on contemporary art. some of that is being driven by the market because there's a huge capitalization of the market going on with money flowing in from latin america, from eastern europe, from asia. so there's a lot of marketing and investment going on. but the good side of that is it's allowing more artists than ever before to undertake really ambitious projects. and i'm sure that history will judge some of this as rubbish. but a lot of it i think is really interesting. and there's an audience for it. it's almost a sort of a new renaissance. >> rose: i was going to say you describe it as a renaissance. >> i think it's fascinating. and in a globalizing world. the art that's being produced now in beijing or seoul has an
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audience and a resonance on the other side of the world in a way it never would have done in the past. >> rose: and you demolished the lila archson wallace wing? >> no, we're look at how we might remodel it. >> rose: "remodel" is a better word than "demolish." >> we're looking at the options. it all depends on the cost and the expense. the current -- >> but what question brings you to that consideration? >> well, over the years and the met has been under construction almost continually since it was first plunged down in 1880, what is now the medieval hall, 1/20 the size of the building it now is. and it more or less doubled in size between 1970 and 1992. since then, we've been kind of rebuilding from within, and we've rebuilt our american wing,
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our greek and roman galleries, islamic galleries, our european painting galleries, and our costume institute. and with the completion of those projects, we really came to the tail end of a master plan that had been in evolution over the last 35 years. so about five years ago, we stepped back and we did a feesibility study. we looked at all the infrastructure needs, and we looked at all of the kind of moonshots,in,ing and really thot what could this building become for the next 100 years. and we identified a number of transformative projects. and the one that really rose as being the one that the-- the greatest need, the one we had to do next, was this looking at the modern wing, looking at the way it connects with the areas around it, and thinking how we can-- what we can do with that area.
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and at the moment, it's hard to find. the galleries are not very congenial for display of art. you're sitting out there in central park, but you wouldn't know it. i mean, every year, 500,000 people somehow fight their way up that horrible back staircase to get to the roof garden. it shows there's this incredible potential to reexplore the relationship of the museum and the park. so this is what we're looking at, working with david shepperfield. >> rose: the met brauer, how did it happen? >> i think there had been-- when whitney decided to move downtown, there had been some preliminary discussion between leonard and philippe. just at the time he was retiring, i was becoming director. and the minute i became director, we had the financial crisis. so everything else was put on hold.
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but discussion kept going, and in-- i think it was in november 2010, leonard called me and he said, "can we talk?" and i said, "sure. when?" and he said, "what about now." and i said, "okay." and i got in a taxi. i went down to his apartment, and he said i really-- i want to keep the lights on in the breyer building. we talked about the challenges for us, what would be involved. but that really got the discussion going. and we had intense discussions within the met about what we would be doing there, how we would use it, what the financial implications woo. roob. and then intense discussion with the whitney about how we would manage a joint operation. but it's all worked out. we've got an initial occupation of eight years. we potentially could renew that.
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it gives us time to really explore the space. >> rose: and what will it be? what is its mission? >> well, we thought very hard about it. we don't upon to just duplicate what the whitney was doing. we coapt want to duplicate what moma or the guggenheim is doing. what can we do differently? and what we codifferently is we can show modern and contemporary in the context of the historic traditions that modern artists are either embracing or rejecting. so that's one very clear thing that our peers are not doing. the other thing that we can do is we're an encyclopedic museum. our collections come from all over the world. so there is-- i mean, of course, other museums are doing this, too. but there is a-- we have logical connections to modern artists beyond the familiar western
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canon, and that's in the first two shows. one show, unfinished, looks at modern and contemporary art and the other monographic show of an indian abstract artist of the 1970s and the 1980s looks at an unfamiliar but significant artist from outside the familiar western canon. >> rose: tell us more about her. >> she is a very delicate-- it's a sort of-- it's a wonderful counter-point to the sound and the glory of the unfinished show. it's a very quiet, meditative show. she trained in london, and after experimenting with painting and photography, her work became increasingly focused on pen and ink abstract designs that in some ways look back to kind of
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russian futurism, in some ways a kind of-- you look at artists like agnes martin working the states. but they're meditations. they're thoughtful, they're spiritual. and she's not had a monographic show in america. so it seemed like a great choice to start this. >> rose: some have said it feels both timeless and futuristic. >> yup, yup. i think it's-- that's the perfect way of describing it, yeah. >> rose: this exhibition "unfinished, through thoughts left visible," you have some images here, but the exhibition spans more than 500 years. >> we're the met. y we have to show off somehow. >> rose: exactly. and this is works that have been left in an incomplete state. >> yeah. >> rose: what do you mean by that? >> so much modern art you're conscious of the raw material.
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the artist is sort of toig with, you know, the tension almost between the raw material and whatever is presented as a finished work. but what we-- what we're doing in the show is showing how this is not just a 20th century trope. in fact, artists have been doing this for a long time. andy we pushed the show all the way back to the renaissance. and when you get off on the third floor and the elevator doors open, there in front of you is this great painting by tickian, painted late in his life, called the "slaying of massuous" painted in the 1570s, and it's a very raw-looking painting. here is an artist who spent his life making almost picture-perfect renditions of the rulers of the day, and beautiful velvet velvets and si. but here in the last years of his life, he turns to these very
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dark myth logical subjects. and the finish looks-- it's very raw, but it's intentionally-- you know, well, there's some discussion was it unfinished or was it intentional? and i think that the agreement is that this is a-- what he's doing is he's concentrating on the emotional intensity of this vision. and that's the power of this rawness. and so this. >> rose: is this part of the met collection? >> no, we borrowed this from one of the great works in the czech republic. >> rose: it is said it is one of the greatest paintings of the western canon. >> there's an element of autobiography in this. it's a terrible torture subject. he had the temerity of having a musical competition with apollo,
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and there is apollo punishing him for his hubris, by skinning him alive. it's a horrible-- it's an image of torture, of searching for art. it's thought that the figure to the right holding his hand in front of his face may even be a self-portrait by tickian. >> rose: and it was a paint heeg kept coming back to. >> yes, i think this was in his studio at his death. so this starts this whole -- >> maybe it was finished but not finished. >> this rawness, this non-finito style, was a self-conscious decision. and what we do in the exhibition is follow through. there are some works that are unfinished by accident. there are others that work on this intentionally raw theme. so the exhibition explores these two poles. it's about making.
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in some caeses you're seeing the artist's thought below the oil surface. in other cases it's working rawly on the can vase in oil. >> rose: this is j.m.w. turner, "rough sea" painted 18-- between anti-ann 40 and 1845, i think, somewhere in there. he had a fascination with the sea. >> an absolute fascination with the sea. he traveled back and forth. many of his masterpieces depict stormy, tumultuous ways. >> rose: and it's said hoe tied himself-- >> to see, to experience, the ferocity of the sea. when he died-- in his lifetime, his-- he pushed the boundaries again of what was considered to be an appropriate finish for a painting.
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he famously was in royal academy on the day it was to open, the show, kind of brushing in. but these works were left in his studio at his death. >> rose: what is the darkness at the center? >> i think you can project into it. is it a steam ship? is it a-- is it a promonnatory of land, with the lighthouse on it? these are so abstract, but, again, they capture the emotions, the tumult of the storm. and these become the sort of the are works what influence the impressionists and artists all the way through to gear hart richter, another public modernist. >> rose: the next one is alice neal. james hunter black draftee in 1965. this is-- i mean, of all the
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stories, this is such a powerful story. >> yeah, this is almost aitalismanic piece of the exhibition. here, alice neal famously-- she painted people who lived in her neighborhood, people she didn't know she'd invite in off the street. and this young man caught her eye. this was a first sitting. he was a draftee going off to the vietnam war, and he never came back. we don't know why. maybe he never came back from the war. and some years later, she -- >> but his name was james hunter. >> yeah, we know that. she signed it and presented it as a finished work so it becomes a metaphor of what may have been a life cut off. >> rose: one sitting. >> one sitting. >> rose: one sitting. >> yeah. >> rose: that's amazing. >> so many of the works in the show have this. un, everyone has a story.
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it's not a show you blow through, you know, in two minutes. every work has a story, and it's very moving. >> rose: the next is andy warhol, from 1962, "do it yourself." >> paint by numbers. in the modern area, we have some works that are, you know, again on the theme of the rawness, the unfinished. but we also go into a kind of a more conceptual area. and we have works that are completed by the visitor. we have works that are about infinity that will never be completed. in this case, warhol in '62, it was very early in his career as a painter. and he bought some of these participate by number kits and then reproduced them. he projected on a screen, outlines them, and reproduced them, so kind of challenging the
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notion of what is a work of art? is a paint pie numbers work of art a work of art. >> rose: is a soup can a work of art? >> exactly. the wonderful clip he had is, "how do you know when a work of art is finished? when the check clears." >> rose: yes, the transaction has taken place and it's now in the hands of someone else. the next one is louie budge waw. this is untitled number two, 1996. tell me about her. >> one of the dominant shadows behind the show is michelangelo, who, again, from the renaissance, left many pieces unfinished, but you have them twisting out of the stone that he was releasing them from.
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and that's a memory is that has influenced so many late 19th, 20th century artists, rodan especially. and here, louise bourgeois is in a way returning to that concept. she visited the corners from which michelangelo sourced his marble. and in this work, you have the contrast between the pair of hands, a man's hand and a woman's hand, in a very delicate gesture of intimacy, just lightly holding one another's hands, carved out of it this raw-- set off against the rawness of the marble, and the marble color in the polished form is like flesh but in its raw form it's this wonderful, powerful marble.
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it's a very moving piece. >> rose: she said about working with marble, you have to win the shape. you know, that you have to win the shape. >> yup, yup. lovely the thought of revealing these forpz from that rawness. >> rose: on the back cover is warhol. how long will this be on exhibition ?k. >> three months. and them we've got an exhibition of the new york photographer diana, rbis. >> rose: oh, sure. >> and work from her early years that's never been shown. you really see her very distinctive photographic style emerging. and after that, we've got an exhibition by kerry james marshall, the african american artist who has made it his life's work, really, to position-- he draws inspiration from classical kinds of painting-- landscapes, porrats
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but he places african americans in these scenes. so it's a kind of extended meditation on the experience, the african american experience in america. >> rose: you get up every morning and simply say-- to me you're the luckiest guy in the world-- because i now have more to work with, more challenges, there's more happening. the wroal tigital revolution has given art a broader reach than it ever has. the sheer excitement of being able to serve somewhere as a connection between-- with both the met and the met brauer, somehow lest a connection between people who love art and the art itself. and more ways to make what connection. >> i'm a lucky guy. walking through the the galleries in the museum, working with the specialists, all the
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people involved in making that museum tick. there are so many people all playing their part, and the collectors, who you know, here in new york it's amazing. around new york there are amazingly rich collections. and it's all part of this dynamic atmosphere. >> rose: thank you for coming. >> my pleasure. s. >> rose: "the wright stuff" is here. he stepped down as president and c.e.o. of nbc in 2007. the network became a global media giant under his 20 years of leadership. among the prominent deals he struck was the merger of nbc and universal in 2004. he also launched cnbc and msnbc. his contributions are not limited to the media world. after his grandson was diagnosed with autism he cofounded the research and advocacy organization autism speaks.
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he writes all about this in a new book called "the wright stuff: from nbc to autism speaks." i'm pleased to have bob right back at this table. >> thank you very much. i'm thrilled to be here. >> rose: let's talk first about autism. when you discovered that your grandson had autism. >> 2004, he was two and a half years old. we had gone through six months prior to that-- it was about this time of the year this, kind of semicold thing. and he-- he was losing all of his identity over a period of six months, as if people were coming in at night and steal-- they were steal higz vocabulary. they were stealing his dexterity. they were taking his health away. and we watched this whole thing happen. we ended up at columbia hospital-- i was on the board of new york presbyterian at the time. he got a diagnosis that said there's a lot of things wrong
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with him but we can't really help you. he's autistic, and we don't have a prot tol codeal with autism. >> rose: what did you know about autism at that time? >> almost nothing. now, we had been looking at different potential issues and autism came up on the list -- >> when you say "we" i assume you mean and you your wife and your daughter-- >> and her husband. and the group she was with was in complete denial. the pediatric group was in denial. they said this was just a function of him having some bad breaks. then they finally stepped out because they knew this was a disaster. >> rose: this was not going to change. >> not going to change. so we ended up out on our own sort of. and we couldn't believe it we got into it. i went to the hospital. we got a lot of information out of the hospital about what it is, after that, and what they do about it. and i neurologist and psychologist and psychiatry and it was all pushed into that world, the world of psychiatry,
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neurology. we're not in the m.d. world. the typical m.d. world of out. we traveled around a bit. we went to see different groups. we met with people. everything was very depressing. money of a huge issue. thereof no insurance. there was no coverage. parents were having to-- one was having to quit work to take care of the child. the other one was away all the time working. they couldn't come up with enough money to cover it. they were living off credit cards. we butched into bernie marcus -- >> the founder of home depot. >> he said i need to talk to you. you're going around talking to people i understand. let me tell you my story. i've put a lot of money into this and quite frankly i failed in my expectation and the reason is there's no awareness of this. i can't build awareness at the political level,t hospital level. maybe you guys, if you want to
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do something, i'm support you. i'll be a major financial supporter if you want to take this challenge on. >> we talked about it a lot and i contacted a couple other poem, and got phil guyer, the longtime c.e.o. of interbelieve it the largest ad agency at the time. he came on board. the slatkins, laura. her husband both came on board. >> rose: were these all people who had a with autism? >> yes, put not phil. he was a close friend. and andra robinson, who was an up-and-coming executive with c.e.o. he said, "i'll help you. hay like on make on mott for profit charges if hay don't believe it. that was our core. exi saw the is this going to be
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run off the ps. iped odd ted financials fer everyone, i wanted to be registered as-- that can be operated in any place upon. mole was to haj national awairntion. its autism, and also to answer some really major science. >> rose: so 11 years later. >> 11 years later we've done both of those things. one of them-- the awareness-- if we were a product proctor & gamble would love it. we went from very little experience, especially among men and women of child-rearing age, which is a critical crowd here. we also have a younger crowd. they're well informed of this
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issue. and this last thing woe did before i stepped down as the c.e.o. last year, and we're still well in it, is to have this arrangement we have with a group in canada plus dpoolg plus google as ourselves per for missing. we do not have the scientific foundations to do the genetic research we needed to do. we now have that. >> rose: you're only now getting that, to do the kind of research to determine the neneck preliminarpreliminary plikses as in autism. >> we have had 8,000 of whole genome science. 6,000 are on a scientific portal at google. nobody's each done this with any kind of disease or condition. people have done hundreds, done a few, but never this. and ear trying to take and move
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groups that are similar in genetic formation, and we can start breaking those groups down and get pharmaceutical companies to look at that. we have all of the phenotyping. in other words, we know these are the ones that don't thing. these are the ones that have trouble -- >> clearly there is disease of the brain. >> there's a lot of gut activity we don't understand. >> there are connections between the brain and gut that nobody really understands. so you can have a lot of gu privates-- would go the other way around. the dput is a completely mysterious part of your body from science. >> rose: there's more and more focus on that impact in science. >> we know there's a connection, let's put it that way. pathways, tawould be the one, brain pathways is the
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fundamental issue to be able to understand what is happening in those path ways. >> rose: so how much-- today, what is the conventional wisdom about the genetic influence. >> it's about 50%. and the rest of it is we don't know. >> rose: environmental? environmental is the word when it's the rest of it. >> rose: they mean things like smoking-- >> most cancers have no idea. my wife was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer now. >> rose: stage four. >> stage four. they don't have any clue how she got this or why she got it. there is no genetic history at all. >> rose: what they're hoping is it will build up a pod of evidence in terms of mapping the human genome of people associated with one disease or another. >> let me tell you what we can do with pancreatic cancer. it gives you an idea of what we
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want to do with autism. we're now matching up her tumor against hundreds of different elements, most of which are drugs. but we know so much-- we've done an extraordinarily deep scwaensing of the tumor. so we know so much about that tumor we're matching it up with drugs to see which ones act on a donor. that's the ultimate goal of personalized medicine and the you ultimate goal of autism. we don't have autism cells yet. we don't know enough about that to get to that stage. that's why we've had to go through this stage. >> rose: it's been an extraordinary growth. we can look at the number of people who have it today compared to 13 years ago. why is it growing so rapidly scwhroo 50% of it is much better tying norfolks, and 50% of it is we don't know. and that's the-- they don't know anything about pancreatic cancer when you get it. 50% of it is genetic.
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the rest of it we don't know. >> rose: how is your grandson? >> he's-- he is not going to ever get a job at google. we hope he can work doing something. he's healthier than he has been. but he has all traces of epilepsy. 30% of children with yaw autisme epilepsy. he has seizures. he doesn't speak except when heavily prompted, and he can't be left alone. so he's going to need perpetual care. he's a nice boy. i mean, he's not an unpleasant boy to be around, but he's not-- he cannot operate by himself. >> rose: so then there's the question of vaccines. >> yes. >> rose: on the one hand there is the controversy, which you
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are very familiar with, and it caused some split in your family explain the controversy. >> the controversy is a lot of children with autism receive the diagnosis of autism at or around the time when they're getting their first really heavy dosages of vaccines. and the vaccines come in stages now at six or seven at a time. and they're given to very young children. one of them was themm r, mumps and rubella. and that was-- that had traces, more than traces, of mercury in it, ethyl mercury. and that became a symbol. you never want that mercury in a medical environment at all. say i will never have it in my office, even though sometimes-- so that became an issue. the children it's coincidence was such a coincidence that it came that must be the cause. but we have not been able to establish that. >> rose: what do you think? >> i don't think it is the cause. but i can't eye am very
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sympathetic to the people what don't get an answer when they see that their child went downhill. my grandson had the same thing happen to him. he also had a staff infection at or near that time and a staff infection is a much more considerable blow to your immune system than any vaccine issue possibly could be. that staff infection could have brought this on, looking for triggers-- they're looking for triggers-- that something is embeddedded in your system, something has to bring it out. right now, i think people that are really concerned about had, what i tell them personally is just try and spread out the vaccines because there are 30 of them taken between your-- before you're three years old. you now, many people would say you know that really is too many. we've crossed the border between-- you and i would have had three or four. there's the differential.
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and many people would say it's really not necessary. they're just pushing it in because they can get it done. children won't tolerate it at four or five years old. it's too much of a niews panse. right now it's relatively okay. people are fighting maybe to get it spread. people are not stopping vaccination in a large number because of this. >> rose: if we went out and talked to the smartest doctoring and researchers in the field, what would they say? >> they would say there's no evidence of it. there's nothing to be afraid of, and everybody should vaccinate. >> rose: that's the majority opinion? >> yes. >> rose: and i should also say that every varksine is identityical in the category. you have 100 million kids receiving the same vaccine but no two kids are the same and no
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two genomes are the same. everybody knows that in the medical community but nobody wants to talk about that. they put out $100 million a year to pay for vaccine issues at the vaccine court, which is kind of a kangaroo court, really hard to-- vaccines are not perfect. they used to be horrible but they're not. there's more than enough evidence to say you shouldn't observer vaccine. >> rose: let's talk about the rest of your career. upon who i remember was a media scwhrierk i met her in 1980. look in order rather than going back over all the stuff rat nbc and your own championship and what happened there and acquisition of universal and the cable properties. where is the feature of medium?
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>> you know we talked about personalized medicine? well, personalized media is where it's going. for you to be racial-- this is a visual now-- for you to be able to see things when you want tow see or whf see them. >> rose: you criminal your own cd. it's a in hand or pocket of peep who are in the ps of rebothers upon. >> rose: who is anything tow win and lose. >> people who are fundamentally living rate is large enough. that's one relationship we can the universal, we made ourselves so big, that the a of content we
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own today or they own today can feed families of millions of people for years and years to come and can't be duplicated. there's no cost possibility. and it's -- >> you say "we." you mean comcast today. >> comcast today or warner brothers today. so that's one safety issue. if you have a lot of content, you know how to produce it. i'm on the board of a.m.c., which is josh sapeien is the c.e.o. -- >> as good a c.e.o. as i know. >> absolutely. and they spend all their time at a table like this, looking at every single option of putting a-- of producing a show. where is it going to go? do we want to rent it? do we want to sell it? how many episodes do we want to do? do we want to put it with amazon or netflix or hulu. do you want to put it on a network? do we put it on our own, a.m.c.? ask they agonize.
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that and the options are so significant that you're never going to make every one of them right. >> rose: there used to be this notion of whether it is content or distribution king. content is king. >> content is always going to be a key element in a world where you're not sure where the distribution is going. >> rose: you wrote that local television is important. >> local news was so pushed down over the last number of years, people are dying to know when something happens in the community. they want to know a lot about it. because they expect to be able to google it and everything. when you see-- when you see a building on fire, i want to know who owns the building. if there's something wrong. i want to know who-- i want a picture of the owner. they never tell you who that is. i want to know how many violations did they have? it's all these things are really useful and because of google and other ways, you can get all that
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information. they have to learn to present that with their stories. and-- people love local but not served the way we've been doing it. >> rose: thank you for coming. >> thank you very much, charlie, i appreciate it. >> rose: thank you for joining us. see you next time. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org
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>> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide.
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