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To put AI to work for people, visit ServiceNow.com this Sunday, meet the Moment conversations with people who are having an impact in Washington and beyond. Your doctor said get a cancer risk assessment, something that most women probably haven't heard of, and you credit that with saving your life. It 100% saved my life. Actor Olivia Munn shares her cancer battle and surrogacy journey.
It's hard to explain knowing that this diagnosis that puts so much fear into me has been able to be turned into something that's saving people's lives. Plus, play by play, sports casting legend Bob Costas reflects on his career and how we consume our favorite games. Do you think the fact that everything, every sport, every game is accessible, does that take away some of the excitement? I think it does diminish it to some extent.
There are also different aspects to it as well. Gambling, so much of it is, for at least some portion of the audience, transactional now. And online education. For someone who's engaged with their learning, who is curious, this is the most exciting time to be alive.
Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, on how to best prepare the minds of the future. You're going to see 10 year olds learn quantum physics. And there are many people who push up on tears and away with words. Amanda Gorman on the power of poetry and why do you think poetry is so critical to who we are as a nation when we are trying as a people to speak to our best shared common humanity?
Typically, poetry is the rhetoric that encapsulates that. Welcome to Sunday and a special edition of Meet the Press of NBC News in New York, the longest running show in television history. This is a special edition of Meet the Press with Kristen Welken. Good Sunday morning.
On this special edition of Meet the press, we'll bring you four of our Meet the Moment conversations. Voices outside of the political arena having an impact on our national discourse. Actor Olivia Munn advocating for women's health care and early breast cancer detection. People who are making these laws and creating these bills and deciding over where the funding goes.
They have mothers, they have sisters, they have daughters, they have wives, they have girlfriends. You know, don't you want to save them, too? Don't you want to help them, too? Legendary broadcaster Bob Costas on the intersection of sports and politics.
So when people say stick to sports, I think what they actually mean most often is stick to sports. Unless you're saying something that I want to hear and I agree with, but if you're saying something I disagree with, that comes from a different perspective, well, then you should just shut up and say there's a ground ball. The should stop. I never bent to that.
Education pioneer Sal Khan on the future of AI in classrooms. If your children are using it to cheat, if, if you're using it to cut corners, to kind of check out, that's not good. That's not a healthy thing. But if you're using it to go deeper into a conversation to answer their questions, it's actually a really powerful skill.
And poet Amanda Gorman on why poetry matters to who America is as a nation. The reason that there's a poem and not a 36 page essay at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty when we are trying as a people to speak to our best shared common humanity. Typically, poetry is the rhetoric that encapsulates that the best we begin with Olivia Munn. Approximately one in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime.
Munn is one of them. Two years ago, despite receiving a negative nanogram and clearing numerous medical tests, Mun's doctor made a decision that she credits with saving her life, administering a lifetime risk assessment test that led to a diagnosis of an aggressive form of breast cancer. Soon after, Mun underwent five surgeries in less than a year, including a double mastectomy and a procedure to remove her uterus. Just months after revealing her battle with breast cancer to the world, she and her husband, comedian John Mulaney, welcomed their second child with the help of a surrogate.
And now Mun is returning to the screen, co starring with John Hamm in the hit show your Friends and Neighbors on Apple tv. Take a look. Well, Keely, since you asked, my husband was just murdered in the foyer of our house, which is now a crime scene, which is why I'm staying at a hotel, which is why I need new products, which is why, as you so acutely observed, I might be in dire need of retino eye patches. We were in the middle of a very nasty divorce, so there's a part of me, a disturbingly large one, that is relieved that he's dead.
But I mean feely, I'm feeling guilty as about that because he's the father of my kids, for God's sake. I mean, what kind of person does that make me? I sat down with man for me, the moment conversation about what she calls her mission to help other women. Take me back to that moment, if you would if you can.
When you were first diagnosed, that shocking moment when you were told that you did, in fact, have breast cancer, what was that moment like? What went through your head? What went through your heart? It felt like I was in a car crash.
If you've ever been in a car crash, which I have been. Oh, God. No, I don't. I don't want this to happen.
No, no, no. This can't be happening. And so that's the feeling I had. And at the same time, I was.
I was so focused and in my body, because I knew that she was telling me information that I needed to know to get through this. You stayed focused. You fought. You had five surgeries in 10 months, Olivia.
And that would be hard for anyone. You are someone who's in the public eye emotionally. How did you steal yourself for that battle? The only thing that came up in my mind about being a public person was that I didn't want any kind of outside attention or any speculation that I may not make it.
I needed it to stay private because I had to stay positive, and I had to fight. I couldn't imagine going through a battle like this and having all this outside noise. And it wasn't until I was looking back on photos with my son, and just as you do, you know, you can go through photos and videos, and I saw this one of him and I playing in the front yard. I thought, oh, my gosh.
Like, I had cancer then. I didn't know it at all. And how many other women are out there right now with a clear mammogram, clear ultrasound, walking around. They don't know about this lifetime risk assessment test that was free and online, and.
And it saved my life. And so I knew. I knew maybe about. I'm not sure.
Like, it was months into the journey that I. I knew that at some point I would talk about it. The cancer risk assessment. You had done everything right.
You had gotten a mammogram. You had been given a clean bill of health, and your doctor said, get a cancer risk assessment, something that most women probably haven't heard of. And you credit that with saving your life. 100% saved my life.
I don't know how long it would have taken me to find the cancer, because I wasn't doing the mammogram for a year. So at least a year. Well, the National Cancer Institute says that since you have decided to share your story, more women are actually getting a cancer risk assessment. And journalist Allison hall says she got a cancer risk assessment, found out that she had breast cancer and she thinks that you and that test saved her life, Olivia.
Or what does that mean? That you are saving lives, you're impacting women all across this country. That makes me really emotional when I think about that, because, like, that was my goal, was for every woman to know about this test. That women are finding out about this and saving their lives.
It's just. It's hard to explain knowing that this diagnosis that put so much fear into me has been able to be turned into something that's saving people's lives. And that's all I wanted. So if you could speak to lawmakers, people in Congress, people who have the power in the health industry to make decisions about the access that women have to healthcare, to the medicine they have access to.
What is your message? We need to be a priority. Women need to be a priority. Women need to be a priority.
You know, our health needs to be a priority. There is the money that is there that's being spent on so many other things. And without women, there would be no life. I mean, not to sound saccharine or to even be annoying about that, because people have said that, you know, in the past, and it's out there, and people say, like, you know, without women, there would be no life.
But that is the truth. And. And although I shouldn't have to say this, because it shouldn't matter, but you. You know, the people who are making these laws and creating these bills and deciding over where the funding goes, they have mothers, they have sisters, they have daughters, they have wives, they have girlfriends.
You know, don't you want to save them, too? You want to help them, too? And. And if they're talking money, if it's all about money, we can talk money, too.
It takes so much less money to educate women on their options, to create options for women to have the best health care possible. And that's going to save you a lot of money. So just help us help ourselves. That's all we're asking for.
We're just asking that you care enough about us to put money where we need it. Because of your cancer battle, you went into surgical menopause. You decided to have a hysterectomy. You like me, and I had different reasons, but I also couldn't carry children.
And so you decided to go the surrogacy route, which I did as well. And I know that that decision takes a long time to reach. Why did you ultimately decide that you wanted to work with a gestational carrier? Having our daughter meant so much to us.
We knew that we Weren't done growing our family. We really wanted this little girl to be in the world, and we needed her to be part of our family. And that was my option. There was no other option for us.
And I just believed that I would find someone so kind and so warm and so loving and who had this calling in life. And so not having the option was. Was the thing that got me through it. If we wanted to have her in the world, which we desperately did, then this is going to be my option.
And I would not let my fear, I would not let my concerns, my worries stop my daughter from having a chance to be in this world. Like, that's what I have to do as a mother, is to be selfless and to put my children first. And that was the first step, was putting my fear aside. How did you do that, your fear?
And what a lot of people feel is still stigmas about surrogacy that exist. I truly didn't understand the depths of the stigma until I had started researching things more and talking to more people about it and saying, like, you know, are you going to talk about using a surrogate? Like, then you got to hide yourself so that people don't know that you're not pregnant. I thought, why would I.
Why would I do that? Like, I didn't understand there was a stigma. And I will tell you that since coming out and telling people about using a gestational surrogate, there has only been love. There's only been love that I have received.
And people have been so happy for us and so happy to see my squishy, chunky little baby girl out in the world. She is the chunkiest, cutest, happiest baby, just like my son. So happy. And there has only been really amazing consideration and understanding.
You are such a fighter, Olivia. Do you see yourself as an advocate? I think there is, like, people who advocate and they're like, advocates. And to me, I think of myself as someone who advocates for women.
And it has become my mission in life. There's a few things on my purpose list, which is to be a great mother, to be a great wife, to get a great sister and friend, and to help, as many women in the world know about lifetime success and test. I never really had, like, that kind of purpose in life. I was really happy.
I wanted to be an actor, and I became an actor. And I just want to work on things. I really enjoyed and had fun and take risks, but I had no other goal. It was not.
There was no other thing. It wasn't like, I want to take my career to this place I just had. I just wanted to live a nice life and be happy. And now I have a very purpose mission in life.
If you want to calculate your own breast cancer lifetime risk assessment score, go to the link on your screen right now. When we come back, our conversation with sportscaster about Costas reflecting on his four decades in sports and why he's against some new trends in how we consume our favorite games. Meet the moment is sponsored by Liberty Mutual Insurance. Only pay for what you need.
Welcome back. Few interests bring people together the way sports can. Last year, the top 10 most watched telecasts were all live sporting events, with the super bowl bringing in 121 million viewers. Now Bob Costas, a voice that has been central to so many iconic sports moments, is marking the end of a legendary run.
After retiring from play by play announcing, Costas spent four decades with me covering nearly every major sport and hosting a record 12 Olympics for the network. I sat down with Costas to talk about the unifying power of sports and to reflect on his extraordinary career. Let's talk about how your career started and the breadth of your work. I mean, you have shared that in your senior year of high school, you're actually cut from both the baseball and the basketball teams.
And the factory is actually reinforced something that was already inside of you, which was this desire to become a sports broadcaster. Was that in your gut always? Oh, yeah. I was smart enough when I was 10 years old to realize if I was ever going to get into Yankee Stadium without buying a ticket, it was going to be in the booth, not to be wearing pinstripes out there on the field like, you know, you're in high school.
I wasn't half bad. I was good enough to be the last guy cut, but I knew I was going to be the star of the team. And it was just amusing that the baseball coach actually said to me when he cut me, he said something to the effect of, you're not bad with the glove and you can run a little bit, but I don't think you can hit your weight and I don't think you weigh 130, which might have been true when I was 16 years old. And then he said, have you ever thought about podcasting?
I said, that's pretty much all I think about. And he was a wry guy. And he said, good, try that. So he was on to something.
He was a good scout, both of baseball talent lacking and maybe potential broadcast talent. Not too bad. In addition to that, you write about the fact and you Talked about the fact your father also had a really big impact on your life. He tragically passed away of a heart attack when you were just 18 years old.
How did that impact who you are, the person you became, the icon that you became? Well, my father was an inveterate gambler. And I looked at him as a sort of Runyon esque character. Colorful, humorous, high spirited.
But it would be untruthful to say that it was all smooth sailing. There was a lot of trauma in our family life because he had a volatile temper and the mortgage was often riding on how his bets went. And he didn't bet on, you know, cards or poker games or crap games or go to the racetrack. He'd been on baseball, football, basketball games.
And so I bonded with him by following those games. I'm sure I would have been a sports fan anyway, like most of my fans. But I became even more knowledgeable. I became granularly knowledgeable because he was following all this so closely and I was by his side.
Now, when you lose someone close to you, when you're so young and your own sense of yourself is not fully formed, you'll always wonder, I wonder to this day how he would have reacted to my good fortune. Could I have made him part of my life and the way I made my children and my friends part of that life? I'd like to think so, but I can't know for sure. I want to just remind you of some of the amazing moments in your career that you broadcast.
Derek Jeter's final at bat in Yankee Stadium. Tiger woods winning the US Open in 2008. Michael Jordan's final NBA championship, just to name a few. Was there one moment in all of your career that stands out?
Michael Jordan's last shot for the Bulls. Jordan Open. Chicago with the lead. I've always felt that a really good broadcast, a sports broadcast, if it's significant enough, should be the first draft of history, that you should hit upon the themes that are likely to appear in a well written story in Sports Illustrated a few days later.
And I think I managed to do that in that moment. Who knows what will unfold in the next several months, but that may have been the last shot Michael Jordan will ever take in the NBA. There was no way you could have anticipated how it would end. Utah was winning the game, and had they won that night, Game 7 would have been on their home floor and they might have won that game.
And so Jordan's career could have ended in defeat. But I was aware enough of the storylines that were Possible, so that when it panned out as it did, I think I was able to put the caption beneath it that was appropriate. The moment we find ourselves in now with sports, because the industry is changing in a lot of ways, and I want to get your thoughts about that. You have tech giants like Amazon, Apple and Netflix who are getting into live sports coverage.
How do you think that's changing the way people watch sports, absorb sports, and enjoy these pastimes? Well, sports is coming at people if they want to, access it, from so many different directions. Now, if you want to, you can access every game. There are highlights everywhere, including on the Internet.
So information and enjoyment in one way or another, are coming at people from so many different directions that even network television, which is still at the center of it, but it doesn't own it, it doesn't have the complet primacy that it once had. Do you think the fact that everything, every sport, every game is accessible, does that take away some of the excitement? I think it does diminish it to some extent. There are also different aspects to it as well.
Gambling, so much of it is, for at least some portion of the audience, transactional. Now you gotta bet on the game. You have a different relationship to how that game plays out than if you're just rooting for your team. Given your father, your background, your childhood, you've witnessed this up close and personal.
Yes. Is this personal for you? Are you concerned on a personal level about what sports betting might mean for some families? I am.
And on both the Major League Baseball Network and when I did a handful of games on Turner, I refused to read gambling promos. I had to have someone else read them or use a voice of God type person to read them. I just couldn't in good conscience encourage people to do something which I know for some of them it's obviously just a little recreation. It's fine.
But there's an insidious aspect to it that I didn't want to be part of. This is your 13th appearance on Meet the Press. It is, yes. We looked, we checked.
Lucky 13. Lucky 13. And it comes at a time when our country is very divided. I don't have to tell you that sports is unifying.
People rally around their team, the games that they love. What can sports teach us and teach this country about unifying? Well, the best of sports, especially team sports, is the idea that people from diverse backgrounds come together in the service of a common cause. That cause being to do as well as you possibly can as a team.
And you look at the arena, and you look at the stadium and you see people with differing political viewpoints and from different demographics, but they're all there rooting for their team. And in that moment, that's unifying. On the other hand, some of the tone now that's around sports, as we talked about before, is angry and accusatory, and it becomes tribal sometimes in a way that isn't really all that healthy in my mind. Politics is a part of sports.
Yes, sports is a part of politics. Does it concern you that we are seeing, in some instances, politics infused in sports? I think that politics inevitably has intersected with sports. Anyone who says that politics has no place in sports has to be abysmally unaware of the history here.
Because until fairly recently in our nation's history, sports and some aspects of entertainment have been the only avenues that were broadly, and even then there was a fight and Jackie Robinson didn't come until 1947 that were broadly accessible to people of color or where someone like Billie Jean King could make a larger statement about women's rights, not just within sports. And to turn your back on that is to wear a blindfold. So when people say, stick to sports, I think what they actually mean most often is stick to sports. Unless you're saying something that I want to hear and I agree with.
But if you're saying something I disagree with, that comes from a different perspective, well, then you should just shut up and say, there's a ground bull that should stop. I never meant to that. And just finally, as you think about the future, do you ever miss it? Do you ever think about getting back into the game?
I don't miss what I used to do. I think I can still be effective and still enjoy it in an emeritus role. So whatever I do should be in an emeritus role. But I have had more than enough times at bat to throw out a cliche type metaphor.
I've had more than enough times at bat. And many years ago, I passed the baton. And I'm generally, generally satisfied and gratified with what my career has been. And when we come back, will artificial intelligence make our children smarter?
My conversation with Khan Academy founder Sal Khan is next. Welcome back. In 2004, Sal Khan, then a hedge fund manager, started tutoring one of his cousins when she needed extra help with math. He started recording YouTube videos of his tutorials that he then turned into an interactive global education platform called Khan Academy.
Khan is now pushing the boundaries of education even further. His book Brave New Words explores how artificial intelligence will transform learning. I sat down with Sal Khan to talk about Khan Academy and his vision for the future of education. I had the great pleasure and honor of interviewing you back in 2011.
I was just starting my career at NBC News, and you were just getting Khan Academy off the ground. How did you take it to a place where you have hundreds of millions of users all around the world, so you probably can't be four or five months? We were above a Chinese tea shop in downtown Mountain U. At the time.
Our goal was to cover all of math from pre K through the core of college. Now our goal is to cover all of academic learning from pre K to the core of college. We've been working with school districts. We're now in 50 languages.
There's 50 plus efficacy studies on what we're doing. Hundreds of thousands of people donate to us. We're still primarily philanthropically supported, but, yeah, it's come a long way. What does that mean to you to know that you are quite literally impacting children all around the world?
And full disclosure, including my daughter, who's 4 years old, who uses Khan Academy to help her learn. I pinch myself all the time. I don't want to jinx it, but I tell my wife all the time I would replace this with anyone. So it's fun to work on intellectually to be able to tackle this problem.
When I was a kid and every kid probably thinks about, oh, how do you tackle the problems of the world? You peel the onion. It all does boil down to education. And now we get letters.
Even back in 2011, I was getting letters from people all over the world. My wife and I just had a young woman from Afghanistan who used. When the Taliban took over Kabul, she couldn't go to school. She used Khan Academy as her school.
And she's a freshman at mit. And so when we hear stories of people like her, I met five, six years ago, I met a young man who was in prison for 15 or 16 years. And his mother gave him transcripts of Khan Academy while he was in prison. And when he got out, he was most excited at age 32 of using Khan Academy.
And then he took the SAT and he did so well, he was able to transfer to Stanford as a junior. And that's where I met him. I was giving a guest lecture at Stanford and I said, any questions? And this 32 or 33 year old raises his hand and he starts crying and things like that.
It feels like you're living in a science fiction book. You talk about the importance of personalized education. Why is it so Important that it's personalized. And you say, really a one on one experience.
In many ways, you go back about 2,300 years. You would see Aristotle tutoring Alexander the Greater, who would be later called Alexander the Great. And for most of human history, that was the gold standard of education. You had a personal tutor or sometimes a team of tutors.
But most people didn't get that. You had to be a prince, you had to be a member of nobility. And about two, 300 years ago, we had this very utopian idea, mass public education. But we had to compromise.
We couldn't afford to give everyone a personal tutor. So we batched students together in groups of 25, 30, 35, we start moving them together. And that's the system we have today. And it's done hugely positive things.
Literacy rates have gone through the roof. Things like algebra used to be considered esoteric. Now we expect everyone to learn it. But we also know that a lot of people fall behind.
So what personalization allows you in that class of 20 or 30, or if you're learning by yourself, a little bit more of that attention. Speed up, slow down, dig deep. When you need it, you developed something called conmigo, the word clearly derived from the Spanish conmigo, which means with me. And it's like a personalized AI tutor.
Where did you get the idea for this and how does it enhance what you are trying to do overall at Khan Academy? This was almost exactly three years ago. I got an email from Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, OpenAI. This was just a reminder for folks.
This was six months before ChatGPT came out. I remember that first night that we had access and I prompted, you are a Socratic tutor. We don't do this now. But at that time I said, you're the Robin Williams character from Deadpool Society and tutor me.
And it did it. Not perfectly, but it did it. And that was in those early days. And so that's when our imagination started to say, hey, why couldn't we use this not by itself, but in conjunction with teacher tools, in conjunction with videos, conjunction with the software exercises to get that much closer to what Alexander the Great had with Aristotle.
Well, in your book Brave New Words, which is about the future of AI and education, you talk about Khan Academy given early access by ChatGPT. You also write that you had initial fears about it, that this would somehow create a generation of cheaters. But then you ultimately came around and came to the conclusion that you now have, which is that there are real benefits. What do you Say, though, to parents and to teachers who are concerned that AI will lead to more cheating.
Yes. When you gotta access the first thing I try to do, I try to get it to cheat. And I did cheat. Like, oh, no, this is gonna open up a Pandora's box.
And it's not just cheating. It would hallucinate. It would make up facts. And they still can sometimes make up facts.
And I started off the chapter before you even getting AI. What was the state of cheating before ChatGPT? It existed. It existed.
And it exist actually pretty, pretty blatantly in a lot of places. And the opportunity here is we have something called writing coach on Khanmigo. And what that does is the teacher can assign through the AI and the AI won't do it for the student, but with the student, it'll act as an ethical writing coach. It'll go through brainstorming, they'll do outlining, it'll do the draft, give some feedback.
And when the student submits the essay through the AI now the teacher just doesn't get the final output like our teachers got when we were young. The teacher gets the whole process. It's like being able to talk to the tutor. How long did this take Sal?
Did he, you know, did he work on it? And the AI can actually notify the teacher, hey, this paragraph right here, we didn't work on it. It just showed up. And it looks a little different than Sal's other writing.
Maybe you want to look into it, and that's the way that you can really police these things. But it's not just about policing. It's also about supporting the students better. You are a father of three.
I have two children. And I know one of the concerns that I have about AI is that my kids will become reliant on AI for writing, for thinking about complex problems, for math. What do you say to parents like me who have that concern that AI will make it harder for their kids to do independent and tough thinking on their own? I think, you know, AI is a.
Is a technology. It's a tool. And I always try to point out, folks, the tools themselves are neutral. They can be positive or negative.
Fire, which is probably the first tool that we learned to harness as a species. You can destroy, burn, but you can also keep warm, prepare food. Same thing with AI it's going to amplify your intent. So, yes, if your children are using it to cheat, if your children are using it to cut corners, to kind of check out, that's not good.
That's not a healthy thing. But if they're using it to go deeper into a conversation to answer their questions, it's actually a really powerful skill. We're seeing that in schools. The kids that know how to ask questions, they're often the races with AI But a lot of kids, they haven't been able to build that muscle yet is hopefully helping them build.
And the teachers say yes, the same students are often not going to raise their hand and ask a question. They're not articulating what they need. And so this might be a good outlet for them. So you want your children or anyone's children to be really thoughtful about how use these tools, make sure that they're not.
They're not using it to amplify their laziness, but they're using it to amplify their creativity, to amplify their, you know, they're brainstorming with it, they're digging deeper, they're accelerating their learning, they're doing things like that. It can be very positive. I wonder what you think about the future of education when you think about a classroom 10, 20 years from now. What does it look like in your mind?
What I would like to see, and this is what we're building forward, is if we're in a classroom in 10 or 20 years. And first of all, this is just a great classroom. The kids are talking to each other. The teacher is walking around, sitting next to students, and he does a great job.
I really like how you did that. Kids look really engaged. It will look like an exceptional classroom today. But when you start paying closer attention, you'll realize that the teacher and the student have much more support to do that really engaging experience than they've ever had before.
Maybe the teacher has something whispering into its ear, into their ear, saying, hey, you know, go talk to Kristen. She just, she's really engaged today. She's really excited about today's topic. Go give her some encouragement.
She could really value that. And why don't you go now, talk to breakout group number five? They're having a little bit of a conflict. I think they need you.
And then that night, that teacher's able to co create with the AI even more engaging lesson based on what the students have said or done. And the AI can, hey, yesterday's lesson went well. The kids really enjoyed it. I talked to them about it, but a lot of them were still confused about the main idea of a paragraph.
So why don't we reteach that tomorrow in this way? So the teacher always feels like they're really supported. And the Students never feel stuck and when they come to class, they don't feel like it's a class. They just have to sit still with their finger on their lip that they can, it's play.
They get to talk to each other, move around. And we can also imagine augmented reality and virtual reality, but I don't think that's really the meat of it. I think it's unlocking the human to human connection by taking out a lot of the administrative, planning and support tasks. Do you think that we are getting smarter as a country, as a world community?
For someone who is engaged with their learning, who is curious, this is the most exciting time to be alive. There's no ceiling. Especially now with artificial intelligence and everything else that's happening. You're going to see 10 year olds learn quantum physics and they're going to be the people who push the frontiers.
At the same time, we know that these same technologies can be used to make very addictive things. Social media people are already, their companies already building AI friends, AI girlfriends and boyfriends. You're going to have AI entertainment that is very, very immersive and I'm excited about some of that. But if it gets too addictive, these games and this entertain.
Yeah, you could see this divide of the people who are using the tools to accelerate their own potential and the people who are kind of in like a opium haze of, you know, and you already seen that in places in East Asia. Unfortunately a lot of young men are so addicted to video games that they're not even getting out of forming connections. So yeah, I worry about that. But whenever I think about that, I think about, well, maybe there's ways of using the same technology to put guardrails, you know, right now on a computer.
Every parent worries what the kids are doing. We worry about it at home. There's very blunt instruments where you can protect from certain sides. I hope AI can observe and be on the parents and the teacher's side say, hey, that article's not appropriate for you.
Or you play this video game for half an hour, why don't you give a little bit of Khan Academy? Or even better run, you go run outside right now. And if it can do that, if you can report to the parent, like, hey, why don't you go walk over and get the play outside. In fact, you go for a walk because you've been on your phone too long too.
When we come back, a journey into outer space with an astronaut who became a Sam. Welcome back. We the press has long welcomed guests from the world of Arts and entertainment. But some, you could say we're truly out of this world.
In 1963, just over a year after becoming the first American to orbit the Earth, astronaut John Glenn joined me, the press, to explain why America was opening the door to the final frontier. All I can do is fall back on something like the Lewis and Clark expedition heading for the West Coast. How did they know what they were going to run into? I know I can't even begin to pinpoint what we may run into or what may prove the most benefit.
But I think man's participation in this guarantees one thing. If we can see things, perceive them, analyze them, relate them back to our experiences here. This is the main thing that man brings to the program. He can see things, new things that now are completely unforeseen or unknown.
This to me is probably what's going to be the biggest advantage of having a man in space program, are things that we don't even foresee right now. 35 years later, Colonel Glenn was now Senator Glenn of Ohio. But his fascination with space never faded. After flying out to space again at the age of 77, he returned to this broadcast to reflect on his journey.
Looking out at the horizon up there and seeing the blackness of space out there and seeing the curvature of the Earth's surface. And I know we didn't get quite the same view as the astronauts that went to the moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz and the other people went to the moon and back where they saw the Earth as the big blue marble as they described it. But looking out from the level that we were at, which is about, almost 350 statute miles high, which is very high orbit for the usual manned space effort.
It's just so beautiful up there. You can't help but look out and you get teary eyed almost just looking out and appreciating the beauty of where we live here. And you can't help but wonder when you fly over places like the Mid east, that we have so many man made problems in that area that have gone on for centuries. Why we can't get together on this beautiful home that we call Earth and really solve some of these problems here.
Just remarkable. When we come back, our conversation with Amanda Gorman and why poetry matters to who America is as a nation. Welcome back. Amanda Gorman captured the world's attention when she became the youngest inaugural poet, delivering a powerful message of President Biden's inauguration in 2021 at the age of 22.
We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be a Country that is bruised but whole, benevolent but bold, fierce and free. In the four years since, Gorman has become an advocate speaking out against racial inequality and the banning of books. She is out with a new book, girls on the Rise, where she speaks to young women about empowerment, inclusivity, and facing their fears. I sat down with Amanda Gorman to discuss her journey and how poetry can speak to all Americans.
Amanda Gorman, welcome to Meet the Press. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. It is an honor to have you here.
What do you hope young girls, young boys, young people take away from the message in this new book? I'm so excited about this children's book because for me, it originated around this idea of having a children's book that underscores the importance of community and allyship. So often in children's books, we follow an individual character, which I love. I live for that.
But I was kind of like, what if we turned on its head a little bit? And the book is about the village, it's about the wave, it's about the movement. It's about what it means to be a young person in the generation that is going to and is currently changing the world. And that's why, I hope, is the heartbeat of the book.
Why was it important for you to celebrate young women and young girls in this moment? I love that question. Because this book has been in the works for several years. I kind of came into being a few years ago when Dr.
Christine Blasey Ford was testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. And I, like so many other people, was just watching that testimony in Rat. I think especially as a woman, I really connected with that sensation of being the person in the room, speaking the truth and not being heard. And I wrote that poem that night.
And then as years went on, I started thinking to myself, this could also be a message I think particularly young girls and allies need to hear now more than ever. You have used your art and your poetry for activism. You've spoken out about racial inequality, climate change. You've spoken out about book banning, particularly after your poem that you delivered at the 2021 inauguration was banned in a Florida school.
What was your reaction when you learned that your poem had been banned? To be honest, it was a bit like a gut punch. It was. It felt surreal.
I had understood that book bands have been happening, but I think this hit me so incredibly hard because not just that it was something I had written, which is besides the point, that it was a moment in history that if a child at the school wanted to Hear words that were spoken on presidential inauguration for their country. It had kind of been softly restricted in that way. But I think as I started to kind of open my eyes to the broader environment of what's happening now. There are so many book bans happening right now that are very terrifying if you pay attention to what that means for children's right to read and learn and what it means for teachers in libraries.
There's been reports of over 10,000 book bans just in the school year alone. That's over 200% increase from last school year. And so I would say if anyone cares beyond just my own work being banned, it's so important to be awake to what's happening on a local level. Why did you know you wanted to be a poet?
Did you know or are you just. Is it just a part of you? Is it something you focus on? I think it's.
It is a bit of part of me. Almost like in my blood I felt this kind of will of writing. Even when I was like 4 or 5, my mom would have to give me quarters for every morning I stayed in bed instead of getting up at like 6am writing because that poor woman would have to get up with me and turn on the lights. And so even then I was writing as if I was a commissioned poet.
I didn't know that writing was a job at that point. I didn't know that it was something that I could do, let alone as a girl, let alone as a black person. But as I grew and saw examples of that, I knew I would give my whole life to just have this as my craft. Why do you think poetry is so critical to who we are as a nation?
Poetry has consistently been the language of a people. I think it's the reason why when there's protest, you will hear metaphor. You will hear, they buried us, but they didn't know we were seeds. The reason that there's a poem and not a 36 page essay at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty, when we are trying as a people to speak to our best shared common humanity.
Typically poetry is the rhetoric that encapsulates that the best. I think there's something magical about it that is humble, that is hopeful, but that's also wounded enough to remind us of the past that we stepped from in the future we want to move to. I'm usually interviewing politicians who don't want to say that they want to run for this office or that office or run for president one day. You have proudly and confidently said that you want to run for President 2036.
And you are able to do that. When did you. You first get that bug? When did you first think I'd be president of the United States one day?
Oh, that's a good question. I think I was probably 11, sixth grade, very early. I have delusions of grander, as you would say. But at that age, I was just starting to become an activist and I was getting interested in local issues particularly.
I had a friend whose mother was doing work around sex trafficking, and I was finding out about that, and I was just overwhelmed with the amount of policy that was not in place. And I started thinking to myself, someone has to do something about these issues. And I kind of looked around and I said, why not me? Why not now?
Why not here? And so I think from a young age, it just felt like a responsibility and opportunity to step up and. Amanda, poets are a part of the history of this country. From Robert Frost to Maya Angelou.
What do you hope your mark will be? I hope my mark is being a wordsmith and a change maker who speaks in a language that allows our country to return to love, legacy, and connection. To see all of our Meet the Moment interviews, go to meetthepress.com that is all for today. Thank you for watching.
We'll be back next week because if it's Sunday, it's Meet the Press. I'm Craig Knoff. Cheers. Cheers.
Cheers. I've always been a glass half full kind of guy, and now I'm talking to some people who look at the world that way, too. Some really fascinating folks who share their defining moments, their triumphs, their challenges, their stories are fun and quite candidly so. I hope you'll join me each week.
Who knows, you might just come along with your own glass half full. So it's glass apple with great.