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Koko the Gorilla's Teacher Talks Zoo Shooting; Barney Frank Talks HIV, AIDS, Presidential Race. Aired 2:30-3p ET

Aired June 3, 2016 - 14:30   ET

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


[14:30:00] BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: Perhaps no other gorilla more famous for that compassion than Koko, also a western lowland gorilla, who has learned more than 1,000 words in American sign language.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. PENNY PATTERSON, HUMAN COMPANION OF KOKO THE GORILLA: Who is that? Think me there. OK. That is you. Gorilla. Animal. Koko love. OK. That's very good. That is you. You are a lovely animal.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: That was Koko and her lifelong human companion, Dr. Penny Patterson, teaching sign language as an infant. Koko is now 44 years old.

And Penny joins me now.

So nice to talk to you.

PATTERSON: Oh, it's great to be able to talk with you.

BALDWIN: I remember being a little girl and seeing those videos of Koko. Before I ask you about Koko, everyone has seen this video from the Cincinnati Zoo that was taken over the weekend. Except for you. You've chosen not to watch. Tell me why.

PATTERSON: Well, partly it's because my consciousness is very linked to the gorillas. They're very keyed in on the humans and their environment. And it's not just gorillas. Chimpanzees do the same thing. There are other projects I have heard the same thing is that our mood sets tone, and if we're agitated, they're agitated. If we're cranky, they're cranky. If we're afraid, they're afraid. So I like to just remain neutral, and this way I can be.

BALDWIN: You say Koko is a powerful ambassador for gorillas and building a better relationship with humans. How do you mean?

PATTERSON: Well, we didn't think of this when we started the research, but Koko is able to engage people in a way that we didn't expect, especially young people. They're captivated by her. They want to learn more. They start to understand her and realize that she's -- while she's an animal, and you saw her saying that, she has personhood, however we want to define that. That's clear, looking into her eyes, watching her behavior, seeing her empathy for other creatures, her desire to be a mom, her grief over her loss of her kitten.

By the way, that has continued for many, many, many years. If she sees a picture of the kitten that she lost back in 1985, she signs, "Cries, sad there." This is after so many years, so their consciousness level is akin to our own. There's no question. And so she reaches out and she engages people and that's what an ambassador is doing.

BALDWIN: And so that's -- so powerful. I'm curious, as someone that's passionate about these beautiful animals, why you want -- when you talk about consciousness and why you wouldn't be able to then learn something about seeing a little boy in an enclosure with Harambe.

PATTERSON: Well, I just -- I just like to -- as I said, I like to remain unbiased, neutral. I don't want to form opinions or have that affect me in a way that deeply unsets me, which my guess is that it would. So on the other hand, I -- I think that we can learn a lot from this.

BALDWIN: How so?

PATTERSON: And in a way that will benefit the endangered gorilla. What we have learned, what I've heard is that people have a great deal of empathy for a gorilla so rather than the King Kong image, which, by the way, in a survey gorillas were right up there with spiders and all kinds of other scary creatures as being frightening instead of being, you know, something that a child or an adult could relate to. This helps us relate to them.

BALDWIN: Sure.

Dr. Penny Patterson, thank you so much. So many of us know exactly who Koko is, and your work through the years is pretty extraordinary.

Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.

PATTERSON: Oh, thank you.

[14:35:47] BALDWIN: Thank you.

Coming up here, we bounce back to politics. Former Congressman Barney Frank joins me. His take on the state of the race of Clinton and Trump. And the effort by the Sanders campaign to have him removed from a key convention committee.

Also ahead, incredible video. Really compelling to watch this father leap towards his daughter's convicted killer. We'll talk to this grieving father, about this emotional moment and the punishment handed down to his daughter's killer.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Alaska, just like the rest of America, well, except, of course, it is cold. Like really, really, really cold.

CNN's own California-raised comedian, W. Kamau Bell went to meet the inhabitants of one of the most inhospitable places on the planet.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

W. KAMAU BELL, CNN HOST, UNITED SHADES OF AMERICA: Still cold. Don't die. Don't die. Don't die.

[14:40:02] (voice-over): Finding out that locals remain active when it's 90 degrees below zero brought several questions to my mind. Most I can't say because they have too many curse words. Still, I need to see what drives people to live in Barrow instead of not Barrow.

Let's talk to the locals.

(on camera): This is ridiculous. I'm so cold.

How long have you lived in Barrow?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is my home. I was raised there and I choose to live here.

BELL: I like the way you say, I choose to live here. Ignorant people like this guy come into the town and say, how do people do it?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: My father and my mother did it, and my grandparents did it, and so I'm doing it.

BELL: Does the cold bother you?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No. This is the balmy weather. I'm wearing my shorts.

BELL: What are you doing? You're wearing shorts.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Life in the Arctic. You got to be tough. Or you got to be --

(CROSSTALK)

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BALDWIN: What? I was like, are those bare legs?

BELL: Yes, they were. Yeah, yeah. I was more cold than she was.

BALDWIN: I was looking at you walking. Did you even own that snow gear?

BELL: No, no.

BALDWIN: You hit REI before you went to Alaska.

BELL: He hit REIs. We hit all the REIs. We hit every place we could. I was wearing several layers.

BALDWIN: Why did you go there? Why did you do this? BELL: The show has become known for the Klan episode and lots of

places I don't want to go, so sometimes it's about racism. Sometimes it's about weather. There's lots of things I don't like to do.

BALDWIN: So this is so totally off the beaten path and 90 degrees below zero, you said it's quite diverse.

BELL: Very diverse.

BALDWIN: Really?

BELL: Yeah, 4,000 people, a lot of people move there because there's good jobs in the oil industry there. And people -- they have a lot of Samos, I met a guy of Thailand. Ethnic and racial diversity. Barrow is 60 percent native people, which is kind of a lot for an American city. You have 60 percent Native American. What other American city has 60 percent of Native American people. Like 20 or 30 years ago, it was like 90 percent native people. So funny to think that Barrow is experiencing gentrification.

BALDWIN: OK. So on United States of America, Kamau goes to Alaska. Not only crisscrossing the country for the show but stand-up and talking to people about politics.

Before I ask you about that, Hillary Clinton spoke a moment ago at this women's event. A lot of actors, Sally Field, Elizabeth Banks, they're with her in Culver City. And here she was.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HILLARY CLINTON, (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE & FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE: You know, yesterday in San Diego, I had the opportunity to --

(APPLAUSE)

CLINTON: -- to just repeat --

(LAUGHTER)

-- what Donald Trump has said.

(LAUGHTER)

I didn't make any of that.

(LAUGHTER)

I mean, it would be hard to make up.

(LAUGHTER)

And by the end of working on that speech, even I was saying, did he really say all of this?

(LAUGHTER) Well, indeed, he did. And I believe, absolutely, that he's not only unprepared to be president, he is temperamentally unfit to be president.

(CHEERING)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: OK. So here she is again on the rampage.

BELL: I like that. She's a little "Stella got her groove back" there. It seems she's enjoying that.

BALDWIN: I think she might be and Donald Trump is enjoying himself, too.

You're crisscrossing the country. You are talking to a lot of folks, doing stand-up. People come up to me and say, tell me about the election. I imagine they do the same to you. What are you hearing?

BELL: I think people are finally, finally, waking up to the fact it's real.

BALDWIN: Totally real.

(CROSSTALK)

BELL: They're like Trump will drop out. Even the Republican Party is saying we'll figure this out.

BALDWIN: They're tuning in.

BELL: But it's red alert. It's DEFCON 1. It's happening. So now there's a question. I talk to a lot of people who, despite that clip, aren't that excited about Hillary or Bernie, and don't know, what do I do? There's a lot of talk about turning your nose up and voting for your party for the Democratic Party. Republicans saying that about Trump. It's an interesting time that politics is super popular to talk about but the people in politics aren't that popular.

BALDWIN: I'm told there's another funny moment with the podium. Should we watch?

BELL: Yes, please. I'm enjoying this.

BALDWIN: Roll it, roll it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: Got it? Whoa.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Oh gosh.

What happened? BELL: Wow.

BALDWIN: Do we know what happened? Guys? Did it just fall?

(LAUGHTER)

BALDWIN: And thumbs up.

BELL: Back to regular Hillary. When's happening? She lost the groove for a second. Thrown off.

BALDWIN: Laugh at yourself.

BELL: Yeah. You know?

BALDWIN: It happens.

BELL: I think she should hang out with that group a lot more.

BALDWIN: You like that?

BELL: A lot of black women back there. I think she was getting "Stella got the groove" back there.

BALDWIN: This guy.

BELL: This guy.

[14:45:06] BALDWIN: This guy, Kamau Bell.

I wish you could come on every single day.

Go back to Berkeley and we'll take you back when we can get you.

Watch him, Kamau Bell, "United Shades of America," Sunday night, 10:00 eastern and pacific, only here on CNN.

Thank you for the Friday laugh, my friend.

Coming up here, former Congressman Barney Frank will join me. He was represented Massachusetts for more than 30 years. He was the first openly gay member of Congress. We'll talk everything from the current the president's race to the climate back in the '80s. Don't miss that.

Back after this quick break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Breaking news here. This rescue for military personnel stranded, this is Long's Peak in the Rocky Mountains National Park. Live pictures here. This is what we know. 10 people requesting assistance after having trouble with the climb. We're told the group was not planning to stay overnight in the area. Park rangers planning an evacuation effort. And we're keeping close eye on the pictures of Rocky Mountains, and as soon as we get the information, we'll bring it back to you live.

[14:50:02] Meantime, the '80s. CNN's original series, "The Eighties" returns next week to revisit a time when the nation saw the first cases of a killer disease called the, quote, "gay cancer." Since then, this is leading to the death of more than 34 million men, women and children worldwide. This is according to the World Health Organization. Talking about HIV and AIDS.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TOM BROKAW, FORMER CORRESPONDENT, NBC NEWS: Scientists at the National Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta today released the results of a study saying the lifestyle of some male homosexuals has triggered an epidemic.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Bruce Harris. David Hicks.

DAVID FRANCE, DOCUMENTARY CREATOR: The quilt was really a tremendous response to a need that we didn't realize we had, which was some central place, some graveyard that brought those that we lost together.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm tired of going to funerals. I can't. I can't keep doing it. So this is for everybody. This is all of us.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: With me now, the author of "Frank: A Life of Politics: From the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage." Former Congressman Frank Barney, represented the great state of Massachusetts for 34 years and also the first openly gay member of Congress, and he was the first sitting congressman to enter a same-sex marriage.

Congressman Frank, wonderful to have you back.

BARNEY FRANK, (D), FORMER CONGRESSMAN & AUTHOR: Thank you.

BALDWIN: So you were looking back to, you know, this time in the '80s, you were just starting your career in the House. This was just when people were starting to talk about this thing called AIDS. What do you remember about that time?

FRANK: Well, it was -- actually, in the very late '70s, when I first began to hear about people getting sick, and by the early '80s, we were aware that there was a terrible illness for which at the time there was not only no cure but not even any effective treatment to deal with the symptoms or even delay death, and that it was especially prevalent among gay men, not only. There were people who got it through blood transfusions. There were other parts of the world where it happened. Haiti was a place which was stricken by it. But within the United States, it was very disproportionately affecting gay men and it was a scary time because we not only had a terrible illness that was killing people, and it turned out, yes, there were certain ways in which people had behaved sexually that could spread it, but the problem from the standpoint of people who wanted to protect themselves that knowledge came too late for many people. In other words, it turned out that things people did years before for which there had been no reason to be frightened, suddenly became death sentences. And so, it was -- and at the same time, we were in the early stages of fighting the prejudice. So it wasn't simply that we were fighting a terrible disease, we were still dealing with a situation of which we didn't have legal rights, which we couldn't serve in the military.

BALDWIN: Yeah.

FRANK: Obviously, people couldn't get married. And many places, just the very act of expressing your love for another man or woman was criminal.

BALDWIN: You mentioned the word "prejudice." I was looking at your book today and you talk about in the first chapter then gay people were, quote, "Most despised." Politicians at the time were well respected. And then you point out, decades later, it's flip flopped. Gays are accepted and politicians are vilified. What do you think happened?

FRANK: No question. Well, as I said, by the time I retired, I got higher approval ratings for marrying Jim than passing what I think was a very good financial reform bill.

BALDWIN: How about that?

FRANK: Being a gay man is more socially acceptable than being a Congressman. The good news is that reality can be prejudice. When we began this movement in the late '60s, early '70s -- I was not one of the first, but I was a fairly early participant -- we were hiding. The problem was that we had this terrible inaccurate vicious prejudicial portrait of us and hard to refute because we were hiding and wouldn't tell people who we were, so our reality was muffled. As the period went on, the single biggest thing that helped us defeat it is we decided to be honest about who we were. We decided to discuss our sexuality. At first that was controversial. People would say we don't want to hear about it. I pointed out that gay people and lesbians, we don't discuss our sexuality more than straight people do. The difference is, when straight people discuss their sexuality, it's called talking. When we do it, it's called coming out. And that's what happened.

[14:55:06] That is an area that people said, if we allow you guys into the military, it will disorganize the military. It didn't. It had no negative effect. If we let you get married to each other, it will un-do society. It didn't. What happened was -- and then the other factor was this. As we began to be honest about who we were, people suddenly realized we were their brothers and customers and clients and doctors and teammates and sales people, et cetera. I used to say to people, you know, you say you don't like and you found out that a couple of people that you like very much are gay. What kind of a prejudice is it that you didn't know you were supposed to engage in it for 18 years?

I think what happened was that the political system here and country failed to adapt to the changing economy. Years ago, after world war ii, in America, if you were a hard working guy without a lot of education, still prejudice against women and blacks, you could make a good living. Things are changed. And what's happened is that I think our political system has not caught up with the economic changes, so that you have this anger, understandable anger, about people who feel that prosperity has come and very unevenly distributed.

BALDWIN: Well, on the anger and on the political system -- let me ask you to put on your political hat on here -- that, you know, with regard with this race for president, you know, on the Democratic side, especially probably post-California, Hillary Clinton is expected to clinch, she's expected to be the nominee. Manu Raju, on Capitol Hill, he is reporting that Democrats are secretly plotting a sort of an exit strategy, a graceful exit for Bernie Sanders. You have your ear to ground. What are you hearing about that strategy?

FRANK: Well, nobody plots strategy for Senator Sanders. He plots his own. He's been a member of Congress over 25 years. He has his positions. I think this. Obviously, there's unhappiness. I would tell you the biggest lie, the most frequent lie told by politicians is not, I'm going to give you more service, lower taxes. It is, we ran again each other but we're still good friends. Any time you hear that, get out your lie detector.

BALDWIN: Baloney?

FRANK: So people -- absolutely. You don't spend months telling other people why someone is not good enough for a job and then have her feel good about you or vice versa. But I think this. I think Senator Sanders is someone -- but here's, I think, the first part. First of all, there will be no basis for arguing that this was in any way unfair. Hillary Clinton is about to be the nominee because she's gotten many more votes than Bernie Sanders. He did very well, much better than anybody expected. But if you look at the votes, she's got millions more votes and many more pledged delegates.

(CROSSTALK)

BALDWIN: But, Congressman, what about -- Congressman, what about an exit? If you have members of Congress trying to orchestrate and it's really all Sanders and what does it look like?

FRANK: Well, no one is going to him what to do. I think this. I'm not one that tells him he should drop out. I do urge him, I have done this, not to campaign against Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly but start to spend more and more of his time explaining why Donald Trump's election would be such a terrible idea from the standpoint of someone from his values. I think he'll go to the convention, make a speech at the convention, there will be votes. Hillary Clinton will win, and win fairly based on her having gotten a majority of the votes. And once that is over, I believe you will see Senator Sanders strongly supporting Hillary Clinton. Any hard feelings from the campaign dissolve. This is a man of great seriousness of purpose and who believes very strongly in a whole range of issues. And every issue on which he's concerned Hillary Clinton is, A, not as he is, and maybe that he is, but infinitely better than Donald Trump. I think this process will begin after the convention when you will see him enthusiastically make clear to his supporters why electing Hillary Clinton is so much better than Donald Trump.

BALDWIN: We'll see a see a potentially huge sift post-California next Tuesday.

Congressman Barney Frank, I appreciate it. Thank you, sir.

FRANK: You're welcome.

BALDWIN: Thank you.

Just a quick reminder, we are watching live pictures of a rescue underway. 10 members of the military stranded there at the top of this mountain here, the Rocky Mountain National Park. An update on that.

Back in 60 seconds.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)