From our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Today, Time Magazine unveiled their choice for person of the year. They have recognized the person who most affected the news for good or ill and embodied what was important about the year. This year, it is a group of people, the ebola fighters. They are the doctors, scientists, and Health Workers battling a disease that is arctic taking more than 6000 lives has already taken more than 6000 lives. To talk about this issue i am pleased to have managing editor nancy gibbs at the table. Let me read what you said. Not the glittering weapons fight the fight, says the proverb, but whether the heros heart fights the fight. Is truly true of these are the heroes youre talking about. The courage it took for them to fight this fight. The risk to each of them individually and to their families was extraordinary. Ebola is a dangerous disease because those who treat run the risk of becoming victims. We saw unprecedented numbers of doctors and nurses more than 300 have died fighting this outbreak. Does it seem it, after you make the choice, obvious and easy . In a way. The more we thought about it we , decided a couple of months ago that this is how we are going to go. It became clearer and clearer as we talked to these people and heard their stories and watched what they are doing. It is against the context of a Global Health system that did not perform well and that is the crucial part. On the one hand, the extraordinary heroism and courage of these frontline fighters that was all the more important because they are protecting the rest of us. It is not as though, in a globalized world, a pandemic is not able to travel further and faster than ever before. And so, if the disease Surveillance Systems do not work, if the alarms are not heeded, the entire world is at risk. These are the people that basically bought us time. And with that time, what are we doing . What is extraordinary is that in march and april, the frontline workers like the Doctors Without Borders were yelling and screaming that this is different, this is serious, and they were being brushed off. They were accused of crying wolf. It took, frankly, dr. Kent brantly, the western doctor, to be stricken himself and flown back to emory for the world to wake up. Within a week of the evacuation, the world bank allocated 20 million to the fight. The World Health Organization finally declared an emergency. It was months after the alarms had started sounding that this thing was really spreading uncontained. Why were people like the World Health Organization late . They have lost funding and focus, and some part of it is turf battles, where regional offices are jealous of their primacy. The local office told the cdc to go away. You have a headquarters in geneva that cannot control what is happening on the ground and in the meantime, more and more people are getting affected. Where are we on the progress to develop a vaccine . These are the other people we write about, scientists working on this for a decade. There are vaccines being fast tracked right now. Obviously, tragically we have , learned a lot about this disease and how it presents and what works in treating it. The crisis gives you a mirror into the disease . It does. And whats remarkable three of , the five people we feature on the covers are themselves survivors and in many cases they are donating plasma to help victims because it helps confer some kind of extra immunity. We will come back to the ebola fighters. Number two of those considered were the ferguson protesters. What was the argument that said not now . What started in ferguson and has spread across the country and gathered momentum with the case of tamir rice in cleveland or eric garner in new york, we have started the longstanding conversation in this country about race and justice and accountability. It was those protests it was not as though Michael Brown was the first black man to be killed by a Police Officer and yet, in this case, it became the center of a debate about police and the militarization of police and how these interactions go that has continued ever since that day in august. So we looked very hard, it is too soon to say what the longterm impact of the protest will be, i think what the protesters themselves say is that we are making people Pay Attention to something that has been a source of enormous pain within these communities for a long time. Vladimir putin. The year started in sochi and the next thing you know, he is redrawing the map of eastern europe. And reasserting russian nationalism in a really have not seen in the postcold war era, and violating norms of postcold war diplomacy that i think most people thought were settled and forcing the rest of europe and the rest of the world to think, what do we do with this guy . How do we draw the lines and what is our ability to enforce . Why isnt isis on this list . Isil . This is a force that is trying to create a state and is engaged in horrific violence. It is, and the vehicle for telling the story and addressing that we chose is actually the leader of the iraqi kurds who, arguably, holds the future of the region in his hands. He is right in the middle. You can find some defining centralization. He has a long line fighting against isis. How this plays out, and the future of iraq will have a lot to do with that. Would you have a hard time putting isis on the cover as the person of the year . I would have a hard time doing that. Somebody who beheads americans when it comes to setting the priority, i go back to where we ended up, which is that as much as the individual acts of the ebola fighters mattered enormously, their looking forward at what we face as a Global Community and what we learned this year, look at the conversations that we had as a result of the Ebola Outbreak in this country. Who is allowed to order someone to be quarantined . Who was allowed to post a guard outside of your door . When Chris Christie quarantines kaci hickox, there was an enormous conversation. There was conflict over who has authority. This is a disease that is not as infectious as an airborne pathogen would be. And so as a test run about our ability to face a threat like this we learned a lot from this. , if we did not learn or do not apply these lessons, we would miss an enormous opportunity at the cost of many lives. And it reminds us, reminds me that there are, out there, in the realm of Global Health, threats like ebola that we have not even come to appreciate. Thats right. The very same globalization that makes it easier for us to unite in fighting a threat like this also makes the threat greater because it can travel more quickly. There are threats that we do not appreciate or understand yet. We are just getting to understand the power to multiply. Ebola, remember, has been around for 40 years. But it never functioned this way. Even experts say it is behaving in ways that it has never done before. That is where it is an extraordinary danger. So why jack ma . The alibaba ipo was the largest in history. So . Well, we will see, but he is in a position to remake Global Commerce that i think we will be paying a lot of attention to in years to come. You take an enormous market and link Small Businesses and merchants and suppliers in a frictionless way, and i think that is going to be a very different model than other ecommerce sites like amazon and it will be fascinating to see. This is someone you have been watching for years and i suspect you will have him back at this table. Or i will be at his table in china, one or the other. He does represent all that kind of stuff. Why not taylor swift . We had her on the cover if you weeks ago as not only the biggest pop artist in the world, she is bigger than anyone, bigger than lady gaga or beyonce. But she also is a businesswoman where she has become a spokesperson for the value of content. And she pulled her music from spotify and said that i think that content needs to be valued, that artists need to be paid for their work, that is a debate that is happening across all different areas of media and she really put a flag in the ground. I think it will be fascinating to see the impact of that Going Forward. What was the last entertainer that was person of the year . It depends on how you count this, but i think 2004, we made bill and Melinda Gates and bono the persons of the year. That was because of philanthropy. With bono it was the way that he leveraged his powers of as in entertainer to create philanthropy. Can i show you these pictures . This is amazing. This is dr. Jerry brown. Tell us who this is. Both of her parents died in a single week. They ran a Medical Clinic in monrovia. She is a nurse who counsels ebola patients and is a survivor herself so she is able to go into Treatment Centers and essentially give patients hope. She says, i got it i survived , it, you can survive it to, and the possibility of hope has enormous power. This is ella watsonstryker, a Health Educator who was on the ground from the very beginning in guinea and elsewhere, trying to educate the community as to how ebola spreads and get the word out, because you have to be able to keep people from infecting each other. This is an ambulance driver, he runs an Ambulance Team in monrovia. Also a survivor he contracted it , in trying to save a little boy. He says he would give his blood to save other people, which he does because it confers a benefit. And finally, kent brantley, a doctor at the same hospital as jerry brown. He, too, contracted the disease and came to emory. Thank you. Back in a moment. Stay with us. Tonight a conversation with , walmart ceo doug mcmillon. Walmart is the Worlds Largest retailer but its dominance is under threat. Consumers can find low prices online all the time. Walmart is determined to catch up with the transformation in retail and with amazon. They are experimenting with delivery and store formats. Since taking over in mcmillon february, has increased investment in ecommerce and he is the youngest ceo since sam walton founded the company. He spent his entire career at walmart and rose quickly through the ranks. He led the international unit. We spoke with him at a busy walmart in washington, d. C. Last week. Here is that conversation. We just went through one part of the holiday season. What did we learn . One of the things that we learned from this black friday and thanksgiving is just how retail is changing so quickly. Some of the themes i have talked about are really starting to become important. It is a transformation of the Retail Business. It is, no doubt. The internet has changed all kinds of business, and when you put that together with mobile, it is going to revolutionize retail even more and faster than maybe retail might have changed in the past. If you look at history, retailers come and go. You can list them. You go back 100 years in this country and retailers have grown and declined. In some cases, unique in our reasons. Case, we are 52 years old. We have done a good job of opening and operating stores to serve customers and to fill our purpose. But we have to learn new skills, many of which are digital, some of which are based on data and technology, and put them together in a way that is most efficient and serves customers in the way they want to be served. If you look at this past holiday, thanksgiving and friday and cyber monday, sales were down on black friday and up on cyber monday. To do to our plan, sales did bounce around, but if you look at what happened in november, for the first time, some of the efforts that retailers have made to spread the business out did start to take hold. I think the internet is related to it. People buying early. They can buy early, they can buy late. We had events thursday morning where you might have been preparing a meal and cyber , monday and the stores were cranking during thursday and friday. On we had over 22 million thursday visitors on thursday to Walmart Stores. Over the weekend, people downloaded our black friday ad 25 million times. We are seeing the customer engage with us in new ways and that is what i am referring to as transformation. Mobile, which has been increasing in importance, surprised me even over the black friday weekend. 70 of the orders we received digitally came through a mobile device rather than the website. And that surprised you . It was higher than i would have guessed. How do you explain it . People are more familiar with mobile and they become more aware of how they can use it . They can take it to the store and see something in order it right there . Customers are smart and are adopting new tools and technologies quickly. We have this tool we call savings catcher, and on our app, you can scan a receipt and we will look at local competition and let you know if we found any lower prices and then give you that amount on a gift card. The customer adoption on that has been huge. Everyone wants price insurance and we are the lowprice leader so it makes sense for us to do that. You mentioned that people order online and pick it up themselves. What is behind that . What is the psychology at work . People are working in moving around and they do not want to sit at home and wait. They can save on freight if there is a freight charge. The u. K. Is the best example. We have been delivering groceries to homes for 15 years in the u. K. And that is something that in this country people are interested in and i think is going to be more important in the future. In the u. K. , we have 90 of our sales in the store. We have been adding a pickup ability in the parking lot and drivethroughs and parking at tube stations to meet people on their way home from work. What we are learning is that customers do not want to break stride. They are going home from work, but they pull in and pick it up. Sometimes i want to go to the store and sometimes i want it delivered. What we have to do is build capability so that however a customer wants to shop. What does that mean for the size of the stores you are building . Great question. If you look at our supercenters in the united states, they grew to where we were building some that were over 20,000 square feet. A few years ago we recognized and started adjusting them down to a smaller size. You did that because you did not need those kinds of stores because people were shopping online . We just found out how big was too big. Some customers do not want to walk all that far. So there is a kind of natural adjustment that is taking place over time. As i look forward i am confident that great stores will still be important to the customer but they will probably get smaller and they will continue to have and turning goods but other items you will order online and pick up later. What do we know about shoppers . Have you seen a decline in impulse shoppers because now they have so much more access to information and they can plan more . That is an interesting point. Some people do say that Online Shopping does not enable him shopping does not enable spontaneous shopping. And i just do not think that is true. People still are people and they want to find a new item, they want to find some and that is exciting. They are still interested in instant gratification. Sometimes they will be in the store and other times they will browse online. Tell me more. Is the profile of the shopper changing in terms of who comes to walmart and who shops online . The u. S. Demographic is basically the walmart customer in the united states. We look very much like that set of statistics in every way. We have a midlower income, lower income shoppers, and everybody is value conscious, which includes wealthy people who shop at walmart for some things. Does it change your products . Does your offering change because of the profile of the shopper . For example, higherpriced items. Think about the ability online to sell a broader assortment. In the beginning, when the internet started taking hold, it was the above average income consumer but that has passed. Where is walmart going . For example, i am told you are getting involved in selling gasoline. You cannot sell gasoline online. You cannot ship gasoline to someone. They have to come to the store to pick it up. What is the market for that . We operate fuel stations at some of our stores and we are able to sell customers value. We love to let people know that we are the lowprice leader. We try to do that with our soft drink machines on the front of the store as well. Fuel, pharmacy, fresh fruit, categories like that and people to the store. Who is your competition . It seems like everybody. The one person who i know wins is the customer. The sharper we have to be. Going back to sam walton, in our dna is being interested in others and talking good ideas. When you talk about walmart, everybody is speculating on the competition between walmart and amazon. It is said that that is the company that you look at and see the most competitive force at play. It is said that you have given every executive of your company a copy of the biography. We believe in learning from other people. What amazon is doing and jeff is doing is showing the world what is possible. I admire that. Having the ability to innovate and imagine what is possible and to have the speed to get there is, frankly, very common and understood within walmart. What do they do . Customer focused, moving with speed, just putting ideas at work that are directly beneficial to customers. The irony of this is that he studied sam walton, jeff bezos and now you are studying jeff bezos. Were trying to learn from someone, learn from competition, and on a global basis be able to be the very best as we try to bring it all together. To me, that is what is most exciting about being at walmart. I am confident that the things that we have done that built this business still largely apply in the future. There are other things that will make us more successful. But that is ecommerce . It is the marriage of both. If you look around the store, we edit assortments. We have a great team of merchants that take the category and really understands it, works with the suppliers to come with the best items. That duration process or editing process will still apply online. Will still apply at some point online. Today, everybody is talking about access to tens of millions of items and