>> good afternoon i'm president of aei and it is my great pleasure to welcome you to this afternoon's conversation with john mackey. the cofounder and ceo of four foods market and the cofounder on —- cofounder of unconscious capitalism to tackle his but conscious leadership. i cannot think of a better guest to have on thanksgiving week it's a pleasure welcome to joining us this afternoon. >> thank you for having me on the show. >> i recommend the book because now almost 18 months into my term the ceo at aei of

nco previously it's always good to be reminded of what makes effective leadership work at any institution of any size. you have a lot of lessons about how to be a good leader and having purpose and leading with love and another is innovation and integrity but of all of the's lessons which is most important that you rely on with those attributes that makes you so successful? >> . >> the purpose part is important because you seem to address why you think it is true that even the for-profit firms that are out to make money and develop a profit and

pay shareholders are most successful when they see a higher purpose. >> this is the single biggest misunderstanding of business in capitalism until we get this corrected capitalism will always be criticized and attacked. because motivation is seen as impure. yes of course business has to make money if it doesn't come it will fail but that doesn't mean that is the purpose to make money. a good way to explain it is my body has to produce red blood cells without producing red blood cells i will die but just because i have to make red buds —- red blood cells doesn't mean that's the purpose of my life. it's a necessary condition but it doesn't define who i am so

similarly business has to make money or it fails. but businesses really about creating value for other people. that's why it exist to create value for other people and if it does a good job with products and services that customers want then the business will flourish then it will make money for investors but because businesses put in a narrow box it's all about money or making money it is so odd because if you ask the purpose of a doctor they make a lot of money but i don't think they say i'm trying to make as much money as possible. even if that is true it's not the ethics behind medicine the ethics behind medicine is to heal people. architects design building. teachers educate. every one of these professions

goes back to value creation that they do in the world to serve other people. business is the greatest value creator in the world by far. so we should be talking about in terms of value creation for its customers and the residual or attendant on —- tangential for reasons are benefiting and prospering and for those in the larger communities it creates value for all of the stakeholders. so we don't do ourselves a service by trying to explain business purpose to make as much money as possible. we lose the argument as soon as we say that for most people. >> when you started whole foods market you a straightforward purpose to bring better quality wholesome natural food to people so they

could purchase that. that's a great purpose and you accomplish that. do you feel you lead to more people eating better and healthy and wholesome food? isn't that achievement? >> absolutely the stated purpose today first when i started the business with my girlfriend i was 24 she was 20. we were a couple of kids. we didn't have a stated higher purpose we were just passionate about natural organic foods. if you ask me the higher purpose in 1978 i would have said we just want to sell healthy food to people and earn a living and have some fun doing it. those are still exist at whole foods but the fun part that

the purpose has deepened in the last 42 years so the official stated purpose now is to nourish people on the planet and that has a lot of depth to that and how you define nourish and people and the planet. they all have different layers. so every business that you admire the most has a higher purpose and i know hundreds of entrepreneurs in my life very few start their business just to get rich. sure they want to get rich but they are passionate look at steve jobs, bill gates, elon musk, jeff basophils they were passionate about something that they wanted to create.

they made a lot of money because they created a lot of value for other people. >> when you tell the story purpose in getting the message of an organization down to every member i've never heard the story and i think of myself as a history buff that president kennedy ran into a custodian who was mopping the floor and said what are you doing? he said i'm hoping to get a man on the moon. i struggled with this at aei so how do you get everyone on on —- in the building to be united behind one purpose he referred to them as team members but how do you do that? >> that's a good question. it's not easy first is

leadership has to embody the purpose. people pay so much more attention to what you do and how you show up and what you say. in fact we have a very well at tuned antenna for hypocrisy witness the governor's faux pas in california or nancy pelosi. when we see hypocrisy people always are looking to call me a hypocrite. it's very important that i embody the purpose of whole foods. that being said, in a company like all foods we have 100,000 people that worked in the company the turnover of continued growth and adding on ten or 20000 new team members every year. how do you keep the purpose or

institutionalize it? and has to be part of the orientation. it has to be something you talk about all the time the leaders reference what you are doing back to the higher purpose of the organization you talk about it all the time because new people come in all the time you can ever take it for granted if you have a resilient and powerful culture , that does a lot of the work for you because the people that have already internalized the values and the purpose they act like the immune system particularly an organization it's been around for a long time they have a culture based on values and purpose and if it is a good strong culture then you can expect the organization to do its work to get people converted over if not then there's a lot of hypocrisy and people don't thank you live up

to it. so the purpose is something i will give you an analogy right now i have no doubt in my mind the united states has a higher purpose it has been it is they are in the declaration of independence it's they are with the bill of rights. but yet it's not being taught a lot of the country no longer resonates the founding purpose of america. so we have done a very poor job to continue to communicate the higher purpose of the united states. >> we completely agree with that there is about call learning patriotism we have to teach those values that we talk about all the time that people recognize the force of our success as a country. it is in our founding documents we are focused on that and we want to do more of that in college campuses and

younger students communicate is exactly right from my perspective but it is a problem as a country. >> the reason i love aei and i contribute to aei because of that. >> and you have a way in which you encourage a positive collaboration and feedback one worker to another. in meetings you conclude by saying tell us about that. >> first i will say love is often times not associated with corporations that have been seen as heartless as part of the image problem it's due to those metaphors to be hypercompetitive we use

darwinian metaphors and hypercompetitive sports metaphors to explain business. when you are at war there's not much place for love. check it out the door when you come to work. we have to win. that is very unfortunate because as not many people associated with. it's also masculine virtue. so i say if you get two things to people they will love your organization and stay with that decade after decade after decade. and those that worked here more than 20 years. the reason why is if you give people purpose and give them a

sense of that they are cared about and they are loved. they want purpose and love if you can give both of those desires and needs you have a great organization. appreciation is one way you can release love. this is something that if you get nothing else out of my talk today is that you just and your meetings with appreciations so every time we have a meeting we wrap it up by doing voluntary appreciations. they are not mandatory. nobody has to do it. but if you do authentic appreciation of someone else you can't do that without opening your heart. people know the difference if somebody just says something and when they actually feel that and express it from the heart. when you do the authentic

appreciation you go from your heart and others pick up on it. in addition it's hard to stand in judgment of someone who has just given the authentic appreciation to you. if tom is a jerk and he says how much he appreciates the things i do in the authentic way and not just sucking up , then i will probably we think who tom is and look at him with fresh eyes. appreciation is a big deal but with my leadership group, a couple years ago we were spending so much time doing appreciations at the end of meetings we had rules we had to limit the number of appreciations. you cannot appreciate everybody we will limit you to three.

than that still took too long then we said you get one appreciation. make it count if you have others, good. then do them outside of this meeting. with one that was about 30 minutes which was reasonable that try it. it is very powerful i've had other organizations and tell me we started doing appreciations and everything changed after that. >> a couple of times already the fact you have merged with amazon it is quite remarkable coming together to iconic american companies. tell us a little bit about that and how it is going. i also want to point out you have another story where jeff has meetings he always has an

empty chair for the customer so the customer is always represented so tell us about the merger. >> the empty chair is part of the amazon story. whether they still actively do that or not, i'm not sure. it's probably based on something real that happened but whole foods was a fortune 200 company when amazon bought us. it's a little bit like a marriage. i say that because coming together voluntarily from through mutual gain and benefit and hopefully because you admire the other person i use the metaphor of a world on —- whirlwind romance.

but when you get married and most people know what i'm talking about, if you get married you will change. that is inevitable because the other person will influence you and you will gradually become, you will gradually change. amazon had a big impact but on the other hand we have a resilient culture. is healthy marriage there is an me and i you and then us. all three have to be healthy so whole foods have to stay whole foods and follow the higher purpose and to fill our core values and the whole foods. and amazon has largely

respected that. that culture is evolving not because they cram things down our throat but we are adopting some amazon process that influences us. one example previously whole foods were more intuitive in our decision-making but amazon is very data-driven with their decision-making process. a lot of times he talked to amazon giving our opinions and theories and they say show us the data. we will not make this decision unless you show the data they have a six page submit your arguments with data supporting and if you do a good job then you will get the decision that you want and if you don't you will be sent back to the drawing board and told know. so whole foods began to become more data-driven in our decision-making and that has become a positive thing we still have our intuition but we are more data-driven. how is the merger are going?

it is going pretty well because whole foods is evolving amazon thinks long-term we can now work on the fourth price reduction that we badly needed to do premerger. amazon has a lot of cool technology. i go through the book and how it's been a win for everyone of the stakeholders and our customers through lower prices and amazon pretty soon after the merger increase starting pay at $15 an hour which then you have to increase everybody else's paid to level out. that was very expensive. the first year it would cost $250 million are you sure you want to do that? they did. that was great form around. that's about 90000 people 85000 got a raise. they were excited about that.

and a lot of suppliers started to sell the amazon they were not doing that before. that was greater for them. for the investors. from the time we began talking to amazon until we close they got a 4 billion-dollar increase in valuation. that was a win for them. and all the community aspects as well, philanthropy and amazon has supported that. and added additional donations. when win-win. >> do you worry generally about the potential negative impact? does it make it harder to lead the way you want to lead? >> the biggest challenge as a result of this merger amazon

is probably one or two or three top companies in the world that get scrutinized everything they do. so whole foods we were beg but now everything we do is under the microscope. anything we say or do to negatively impact amazon but the guy reports and says using my metaphor of marriage you have a bunch of in-laws now. some people don't like the in-laws and you have to live with that because you are part of the family now. i thought that was a clever way to put it. that if people are mad at amazon and they are mad at whole foods.

and vice versa. . . . . now we are going to shift from your company and come back the leadership of companies in america. i want to ask about this in an effort to get to your view of where we are as a country. you talk about three kinds of cultural intelligence. the modern and then the progressives and it's the old space, modernism, liberal america that's open society

believes in science and change and progressive, a little stepbrother but are milder way and then you talk about post- progressive culture, could you tell us about what that is? it looks to me a little like something that gets us past the division plaguing america. >> you are right, this is a good framework and those of you interested in this opportunity, we have an appendix of the end of the book that goes into detail about this. chances are a book about this -- >> it looks like you are laying a seat for something bigger. >> yes, got a book we are talking about called purchase america and it goes deeper. in the united states, do you terms about it in worldview,

three dominant worldviews in america. the first one is a more traditional worldview based on faith, family and the country and it's got traditional values about religion, family, it goes back to the constitution, the declaration of independence. >> we are comfortable in that. the kind of heroes you might traditionally like ronald reagan and winston churchill and william buckley and people like that. attritional view would be a lot more belief in what's being revealed through revolution through faith. the modernist who's much more scientific, more enlightenment

of progress through science, through reason, through capitalism. we estimate about 30% of the population in the state or traditional and that's where they are anchored. about 50% is anchored in modernism. some examples would be thomas jefferson, ben franklin, madison, john f. kennedy, einstein, edison, friedman in some ways. guys like bill gates is another strong modernist. the progressives which make up about 20% of the population right now, for each of these comes out and they partly reject the worldview that came before them.

modernism rejected faith, religion largely. many atheists believe in reason, science. they don't believe in scripture or revelation or things like that part of them there is rejection of what comes before but progressivism, you have this hawaiian between traditionalists, ethics and modernist sites. it drove america for many decades until this came along. it comes about because their flaws or failures in the previous worldviews so modernism does not fully realize the things progressive is him has come up, realizing so the environmental movement has come out of that because modernism produces economic progress, there are externalities coming

out about back in impact to the environment so people were progressive tend to have strong environmental views. we particularly have this year but in the last few years we have antiracism movement which is very progressive, though whole woke ideology mindset and basically arguing that america is inconsistent with founding values and equality of all and we have not done a good enough job overcoming racism, having inclusivity and diversity and that's obviously in the media a lot. of course i see we've made progress in america but we still have some problems but that helps motivate it.

i say progressive view is also pretty globalist in the sense that it's concerned about inequality, suffering by anyplace in the world really so there is a strong anti- modernist streak as well. distrust of science except when it serves their ideology, mistrust of progress because -- >> they don't like capitalism. >> that's right, rejection of capitalism so there is an element of socialism from antimodernist streak to it. those are the three, who got 33% modern and 23% progressive. they dominate academia hollywood and the media way above their weight class in terms of numbers

but that is the cultural war. we have use views struggling with each other. how do we move past it? the authors argue we have to go post- progressive in the essence of post progressivism is to recognize that all three of these worldviews have dignities and disasters. there are good things and bad things about it and what we have to do is honor the good things in each of these worldviews so for example, we have to recognize some of the progressives insights are important and they shouldn't go away but we can't draw capitalism and replace it with socialism. it's been tried 42 times in the last 102 euros and 42 failures, it doesn't work. we have to keep capitalism. i would argue we need conscious capitalism and leadership were just capitalism but done in a much more conscious way taking into account higher purpose,

stakeholders, human flourishing and done in a conscious way so we need to take the best of these worldviews and make sure the very bad things we can recognize bad things so it might be the disasters, a traditional worldview are racism, bigotry, homophobia, that could be an accusation sometimes of traditional values. modernist we recognize that sometimes he can be captured by special interests that it can be indifferent, it could be elitist, it can be uncaring so to speak -- >> materialistic. >> overly materialistic and then you look at the disasters and progressivism, anti- modernism, reverse patriotism so no longer patriotism in all america, the west country has ever existed.

>> very authoritarian. >> yes, it can be self-righteous, insulting, telling everybody criticizing canceling people out different views, we clearly see a lot of disasters progressivism because they are on this but there are beauties of progressivism we need to integrate to go forward in a healthy way. if america gets to the next place we need to integrate the best of each of these worldviews and minimize the worst of these worldviews. we would call back post progressivism or the interval worldview. >> i encourage you to keep that going because we see that all the time and i wanted to ask you where you see it in your stores. look at the map of america in the election, this red and blue thing rural urban divide and elite versus non- elite.

you have stores in both kinds of america and workers and customers in both sides of america and i wonder from your perspective after all these years of being in the middle of that, is that divide difficult and painful as it looks or do we exaggerate because of media attention it gets? >> i think there's a big divide. 2020 has been a terrible year because of covert and everybody being walked up and people getting lonely and angry and frustrated, people losing their jobs, people businesses failing, people are on edge and rise over the summer, a number of stores have been damaged. damaged a couple of months ago important a couple of our stores were damaged and that has happened maybe 15 or 20 of our stores have suffered damage

during peaceful protests so we have team members and a big controversy this summer about dress code, sort of like we don't want you to -- we want you to wear -- we don't want you to promote whatever your political causes are whether black lives matter or make america great again or whatever it is, check at the door, we want you to be serving customers and not bring in politics and that's been controversial. we had a blowup last week because we didn't want canadian team members to be wearing poppies and we had congress or legislature on canada condemned for telling people, they just wanted to wear official company

dress and when you get the government threatening to shut you down, you will change your dress code and waited for canada. i even wonder if that would have happened if amazon wasn't a donor, i'm not sure it would have. everything magnified because of the amazon connection. >> that is so unfortunate. the disturbances of your stores, it seems to me -- more active in portland -- i am from new york and reno protests. under the time that i've worked there, we did believe in order and respect of property. is that lost? in the community? >> it's being challenged, to put it that way. here's the thing. we just want to sell -- our team

members have to be safe. we've had stores broken into and we give quick instructions, chicago and new york, in seattle, in portland, in oakland and several other cities as well. we've had disturbances and protocols in place, protect our team members, they are far more important than properties so we have had team members run out the back door. some of these people break into the stores and coming with baseball bats start banging at cash registers going into the wind department and slaughtering getting wine bottles and being destructive so business has to be, we need peace. commerce is based on peace. >> rule of law. >> we need the rule of law. i think the rule of law has been

challenged a little bit and is being challenged so we are in a rocky place in america right now and defendant police in a lot of communities so it's harder to do business. we have to hire more security now. >> speaking of hard to do business, or to ask you about the innovation and startup culture in america, this is a question from our audience. you think you could do what you did all those years ago as easily as the restrictions our ability to start a business micro business, be free to establish a successful enterprise? to think that's lost? >> that's a good question, i don't really know because i've been doing this 42 years pretty easy to start a business in 1978. i just opened the door for business one day. [laughter]

the government aircraft came around and said where is your health department certificate? i said we need one of those? where is your billing permit? they came around but didn't shut down. they just said we got to get that, we had to pay a fee. >> you are always focused on your purpose. you tell a lot of stories about business people who kept focusing on what they wanted to achieve and when they ran into robot, they kept their eye on that goal. it ultimately got through. >> business people have to constantly innovate around bureaucracy stupid rules and figure out ways they could day in business. business in the whole history of business in one way is dealing with, you need rules and regulation and law so stores are not broken into and booted, you need police. on the other hand you can overly

regulate business so it's hard to do business in the whole society becomes less wealthy and less prosperous. >> i want to go back to the book again because i do like the book. one of the things i love is that you don't only tell it through your story, you tell a story of 100 others business people who started businesses and mud values. i want to ask what's your sense, is it your sense that these kinds of leadership values are on the rise are more prevalent than you realize or you think your writing uphill against a culture that needs to be changed dramatically? >> it's evolving, it needs to evolve otherwise socialists are going to take over is how i see it.

that's the path of property when they talk about trickle-down involved but socialism has about property. that is my fear that the marxist, academic community is generally hostile in business and always has been. it's not new. you will see all the minority groups that are business people have always been persecuted, the jews in the west and chinese in the east are the two best examples. the aristocrats for the intellectuals, the clergy, they have always despised business, it's what tradesmen do, they are making profit, they are terrible people. they're not gentlemen, wrong motivations. you study european history if

you were a businessperson, you would be called a jew even if you want jewish. that was an attack on business culture intellect so now the universities are, i mean you go through their and they are so progressive and anticapitalist. when i speak at universities for example, sometimes i get hecklers sometimes they just invite me more often i watch these students, particularly if i speak in business, they love the message. you can do well and be prosperous and fulfill a higher purpose. that's music to their ears but the professors are skeptical they want to argue. one of the interesting things about business schools, if you think about it, who teaches medical school? or the teachers?

doctors. who teaches law school? >> former lawyers. >> who teaches business? >> a businessman? >> not business people, intellectuals. intellectuals who've never actually been in business at all. it's interesting and they don't understand business don't understand entrepreneurship and can oftentimes be hostile towards the very think they are teaching. that's a particular challenge. >> yet many people -- >> about 100,000. >> 100,000 people with jobs, that's valuable. those are livelihoods, the pathways of. that's a greater contribution than universities in some ways. that's tremendous. i'm a former welfare

administrator, i lived off providing jobs. that's what i counted on when the economy was strong in people and all kinds of ministries and workers were hiring. the best thing we could have. >> so let me be clear about it. capitalism, or i prefer dj mccloskey's work for innovation is him. is the greatest thing humanity has ever created. if you go back 200 years ago when innovation was beginning to pick up steam, 94% of everybody on planet earth was lived on $2 a day. today that's under 10%. the average lifespan 200 years ago plus 30. now is 72.6 in advanced countries it's closer to 80. literacy rates of 200 years ago

across the planet were 88%, now they are 12%. if you read enlightenment now, you will see documentation after documentation after documentation how much the world has progressed. it has been signed and technology combined with innovation is him as the entrepreneurs took the scientific discoveries and operationalize them to make our lives better. it is the greatest thing humanity is have a gun. business people are not the balance of the story, they are the heroes of the story. the entrepreneurs are the ones who create great progress and they are universally vilified for the most part. if you look at the studies, look at the polls, people don't trust business. they think business because their motivations are wrong, business is greedy and selfish, all he cares about is making money so it can't be trusted. it corrupts the political culture, it's fundamentally a bad thing and that's why we see

this move towards socialism because capitalism is inherently corrupt. that is wrong. capitalism is the greatest thing humanity a separate gun, were told that narrative them up enemies of capitalism put out a narrative about us that is wrong, inaccurate and doing tremendous damage to the minds of young people. we have to counter that so concert leadership is to counter it. >> i think you are right and i think we are a victim of our success. when things go bad socialist parties take over in the market goes down to where it bent in the past and all of a sudden people realize the benefits of a growing prosperous economy, i think. >> they may not realize it. the reality is what we've done the last 200 years has never happened before. for the most part, it has slow

progress because business people will basically self regulated, the genie never got out of the bottle until enlightenment so for a brief period of time intellectuals at least when it's neutral on business so maybe there is good in this. then we exploited and they are trying to stop the genie back in the bottle and if they do, we will stagnate and began to regress. i'm not think the technological civilization will collapse but it will not progress and it will begin to stagnate decline gradually. if we put in some of these green new deal policy, you will see us go backward. >> you are looking at longer-term, you're not caught up in this election for this price but you mentioned cobit a couple of times and i wanted to get your sense of where we are

in the communities you serve in your sense of large employer and businesses in america. and your observation of the pharmaceutical on a suitable industry and others that moved so quickly to develop a vaccine. are you feeling we're getting the light at the end of the tunnel here? are things going to get better? i hate to ask you monday business questions but i thought some people in the grocery business there were some optics during covered, did that not happen in your presence? >> hours were way up. the media reports strong for two reasons. the first is that our transaction stores are down, traffic counts are down but they are down because there's a lot of business, office workers

coming to lunch and offices closed down during covered, we didn't get the trap. second, i might businesses tripled, three 100% so actual sales are way up. inaccurately reported so business has done well during covered and i think restaurants, people have made a transition temporarily, i believe to not eating out as much, eating a lot more at home that has been good for supermarkets, all of. kroger, walmart, all of them. >> you have been able to adjust to whatever covered restrictions in place and interventions? >> whole foods has the duty and

responsibly to keep team members safe so i am proud of the fact that our company was in front of lot this and partly because amazon is out in front on it and we ended up, we've been recognized in a couple of different publications is the safest supermarkets in america during covid so most people have copied a lot of all food doing masks to disinfecting to cleaning to temperature testing and things like that so i think we have been successful in terms of infections and the number of people who have died. it's a relatively small. pretty low. make no mistake, it's been a difficult year even with sales up. everybody wearing a mask, everybody is social distancing, whole foods is a huggy culture, nobody is hugging. you do elbows were kick feet

with each other and that's not the same. people aren't socializing as much so i say whole foods made cultural deposits for a number of years. 2020 has been making withdrawals on the deposits. >> tumor questions, in your book you say you like to hire within and promote but you like to overdo it. there is a percentage you like, i think 80% or 75% because he felt bringing people from outside invigorate a culture so tell us about your hiring and choosing of team members. >> it is a balance between, if you only hire from within, if you only promote from within and that enhances the culture in the sense that people know if they work hard, they can rise up and get ahead because whole foods

has been growing, is a great place of opportunity for people since the pounding of the company. it doesn't require a education to make a lot of money because you can rise through the ranks. on the other hand if you only promote from within thing you stagnate because you're not getting enough new ideas, enough innovation from outside that sort of helps firmament, innovation and creativity. on the other hand if you promote too many people from the outside and people began to think you can't get ahead in the company. the way to get ahead is to work somewhere else with aramark appreciated so approximately are leadership about 25% get promoted from outside the company and 75% are promoted

from within. that's the way it's worked out for whole foods in the right number but back in barry and other companies. >> i wanted to ask a thanksgiving question related to the underlying business and your passion for healthy and wholesome foods. we are going to have things and we may have gatherings smaller than usual but still have gatherings with family. what is the product or food that is the main stay at your table and you would recommend to those of us -- >> i may be a bad person to ask, i am plant -based, vegan. >> i know that, i wasn't thinking you are going to say turkey but that, we all eat vegetables. what is your go to dish? >> my go to dish generally is a

been stew with a ton of vegetables in it, that's my favorite. >> that will be on the table at thanksgiving with your family. >> absolutely. a lot of beans but a ton of vegetables. sweet potatoes and broccoli, cauliflower to opera, whatever veggies are in season. >> all right. i hope you have a great thanksgiving and thank you for all that you've done thank you for your book and guidance in your leadership and for participating in this conversation. do you have any final words or anything we've missed? i like to give people the chance to say they feel there's a message they want to convey. >> i'll convey a message of hope that america has gone through a difficult time and we are not

merely through it, we are not going to get through it anytime soon. i'm a student of american history and we have faced bigger challenges and this one. we stumbled our way through but we have gone through it i think we will get through this, too. maybe it's going to take a few years, maybe longer but i do think america has a great capacity to renew itself and sometimes we are best when our backs are against the wall and forced to make changes. forced to make reformations and there's a great underlying weight in america, i think we've seen in this election cycle and i am hopeful about the future even if i'm not particularly hopeful about the short term. i think we are going to get covid, i think we will be passed to a year from now and abnormal behaviors will return which will be a good thing. stop being so scared, that's a

good thing. >> got to live, got to go forward and we are going to get through covid. thank you for joining us, we appreciate it.

amazon's senior vice president alisha davis. >> i am so excited to have this opportunity to talk to you today. where you are is not who you are. i've been incredibly inspired by your learning so i am excited to talk with you. >> i am happy to be here and happy to help. >> let's go ahead and get started. in the purpose he say is truly remarkable for book worthy about your story. what finally convinced you to write your story? >> is at the urging of so many people and at the end of