 So, it is my great pleasure to introduce Steve Mariotti to deliver our Henry Haslett Memorial Lecture. This is actually the second time I've gotten the pleasure, had the pleasure of introducing you for a keynote speech. We had him at our campus a few years ago where he gave a terrific talk. Steve was named Social Entrepreneur of the Decade by the Industry Association of Top Professionals. He has written or co-authored over 40 books and manuals on entrepreneurship, ownership, and financial literacy, of which there are an estimated 10 million copies in print. His recently published memoir called Goodbye Homeboy is an Amazon bestseller. It was named the Top Educational Nonfiction Book in Education for 2019. Steve Mariotti began his career at Ford Motor Company in Detroit, where he was part of the finance staff at the World Headquarters in Dearborn. He was an international financial analyst. He left Ford and moved to New York City to found an import-export company called Mason Import & Export, which representative over 20 overseas manufacturers, mostly from developing countries. In 1982, he switched careers and became a special education teacher in New York City in the South Bronx, where he specialized in enabling students who had dropped out of school to re-enter and take a class he developed entitled The Young Entrepreneur's Guide to Starting and Managing Your Own Small Business. And I don't know if some of you are like me, where I first heard of Steve Mariotti was from a fantastic segment in John Stossel's documentary series called Greed. You might remember Steve Mariotti as the inner city teacher who was able to reach his students by teaching them about business. So his course was a tremendous success and encouraged by his success in reaching students, especially at-risk youth through teaching about business and entrepreneurship. He founded the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, or NIFTY as it's sometimes called, in 1988. Thirty-two years later, NIFTY has over one million graduates from its mini-MBA program and has become a global movement with over 12,000 trained teachers and programs in 10 countries and 17 American cities. So Steve Mariotti has received a number of awards, including the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, the Bernard Goldhurst Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award, the New York Enterprise Reports 2012 Founders Award for Social Entrepreneurship, the National Directors Entrepreneurship Award from the Minority Business Development Agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the Association of Education Publishers Golden Lamp Award for the Best Curriculum in U.S. Education in 2002. Steve has attended the World Economic Forum for many years and has co-authored the widely acclaimed paper The Next Wave of Entrepreneurs, which guided several governments around the world in how to implement a youth entrepreneurship program at the national level. He received his BBA and MBA in finance from the University of Michigan. He's also studied at Harvard, Brooklyn College, Stanford, and Princeton. He's a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and really one of the nation's best known spokespersons for entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education. So it's a real pleasure to welcome you, Steve Mariotti, to the Mises Institute for the delivery of the Henry Hazlett Memorial Lecture. So please join me in welcoming Steve Mariotti. Thank you, Peter. Hi. I was touched by your introduction, Peter. I've forgotten all that. There was like, I was listening going, wow, I want to meet that guy. The next thing I know, I'm somehow standing up. And, Peter, you've been a great friend to me, so I really, really appreciate it. I want to tell you that I wanted to be a economist and very, very much. And I went to Michigan, which was a great school, very loyal. But within like a week, the head of the economics department called me and he said, you know, Steve, I don't think you're gonna be very happy here because you're in the Austrian school and I'd grown up in that school. My grandfather was a, I'm Rand's lawyer and was great friends with Hayek. And so he was always sending me, in fact, the first book he sent me now, I think about it, was Hazlett's Economics in One Unit. That has to be one of the clearest written books ever, ever written. It took a, for me, it was like someone made something that was hard to learn. I was having trouble with economics. And it turned it into this incredible common sense made difficult but then made easy. And for that, for his contribution there, it's just enormous, I think. And so this wonderful professor said, I don't think you're gonna fit in here and he's really nice about it. And he said, I'll walk you over. It was like high school. Remember, you get in trouble and they walk you over somewhere? I'll walk you over and introduce you to Paul McCracken. He's more, he's not an Austrian, but he's a monetist and he'll be able to guide you better. So I think I was the only person in the history of the University of Michigan to be walked over by the head of the department to the business school where I found a home and focused on international companies, which is something I was fascinated by and was totally, it was totally apolitical. So I never bumped into issues like should there be price controls on housing in the South Bronx or something like that. And I spent six years there and I had a great time. And then I really wanted to get back into where I am right now with the Austrian economics community and in 77 at the Institute for Humane Studies, they had a summer program sponsored by the Liberty Fund where Hayek was actually gonna be there and he just won the Nobel Prize. And that was a big deal for me. And I fought and fought and wrote letters. I had people call. I was rejected for younger people here seven times because I'd never taken an economics class and so they thought, I wouldn't fit in. But I'd done all the reading and could cite human action. I knew money and banking. I knew socialism. I knew the papers Hayek had written in 1929 to 30, which he used to debate John Meter Keynes and Cambridge in 31. And so I was finally able just through force of will get into this program. You can imagine what I was like, right? I'm the only person I know that applause themselves. But that three months, four months actually. Was there anybody else here that happened to be there that summer? It was the happiest, actually, I'd have to say professionally, it was the happiest time of my, that I've ever had in my life. And Don LaVoy, Larry White, pretty much everybody that followed a traditional career path in economics was there. Mario Rizzo and Eleanor Ligio was head of it. And I somehow got selected to pick up Hayek at the airport. And boy, that was a big deal. It was a random draw and all my friends were mad, like, how come Steve gets it, you know? And so there were two paragraphs in the use of knowledge in society which Hayek had published as a cover, American Economic Review, 1946. They're paragraphs 10 and 11. And they had fascinated me from when I first read them. My whole life I've been fascinated by those two paragraphs. They're the paragraphs that talk about unique knowledge of time and space. And coincidentally, that led to my whole future career that I'll take great delight in telling you about in a moment and filling you in on all the awards that I won that Peter didn't mention. So I was, you know, got there two hours early. I was like, I was so happy to see Professor Hayek. And as you can imagine, he was jet lagged and kind of tired. And I was doing the best I could not to talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, but I couldn't help it. And I had spent the two weeks previous learning those two paragraphs in German. And if you recall, Professor Hayek, incredible hero of the last century, often wrote in his needy language these long sentences that were very hard to translate and to some hard to understand. I meant that as in a nice way. But so I had spent memorizing how to say it in German so that he'd feel welcome and he'd be impressed with me. And I'd done a paper on the Austrian trade cycle theory. And I wanted to impress him. So he's kind of dozing off as I'm driving. And so I'm unaware of anybody but myself as usual. I start to talk in German the best I could. And recite those two paragraphs. And poor Professor Hayek kind of comes to me and goes, oh, do you speak German? I said, no, but I memorized my favorite two paragraphs in your literature that you've written. And he goes, what are those? And so I said, I can't even imagine I did this. I said, see if you can tell. And wait till you see what else I've got in store for you today. And from that, he was very kind to me. And I never forgot his kindness. He'd always say, hello, Steve. And then he'd say in German, the first sentence of paragraph 10. It was our little code. And all my friends would go, god, how does Steve know Hayek? And they're talking in German. I'd be like this. So it's one of the great memories of my life. So as life would have it, I very much wanted to get a PhD in economics. And I had an acquaintanceship with Professor Friedman, another remarkably wonderful person. You know, I found that the better someone does often in their career, the kinder they are because they don't have, I'm not sure what it is, they don't have any chip at all. So they want you to do well. And Professor Friedman was so kind to me. And he said, Steve, are you sure that you want to come here to the University of Chicago? You know, you're going to be doing math for four or five years. And I know you well enough to know I'd been a Bay Carrier at the Mount Pellerin Institute in 74 at Hillsdale College and would talk constantly to him. And he would always listen, listen, listen. He was just a wonderful man. And he goes, I know you well enough to know that you're not going to sit still long enough to do the math. And that word of advice went right into my subconscious. And I realized he was right. And so my life went in a different direction. And I went to Ford Motor Company where I was a financial analyst for three years. And in the international finance department. And just had a magnificent time there and learned a ton. But after three years of it, I realized I wasn't going to ever be comfortable in a hierarchy, a corporate hierarchy, or really any hierarchy. And it comes back later that I want to talk about it. It was a source of strength to me, the concept of subjective value, which really to me is a lesson in passed down in the Austrian tradition, which the brilliance of it by Menger and Warrison, the third guy I always forget, all in the same year, I believe 1864, I believe, that they all had this insight that value is subjective. And that insight, once I was able to integrate it has been so helpful to me in my life because I was able to get myself out of a hierarchy. And realize that I wasn't going to be happy in a hierarchy because I viewed, I would always have a different viewpoint. And so I had the courage to leave Ford and they overpay you there and it's very hard to leave because it's such a great place to work. And I moved to New York City and I started a business that Professor Klein was kind enough to mention and I just loved that. It was basically every day I'd go on sales calls and help somebody with the manufacturing firm in a third world country sell their product. I had no competition and after a year all of a sudden I started to make money on top of it and it was just a miracle. And then out of the blue, I'm in the FDR Park in New York City with my, I thought she was my girlfriend, she didn't think I was her boy from this point that way. But a young woman that I really admired and we're walking along it's daylight and there's two or three hundred people there playing soccer, softball, it's a great part of New York and with no warning at all, I should say we got attacked but it ended up really, I got attacked by like three or four young kids who were smaller than I was. I'd forgotten how to fight from Flint and kind of when I was a kid would pretend to fight, you know, but they pushed me down and I cried and it was really humiliating to, it wouldn't bother me now at all, you could beat me up or push me around now, I'd go ah, you know, but back then in front of a friend that I really wanted to impress it was really painful particularly when she went stop it and they all froze, go away and they ran away and as they're leaving she pretends to kick one of them and like a movie scene he falls down, she doesn't even kick him, gets up, runs away and so she was the hero and I was kind of the person that she'd rescued and that was a, it seems minor now, I think of it, how could you be so bothered by that, but I was and I had constant flashbacks which is called post-traumatic stress disorder, I would not wish that on my worst enemy, it was like really, really painful and at that time in my life I had this unique relationship with I'm Rand, who my grandfather was the lawyer for her and I would get to see her every four months for 15 minutes but because I'd learned to be real quiet with her it would turn into five hours because she would talk and I never interrupt and she kind of liked that and so and so it was a great relationship and that was the rule I'd say hello goodbye boom and I want a hero when you think of it there's another hero which she went through and the legacy with all of her shortcomings and fobals that we all have but another real hero in standing up against tyranny so at the last time I met with her was in December of 81 which was right before she gave her last talk in New Orleans for Jim Blanchard's community and she noticed that I was distracted like you can't notice now you know and and that I was kind of talking to myself which are symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and I didn't know anything about that and she goes what's wrong with you you're not listening to me I'm going no I'm listening total I'm totally focused I'm listening no you're not no I am this man imagine debating I'm Rand on that topic well that you're listening and so much to her credit you know a lot of literature paints her at this whole distant person but I I didn't I was afraid of her but I never felt she didn't care and on a Sunday afternoon she called her friend enemy that's how she referred to him Albert Alice who was a great psychologist you'll remember him from you can change how you feel by changing how you think which is standard practice now and he she said I have a friend she called me a friend I couldn't believe it that it has I think it's some kind of trauma this is after the mugging and I want you to see him and I could hear him saying I can't see him you know it's a Sunday blah blah blah and I was so embarrassed you know and she made him see me so it was like you know I felt like well I obeyed her let's put it that way so I went over to 65th Street in Lexington where he had this big home beautiful home and he came down he was um uh grumpy but he was always like that I found out later and he took me um with a graduate student who he called up on Sunday made the poor person come over and he goes now what is bothering you and so after 20 minutes I finally was able to say uh I feel humiliated because I got pushed around in front of my girlfriend I put quotation marks around he goes he takes a picture of it he said I'll show you this picture in six months and now you're gonna change the sentence to a positive sentence and that took a while and he pretended to guide me a little bit but I finally got there and I changed it to I am a hero because without any violence my friend and I were able to um stand up to uh young people that were trying to hurt us or something like that but I became the hero of the sentence then and so all immediately I felt better it's like a miracle and then he goes yeah now you're gonna write it 500 times I thought he was kidding you know that's like funny to me so I go you know but he met it and the poor graduate student who I'm still Queens as well I'm friends with now I actually had to sit there and watch me write it but let me off after about 200 and I go home next morning I wake up and it's this uh pain that I was having constant memories of one event um was gone and I was so happy I couldn't tell you and so I call secretary and I say I want to come up and say thank you to professor Ellis and she puts me on the appointment schedule or something so I go up there and walk in I have a gift and you know professor uh or Ellis don't call me that Albert uh I mean Albert uh I wanted to tell you how oh would you you're not done and so he takes me into his office same graduate student and he goes all you've done has gotten a reprieve from these um uh he used some more goblin or something that's gotten in your mind you're just starting your recovery and I said no no I'm I'm really I'm fine you don't know you have to do what's called flooding um anybody remember that from reading Ellis I love it when I'm the oldest guy in the room yes I've made it so flooding is where you really live a anything you're afraid of you do over and over again so if you're afraid of an elevator you write write it up over and over again if you're afraid of playing baseball or going in the water you just do it over and over again and it really does make a huge difference so he said uh now you're going to go be a teacher in schools that are um he was the first person I ever heard use this word under resource which is a very common phrase now he used that in 82 and I said I can't do that I have small business and he was like really aggressive he said you don't do it I'm gonna call I ran and I go I'll do it I'll do it um and so I went to um Boys and Girls High School in uh a friend of mine um Ray LeBuff was the um um a director of placement in New York City schools and so it was kind of relatively easy for me after three weeks to get a placement in a a school where nobody would go like 79 teachers had been assigned there and not one of them would would they've refused to go and so I was thinking the way I had a plan I would go for like you know two or three days meet my requirement with Professor Ellis not getting trouble with Ms. Rand or my grandfather so I had to go all planned and I walked in and I hope this happens to all of you but it was the minute I walked in I knew I'd found my life's work like really within 10 or 15 minutes I felt like I could really add value to something um and in oh I hope that applause was meant for me and not some um so I then spent um really the rest of my life in this field and I there was one point after about three or four months which was seminal and it almost drove me to leave but I'll tell you quickly what happened I was assigned the um uh kids that they're called special children to me they're a special gift from God they really are and they but when you're looking at their behavior sometimes it's excessive so they're defined a certain way or when you're looking at their learning style they learn uniquely but if you can get under that they they all have special gifts and it it was a very beautiful thing learning that for me but one day I'm in class and I lost control of the class and that happens a lot it's on the machine but it was particularly brutal that day because the class was what was called overloaded which means there was 30 kids and you're supposed to be 12 and it wasn't it was a programming error and I don't know if you've ever been in a situation where you're so uncomfortable that you can't you can barely stand it anybody ever been there don't all raise your hands at once right we all have right so I went outside the door and I literally um prayed I said God let me find a way to um teach something today of value and I remember I looked down and I had a regular inexpensive watch on and I walked back in and I said you know it was like the noise was overwhelming but I waved the watch and I went how much would you pay for this and the class went totally cold stone silent and everybody was looking at me kind of like now and I said again how much would you pay for this and suddenly it was like a seminar at what I'd always imagined a great a great a graduate school would be like and not only were they throwing out different prices but then they were debating amongst themselves questioning whether the $10 was too high or too low and right then I I that became my life's work within my life's work which was teaching about business to low-income children who through no fault of their own this is the tragedy of this to me and also an opportunity no fault of their own had never been exposed to something they were really interested in which was money I happen to be somebody who loves money talking about it making it I really appreciated the stipend they gave it to me knowing me when I walked in it was the first thing I was like totally happy and so I began to focus on that one issue and for the next seven years eight years actually I basically worked on books for kids on how to start small businesses and this was this is the latest version actually now that I'm looking at but that is probably the 40th edition and I updated every six months I self-publish and I just would produce all this literature that didn't exist aimed at children who had gotten behind on their reading or had a problem with mathematics and were unique learners and instead of pushing them away or giving them a grade I would enhance them and that was the other time of subjective value came in to my life really vividly is I began to talk about subjective value and it was like lifting a weight off their off these children's shoulders because they had been taught as most of us are that what's your SAT score are you going to go to school here or there are you starting on the basketball team and blah blah blah and for me the ability to talk about that your viewpoint is a value as an individual and that you have the right to have a different viewpoint is often never said to children that are at the are defined by society at the bottom of a situation and it was liberating for them and for me to be able to share that and all that came from menger and the Austrian tradition and so I wanted to say thank you to for that insight and I can't tell you how happy I am to be here today and it's like my my heart is going really fast it's just such an honor I so eight years goes by and I'll now turn to Jessica and I'll play the Jessica I'm sorry we'll play the EBC news piece and this will bring you up to date and then I'll talk some more EBC this is world news tonight with Peter Jennings tonight we begin our report on the American agenda with a rhetorical question can one person really make a difference the issue tonight is drugs specifically the fact that thousands of inner city kids are drawn into the drug business because well because it's a very easy way to make money tonight's report tends to emphasize one of the things we've noticed about many of the issues on the agenda quite often the solution to a problem is not a grand one here's Beth Nissen by hot dogs people come on I'm proud of this of this business because I don't have to be afraid you know I'm saying the cops on after me I don't owe anybody money this is my own little business meet Howard Stubbs high school senior company president he owns Howard's hot dogs every weekend he works this corner in the south Bronx last year he grossed ten thousand dollars don't sell things you don't believe him Steve Marriotti is the man Howard credits for most of his success two years ago this high school business teacher had an idea give inner city kids better job skills and build their self-esteem by helping them start their own companies Marriotti quickly found that many were business naturals it's got something to do with street smarts that if these children can make it to the age of 17 and they're alive and they're not defeated mentally they're they're heroes and they have the mental strength to start a company the bottoms come in small because I run pretty big okay and the top comes more medium in Marriotti's program Josephine Reneau devised a business plan for her lingerie company she learned how to select her stock display it price it how to keep the books and reinvest the profits when I used to get my little allowance I used to just spend it but now I know I know to use some money for the year so far I made a 10,000 you're 19 years old right what other kind of work would have been able to provide that kind of profit for you what what else could you have done to make drugs drugs all right listen meet and guard the bomb go show your how a sound lead on drugs alone I'm going to tell you now hold on hold on hold on I've got a little messed up messed up messing up is what 18-year-old Vincent Wilkins says he was doing two years ago working for a drug dealer hardly going to school he was a sullen student in Marriotti's class until Marriotti encouraged him to write and record rap songs what would you have been now for this program so I would have been a big-time drug dealer right now if I was for many who live in Vincent's neighborhood the drug business is where the best job opportunities are and the only entry-level jobs that pay more than fast food wages you don't need special training Vincent was paid for just standing on this corner they tell you hey man you know you want to make a little money just watch the corner you get paid $200 like that and that make you bug out how fast I made that money you know I can make more you know the drug industry has trained I hate to say it but a whole generation of inner city kids in the area of distribution sales you organized on your stuff yes okay for Marriotti's students this is the first step into legitimate business a trip to a wholesalers with $100 each to spend on merchandise Marriotti used to pay out of his own pocket he now gets some money from corporate sponsors who have invested in more than 50 little company presidents like Ray to boot all right I bought these for 350 each right and then I'm going southern for 10 how long have you had this company of yours um about five hours five hours in my opinion they see themselves uh at the bottom of the hierarchy getting a kid his business cards making him president of his own company all of a sudden he comes out of that hierarchy he's no longer on the bottom row Josephine says the program has given her a sense of purpose now I have a whole lot of plans I want to open my shop I want to go to college Howard already has a four-year scholarship starting next year and Vincent he wants to be a star and inspire other young artists these days he is trafficking only in dreams Bethnus maybe see news the south Bronx what sort of a difference can one person make in the past three years those 50 businesses that Steve Marriotti has helped youngsters to start have earned more than $80,000 no it's not as much money as drugs perhaps but at least they earn it the old-fashioned way Peter Jennings we marked the first anniversary of the American agenda on this broadcast we're going to revisit some people who were the focus of one of our very first reports a teacher who wanted to help kids turn away from a world filled with drugs and the kids themselves who had the guts to reach for a different dream the idea was a fairly simple one help a youngster start a legitimate business as a way to resist the temptation of selling drugs but wouldn't work here's Bethnus this was Howard Stubbs a year ago a high school senior making $10,000 a year selling hot dogs on the weekends and dreaming of someday making it out of the south Bronx someday owning his own restaurant this is Howard Stubbs today a freshman at Johnson and Wales University a four-star school for culinary arts the university was so impressed by this young entrepreneur that it awarded him a generous scholarship but for Howard college was a step higher than he thought he could take I felt kind of inferior I was like well you know I'm different I thought that I couldn't handle it then he realized that mastering new concepts establishing new territory was what he'd done in running his own business I finally said to myself I said hey if I can do that I can stay in this college and I can be the best Howard how are you doing Steve Marriotti has worked hard to convince students like Howard that they have a place in the mainstream economy last year his entrepreneurial program helped a dozen teenagers start their own businesses this year an expanded staff is advising 30 young business owners the idea help kids resist entry level jobs in the drug industry you have to offer alternatives other than just minimum wage jobs you have to give a child a vision and entrepreneurship does that the bottom's come in small because I run pretty big okay and the top comes more medium-sized this was Josephine Renault last November working flea markets selling lingerie a few months ago she moved to Los Angeles and landed a job as a bank teller how would you like your money when Josephine entered Marriotti's program she could not add or subtract running her own business taught her to balance the books it gave me a lot of encouragement and a lot of experience I think if it wasn't for Steve I'm teaching me math I wouldn't be a bank teller like many graduates of the entrepreneurship program Josephine has let her business slip Marriotti is not disappointed whether a kid builds up a Ford motor company or a major company or even if he goes into business doesn't matter to me as long as it's had a positive effect on his on his thinking I was doing the drug way that's the wrong way of life but when you're living in the ghetto it's hard you gotta fight this is about where we left Vincent Wilkins a year ago Vincent had been working in the drug business as a courier until Marriotti convinced him to work instead on recording his own rap songs but he stayed out of the drug industry now for two and a half years uh you know it's very easy to get addicted to that industry from a business point of view he has not done that to Marriotti that counts as one tiny victory in the drug war although he worries that Vincent sabotaged himself when he dropped out of high school last spring Vincent now spends his days recording others in his cramped bedroom studio on equipment bought with a loan from Marriotti's program he charges clients 40 an hour a fraction of what he made on the streets your friends once were still involved with drugs what do they think of your business and what you're doing now I think I'm a fool man so far Vincent has tuned them out but even young children hear about street profits and Marriotti wants them to learn his brand of economics first money you gave him me and what did he give you in return change he is trying to recruit them before the drug dealers do he has brought his program to grade school a laundry man very good is that example of a business yes and who won't who would own that uh i'm beautiful i'm proud of you Marriotti says anyone can learn to be an entrepreneur and anyone can start a program like his what it takes are large reserves of energy an eagerness to extend credit and a gift for nourishing all that has value bethness and abc news the south Bronx new york i just want to say hi to Vincent and Serena who are watching i hope um those were two of the young people that were in that film i forgot i hadn't watched that in a while but it was uh very emotional for me to see that um so uh can we go to the nfte page and uh so i wanted to show you this out of that um media um i was able to raise enough money to found a nifty in um right after the first peter jennings piece actually i would go around with the a tape and show uh wealthy entrepreneurs or business people or foundation people in new york city and um and i'd write letters to the forbes 500 and um forbes 400 and finally this wonderful man ray chambers in morristown new jersey said well how much do you need to found this and i i said and he did me a great service he goes how about 600 000 200 000 year for three years i was going to ask for 25 000 and he kind of sensed that you know and uh so thanks to him and and then tens of thousands of other people this is argued has become arguably the most successful uh youth program for um uh young people as far as replication is concerned this is actually now in 17 countries we have a million 100 000 graduates and guess where our largest program is as far as graduates this year i went and i won't mock you if you're wrong i'll call on steve uh china your right steve very good it china has this year will graduate more um uh young people from our program than any other um country in the world and i was like amazed by that um as i the juxtaposition between a communist um government which is really the opposite of at least how i perceive humanity that of individual liberty and the importance of the of the individual with god given rights that can never be taken away and as i understand from reading dust capital and communist manifesto and in London and um Trotsky was was actually the one who came up with the technique of how to take over a democracy uh in his 1935 paper the left turn which all of you should read um i i don't i can't reconcile that but it's a sign of hope to me that we will be able to get differences worked out and without giving up our core values or engaging in a disastrous exchange of of violence so i urge you to go to the site if you'd like to it's nft.com it's a charity and um i'm really it's uh the culmination of of um what i'd like to be remembered for um after working there um as the president and the founder of the um fundraiser also uh a i went part-time and um it's been a real blessing for me because it's opened up all of these wonderful worlds that i've gotten to experience um if you want to go to the next page that'd be great first of all i started a uh business with this young man michael bees in uh this in um south carolina and he is arguably the top um it's marketing person consultant you know at least in this country there's nobody close to him and i heard about him because i was going to write my memoirs a goodbye homeboy and i never had a bestseller because all all the books that i'd written had been like textbooks or manuals and it's just not something that the general public would buy so i wanted to really put see if i could do it and learn how to create something that millions of people would buy or be interested in and so i was living in new york city for 40 years um and i asked of my friends who've had new york times bestsellers how they got so successful in the marketplace and i asked 10 of them and three of them mentioned the same young man um michael bees and so i called him and uh he came up to where i live now princeton we got to know each other and then i went down there and he's got a beautiful family and we decided to create a publishing firm for people that can't find a publisher anybody ever been there oh right it's hard right and it's i don't think it's fair it's usually based on the influence your agent has and if you don't have an agent and you don't live in a new york city or one of the major um urban areas you don't meet agents so this was created to help authors that can't find a publisher so we publish and then thanks to michael's you know lifelong or over a decade study of the field he's able to i should say we're able to it's really him i market a book and guarantee that it be on um number one on amazon in your category i never even knew there were all these different categories in amazon and that's just with the e-book by the way but so you take someone who's never had an opportunity to publish you publish their book you give them the files back so that you're not um holding them back they can go anywhere they want and you you teach them how to market it so that it becomes a number one amazon bestseller in their category and that can be life changing and it's been a great joy being a small part of that um and then from out of this or simultaneously i guess um i began to i i was in cambodia on a lecture tour and i've read all about literally almost everything written about the uh holocaust genocide that went on there and three million people out of eight million were killed in 27 months um without the use of bullets can you imagine i mean so i'd read all that and studied it and would was trying to analyze it and understand it and so it would never happen again and there's almost no research on that on cambodia and so the state department heard about all this research i was doing and trying to understand it and my buddy there called me and said do you want to go there and give a series of lectures on small business i said oh boy i love to so i everything i knew once i got there and then each each lecture i'd go in and it would be almost all women and i would say where are the men each time it was so shocking to me that i had to relearn it and they go well you know in this generation they were you know pretty much all killed and i go what and because my mind was pushing it away into my subconscious i think or something but it was that that um uh troubling to me and from this i was invited to hanoi which was another surreal experience meeting with the leaders in uh you know hanoi which my generation had been taught were um uh you know um vary against american values and getting a different perspective you know hanoi of vietnam in general has the highest rate of business formation in the world and their marginal tax is 10 percent and i remember sitting with their uh uh leaders and all and you know they say well mr mariotti we brought you here because we'd like your advice on creation of small business and i get all motivated you know to talk five hours away and i start well we've got to get your tax code right first and they go they're all taking notes they go what should we do and i said well i'd recommend a 10 percent flat tax you think you could do that and they they bring out their tax code show it to me and it's 10 percent flat and poor people pay zero and i literally almost fell over i go where did how did you hear about that you know and they go well we're watching the presidential uh debates and that guy steve forbes had had recommended that so the next day we went out it was just unbelievable to me and um i i also learned other things that were actually painful i'll quickly tell you one quick thing and that i my generation was taught that ho chi man was this person that was against freedom of speech from religion freedom of press and you know i don't know if that's true anymore i i went to this museum where um very few non um vietnamese are taken it's a big honor to me and i walk in and the first thing i see they had the guillotine there where they actually beheaded you know anybody that was a revolutionary when the french ran were colonialists of vietnam and i see that and then i turn and there is um a quote from a meme that i knew which was ho chi men's partner in the original uprising which i think was 1922 and so he uh this guy su cu and ho chi men had led the revolt against the the french um and here's the french would always before you beheaded give you a last word right and that goes back to the um 1793 um and he uh so they gave this gentleman cu who had been captured the his last words and this is what they were to the best of my memory it was you kill me today because you claim i'm a communist in reality it's because i revolt against your high taxes forced purchase of government debt all of which the proceeds all of which you send back to make your own country wealthy and it the more research i did on it at least with ho chi men and sue they would be like a berry goldwater which you know it was kind of hard for me to adjust to that that insight and i think that that's that's accurate tragically and there were other reasons for our involvement there which i think are maybe if true our heartbreaking so i'll move on from here um so this was oh um before we show it right thanks thanks jessica i appreciate that and clay um so from that experience in cambodia and and i was going to vietnam i came back and i was i was debriefing with the state department and trying to give my recommendations or something and i didn't really i realized i didn't really know what to say like how do you prevent a genocide or a holocaust or just this incredible tragedy and um so uh that was eight years ago and i set off to create a documentary film and with these wonderful filmmakers uh herald and nan kline who really are the heroes here i just raised the money um and but we finished and i want to show you uh the trailer uh the film the documentary will speak for itself i'll just show you the trailer we had a very tragic incident in our family dealing with race it was a very traumatizing and a time in our house because we needed the money then the doctor called and when she delivered me the news that you know i had cancer i thought the world was done with me i thought that i would die and i was with one of the hospital corpsmen opened it up and from the floor to the ceiling were body bags they were all my platoon they load us up on a train easy 150 people we started asking in polish where they taken us so the people made like this i ended up in waking up bleeding i knew something horrible had happened he raped me he raped me you don't know if you're going to be lucky and survive or if you're going to die depicting close to 3 000 people in the point of my life i was telling my son you know i i'm i'm going i'm dying and i go to the doctor and the doctor says you're pregnant everyone told me that it would ruin my life that i wouldn't have a future a physical wound you can deal with a mental wound is like a knife it's always cutting i wouldn't be here today i would have probably drank myself to death and i thought well i'll build a casket and i said i leave i quit the same day i started a business i ended up moving into my radio station and sleeping on the floor for 18 months in a sleeping bag i am going to build a medical practice everybody thought i was completely insane i think when somebody is faced with tragedy in their life you have two options you can lay down and take it or you can stand up and you can fight back that's what an entrepreneur does it's not about a business it's about a state of mind you are a victim until there is a change and you become a survivor if you want to grow you have to be uncomfortable there is no way that if you're comfortable you are growing i don't have to worry about post-traumatic stress it's just me and what that would is telling me to do i believe that my mission in life has been to uplift and motivate my community if cancer prepared me to start my own business and run my own business then heck yeah i'm gonna have to go for it where i lost my family and if my family would be here they would be very proud i'm representing the six million it is scary but when you come from such a trauma not much scary anymore so thank you so i'll wrap up now but the thought that has came out of this like eight-year uh um adventure in finding people that had had lived through these traumas these horrible uh events and then not only survived but also turned their life into this great success every every life is a great success if you you know you that's self-determined but all over the world i would we'd find these people film them and what i think is a huge question for the academic community particularly the uh using a methodological individualism a prexology i'm sorry i'm showing off pure positive but is to um this question whenever there is excuse me violent conflict between uh governments right no one ever asks what is the entrepreneur doing like it becomes and with and i'm not totally objective here but time periods of history will become about Churchill um uh Hitler uh Stalin Roosevelt you know those names patent etc no judgment at all but no one knows what's happening to the billion entrepreneurs around the world and i've i've it left me with this thought if those people were empowered um into impact what uh was going to happen as far as these conflicts they might be able to stop it and i find it really interesting when you engage in conversation with almost any government entity anywhere in the world that the entrepreneur never enters the conversation you have to bring it up and talk about it and politically it never enters the conversation this huge community of people that are not are almost never violent or professionally almost are never violent and i think it's a question that um uh needs to be discussed more and a lot of good will come from talking about it filming and thinking about it and engaging in a broader debate i'm so happy to be here today i really appreciate it so thank you for inviting me thank you thank you