 is treating everybody with kindness and decency and fostering encounters with those different from us. The key to healing our wounded world. I've been struggling with this question a lot lately because as you see over the last few years, this rise of totalitarian dictatorships and the threats against liberal democracy, against freedom of speech, against rule of law, not just globally but also in our country. It starts making you wonder what's really gonna take to try to rebuild those bridges that are being broken. One of the most fundamental things that I love about America, the country that I immigrated to is that special fabric of decency, of civil discourse, of respect, the ability to listen to one another, the ability to foster community even with those that have different perspectives from you. And it's sadly something that's truly under threat today and that we cannot any longer take for granted. So it's fostering emotional intelligence and empathy among children going to change things. My perspective and my history, my mom's history, but even more my father's experience tells me that it absolutely can and that it's the only way. My mom was born in cattle country in the north of Mexico and came to the United States as a foreign student when she was 15 years old to our lady of the lake to study school and she learned to navigate different cultures and taught that to all of us. I came from Mexico from a sheltered isolated Jewish community. There's a couple Jews out there in Mexico to a public school system in San Antonio, Texas from a private Jewish school that was very homogeneous to a very, very diverse public high school in San Antonio. So yes, I'm a product of a public education also. And I really learned not without some trials and tribulations how to navigate different cultures and cliques and groups. And I have to say, going from that sheltered of bringing in the 1980s to the middle of San Antonio, Texas I don't know any of you guys that experienced it but there were people wearing break dancer pants and Michael Jackson jackets and some were jocks and some were punks and some were new ages. And I had no idea that they were all different. So each day I wore the clothes of a different one and I sat down for lunch with the drama kids one day and with the debate kids another day and with the black kids one day and the Hispanic kids another day and I didn't understand that I was not supposed to hang out with everybody. And one day Amber Alonso who was kind of in the punk group and she looked at me and says, Daniel I need to give you some advice. You have to define yourself. You have to choose one of these groups. You can't be friends with all of them. But I managed to be friends with all of them. But it's my that story that was the most impactful to me and that gives me both the most pause and fear and existentialist fear about what we're living through in our world today but also it gives me the most hope. He was a holocaust survivor. He was nine years old when the war started and 15 and a half when he was liberated from a concentration camp by American soldiers who risked everything to travel from abroad to save him and others like him. And he made sure to talk to me about the horrors that he went through and it absolutely seared itself into my mind so that I will never forget what he went through and not let it happen again. But he also made sure to talk to me about the kindness that helped him survive. About the moments of courage and kindness and just human recognition of his humanity. Oftentimes the people that were not kind that helped him live and that helps me be here today. And one of them is a German soldier that when people were not watching through a rotten potato by my dad's feet because he saw in my emancipated dad's persona, shreds of remaining humanity. And I think my dad was strengthened not just by the nourishment of the potato by that recognition that he was still a human being. But one of the most harrowing stories that he told me was about his superintendent. When he was around 10 or 11 years old and the war had broken out, his superintendent told him, you're hungry. And my dad said, yes, let me show you where you can get some food. And he walked him a couple blocks and pointed to a pile of dead bodies. And he said, there, those are Jews, cut a piece of meat and eat it. And my dad was a little kid. And shortly after that, the paramilitary forces showed up to the building where my family lived, where my grandfather, grandmother, my dad and his brother lived. And the superintendent escorted them to every house where the Jews lived and they exterminated them all. And when they ended up at my grandparents' house, they took my grandmother into a room in the back. My dad didn't understand what was going on there. And when my grandmother came out after a while, they walked them down, presumably to be exterminated. And then out of nowhere, the superintendent spoke to the paramilitary forces and whispered to them something and they left. And he approached my dad and my grandfather and he told my grandfather, Mr. Lubetski, you were always kind to me. You always looked at my eyes. You always smiled. You always told me jokes. And on the holidays, you give me a bottle of schnapps. So I'm sparing you and your family, but leave before I change my mind. And that night, they went into the Covnogetto and then thereafter, they was sent to a concentration camp and then liberated by American soldiers. And it's not easy to come to terms with the fact that I sit here today and I live because of the kindness of an evil person who somehow in the darkest of moments found the courage to spare my family. And that has fueled my dad's experience, has fueled my commitment throughout my entire life to try to build bridges between people, to prevent what happened to my dad from happening again to others. And I've done it through businesses that I've started like Peaceworks, the first company I created right after law school where we tried to use business as a force for bringing neighbors together, to build products together, to shatter cultural stereotypes, to cement relations through that shared incentives that they have to profit from those trading relations where Israelis, Palestinians, Egyptians, Turks, Jordanians traded with one another. And through the one voice movement we've created a movement where hundreds of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians were given a voice and a set of tools to try to discover, choose humanity and raise the voice of moderates that want to end the conflict while preserving their pride and who they are and where they come from but finding a way to build bridges. Or through kind, the company that makes healthy snacks that are about doing the kind thing for your body, for your taste buds and for your world and for your bodies about nutritionally reaching ingredients for your taste buds, they should be delicious but for your world is about trying to inspire kindness, about making kindness a state of mind, about elevating kindness into the most cherished skill that we can pass on to our children, the most cherished value that we can celebrate. And through kind, we created a kind foundation and recently in the last year and I have launched Empatical, which in my opinion is the most important thing that I've been involved in giving birth to together with George Halaf who's sitting there and our Empatical team because it has a chance to potentially reach tens of millions of children across the world and to give them the gift to connect with those people that are different from them and to learn how to navigate those difference, to learn how to celebrate what they have in common as well as what's different and how to solve problems with kids that are different from them. It's based on a very simple notion of making it easier for teachers to be able to connect their classrooms. So it's a technology platform and a community and an ecosystem where thousands of teachers have registered and we hope it will be at least a couple thousand more after the end of today to give them for free access to connect with other classrooms and it's very seamless and very frictionless, very easy to use, it's free and very easy to adapt to what the teachers want. So if you wanna create a free forum for the children from Memphis, Tennessee that Melissa Collins has to connect with the kids in New Jersey that she connected to and they just wanna talk, they can just talk. Or if they want to try to cover a curriculum unit to satisfy particular needs that they need to cover in that particular year, there's products created by teachers with best in class educational tools for the kids to solve problems together or cover the weather or math or any particular assignment. And it's very, very flexible and malleable and it allows the teachers to make it their own. And I was really, really inspired earlier today where I was talking to Melissa Collins and when they turned and they made me cry, I think they should be here rather than me telling you about how impactful it is to be able to connect these kids, some of Melissa's kids, it was in a lower income title one school, all black kids connected with these kids in New Jersey who were all white who had never met a black kid and they made friendships that were so deep that when they agreed that for Christmas they were just gonna be able to send each other a little gift and they agreed on a budget of $5 which was a lot to ask for these kids. Some of these kids from her school showed up with gifts of $25 and $30 for their friends in New Jersey and some of these friendships ended up yielding connections where the kids ended up meeting with one another. And when these kids met kids from Delaware, met kids from Minnesota, but now they're gonna meet kids from Nigeria. And look, connecting kids with one another is enriching to everybody, but it is essential to those kids that have otherwise no other opportunity to expand their horizons and to discover differences that are important to navigate in our lives. We live in an interconnected world and we really put our kids at a disadvantage if we don't give them this toolkit, not just give, but this essential skill set for them to grow. And emotional intelligence and empathy according to a lot of studies has been proven to be a greater indicator of professional success and of happiness and fulfillment. But it's not just for the kids that were doing this, it's also for all of us, for society because if we equip these kids with this set of tools, with these skill sets, not only are they gonna be able to do better in their lives, but our world is gonna be a better world. And tomorrow and today and the day after, they're gonna face encounters where they're similarly trivial encounters about how to approach one another in a coffee shop or life moments where they are gonna be able to make a difference. And turn this world into a kinder world. So I wanna make sure that everybody understands that Empatico belongs to all of you. And that its promise is not gonna be fulfilled and its potential is not gonna be achieved if you don't take ownership over it. Please, if you're right now a teacher of kids at just seven to 11, sign up now on Empatico.org and commit that you're gonna use this tool at some point over the next month or two. And if you're not teaching kids seven to 11, commit that you'll find somebody that teaches kids seven to 11 and soon enough it'll be expanded and broadened to more and more classrooms. But it's really, really important that you take ownership over it, that you tell us what is it that we can do together to make sure that we reach more and more kids and that it becomes something that we can when they take for granted because every kid is given the gift to connect with one another. I'm pleased now to introduce our final speaker for the night, an amazing storyteller whose story is really, really, and Ted Talk really, really reached me, but whose name I have to read, Shimamandan Gozi Adiche. It's a pleasure to welcome her to the stage and thanks for having me tonight.