Couple old friends along with 1 million other acquaintances. Weikel and i go way back. Lets start out talking about, you are an art history major at princeton and you go to wall street and do really well. You could have been rich. You could have your own plane at this point. Instead you went into the book business. Tell us how that plays out. Guest joel and i were classmates in college. It was an accident. He thought it would be good, they didnt know we knew each other. This is an opportunity for joel to express all the resentments he feels. This is the undoing of joel and michael. The fact so the question is why i quit wall street. I didnt know i knew what i wanted to do with my life in college. You wanted to be there. When i got out i didnt have any plans. It didnt occur to me partly because of how i grew up. I grew up in new orleans. It didnt occur to me that i would have to. Hence our history. It was a place for careers to die but it was a great place to study and i loved it. When i got out i didnt have any kind of plan. The job on wall street fell into my lap and it was a way to make a living but by the time i got it, i had figured out i wanted to write. There was a two your gap. Host how did you figure that out . Guest you had to write a senior thesis. I immersed myself in that. I loved it like i love no other academic experience. I made the jump in my mind this would be a good thing to do forever if you could. The false start is i thought is would mean an academic career. The guy who supervised me not only told me i wasnt made for an academic career but i asked at the end of my thesis because i was feeling vain about the writing what he thought about the writing. He said put it this way, never try to make a living at it. So it is revenge, one guy. William childs is his name. If you see that name. He was great actually. A wonderful professor, so i started to submit magazine pieces. Didnt know what i was doing. Didnt know anyone who wrote for a living. It was a quixotic enterprise. The writers market, about that sick and had the names and addresses of all the editors in america and i got it in my head the easiest thing i might break into was inflight magazine. I was volunteering at the soup kitchen and they were so interested i got to know the homeless people. I sent it to inflight magazines in america. I got a letter back from Delta Airlines the kind of like the piece but it what we are in the business of doing is getting people to go places. Took a while to figure out the market. Started to get some things in print. It basically gave me my start, but Michael Kinsley in the republic, it was a graduate student, want to write for your magazine, and got this job on wall street, promising a fortune. It was 100,000 a year. It is one hundred thousand dollars, 23. And it was incredible. I have to do this and see what it is but by then i knew i wanted to write something so i have a friend, you joke about i could have been rich but they pity me. They went and hid wall street at the same time to get really rich. When we met the first day of class he introduced himself telling me he wanted to go into mortgage bonds and whatever. I said my name is Michael Lewis and im here to write a book but i had it in mind i was going to write about this, and the back of my mind, when i was there, this was how the book career happened. I started continued, started to publish pieces about wall street and put a piece on the oped of the wall street journal that had at its bottom Michael Lewiss is an associate with Salomon Brothers in london and made a piece that they were overpaid and i was working in london and came into work the next day and the head was sitting at my desk, happy to be the guy who gave me my job and he was ashen and he said do you realize what you have done . You have a piece in the journal and he said we have a crisis meeting with the board of directors to talk about how to deal with this piece because of local newspapers around the country. That is great but he said no, he said this is a big problem. You are not going to fire me. A different era but he says that down and said how do we fix this problem . I said you tell me. You dont write anymore. And that happens. I am going to keep writing. He wanted what if you wrote under a different name, and what if i wrote under my mothers maiden name . No one around here will think a woman is a man, they will never make the connection. I started to write with abandon under that name. One day i get home from work and dianas career is taking off because people want to read about wall street in 1987. I get home from work and there is a phone call. Say chevy chase, his dad was an editor at simon schuster, distinguished book editor. He says i find out you are diane bleeker and i think you should write a book. From that moment, that was september 1987, i was out the door. I knew that was what i wanted to do in the money didnt matter. I am the potted plant. The carrot in the school play. What happened next, i waited until they gave me my bonus at the end of the year. A huge pile of money. And then said i am leaving to write a book. And write about wall street. They took me into the room, didnt care that i was writing about wall street. They thought i was out of my mind. You do understand you made 250 million this year and next year 500 and after that a different thing. You can stay here another decade and in ten use you wont have to work. Dont do this to your self. They felt sorry for me. I was so out the door, so in a bird, so amused with myself as now, what happened when i sat down with blank sheet of paper . When you are 2425, i was 26, you go with your gut. This will not work for everyone, this career path. Being it is a good personality trait for this business. I have a bunch of props here, this, everyone knows this book. [applause] at the end of the book is a harrowing encounter with john bit going may he rest in peace, your former boss and we read it again this morning, tell us the moment your boss a major career. In slightly different terms. The reason i went to see him, it seems clear to me that was a bookend. A lot of the forces that led to the financial crisis had been set in motion while i was on wall street. We were watching the end of a process that i put in motion. The big one was her turning wall street partnerships into corporations. Was it scary . Terrifying. He booked a table for two at his favorite restaurant around the corner, he said yes but didnt say more than that and i got there on time and he did not. One of those tables where you sit with your legs together, i sat down and started to sweat. Set it up and sit like this for two hours, he walks in and says your book made your career and it ruins mine. You had a lovely lunch after that. I said that is the misinterpretation, i dont think my book ruins your career. It didnt help but didnt ruin your career. I would see him from time to time after that and he was very genial. Always kept me a box of books under the desk for people who came to his office. That is a win. Your biggest customer. You gave the commencement speech at princeton a few years back and described yourself as lucky, some people are just lucky. Those of us who know you well, you working credibly hard, very hard worker, incredible gift for telling a story, you write in the vernacular. You are not lucky but what in terms of finding stories not only that people want to read but no one else has told. We were writing about the financial crisis, the great recession, you come in with something no one else had written. How do you find this . It is not true that i am not lucky there is incredible serendipity in my career. The fact that i wanted to be a writer and got this job in the best place on earth to write about wall street, the place in the firm, i was given the leader by my parents two or three years after college and if they hadnt done that i doubt i would have become a writer. You had some huge advantages. People this odd conceit in our culture that you have made is it was inevitable because of the virtue of you. A fact, that is not how it works. Obama was right when he said you didnt build it. You are such the recipient of benefits of this culture. To tell the story without a high level of awareness of that, it is getting harder to see how lucky you are. You had a lot of advantages, the freedom to look around and improvise, you also found a story no one else saw. Tell us suddenly got an incredible book to the blindside. It is typical of how i find stories, in that you see it is just chance. Maybe slightly different but blindside, what happened was it started with a bottle of wine and the New York Times magazine editor, we were sitting in new york, trying to decide what i am going to write next. Whatever it was, 2005, 4, important people, jamie diamond, never interested me, you want me to write about someone important, a teacher who changed my life. He happened to be my baseball coach but he was a teacher. I thought i will write a personal story about the coach, i will talk to some people in my team. On the blindside it was a catcher, i havent seen him since high school and he picks me up at the memphis airport, full athlete, drafted in the nba, he had gone on to make a fortune in the fast food business, really showed me, took me to the mansion and we spoke about our own coach. And was not introduced to me. In the school play on the back of the airport, i said a new project. Standing in the bus stop on an empty shirt and recognized some and stop is a leader in the car. Nothing to read, illiterate, and a rich white evangelical republican living on the outskirts in a racially divided city, make a rich white evangelical christian and dont get in the way, and going to do it. That is odd. I thought i will follow that and how the book comes out, that is interesting. Curious thing. I just want to know more. Flash forward a few weeks. Got to be friends with a brain trust such as they were in several nfl front offices, some were brain trusts, you wouldnt trust their brains but the brain trust was great and it was a conversation about football. There is not a moneyball story, football is the same story because everyone has the same money to spend. It is not rich teams and poor teams, how to do more with less. It is about how to distribute your money across field. Can you get me a history how that happened once free agency happened . He pulled it out and it was remarkable you have this character on the offensive line whose salary had gone from the yellow line to the secondhighest insurance policy on the most valuable asset. So you get hurt in a way you wouldnt normally. I thought that is interesting. Forward 6 or 8 months, hearing about michael or, the stories getting rich and emotional, something odd. Sean calls me and says there is a lot of that. Neck sabin, alabama coach, looking at some players and saw michael on the basketball court. Sean knew him and he said that is a future nfl left tackle. You see this from the way he moved. You know what they get paid . That is what it was. I told the story and then started saying he was going here and the kid, the moment he was identified as future nfl tackle which he became, the most prized kid in the universe. He had gone from least valued 15yearold on earth to the most valued 17yearold in a flash. In a story that can be organized along these lines, forces of the life to change his value. One of those forces is stuff happening in nfl strategy and what is a mother. Unless i realize that i had a story, this happens, had it for six months and kind of thought i often think theres something better, someone who has empathy or someone who knows the emotions or someone who knows about psychology or there is some part that is alien to me so i shouldnt be the one to do it. The truth is why you should do it, you could get across other people, the stuff about it. So sean came out, a commentator for memphis, we went to dinner and started telling my wife some of the stories. He said to me it was interesting when he came in the house and took him into a room and just stared and said what . I never had a bed. He was 15 years old and never had a bed. My wife started crying. When she got in the car she said you are an idiot, if you do anything but write this book so i wrote the book. It has happened in various forms over and over. You have a common theme of unrecognized value in several of your books. Is that a conscious thing you shoot for . This book every business person in america is going to buy my book because the saying is the blindside, a bit short, with the new book, think differently about this, there is value out there. Is that a conscious theme you have . No. What does seem to have a lot and i dont know why, i can guess why but the way markets dont function sometimes very well, they are miraculous in a lot of ways but value comes from the market so there is a market angle. Since i left new orleans i have always been bemused by value, i came from a place that was very charming to grow up, really rich, interesting childhood. I love the people, i love the place, it was a failed place. It was not valued. You see over and over people who are special dont get valued. People who are distinctly not special valued very highly. That has always interested me. Since i was a little kid, really interested me. My father told me not long ago he introduced me to the stock market, still dont have much of an interest. He is obsessed with it, likes to watch his portfolio, just watch it. I dont get that. He is watching his portfolio, going to give ten shares of stock and you can learn to watch it too. I was 13 or 14 years old, a little black book in which to keep the record that i thought watching it. He gave me ten shares of chart house which was a restaurant company, gave it to me. I looked at him like he paid 220. I said ten shares was 200. That is what we had to pay to buy the stock. I said i will hang the towels. That is outrageous. He charges that much, how does that happen . Outraged at the value assigned to that role way back then. Then you invented online trading. We should talk as a novelty about your new book. The undoing project a friendship that changed our minds. Tell us how you got into that. A little different from your other books. It is more about psychology, more academic. Fundamentally a friendship book. I think a love story. Sold the movie. It is a love story. When i finished it it was being sold for a movie, Hollywood Reporter called me and asked me what is the one line elevator pitch for this book . It is about two academic sitting in a room with ideas how the human mind works. How do you turn that into a movie . What is your pitch . I said it is broke Back Mountain but they screw each others ideas. That is what it is. That is what it is. We can delete that line somehow. That is not on the internet, is it . Nobody will be offended by that word. What happened is the way this story came about it is about two israeli psychologists working on a book. I dont like to talk about my book. Amazing how quickly they can be described in a way people dont want to know anything more about them. Working on a book about baseball, ask another question. If you want to stop a room cold, what are you working on . Israeli psychologists. Nobody wants to know anymore. That is what this book is about. The way it came about is if you had moneyball, moneyball is about miss valuation of people if you happen to be baseball players, and they got missed valued by making intuitive judgments about their value and i thought that was the story. The book comes out and gets reviewed by richard saylor. Gets reviewed by richard thaler, distinguished legal scholar, they say in the new republic nice story, he missed the point of his own story. What he told is a case study, case study in the way the human mind leads us astray when it is operating from intuition and the ways in which the human mind described were mapped by these two psychologists in the late 70s but i missed the story. You get one bad review or questionable review in the new republic, a new the i did never heard of these guys even though he won the nobel prize in economics. It wasnt that impressive. [laughter] but i mean it bothered me that i had missed his trek. And people say an explanation is where the mind comes direct and the book is your explanation. What you do as a story is where your mind came to rest. I think ive exhausted the material. Ive mind out the material. Theres nowhere else to go behind me to find something really great that i didnt find. It didnt even occur to me thats something that is wired in certain ways and people have figured out how we are wired that explains all the stories. Expl it just bothered me for years. I thought about it. Every now and then and i mentioned it to my psychologist friend that he said danny lives have come out from your house. S. You need to talk about this and get it off your chest. Thats what i did and i went and knocked on the door and we developed a relationship. We would go for long walks in berkeley and he would talk about this now dead colleague. He was his lover. He was in his physical lover but in every other way. They were passionately involved with each other in tumultuously involved with each other. I taught for a term. It was called a class at cal to teach writing. I didnt do a very good job of it that one of my favorite students it turned out he was a missing puzzle the sun. Very quick read access to both sides of this collaboration and the material, i kept saying im not going to write this. This is really interesting. Im not jewish and the story takes place in israel, a lot of it at the back top is the birth of the israeli state in early israel. I had been mean to take psych 101 and interesting psychology up to that point. Interesting it was all aliens so it took me forever to talk myself into the place right but i should be the one to do it. And that led me to this point eight years after i started walking the hills with danny condon is the people were starting to die and it was clear if i didnt do it would be gone. I think its an incredibly important story. Their k their work is incredibly important. Its a very emotional story between the two men. Its an unusual story. So at that point i turned to danny and i said its going to seem odd to you but i want to write a book about this. He hemmed and hogg ended like a the idea of it. I said your work is too important. Someone has to write a book about it and its probably int your view going to be a bad book and if anybody has a right to write a bad book about you should be me because i spent all these years with you. He himself wrote a book or did you ghostwrite that book . At the end of the book you mentioned the early chapters about book. When i met him one of the first things out of his mouth was to come at a good time. They asked me to write this book and its going to ruin my reputation so its going in the garbage can where it belongs an i said could i see a chapter to . He gave me a chapter and i watched him and the quality that is peculiar to the degree that ive never seen in any otherth human being is doubt, doubt about everything around him including his own thoughts. Hes constantly chewing up what he created before it ever gets out the door. He got to a point after throwing it away and pulling it out of the garbage can and pulling it out at the garbage can three or four times he said i know what im going to do. He said im going to give money to a friend of mine who is a specialist in my field and have them distribute this money to free people he liked and their job is to trash the book, to write a negative review so i can see how bad it is. His own book. He paid 5000 for city review of his own book to talk them out of publishing it. Publishing this is a peculiar character. Thats what you are looking for, genius. Even better he thinks hes normal. The best characters dont know their character. The minute someone knows they are character they lose out on the page. He was just a different person and he had a lot of different thoughts and he would never have the thoughts if he didnt have that love affair. So anyway it was a long torturous path to writing the book because it was even more off my beaten track unusual. You have a lot of other options offered to you about writing a movie and i think did you write a novel once . He played around with it and he probably had movies made of your book so when people want to know isat is brad pitt really like . [laughter] do we want to know . I can tell you. Before we get into the movieie thing, i dont want to create the impression i had anything to do with the movie. I think they are great but the apropos of this gathering, the people in hollywood really preferred the author to be dead. [laughter] all the living author does is cause trouble. He wants credit. He wants to criticize and you taking his precious work of art in screwing it up he wants to tell you who to cast in the picture. He wants to hang around with you. They just dont like you live. They convey this. Thats the odd thing about about hod. They are fastidiously polite and everybody is challenging each other to be the first one and when youre in a conversation in los angeles in the movie business. Everybody is showing off how gracious they can be even while they are sticking a knife in your back. Its not like wall street that way. Ck. [laughter] so living author who maintains a Good Relationship with the raider is this, they pretend to be interested in what you have to say and you pretend to believe they are interested and as long as no one thinks theres anything genuine bear a relationship can be quite lovely. Ship [laughter] thats what happened with brad pitt and the relationship was quite lovely. I dont know if we are ever going to be together again. I hope we are but ill tell you a story that encapsulates a part of red pit. When you meet him you are supposed to think he is because hes so beautiful that is not. Hes very smart. Hes very interested in things. Hes a delight to talk to. Hes surprisingly shockingly normal without being normal. To the point where he refused to go to the set and they said they were going to make the movie after i told him he could fear of them because theyd never make it movie about a small statistics he called me up and he said you. Hes angry. Read just called and is coming to my house and my wife is putting on makeup. [laughter] and the babysitter is wearing a dress. [laughter] a dress. So in the middle of making a movie that people who want you to engage in this false relationship or you tend to believe they care what you think were getting uncomfortable. He wasnt coming to the set, he wasnt returning phonecalls. Want anything to do with it. His office is right there and he would refuse to come down so one day they called me. Everybody is upset. So i called billy and i said just put everyone out of their missouri. Nome down, nothing bad willl happen. Smile and be charming and you can leave. Do you promise it will be there . E i will be there. So i drive out to the set. They recreated a game between these body doubles. 8000 people to make it look full. I go out with my daughter nine years old or 10 years old. They just finished where rad pitt is moodily Walking Around the field. He comes over gets down on one knee and starts talking. I leave him alone for 10 minutes. 10 minutes later dixie is around my leg ilec down and shes got this concern in her eye and she says who he was that weird old guy . [laughter] brad pit vanished. A Production Assistant with headgear andys got a boulder comes running over and he says c mr. Bean, mr. Bean thank you for coming to the set. You are my hero. Your book changed my life. The guy refused. He said it was your book mr. Bean that changed my life and would you please sign my book collects there were two billy deans in professional baseball. They played outfield on the twins and the tigers. The other billy dean came out of the closet and wrote a book about coming out of the closet. [laughter] it was changed to the other team, Something Like that. It had that kind of title. The young man opened the book and he gave billy dean a memoir. Billy dean is like theres no light at that point. Over in the dugout brad pitt is rolling around laughing because he had set the whole thing up as a practical joke and that was the only reason he wanted billy dean to come. [laughter] so thats brad pitt. Thats the brad pitt story. Im glad i asked. [applause] we have microphones. We are going to do question so come up and ask a question. I asked just dont make a speech about how much you love michael. We know how much you love him. I think there are microphones. There you go. Re are m are they all up here or are there some in the back . I will start. Iraq read several of your books and it seems to me you have a fairly consistent week were you very strongly personalized aai theme so you are writing about the emergence of the left tackle as an important player in football and the restructuring of the economic the economics of the game so you really drill down. If you are writing about the economics of baseball and its billy dean. You do it with big short and you have a couple of main characters strongly personalizing these larger themes. Clearly their advantage is to that in terms of narrative strength. Talk a little about the process and also about the minuses of that approach. I dont know any other way to do it. I found myself very easy to sympathize sympathize with. I felt everything that character felt. And approved of almost everything that he said. Hes very cordial. The tricks such as it is its how i naturally get interested in things. Through characters and through people and what all the bookss have in common is their carem a jars, interesting characters to me in interesting situations. So the trick is if you can attach the raider to the character at the beginning of the book they will follow thatbn character. Trust me there is no person in america who would want to read my description and collateralized that information. They should realize that the lives of these people that come to know you want to know. Its a very powerful light that is the origins of literature. I dont regard it though as, i guess you could argue you put undue emphasis on a single person. Billy dean deserves to be thedet face of the transformation of baseball. Intellect. I just wanted to thank you for flash boys on wall street and the effect that had. I ended up reading that. I went to school with Ronnie Morgan and thats a coincidence, i got involved in that whole battle, fidelity and about closing my account because they kept insisting i should be alert to directly connect to a ie x. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that but thank you very much. Is that coming out . They never die. The problem is revealed in her emails back and forth about how impossible it was to make a movie with a major league. They have gotten to the point where they are nervous. W they dont have it well enough known agent mail at your which l think is crazy. He could surround him and creative person but the flash boys story to me is very very much alive, all of it. There is a war going on and it isnt going to be properly regulated. A narrow vested interest in a way that essentially causes of the rest of us. Right now they are. These guys are the single greatest force shedding a light on the whole problem. Hes a canadian and an american hero. Its very moving but 60 minutes did their piece and there was a lot of screaming and yelling about it that i had gotten it all wrong. Dem what they were saying was not true and its shocking the problems that have been repaired so, i dont know. What are you working on now . [inaudible] [laughter] i was struck after the president ial election when he got elected president but it was interesting to me and i got interested in it in march, april , the vast gaps between the effort that the Obama Administration and put into thet transition and the Trump Administration up into theion, e transition. They had created come inspired by bush for how much effort you put into handing the government over to him. Obama had created a short course row the federal Government Works so in our crazy system you dont really know very much about whats going on to the department of energy say. They can quickly get up to speed and as in the past handovers the day after the election there would be 30 or 40 people from the new administration and cramming for seven days until inauguration. A lot of people are forgotten by law from getting in touch with them. You have a need for a thorough g and quick education and a lot of missioncritical things. And the trump people didnt show. Re the Parking Spaces or empty and they are set aside for people in education. Its a nonideological vision. I think it would pay a big price this is the bomb with a very long fuse but its a mismanagement of the government that results from this is a big big deal. Happily its made the material really interesting. Trump has electrified the federal government. Who would food will want to read it a year ago . He wouldnt. The its kind of incredible. You cant make this up. Wood its Hollywood Comedy after Hollywood Comedy waiting to happen. En what im doing right now is the Trump Administration didnt bother to get the briefing so i did this months vanity fair where you run around the department of energy. I was pretending to run it and i figured out what the hell this place does. [applause] i have a quick question onqu the undoing project. You have been on wall street for a number of years and you know so much of wall street is based on the market and making rational decisions. What are your thoughts about the impact on the whole business as more of us get to realize they are driven by idiosyncrasies and irrationalities and we are not as rational as we think we are . L but i think the impact of Behavioral Analysis would be on wall street . You know if you lift in a saneut world much of what wall street doesnt wouldnt be doing. Shortly after the guy charged me 20 bucks he was explained to me that wall street and it really still does. Its amazing amazing in this day and age that people will give the kind of Financial Advice they give with a straight face. People who claim to know where the prices of things are going or have some insight into it and direct peoples money, they have no idea. They will construct construct a story about their career that seems to demonstrate that they predict things. Not only did they not predict them but they inherently were unpredictable. Random thoughts are being construed as patterns and patterns of being defined by the priest and the priests get paid a lot of money for it. Ie that is crazy. Economists would have a lot to say about it but the truth is that people dont like takinglir responsibility for making their own Financial Decisions and they will always pay to get rid of the problem. They cant get in their heads that not only is that person not an expert, theres no such thing as expertise. They can say is a bad expert gummi lost my money. They shouldnt be listening to anybody. So the damage that the intellectual work grows out of and wall street are think theres minimal. Wall street is responding to a psychological deep need that has nothing to do with so you cant argue it away. In short i think the answer is very little. Where do you invest your money . [laughter] in a mattress . Stre its not saying you dont think the American Economy is an incredible miracle and an engine of wealth creation. The economy is wonderful. The American Economy is one ofof the great miracles and i invest in it but i dont invest in it under the direction of some wall street guru. I think the two smart things to do, the broad thing is you decide how much you want to put in the stock market and how much you want to put some are else and then after that how do you put it in the stock market . I either by lowcost basket of fu stocks or give it to warren buffett. This is a basket of stocks that he has but hes the one person on the planet whose capital has got a different value. People pay more for his money because of his reputation and he gets deals that no one ever gets. I have long lambasted him for being in the situation. I surrendered. Im so happy i surrendered. I own a bunch of brookshire i hathaway stock. Im. I wonder approximately what percentage or to what degree you have prepared or practiced this interview and your response . [laughter] guest sh she asked how much we prepared for this. s we did this before up the street at politics and prose that this is a slightly largeris crowd. F you ever i dont know of few have ever talked to me about my vote. Its fake news. Ive always asked you about your vote. We only have a couple of minutes. Are you still at softball commissioner for your daughters lee . A retired years ago. I was at running a travel competitive softball team. That must have been a heady thing with the power. Actually it was a fantastic choice for me. Filled with all these liberal people who dont believe in competition. So the soft fold egg is wonderful. The rule is if you coach in this league you have to the game. The perfect coach howeverize someone years ago realize some people had a competitive streak so they allowed after the leak completed all stars were picked and they would go out into the wilds of california in play republicans. [laughter] this was always miserable. Every game was custers last stand. Irls were these little girls would be sent often they get mutilated by these republicans. I took over the operation seven years ago and i created liberal warriors. Everyone in this room has the same side. Thats the next book. We went out and we really kicked some republican as. It was really great. They got an early respect for the first time. When she was 10 and her team was number one in the country and we got very good to the way we got good was by going outside of berkeley and Getting College womens softball players who dio not want to lose. When my daughters team is going 401 my son walker is seven years old, six years old and hes in the dugout. Hes in the dugout is about voip and hes agreed to take the job for his sisters team because they are winning trophies and he got a trophy. Walker was sitting there with one of the guys i hired, the on game they were going to lose. Down by six runs after two innings and he turns to the coach and he says janice we are going to lose this game. She started screaming at him. She said if you want to sit in this dugout in be the batboy and i think more positive thoughts. Walker sits and thinks about it and he says janet im positive we are going to lose this game. [laughter] hon that note its been a pleasure. Thank you for coming. Thanks very much for coming. [applause] and now ibram kendi. [inaudible conversations]