The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich by Thom Hartmann

Episode Date: September 2, 2021

The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich by Thom Hartmann Popular progressive radio host and New York Times bestselling author Thom Hartmann reveals how and why attempts to implement affordable universal healthcare in the United States have been thwarted and what we can do to finally make it a reality. "For-profit health insurance is the largest con job ever perpetrated on the American people—one that has cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives since the 1940s,” says Thom Hartmann. Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States. Hartmann offers a deep dive into the shameful history of American healthcare, showing how greed, racism, and oligarchic corruption led to the current “sickness for profit” system. Modern attempts to create versions of government healthcare have been hobbled at every turn, including Obamacare. There is a simple solution: Medicare for all. Hartmann outlines the extraordinary benefits this system would provide the American people and economy and the steps we need to take to make it a reality. It’s time for America to join every industrialized country in the world and make health a right, not a privilege

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks who's boss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here the inner great podcast again who knew we were going to make another hundreds of uh episodes and we decided to make another worth in uh what 200 of making it to a thousand episodes of the chris voss show who knew we were going to make another hundreds of episodes, and we decided to make another more than, what, 200 of making it to 1,000 episodes of The Chris Voss Show?

Who knew it would last this long? But I've got someone who's done many more shows than I have on this show who's gracing us with his honor today. So we'll be talking about his new book. This is his second appearance on The Chris Voss Show. But in the meantime, you're going to watch the video version of this because he has a great YouTube channel as well. Go to YouTube.com, 4Chance Chris Voss.

Hit the bell notification button over there. Go see Goodreads.com, 4Chance Chris Voss, all the different books that we're reading and reviewing over there. Go see all the groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. Just ask your kids where all the things are for social media, and we're probably on it. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life and experiences

in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold, but the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com.

On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom-made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out, or order the book wherever fine books are sold. So anyway, we've got a great author on the show.

He's got his newest book that's come out. The book is called The Hidden History of American Healthcare. Why sickness bankrupts you and makes others insanely rich. And this is part of his The Tom Hartman Hidden History Series. We had him on the show, like I said, for one of his other series books. He's got a whole line of books. You're going to check them out. This is going to be coming out. You want to be the first on your block to order it September 7th, 2021. And you can order that baby up and be able to take care of it. And the first one on your block, you can be like, I read it. Tom is a progressive national and internationally syndicated talk show host whose shows are available in over half a billion homes worldwide. I'll ask him why it's not a billion. He's the New York Times bestselling

four times project censored award-winning author of 24 books in print and 17 language on five continents. Even Leonardo DiCaprio was inspired by Tom's book, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, to make the movie The Eleventh Hour. Congratulations on your new book, Tom. Welcome to the show. How are you? Thanks, Chris. It's great being here with you. I appreciate your inviting me back. I appreciate having you back.

Thank you very much, sir. And give us your plugs for people who are going to find you on those darned interwebs, the tubes that run in the... Mostly stuff having to do with the radio show is at TomHartman.com, and then I do a daily column over at HartmanReport.com. Those are the two. And pretty much however you spell it will get you to either one of them. There you go. It's, it's good to have that sort of variation. Yeah. There's a couple of Chris

bosses and the hit man haven't found a man evidently. So I'm working on that. So tell us what motivated you to write another book. Is this the 24th or 25th? It's actually, I think the 33rd or 34th book that bio is probably a decade old, but, and now that we're on the internet, I guess, I think we're in probably 3 billion homes, but any place you've got an internet connection, it's just like your show, your show is 3 billion homes too, potentially. Well, four or five or something. Yeah, there you go. What motivated me to write this book, we are facing a health, a care crisis, a very real one, this pandemic, at the same time that we're facing a health care, a situational health care crisis,

a structural health care crisis having to do with a health care system that at one point sort of worked, mostly for working people in the 50s, 60s, 70s. Back in the early 70s, i had a little business in michigan we had 18 employees and all three hospitals in lansing were non-profits st lawrence was owned by the catholic church ingham medical was the county hospital sparrow was funded by a foundation that was started by one of the vice presidents of Oldsmobile back in the 20s. And they were all nonprofits. And the health insurance companies were required by law to be nonprofits. So we had Blue Claws, Blue Shield. I recall, it cost me $35 per month per employee to have health insurance. And that was comprehensive health insurance. It was cheap back then. But then

the Reagan era came along and greed is good and deregulate everything and allow the hospitals to go for profit, allow the insurance companies to go for profit. And now we've got a situation where the average American is spending $3,000 a year more than the average Canadian or European or Taiwanese or South, or Japanese on health care. And that money is all just being skimmed off the top as profit for giant health insurance companies and for-profit hospital groups and whatnot. And this is happening. We're being robbed basically in plain sight. And we pay twice as much for pharmaceuticals as any other developed country in the world. And this is all happening in the midst of a pandemic. And we've gone from typically having around a half million medical bankruptcies a year in the United States. We've been steady at that number for the last 15, 20 years.

Last year, it was 700,000. This year, it's going to be well over a million. And of course, these are all because people got sick with COVID. Two weeks in the ICU could be a million-dollar bill. And you've got health insurance companies that are going, oh, yeah, we'll pay a little of it. And it's just half of America can't deal with a $400 expense. 80% of America can't deal with a $1,000 expense without having to get a loan. So this system that we have cluged together and that was put on profit motive steroids by the Reagan administration is just devastating everybody except a small handful of very rich people who run and work in senior management of or own large chunks of stock in about a half a dozen health insurance companies

and maybe a dozen hospital groups. Everybody else is getting screwed. So is this, you came on our show last time with your book, The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. And is this a problem with the unbridled capitalism that's just, I'm a capitalist, I'm an entrepreneur, but there is a point where this becomes just too much, where the profit motive of everything, including whether or not someone lives or dies or gets healed is insane. Is this a product of that? Yeah. And I think that we need to be careful

or we need to understand our definitions. I have started seven businesses in my life. I've started five that were pretty successful, three of them that I sold and retired for a couple of years each time, but I've never been a capitalist. I am an entrepreneur. I start businesses. But a capitalist is a person who lives off their capital. So Paris Hilton is a capitalist. She was born with a million dollar trust fund, and she makes her living sitting around the pool waiting for the dividend checks to arrive. Now, you could argue she started a little business too, and so I don't mean to pick on Paris Hilton, but you get my point. There's really not that many actual capitalists in the United States. There's probably 10, 20, 30,000 people in the United States who just live off their investments.

The rest of us are just out here scuffling. We're entrepreneurs. We're small business people. We believe in free enterprise. And the problem is that that game of what we refer to a thumbnail as capitalism, but really what we're talking about is the what Lewis Paul referred to as the enterprise system, business system, that it can work, it can work really well, just like football can work really well, when the rules are consistent, and the rules essentially guarantee fairness and are enforced. Imagine how much fun it wouldn't be to go to an

NFL game if the league decided that for every game, whichever team gave the largest multi-million dollar donation to the league got to have three extra players on the field throughout the game. You can pretty much predict what's going to happen. That's what's happened with our capitalism system or our free enterprise system is that it's been heavily rigged by really rich people and really big corporations. And so small guys like you and me, you run your business of your show and your podcast, that's a small business. We're the ones and all the other small businesses of America that are trying to compete, whether it's a local coffee shop that's trying to compete with Starbucks or the local bank is trying to compete with Wells Fargo or the local clothing store is trying to compete with Macy's. We're all getting screwed by these people. And that, I wrote a book called

The Hidden History of Monopoly that preceded oligarchy that was about that. And then the oligarchy book is about how that same, let's rig the system for our own benefit, that was used to create business monopolies in the 60s and 70s was used to create business monopolies in the 60s and 70s was used to create political monopolies in the 80s with the Reagan revolution, and just taking us in the direction of something that very much does not resemble democracy. And then now in this book, I'm talking about that same kind of corrupt that involves both politics and economics is making our healthcare system basically unusable for much of America and destroying families left and right and not producing good results. We have maternal

mortality outcome, women dying in childbirth that are third world level. We're the worst in the developed world. Literally, there's only one area of medicine where the United States does better than any other country, and that's breast cancer. And the only reason for that has nothing to do with technology. It has nothing to do with our healthcare industry. It has nothing to do with health insurance companies. It's because a group of women about 30 years ago got together and decided to start doing some real serious educational work. And they, for 20, 30 years, they taught American women how to do self breast tests, how to feel. And so we have the earliest diagnosis. Now other countries are starting to replicate that. And, but every other measure of, and that's the one thing, by the way,

we try to debate this with somebody from the healthcare industry. They'll go, oh, the United States has the best breast cancer survival rates in the world. And yeah, but it's got nothing to do with you. It's got nothing. But in every other way, we are way behind everybody, and we spend far more money. Yeah. Yeah, it's really insane. I'll tell you a story that I think might interest you.

In 1998, we had a pretty big company of 100 employees, and we were setting up a health insurance for them. And so the health insurance was doing all that or whoever was providing it to us was doing that whole thing where all the employees felt forms, their history, and they come with the price for you. And they literally came to me and I'll never forget sitting in my office. I wish I recorded it. They literally came to me and they said, there's two employees that are running, are going to give you the highest cost per employee, that probably about $50 you'll save per employee. But we really would like to see you get rid of these two employees. And I'm like, what? These are people with chronic conditions. Either chronic conditions, shillings? No. She was older. She had a lot of problems.

One of my best employees, like this gal worked her butt off for me. She was one of my best employees. There was no way I was going to me. She was one of my best employees. There was no way I was going to cross this integrity line with any, with what they wanted, but they literally pressured me. I'm not even kidding you. They pressure me. They kept coming back, pressure me. Can you please get rid of these employees? Do it. Come up with the reason to fire them, get rid of them. Because if you do that, we really don't want them in the plan. And I was like, F you guys. No, I'm not doing it. We took the plan and we just ate the cost and everybody had to pitch in for it. But that's the way it was. But to get that kind of

pressure, I'm like, how corrupt is this fricking business? I have a pretty, I like to think I have a pretty high integrity level, but how many businesses fired employees like that? I was just like, Oh my gosh, it's insane. Yeah, probably more than a few. Yeah, definitely. And it was significant too. It was like 50 bucks per policy just to get rid of those two people. And that makes a difference in your employees or your own costs or something. So I'm sure a lot of people were motivated. But we almost live, and you write a lot of books and you talk a lot about your show.

I learned so much stuff from your show. My mom watches your show now. And it almost seems like we live in an indentured servitude thing. With colleges, you're indentured servitude for what, 20 or 30 years to pay off your loans. With healthcare, I had a friend two to three years later, she's still getting these surprise medical bills. Half of America has medical debt right now. Yeah. Yeah. They're just in 30 grand just showed up after three years in a bill. And she's like, what the hell? Who's this? And it's just insane. So I imagine you talk about some of that in the top. Just show the contrast here. Here in the United States, we've got this for profit system to pay for health insurance, healthcare. Our health insurance companies used to be able to just basically make anything that they wanted. Obamacare limits them to 20%

overhead. Now that overhead is used for profit and for huge salaries for CEOs and things. For comparison, Medicare runs on between two and 3% overhead, depending on whether you count the cost of the federal buildings for the Medicare offices. It can be done cheaply. There is a hospital, and the examples in the book, I'm sorry, I don't remember the name of the hospital. There's a hospital in New York City that has X number of beds. Let's say it's 529 beds. And there's a hospital in Toronto that's almost identical. It's like within three beds of the same number of beds. So it's real apples to apples, right? Big cities, big hospital, basically the same kinds of services. The hospital in New York has a floor and a half filled with desks and people that do nothing but billing.

The hospital in Toronto, Canada, where they have Medicare for all, has one room with two desks and three people that does the billing for the entire hospital. That's crazy. Yeah. And of course, you go to that hospital in New York and part of your bill is going to be the salaries for 100 people who are sitting around begging insurance companies for money and fighting them when they say no. I had when we were living in D.C., my regular family doc, I had a good friend, one of her best friends, a liver doc, and they had just come out with that new drug for hepatitis C. I forget the name of it, but it was like $80,000 for a dose.

And her friend, the liver doc, hired two full-time nurses to do nothing but fight with insurance companies because they found that they said yes to the payment on the sixth or seventh time they were harassed or called or got a lawyer letter. That's what it took. That's a scene. There was a movie I watched. I can't remember what it was. I think it was Health Incorporated or something like that. But they talked about, there's people that are dying of cancer. The insurance companies won't give them. They fight them, like you say. And they just go, this guy's going to die in six months. We'll just argue it and screw it. It's all about money. I remember one girlfriend I had when I was 22, she worked in a medical billing office, a small doctor's office. And she, like you say, two or three employees they had that were just fighting with the insurance companies to get their bills paid.

And of course they would pass the cost of that over onto their, on their patients. And yeah, and it was just insane. You would hear the billables. And I think I've had over the course of owning a mortgage company, some loans come in, I would see medical doctors and all sorts of stuff. And it was just insane that the costs and how much went into that. And you're like, God, if you could cut that out of the system, do you think that we should maybe move to a medic, Medicaid system, like you quoted, 2% or whatever? Yeah, Medicare is a single-payer system. It has a 20% hole drilled in it, which is another story. If that was fixed, it would be a true single-payer system. In other words, Medicare paid all expenses.

And then they actually, Robert Ball, who wrote the bill back in the 60s for Lyndon Johnson, actually wrote it in such a way that just a couple of sentences could be changed. The sentences that say, you only qualify for this if you're over 65. Just a couple sentences could be changed and suddenly you've got a national health care. And it's just that straightforward. And just to show how absurd it is that we are tolerating these massive expenses and these massive profits, Just consider just one health insurance company, the nation's largest, UnitedHealthcare. They paid their CEO, William McGuire, they called him Dollar Bill and Quarter, is what the Wall Street Journal used to call him.

They paid him $1.6 billion. Wow. Part of that was pay, part of that was stock options and things like that. But that's what he walked away with from that company, $1.6 billion. He ended up having to give $300 million back because the federal government said he had taken it fraudulently. But of course, being a billionaire and a white guy, he just gave the money back. If he had been a black guy, he'd taken $20 out of the till at 7-Eleven. It would have been a whole different story. And then he was followed by a guy named Stephen J. Hemsley,

who took $700 million. And this is a company with somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 executives who are making over a million dollars each. Why? Why are we doing this to ourselves? Why are we letting these parasites attach themselves to our backs and suck the blood out of us? Yeah. How much do you think this has contributed? We've seen the dissolving of the middle class. For me, going back to Reagan, it seems when it started in the rise of Wall Street era, the Ivan Bioski era, I always call it, the greed is good era for those. There's always people when you say that quote, they go, that's from that movie, Wall Street. No, that's actually from Ivan Bioski. How much of that really comes down to, I think I got lost in the whole question there with the Ivan Bioski

reference, but I think you know where I'm going with it. In other words, why do we have this system? Why are we saying there's big money to be made. If you've got a health insurance company that can pay their CEO a billion dollars, they can certainly pay a million dollars to each of, say, 250 or 300 members of Congress. And the Supreme Court legalized that with Citizens United and said, if a big company wants to own a politician, that's called free speech. It's protected by the first. It didn't used to be that way. We used to call it political corruption or bribery.

Five right-wingers on the Supreme Court changed the course of history with that one. And so any kind of change. And so Medicare, George W. Bush, back in 1978, when he was an oil man in Texas, he wanted to be a member of Congress. He wanted to follow in his pappy's footsteps. And he ran for Congress in 78 on the platform of turning Medicare over to the health insurance companies, privatizing Medicare, and turning Social Security over to the big Wall Street banks, privatizing Social Security. And there are people who make arguments for those things, that the free market does everything more successfully than government can.

Well, he lost the election, but he always held these as really high values. And so in 2005, after he won reelection, he went on national television. He said, I've got political capital and I'm going to use it and I'm going to use it to privatize Social Security and change Medicare. And he started this roadshow and I think he to use it to privatize social security and change Medicare. And he started this roadshow. And I think he went to 24 cities. And what he found was the more he pitched this, the less popular it became. So he finally gave up on it. But the one thing that he did do in 2005 was he passed a reform of Medicare that added,

actually, maybe this was 2003, whichever year it was, anyhow, that added a prescription drug coverage, Medicare Part D, and also allowed private for-profit health insurance companies to sell a product that directly competes with Medicare that is subsidized by Medicare. And they can use the word Medicare on it, even though it's not Medicare. It's called Medicare Advantage. And it's a scam. You see, if you're over 65 and you sign up for Medicare Advantage, you are going to get screwed. It's virtually 100% predictable. It's just like regular health insurance. You've got to get everything approved before your doctor has to call for permission. You've got to fight with them constantly. And the older and more expensive you get, the harder they're going to make for you until you finally you just freak out and go back on Medicare. In the meantime,

the federal government is giving them all the money that they're spending on you on the back end, plus a 20% profit. So they're draining the Medicare trust fund, and they're screwing their customers. It's just nuts. And also, with the drug plan, Medicare Part D, they said, oh, and by the way, Medicare is now going to pay for prescription drugs, but they have to pay at the one pill price. If a bottle of 20 pills of penicillin would cost you 10 bucks, it's 50 cents a pill. Or if you're the Veterans Administration and you're buying a million pills of penicillin, that'll cost you a penny a pill. If you went into a pharmacy and you said, okay, $20 for a bottle or $10 for a bottle, 20 of them, how much for one pill? They'd say,

it'll be three or $4. That's the price that Medicare has to pay. They have to pay the one pill price. And so now AARP, which is I'm ambivalent about because they're really basically a sales front for UnitedHealthcare. But nonetheless, they're trying to get Congress to change that law so that Medicare can negotiate prices the same way the VA does. Because the VA will buy, say, C-Pro, an antibiotic, and they'll buy it for X. And then Medicare buys the same amount of the same drug, and they pay literally sometimes 10 or 20 times more. And certainly twice as much generally, but sometimes way, way more than that. And now that this has become a topic of discussion, I don't know if you've caught these ads on TV, but you've got the pharma, the drug industry out there going with a sweet old lady. Oh, Congress lets them negotiate prices. I won't be able to get my

medications on Medicaid, which is a complete lie. There will be more medications available because there's less money going to the, as profit. This is a $60 billion a year profit center for these drug companies. Built on the lives of people, man. Yeah. And it's all because the Supreme Court said that it was just fine for the pharmaceutical industry to pay off some politics. And the funny thing is, you talk about your book about Germany. The funny thing is, people don't realize, because I'll have people argue, they'll be like, if whatever happened, they took away Obamacare, there's all these people that are

basically programmed by the Betsy DeVos Network, the Center for National Policy, the radio stations and all that stuff. And they're just programmed to vote against their own best interests. But is there one party that's behind this? I know she had a story in here about Joe Lieberman and stuff. Yeah, Joe's a Democrat. Now, the corruption, well, actually, he's an independent now. But the corruption of politicians is relatively universal, or not universal. The Progressive Caucus in Congress, you've got about 100 members of the Progressive Caucus who refuse to take PAC money, which is a big deal.

It really puts them at a disadvantage, and that's a real high-integrity thing. But the entire Republican Party and a good chunk of the Democratic Party just sold out, and it's really sad. It's not their fault. If you owned, if you owned a football team, an NFL football team, and you knew that by giving Roger Goodell an extra 3 million bucks in an envelope before the game, you could have three extra guys on the field,

would you do it? Yeah, probably. Yeah, hey, these are the rules of the game and I'm not going to go to jail for it, but I'm going to win, of course. Yeah, and people should read your Supreme Court book and then the oligarchy book, I think, and probably some other books. But I remember those really laid out how we got to this point with the SCOTUS rulings

to do this. One of the things I really love about your books, Tom, and of course, your radio show and everything you do, your email every day, is you keep this really tight and concise. The book is total. It's what? It's 100 and some odd pages. It's 140 pages. Yeah.

A hundred, a hundred, a 60, 170, roughly, but you get right to the point. Like you don't dress it up with all this sort of long, this,

that you deliver the history of it. So it's boom. I love the books. Anything more you want to give us before you go out? No, thanks for acknowledging that though, Chris, when I pitched this series of books to BK, to the publisher, I said, I don't have time to read these 300-page books anymore.

There was a time in my life when I did, but I don't think anybody else does either. So I'm proposing a series of small books on single topics that run around 30,000 to 35,000 words each, a book that you could literally read on a Saturday and Sunday, a day and a half, depending on how fast you read, and that you can easily skim, where all the chapter headings actually describe the chapters, and they're all on the table of contents, super accessible. And I think we've done that. I'm really pleased with the product, with how these books have turned out.

And this one, I think, is one of the very most important, because this is life and death stuff, Chris. It definitely is. And people need to quit voting against their own better interests. and this one I think is one of the very most important because this is life and death stuff, Chris. It definitely is, and people need to quit voting against their own better interests. They need to wake up and quit watching Fox News and stuff. So thank you for being on the show, Tom. Give us your plugs again so people can find you on the interwebs. Oh, it's my pleasure, Chris.

TomHarvin.com gets you all the stuff on our radio show, and then five days a week I write a newsletter or a column that typically becomes my first rant in my radio show. No ads. We don't sell our list or anything. It's totally free. And that's at HartmanReport.com. There you go. There you go. Guys, check it out. It's coming out September 7th, The Hidden History of American Healthcare. Why sickness bankrupts you and makes others insanely rich. Part of the Tom Hartman Hidden History Series. So be sure to of American Healthcare, Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, part of the Tom Hartman Hidden History Series. So be sure to check that out. Thanks, Manish, for tuning in.

Thanks for Tom for being on the show. Thank you very much, Tom. We certainly appreciate it. Thanks, Chris. It's been an honor and a pleasure. There you guys go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss. See the video version of this, goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss, and all the different places we are on the interwebs.

Be good to each other. Stay tuned, and we'll see you guys next time. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader,

and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold. But the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom-made numbered book plates that are going to be

autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out, or order the book wherever fine books are sold.