Okay, we're back live here in SiliconANGLE.tv's theCUBE. Here live in Cassandra Summit in Silicon Valley, I'm here with Yuri Cohen. Yuri, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. And Jeff Kelly, my co-host for this event. Jeff, how you feeling so far? I'm enjoying it. So we talked to a lot of the alpha geeks, obviously, from data stacks as well as Netflix. Adrian was on, he was cool, he was talking about his demo. But I want to get your perspective. What's your take of the event? And share with the folks your take of what's happening here. And then what is happening that they might not know about? Share something original. Okay, so my take, I came here, I was expecting it to be like a medium to small event. And then this morning there were about 800, close to 900 participants and it's mind blowing, right?  So it's pretty amazed. And I'm telling Jeff, it's not just the amount of participants, it's actually the focus and the level of conversation that we're having with people, very professional. I mean, people are coming and they are either engineers or engineering manager and looking for solutions and they know their stuff. So it's, we're very happy with it. I mean, it's been really nice. It's great. Yeah, I noticed the same thing. It's not a lot of kind of novices coming here. Let's learn a little bit about the technology. It's struck me as how kind of mature this ecosystem is, compared to those people who are two years old. So why don't you tell us a little bit about the spaces, kind of what you guys do and then we can kind of go into some of the details of what you guys are doing around the Sondra and show up again. So we've been around for quite some time now. We have two products, the first one is called ZAC. It's called Extreme Application Platform. And start off as a distributed data memory database, kind of similar to what you see today with Cassandra and other NoSQL databases. We took it from a bit of a different perspective. It's all in memory, it's transactional. It's mostly targeted at transaction processing. So our primary adopters were financial services, organizations needed transactions and not lose any message. So it's a bit different for the requirements of NoSQL today. That's one thing we do. And the other thing we do is a product called Cloudify, which is designed to take complex, multi-tier, big data apps to any cloud environment. And managing big data apps is not very easy in terms of multiple components. And Cassandra is just one piece, usually has a dupe and MapReduce on top of that. And your web containers and your SQL databases and caching layers, so providing a way to manage all that consistently and auto-scale it on any cloud environment that's something we do with Cloudify. What do you think about the big trend around solid-state memory and disks, et cetera? Obviously, it's changed the game we heard from Adrian. It's obviously, Cassandra's a nice use case if anyone who has solid-state in their architecture. Obviously, that's where the market's going. How is it affecting cloud in particular? Cloud is now segmented on and with public clouds, all the big rage, OpenStack is a big proponent of creating this whole public cloud Amazon we know about, Adrian talked extensively about that. But also, the enterprises have on-premise data centers. And then you got this hybrid cloud. So private cloud, hybrid cloud, public cloud. Sort of what's happening in this space because now you're seeing things span across clouds. What's going on in those areas right now? So I think it really depends on the type of organization you are and actually one of the stuff I talked about in my session here is how cloud portability is not really kind of something unique or even if you're starting a small company, you need to be thinking about it today because cases like Zynga and Mixpanel, these guys have started off with small setups and then went to public cloud and then realized that for the scale they're at, they probably better off go back to at least some of their capacity to private clouds. So I think what we're going to see moving forward is a mix of both, where as part of the workloads, maybe the most sensitive ones where you need the low latency are going to be focused on private clouds and you're going to see public clouds for most of the rest of the stuff. What do you think companies like Box.net that have been got huge valuations out there?  I mean, is that cloud? It's consumer cloud, yeah, it's consumer cloud. Well, they claim they're doing enterprise. Yeah, but they're not focused on enterprise building applications, they're not a platform, they're really a consumer product and one of their customers is consumers within enterprises, so I'm not sure about the valuations, I'm up to them. Costs to a billion dollars, but then again. It's pretty amazing, I can't tell if it's just quite a lot. You can say it, go ahead, you can say it, it's hyped up. John's trying, he's trying to extract. No, I mean, they're putting a lot of PR saying they're enterprise grade and we cover oxygen cloud and we cover bots and drop bots, but then I think they're consumer applications and they're consumer applications in the cloud are great business models, you got a freemium, you're free and then you got a freemium, you kind of go freemium. Okay, cool, when you start doing enterprise level cloud you have to, there's nuances there that are table stakes, security, data portability and certain data center kind of features that need to be in place and it's very difficult. Can you expand on that conversation because that's what people are trying to figure out. What does enterprise cloud mean? Enterprise ready, enterprise cloud. We know there's a lot of shadow IT going on with public cloud, so that's okay, I think that's just competition. Developers want to play and there's tools in the public cloud and they play out there, but when they prototype it, they got to get it to production. So that's been the big theme here. Talk about that, getting something in production. So I've been shadow, do some shadow IT, now I've got to bring it back to the enterprise and make that ready. So I think in terms of the way you would do that, public cloud versus private cloud is not really all that different. These are the same concerns like you mentioned, security and portability and all these concerns. What I can say is that when you're building an enterprise solution, you can't neglect a lot of the things that people neglect when they go to public cloud. You have to start for accounting for availability and one of the SLAs and not everyone on Netflix but they can actually build a huge infrastructure around that to be able to cope with all those failures and data center crashes and all that stuff. So if you want to do enterprise in the cloud, that means that you're probably going to have to design your applications for that. So let me ask you about virtualization. Obviously, virtualization has been a game changer. We saw VMware evolve from a company that had a hypervisor, you had Citrix out there and then Xanon Citrix. Then VMware is now moving with that data center focus or enterprise now with Cloud Foundry. So it's pretty clear what they're doing, right? Pat Kelsinger's in charge. VMware is going to be a whole different company than they were. But is it viable with virtualization that it's totally game changing? Also, another, we saw that Nasir was bought out by VMware for a billion dollars or something. They got an amazing amount. Crazy. Again, they were the VMware for networking. That was the quote, VMware of networking. Is there a cloud virtualization play like that where virtualization actually changes the clouds that you guys are doing? And is it that easy to just bucket something into a bucket saying you guys are doing virtualization with Cloud? Explain what that means, virtualization in the cloud. So we're actually doing, I would say something a bit different. We're allowing you, if you have an application, right? If it's a legacy application and it's very complicated, we're going to allow you to take the same application and put it on your data center or on a virtualized environment or on a public cloud without changing a single line of code. Obviously, it's very important for two purposes. One is when you're trying to decide where you want to deploy it, where you want to put this application, you want to be able to test things easily. You want to be able to deploy the same application on multiple environments and see what works best for you. Even across multiple public clouds. That's one thing.  What do you think about the database? So obviously, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service has been a great enabler for new things. Enterprises are realizing now they could do more things now with Solid State. So internally, inside the firewall or on-premise, Solid State has offered up great new provisioning opportunities with having storage better, making caching layers. So some coolness going on there. You got some coolness going on in the cloud. What's happening in between there? If you're a developer, can you connect the dots there? I mean, is there a way to create a cloud infrastructure? Because if I'm an enterprise customer, I say I want to do the cloud. I want to build my own cloud. How do they do that? So, first of all, Solid State is, I think it's a game changer. Especially with the kind of stuff that Amazon is doing, and we've seen it. If you attended Adrian's talk this morning, it's really about doing a lot more with the same resources. And traditionally what happened in cloud is two things regarding IO and what happens with just writing stuff to the disk on the cloud. So one thing is that it's very slow. And if you compare a server in the cloud and a non-virtualized server in your own data center, sometimes it would be 10-fold faster. Just one server. Just doing IO on that server. So it's one thing the SSD is doing and the stuff that Amazon is doing now. The other thing is the fluctuations that you would experience with traditional cloud, with IO and traditional cloud. So up until now, before you had this SSD, you could get a decent performance on average, but then you would get those spikes that something that would take you 30 seconds would suddenly take you 20 minutes. And for no apparent reason. So you have to accommodate for that. And you can just browse through the Netflix blog and see how they do that, like writing stuff for three or four locations just to accommodate for that. So it's definitely a game changer on that respect. If you're building a private cloud, I would say SSD is definitely something you need to take into account. If you're an application developer, it really changes the way you can think of things. So we traditionally come from the in-memory database or in-memory caching area. And SSD gives you a lot more flexibility in the transition between memory to disk. So you can have this kind of middle tier here that is almost as fast as in-memory, but then it's much more robust, it's much more scalable, it can store much more data. So Yuri, tell me what you think about the different horses on the track, as we say. Mongo, Cassandra, HBase, you've got SimpleDB, you've got DynamoDB, the Amazon one. Would I miss anyone?  Right, yeah.  So break them down for us. Well, Mongo seems to be the most vocal about against Cassandra. It seems to be that kind of developer crowd. HBase has emerged, just had Duke HDFS. But is there the benefits? I mean, Cassandra, also we're at Cassandra Summit, so we want to compare and contrast Cassandra versus some of those other ones. Is there a winning use case for each one? That's what we're trying to explore. Yeah, definitely. So Mongo, I would say the biggest benefit there is usability. So it's so easy to pick up and get started with that most developers would default on that database. And I can understand why, and you've got drivers for every language. So no matter what you're doing, Ruby, JavaScript, Java, there's a solution for you there. Cassandra traditionally was a really good database as far as the distribution models, as far as the clustering goes. It's much more, in my opinion, it's a more robust implementation than Mongo. It's- And what ways? Distributed database or? In the way that, first of all, the algorithms there are more kind of pure it's easier to set up because everything is symmetric. So if you want to set up Mongo in a cluster, you have a bunch of roles and components there. And if you want to set up Cassandra, just kick start a few processes and they kind of figure out the roles between themselves. Such easier to do with Cassandra. Where Cassandra fell short up until recently is the usability part, the API part. Two years ago, it was very hard to get started with. It's still harder than Mongo, but things are improving. And that's one of the stuff I'm seeing here is this great improvement in usability and the stuff that Netflix is doing, for example, around APIs. So he took the Cassandra API and they created their own kind of layer on top of that, which makes things a lot simpler to work with. We have CQL, which is similar to SQL and allowing users that are familiar with SQL to kind of work with Cassandra without picking up on all the unique terminology, so to speak. So I'm very, very optimistic about where that's going. HBase traditionally was, it has its use cases. Obviously Facebook is a big proponent of that. They've done a lot of work around improving the code base from the last 12 or even 18 months. Their inbox and all that functionality is now based on HBase. HBase itself, it's a bit more difficult to set up than Mongo and Cassandra because it sits on top of Hadoop and then you need Hadoop infrastructure to begin with and only then HBase. So in terms of setup, I would say it's the most complicated industry, but both HBase and Cassandra are very good at write scalability and just accommodating for application that massive write requirements. I wonder if we could talk about analytics a little bit. So certainly Cassandra had known for really supporting real time transactional applications, big data applications, but then when it comes to the analytics part, we talked a little bit earlier with Billy Bosworth, CEO, we're talking about partnering with some of the BI players to do some analytics. I know Gigaspaces recently rolled out some capabilities to kind of build your own real time, big data analytics platform. So big data analytics is hard enough when you add the real time component. Now you're really talking about some of the challenges technically. Talk a little bit about both the technical challenge of building that kind of platform and really the use cases. What does it allow you? What kind of insights does it allow you to get? You can't get from a more traditional batch type of analytics. Sure, so in terms of, I mean, the driver for that, right? Let's start with that. So everyone are, you know, Hadoop is very big and you see a lot of companies behind it and a lot of use cases, a lot of tools. So I'd say the ecosystem is pretty mature and robust, but Hadoop is offline, okay? So it's very good that you can push a lot of data very quickly to Hadoop, but then if you want to process that, that can take anywhere from minutes to hours. And that's, in many use cases, just not feasible, right? If you're building, if you're Twitter for example and you're building analytics dashboard and if you're Facebook and you have those widgets on people's website, you want to give them the insights as fast as you can because that means money. If I'm publishing some content on my website and I'm seeing that it's not getting the traction I want, it's getting negative traction. I want to change it very fast. I want to be able to do that in real time. It doesn't help me that Hadoop can give me the insights a day or two days later. So we're seeing a lot of real-time analytics tools being created. So Twitter Storm is another framework that people are talking about, kind of the online version of Hadoop. What'd you hear about that? Do you play with it at all? Yeah, yeah, definitely. So it's, I like it a lot. I mean, it's very good for what it does. I think it's going to pick up a bit more. It's kind of the real-time version of Hadoop. So instead of pushing data to HDFS and then kind of processing it and offline, basically you process the data as it comes in. Kind of passes through that real-time analytics layer and then you can store that data in Hadoop and do later analytics to touch what you're doing. Yeah, but you want to do the real-time stuff as it comes in because that's when it matters, okay? So simple analytics, you can do obviously pattern analysis and I don't know, fraud detection, stuff like that, but what you can do is you can actually count things, do some simple queries, all the stuff, for example, if you want to build a web analytics dashboard, that's very relevant. If you want to, for example, a lot of our customers have been doing that for years with financial services, like processing trades and antics and stuff like that, do you want to do it online? So that's the kind of stuff that you can do with real-time. So we did around, we had this in-memory data grid platform, so we built some eventing capabilities around that to be able to handle these kind of workloads and these kind of scenarios. Interesting, so kind of, is it an alert-based system whereas where you detect anomalies and then you kind of push that information to either to another application or process or to a human to take some kind of action? Is that kind of? So it's up to you, it's more of a development platform that allows you to distribute the processing of those events across multiple nodes to store information in-memory in a reliable fashion, that to do it transactionally and basically give you all the framework that you need to be able to build such applications. So what are the challenges around doing that kind of work, real-time analytics in a big data environment versus complex event processing, CEP engines have been around for a while and as you mentioned, financial services firms have been doing that kind of thing with smaller data volumes and maybe not quite as high velocity. So what are some of the challenges, technically speaking, when it comes to applying CEP-like technology, real-time streaming analytics to big data? So it's about the sheer scale of things, right? So if you have enough capacity in one server to process events, then you can do it much more easily. Because you have a single source of information that's co-located with where you do the processing, you don't need to think about how you distribute the data, how it's load balanced across those servers, what kind of data you would need to access from each node, because if you're distributing and then you're processing an event and then you realize as you're processing this event that you need data from another server or from a bunch of other servers, it's not going to scale. So there's a lot more thinking about what's your use case, what's the most important piece of your application that you want to scale versus traditional frameworks. That's a challenge with those kinds of platforms. So Yuri, we're going to end this segment, but I wanted to ask you one last time, share with us what you're working on, your framework, what your company's doing, get a quick plug-in and what you're doing here at the event. Okay, so I mentioned the two products that we have. So we'll start with Cloudify. So with Cloudify, what we've done, Cloudify itself is, like I said, it's a framework for pushing big data apps to the cloud. One of the key components that we're seeing in the market, our prospects and customers are demanding for its Cassandra. So we've built a very nice, we call it recipe for Cassandra, which allows you to embed a Cassandra tier within your big data application, push it to any cloud environment, scale it dynamically and basically accommodate for all the management aspects of what it takes to manage a Cassandra on the cloud. And as far as the other platform is concerned, we've built an offering where you can actually put this in-memory event processing grid in front of Cassandra and process stuff as it comes in real-time transactionally and then push it to Cassandra as a back-end and then do the long-term stuff over Cassandra, store information with almost unlimited capacity, which you can't do within memory. Awesome. Here we come with VP of products at Gigaspaces. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. We'll be right back with our next guest after this break. Thanks a lot. Thank you.


Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nicaraguan peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with Steve Roberts and Rebecca Boggs Roberts about Steve's new book, Kauke, A Life Well-Lived. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Thursday, November 4th, at 1 p.m., Philip Bigler, the author of Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, will share the history of the tomb, which marks its 100th anniversary this year, and is America's most cherished and revered military shrine. And on Tuesday, November 16th, at 1 p.m., Gail Jessup White, a black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemming's family, will discuss her new book, Reclamation, which explores her journey to understand her heritage. Historian Annette Gordon-Reed will join the author in conversation. To many people, Kauke Roberts is most well known as a journalist, but she was also an advocate, best-selling author and historian. She had a long and devoted relationship with the National Archives. She worked tirelessly on behalf of our education and outreach activities. I'm so grateful to have had the privilege of working with her for 10 years and calling her friend. She spoke at many of our public events, including July 4th celebrations, and played a leading role in our commemoration of the Centennial of the 19th Amendment. Whenever Kauke and I walked through the rotunda of the National Archives, talk would turn to the murals there that depict the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The author of two books about women who helped shape our nation, Kauke always pointed out that there were no women depicted. On the night she would have received the National Archives Foundation's Records of Achievement Award in 2019. Images of Abigail Adams, Dolly Madison, Martha Washington, and Eliza Hamilton were projected onto the Constitution mural and tribute to her dedication to telling the stories of her nation's founding mothers. Kauke had an amazing career in public life, and in Steve Roberts' new book, we also learned about the generosity and inspirational qualities she demonstrated in her private life. Thank you, Steve, for giving us the chance to get to know Kauke a little better. Kauke Roberts was a long-time member of the National Archives Foundation. I'm pleased to introduce historian and journalist and Chair Emeritus of the National Archives Foundation, Alulia Bundles, who will share some thoughts about Kauke and the National Archives Foundation. Thank you, David. We at the National Archives Foundation are proud to partner with you to advance the work of the National Archives. Kauke Roberts, our board member, of course, was very committed to that work. She set the bar for all of us, with her deep knowledge of Congress and the workings of the federal government, with her personal diplomacy, her honesty, her ability to cut through the, shall we say, fog, her wicked critique of the high and mighty, her compassion for those who needed an advocate. She was grounded and unpretentious. She also could rise to the occasion to spar with the best of them. We miss her mightily, and we are very glad that Steve Roberts, the love of her life, is with us this evening to share his stories. Thank you, and now I will pass it back to the Archivist of the United States, who will introduce tonight's speakers. Thanks, Alulia. Steve Roberts has been a journalist for more than 50 years, including 25 years with The New York Times. Since 1991, he has taught journalism and politics at George Washington University, while serving as the Chief Political Analyst for ABC Radio and writing a syndicated newspaper column. Rebecca Boggs Roberts is curator of programming for the Planet Word Museum in Washington, D.C. She's the author of Suffragists in Washington, D.C., and co-author of the Suffragists Playbook. Now let's hear from Steve Roberts and Rebecca Boggs Roberts. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you all so much for having us. We are delighted to be here. We both really care about the archives. Mom was always involved in the archives. I'm involved now, and I think Dad has grown to appreciate the archives and the records they keep as he has started to do his own research for this book and others. Dad, you need to unmute yourself, but when you do that, congratulations on the book. You need to unmute yourself. Hi. Now can you get me? Yeah. All right, good. All right. So congratulations on the book. It came out yesterday, right? That's right. And you're right about my appreciation for the archives. And I'm a journalist. I don't do a lot of historic research, but pouring through the archives and your mother's archives, including many appearances you made right here for the National Archives was enormously helpful. You know, the book is lovely, and it tells all these stories. And for us in the family, it's so nice to have. What do you hope people outside the family get from it? Why did you write the book? Well, two reasons. You know, after mom died, I did a ulogy at the funeral, and I just told stories about her. And you remember a lot of laughter echoing through the cathedral and a lot of tears at the same time. And people seemed hungry for stories about her. And I just wanted to write more stories. But there was another factor too. The public cokey was pretty well known. We had known for many years, all of us in the family. You know, I traveled with her. People come up to her all the time and say, you're so important to me. You're such a role model. There were so many young women and girls throughout the country who heard her on radio, watched her on TV and said, I could be that smart. I could be that strong. And I could be me. I don't have to accept that, you know, what other people think of me and predict what other men think of me.  But there was the private cokey too. The cokey lived the gospel. She was a very devout Catholic. She lived the admonition to be a good Christian every day. And she did something good for somebody else, almost every day, acts as generosity, friendship, charity. She was the first person that everybody's maternity wore. She was a baby freak, as you will know. She was the first person to offer to go with a friend who was facing a diagnosis of breast cancer, to go to their doctor's appointment. She was the first person to show up at the funerals of people's relatives. She just decided that every single day she was going to take time to be a good friend. And the public doesn't know that cokey. And, you know, not everybody can be a TV star. Everybody can be a good person. Everybody can learn something from the way she lived their life. And that's really the most important message of the book. Yeah. You know, I mean, I think that the idea that part of her public persona was very much herself. You know, her laugh and her sense of humor and her ability to skew her pomposity. And so I, all the time I get people say like, I feel like I knew your mom, right? I woke up with her on Monday mornings or she felt like someone I would want to be best friends with. Yeah. And because she was herself on air, she was that person off air too. I mean, maybe a little bit weirder. But, you know, this completely normal approachable person, including her name, right? I love that story of in early days at NPR when a foolish, foolish editor thought that cokey was a little too silly and preppy. Yes. Right. And it was Frank Mankiewicz. He's the head of NPR and he thought it was too cutesy, you know, not serious. We're serious people here at NPR. And of course, mom was so mischievous and devilish. And she said, okay, pal. And signed off one night as Mary, Martha, Kareen, Morrison, Claiborne, Boggs, Roberts, which is in fact her full name. Finally, Frank said, I give up. I surrender. Cokey will be. And it served her in very good stead because she was the only one. And she wasn't quite like Lady Gaga or Madonna, but people knew her just as cokey. And it was so approachable, although when she became a grandmother, of course, you had your three children, your brother had three. And people would say, well, what's your grandmother's name going to be? And she would say, Cokey. One cutesy nickname is quite enough. But, you know, when you talk about approachability, just that happened earlier today, I was doing a radio show in Southern California about the book. And a woman calls in and says, I always trusted Cokey. And yeah, there were a lot of guys who trusted her, a lot of guys who thought she was smart, a lot of guys who thought she was sexy. But it was women in particular. And she knew that she understood this. And when she started doing TV and radio, women would say, countless women would say, finally, someone who asked the questions, I would like it. Finally, someone who says what I'm thinking. Finally, someone who has lived the life I've lived and has that experience in that perspective. And I think that a big part of the influence she had was women finally saying, it's not just old white guys up there, someone who looks like me, thinks like me, talks like me.  And people would stop her in the Safeway and say, Cokey Roberts in the Safeway doing your own shopping and say, who else is going to do my shop? Would you like to do it for me? She would but you know, she was she was down to earth that way. So you all met as teenagers in college. How much of the sort of fundamental Cokey did you recognize them? Yeah, I was one year younger than your twin boys are now. Just think about that. Yeah. And I knew, honestly, I did know pretty early that I was married to this extraordinary dating, knowing this extraordinary long before we're married.  I've met anybody who, you know, was was that knowledgeable and that self confident.  And I knew from the beginning that I was married. Why didn't you ask her on a second day? Well, I asked the second day wasn't the third day. It's true.  In fact, you know, she asked me out. She was a performer, a singer like you were in college. And she asked me to the junior show at Wellesley fall of 1962. And I went and we had this really lavish date afterwards at the Howard Johnson's.  And and then I stopped calling. And fortunately, about six months later, we were both coming to Washington for a student political. We had met at the National Student Association that summer between our sophomore junior years. And I we were both due to come back to Washington. And we're going to share the same car. We're riding in the same car just accidentally, really. And I remember approaching the car and seeing her through the window in the backseat.  And that weekend, we drove together to Washington. And we'll end up staying up all night talking in the house, you know, where you grew up, where you moved in when you were seven. And she was eight when she moved into it, you were seven when you moved into it. And that was the first time we could see a way forward. We were an interface couple. She was Catholic, I was Jewish. We're being told by everybody who cared about us, our parents, our friends, it was never going to work. But that weekend, we sort of talked our way through and started seeing dimly our way forward. And really, we were together from that weekend. What did you see? What was the way forward? It's a good question. The way forward was, it was addition and subtraction. The subtraction was take away the labels, take away the prejudices, take away the stereotypes, take away the assumptions that people were trying to impose on us. To say, just because you are of different religions, you can't possibly make it work. As we talked, as we thought, as we cried, as we struggled, not just that night, but for the next couple of years, we came to realize that the most important things were not theology and not the labels and not the differences. It was what we shared. It turns out that we were both deeply committed to our own traditions. She was a deeply faithful Catholic. I was not a practicing Jew, but I was deeply loyal from a tribal point of view. My grandfather's both been refugees, basically political and religious refugees from Eastern Europe. History and tribe had stamped me as Jewish. And I was deeply devoted to that tradition. And in some ways, the fact that we both were deeply, both so old-fashioned and both devoted tradition. This is the middle of the 60s when everybody was challenging every tradition. And yet we looked at each other and said, you too, you still believe, you still are loyal to where you came from and who your people are and what your traditions are. But it took us a long time to figure out that we shared so much more than the doctrinal differences. And eventually we figured it out. Figured it out, wrote a book about it, continued to counsel interfaith couples. I mean, you get asked about it weekly, don't you? I do. And I just the other day at one of these book events, someone said to me, a rabbi actually asked the question, I have so many of my parishioners who have children and interfaith marriages, what would you advise them? And I, similar to what I just said, that focus on the person. Look, I was not marrying a cardinal. I was not marrying a priest. I was not marrying a nun. I was marrying one gorgeous, brilliant, loving woman. And it took years for my parents to understand this, but your mother and your grandmother, when they put on a charm offensives, it was not a lot of defenses. And they decided that instead of chance, yeah, they were going to convince my father, who was very reluctant, or my father wrote me a five page single page spingles. And it took years explaining to me exactly why parents understand this, but your mother and your grandmother said, I will, when they put on a charm offensives, it was not a lot of difference in my own household. I understood years later, he was saying he feared that he would always be a stranger. But as we spent so much time just trying to convince him that, you know, I was, I was not making a mistake.  I'm in love and you're not. And eventually he fell in love. Eventually he came to raise your mother at one point he said to me, you know, Steven, it would be so much easier to oppose this match. If it wasn't so obvious, she's the perfect girl for you. And I knew it was going to be okay. And so you got married in 1966. That was the circus, 1500 guests and a priest and a rabbi and the president of the United States. Welcome to the family. It's an intimate family gathering. And you moved to New York because you were on the city desk of the New York Times. Well, mom, well, years right. Yeah. And mom was already a TV star in a way. I mean, she was hosting her own show on the local NBC station. A lot of people don't realize this, but her first job at a college, she's worked for a small TV production company. And the woman who read it was the first of many TV producers to realize that the camera loved Koki Bugs. And they started this small show. It's called Meeting of the Minds. It was on NBC. In fact, in here in Washington, it was the lead in to meet the press. And mom was the host.  And it was a measure of life in 1966, 67 that we just assumed that my job would be more important. And we didn't even have a conversation. Maybe the fact that she was actually running her own TV show, maybe that was important. She moves to New York and she runs into a wall of discrimination. Now, this is a woman who wrote five national bestselling books. And she was told flat out by Newsweek magazine and many other people, we do not hire women to be writers. I think after those five bestsellers, she proved them wrong. Just saying, right? But at the time who's deeply depressing, and she tells this wonderful story, just to illustrate how deeply depressed she was and how frustrated how she could barely, how she could barely wake up and get to just get dressed.  And she had a wedding present that she wanted to return. And so she goes to this store on the east side of Manhattan called Yorg Jensen, a big fancy store. And as she told the story, she couldn't quite have the energy to get dressed. So she put on her coat over her nightgown and goes to the crosstown and goes to the store and she's standing there online. And to her horror realizes that the guy of the couple who is giving us the wedding present she's returning is standing on the line in front of her. Now, eight million people in New York City and this guy is standing in front of her. And she thinks, but it's the guy, he has no clue what the present is. So maybe I'm safe. And he gets to the front of the line, there's some question about what he's returning. He calls his wife says, Hey, guess who I ran into? His wife starts laughing, says put Coke on the phone. She says, you know, because she knew exactly what the present was that she what are the odds, right? So our friend Terry says to her, says to mom, no hard feelings here. He was a New York Times reporter. He was about to cover Governor Rockefeller swearing in in his new term. He says, come with me to the Rockefeller swearing. It's actually not far from here in Manhattan. So mom in her nightgown says, okay, Terry, and they show up and it's all of these hot TV lights and everybody's saying, ma'am, can we take your coat? I'm from the south. I'm always cold. I'll keep my coat. So she stays through the whole ceremony and then Terry is being very nice to her and says, well, how about I'll take you to lunch just to show no harm. And at that point, mom says, no, no, no, Terry, I'm going home. I'm not really sure. But you know, it was it was hard on her and and she was genuinely depressed. And it wasn't really till 11 years later, when we returned to Washington that she became a full time journalist. But that wasn't, I mean, she didn't take a big break between them, right? You all moved to LA, she produced a children's television show. We as a family together moved to Athens, Greece. And that's when she first kind of became a breaking news journalist. Tell that's true. She decided that, you know, she couldn't produce children shows in Greece. So she decided to try to hook up with one of the networks and had this agreement with CBS that maybe they'd use the phrase as a stringer as a part time reporter. They already had a reporter in Athens, but maybe they'd find out a little work for it. But they're only three months. And there's a coup in the island of Cyprus, part of my territory. And so every journalist from that part of the world flies to Cyprus about a day or two after the coup. And as a result of the coup back in Athens, the military government, there's a military government that starts crumbling. Now that was a much bigger story. You know, Greece's NATO country, the decline of the military government, and she was virtually the only English language reporter left back in Athens. So CBS cables her and says the Turks have, and then as a result of the Cyprus coup, the Turks invade Cyprus. And so that morning, two days after I left, she gets a cable from CBS saying the Turks have invaded Cyprus. Can you file a radio spot in 30 minutes?  She figures out how to do it because, you know, she was smart. And then the Greek government falls. And she's covering this whole story because CBS can't get anybody into the country because the airports have all closed. Now, I'm totally out of touch with it because I'm on the island of Cyprus. I'm on their fire. There's a war going on. If I could occasionally get a phone line, I had to talk to my editors in New York. I come home back eight days later to find I'm married to a veteran foreign correspondent. When I had left, she had not done a radio report in her life. Eight days later, she had been filing continuously. So, yes, she, that was really her first breakthrough.  Three and a half, yeah. And then moved back to Washington, which was not mom's choice, it must be said. For someone who lobbied her children very hard to come back to Washington, she resented that move herself. But it worked with you. Well, it was because for a lot of reasons. This was where she had grown up. This is where she was handling Lindy Boggs' daughter. She was not as independent. Even though she had had that success with CBS, she was very nervous about entering the job market here in Washington. I mean, she was 33, turning 34 years old. She'd never been a full-time working journalist in her life. And we, she loved living abroad. And she kept saying, you know, I'm a really good foreign correspondent's wife. Let's go. And she was always more adventurous than I was. And New York Times wanted to send us to Bangkok. And she was all for it. And I said, I'm tired. I've been traveling for nine years and I got a chance to join the Washington Bureau. So we came home. And my first day here in Washington, I go to the Washington Bureau of the Times. I look around. I'm given a desk and there's a young woman sitting at the next desk. I don't recognize her. I say, hi, I'm Steve Roberts. She says, my name's Judy Miller. I said, I don't recognize your violin. Where did you use to work? She said, National Public Radio. And I said, what's that? Because it had been in existence for six years, but we had been abroad for four of those years. And she tells me and I said, wait, that's the perfect place for my wife to work. I just know it. What do I do? She's crying herself to sleep and Bethesda every night. And Judy says, call my friend Nina Totenberg, who of course, who many of our folks tuning in tonight know exactly who Nina Totenberg was then and is today, the Supreme Court correspondent of NPR. I never met her.  I know who Cookie is. And bring me her resume tomorrow. And so I hurry over there the next day, meeting her on the street corner outside of the NPR. And back, this was the first time I had seen the old girls network at work where women at NPR had the ability and the impulse to help each other in the way men had always done this for each other. And Nina takes her resume and immediately starts pushing it through the NPR system. Linda Wertheimer is there and says, wait, I know who that is. I went to Wellesley with her. And the two of them put the hard press on and that's when NPR hired her. Do you think NPR was distinctive in its hiring of women in those days? Absolutely. Without a question. Now, Nina always said, because they paid so little. And that certainly was part of it. But there were two other reasons. You know, I worked three blocks away at the New York Times Bureau. There have been white male White House correspondence with the New York Times for 100 years. It was a deeply encrusted prejudice and assumption about what a White House correspondent looks like and sounds like. And it was a white guy, right? But for NPR, they were new. They were nimble. They could reinvent themselves in different ways. And so they didn't have anything like the same prejudices. But there's another interesting reason which the producer at NPR told me that, you know, on TV, it's easy to distinguish genders and it's easy to distinguish voices. But on radio, if you have a bunch of male voices, it's much harder if there's a conversation for the audience to know who was who. So that by putting women on the panels and in the conversations, people had a much better idea of the identity of each person who was talking. And so there was just from a production point of view, there was also that impulse to add women at NPR. And, you know, I mean, I feel like those years, the 80s, mainly in 90s, NPR was growing in scope and loyalty and reach and mom was falling in love with the medium of radio. And I think that kind of grew up together in some ways, you know? Sure. You know, she fell in love with radio as did you at another point in your life. She always loved radio because she felt it was a great storytellers medium and a great writers medium. TV, it's a cliche, but it's true. You're so overwhelmed by the visuals, by the images.  And they'd say, yeah, I like your tie or you need a haircut or, you know, and if someone says, I heard you on radio, they quote back to you big chunks of what you said. There's an ability to make so much more of a sophisticated complex argument. First of all, you have more time, right? If you're on TV, you get a minute and a half. A spot on NPR will be three, four, five, six minutes. But also it's the nature of radio. There's only one sensory input. People listen to the words and as mom always said, they create the pictures in their head. And that's one of the reasons why she stayed loyal to NPR her whole life, even after she moved her base to ABC. She loved being on NPR every Monday morning, because she knew that she could make arguments and analysis there that she couldn't really even do on TV. You know, I think she was always a really good writer, but I think it makes you a better writer too, because you can't have a lot of dependent clauses. You can't lose your antecedent, right? Because they lose the thread if they can't go back a sentence and check. And so when mom started writing books and trying to bring history alive in this very vivid and approachable way, I think that radio training came through at all of those books. Absolutely, because she was such a clear writer and also such a passionate writer. There's a clear arc that runs through almost everything she did back and that was supporting, promoting, encouraging women in one form or another. So there's a direct line between that line of young women outside her office door seeking counsel and encouragement and her focus on women in history. But one of the reasons why she was so sensitive to that and interested in it, because she grew up with it, your grandmother, her mother, was the modern incarnation of Dolly Madison. Mom even made that comparison when she said, you know, my mother reminds me of Dolly Madison or the other way around because she saw right in front of her all these enormously talented and powerful and important women in Washington, whose influence derived from being the counselors and advisors of their husbands. Whether it was Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, Pauline Gore, the wife of a senator, the mother of a senator and vice president, she saw them as her mother's pals and she saw the influence that they had. And that made her, you know, Lady Bird Johnson was the modern equivalent of Abigail Halips in the same way. But of course, what happened to your grandmother when your grandfather Hale, Kokie's dad, was tragically killed in a plane crash, 1972. Suddenly, your grandmother runs for his seat and moves from backstage to center stage. And there's a wonderful story in the book where she calls her lifelong friend Lady Bird Johnson and says, Bird, I've just decided I'm going to run the Hale seat and I want you to know that before you read about the paper. And Mrs. Johnson says, why darling, Lindy, that's a wonderful idea. But how are you going to do it without a wife? So mom's father, my grandfather Hale Boggs was a member of Congress. My grandmother, Lindy Boggs was a member of Congress. My uncle Tommy Boggs, mom's brother ran for Congress and lost. My aunt Barbara Sigmund, Barbara Boggs Sigmund lost for Congress, but was mayor, elected mayor of the town of Princeton. Do you think mom ever regretted not running for office? Yes. And she was, she described herself as semi-guilty. I think, yeah, whatever that means. I think if she'd married someone else, I mean, she always said I became a journalist because I married one. And she said, you know, Stephen was going to be a journalist from the time he was 12, which is true. And that once we were committed to each other, politics was off the table. I couldn't run for office. I was married to a journalist. I think she always felt that journalism quite rightly was in fact a former public service. But it wasn't the kind of direct advocacy that she always really wanted to do. Now, she never did run for office, never became a political partisan. But she made a very conscious decision at one point in her life to retire from the anchor desk at ABC. She was running the Sunday show for six years. She left that show for a lot of reasons. Maybe the single biggest reason was that she really did want to be an advocate for causes she cared about. And again, this bright line that runs everything she did. The woman who wrote these bestselling books about women in history also wanted to be an advocate for women and children. And she joined the board of a wonderful organization called Save the Children. She traveled the world advocating for women and children, learning about their programs, spokesmen for their causes. And she was always particularly committed to the notion of keeping girls in school in developing countries. She felt this was always the key if they put off getting married. They developed a marketable skill. They were independent people. They had an economic basis. Just everything, everything good flowed from keeping girls in school. And I remember once, you know, she went to Malawi to open a school that saved the children and helped finance.  You know, her friend Diane Sawyer, former ABC star and also a graduate of Wellesley said, once said, I court her in the book. I think Koki believed women would save the planet. And that's right. She did believe that. Of course, did it entirely in her own way. Actually, it's one of my favorite memories. I ended up going to Vietnam with mom on a Save the Children trip. It was, I finished grad school and was about to start a new job and had this sort of unusual time when I could go halfway around the world. And we took these terrifying vans up and up and up and up almost to the Laotian border to a Hamong village where there was a Save the Children funded school. And you just can't imagine how remote this was. And it was really muddy. So you're on a steep hill in the middle of nowhere in ankle deep mud. And the rest of us are all in, you know, athleisure and sensible shoes. Mom's in a linen pencil skirt and little strappy sandals. And is picking her way through the mud of this Hamong village. And absolutely, you know, joining in the classes and having her picture taken with all the girls and just couldn't be more enthusiastic or more on task. But she was not going to wear ugly clothes while she did. And I think that was the time when, because she was so muddy, the Carolyn Miles who was on the trip tells the story that she started jumping up and down to get the mud off her shoe. And the little kids thought this is about the funniest thing they've ever seen this crazy American lady jumping up and down. So she kept doing it. She kept jumping up and down. The kids kept laughing. But yeah, some of my favorite images and there are a couple of them in the book of her and her affection and her joy at being there with these kids is just so tangible. It just comes right through. Yeah. You know, we've talked a lot about successes and happy times and the joy that mom was so capable of and capable of spreading. But her life was certainly not without hardship. Her father died young and in a very difficult, hard way. He was lost in a plane crash. Her very beloved sister was the age I am now when she died. And you were there for all of that. Tell us a little bit about mom weathering losses.  And I don't think she ever fully got over it. She was the baby. She was his favorite. I think she deeply mourned the fact that, you know, you were two years old. Your brother was four when your grandfather died and you have no memory of him. And that pained her always that not only that you wouldn't know him, but he wouldn't know you. And I also think that I thought a lot about this. I think that she had pained her not out of pride so much, but I think he she knew that he would be really proud of her, you know, because he spent his life devoted to the US Congress. He was a member of Congress for 30 years. He was the majority leader when he was killed. He probably would have been speaker if he had lived. And she revered the Congress. She was a correspondent there, but it was more than just reporting about Congress. She was on the, you know, not only on the National Archives Board, but on the Congressional Historical Society. She she was deeply devoted to the respecting the institution. You know, she and I covered Congress together for eight most of eight years from 78 to 86. I was at the New York Times then and she was an NPR and would commute together would have lunch together cover the same stories. And when we would leave at night in those old days, you could, if you were a reporter, you could park your car right on the ground for the Capitol and we would go to our car and she never failed to do this. She'd look up at the dump and if it was night, it would be lit up. And she would just say, isn't that beautiful? And she didn't just mean it was beautiful because of the site. It was because of what it symbolized. So I think she really deeply regretted it more than the fact. And then her father's death, it was so, as you say, it was so odd because he was lost in a plane crash and the body was never found. The plane was never found. Wreckage disappeared. We think it probably sank into a Prince William sound, but she had this, she would say this, and it's quoted, I quoted in the book, now she had this absolutely strange impulse that maybe someday he'd come back. And of course we lived in the house that she grew up in. So she said for years, I couldn't bear to change the wallpaper in the kitchen because I had this fear that Paw Paw, as we called them, Paw Paw would come back somehow. And if the wallpaper was different in the kitchen, you'd think they were strangers living in the house. I mean, that's borderline weird, right?   So it was very emotional. Her sister, some ways it was even more, I mean, if her sister was only 51, as they say, say how exactly well you are now. You of course know the story about very well, you were an undergraduate at Princeton when Barbara was the mayor of Princeton and you helped nurse her through her last year. She died during your junior year in college.  And the night Barbara died, she held her in her arms after she died and sang to her in the middle of the night till dawn broke. And she had to deal with the doings of death. But she and I don't think she ever got over her sister's death either. And she once wrote about this, didn't do it very often, but she once wrote about this in a little note she wrote for a Wellesley book, you know, that classes publish, you know, we're members of the class will write little memories. And she writes in this, in this book, it never occurred to me that I wouldn't grow older as my sister. And I always thought I always pictured us sitting side by side on these rocking chairs and some porch somewhere. And she said that image of Barbara's empty chair, you know, haunts me. And it was more than that. But she said, you know, as the younger sister, I always went to Barbara, if I had a question, what really happened? She said, Barbara was part of my memory. She was part of my identity. And when you lose someone like that, you lose part of yourself, you lose part of your own memory, you don't have anybody to go to, to ask questions. And she and Barbara shared a view of the world, they had very little tolerance for male pomposity, including in their husbands, by the way. But also kind of strange things people did. And mom tells a story about one day reading a story about elderly women in their fifties, trying to get pregnant through IVF. And she just thought that was the kookiest thing she could imagine. And she literally picks up the phone to call her sister, to have a laugh over it. And as she's dialing her number, realizes she's not there. So, yes, her life was definitely marred by those two tragic losses. I will say, and I don't know if it was because of those losses, but mom was really good at death. That's a strange thing to say. But, you know, not only did she advocate for doctors, you know, not being, not acting like gods and helping people through a good death and, you know, making sure that her mother, who was 97, was able to be home and surrounded by everyone she loved. But also, she is why, mom is why I don't let a friend go to the funeral home to pick out a casket alone. She was always the one who managed the details of things, told people what they needed to know, made sure those awful, awful errands were okay, and that she was by someone's side. She had a couple of things that, I mean, she was an incredibly devoted friend. But there were a couple of things that she would always make sure she was there for, babies, oncology, and funerals. Absolutely. And her dear friend, Nina Totenberg, tells a story. It's in the book. Nina married a much older man, Floyd Haskell, the former US senator, who's 26 years older than Nina. She always knew the odds were that she would have to bury him. And he struggled through a number of illnesses. Mom went with Nina to all of the appointments with the doctors, all through Floyd's illnesses. He had fallen, hit his head. And she was the one, she always said, when you're in those situations, you don't, you're not thinking clearly. You need someone with you to take notes and ask questions. And then Floyd died, and he died in Maine. And they had to ship his body back to Washington with enormously complex and traumatic different circumstances. And Nina said, direct quote, cokey managed Floyd's death, and she just took it over. And then finally, after helping you get him buried at Arlington and all these things that she did, it came to picking out a casket. And Nina tells the story, tells in the book, that they're looking at these caskets. And Nina's this white faced, obsequious character, the funeral home, is trying to sell her a more expensive version. And she says to her, Ms. Totenberg, your husband was a very tall man. So he'd be more comfortable in this casket. And Nina and cokey look at each other and burst out laughing. Now, you got to be, as Nina said, you got to be a pretty darn good friend to share a laugh over your husband's casket, but that's exactly what they did. And she was there, she was there for funerals. Here's another story that a friend of hers tells, an African American woman's brother died. And cokey had been a counselor to this young woman taking care of a child who was not her own. And trying to work, trying to go through college, cokey was there every step of the way counseling her. And then Sonya's brother dies. And there's a funeral at a big downtown black church in Washington. Sonya tells the, describes the scene that middle of the day in in walks, cokey, she's the only white person in the church. She walks down the aisle, everybody's looking at her. She walks down the aisle, comes to the family in the front and embraces Sonya's mother. Sonya said it was like my two moms embracing and she was never afraid of it. She was never, she never flinched from those tragic moments because she knew that people needed someone at their side of those moments. We've got a couple of questions from the audience. Somebody asks, where did cokey get all that joy and all that selflessness? Good question. I try and to answer that question in the book. A couple of the answers, one was her faith. She lived the gospel. You'd trace her generosity of spirit directly to her religious training by the nuns of the sacred heart. And she believed what she was told as a young girl in catechism class. Every person is fashioned in the image and likeness of God. I'm not going to get the quote right, but she believed that and she lived it. I think her faith was very important. And the nuns hammered home to her the adage to whom much is given, much is expected. And she absolutely embraced that, lived it and practiced it. And I think some of it came from her mother, who was very much the same way, who set a great role model for her. Cokey always said, mothers of my mother's generation were often guilt inculcators. My mom was the great guilt eraser. She always said, you're going to be okay. You know, you can do all of these things. I think also another very important element was her sense of continuity with women. She was this fascinating combination of radical and traditionalist at the same time. No one fought harder for women's rights. No one promoted women more ferociously at ABC or anywhere ever she was. And yet she always said, no matter what we do, no matter how far we come, no matter how visible and celebrated we are and how successful professionally, we cannot as women forget who we really are and what our historic missions have always been to be the nurturers and the caretakers and the mothers. And she had a great sense of that continuity. And I think that was part of it too, that she wanted women to understand that you could be both, you could be both an enormous professional success, but don't forget what the essence, the basic nature we have as women. And in terms of that joy, I would also add, first of all, she had a wonderful group of friends. She was a very good friend, but also, you know, absorbed the support and, you know, camaraderie of wonderful, wonderful friends. And also a wicked sense of humor, right? So I think that that ability to see the strange and absurd in almost every situation keeps that true selflessness and decency and desire to be good from tipping on into sort of deadly earnest. Because while she was doing all of that, she was also poking fun of herself and everybody else. Oh, absolutely. And you, mainly. And me, mainly. Absolutely. You know, we did a book about our interfaith marriage many years ago. And we originally thought that we would write it in one voice and we couldn't do it because we disagreed so much. And so we wound up doing it in dialogue form and we would tape, you know, talking with tape recorder. And I would tell stories like, Steven, that's not how it happened. And we kept that all in the book because it was so typical of her. And she did not rest easily with male pomposity, as you say, particularly her husbands. And I learned that. And one of the moments I learned this, we had written, she had written many years before, because she joyfully, even as a devout Catholic joyfully embraced my Jewish heritage.  And so Koki decided she was going to write a Haggadah. This is the book that the Passover service is written in the prayers, the stories, the symbols are all contained in this book. And that's how you conduct the service by using this book. So she decided, of course, she was going to be serious about this. She was going to write her own Passover Haggadah because none of the ones she sampled were good. Thousands of years of tradition, unacceptable. Thousands of years. She was going to write her own. And because she wanted one that was crafted with an eye toward our interface marriage. Anyway, she writes one. We use it in the family, as you well know, for many, many years, sanctified by wine stains and food stains. And then it was just on minimum graph paper. And then people after 25 years republished it. But still, it was just in the family. And some editors, Jewish Book World, hear about this and say, well, you should really publish this as a book. So great, we decide that's a good idea. So we start, we start editing. And I start reading it. And I think, oh, this could use some freshening. And she's furious.  And she says, you cannot change a word. This is sacred text. I said, I did not stay happily married to your mother for 53 years, ignoring her at those moments of extreme adamancy. So yes, darling, whatever you say, dear, then she starts editing. And I said, we're way toky. You said I couldn't change a word. And she said, that's right, Steven. I said, you couldn't change a word. But because I wrote it, I can change anything I want. Very typical. And we came to a detente, and we both edited it. But, you know, she laid down the law. But with a smoke. And that laugh back, that laugh, I can tell you how many people I talked to said that the best part about listening to her on television was her laugh. And there was one writer who really understood her pretty well in magazines, the profile said, watching Koki on television, you think fun is about to break out somewhere. Someone in the audience has asked, what was Koki's favorite job? Mother. I mean, without question, right? Without question. I mean, grandmother, but yeah. Maybe grandmother. Absolutely. She says, you know, from the time, I can tell you, from the, no, maybe 10, 15 minutes into our marriage, she started loving for maybe, took a couple of years.  And I think she would say that you asked her that question. That's exactly the same answer she would give. I will say you asked about regrets. And, you know, when she died, her oldest grandchild was 18.  And I think her deepest regret as the illness took hold and as she could see her mortality becoming more and more tangible was not being able to see the grandkids grow up.  So when she would travel with him, you know this, she took one of your boys to Maine once and he's never gotten over it.  The whole thing so wacky. He was like 14 and she called him up one day and said, I have to be in Maine for 24 hours, come with me, which was classic grandma Koki, right? Who knows where she was going or why she had to be in Maine for 24 hours, but she was going to be bored without company. So she called up teenage grandson and set up on a plane with me and he, you know, trailed her to whatever events and made all the polite noises that, you know, the reception she had to attend. And then it was time to go home. She bought a box of live lobsters on his lap and told him it was his job to take care of her. She loved traveling with the grandkids. And, you know, she took your every one of them to the White House Christmas party one year or another and took your youngest Roland to Maine again to Maine. And where you got to meet President Bush 41, just a month or two before he died. So she loved showing them off, but she loved just being with them. You know, her youngest grandchild, you know, your niece, Cecilia, when we were at the beach altogether or a beach house in South Carolina, they had a deal where they would watch the big red ball and they would both get up really early and watch the sun come up out of the ocean together, the big red ball. You know, she found some connection with these one of them separately. Yeah. No, I don't think there's any risk that they won't remember her well and funny. We are almost out of time, Dad, but I want to just give you one chance to sort of say what you hope people will take from this book and encourage them to buy it. I will encourage them to buy it on your behalf. Well, it's really very simple. As I said earlier, not everybody can be the public cokey. Not everybody can be famous. Not everybody can be recognized in the grocery store in the airport. Everybody can be a good person. Everybody can learn something from her. And one of her friends said to me, one of her best friends, you know, I think about cokey, I'm not going to get one of those bracelets that says WWJD. What would Jesus do? I'm going to get one that says WWCD. What would cokey do? In fact, there's a hashtag now, WWCD, that I know several of my former students are circulating. And the story that ends the book, as I was writing this book about a year after mom died, my younger brother Glenn died. And I knew he was fading and phone rang at six o'clock in the morning was my sister-in-law saying we lost him overnight. But now you can go back to bed. And I sat there literally with the phone in my hand saying to myself, what would cokey do? And I knew I got up, got dressed and started driving to my brother's house, which is about 15 minutes away. I called my sister. And I tell her that I'm going over there now because that's what cokey would want me to do. And that's what cokey would have done. And she said, Stephen, you have it wrong. Cokey would have been there last night sleeping on Glenn's couch. So later in the day, I talked to your brother and I tell him this story and he says, dad, you're both wrong. Mom would have been there the last three nights sleeping on the couch. Well, what would cokey do? If you just read this book and ask that question, you'll learn something wonderful. I agree. Thank you for writing it. Thank you for joining me for the last hour. And thank you everyone in the audience. And thank you to the Archives for having us.


Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for that introduction. I would say the entire team was responsible. I cannot be credited for the success. For the next few minutes, I'm going to share my thoughts on the new influencer paradigm in India. And how is it helping brands in building their brands? How is this influencer helping in building their brands? It's interesting. It's an interesting slide. We all know Mr. Amit Vandana Bachchan. I think he needs no introduction here. He has been the biggest influencer in the past and even now he comes to be. But what is more important to see here is that who is Mr. Amit Vandana? He is a new age influencer influencing large masses today with his content in the digital media. Now back in time, in the 1990s, things were dramatically different. There were very few people influencing the masses and those few people just came from either bottom or sports. You'd agree. And brands had only these few faces amongst themselves and they recycled it over and over again. Let's have a look at the typical endorsement brands used to do in that era. I think this person needs no introduction again. Mr. Sethan Tungungur. He is referred to as the god of cricket. And every brand wanted a piece of Mr. Sethan Tungungur. And I would like to cite an instance here. I was influenced by one of his brands that he was endorsing, which was MRF. I was a cricket enthusiast at Maxal and I wanted to play cricket and do batting. And I wanted an MRF bat just because Sachin uses that bat to play like Sachin. That was the power of the influencer he had on me. And he was endorsing too many bats in that era. And that led to a pitfall. Sometimes brands compromise on their reach with the ability to store Italian when it is in loss of so many brands. Then came the new digital revolution. And this digital revolution I think is a boon for all of our marketeers and influencers. It's interesting to notice here that today one third of the population owns a smartphone. And by 2020 this is going to double, almost double. I think I just mentioned one third of the population have a smartphone. They actually carry knowledge and entertainment in our hearts today. With the emergence of the digital age, there came a lot of digital platforms were born. And these digital platforms, the interesting thing to notice here is that the amount of reach that they have garnered over this decade and the amount of time people are spending on this platform. It's really encouraging for us, marketeers and influencers. Let's just tap into this golden wine here. This is the digital era, the digital revolution. I just talked about the celebrity influencers which have been there in the past. They have been there, they have currently now also, they will be there in the future. But what is more important to see here is the two other levels of influencers that have added with the digital revolution. They are the macro influencers and the micro influencers. The macro influencers are basically area domain, they are expert in the area domains. And the micro influencers are people like you and I. And I would just take an example here. Whenever anybody wants to buy a smartphone or a TV or a tablet here, they are, are we just buying it by seeing an advertisement? I think the answer to that is no. We are seeing, we are following, we are seeing the blogs of the area expert to get that technical knowledge. And we are also talking to our peers, our subordinates and people at large who understand their experiences about the product and then making a final decision on what we need to buy. And the other two levels that I was just talking about, the micro and the micro influencers, what they lend is a lot more authenticity. And you would agree with me there and that authenticity is really important. Today, if you want to buy a product, we from online, say for example online, the biggest e-market place, one of the biggest players in the e-market place is Amazon. And Amazon, if you want to buy a product at Amazon, we just don't see the product entirely. We first see the ratings of the product and we also see the product reviews and then make a decision on buying it. Similar is the case with Zulacan. Today, we don't see the menu first. We see the restaurant first and the ratings of the restaurant before ordering food. With the emergence of the digital era, the second part is the engagement is a very, very integral part. Awareness has always been there, it will be there. It is a large part of our market deals to have their awareness to our brands. So what is equally important today is the engagement. And engaging with your consumers directly and transparently, that is very, very important. Present to you a case study on pulse. How pulse, how influencers were an integral part of the success of the brand pulse. We at TS Group, we have a diversifiedglomerate with interest in many business areas. We have a legacy of nine decades and our core confidence lies in understanding the Indian flavors and pregnancies. For the last nine decades, we are understanding consumer taste preferences. Brand influencers have been very integral part as I mentioned today, but they were equally important in the earlier era. But what has changed? The change that has happened is that in the earlier times, the brand when it was getting, the time taken for the brand to get successful was much more than what it is having today. Because of the influence of digital era, digital cage and because we can communicate to our consumers now and a large base of consumers to get in one go. So I talked about pulse, I just, we have a video here and this is how pulse was, when we launched pulse, how we got the response for pulse. Connection to your heart, come on, use it. So it's kind of a circuit? Yeah, for everybody else, our favorite shop around the city, everybody loves it. That's like a potato? Yeah, little bit. Yeah, little bit of that. So that sour, that sweet, that softness, that's insane, that's sweet, it's that holy sugar. That's like a cure, that's a cure. Cure, yeah. Come on, I'll do it. You like that? Most of you would know, he is the Michelin Star chef, one of the world's best chefs. He was recommending pulse, that's the power of the company. Since we had a lot of fans and these fans were advocates. They started recommending their product in their social circles, to their peers, to their friends and family. This was majorly happening online, but things were also offline. Our retailers, trade partners, everybody was an influencer for pulse. So we have talked about the influencers. There's also a side to the influencers is success, when a brand is successful, there's a lot of counterfeits that come. And with pulse, we had to face the same phase. We had a lot of counterfeits, more than 50 counterfeits available. And some of them looked exactly like pulse, just slight intervention in the name. And the problem that happened was that a lot of consumers, by mistake at the product, counterfeit product, and they had a bad experience. And then when they had a bad experience, they started to write about it on the social handle. Very simple now. And the interesting thing you have to notice is that in their social space, we had these huge amount of influencers which had already faced this problem. They came out first, before we came out to the product at large. They came out first and educated those people. That is the power of influence. Media, a very big influence again. Please have a look. It's a 6,000 crore market. I'm talking about sweet candy. And a third of that is owned by hard-boiled candy which is approximately 2,100 crores. The DS Group's pulse has achieved a sales of 100 crores in 8 months. Take a look. Your punctual role went a lot of brands at the time. And Pulse was sold as a premium of 50% to its MRP. But I'm not going to take any chances with Pulse and take the entire chart back home. But they can't keep pace with the demand production. I haven't tried it, but I know everybody in our Bombay office is addicted to Pulse candy. I think most of the officers would have had the same. It is very important to have a great product for all of this to happen. We also had a large amount of impressions in this social media space. We are still influencing the masters. But slightly differently, please have a look. I have always lived a good life. You are a very good man. You are a very good man. I'm not a good man. Pulse is good when you are busy. Look at Pulse, he is a good man. He is a good man. He is a very good man. What else do you want? Pulse. If Pulse doesn't eat, he doesn't eat anything. He doesn't eat anything. He is a good man. He is a good man. But he teaches you all Pulse candy. Pulse candy. What is your name? Pulse Zero. Pulse Zero. Pulse Zero. No sugar, no salt. This is the first time in all of this. He is called Pulse Zero. No sugar, no salt. We are the number one heart point candy for the last three consecutive years. And all of this was possible because I can influence the play of major, major role in the success story of a brand. Thank you very much.