today i have this amazing opportunity as you see i'm not in the studio i'm on the bus and this bus has been to sixty cities and seventy eight days and i have an opportunity to be talking to an amazing person my friend here craig and craig has when he was forty years old he retired he sold his i t company very successful he was an amazing football player in the hall of fame quarterback and never wanted kids happily married and playing golf and his life changed one day when he met someone who told him that he had adopted two haitian baby craig went to haiti and his life started taking another track so i'm really excited to be on the bus and i'm excited to talk to this amazing human being who as i tell you my shows about is an ordinary person who's done extraordinary things so welcome to the show with thank you and tell us you're playing golf and you meet someone and and why why go to haiti why have all this change what had happened at that moment for you well i think the conversation showed up at the right time for was wonderful for a number of years but then ultimately this whole notion of there has to be more to life than just golfing skiing abruptly showed up and you know so i spent a number of years just questioning the artist better of my worth what what was my life going to be like what was i going to do and what kind of contribution if any could i make and was this question was this questioning of yourself happening prior to your trip to haiti yeah i would say you know i just you know  the whole thing after a few years of return i wasn't i don't i think once i packed it in them stopped working i wasn't depressed but i would say i was just chronically ill and so then this one conversation which you know was so unpredictable for me i mean i here i was this desk pounding i'm never going to be a dad guy and so this issue of adoption and child welfare and in even the connection wife adopted two kids from haiti i thought i was fascinated with the idea of haiti representing somewhat of the opposite of this luxurious lifestyle i was living this idea of they had adopted the kids in second generation parenting their they had raised their three boys that they produced biologically and they've gone off on to their way and then at fifty one if it's one years of age he and his wife adopted two children from haiti and i happen to be fifty one and i i went home that night say ambition to build a successful company what i didn't want to do is have this situation where i was in a meeting at six o'clock and i knew my kid had a had a game and i'm looking at my watch kind of and so it was yes i had nothing to do with lik not it was really a matter of just doing one thing or the other yes that's right and so and then once that fang went away the door was open at least examine that as a possibility but i still wasn't something that i felt was just going to be part of my life or my lifestyle and we had surrendered to the idea that we were going to be parents and we were on our way on this lifestyle that we thought we really wanted but that lifestyle to billy just had some real  to wait for us to think forward and look ahead and and so i think when that part of your life goes away and you don't have this the same edition any longer and what starts to become more important is the memory of being ambitious and so i think that we you know at least i came to terms with being able to have something where i was making some sort of contribution or i you know i think she discounted it as just a wild idea that probably would never betray realize and ultimately i really wanted to go to haiti in the first place just because i thought i'd be a better man for the experience and just seeing the opposite see in the poorest my childhood had looked like and i had you know two fabulous parents and i had you know a bicycle and i had a little league and i had ice cream and i had you know i had you know what you when you think about childhood i had all those components and when i saw these kids just fighting to survive every day it was actually give us a visual but it looks like well these kids they had this match shoes they didn't have much to there's kids are they are existing they're not playing they're not growing they're not learning anything yeah really but del delhi you know and again i've read relatively compromise diet relative to what you and i think i mean you know maybe a a day or rice and beans in the morning and they seem really hungry they did see progress they seemed hungry but more importantly they seemed really neglected and and what they don't get is they they don't get this affection that kids need i mean love grows kids and what we saw when i went in there was how these kids really just wanted some sort of human contact that it's not that the caregivers in these orphanages  don't care they do care but they're unsettling well they're outnumbered and so as they're outnumbered what happening is that they go from crisis to crisis to crisis and then at the end of the day they're so washed out they don't have time to give these kids the love that they really need held just for just for a minute just for middle of the holy make me feel like i matter make me feel like i'm special so you're in this amazing situation it's mine sounds like it's life altering it was for me i mean it was it was such an awakening it was it just at home what i learned was kids are kids whether they're born in houston or haiti our kids didn't weren't any different than any of the other kids that i had come to know you know they could see them having their breakthroughs and they had their good days and it was just it was so inspiring to see their human potential even early on start to emerge and grow and blossom things that they naturally gravitated to you know our oldest is very athletic and how readily we would just play catch and our daughter is a great dancer and how she would love to start dancing to music from the radio or from the things she saw on television in our little one was so you know he was an infant at the time but you could still see their human potential and what i had so that you had this idea that kids are kids irrespective of where they're born or where they came from but then the other thing i got to learn is that the the system of international adoption is highly inefficient at best case scenario that we are i guess you know i could see some of our inefficiencies and why these why things were taking so long with every day banners in the developmental cycle of help there is a day that they never get back and so what i learned as an entrepreneurial businessman was we had this dichotomy we had an inefficient system and a broken system that was creating  necessary delays for kids to get to their family first and then the second thing was this broken in and dysfunctional system was actually turning good people away who wanted to adopt a child well because they would be they would take a look at this bureaucratic obstacle course and they would see that it cost twenty eight thousand dollars and it took three years and first of all those two data points alone were practical barriers for many families who would like to adopt and they couldn't so what happened was after our kids came home my golf buddies were so astounded that i had done this that we had one gone out and adopted the street kids they they said you got to write a book about this experience and so i did i wrote a book and i just and  i wrote of the to inspire others to consider the possibility of adopting for if i could be doing it and really be enjoying it you know maybe others would find the same path where we were going to the book is called both ends burning which in that context was a phrase my mother used to use when she was overwhelmed and here i was a rookie parent at the age of fifty one you know and we were really just all the learning together in the end the book is really about how five people grew untransformed haven't thought about it but now that you mention it maybe we would like to adopt it and then they could they were too old or too young or too something in there were all these restrictions and barriers and good people with a sincere interest in taking one of these children and offering them t love and guidance and encouragement that a family can give these kids we were turned away and it just didn't add up to me and so you know there comes a time in your life when you know you encounter something that that's wrong and at that moment you have a choice you either have to find a way to rationalize and mix up that wrong which we frequently do or you just say well you know what i'm not sure i can and i'm going to try to deal with this and so i think something to do with entrepreneurial  bit sure yeah i think so when you have your own company really have to deal with problems that come up and you have to move well yeah i mean the i think the term entrepreneur is just code for can do and you know but when i look at this thing i really you know at first i was just curious and then i went out on a fact finding mission and that curiosity ultimately led me to become concerned and the more i learned those concerns led me to be outraged because so many children were being denied the very basic human right of a family i felt well i now know too much i want to go and try to do something about it and so i looked at well what how could i make an impact and this is a it appears to be a complex problem it's a global problem but at its simplest form it's getting kids out of orphanages and into families in a safe transparent and efficient manner that's that that's what's at the heart of this and let's get these kids out of orphanages and get them where they should be which is a family and because so i took that basic simple simple framework and then said how could we make a great impact in a short period of time and what i realized based on some research we had done was that we had an awareness problem eight out of ten americans believe international adoption is on the rise when it's in freefall decline and because of this lack of awareness we've allowed political apathy to persist the real heart of this problem is these kids who are tucked away in these orphanages are not one of our priorities were we're comfortable enough with letting them grow up in these were for the ages and it's it's just not on our political radar screen or on our agenda it needs to be part of our not only our political agenda but as a society these kids lives have to matter they have to because once they become a priority i really believe we can so they don't have a  it's convenient and easy to forget about these kids because they're tucked away off in these far corners of the world but meanwhile there's plenty of families all over the world who would like to adopt these kids today but can't so we really like that how can we disrupt the quo and really begin to challenge the current expectation and start looking for better ways and the first thing was to to reestablish a new set of expectations through awareness and again most people don't know about this issue it's not something we're talking about and well you but you know writing a book you do by yourself and on your own terms making the movie is really a function of creating a great team to make that movie and i was lucky enough to to surround this project with really talented dedicated and really talented and dedicated artists and and you know we really didn't have much of a play and we just i knew i wanted a feature length documentary i knew i wanted  theatres because i wanted to create a conversation and ultimately two years and two months later we did have a finished product that does tell i think a good story it's  very authentic it's very genuine it's very emotional and audiences really seem to rally around this film i mean their reaction to the film as we've gone across the country is twofold one i had no idea and then two how can i help so we're building a social movement because social movements are great agents of change for society and the reason they're there so necessary as an agent of change is because political systems and politicians don't do anything proactively they only react and who they react to is the squeaky wheel so once the film came out and we felt we did have something that was worthy of somebody you know paying money for than going and sitting in the theater we decided to come up with us good old fashioned grassroots bus tour that we started in washington d c in february twenty eighth and we've toured the country for the last few months we've gone to community to community to community really just to us to show the film to engage in a conversation about the but they're they're not created out of thin air it takes people like you and i to to form movements and they have life cycles and they grow and they emerge and they either succeed or they fail that what we would like everybody to do is go to both ends earning dot or washington you know so when the way that the two are concludes and by the way we would like everyone you know we've only been in sixty cities so we would like everyone who hasn't been out to this theater just to cease the stock we think it's it's a new piece of information it's a great educational tool it's also it's also a film that has won two awards of the three festivals that we've been in so we're really proud of it so you can go to stock documentary dot com and share not only watch the film but then once you do watch the film if you're moved the way many people are then share it with your friends you put this diary stock documentary dot com this well what stuck does is a put a face on the issue and to build a movement you have to be able to mobilize a population and to mobilize a population you have to move people from being sympathetic to passionate there's a lot of evidence there's a lot of bar charts and graphs and there's numbers about this crisis in adoption but that just perfect the way we're going to create passion is if we can get as many people as possible to see stuck it humanizes this issue these are real kids with real lives with real consequences and and it and  of reality a merges once you watch the film and so we i just i mean the most important thing everybody could do is go to stock documentary dot com watch the film and then share it with your friends and then over time what this new information so rights but what about this right that was child to get a family how would we do it on their own and i think as a society i think we need to come together and really start to energetically defend this right of a child to belong to family and there's a lot of pathways there's a lot of things we need to be considering and working on family preservation family reunification of the best a good option programs foster care programs and internationally but they all should be when we come back we're going to meet a family who has also gone through this personally inside the theater it's been a real pleasure yeah but closure and i'm really excited that this is the kind of man that this remember if you feel and at the end of the this movie is not a fabrication it's just the worst situation this is a really really what's really going on this is really what's going on in a lot of different countries for different reasons and what are people who are watching this need to know and what can they do what can they do well there's a petition going out tonight that they can sign for the such are fam please are going back to washington on tuesday we're holding a press conference about the russian ban on adoptions and they can call their congressmen or their senators and say we care about this issue we care about every child everywhere deserves a family every child has a right to a family every child has a right subsampling let's talk about human rights let's not talk about they deserve it they have a right they have a right and they have no voice and we have to be their voice and it's about it's about these children finding families not parents finding children right yes so both ends burning you both deserve they deserve each other son deserves you you seem like a really lovely people and you know what you deserve your son i much the current international adoption process takes nearly three years and cost around twenty eight thousand dollars and the most frustrating part is that all of these kids have families all these kids have guns in the u s and they have for years i  raise the world to stop paying attention and it's failing we thought we were going to be one of those families stuck forever and i mean to three days our situation changed completely we made the request to the state department to get those three thousand children out of haiti all the children in the middle of an adoption process were able to come home we saw irksome being carried out so we just pray and we don't need  millions of children in need thousands dying every day why don't we do something about it we want each of the senators to go if we shut down international adoptions what we are saying to the children is that they don't matter the right to a family