Making the World a Better Place

Well, the obvious answer is to prevent future fatalities and serious injuries.

I guess the almost automatic reason for that is you don't people die and when you start thinking about that you then think about you know they've got a wife or they've got a husband or they've got kids or people who love them and it would certainly be a horrible day for them if something bad happened to them so if you can prevent that from happening it's really changing the way um changing their life from then on the life that wouldn't have been is now has a future and i didn't really think about that the question you're asking i never heard your story before that one and i never really thought about that well i guess i could tell two stories uh the first one's about amy She was a lifeguard, and I went to go watch her be a lifeguard.

That's the only reason I went there.

It was a swimming lake.

And out in the middle of the lake, they had a little floating platform you could swim out to.

And it was deep.

You know, you couldn't just walk out there.

And so I'm sitting there, and I'm watching Amy, and she's watching dozens of people out swimming in the lake.

And...

I don't remember whether I watched her spot the person or whether I spotted the person and looked at Amy, but there was this guy who had a kid on his back, and he was trying to swim out to this platform with a kid on his back.

And the kid kept climbing higher and higher on his back, and pretty soon he had his head underwater, and he couldn't get his head above the water.

And he and the kid disappeared, and Amy, like Baywatch, jumps off this big platform and and dives into the water with her little trailing floaty thing behind her and swims out, pulls these two people to the surface, gets them on the floaty thing and hauls them back into shore.

And I'm like, wow, she just saved two people's lives.

And so after the day, I was telling her at dinner that night or sometime, wow, this is really amazing.

and I just think you're just like a hero.

And she was like, oh, Dad, it's no big deal.

I do things like that every day.

And I just thought it was so amazing that there's people who do things that prevent fatalities, prevent, you know, this drowning in this case, and they don't even realize what they're doing.

Second one was for me, and that was I was at a Taproot Summit, and this was a long time ago.

This was probably back in the late 90s, maybe early 2000s, and this guy comes to me at the Summit, and he goes, oh, Mark, I really have to thank you.

Thank you for creating Taproot.

Thank you for training us all.

It really is amazing.

I don't know if you know this, but I come from a small refinery, and we were having fatalities.

We'd have one or two fatalities every year.