From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. This is theCUBE virtual. I'm your host, John Furrier with theCUBE. theCUBE, you're normally there in person this year. It's all virtual. This is theCUBE virtual. We're doing the remote interviews and we're bringing in commentary and discussion around the themes of re-invent. And this today is public sector, Worldwide Public Sector Day. And the theme from Theresa Carlson, who heads up the entire team is to think big and look at the data. And I wanted to bring in a special CUBE alumni and special guest, Alan Cohen, who's a partner at Data Collective Venture Capital or DCVC, which we've known for many, many years. Founders Matt Oko and Zachary Bogue who started the firm. Over at about 10 years ago, we're on the really the big data wave and have grown into a really big firm. Thought big data, data collective, big ideas. That's the whole purpose of your firm, Alan. You're now a partner. Retired, I mean, a venture capitalist over at Data Collective. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. And great to see you as well, John. Thanks for being so honest this morning. I love the joke about being retired as the VC game. It's not a retirement for you. You guys made, you made some investments. Data Collective has a unique philosophy because you guys invest in essentially moonshots or big ideas, hard problems. And if I look at what's going on with Amazon, specifically in the public sector, genome sequencing now available in what they call the open data registry. You've got healthcare expanding huge, you got huge demand in education, real societal benefits, cyber security contested in space, more contention and congestion in space. There's a lot of really hard science problems that are going on that the cloud and AI are enabling. You're investing in entrepreneurs that are trying to solve these problems. What's your view of the big ideas? What are people missing? Well, I don't know if they're missing, but I think what I'd say, John, is that we're starting to see a shift. So if you look at the last, I don't know, forever, 40, 50 years in the IT and the tech industry, we took a lot of atoms. We built networks and data warehouses and server farms. And we kind of created software with it. So we took atoms and we turned them into bits. Now we're seeing things move in the other direction where we're taking bits, software, artificial intelligence, massive amount of compute power, which you can get from companies like AWS. And now we're creating better atoms. That means better medicines and vaccines. We're an investor in a company called Abcelera, which is the therapeutic treatment that J&J has taken to market. People are actually spaces and commercial business. If it's not a science fiction novel, we're investors in planet labs and rocket labs and propellous space. So people can see right down to you sitting on your terrace of your backyard from a satellite that was launched by a private company without any government money. You talked about gene sequencing, folding of proteins. So I think the big ideas are we can look at some of the world's most intractable issues and problems and we can go after them and turn them into commercial opportunities. And we wouldn't have been able to do that before without the advent of big data and obviously the processing capabilities and now artificial intelligence that are available from things like AWS. So it's kind of payback from the physical world to the physical world from the virtual world. Capella Space was featured in the keynote by Theresa Carlson. Great to tie that in, great tie in there. But this is the kind of hard problems and I want to get your take because entrepreneurs, it reminds me of the old days where you didn't go back to the dot-com when that bubble was going on and then you got the different cycles and the different waves. The consumer always got the best kind of valuations and got the most attention. And now B2B is hot. You got the enterprises super hot, mainly because of Amazon. They didn't let you into the DoorDash IPO obviously this morning. DoorDash IPO, I didn't get a phone call for friends and family and one of their top customers, they started Palo Alto. We know them. Instacart, DoorDash. These are companies that are getting massive information. Airbnb. Zoom. The post-pandemic is coming. It's going to be a hybrid world. I think there's clear recognition that there's some economic values or digital being digitally enabled and using cloud and AI for efficiencies and velocity of new things. But it's going to get back to the real world. What's here? There's still hard problems out there. I mean, all the valuations are going to be food delivery. Well, yeah, there's always hard problems but what's different now and from a perspective of venture and investors is that you can go after really hard problems with venture scale level of investments. Traditionally, you think about these things as like a division of a company like J&J or General Electric or some very massive global corporation and because of the capabilities that are available in the computing world as well as kind of great scientific research and we fund more PhDs probably than any other type of background for founders. They can go after these things. They can create, we have a company called Pivot Bio and I think I've spoken to you about them in the past, John. They created a series of microbes that actually do a process called nitrogen fixation. So it attaches the nitrogen to the roots of corn, sorghum and weed. So you don't have to use chemical fertilizer. Well, those microbes were all created through an enormous amount of machine learning and then where did that machine learning come from? What does that mean? That means climate change. That means more profitable farmers. That means water and air management. Well, major issues in our society where if we didn't have the computing capabilities we have today, we wouldn't have been able to do that. We clearly would have not been able to do that as a venture level of investments to get it started. So I think what's missing for a lot of people is a paucity of imagination and you actually have to take these intractable problems and say, how can I solve them? And then tear it apart to its actual molecules just a little inside joke, right? And then move that through. And this means that you have to be able to invest and work on things. These companies don't happen in two or three years or five years. They take sometimes seven, 10, 15 years. So it's life work for people. But we're seeing that everywhere. I mean, Rocket Lab, a company of ours out of New Zealand and now out of DC which actually launched the last Capella Space satellites. They print their rocket engines with a 3D printer, a metal printer. So think about that. How did all that come to bear? And it started as a venture scale style of investment. So Peter Beck, the founder of that company, had a dream to basically launch a rocket once a year, once a month, once a week and eventually to once a day. So he's effectively creating a huge, huge upswing in the ability of people to commercialize space. And then what does space do? It gives you better observability on the planet not just from a security point of view but from a weather and a commerce point of view. So all kinds of other things that looked like they were very difficult to go after now start to become enabled. Yeah, I love your investment in Capella Space because I think that speaks volumes. And one of the things that the founder was talking about was getting the data down is the hard part. He's up there now, you can see everything but now I got to get the data down because say the wildfires in California or whether things happening around the globe. Now that you have the observation space you got to get the data down there. This is the huge scale challenge. Well, let me give you something that's also, so we are in a fairly difficult time in this country right because of the COVID virus. We are going to maybe as quickly as next week start to deliver even though not as many as we'd like vaccines and therapeutics into this virus situation literally in a year. How did all these things, obviously one of the worst public health crisis of our lifetimes and maybe of the past century, how did that happen? How did all that, well, the ability to use computing power in assistance in laboratory, in development of pharmaceutical and therapeutics is a huge change. So something that is an intractable problem because traditional methods of creating vaccines to take anywhere from three to seven years, we would have a much worse public health crisis. I'm not saying that this one is over, right? We're in a really difficult situation but our ability to start to address it, the worst public health crisis in our lifetime is being addressed because the ability of people to apply technology to accelerate the ability to create vaccines. That's a great point. Absolutely amazing. Well, let's just pause that. Let's double down on that and just unpack that. Think about that for a second. If you didn't, and then the Amazon highlighted this on Andy Jassy's keynote, carrier, which makes air conditioning, they also do refrigeration and transport. So one IOT application leveraging the cloud is they, we call it cold chain, managing the value chain of the transport, making sure food and in this case, vaccine, they saw huge value to reduce carbon emissions because of it. The waste involved in food alone was a problem but the vaccine, they had the cold chain. Can you imagine? Maybe this year the cold chain is more valuable than the block chain. Yeah, cold chain sounds like a band, cold play. I had to get that in, Linda loves cold play. But if you think about like where we are to your point, imagine if this hit 15 years ago or 20 years ago. You know, you two was just hitting the scene 20 years ago, 15 years ago. So, you know, that kind of culture, we didn't have Zoom. Education would be where? We would be Skyping, there's no bandwidth.   What's your reaction to that? And compare and contrast that to what's on full display in the real world stage right now on digital enablement, digital transformation. Well, look, I mean, ultimately I'm an optimist because of what this technology allows you to do. I'm a realist that, you know, we're going to lose a lot of people because of this virus, but we're also going to be able to reduce a lot of pain for people in potentially death because of the ability to accelerate these abilities to react. I think the biggest lesson and the thing that I look for, and I hope for so when Teresa says, how do you think big? The biggest lesson I think we've learned in the last year is how to build resilience. So all kinds, parts of our economy, our healthcare systems, our personal lives, our education, our children, even our leisure time have been tested from a resilience point of view. And the ability of technology to step in and become an enabler for that of resilience. There's like, people don't love Zoom school, but without Zoom school, what work is going to do? There is no school, right? So, which is why Zoom has become an indispensable utility of our lives, whether you're on it too much or you got Zoom fatigue, doesn't really matter. The concept, I mean, what we're going to do call into a conference call unless you're a teacher, right? And you know, so how are you going to, you're going to do that? The ability to repurpose our supply chain and you know, we see this, we're going to see a lot of change in the global supply chain. You're going to see whether it's read domestication of manufacturing or tightening of that up because we're never going to go without PPE again and other vital elements. We've seen entire industries repurpose from B to B to C. And their ability to package, deliver and service customers. That is, those reforms are resilience. Yeah, and taking that to the next level, if you think about what's actually happening on full display, and again, on my one-on-one with Andy Jassy prior to the event and he laid this out on stage, he kind of talks about this, every vertical being disrupted. And then Dr. Matt Wood, who's the machine learning lead there, and Swami says, hey, you know, cloud compute with chips now and with AI and machine learning, every industry vertical, global industry is going to be disrupted. And so, you know, I get that. We've been saying on the queue for a long time that this is going to happen. So, you know, we've been kind of on this wave of horizontal scalability and vertical specialization with data and modern applications with machine learning, making customization, really high fidelity decisions, or as you say down to the molecule level or atomic level. But this is clear. What I found interesting, and I want to get your thoughts because you have one been there, done that through many ways of innovation and now investing, leading investor in this area. You made up a word, I like it. Jassy talks about leadership to invent and reinvent. Can't fight gravity. You got to get talent hungry for invention, solve real world problems, speed, don't complexify. That's his message.  I quote the Godfather.  You don't want to be that guy. You're not a wartime conciliary. This is a time, there's times in companies, a history's where there's peace and there's wartime.  Having the right personnel is critical. So one of the themes this year is if you're in the way, get out of the way. You know, and some people don't want to hold onto the past, that's the way we did it before. I built this system. Therefore it has to work this way. Otherwise the new way is terrible. The main frame, we got to keep the main frame. So you have a kind of an accelerated leadership mantra happening. What is your take on this? Because that would be the thing I would be told if you're going to, if you're going to, if you are going to use mob related metaphors, I'll share one with you from the final season.  And he goes, remember when is the lowest form of conversation? And which is I kind of, I think what you were talking about and what Andy is talking about is that the thing that makes great leadership and what I look for is that when you invest in somebody or you put somebody in a leadership position to build something, 50% of their experience is really important. And 50% of it is not applicable in the new situation. And the hard leadership initiative is to understand which 50 matters and which 50 doesn't matter. So I think the issue is that, yeah, I think it is lead follower or get out of the way, but it's also, what am I doing? Am I following a pattern for a technology, a market, a customer base or a set of people I'm managing that doesn't really exist anymore? That the world has moved on. And I think that we're gonna be kind of permanent war time on some level. We're gonna be, because I think the economy's gonna shift, we're gonna have other shocks to the economy and we don't get back to a traditional normal anytime soon. So I think that is the part that leadership in technology really has to adopt. And I mean, the first great CEO of Intel reminded us, right, that only the paranoid survive, right? Is that it's you, some things work and some things don't work. And that's the hard part on how you parse it. So I always like to say that you always have to have a crisis and if there is no crisis, you create the crisis. And you can't even put it back. You said, don't let a good crisis go to waste. As a manager, you take advantage of the crisis. Yeah, I mean, look, it wouldn't have been bad to be in the Peloton business this year, right too, right? Which is like, when people stayed home and that will fade, people will get back on their bikes and go outside on the cyclist. But a lot more people are gonna look at that as an alternative way to exercise or exercising when it's dark or when the weather is in climate. So what I think is that you see these things they go in waves, they crest, they come back but they never come back all the way to where they were. And as a manager and as a builder in the technology industry, you may not get like, okay, maybe we will not spend as much time on Zoom in a year from now, but we're gonna still spend a lot of time on Zoom and it's gonna still be very important. What I would say, for example, and looking at the COVID crisis and for my own personal investments, what I look at, one thing is clear, we're gonna get our arms around this virus, but if you look at the history of airborne illnesses, they are accelerating and they're coming every couple of years. So being able to be in that position to more react, more rapidly create vaccines, the ability to foster trials more quickly, to be able to use that information to make decisions. So the duration when people are not covered by therapeutics or vaccines shortness, that is going to be really important. So that form of resilience and that kind of speed is gonna happen again and again in healthcare. There is gonna be increasing pressure across in part of the segment. Food supply, right? I mean, the biggest problem on our food supply today is actually the lack of labor. And so you have farm, I mean, farmers have had a repurpose, they don't sell to their traditional, so you're gonna see increased amount of automation and mechanization. Well, had We Farm, We Farm was on the keynote today talking about how their marketplace is a collective, people working together. Given that big ideas, let's just end the segment here.  Well, I think now we're at a time where you can actually go big and stay and be big or get to be big at your own pace because the mantra has been thinking big in years, execute, plan in months and execute weekly and month daily. You can plan around, there's a management technique potentially to leverage cloud and AI to really think about the big idea. If I'm a manager, whether I'm in public sector or commercial or any vertical industry, I can still have that big idea of that North Star and then work backwards and figure that out. That's obviously the Amazon way. What's your take on how people should be? What's the right way to think about executing down that path so that someone who's say, trying to reimagine education. And I know of some people that I've talked to here in California are looking at it saying, hey, I don't need to have silos of students, faculty, alumni and community. I can unify them together. That's an idea. I mean, execution of that is, you know, move all these events that have been supplying siloed systems to them. Because people want to interact online. The Peloton is a great example of health fitness. So everyone's out there waiting for this playbook. Yeah, unfortunately, John, if I had the playbook, I'd mail it to you. But I think there's a couple of things that are really important that may be good to help, that is one. Where is there structural change in an industry or a segment or something like that? And sorry to just, I'm home today, right? So everybody's running out of the door. And, you know, so I talked about the structural change. We talked about the structural change in healthcare. We talked about maybe some of the structural change that's coming to agriculture. There's a change in people's expectations and how they're willing to work and what they're willing to do. As you pointed out, the traditional silos, right? Because we have so much, you know, information in our fingertips, you know, people's responsibility, as opposed to having products and service to deliver them, what they're willing to do on their own is really changed. I think the other thing is that leadership is ultimately the most important aspect. And we have built a lot of companies in the industry based on forms of structural relation industry background. I'm a product manager. I'm a salesperson. I'm a CEO. I'm a finance person. And what we're starting to see is more whole thinking, particularly in early stage investors, where they think less functionally about what people's jobs are and more about what the company's trying to get done, what the market is like. And it's infusing a lot more how people do that. So ultimately, most of this comes down to leadership. And that's what people have to do. They have to see themselves as a leader in their company, in the business they're trying to build, not just in their function, but in the market they're trying to win, which means you go out and you talk to a lot more people. You take a lot fewer things for granted. You read less textbooks on how to build companies and you spend more time talking to your customers and your engineers. And you start to look at enabling, so we have, I mean, between machine learning, computer vision and the amount of processing power that's available from things like AWS, including the services that you could just click box in places like the Amazon store. You actually have to be much more expansive in how you think about what you can get done without having to build a lot of things because it's actually right there at your fingertips. Hopefully that kind of gets a little bit to where you were asking it. Well, Alan, it's always great to have you on and great insight and always a pleasure to talk candidly. Normally we're a little bit more boisterous, but given how terrible the situation is with COVID, I'm working at home usually in person, but you've been great. Take a minute to give a plug for the data collective venture capital firm, DCVC. You guys have a really unique investment thesis. You're in applied AI, computational biology, computational care, enterprise enablement, geospatial, you talk about space and Capella, which was featured, carbon health, smart agriculture, transportation. These are kind of like not on, these are off the beaten path of like traditional herd mentality of venture capital. You guys are going after big problems. Give us an update on the firm. I know that firm has gotten bigger lately. You guys have some successes. The firm has gotten bigger, I guess since Matt and Zach started it about a decade ago. So we have about $2.3 billion under management. We also have a bio fund, kind of a sister fund that's part of that. I mean, obviously we are traditionally an early stage investor, but we have gone much longer now with these additional investment funds and the confidence of our LPs. We are looking for, as you said, John, really large intractable industry problems and transitions. We tend to back very technical founders and work with them very early in the creation of their business. And we have a huge network of some of the leading people in our industry who work with us. It's a little bit of our secret weapon. We call it our equity partner network. Many of them have been on theCUBE. And these are people that work with us in the creation of this. We've never been more excited because there's never been more opportunity and you'll start to see, you're starting to hear more and more about them. We'll probably be a couple of years before we're a household name, but we're a wash and deal flow. And the good news is I think more people want to invest in and build the things that we've, so we're less niching, more people want to do what we're doing. And I think some of the large exits that started to come our way will attract more great entrepreneurs in that space. Yeah, you guys really saw the data models, data trend early. You saw where it's impacted. And I'll say that's front and center on Amazon, web services reinvent this year. You guys were early, super important firm. I'm really glad you guys exist and you guys will be soon a household name, if not already. Thanks for coming on. All right, Alan, thank you. Great spending time. Thank you, appreciate it. Take care. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. You're watching Reinvent Coverage. This is the CUBE live portion of the coverage, three weeks, wall to wall. Check out thecube.net. Also go to the CUBE page on the Amazon event page. There's a little click through the bottom on the metadata main stage. Tons of video on demand and live programming there too. Thanks for watching.


I'm Carol Monli and this is Education Matters on Think Tech. We define education broadly on the show by exploring a wide variety of topics. Today's program is Leaving Legacies for Hawaii and covers philanthropy and in particular plan giving or gifts after we pass away, which are more important than ever. My guest is Jeff Peterson, the Director of Plan Giving at the Foundations of Hawaii Pacific Health. Welcome, Jeff. Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. Great. I heard about Hawaii Pacific Health and your role in it. I know Hawaii Pacific Health is a very important position in our community. We have four hospitals.  So the four hospitals are under the Hawaii Pacific Health umbrella? Correct. And then the foundations, each hospital has a foundation that is set up to receive, raise money for, and receive gifts for that institution. I see. And what is your role as Director of Plan Giving? I work on both, mainly legacy giving. Plan giving and legacy giving is really larger gifts. They tend to be planned out with attorneys. They tend, or family members. It's more than just writing out a check, generally. Okay. So for our viewers, distinguished for us philanthropy, which is the bigger picture, and planned giving and legacy giving, at what point in time are those taking place? Generally when you look at any non-profit, there's usually three income streams to support that mission or that institution. Generally they start out with annual giving, maybe a direct mail campaign where solicitations go out in the mail and people can send in a check. Those fall under the annual giving umbrella. And so that's during lifetime? During lifetime. Right now. Like today, before April 15th, I might want to give a gift, or before year end, I might want to give a gift. You'll get home today, and in the mailbox there's going to be a number of envelopes, number 10 envelopes with your name on it, and all sorts of wonderful stories of why you should give to that charitable institution and how you can make a difference by writing out a check to support that institution, or of course today going online and making a gift online. So those typically are the foundation for most organizations fundraising efforts. They tend to be smaller gifts in terms of $10, $20, maybe $100, but a lot of them. So that's the basic foundation. Then from there, you'll have what is generally called major giving.  They tend to, large depends on the institution. At one institution it could be $500, at another institution it could be $5,000. But again, those typically are current gifts where people are making a monetary gift to support that institution today. And then plan giving or deferred giving typically comes from a person's, their assets, not what's in their checking account. It could be a gift of stock, it could be a gift of real estate. It could be a bequest or a gift in a person's will or trust. All of those tend to take more planning through advisors. They take more thought from an individual or a couple. And that's the role that I play, and I work in that area. I see. So the distinction between current versus future giving, and under future is plan giving. Yes. Or if they're larger you call them legacy. Yes. Okay, well let's take it from the side of the donor. Yes. So who am I going to choose? I know you mentioned nonprofits. But I might have interest in a variety of causes that I want to support. There's a couple ways to look at this. First is in terms of regular nonprofits that will go out and solicit money. In those annual gifts and those major gifts, that nonprofit is usually coming to you telling their story, asking you, Carol, to give them money.  I have to build something. I have to save something. Plan giving tends to be more, it's reversed. The institution will sit down with the donor and say, Carol, tell me what's important to you. What do you want to support? Why are you connected to this institution? Why have you been giving $10 for the last 20 years? And if it's done right, the plan giving person will listen and hear that story and find out why that person, why that donor, is connected to the institution, what their story is, and then go from there. Okay, so in Hawaii, you mentioned earlier that there are not that many directors of plan giving like you in Hawaii. That's right. Why is that? The technical position, institutions have to be large enough to afford a dedicated person to focus on this. And again, a lot of these gifts come in later, and a lot of institutions do not have the luxury of money to be able to support a person who can focus on the long term. We just, for example, received a gift on Friday from an estate, a wonderful woman. She had been a donor to Copilani Medical Center for Women and Children. Her first gift came in 10 years ago. It was $100. And the following year, she gave $1,000. But that was it, and her total lifetime giving was just $1,100. She passed away two years ago, and I've been working with the attorneys and their financial people for two years, and now we received a gift on Friday of $690,000. Oh my goodness. So she had already planned, of course, before she passed away to designate Copilani as the recipient of this money. Exactly. So that's the planned part. She did it before she died. Yes. You didn't get it until... We didn't get it until 10 years later. Until 10 years later. 2009, we had a nice lunch. She said she would like to do something in her estate. She connected me with her attorney. We worked through some paperwork. We put a provision in her trust, and over the years, we visited her. We had lunch with her. We spent a lot of time with her, just as a donor. And yeah, and now, here it is in 2017, the gift comes in. So mechanically, you mentioned you, as the director, worked with her before she passed away, and did the tax work and the paperwork, but what if she changed her mind before she passed away? Can she do that? Oh, absolutely. It would be unusual for a person to make an irrevocable gift to a charity. Usually they want to retain the right to change their mind. And that's the donor's prerogative, and that's the way most people do it, absolutely. So what percentage of the donations that you receive every year are based, are current gifts, and what percentage are the return on this future gift? Well, I'll give you an example. Just with this lady, and also normally for Hawaii Pacific Health, we process, we have wonderful donors, probably 18,000 plus gifts a year are given to support the hospitals of Hawaii Pacific Health. So the four hospitals get about 18,000 gifts a year? 18,000 gifts. Small and large? Small and large, $10, $100, $1,000. Those annual giving campaigns or initiatives and efforts will generate anywhere from $4 to $5 million to support the institutions. So there we have $4 or $5 million, and then all of a sudden one woman decides to leave us in her estate, and we get 690,000. So it's kind of lopsided, and yeah, that's why institutions look at plankeeping. I see. So now, of course, we're talking about health care, and there's so many other nonprofits in Hawaii, and is it the same procedure then for, in general, if someone was interested in another cause to create a man-giving? I've given examples of what I'm familiar with in terms of our institution, but what I have shared with you would be across the board, from universities to churches to any of the non-profit institutions. Nice. Yes. So I understand there, but aren't there different approaches to? Oh, very definitely. So through this whole world of legacy planning, as we get into that, there's different ways to approach what I just shared with you. Some institutions will take a more technical approach. So you may sit down with a plan-giving person at a university. They may be more focused on the technical gift vehicles, charitable trusts, charitable annuities, and really talking about how these different types of instruments, their benefits, the way they can help. Tax benefits? Tax benefits, yes. And they may approach plan-giving in more of a technical, mechanical, a lot of paperwork. Yes. Absolutely. There's a lot of paperwork, but they'll approach it that way. Now from my perspective, I've been doing this for a number of years. I have found that my approach is more legacy planning. I really start with the families and their values. And what is it that they are looking to accomplish? And then those technical vehicles are mere vehicles of solutions once we figure out what that family wants to accomplish. So how small, though, because we're talking about families and kind of big supporting hospitals, but do you have to be rich to do this? No. And how do you define rich? And how do you define rich and everything? But years ago, you would think of a planned gift or somebody in my position working with millionaires who are making million-dollar gifts today. People can make a big impact, and you may not need to have a million dollars. You can make a big gift with $50,000. Now, $50,000 is a lot of money, and at the same time, in today's society, it's a really nice car. I mean, it's not $50,000 isn't what it used to be. And yet $50,000 for a lot of institutions will make a big difference. Yes. Great. So you have some more stories about some of the donors that you have. You mentioned the $650,000 one. Do you have stories of maybe smaller donors? Oh, absolutely. And it's really not so much about, from my work, I mentioned the $600,000, whatever, $90,000. Because it gives some context to the role of plan giving in a fundraising effort. But when we sit down with a family, it's really talking to them about what is important to them. And typically, you know this, you have a family. You have families and friends. Generally people want four things I have found. The first is they don't want their family to be destitute. So whatever legacy planning we do, we start with the family, recognizing that the family is first and foremost in terms of what you're going to do in terms of leaving money to your children, or the heirs could be nieces or nephews. You don't want them to be destitute. The second piece that we find is they want families. I want this as a parent. I want to provide opportunities to my children and grandchildren. I want them to be able to, whatever they want to do, whether it's go to school or whatever, they want opportunities. I have worked, I just thought of the fact that when I started doing this, I worked with a lot of World War II generation guys. And I remember a gentleman who said to me, he said, Jeff, I landed on the beaches of Sicily. I lost a lot of my friends on the beach. He said, I want to give opportunities to young people to do things because I didn't have those opportunities. And so we look at providing opportunities. And then thirdly, we have families who say, I do not want to promote a nonworking lifestyle for my children. So you don't want to give them everything? You don't want to give them everything because they recognize that they don't want them sitting on the couch watching TV, drinking beer, and not doing anything. They want them to be productive human beings and contributing to society. And fourth, the families not fighting. We want to create an estate plan that allows families to be working in harmony and not at each other's throats are estranged. So we start there. And then we move forward to figure out how to do that. Well, let's take a second on that, and we're going to take a short break. We're talking about Legacy Giving with Jeff Peterson from Hawaii Pacific Health. We'll be right back after this short break. All right. This guy looks familiar. He calls himself the Ultra Fan, but that doesn't explain all this. He planned this party, planned the snacks, even planned to coordinate colored shirts, but he didn't plan to have a good time. Now you wouldn't do this in your own house, so don't do it in your team's house. Know your limits and plan ahead so that everyone can have a good time. Welcome back. This is Carol Monley with my guest, Jeff Peterson from Hawaii Pacific Health, and we're talking about plan giving, a very important topic for our viewers. So when we, just before the break, we talked about the four factors that you go through with donors to make sure that their families are covered, which are very important. So once that's been done, and assuming an individual has more resources than are needed to cover the needs of their family, but as you said, not give them so much that the family, the children become... They need to be productive members of society. Right. So here is now the next step of where you come in, right? I would typically sit down with a family and talk to them, talk story with them and find out what their background is. As I said, why they're connected to the institution, and then their life story and how they made their money, what that means to them, their values. We also talk about their, if they have children, their children. Can their children manage money? Many parents, while they love their children, find that they may not be able to manage large sums of money, and that maybe a trust would be better. So we look at some of those factors. And then, from our perspective, we ask, we do general legacy planning, meaning it's not just for the hospital. So if a family says to us, as we sit down and we say, what's important to you, Carol, and the donor might say, well, I'm involved in the symphony, and I went to school at this institution, and I might volunteer at some other non-profit, and in our case, hospital. There might be, generally, when I work with families, they usually have at least four or five charities that they are connected to. And so you help. We help with that. But do people find you, though, through their interest in one of the four hospitals? Yes. Okay. Yes. And then you might step in and talk about their possible. Their general legacy planning. We do not go out, and I'll use these sales terms, cold call on people, and say, hi. Hi, Carol. You don't know me. You don't know Capulani. And do you get a commission? No. That's the thing. No, this is true across all foundations. Plan-giving people are really a great resource to talk to. And many times they are. Let me use the word honest broker in the sense that they're not selling anything. They're not selling insurance. So the one thing you pay is the public. No. So you're not selling anything, and you're not being paid by the donor? By a commission or a donor. There's nothing like that. Plan-giving people get a salary. It's an ethical consideration in terms of the plan-giving field. You get a salary. There are no commissions for a big gift. There's no bonuses for... Sending, diverting the money to one hospital over the other. Oh, absolutely not. I think there's even federal... I think I could go to jail for that or something. So no, we don't do that. So you get an honest... What I'm able to do is sit down in a confidential way and talk to people about their wealth and their families in an unbiased way because I don't have an agenda. Somebody said to me, well, you want their money. I'm like, yes, but I only talk to people who come to me first and say, I want to do something. I'm not sure how. So we're in alignment on trying to figure out the best way to come up with making a gift. Right. And so what about tax benefits? Do you talk to them about that? We certainly would. Our role is to provide education. We don't provide legal or tax advice. But what we do is we bring in their advisors. So then my role is to sit down almost as a quarterback, if you will. And we will bring together all of the advisors around the table at the same time. The attorney, the financial advisor, the insurance broker, whoever there might be in terms of the advisors. And we'll say, here's what the donor wants to do. These are their values. Here's what they want to accomplish. How do we go about doing this? And we'll come up with some recommendations. And then from there, if the donor says, yes, I'd like to set up a charitable trust. I love these institutions. I have assets that would be good to fund this trust, maybe real estate that we're not using anymore. And then we would work with the advisors to set everything up. So are those my advisors as the donor or are they your advisors? Oh, they're your advisors. They work for you. Absolutely. There would be a fiduciary responsibility for them to work in your best interest. Yes. Right. And I appreciate you mentioned this is all confidential. It is highly confidential. And I know you do house visits. All the time. The work we do, I sign the same confidentiality agreements that your doctor would when you go to the hospital. I can be fired immediately for sharing confidential information. So what we talk about is, it's all just, yeah, I can't, you know, it's your family, it's very confidential. Yeah. And I've also read that the larger group of donors are women. Absolutely. And tell us about that. Well, you know. Is that true for Strop? For us? Oh, in all the institutions I've worked with, you know, the guys tend to not live as long as the women. The guys tend to, these are all stereotypes and generalities, but many times the guys are more, they want their name on a building. I see. So they're giving... They might be giving for other... Less charitable, but more maybe self-interest. I can't say that, because all our donors are just wonderful. Of course. Okay. But I find that women, for the most part, they really want to make an impact. Yeah. And I will say that for plan giving, men and women, they're the best people I've ever worked with in my entire life. They are caring. They say things like they are stewards of these gifts. They want to open doors for others. They are not interested in the naming opportunities, as maybe a major gift donor might want to do. Which would be, like, naming a building would have to be, the gift would have to be during lifetime, probably, right? Generally, you say it that way, because usually an institution will have a capital campaign and they'll say, name our campus or our wing or something like that. My role and most of plan giving roles is really not so much naming because we don't know when the person's going to pass away, so it's not naming for this capital campaign. Therefore, most of the money goes into endowments to support research, to support whatever the donor wants to support. They tend to be more endowment driven. Scholarships, endowments, chairs, supporting professors. Scientific research. Scientific research. Cures to cancer. Absolutely. We have a number of donors that support both us and organizations like St. Jude's. Because we also do pediatric cancer research. So they'll say, I want to support research. I can use her name, a wonderful woman passed away a little while ago, Betty Funiyama. Her husband had been cared for by the hospital and she felt that her husband had six additional years of life because of the cardiology team at the hospital. And so she said, I don't know what I want to do. Then my role was to sit down and talk, listen to her story. And we finally developed a plan where some of the money would go into support the cardiology team today with current equipment and needs. And part would go to an endowment in his name for cardiology research. That's what we do. So we talked about gender. Let's talk about generally what's the right age. And I do see millennials in that frame of mind to begin planning or is it mostly ... Well, I tend to deal with a little bit more senior folks. But ... The baby boomers are really ... The baby boomers are the ones right now that are really looking at ... We're working increasingly with families, baby boomer families, who have businesses. And over the next 10 years, there's going to be a huge transfer of ownership on family businesses. Because of the ... The baby boomers are retail. The World War II guys came back. They worked for 40 years. They came back from the war in 45. By the mid-80s, they were selling businesses. They were bought and started by baby boomers. And now today, 40 years later, the baby boomers are looking at what are we going to do. My role is simply to say, what's your plan? And many of them don't have a plan. So we talk about their values and help them with the succession planning. Because if they're charitable inclined, that is where they can have significant impact in creating a gift to Hawaii, to give back to Hawaii. Create a legacy. To create a legacy. To benefit Hawaii. Yes. Do you see a growing interest in philanthropy now? Oh, absolutely. I think for us, certainly on the plan giving side, people tend to reach a point in their lives where they're reflective. And they're saying, what do I want to do? What meaningful thing do I want to leave behind? Those are the people that I work with. Right. Well, we just have a minute. All right. And I know that you have an upcoming seminar. So is that program something that's open to the public? And maybe you could tell our audience, look right into the camera too, about this program. We have this Thursday, we have a few seats left. We're going to be at the Hawaii Prince Hotel. Values based estate planning. Dr. Wendy Hirsch, who is a child psychologist, therapist at Kapilani, and I will be speaking there. Our number would be 535-7134. And we've got about five seats left if people would like to come and look at values based estate plans. Is there a charge? No charge, and we'll feed you lunch. Okay, wow. I know. So that's a wonderful way to end our show, to invite people to attend the program, learn more about plan giving, and in particular about Hawaii Pacific Health in your hospitals. Yes. Yes. Well, thank you so much, Jeff. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah. Well, this brings us to the end of today's show. I'm your host, Tara Monly. Our guest has been Jeff Peterson from Hawaii Pacific Health. And we've been talking about plan giving, leaving your legacy for the benefit of others. So thanks to our production engineer Ray Sangolang and our floor manager Cindy Monofukai, and all the people who contribute to Think Tech Productions. If you want to see the show again, go to ThinkTechHawaii.com or YouTube.com slash Think Tech Hawaii, where there will be a link to more shows just like this one. Thank you for watching, and aloha.


Yeah, we actually have a club softball team and 58 other club sports. In addition, we have 212 clubs and organizations that our students can become a part of any of their four years at UMEM. This is a great way, especially for transfer students, to get involved on campus. Transfer students who are under the age of 20 on the first day of classes are required to live on campus, but you get placed in an awesome residential learning community, which is a great way to meet people who are interested in similar things as you. My first few semesters on campus, I've really made a point to get involved in things that I'm passionate about, and that allowed me to make friends with people that had similar interests as me. I was actually really lucky because through the transfer orientation program at UVM, I was able to meet my best friend, and we now live in an off-games apartment together.


In order to find a Creative Commons image, we can go to flicker.com. I'm going to go to flicker.com and on the main page I'm going to select explore. In the search bar, I can type in anything that I want to search for. For example, I can search for mountains and then I will push enter. Now I have several pictures of mountains. However, under license it says any license. I'm going to select the arrow and then scroll down to creative commons only. This means that these pictures can be used by me and put into my presentation. Now I have all of these options for my presentation if I want a picture of mountains. I will select this first one. It's titled mountain by Doug 8888.  So this is the author and this is the name. If I want to find the license type, I can click here. These symbols indicate what kind of license this photo has. I will click on some rights reserved. Up at the top I can see the license type and number. This is what you need to record the license number. These symbols here give you more detail about the license type and what you can do with it. I can go back to the original page to the photo and click to save the photo. I will right click on the photo and select save as. I will save my photo in the pictures section of my computer. I will name my photo something that will help me remember. Since the name of the photo is mountain, I will just name it mountain and then I will click save. Now I have saved the photo.


The David Feldman radio program is made possible by listeners like you.  Welcome to the broadcast. Who really won last November's election? Obviously Hillary did, but who really, really won it? Today's guest says it was ExxonMobil. On today's show, we're going to look at Trump's new cabinet through the prism of how they benefit ExxonMobil. Jenny Roland is Research and Advocacy Associate for Public Lands at the Center for American Progress and I contacted her after reading a piece she wrote entitled How Exxon Won the 2016 Election. I'll link to that article over at my website, but you should instead go to AmericanProgress.org and read the piece over there. She joins us today from Washington. Jenny, how big is ExxonMobil? It's been described as its very own nation. ExxonMobil is one of the largest companies. It is actually the largest publicly traded oil company in the U.S. and is I think the eighth largest company in the world. And they, as far as energy development is concerned, they kind of have their hands in everything, oil, natural gas, tar sands, you name it, and that's kind of the largest of this company is why we felt like they were really the ones that won the 2016 election. I see their ads all the time. They're all about clean energy and alternative energy. According to the ads, they're good people. They ran into some problems about two years ago. The price of their stock went down. Why was ExxonMobil in danger during the lead up to the election, quote unquote, of Donald Trump? So in 2014, their Security and Exchange Commission, their SEC filings, showed that they might be in a little bit of trouble. And primarily that has to do with the fact that the price of oil was falling well below $100 per barrel. That's primarily how the company makes money. And so with that falling that low, they had predicted that for every dollar it fell below $100 per barrel, they would lose $150 million in earnings. So that's probably the biggest reason that they were feeling in some trouble then. President Obama was also making some moves on some environmental regulations, which they had been fighting against. They were in a little bit of some hot water for investigations into what they knew about climate change that really were just starting to get going. But primarily it is the price of oil and their price of oil that I think about 17% over over two years. And was that across the board for the entire sector? Or was it specifically ExxonMobil? Were other energy stocks in trouble? Yes, overall energy stocks were specifically oil, natural gas, and the US was doing pretty well. If the price of oil goes down, that means Exxon can't charge as much for it. But if we open up drilling rights, offshore drilling rights or up in the Arctic, doesn't that increase the supply? So if there's an increase in supply, wouldn't the price go further down? It would also drive up demand, though, here. There's a number of things that could happen to drive up demand. And that's kind of how they make their money. And when oil prices are high, then they make more money. Right. So more drilling actually increases demand. Yes. OK. That's for another show.  Jenny, the former CEO of ExxonMobil is Trump's choice for Secretary of State. I call him Rex Spillerson. In reading your article, I realize there's more to the story than what happens when the former CEO of Exxon becomes Secretary of State. In fact, he may not even get confirmed. Marco Rubio was grilling him last week on Russia and Aleppo and suggests that he may not even vote for him. But who knows what that's really about? He might have been grandstanding. But I'll get to Rex Spillerson becoming Secretary of State and how it's a windfall for Exxon and a disaster for our planet in a few minutes. By the time this interview is over, his name may have been withdrawn. Let's first tackle the Justice Department, the EPA and the Department of Interior. I want to first get to the EPA, but let me read what you wrote. This is what you and your colleagues wrote in how Exxon won the 2016 election, which you can read over at AmericanProgress.org. You should go there every day. This is what you wrote. At no time in recent US history has one company been at the brink of attaining so much power and influence over US policy, both domestic and foreign. If the Senate confirms most or all of the five cabinet nominees whose backgrounds and positions would most benefit Exxon, the company will have acquired substantial direct and indirect control over the regulatory, law enforcement, lawmaking and diplomatic powers of the American government. Wow. So, you know, I think Rex Spillerson is almost a distraction from all the other guys. I want to talk about the EPA, the pick for EPA, Scott Pruitt. But first, the Rockefeller family announced they are divesting themselves of all their holdings in Exxon. Tell my audience why they're divesting themselves of their holdings and they'll better understand Scott Pruitt. Some of the hot water that I talked about earlier that they've been in for denying climate change, science and kind of high even hiding the fact that they knew that they've known about the dangers of climate change for years and have been hiding that are some of the reasons that I think they are divesting as they don't want to be associated with that kind of name and that those issues there.  But, you know, more secretively and covertly, really, they've been funding climate science denial groups and different scientists, contrarian scientists that will basically say that the dangers aren't real and that it's not happening. And so that's not something that the big names like the Rockefellers want to be assisted with. Yeah, I read their letter. The Rockefeller family wrote an official letter. It was published in the New York Review of Books. One of the things I came to understand is that Exxon Mobile for the past 40 years hired the top climate scientists in the world. You know, you always think NASA has the top client scientists, but it was really Exxon. And about 40 years ago, they realized they were heating up the planet and knew there was a problem. And like the cigarette companies, they chose to bury that information. And the Rockefeller family is their fortune was built from Exxon Mobile. And they're walking away from it. There are two attorney generals, state attorney generals, investigating Exxon Mobile's role in hiding climate science. There is an attorney general from Oklahoma who Trump has nominated to be the new EPA administrator. His name is Scott Pruitt. Who was Scott Pruitt and what has he done for or against Exxon Mobile as attorney general of Oklahoma? Yeah, so as he said, he is the attorney general of Oklahoma. He has been nominated by Trump to be ahead the Environmental Protection Agency. Environmental Protection is not exactly something that he's known for. He sued the EPA a number of times in his career as AG of Oklahoma. But in regards to Exxon, as AG, he's gotten a number of campaign donations from the oil and gas industry, including more than $6,000 from Exxon specifically. And then you mentioned he wrote a letter defending Exxon actually against these charges that they had funded fraudulent, fraudulent climate science, that they have been denying the dangers of climate change that they have known about for decades, about 40 years. So he's come to their defense time and time again and not necessarily surprisingly, because they're funding his campaign. The EPA is a more recent cabinet position. I think it came about during the Nixon administration. And there's a lot of presidential power associated with the EPA. President Obama has has proven that that with the pen, without consulting Congress, he can do many things. What are some of the things that Trump could reverse over at EPA that would benefit Exxon Mobile? So I think the first thing would be the climate rule, the clean power plan. Right now, that's in the courts. And so that that might not be directly under EPA right now, but that's where it came out of. And it could definitely go back there and prove it could. That's one of the things that he has sued to get rid of. So presumably he would get rid of any attempts to curb carbon pollution. A couple of other things that are might be in danger with a Pruitt nomination is the EPA methane rule. Methane is a lot stronger than carbon dioxide, but causes the same issues with global warming just at a more concentrated amount. And EPA has recently made a rule that we would have to capture that. It's natural gas that can be burned, just like other natural gas and sold, but when it's just let to vent, it causes a lot of pollution. So that's one of the things that would be in danger. The ozone rule, ground level ozone is a bad for people's health. Common in cities, that's another thing that would probably be targeted. And lastly, the clean water rule and the Exxon has publicly opposed all three of these rules. They've lobbied against them and put out statements that that they would hurt their businesses. And they so presumably getting rid of them would help their business. What is Exxon's role in fracking? They definitely participate in fracking. It's one of their biggest businesses within the U.S. It's been growing and you can drill for both oil and natural gas using fracking. You wrote that they're one of the largest holders of natural gas in America, right? They are one of the largest holders of natural gas, as well as one of the largest holders of Canadian tar sands, which is another fuel source. Right. And fracking involves water, shooting water deep below the earth's surface and the runoff, we are told, poisons wells, poisons groundwater. At first, the EPA said it didn't pose any harm to our drinking water. They've since reversed that, right? Recently, the EPA said, no, this could be bad for the drinking water. So we don't have good drinking water in America anymore. We have infrastructure problems. And it's not in Exxon Mobil's best interest for us to be able to use tap water anymore. OK, for Attorney General, we go to Jeff Sessions from, I believe, Alabama. It looks like he's going to be our Attorney General. The Senate has been very kind to him because he's a senator. They tend to take care of their own. Has he been a friend of Exxon Mobil? He has. He's been really a long time friend of Exxon Mobil. Also has, as a senator, has gotten many political contributions from Exxon, up to, I think, ten thousand dollars from Exxon Mobil and then even more when you count kind of the entire oil and gas industry at large. And similar to Scott Pruitt, he's also written letters in support of Exxon Mobil. This is specifically in relation to the investigations going on by the state Attorney Generals in Massachusetts and New York, the investigation that we discussed earlier, and he wrote a letter to the Department of Justice, which it looks like he'll be running soon, asking them to basically quash any investigation into Exxon on their knowledge of climate, the risks of climate change, which would just be a windfall for Exxon Mobil to their bottom line. It would be like saying when the state Attorney Generals were ganging up on the tobacco industry a couple of decades ago, and there was this amazing settlement that supposedly went to to state states to help with health care to pay to pay damages for for cigarettes. It would be the equivalent of an attorney general in a justice department trying to stop the tobacco companies from being sued by state Attorney Generals for hiding the evidence that they were manipulating nicotine levels and that they knew cigarettes were cancers before the public did. Exactly. Yeah, this is go ahead. I was just going to say, and there's there's a lot of parallels between this investigation and the settlement reached with the tobacco industry about, you know, just kind of fundamentally misleading the public about the harms of its products, carbon pollution being for Exxon Mobil. Another thing that settlement, recent settlement, very recent that we compare this to is the Volkswagen case where they were polluting and cheating the system basically on their pollution. And they just settled for fourteen point seven billion dollars. Now it's for lying about polluting over seven years. And so if you kind of multiply that by the 40 years, the Exxon has allegedly lied about the knowledge of climate change. Then then that's a pretty hefty sum for them. We didn't really give the Obama administration enough time. Eight years wasn't enough. There was something beginning to happen that started under holder and then Lynch at the Justice Department where they began to prosecute corporations. You know, they put the private colleges. They didn't necessarily put them out of business, but they put a lot of private universities out of business. They're kind of putting private prisons out of business. And I was getting really optimistic that if Hillary became president, this would continue. And we'd see something that we really have not seen for decades. I don't even think we saw it under the Clinton administration where the Justice Department began to say, OK, if corporations are people, then the people in those corporations are well, not going to go to prison, but they're going to be fine. We're going to go after them. We were beginning to see that recently, weren't we? Yeah, absolutely. And we're not going to see that now. This is a new he's basically putting people in charge of cabinet positions that they want eliminated. For example, Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, the longest serving governor of Texas. He's been nominated to run the Department of Energy. That's the department he couldn't remember. He had three departments he wanted to eliminate during his 2012 debate. Oops, moment. So it's always good for Exxon when a mouth breather is running energy. Why is this specially good for Exxon? If this specific intellectual light weight, Rick Perry is running energy. Yes, running, running energy and and our nuclear weapons as well. A lot of what nuclear energy is what they they work on a lot there. So as kind of we've talked about a lot, all of all of these nominees in these kind of critical cabinet positions have been funded in their political roles by Exxon Mobile and Rick Perry's no different. He has taken $40,000 just in his most recent gubernatorial election from Exxon Mobile and in his role at Department of Energy. If he's confirmed, he would be, you know, over overseeing a lot of research into Exxon Mobile's competitors in alternative fuels and electric vehicles. And so that kind of stuff could really go away without funding being directed towards it. I read in your article that Exxon is against electric vehicles because because the ads that I see, they're they're championing all these alternative fuel sources. And your article says that they they're against electric vehicles. In the United Kingdom, at least they have lobbied pretty hard against electric vehicles there. And in their SEC reports here, they've noted that alternative fuels are a threat to their business. So their ads, they're not telling the truth in their ads. Surprising. One of the things I do, I'm probably going to get kicked off Twitter. I keep getting these promoted tweets from Exxon on my feed. So I tweet back to them, you know, you're destroying our planet, your pathological liars, the only government building Rex Spillerson should be invited into is a prison cell. I have a feeling Twitter is good. I have I have not been successful on Twitter. I've been more successful on Facebook. Hey, I've turned this conversation. It's all about me, not the planet. It's my Twitter followers, my number of Twitter followers. OK, this is going to I'm going to get to Rex Spillerson in a second. Let's eat our vegetables. This is going to be hard. So we're going to this is I don't know if I'm going to understand this. President-elect Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Interior is Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke. This involves the leasing of public lands and royalty rates. My eyes glaze over. I it's hard stuff. And when it's hard stuff, that's when the Republicans they insinuate themselves in the the difficult stuff. So we don't we can't pay attention and they steal everything from us, so we need to know this help me. But what is the Department of Interior do? What are what are public lands and royalty rates? What's going on here? Because I know this is where we're going to wake up one day and find out that's where all of the damage was done. Absolutely.  And I think you're right that some of these things can be very confusing. And that's really where they try and get you on it when when it's a little bit too confusing to figure out right away. And so one of the things that the Department of Energy does is they manage all tax, but the Department of Interior Department of Interior apartment interior. Sorry, I misspoke. They manage all taxpayer owned natural resources on public lands. So public lands, most people know national parks, national forests, things like that, wildlife, refugees, those are all public lands. And then there's Bureau of Land Management lands, which are also public lands and they're popular for hiking and outdoor recreation. But they also are used for oil and gas production for alternative energy production as well. Is the Bureau of Land Management underneath the Department of Interior? Yes, it's part of the Department of the Interior. And so the they lease these lands to companies like Exxon Mobile to drill and get oil and gas from. And we charge royalties on those that go to taxpayers. And those royalties are very low and haven't actually been changed in over 30 years. Exxon Mobile is one of the companies that leases lands. And they I think a couple of years ago, they leased about almost four billion dollars of taxpayer resources. And we get about 12 percent is what taxpayers get on that. And so if those royalty rates are either not changed, the Department of the Interior under Obama has been looking to increase those to kind of make it more fair for taxpayers, because those numbers are very, very low when you compare them to, say, state or private land leasing. And so if those numbers under Representative Ryan Zinke are lowered, the royalty rates numbers are lowered or they are left the same, then that can put a lot of money back into the pockets of Exxon and other oil and gas companies. But if you listen to CNN or Fox or even MSNBC, except for Rachel Maddow, when they talk about the Department of the Interior and they talk about the Bureau of Land Management, they'll only tell us about the Bundy standoff Clive and Bundy and his grazing rights and sovereign nations and people seceding a great distraction from what's really important, which is the pillaging of our natural resources. All right, thank you for explaining that to me. And, you know, it's just something you have to just stick with it and read read about it every day. And some eventually it begins to make sense. Let's get to Rex Spillerson. I didn't realize this until I read your article and everybody should read this article, it's over at the American progress dot org. I realized after reading your article that Rex Spillerson being named to be Secretary of State was a red herring, a distraction. So people wouldn't notice the the the other Exxon mobile puppets who are being installed within the cabinet. So Rex Spillerson, if he becomes Secretary of State, how does that benefit Exxon Mobile? So I think, yeah, in in the obvious way that he has been a lifelong Exxon employee most recently, their CEO, he it's tough to believe that maybe he would be looking out for the best interests of everyday Americans rather than still holding on to some of his corporate interests. And so as Secretary of State, his relationships with other countries is primarily how he could benefit Exxon Mobile while he's not there. Exxon produces oil and gas in twenty two countries. And I think most recently have had plans to expand that. We also know that Rex Spillerson has close ties to Russia. That's what during his confirmation hearing that he got questioned on that a lot. And there is a lot of oil and gas in Russia and a lot of oil and gas that Exxon Mobile would like to be further producing, but haven't been able to right now because of US sanctions against Russia. We put in sanctions against Russia after they seized Crimea, which maybe they're entitled to. Some say they had every right to take Crimea. And we ended up blocking a pipeline that Putin wanted and Exxon wanted. If he becomes Secretary of State, pipelines fall under the purview of state like the big pipeline from the Canadian tar sands that we're still waiting to hear about. Right. Exactly. So international pipelines are also under the purview of the Secretary of State. And the most famous one is I think that you reference is the Keystone XL pipeline that President Electron has talked a lot about as Secretary of State. Tillerson could speed up the approval of international pipelines. And that would help Exxon because they have a lot of stock in the Canadian tar sands. I think about 35 percent of their holdings most recently were in tar sands. So getting those to market could really be a windfall for them. So aggravating. It really is. It is. And I think you're right that in some ways, you know, a little bit of a red herring, it seems so obvious that Rex Tillerson might help benefit Exxon Mobile, but really Trump has seemed to try and stock his cabinet with as many people funded by the oil and gas industry and even Exxon Mobile, in particular, that they could really have some impactful decisions for the future of the company. Yeah. How do you keep from being overwhelmed by all this information? How do you keep your head on straight? Because it's definitely a concerted effort by Trump and Bannon and Kushner. They're really manipulating the public, just throwing so much stuff at us. It's like a document dump. There's just so much corruption you can't. Your head is spinning. How do you stay focused and not just how do you get out of bed? Yeah, I don't know that I do, but I don't know that I have a great answer for that, except for that you're completely right. I mean, this Wednesday, they had Trump's first press hearing and so long, and they had Tillerson going and Sessions going and Congress doing a Voterama trying to repeal Obamacare. We're seeing almost every single one of these cabinet nominees that I mentioned are having hearings one day after the next. They get Zanky on Tuesday, Pruitt on Wednesday, and Rick Perry on Thursday. And so it really is just a document dump that try and get a handle on and try and pick out what's what's really most important.  I'm going to find out its price performance. Let me just see for a second. So Halliburton was was Dick Cheney's company. And he was made vice president. And he left Halliburton. All right. So when in 2000, in 2000, the price of Halliburton stock was $19 and 22 cents. When Dick Cheney on January 18th of 2002, it dropped to $5 a share. By 2005, it was up to $36. It hit a new high by June 27th of 2008. It went up to $52 a share. So when he left office, when he left office, it was worth $52. So when he took office, it was $21 a share. When he left, it doubled in eight years. That's not nothing. That's not nothing. Well, and you're not nothing. Jenny Rowland is research and advocacy associate for public lands at the Center for American Progress. Her recent piece, How Exxon Won the 2016 Election, is available over at AmericanProgress.org. She joined us today from Washington. Thank you for being so generous with your time. Yeah, thank you for having me on. The David Feldman radio program is made possible by listeners like you.


Leeds United hoping that kind of thing continues, and Somerville is in straightaway. He goes down, and it's a penalty in the first minute to Leeds United. It is Rod Rigo. Oh yes, you could be sure of that, and he could be sure of that. It's a perfect penalty. Keeper Moore was about to shoot, and Bournemouth have responded quickly. And it's Marcus Tavernier, born in this city, who scores his first goal for them. How about that? Tavernier is on the chase, and he's in. He's away from Christensen. This time, Mellier blocks it, but hang on a minute. Oh, what a finish! Phillip Dilling! Solanke, and Moore waiting for service. And Solanke has put it away! Somerville, bounced off Mepham, looking to provide their third. He put down!


So what is that, you know looks like a dinosaur but smaller Monitor lizard Is the other one Oh That's one magnificent lizard. He knows he's in a safe space And he's a pretty beautiful place, mate There's a just hanging out Putting his eye on me.


Hey guys, Coach Mack here with this week's Beneath the Surface powered by Microsoft Surface beginning now. We're going to look today after the effect that Jeffery Simmons had on this game after his return from a one game absence. His presence was felt at some very critical junctures in this ball game. Let's highlight two of these crucial plays by Big Jeff in the victory over Green Bay at Lambeau Field on Thursday night football in front of a national audience. Green Bay Packers came into this ball game one of the top rushing teams in the league. Simmons defense held the Packers offense to a 56 yards and a 2.9 average. Titans are now up 27-17. We're looking at a wide nine rush alignment three by one offense. Jeff is the left wide four eye technique. It's a three deep with a high hole robber. Joshua Kalu is the high hole robber as he drops down. This is a picture perfect cage rush. Excellent marriage of rush to coverage here. Big Jeff once the pocket is squeezed the middle is squeezed. Big Jeff then does an excellent job of coming off of a double team making a very perfect tight wrap. Aaron Rodgers never sees him coming around the corner. This is a huge sack at this point in the game after a huge sack.  So great to see next play we're going to look at fourth and one 212 left to the fourth quarter. This is a critical play for Green Bay. They're an 11 personnel two by two to Titans are in a man to man four man front. One starts out in a tight two eye technique and then prior to the snap moves head up on the guard. The ball is snapped. This is excellent get off by him with a hat in the hands technique. He crushes the guard number 76 into the a gap forcing the back to alter his path allowing David Long who has a tremendous trigger and feel massive fourth down stop at this point in the ball game. This Titans defense was very opportunistic and very critical all game long of turning back the Packers in crucial situations some after many sudden changes but Big Jeff made his presence felt in his return on Thursday night football.