Verizon have in place to protect the information you get from consumers and customers and how is that information used . Guest that is a good question. We have a Privacy Policy in place that covers how we use customer information. The whole list of different issues. And a whole gamut especially. The line drawing at the fcc is exercising is trying to figure out where do we give customers notice and opt out. We have had to make those calls over the years. We spend a lot of time on privacy. A chief privacy officer reports to me. We spend a lot of time on that. Very important to the company. We have a lot of different consumers and we have a policy we post on our website. We give customers separate notices. When they change the policy. There is a lot of information we are providing to customers and trying to make clear how their information is used, how it is collected and what we do with it. Host do customers read the long, privacy forms . Guest they do. We spend a lot of time explaining our Privacy Policy in a way that is understandable by people. We work with outside experts sometimes to make sure to your point when customers get that information it isnt something they just disspell and dont Pay Attention to. Dispel. That is important. It is not just we want to, you know, post this because the regulators ask us but it is because it is important to them and it is a trust between us and them and a trust that goes on there. If they get this big, long, 20page document they dont understand that is not good from our perspective either. Host you were a litigator with williams and connelly before joining verizon, from long island and went have uva und undergrad and grad school. Another thing flowing from the Net Neutrality decision is what the fcc will do about zero rating and that is who charges and doesnt charge for which kind of data. Talk about how you think that should play out. Guest these are products being rolled out by various companies in different ways. The customers have been responding to them pretty positively. Right . People like free data and free things. The real issue in our respect is it isnt what we are charging for it but it is who pays for the access to the content. Is it the customers or the Third Party Creator . Somebody who wants a new product and in front of customers. So we hope that what the fcc does is kind of let these products roll out to see what customer reaction is to them. And make a case by case determination as to whether or nut there are concerns there. Customer feedback is very positive right now. Ctia has done surveys, particularly millennials like these kind of product and the idea of these products. Isnt it unlevelled Playing Field when you can give your data to customers for free and they have to pay for the data from lets say netflix . No, because the way we structured our program is anybody can have access. Anybody can participate in the program and sponsor the content for the customers. The terms we offer are available to any other provider that wants to doit. It is really up to the third party whether it is something they think makes sense from a business perspective. It is actually a very leveled Playing Field. Which products talk about which products are involved . Guest if is essentially a way a third party can sponsor content for customers. They pay for the data usage rather than that data usage counting against the customers data plan. Is this the wave of the future . Are there going to be a lot of these products and become poplar . It is hard to say. That is one of the exciting things about the time we are in. It is hard to know where the market is going. And all of us trying to figure it out. If they think they need to step in, we will assist, it looks positive. Host is there regulation between the line and wireless . Guest the Wireless Industry is extremely competitive. It has always been but when you look at the industry now it is more so than ever. I dont know if there is a clear answer to that in every case if that makes sense. In general, it is good to apply regulation in a way that is Technology Neutral or provider neutral. But it is hard in our space. Things are so complicated. There are so much nuance and change that it is hard to say yes or no to that kind of question. Is there going to be wired Telephone Service in 1015 years . Guest probably. There are some people who, you know, like it. That will be a challenge, though, because the smaller the pool of people that use it the expenses dont change in terms of how much it cost to keep the network running. We offer a Voice Service over fiber in our territories. That is much better, frankly, than what you can get from a copper line. Fiber is always better, it is cheaper to maintain, you know, it doesnt cost anymore to the customer than a regular Traditional Land line would. So it is hard to say exactly. If you look at what customers have doing and what customers think, they are moving away from landlines in droves. It will be interesting, if you talk to someone in their 20s, some dont know what a land line even is. So, that is something, i think, for policymakers in the industry need to think through. This goes back to 5g. Does the world move toward wireless, particularly hard to serve areas . Do they become more and more served by wireless and not by any kind of red line . That line makes sense in a lot of places. Especially as Wireless Service develops, becomes more resilient that might make more sense. Maybe fiber. Some people in the because of the economics in the industry and pace of change, you know, i think companies have to have the flexibility to make those decisions in a way that is good for customers and always economics in terms of business. Over six year there is an investment and this isnt about fios. We call it a fiber approach. We looked at it in a particular area and they look at the Business Case for vios. This is for a small group of people in the country that will have a state of the art system and they will be ready for deployment for 5g. When you think about it that way, the project involved, you can see how important that is. And finally, the fcc recently came out with a new plan for set top boxes. Where is verizon on that . We have stayed out of the lobby battle for the most part. We filled comments and have concerns about the proposal that the fcc initially rolled out but we also understood the goals of it. So we understand that customers want to move away from set top boxes. That is a pain point for customers in many ways. We see the industry evolving. The set top boxes are going to go away. We understand the goals we they are trying to accomplish and we have concerns. The Cable Companies have proposed an alternative proposal which we thought was a positive step. I think the chairman felt that way, too and google made similar comments. We will have to say how that develops. At 10 00 pm and sunday at 9 00 pm eastern. When im making a point at a town hall meeting so we decided wed turn it into a regular feature and. Surprised about how much attention it got. Lets go you change it every month or so. Guest we do. We find the right way and itll be a series of books on a particular topic. But its usually the easiest way is literally what we are reading now and we keep one up about a month and sometimes maybe i will have two or three books that ie reading and okay take a picture in this month and next month or whatever. Host do you ever post reviews . Guest ive never done much of that. I dont have a lot of time to write reviews. If i put the book up there it means im reading a pretty good but that. Host what are you reading right now . Ou guest i thought i would take a low break and this is one of those classic cases where you see the movies they want to reaa the book, the martian and i think its andy weir and i got intrigued by this new netflix thing with a man in the high castle which is an old book, 62. Days to read Science Fiction when i was a kid and for whatever reason i didnt. That one and a guy named philip who is now dead, so those are the things. I just finished up about your faith of roger shindos book but its long. Host you read mostly nonfiction. Guest i do it mostly heavyly biography, history. I used to be a historian so thats what i enjoy but we will have some things like, and if i read fiction its quite often. This is like im going back to being 12, two Science Fiction books basically but i read quite a bit of historical fiction lima call as wonderful series on Julius Caesar first manner from and things like that lets mostly heavy history heavy biography. Host you mentioned you have your ph. D. Where did you teach . Guest actually taught as a graduate assistant and an adjunct professor at the university of oklahoma, oklahoma baptist university. That was a semester gig, todd and grenell colleges london program. That was a fun one that i got my undergraduate degree from there and then i did a stint teaching a class. I taught with don faller Democratic National committee chairman. A class and National Parties and campaigns at gw appeared in d. C. And i taught a campaign course at the university of central oklahoma. Host are there any historians that will make him out with a book or entire series you have. Guest i like everything that Steven Ambrose wrote. And a lot of range in his writing. Very good obviously John Mccullough is an excellent, excellent historian but probably it was heavily focused on british history and these are not all histories but churchill was always worth reading whether his just memoirs or whether it was his he had a wonderful little book called great contemporaries back in the 20s which later on nixon actually did a sort of follow on kind of book himself. I like to read Richard Nixon stuff. I like to read about Richard Nixon. I think hes most fascinating politician of my lifetime and i thought the things that he wrote were really quite good. Host did you read did your reading help you in your work as a congressman . Guest it does, history particular provides a lot of context, a lot of analogies. Frankly a lot of just understanding because most people when they get to congress if they arent careful they think history begins with them but you are really stepping into the flow of something, an institution and if you read history a lot of interesting now it parallels but that ground quite frankly to whats going on. John barry wrote a wonderful book years ago called the ambition of power which barry is a substandard freighter. Substantially of writer. He did a great look on the 1927 or flood called the rising tide or something. But he got cut up with speaker ryan before he realized, he was in his last year basically and he wrote a book about congress and it turned into the rise and fall of speaker wright and there are a lot of characters. In that case a lot of people i know, Newt Gingrich ascended Mickey Edwards i worked for many years ago, west or consequential figures in the sense that they were close to ryan that you read about. So those kinds of things i think are extraordinarily helpful and sometimes older members or morek senior members are telling stories. You know something about the context of the story that it really comes out of. Montel rogers the chairman of the appropriations has been here since 1980 and when he starts telling stories about the guys when he got here had been here since the 50s, its fabulous. Its fabulous. Host besides john barrys book are there other books you could recommend about congress or that you read before you take your seat . Guest you know, one of the more interesting books, its not about congress per se. Its a biography but Lynne Cheneys recent biography of madison is a good buck because heres a guy that in many ways shape the system so to speak both in terms of the constitution and serving in the body and its very first term. I think its always good. I like these things, again nixon is good. The johnson series. Host robert caro . Guest gosar spectacular because nobody who thiss institution the senate the presidency obviously the breadth of american politics like you did. I had the opportunity to meet him on several occasions. He really really knew this. I would also say the biography of gerald ford obviously because he was as president very much a creature of the house. I cant remember maybe joe cannon i cant remember. But i think it was time and chance or Something Like that a but it was a wonderful book and again you are lost in the politics of the era because this guy comes in the 40s and his minority leader when he was elevated to vice president. Thats an awful lot of history. And years ago i worked for a guy , not enough people remember that should guide vander check it was the creator of the modern Political Campaign or the nrcc. He arrived in 1966 and lost thee republican primary in 92 but you talk about a guy that understood the institution because he was involved in campaigns all across the country. It was a very consequential you know, legislator delivered the nomination speech for Ronald Reagan at the 80 convention. A pretty cool guy and his ability to tell stories, his observations, i used to call him poses because he got his right to the edge of the Promised Land and had he not lost his 92 primary he would have been reelected and rcc chairman and would have had the opportunity to be in the creation of the moderate republican majority. Re. Probably he did more to bring it on that any single guy guy but yeah just pick up some month listening members and some other reading. Host when you read some of these older biographies, Lyndon Johnson or gerald ford, do you ever say to yourself the house is a work that way any more . E . Guest occasionally you do. Obviously the house changes with the times although there are lots of elements that are the same and i like to think honestly of the Appropriations Committee is a Little Island that actually pretty much functions the way was supposed to. That wasnt always true. It went through a rough time but rogers who very much is in the best sense of the word and institutionalized and a creature of the house so to speak has really done a lot i think to restore that in the hopes that it can spread more broadly across congress. E in a we live in a very divided and very ideological time to where you know the ability to rise to consensus or make a deal or literally i have a lot of good friends on the other side but theyre not as as many issues that you can work on together in a way that clearly some of our predecessors managed to do. Host given your oat la houma rootsy ever. Books on Andrew Jackson . Guest my grandmother we are chickasaw so my great great grandfather was forcibly removed from mississippi and some of the last chickasaw to come out so we were raised and days a satel people when i was five years old i wasnt sure who Andrew Jackson was but i knew he was a very bad man and had done evil things. My grandma wouldnt carry a 20dollar bill. I have read when Robert Remini was the historian of the house o and wrote it book on congress. E i should have mentioned him but he is a big reader. You should talk to lloyd sometime. Lloyd and i were having the chief whip and rodney freilinghuysen, having lunch with dr. Remini and he presents me with a copy of jacksons indian wars and he present rodney with a copy of henry clay biography because rodney think it was his great, great grandfather theodore who actually ran on the ticket with henry clay. He also held the floor against indian removal for three days so we were both sort of jackson and amazed by dissent and that it was wonderful. I remember him handing me the book and saying now you probably wont agree with my thesis in this book but i want you to read it and think about it and come back. Not that he meant to do it but in some way the removal of the five great tribes of the southeast cherokee and choctaw chickasaw save them because of push them further out and kept them from being totally overrun. Thats a unique explanation for violating treaty rights and what was effectively ethnic cleansing of the southeast part of the country. So, i said i dont agree with you in some ways that i will say this i remember having gone ati the same timeframe i read this, we have a great chickasaw festival in tishomingo which is at the site of the old chickasaw capital. Had a great grandfather who was the dash of the chickasaw nation and there were thousands who came to this thing. It is amazing but that might not have been the case we might not have survived quite the same way that we did because we were a large tribe. We were a 60,000 person tried and you dont have anything anywhere near that size on the east coast in the areas where you obviously have europeans and americans in conflict and contact. Host what about books on native American History . H guest oh gosh a lot of them Charles Manns book is not really so much native american but its 1491 which is the state of the indigenous population in the north and south america on the eve of the european arrival. And what happened and how devastating that contact was. Man mann makes a case that the disease alone was much greater in terms of people and the indians whether north or south American Allies had contact with whites long before they saw them because disease traveled ahead and decimated a lot of these populations. A i love empire to summer men. The comanche nation is in my district and its a great biography on Quanah Parker that is an award winner and just one of the best biographies. A guy named Harold Gibson wrote wonderful outdated history. My own tribe to chickasaw and there are a lot of them. A biography of my great aunt, wonderful indian folklore artist who did the First Entertainment and the Roosevelt White house for ramsey met donald in march of 33 and entertained the queen of england at hyde park at 39, known all over the world. I have to get a plugin for her but we have lots of them. Angie debow, one of the great historians of native america. A lot of people wrote about are free of geronimo but some of the consequential books, a book called still the waters flow as about what happened to the five tribes when oklahoma was opened up to a White Settlement and my family owns the last of the land still but a pretty devastating experience for the tribe that had already been moved and effectively had their treaty broken and their land, ended up in individual ownership which io many cases was systematically looted from them. Its a really tragic tale so its not as if Everything Everything bad that happened to the indians happen 200 years ago. This was the early 20th century in oklahoma so its still a very, to difficult issue and its difficult for americans sometimes to get their handsro around it because honestly it does reflect does not reflect very well on the americanov government are frankly the american treatment of native americans by the nonnative population. Its a hard, hard history. Host congressman cole do you bring others into speak to their public and conference india recommend books . S . Guest i recommend books all the time. Y as a matter of fact every christmas i have a dinner for my republican appropriators and my classmates. We have a republican appropriators because the classmates rrs that diminishing group as they retire. But we always buy a present and its almost always a book so i gave him, i think the most popular is probably unbroken which Everybody Loves that book. Host laura . Laura hillebrand. Guest a great author. Its a fabulous book. One year bob woodward wrote the price of politics which is a great book and particularly when i gave it, i gave it out in 201, on the budget crisis in the budget act of 2011. I said you guys need to read this because all the characters are still the same and they are all here. Host did you find a bug accurate when i talked about president obama . Guest parts of it i knew but hes one of the great reporters. He was kind enough to sign the them also we bought 50 or 60. It he took my copy to be signed as he was doing all the others and he opened it up and when i read i write. D he starts going i underlined this and that he started going through that and he said this bs mean what i think it means . For something close to an hour she told me the story and read the comments. Host you put the mac s in the books . Guest it may have been named that the character as opposed to the account because i do think you know i do want to be critical of the book. Wi i have a wonderful relationship with john boehner but an upanddown relationship. I should say up, down and up so we are in a good place now and i have a decent relationship with the president on a personal basis. Ive had the opportunity to interact with him. He was wonderful frankly in my hometown in the tornadoes and 2013. We couldnt have asked for a more compassionate response. If you look around this office i was joke im probably the only republican that has five pictures of barack obama in his office because we have done everything. Legislation is writt most indian legislation tends to be bipartisan and we have worked well with the white house on everything from the call bell sediment which is the largest classaction settlement in america for mismanagement of the indian trust land, violence against women act. We had a very important tribal provision to expand tribal sovereignty, indian reservations are underresourced in terms of police and their all sorts of tricky jurisdictional questions to try to work with those. Said that, i like both. Com having said that i like both of these guys. So i think some of the president sob observations about john boehner are based on misunderstanding who john boehner was. You can see in that book theres a park part where he talks, i understand guys like boehner. Hes a country club republican. I will grant you that boehnerry looks like a Country Club Country Club republican but hes anything but a country club republican. Hes a guy that grew up in the family of 12. Hes the only one that i got to college. Eg his dad aranibar. You know he took longer to get to college because he was doingh a business. He is really a much different guy and his story in some ways it to the rise of the speakership is every bit as remarkable given his circumstances and where he started life as the president which is a Great American story. So, i think sometimes it would have helped if that book you been written before and they could have each written a book. I think we might have had a somewhat different ending to the story although frankly they maintain a reasonably Good Relationship despite the difficulties of the year. So anyway, back to the main point. Obviously we give books every year and its always interesting to see what your colleagues i have a lot of time to read. Empire of the summer, they loved that one. Recently im blanking on the authors name. A fabulous, fabulous book about two american pilots. One of them the first africanamerican carrier pilotan and his wing mate who is an annapolis Ivy League Educated i think that from a very affluent family in connecticut, still alive and the africanamerican was shot down in korea where they were frankly helping cover the retreat from the alawites river but how close they were and the white pilot, all the pilots were turned to cover this guy who had to crash land his plane. He cant get out of the plane. He is trapped in it and eventually die sadly with jesse brown but he crash lands hisd plane trying to get his friend out of the plane and its everything from the letter that the africanamerican pilot writes to his wife and the night before he is killed and its all report is to in their handwritten letter. The guy had wonderfully clear penmanship. But stuff like that, thats. Priceless stuff. Host that adam maacos. Guest yes, thank you for remembering. Im embarrassed to have forgotten. T he said so many great things about the country that we still had jim crow and this was precivil rights and here are two guys and the crew around him on the Aircraft Carrier and they all became friends and you know its a very moving, very patriotic story. Out to be a movie and i hope some day it is. Host do you read a book a week . Guest obviously it depends[l on how long the books are so yeah on average probably one thn week or Something Like that. So certainly two or 3a month. Host on the airplane backandforth . Guest absolutely. I do two things on the airplane but if im fortunate enough to operated, i keep a journal so if im several days behind thats a good stretch of time to catch up but usually reading yeah. Host is that journal for a future book . Guest i dont know. A good friend of mine who is since deceased wrote a a wonderful story named rufus fears. Teaching people who listen to Teaching Company which has these wonderful lectures he has got five different series in their. He was a classical historian so lives of famous greeks. At the university of oklahoma and he chaired a by the blankenship family and freedom and he wrote a great lecture series called the history of freedom and was a specialist on lord acton the Great British historian who have that same dramatic flair and early 20th century. Roof is, he was a guy that i used to sit down with two or three times a year. We would seek advice of not longer after i got to congress or maybe before i got here and had been elected we went to have lunch and i said hey id like some some advice. What do you think i should be doing up there and he thought for a minute and he said wrightm he said first of all tom not many people do anymore and so it needs to be done in frankly do it in hand and not on the computer because the Electronic Technology can corrupt it inin ways. It may not be important when and you are an that will be important when you are gone. Historians will look at it and ive kept journals when i worked for Frank Keating as his secretary of state and its pretty cool to have written to the Oklahoma City bombings and have that. Literally that day or the next day while he was in the crisis and what we were seeing as it was unfolding. Dabbled with i have always dabbled with it for certain periods of time but when i got here i am pretty good at it so there are no breaks. Its been. Continuous. Host are are you disciplined to wright . Guest i usually do it about three times a week but uis keep your schedule with you and then you can bring whatever the memory is right back. So i dont have a certain time or whatever but im very systematic about keeping it. I go back and look at it occasionally. Found one been there and ive been through good period and a challenging period. When i first got here i had known him. I was the executive director of the nrcc, our Campaign Committee and he was one of the gang of seven. We came up with the poster at the nrcc. It was so cool. They were rebels back then. Although leadership hated these guys so i knew him very well and hed he has been helpful in my campaign. I also am very good friends with lloyd lund. Now senator blunt but our chief whip and roy had been exceptionally good that he didnt know me but not only he contributed to my campaign was a very competitive race in 2002. He literally sent a busload of volunteers to my district all the way down to lawton oklahoma because we have big events going on in both places. I had to cover a big parade in my hometown and it was close. They said how can we help and i heard about this and they had 5000 so we were there. I got here and it made me the way up and i was the first guy in my class to become a deputyom whip in my second term. They ended up running against one another and im on teamm onl blunt which put me in the dog house for two or three years with Speaker Boehner but one night, and this was before this race had occurred, and he was sitting in the capital with some good friends of mine, john kline who is still here and Gresham Barrett who is gone and gone in the sense that not here, they are light that we were frankly having a drink in boehner had this big table where he tended to hang out with his kind of group. We are all friends and we are all in this committee. I know gretchen, zoe sits down for a second and we are chatting away. He says in my journal at night write john boehner came by and we are sitting and chatting and i think he will run for leadership. If he does i will probably support him unless he runs against roy blunt. Case im s. Here but again like most things in life, Speaker Boehner actually has a wonderful phrase, the right things for the right reasons, the right thing will happen, so over the course, you know, our relationship changed pretty dramatically to the point that i was boehner defender, close boehner ally, we went through a couple of difficult years, but, you know, that happens in politics and it wasnt unfair, we just we were on different sides on a lot of things and its not smart to be on the wrong side for first the leader and the speaker, by the time it was speaker, i think we had worked through our issues and worked very hard to find Common Ground and so throughout his speakership i did have a terrific relationship with him. Tom cole, how do you get your books, do you buy them, go to the library . V
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