Episode 99 - Tom Darden: No Exit Investing
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Tom Darden is founder and CEO of Cherokee, a private equity fund which focuses on financial, environmental, and social returns for investors and communities. Cherokee has raised over $2.2 billion in five institutional private equity funds, and invested this capital in the acquisition, cleanup, development, and sale of approximately 550 environmentally contaminated real estate assets in the US, Europe and Canada. Since the 1980’s Tom has invested in over 100 companies using a “no exit” philosophy. Tom shares more about the benefits of investing for the long haul.
All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host and guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific investment advice for any individual or organization.
Episode Transcript
Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. I'm here with my partner, Luke Roush. Luke, awesome to have you. We got a special guest.
Luke Roush: We sure do. Tom Darden goes all the way back to day one. You and I together almost 10 years ago now.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah, sure, man. And for those of you don't know, Luke and I are in different places in the country now. He's in Nashville. I'm in California. Tom is in Raleigh. But Sovereign's Capital and really our emphasis and calling to the work of Faith Driven Investor and started in Raleigh and Tom came along side us and encouraged us and was there at the beginning and just more than any other person outside of the three of us. Andre, Luke and I just got it. And just like it didn't need to be sold on it. And that was really refreshing because, you know, as a time at the beginning of sirens, when we really felt a lot of headwinds, right? I took his two and a half years, raised $12 million.
Luke Roush: Oh, my goodness. Oh my goodness. The level of hubris that we exhibited and also the level of rejection that we experienced was
Henry Kaestner: I was just thinking about the rejection part. I don't know about the hubris, but there's probably something to do.
Tom Darden: I don't know about the rejection for it, but the hubris that you had no hubris truly believed from the very beginning that you were on it. This was something that the world needed and you guys were the right guys to do it. So it was just a privilege and an honor to be able to watch you guys build this thing that you built and thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Henry Kaestner: Thank you. Many of our audience are going to know you. Many are not. And so what we like to do on every podcast episode is to get an autobiographical fly over the person we're talking to. And you begin your life not so much as a Faith Driven Investor, but as a Faith Driven Entrepreneur. And we don't need to go all the way back where you're rebuilding British sports cars, although that would be fascinating to go into. But you know what? They start off the beginning. You grow up in a family. You grew up in North Carolina. Who are you? You can include the British sports car saying if you want.
Tom Darden: Yeah, I was born in Pennsylvania. My dad was in the Navy at the War College, and he was working on the first computer that they had. So I kind of had some technical genes, I think, from the beginning, and we lived in small towns in North Carolina. Morgan son Lenore Highpoint, North Carolina, Petersburg, Virginia. And when my dad was forty one, he quit work and went to law school. He wanted to be a lawyer and he had always wanted to be a lawyer for some strange reason. And I think I was very influenced by that. I then went to law school myself after I went to unceded college and to grad school. I studied urban environmental planning. I was very passionate about environmental issues from high school. It was an early environmental movement. It happened kind of post 60s. So I'm sixty six years old now, born in nineteen fifty five. So, you know, I was thirteen and nineteen sixty eight just to kind of give this some context. And it was a very tumultuous time. And the environment, civil rights, the Vietnam War were the big movements kind of inverted order. But the environment was on a lot of people's minds. I was very influenced by that, just sort of feeling this sense of abject terror about pending environmental doom, which I know a lot of young people these days feel. Also, it's kind of a sad thing to have inflicted on you. And I decided I wanted to do something about that. And I went to law school to be an environmental lawyer. I did work as a mechanic and bought a car when I was 13 and was very technical and ended up buying, fixing up and selling 20 cars or motorcycles. By the time I was age 20, that's kind of how I made money. I was always working, doing some kind of work. Start with the paper route at age 10 and pretty driven to make money. I mean, I'd say somewhere in the vicinity of greedy. I went to law school at Yale. I didn't like the law that much. I went to work at Bain and Company, and I did statistical analysis of the energy consumption in heavy industry. I kind of used that way of thinking about industry to buy these brick manufacturing companies that use a lot of energy and convert them to using wood waste. So biomass fuel, which saved a lot of money and that worked out well and then sort of bacteria growing company to grow bacteria for cleaning up pollution in the ground that led to creating the contaminated land cleanup business. And then let me
Henry Kaestner: stop there for just one second. We've never interviewed somebody who started a bacteria growing company. How did you get started? No, we haven't. What does that even mean?
Tom Darden: Well, it really came from my background in grad school. When I went to grad school, I studied about waste treatment, different types. But sewage is processed by bacteria like people don't know that. I mean, obviously lots of people know that if they're in the business or involved in it, but the job of consuming and breaking down sewage and lots of other kinds of waste, it's done by bacteria. It's like, you know, society hires these bacteria to do this work for us. And I was overwhelmed by that. I remember in grad school, I drove my wife crazy, my wife to be crazy because I was just obsessed by this amazing phenomenon. So it's always in my mind, and I knew that bacteria would. Consume all kinds of contaminants, and it was known that bacteria would consume contaminants in soil since it is an easy step from there. I had some contaminated land that I needed to clean up at these old manufacturing plants and I thought, well, instead of holding it all to a landfill or hiring some third party for it, we could figure out a way to do it ourselves. And I've got some professors at Virginia Tech gave us some money. We ended up building a business called Cherokee Biotechnology to grow bacteria. We sold bacteria to others in the remediation world, and we started a remediation company taking dirt, contaminated dirt and cleaning it up with bacteria. And then that led to being able to buy contaminated land, you know, more efficiently or not being so concerned, I guess, about buying contaminated land. We were willing to buy land if you weren't willing to buy. And that led to creating our private equity funds. We raised $2.2 billion over about a 20 year period to buy clean up and then sell contaminated land. So anyway, that's a little bit about kind of our background. I continued to invest in, you know, interesting technologies sort of like the bacteria stuff on the side. But then that kind of became our main focus. The thing I was doing on the side really became a primary work way, and I got three kids, four grandchildren.
Henry Kaestner: Well, along the way, you also started one of, if not the largest bread company in America, one of the larger companies in America. So you even mentioned that, you
Tom Darden: know, that was the thing I did when I left Bain and company is is a bought for brick plan sort of all together in a transaction substantially financed by a public company that needed to get out. They were losing a lot of money. And I did that because I had this plan to convert these plants to using biomass instead of natural gas, which is very expensive at the time. Gas prices spiked and it became uneconomic to make bricks, basically. These companies were losing money, but I had a plan to instead of using natural gas to convert them to using wood waste. I knew about that because EPA was beginning to regulate wood sawdust and forcing the sawmills to pay to put it in landfills where it produced methane. So it was a stupid solution. And I thought, Well, we can use that instead of fossil fuels as a fuel for the company for manufactured bricks. And so that led to an enormous cost reduction, plus a great environmental benefit. It was a wonderful thing. And then I just continued, I kept my bread companies ended up with eight brick plants and a number of distribution sites. We had a peak of about a thousand employees, and it's great business. I really love the brick business and the teamwork and the work of the people in the brick plants.
Luke Roush: Tom, one of the things that you and I talked a fair amount about in the past is this idea of really focusing on long term and being an investor that thinks with a very different time frame than maybe the rest of the world. Can you share just a bit more on that? Why it's important to you?
Tom Darden: Yeah, I think that it kind of relates to the question of liquidity. It's not really the same, but I think of it as sort of in the same vein. Like, why do you care about time? You care about time because you want to have some sense that you're going to fill in the blank? What have some money at some point in the future that you could imagine, right? So I kind of would refer to that as being liquidity. You want some predictability about your future financial state, and those are things that I think generally we should discourage in ourselves, you know, sort of from thinking that way. First of all, predictability about future financial stake. It's kind of a fool's errand in many ways, or it's trying too hard to kind of get everything taken care of. Well, if I do that, then everything will be OK. You know, which obviously is not the case in our lives. I also think it greatly influences the types of investments that we do. We're not we're not willing to do certain things if we're thinking about, well, how am I going to get out of this or how long is this going to last? You know, then that causes you to to have a bias toward investments that have greater liquidity. And then at least you can kind of control the time horizon in that case. You know, if you think about your capital, your investment activity as being part of your mission, part of your philosophy, part of your phase, you know, part of your beliefs, then I just feel like you should use that as the driver of what you do, as opposed to thinking more about the investment attributes or aspects of it themselves. If that that shed some light on that topic,
Luke Roush: well, and so on the topic of liquidity, you know, maybe just speak a bit as to how that has influenced your portfolio allocation between public equities and private equities.
Tom Darden: Yeah, right. Like the zero and 100 early on came to be infatuated by entrepreneurism and the effect that entrepreneurs can have or really businesses can have on people and really came to believe that business was the most important vehicle for almost any kind of social, you know, social or economic change or activity. And along the way, there were people who were nice to me or helped me or. And I just thought, I want to do that. I want to help make that happen. And you know, you could say, well, if you invest in the stock market, you're doing the same thing, you're providing capital to companies that end up creating jobs and doing all those great things. I'm not disparaging of that, but I wanted to do it more directly. Also felt like I had some ideas or some thoughts, or it could be helpful in that sense in a denied the premise of sort of diversification. I mean, I felt like diversification was it was sort of like not burning your boats. You know, when you cross the river, you should burn your boats because you're in, and if you diversify, then you're kind of not really in. And so what I would do is if I saw an opportunity or Amen in Austin or the film made sense to this, and then I would not invest in it. And the first deal that came along basically took 100 percent of the capital that I had. Well, the company did. I have almost no capital. But then after I ended up selling them, which was a big mistake, I had some liquidity and the first next deal that came along, I put almost 100 percent of it into the deal and just thought, I don't want to kind of create a portfolio per se. I want to use this specifically productively in terms of some objective. And so that kind of takes you out of the public markets mentality of having a diversified portfolio about I so never buy any public stock, mutual funds or bonds. None of that stuff. And I pretty much kept to that bell. I have bought stock in public companies, so I went on the board of the board for public companies over the years and about stock in those companies while I was on mutual funds, bonds, stocks, any of that stuff. This publicly traded concept, I've got a four one K that is allocated that well,
Henry Kaestner: it seems, from having known you for the last decade or so that part of what drives you to is relationships. I think back, you know, we've had Pete Oakes on the program before. We're good friends with a bunch of the folks that you've been in relationship with, and it seems that you get a lot of joy. I'm going to go back in a little bit and I'm going to talk more about what you do invest in. But my sense is that there are a lot of relationships that you've had the impact on and have had a big impact on you. Can you talk to that personal aspect of private investing?
Tom Darden: Yeah, I think it's really, really important that for a lot of us, you know, our primary friendships are primary relationships from people that we work with. And I'm not a particularly social person. I tend to be fairly introverted, but I have very close relationships with the people that I work with, either here in my office or in these kind of loose, you know, loose affiliations of relationships where we work together, like so the people that you mentioned and the opportunity to grow and and thrive and learn from these other people that you're in business relationships with, it's really important to me, also have chosen very affirmatively to invest in a number of young people to try to think very intentionally about, Well, how can I use capital and business or knowledge relationships to sort of create a continuing rolling on forward into the future virtuous thing? And I think that's a really important and wonderful, wonderful thing. I've had some powerful experiences not doing what you said, in other words, where relationship or values were not sufficiently weighed or taken into account in a business setting. And oh my goodness, you know, you just you pay a heavy price in those situations.
Henry Kaestner: So one of the things I think that I hesitate to say saying this, but that I see some of myself in you, is that both operators came out of an experience that was born out of wanting to solve a problem in the marketplace and for you, as on the environment that you then bridge from being an operator to an investor investing in the same team, the same problem that you want to solve as an entrepreneur, you're now solving as an investor and doing it a great scale. Two point two billion dollars is a lot of scale looking at big projects. Talk to us a little bit about that, about the impact you see, being an entrepreneur, solving a problem and being an investor and solving a problem.
Tom Darden: Yeah, interesting issue. I think the happiest and in many ways most productive times of my life were when I was in operation. I think a lot of people who ended up started a business but then ended up as kind of an investor would say the same thing and the investment side of my life, it almost became a. I don't have to say this, but almost sort of a necessity or a mandate like what are you supposed to do? You know, you end up with some resources. Then what are you supposed to do? And I feel very called to use those resources in a way that are consistent with my faith, with my values. And so that became my job, if you will. But it's very different than the opportunities that you can have as an operator. And I'm always counseling. People don't sell your business. Everybody as a business ends up, you know, they all want to sell their business and they won't sell their business because they want liquidity in the market. They have liquidity. They're going to be trying to figure out how to get back in the same situation. They just got out of it. I may be exaggerating somewhat, but so I'm always saying, no, please don't do that and I'll look back. You know, I was twenty eight years old when I applied to separate companies and straight away had five hundred to seven hundred fifty people, depending on the year. We were sort of looking at me every day and say, Well, what I do, boss. And of course, you know, I was clueless. I knew about one thing which was energy kind of energy and engineering, basically how to drive this energy conversion. But I went back and I have such regrets about not having responded to what was a great opportunity to have a real impact on people's lives and even just simple things that that I knew about. I don't know, like personal financial management. I think about the message of Crown Ministries and Compass and these organizations that are teaching people how to be responsible with their money. I was kind of born with that knowledge. We later began to teach basic skills, you know, reading, math, et cetera, basic skills. But just some of these things that we could have done with this big, big platform access to people, then I didn't think about that or thought, Well, you know, they just work here. But that went right. This is an important part of somebody's life, and I wouldn't really I didn't respond to that real mandate. I feel like if you an operating business, you have a much better opportunity to do that. Cure investor, you're interacting with executives in the company, but you can't reach down.
Luke Roush: So one of the things that I've always found unique in some of our conversations, Tom, is both your focus on not maintaining liquidity, the long haul, but also your willingness to, you know, take dreams and big, hairy and audacious goals and be a part of some real, meaningfully risky companies that are, you know, anything but safe. And usually those two things don't go hand in hand. Some of the people that are really long term and are highly relational are thinking about stability a bit more, whereas you're doing that, but you're also, you know, aggressively taking risks around, you know, crazy ideas. Maybe just share a little bit about how you've thought through that during your tenure as an investor.
Henry Kaestner: And give us some examples of those crazy ideas. Sure.
Tom Darden: Well, I mean, you know, I guess the craziest of them would be age, which originally was was named industrial heat, and we now referred to it as h. But that's our fusion research project, where we set out to try to gather as many leading minds who were working on a particular type of fusion sort of quantum level fusion or, you know, very fusion at a really tiny level as opposed to the big fusion initiatives, just to see if there was a way that we could create energy from nuclear fusion using hydrogen instead of radioactive material as fuels. And you know, this is like a crazy thing to work on and certainly is is an enormous risk. I actually think the risk return relationship is not so bad. If you did a pure financial analysis of it, you'd say the payoff would be vast in relation to the risk. But most people just can't deal very well with, let's say, 100 to one or even 10 to one probability of loss. Right? Just it's just difficult for people's brains to deal with that. And I just wasn't born with that gene. That said, you can't lose money or for fear of losing money. I just didn't have the fear of losing money. And so again, it's kind of a burn in the boats when you cross the bridge way of thinking about things like you're in and now you need to work as hard as you can and try to make it work. But there's some reasonable probability that that it won't. And let's do it anyway. That's been my mentality about it. After the deals I've been in have lost money, and at least half of those have lost all the money. So, you know, to kind of get your attention.
Henry Kaestner: Talk to us about lessons that God's taught you about himself through your investments. Any aspect times when you felt, you know, this is I'm communing with the living guy through what I'm doing. What does that look like or do you feel that way?
Tom Darden: Yeah, it's sort of it's something that I've been thinking about increasingly or, you know, really for a long time, but. Increasingly thinking or Bill, something maybe related to that, which is how does our work, how do our acts reflect glory on God or the glory of God, let's say. And I see that constantly in the others that I work with these relationships that you mentioned, you know, if you see what Darrell Heald is doing, if you see what Jeff's and what just grill was, period, Pete Hoekstra Leininger, you know, you guys, you know what you're doing. I just see God's glory that it's so obvious that people are responding to a calling by God. They're not chasing their own desires, or they're they're managing their own desires in relation to God's impact on their lives. And it's a very compelling thing. I think about the stewardship. Why do I so limit those early years when I was in the bread company? And it is sort of things left undone. And it's because of a failure to respond to that. And by contrast, I wouldn't do that again. Now we all could do a better job. But to feel that sense of motivation and the privilege of being able to think that I have an opportunity maybe to reflect God's glory. Think about how that affects what you do.
Henry Kaestner: We entered into a section of podcasts now that we call lightning oracle to the lightning round is powerful for times. The answer is powerful.
Luke Roush: Very powerful.
Henry Kaestner: Now it was in a way, my big takeaway before we go in the Lightning Round is that your answer wasn't prescriptive. It was this sense of seeking out the answer and asking the question. And that's the thing that I hope that all of our listeners are just what is it about God's glory as manifested in my work? Am I being brought closer to him? Is it about me or is it about him? Where am I experiencing this pleasure? Just open ended questions and just asking those questions basic conscious for all of us. And then, as we mature, allows us to think about the times in our past when maybe those questions weren't front and center for us, but maybe could have been. So thanks for being vulnerable about that. Well, you
Tom Darden: never get there. You know, you'll never get where you wish you were or, you know, it's a it's a journey and it's an aspirational journey. It's not knowing that you're at the destination, you know?
Luke Roush: I'm going to start off, I'm
Henry Kaestner: going to start off with lightning round. I'm ready. OK. Tom, there's a
Luke Roush: story that's going around about you that involves you choosing to stay in a tent at a conference that you attended. I'd like you to speak more about that.
Tom Darden: Yeah. I don't know. I don't know if other people do this, but I actually have a lot of these, but just stupid little like calls or mandates or things I'm going to do. And one is that I want to be sleeping outside for a week every year. Like, like, it's not OK to have a year ago that I sleep on the ground for a week and I say that for all kinds of reasons. And so meanwhile, I go to this conference in Iceland every year and I stay outside. It's very crowded, by the way. I mean, the lodge itself is very crowded, so rooms are at a real premium. It's actually kind of convenient to have somebody not in the lodge, but there's a little place in the woods outside and set up a tent out there. And I've seen the tent. I've actually stayed in the tenant more than one conference. But anyway, sometimes I travel in work and I'll take a tent and my little airplane outside while we were playing in more than 80 per cent of airports sleep on ground the. I just think it's a good thing to sleep on the ground.
Luke Roush: I like it. I like it. How many did
Henry Kaestner: you take on the airport hotel? Do you have that? They take on the airport hotel? I'm like, Oh, there's one in Dallas, there's one in Denver. And for Tom Dart and there's one everywhere.
Luke Roush: Tom, how many times around the country and you hitchhike?
Tom Darden: Well, I mean, I've hitchhiked California between Texas and Canada, hitchhike from Canada to Texas to Louisiana, which I calculated I've hitchhiked about twenty four twenty thousand miles, just sort of summing up these trips. And I thought it was kind of interesting. I wonder one day I'm retired because I hitchhike like a bandit. I mean, I was just a fiend when I was young. I started when I was 14. My family moved from Lenore, where all my friends were that I love so much to Chapel Hill, where my dad was going to law school and I have any friends as three hour drive. And I was 14 and I'd walk out of the room, hitchhike. It was the time when people did stuff like that. My parents were wonderful parents. I was full grown when I was 13 14, and so they just weren't that worried about sudden hitchhike up to Lenore. And then I began hitchhiking longer distances and the child to New York all over the place.
Luke Roush: Last question for me, and all of a sudden, you know, a Yale Law School student, you know, one might imagine that you were kind of straight A's all the way through. Walk us through your early secondary educational experience, please.
Tom Darden: Yeah, it's pretty rough. So I was begun as an athlete, and all I cared about, probably in order, was girls sports and cars, or maybe cars and sports. I'm not sure which, and I truly thought that I was going to go play basketball at Duke. I went to Duke's basketball camp when I was a kid, so I wasn't worried about academics and failed a couple of courses my ninth grade year and then. But I quit growing and I was six two and weighs one hundred eighty pounds when I turned 13 six to eight hundred eighty pounds and I'm six to hundred pounds today. So every year I got shorter and shorter basically as everybody around me got taller. And when I was in the 10th grade, I thought, You know, this is not working out like I got. I literally thought, I need a new plan. And so I thought, I think I'll study. And so my next year, I was about in the middle of the class. My junior year, I was number 10 in my class and my senior year. I was number one in the class for the first quarter. And then I was. I study like a maniac when I was in college and I just got really serious about academics at that point.
Luke Roush: That's good. Henry, what do you?
Henry Kaestner: So sold one of mine or a couple of mine, but you did give me some more material. I'm going to go back in. Well, I'll start off with one that's off of what you talked about hitchhiking. I mean, you hitchhike that many miles. That's unbelievable. Thirty seconds to ask you, what's your favorite hitchhiking story?
Tom Darden: Well, I'm trying to think of the ones that I could tell by now, here's the thing
Henry Kaestner: do we have like a PG 13 version of the FDE? I guess you can tune in to later to hear the real answers?
Tom Darden: Yeah, I'll tell you those later. So I get picked up by this guys in a jacked up GTO, Pontiac GTO and discern within just a few minutes of being in this car that this guy is stoned out of his. I mean, he was stoned out of his mind and he's driving this car and he had a gun and he was not being aggressive to me, but he was kind of waving this gun around it. Just he was he was pretty crazy. And my goal, any talk to anybody who was drunk or who was using drugs which lobular these drugs at the time I wanted to be driving, I thought, I need to get behind that wheel. So how can I contort this into me, helping him out by driving the car? And eventually I told him, of course, I knew a lot about the car and knew a lot about cars, and we're talking about cars and and all that driving. And eventually I was driving the car. So driving through the night and there's a car that pulls right up on my bumper and it looks like a police car. You know, I'm look in the rearview mirror, it's got Iraq, and this guy has a stash of dope in the ashtray of the car. No kidding. And he keeps reaching in and grab his stuff. But but he's asleep at this point. So I'm thinking, I'm driving this car guy to get these drugs out of this car. And so I start reaching in the ashtray, pulling out marijuana, but also some pills and trickling it out the open window beside me until it was perfectly clean. I got rid of all the drugs that he had stuck in the console. This car? Well, I mean, I realize he's going to wake up at some point. This guy's got a gun, something and what am I going to do? But I have plenty of time because he slept for a long time and I finally had to pull in and get some gas. And I told him he reached up to grab his drugs and he said, Where's my stuff? And I said, You don't remember. And he said, no, and I said, Well, there was a car behind us. I mean, there was a police car behind pulled up right behind us. And you said, Hey, we got to get these drugs and so we got the drugs. And you know, you were really paranoid about it or whatever. He's like, Well, how about that? That's that's the strangest one of the Stranger Stories.
Luke Roush: Yeah, that's the first time for the FBI podcast dumping drugs out the car window. That's a first.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah, it's awesome. OK? You wrote a paper while at Yale about acid rain, which is something that actually you and I have in common. Not the part of going and getting our J.D. from Yale, by the way, but the part about the fact that we've both written papers about acid rain. I wrote mine in high school. So my question to you is 40 years on is acid rain more or less of a problem than it was in 1981.
Tom Darden: Acid rain is a lot less of a problem, certainly in the U.S., probably even in China. At this point, it's a function of coal, sulfur and coal, and all power plants in the U.S. still have scrubbers. Problem with scrubbers is that they eliminate the acidity, but they increase the CO2 output so they actually cause a coal plant to have more CO2. So it's a bit of a dilemma like you're trading one problem for another. But anyway, so many of the specific human health type environmental problems that we were so worried about in the past have been dealt with at this point. The environmental problems are much more systemic questions about how are we affecting the micro organisms through the pollution that we're putting in the ocean or that's fallen on the land from air pollution? CO2 global warming Those types of pollution issues are much bigger concern to this point, I think.
Henry Kaestner: OK, I had not known about your dream in high school, but my question is related to that. And that is that knowing Luke Roush, as you've come to know him, does that change your perception of Duke University at all or is that just not possible? It's not
Luke Roush: fair.
Tom Darden: No, I was a fan of Duke. I didn't have a problem with Duke when I was a kid. I went to basketball camp at Duke, as I said, and I was a big fan of Duke, and I actually had been somewhat involved with Duke. After that, I hired professors at Duke for an engineering project to work on a waste segregation system. I was on the board.
Henry Kaestner: There's so much they could go with there. Yeah. Given the dirty work to the Duke case, but I won't go there. Maybe it is good. All right. Well, let me ask you a simpler one. Maybe it's not so simple. Duke plays Carolina basketball. How do you reform?
Tom Darden: You know, I mean, oh my goodness. Yeah, a lot. No, I would refer to I would refer to a lot of but you know, I just don't know. I'm kind of holding the thumb. If there's a
Luke Roush: duke who was our original first connection, Tom and I named the person Henry case, and we're turning it around.
Henry Kaestner: Oh, my. Who it that they connected you to, Tom. You're asking me 30 seconds or less. I have. I have no idea.
Luke Roush: That person was Joel Fleischman.
Henry Kaestner: Joel Fischer Oh, yeah.
Tom Darden: Oh, well, Joel Fleischman got me my first summer internship in Washington, D.C., working for a socialist think tank. No kidding. So, I mean, he was doing what he's doing now. One hundred years ago, approximately when I was in college, he is one of the kindest, most wonderful men.
Henry Kaestner: For those of you don't know, Joel Fleischman may be better known. Not for I did not know about the socialist part, but he's really known for being one of the greatest minds around philanthropy in the United States.
Luke Roush: One hundred percent.
Tom Darden: He was the guy behind the billionaire who was the book called The Billionaire, who was the guy who who built duty free shops and was a billionaire. But he gave it all the way through the Atlantic Philanthropies, all anonymously. There was this huge thing going on with all this philanthropic money raining down on the world, and it was all. And Joel Fleisher was in charge of all of that
Luke Roush: in a really serious believer, interestingly.
Tom Darden: Incredible story.
Henry Kaestner: Yeah, Tom, we're very grateful for you. You may know that the one question that matters most to us that we would ask anybody on a podcast like this is what you're hearing from God, in his word, in the Bible. And it doesn't need to be this morning, necessarily. But it could be last week. It could be over the last month. But we believe that this book is alive and that it continues to instruct us. And so hearing how it impacts those who come on the program is a special blessing. What are you hearing?
Tom Darden: I want to. I want to find ways to more precisely align my work, my activities with God's will. And so my kind of constant prayer is God, show me your will and help me bring into alignment what I do with what you would have me do. And it's not quite the same, but kind of related, you know, how do I let my works reflect God's glory? That's Matthew five 16. I'm just sort of obsessed with that because I feel like I could do a better job in that regard or trying to make that more specifically clear, I guess you'd say.
Henry Kaestner: Thank you. Thank you for being our long term friend and encouragement to Luke, and I thank you for being on the podcast for sharing. Thank you for making what it would even seem to be like a layup question. A difficult one at the end. And now I understand a bit about, you know, I had a conversation recently about rare seagulls, and I shared with you about the fact that my dad's an ornithologist, is a bird watcher and loves rare birds. And and he would take me to the sewage treatment plant growing up because that's where the rare seagulls would come. And usually when I tell that story to people as an explanation about why I am also not a bird watcher, you're like, you picked up on it right away. You weren't grossed out at all, and I didn't know why. But now I do that. It's a big science thing, and it's the removal of waste. Is this redemptive thing and your life's work had been about that. It's about what is wrong. How do we get waste off? And it has something to do with even ornithology and sewage treatment plants. So that's the first time we've ever talked about that on any podcast with FDE or FDE, you went there and I thought it was a beautiful thing. Thank you for sharing with us.
Tom Darden: Hey, thank you so much. It isn't often that I get the chance to talk about sewage treatment, but I really appreciate the opportunity. I really appreciate you have to talk to you guys because I love what you're doing and the impact that you guys are having. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bless you, guys.