a day for every adult. that is a recommendation that still goes on to this day. >> the full program is available to watch online. >> weekends on c-span 2, every saturday american history tv documents america's story and on sundays, book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more, including mediacom. >> nearly 30 years ago, media, sounded i powerful idea to bring cutting edge underserved communities. from coast-to-coast we connected eight hundred 50,000 miles of fiber. our team brooks be barriers, delivered one gig speeds to every customer, has led the way in developing a 10g platform and now with mediacom mobile is offering the fastest most reliable network on the go. mediacom, decades of dedication,

decades of delivery, decades ahead. >> media along with these television companies the fourth c-span as a public service >> and now, more television for serious readers. >> welcome to today's competitive enterprise institute book forum and the new book "the power and the money." how the epic clashes between commanders in chief and titans of industry. in your host ryan young senior economist here. for those of you who are new or do not know what we are about, we are a think tank based in d.c. who focus on the regulatory aspects of several different public policy issues from the radio torry process itself to technology and antitrust to energy and the environment. and our guest today, because we

also like to talk about bigger ideas that are less granular than individual regulations is maybe one of the most distinguished speakers we have had your outside of the occasional nobel laureate. he has affiliations with the bipartisan policy center, and the mercator center at george university. he has also worked both in the white house and on capitol hill, and you've worked at least one regulatory agency. >> two. >> two. and we are not done yet. he has a phd in american civilization from the university of texas at austin and i hold in my hand some proof that he has put that phd to good use. so welcome, we are having to have you. and also in lieu of books for sale, we have these qr codes

that you can scan to purchase your own copy. the book is hot off the press, came out on august 20, so just about one week ago. and i highly recommend the book as well as its predecessor which is called "fighthouse" which is about the in-house staff clashes at the white house that have occurred over the many years. so my first question for you since not everyone has yet read the book, what is your 30 second elevator pitch version for what it is about. >> thanks for having me and thanks for hosting this event. my book is about president and ceo's, the 150 year history of presidents and their clashes and sometimes collaborations with big-name ceos and top companies. this goes back to john rockefeller in the 1870's and all the way out to elon musk and mark zuckerberg of today, and that story of how these ceos built their companies and how

presidents often reacted to them and build a regular to restate this really the story of the development of modern america. >> that is pretty good. and i will say you spent a lot of good yarns in this work. you are a fantastic storyteller and that come through time and again from rockefeller alloy up to mark zuckerberg today. what inspired this book, you have some kind of flashbulb moment, did it build upon earlier work? what got you interested in expressing the relationship between business and government in this way by talking about eos and presidents? >> as you said earlier, i've written other books. and as i looked at it, i realized that all of my books are about presidents and something that nobody has ever covered before. and also something that speaks to our current moment. you kindly mentioned my other book. in the late 2010 people were talking about all the infighting in the trump white house so i decided to do a deep i've exploration to see that it happened release administrations

before the trump administration. spoiler alert, it did. so now i was looking for a new topic that would speak to our current moment and what i noticed is that ceos and big companies are more powerful than ever before. they affect so many aspects of our lives. the iphone we carry, the cars we drive, the fuel that powers the cars. but at the same time, ceos seem more unpopular than ever and we are in a weird omen where both, grass and republicans seem to hate corporations. so i thought now was as good a time as any to explore the history of the ceo. >> conflict. fighthouse was about conflict inside the white house between staffers who work for the same boss and we want the same party. this book is about external

conflicts between presidents and ceos who are outside the white house is that through line from the book to book intentional or did it just happened to be that way? >> you kindly said i spin a good yard and i think good yarns come from good material that often comes from conflict. a bunch of people sitting around a fireplace and singing isn't that interesting a book. but a book about people undercutting each other and fighting and having titanic goes and having high-stakes which is what we have both in this book and also in "fighthouse," i think that makes an interesting tale. conflict is definitely part of my brand. >> another theme i noticed is something that we try to emphasize and that is the difference between being pro-business and being pro-market. if you're pro-business, you might think that what is good for gm is good for america or that the best way to exit a financial crisis is to bail out financial institutions. that is very pro-those

businesses. but we prefer a pro-market approach ray you want open and fair competitive process that anyone can participate in and we succeed by creating value for customers and consumers. you mentioned that both parties are pretty hostile to ceos. there is an antibusiness streak going on, but also a pro-business streak going on at the same time. can you unravel that a little bit, and also many, don if either party has any semblance of a pro-market street, as distinct from a pro or antibusiness streak? >> i think that was sickly and well stated, the distinction. and i think it is an important distinction. and i am with you on the pro-market side. but you are right. he ceos don't have the interest of market in mind, they have the interest of their business in mind. and that is their job, to create shareholder value. i remember when i worked in

regulatory agencies, the first one with the department of labor and my boss was elaine chao, a very skilled and very smart cabinet secretary, at the time the head of labor. and i remember she said to me don't count on these corporate executives in the foxhole. they won't be with you on a tough fight. they are with you when you are doing something that helps their business, but they are not with you in the larger ideological struggle. and i think strike with me. you have this sense that businesses are lobbying on behalf of business and that is what they should do. there have been some exceptions. i do talk about a couple of corporate executives who really try to see what the country needed at key moments. j.p. morgan helped to bailout the economy in crucial moments in the crises of 1893 and 1907. john rockefeller helped try to prop up the economy in the great depression. didn't work, but he did try. henry ford despite his hatred of

franklin roosevelt builds the largest armaments factory in the u.s. at willow run and he has roosevelt visit the facility and it is so vast that they have to travel around in a car. and ford, who hates roosevelt is jammed in the backseat of this car with eleanor roosevelt on one side of him and franklin roosevelt on the other side of him and across from him is his son, and a son who knew how much his father hated the roosevelts, and his dad was giving him the stink idaho time -- stink eye the whole time. for the most part they have been interested in pro-business being their business. lee iacocca first shows up as a kind of pro-free-market anti-regulatory guy who comes to the nixon white house to argue

against regulations being imposed on the auto industry. and as time goes on he evolves and experiences all these challenges from competition from japan and abroad and suddenly they want government intervention. so he is buddies with jimmy carter leading to the chrysler bailout of the 1970's. and then in the 1980's, he's argument with ronald reagan for anti-market regulatory actions that would help his company and ronald reagan had very little patience for him. there's a great story where reagan doesn't accept the arguments in favor of a gas tax and he tells them that reagan would be blamed every time people pumped up their cars with gas and they would call it the reagan tax and then he says that is why i'm on the side of the desk and you are on that side. so his attempts to bring his anti-market interests met their limits with ronald reagan. >> it seems to me that is a

common tale moving from relatively pro-market to solidly pro-business, whether that happens to coincide with market policy or not. have you seen a similar trajectory in any of today's more famous eos? >> you look at someone like bill gates who also has interesting evolution. bill gates of the 1980's was not the bill gates that we think of today as kind of the philanthropist. he was a hardcharging business executive. there were all these jokes about microsoft such as the microsoft programmer joke is windows eight done until lotus don't run. lotus was the competing product, so they would set up the microsoft product so that the competitor products wouldn't work as well on their operating systems. and gates takes a very hardcharging approach to not only business and pushing out his competitors, but also to government and when government

starts looking to his business practices, he is all in fight mode. he doesn't necessarily work for him because the business is faster than government but it is not bigger or stronger than government. i think the gates of the 1980's is a very different one than the one we have today. >> ceos are humans, they don't just have our virtues, they also have all of our faults, and that can include getting into temptations for easy money from possibly unethical sources. another theme that jumped out at me, a lot of our work here focuses on formal institutions, and institutions, think of those at the rules of the game. the waiter regulatory process is structured, the separation of powers for the way the court system is built. those are institutions and a lot of our work focuses on those formal institutions as they exist, how we can improve them.

your book focuses also on institutions, but it is more about informal institutions. personal relationships, gentlemen's agreements, that sort of thing. could it be that a lot of us are missing out on something very important? >> i think what you're getting at is for the intangibles. one of the points that i make is this idea that if there are two companies or to industries who are conflicting with one another on an important regulatory issue, they basically are going to fight themselves to a draw in terms of lobbying resource, and sometimes ceos can be the tiebreaker. if you have a ceo who has good relations in washington, we can shape the debate in a way that a ceo who is just focused on the

bottom line and logistics of the company is not going to be able to. ceos can bring this additive band to the company if they get involved in washington. >> support of the modern skill set isn't just management or decision-making, part of it is also the rolodex. is that something that has become more true over time for less, or about the same? >> the rolodex is definitely important rolodex in washington in particular is what i focus on. we look at some of my genie diamond with the ceo of jpmorgan chase and a very skillful operator, i talked about him a lot in the book. and one thing that jumped out at me, there were a couple of things. when he started as ceo, he used to come to d.c. twice a year and he realized that wasn't enough. he started coming twice a month. that is a big use of corporate resources. the number one value you have is

the ceos time, and they are choosing to use his time that way by bringing him to washington twice a month and in doing so he can't meet the same people. you get to meet other officials. so regardless of who wins this upcoming election, jamie diamond is going to know people with senior roles in either administration. the second thing that he does that i think is clever as he has this construction re-describes himself as barely a democrat. democrats hear that and say well, here's this corporate ceo is not a republican, i like that. republicans here that and they hear barely. inland republicans hear barely, they think maybe he's a democrat, he's against the excess of the woke left, he is not a squad members of the is ok without even though he feet normally a democrat, he is someone we can deal with.

>> do you think that kind of triangulation, you think that is sincere or do you think they are putting on a show, or do you think it is a little bit of both? >> it is definitely a bit of both. what i argued is that if you view how a ceo deals with washington as some kind of a soundboard, you want to push out the engagement to the highest level. you want to be as engaged as you can. you want to pull down the partisanship. you don't want to pick one side to strongly i think he is very clever about the way he had the engagement at 11 throughout. in the trumpet ministration he made some offhand comment about how he ran against trump for president, he would win and he recognized almost immediately that was a problem. trump puts out a pretty critical tweet of him and jamie diamond apologizes and says he is not doing that.

so he recognizes what the limits are and where he can and can't go. >> there's a common tendency with most people to do things in binary. one example of that is people tend to think of things as either the government over here, the private sector over here, and never the twain shall meet. i don't think that's true. whether you were talking about the airline industry or the health-care industry or the auto industry or these days, increasingly the semiconductor industry. it's not really part of buyer. there is a whole emerging field and political economy called entangled political economy. it is not either/or, it is both. tabled in a unique way. i think your book is a perfect example of entangled political economy. so my question for you is from rockefeller to the present, the

scope of your book, has that entanglement changed in any fundamental way, are things more entangled, differently entangled? >> absolutely. if you do encounter one of those people who think that never the twain shall meet, i will show them and tell them to read it to disabuse them of that notion. but what i talk it out in the book is the evolution or maybe de-evolution of how things have changed over time. the rockefeller chapter i intentionally called a blank slate because rockefeller is building his empire without any government intervention or the ability of government to intervene. there were no regulatory bodies, no sherman antitrust act, no regulation that could have stopped what he was doing whereas over time, the government has developed massive regulatory apparatuses plus a massive number of regulations, and they can shape what companies do. that doesn't mean that companies can make a profit. obviously companies are very

successful in some of them make huge profits, but it means that government regulations and actions are shaping for the companies do to advance what the government wants them to accomplish in many ways. and out of use the words entanglement, the two sides are matched in a way that they absolutely weren't back in the rockefeller era and they are increasingly so over time. >> you think there are any ways to possibly reduce that entanglement? it will never go away, the real world isn't built that way. but either way is to reduce it or reduce its harmful effects, or do you think we are doomed? not in general, but doomed to eternity of cronyism and public-private partnerships? >> i am never one to believe we are doomed. i am inherently an optimist. i first bossed was a congenital optimist and he taught me that things can improve and we see

many things improve over a lifetime. some things have gotten worse also, but i'm in this business because i think things can get better. and i'm a proponent of regulatory reform. i think that there are things that some presidential candidates over time, maybe not either of them right now, but president and president of candidates have talked about regulatory reform with a lot of interesting ideas out there. i think there should be some kind of regulatory scorecard where agencies have to say what the costs are of all their regulations, but the benefits are, and actually not go over a certain amount in terms of cost over benefits. and i think they should be able to enforce that with some kind of hammer whether it is a congressional hammer within the administration. so i think regulatory reform can get things back to a more stable equilibrium where they are not as enmeshed.

it's never going to go away as but i think things can improve. and that's again, that's why i'm that's why i write the things i you have a history,ive a history in bachelor's. as an old history major, one of the things i enjoyed studying is not just the facts and the stories, but the way you approach it. one way to view history is the product of great forces, more of the leoly to industry view of history. napoleon didn't do what he did because of his great personality. there were larger forces, like reaction against the enlightenment and the birth of nationalism that led him to do what he did. there's also opposite the great penalties view of history. such as c.e.o.'s and presidents. do you think those personalities are the driving forces of the stories you tell in your book, or do you think larger forces such as a general rise in the

role of the state off the ebbs and flows of populism over the decades, things like that, have more to do with how the stories in your book turn out? >> i think personalities are hugely important. you look at john d. rockefeller, who built the energy industry in this company, he called his company standard oil, because he was establishing a standard for what oil products should be. before that, oil was either be ineffective or unrelike or combustible, so he said if you buy standard oil products, you know what you are getting. there's a kind of form of private sector regulation. he built that industry by force of will. that said, oil was going to be part of the american economy. it always was going to be. it just was shaped in the way it was by rockefeller and his personality. so i think both are important and what i try and get at in this book is both the larger forces at work and what's been happening and how the country has changed over the last 15

years. but also the degree to which these personalities, both presidential and counter, shaped it. >> any mature thinker will say both great forces and great personalities. the question, and i don't think this debate will ever end, is what's the balance? it can change over time, change with the people involved. but your book is mostly about personalities. you've told some good stories from your book so far, but do you have a favorite personality or favorite story that reveals a personality that you encountered while you were writing the book? >> one of my favorite characters in the book is someone who i hadn't thought that much of before i wrote book, lou wasserman. he was a hollywood agent, came from relatively obscure background in cleveland. they still never found his birth certificate. and he rises ahead of hollywood's most powerful agency, and then he wants to buy a studio. up to this point, he has no interest in government. he doesn't want to get involved in fundraising.

most of the hollywood execs at the time were republican, which is very different than today. but he was standing aloof from government. and then bobby condition de's justice department -- kennedy's justice department starts investigating him, and he recognize this is government thing is something he's got to deal with. and so he starts befriending presidents. he befriends john f. kennedy a little bit, then kennedy is tragically assassinated, but then he becomes very close friends with lyndon johnson. in fact, in 1964, as johnson is at the cusp of a great landslide victory, wasserman says to johnson, i have a favor. johnson embraces, what's the favor going to be, because people ask him stuff all the time. i want you to promise me i'll never have to serve in government. so it's such a relief to johnson that he is happy to grant that favor, because so many people were coming home for government positions. wasserman befriends johnson and starts the pipeline of liberal money from hollywood to washington that really wasn't a

big thing before wasserman. he also is able to make friends on both sides of the aisle much his friendship with ronald reagan, based on when he was reagan his agent and got him his first million dollar contract in hollywood, that friendship is something that carries over into the white house. on some occasions, as i write about in the book, actually affects policy. >> speaking of wasserman, i think one reason that he might have gotten into the political game in the first place is because, as you tell in the book, in 1962 when his company, m.c.a., merged with universal, there was an antitrust action against that that temporarily blocked that from happening. do you think his entrance into politics and his preference for staying behind the scenes was based off of that incident and trying to avoid a repeat, or do you think it was just his temperament as an agent to let stars be the stars and we'll make things happen behind the scenes? >> well, in a way, it's both.

he is spurred to go into politics based on the 1962 incident you talk about with the antitrust investigation from kennedy's justice department. but he always had this theory about staying in the background, and he had rules for agents. first of all, his agents had to wear black suits, no color, no splash, and white shirts. but then he also didn't want his agents to become stars themselves. he would say stay out of the spotlight, it fades your suit. so he had a very specific way of going about things, and i think he took that attitude to his dealings with washington, and he was very close to lyndon johnson. he would stay up late at night in the johnson white house talking to johnson. in fact, at one point he runs into mrs. johnson when wasserman is leaving l.b.j.'s bedroom, and he thinks she's going to yell at him, and he apologizes for keeping the president up so late. she said, oh, no, you don't understand, he lives for these conversations. because there's a concept of the loneliness of leadership. c.e.o.'s and presidents really have no peers sometimes. they feel like there's no one

they can talk to, but they can talk to each other. so wasserman really had these rules about how to deal in business, and applied them to washington, and i think they were pretty effective for him. >> of course, some c.e.o. and presidential interactions cross ethical boundaries, we'll put it that way. which way does causality run? do c.e.o.'s corrupt politicians, or do politicians corrupt c.e.o.'s? >> well, obviously it could go both ways, but in my book, i intentionally try not to pick people who are unethical or people who went to jail or did anything bad. i mean, i may not agree with their political or strategic decisions, but i'm really not trying to foster this idea of everything is corrupt and everybody's really some kind of criminal. i'm just trying to show how these people who are trying to be stewards of their companies, who are trying to think about

shareholder value, how they are operating in a very challenging environment where government has more and more power, and sometimes presidents like roosevelt against rockefeller see advantages in targeting them as villains, and they're just trying to make a go of it and make their company successful, even as government imposes certain road blocks along the way. >> a lot of the c.e.o.'s that we meet in the "power and the money" work in media in various forms, print, hollywood, tv. in the early days of journalism, about the 1930's, henry loose pioneered a technique called the breakfast technique. can you tell the story of what that is? >> henry luce is the founder of "time" magazine. he founded it in 1923. and his idea is that there's no real national news source. you might have a big paper like

the "new york times," but there's no national news source that's giving the news equally to people in california as in new york has iowa, kansas. his insight is to create something like that, and by the 1920's, the technology exists that this can happen. the interest is there. so he has an special focus on personalities, particularly on the president. he has an item in time called the president's week, where they talk about what the president has been up to. it's a great archive for things that presidents do or things they said or events they were at. and he also has this thing called the breakfast technique, where he would take or one of his journalists would take a political figure to breakfast, and as they report on what the person said, he would also report on what they ate. and so there's this great example of the 1936 candidate for president, he was the governor of kansas. he's assumed by many that he's

going to win the 1936 election balls the polls say he's going win, but he loses very badly because pollsters at the time did not recognize that the only people answering polls were people who had telephones, and people who had telephones were wealthier, and therefore more inclined to vote against roosevelt than for landon. so it was not a statistically significant poll in any way. but in any event, the interview with landon includes the fact that he had kidneys for breakfast. and there was a guy named lance morrow who writes for the "wall street journal" frequently, who was a write for "time" for many years, and he said even recently, this is 90 years ago, he says no one who read that article ever forgot the kidneys. >> yep, that is now seared into my brain. but it seems like it's at least an attempt, maybe not in landon's case, but an attempt to humanize great permits who are rich, famous, successful, make

them seem a little more like you and me. are there modern equivalents to the breakfast technique, like maybe politicians doing tiktoks, something like that? >> politicians are always trying to find ways to show themselves to be human and regular. donald trump has spelling errors in his tweets. i don't think they're unintentional. i think there's some method to them. also i think that you see politicians have podcasts today. you think about different senators who have twitter accounts, where they bring more of their personality into it. so i do think that politicians try to show themselves to be regular people. now, it's not always the case, because they're not always regular people, but a lot of them are. when i was in the white house, i used to tell staff there were intimidated by famous names that they read in the newspaper, they put on their pants or skirts one leg at a time like everybody else. so they are people. they just have jobs that sometimes can go to their heads.

>> yeah, that same impulse existed 100 years ago. it still exists today. sometimes i wonder if some of the politicians involved are actually human. but speaking of human universals, and how they express themselves differently over time, you talk about how "time" magazine during the 1950's was rapidly pro-eisenhower, very partisan, to the point where it even impinged on their credibility. you write that on page 88, the famed mccloughan wrote of "time's" rapid-fire proceeds encouraged a sub-rational response. that sounds to me like an old-timey version of trump advisor steve ban non's flood the zone strategy and also the way that a lot of the very online people engage with politics today. maybe we're not in uncharted

waters after all. >> i wonder if that's the first time anybody ever paul them in the same sentence. i think banknown would appreciate it, and mccloughan would have been mortified. in any event, yeah, i think that there is something going on there with, i guess, the mccloughan approach to "time" magazine and "time" did lean pretty hard in for eisen hour at luce's explicit direction, because some of the staff members do not want to be supportive of eisen hour, but luce recognized the opportunity in eisenhower, and he wanted to be a president who he was friendly with in stark contrast to roosevelt, whom he hated. even after roosevelt died, luce said it is my duty to go on hating him. even beyond the grave, he was still hating roosevelt. but "time" did suffer as a result, and there was a joke i lay out in the book, and i think you noted that there are many jokes in the book, i even have an appendix of all the jokes i

found that were told by or about c.e.o.'s, and that in itself is worth the price of admission. but the joke about "time" was that "time" at this time was bipartisan, because half the time it praised the republicans, and the other half it bashed the democrats. >> i like that a lot. facebook has come under fire for similar reasons. they're not in the tank for eisenhower, i don't think anybody is these days, but a lot of republicans went into grievance mode and said they're in the tank for democrats, and there are a lot of people on both sides saying that facebook pushes misinformation on people and can change election results. i'm a little not fully skeptical, but mostly skeptical of that. partially because i can't name a single person who has changed their vote because of something they saw on facebook. and the other reason is that algorithms tend to push content, not to new people, but who

people who are already interested in the thing being pushed. so when you have russian gots pushing pro-touch and anti-democrat propaganda, their reach is limited to people who mostly already buy into that point of view. so it's not so much changing elections as much as reinforcing what people already believe. i don't know, do you think there's something to that, or do you think facebook and other system sites are having a more pernicious effect? >> facebook is a tool. what i've found in my studies of presidential history is that as new tech knoll tools, as new tools are developed, campaigns adapt them and use them. the ones who adapt to them first and are skillful about it can be more successful, so franklin roosevelt with his brilliant use of the radio, john f. kennedy was so skillful with television that after he won the 1960 race, he told one of his aides, we wouldn't have had a prayer without that gadget.

and then in the 20's's, you start to see these internet-enabled technologies. in to 04, the bush campaign, for which i worked, had a microtargetting strategy that was effective. it was pre-football, but it was useful way of identifying who the voters were. and with target to facebook, both sides have reason to point to something that facebook did to help the other side that they don't like. so in 2008, a lot of facebook aides are helping obama and his high-tech apparatus in the campaign, also in 2012, so there's a lot of pro-obama sentiment among facebook executives, and they actually went and helped the obama campaign. in 2016, the trump campaign pretty cleverly uses facebook, not to convince people who were going to vote some way to vote another way, but actually to suppress the hillary vote. i don't mean suppress it in a nefarious people, but to us courage people, people not so

excited about trump or hillary, they would put out information about hillary to make people less inclined to vote. they might have been hillary voters, and that was a benefit to the trump campaign. both sides have used facebook, have found some success with facebook. those things in themselves are not necessarily facebook's fault. but facebook is increasingly unpopular and is soon by both sides as some kind of a villain or bugaboo. >> which has made life very difficult for mark zuckerberg, who figures prominently in the later chapters of the book. can you talk about how he has tried to thread a needle that probably cannot be threaded? >> yeah, look, in 2010 i talk about how zuckerberg hosted a george w. bush book event after his memoir comes out, and i speculate, and i'm not the only one to speculate, i cite a source, this was after the republicans won congress in 2010 and maybe they recognized that

they needed to be nicer to the republicans. obama does events with zuckerberg at facebook headquarters and jokes about the hoodie and notices that zuckerberg is nervous and kind of makes fun of him for being a little sweaty at these events. again, there is an effort to cultivate both parties, and then with trump, you have facebook, which has a very liberal staff. you've got a person in trump who is kind of universally disliked among senior facebook people. but at the same time, zuckerberg is trying to maintain relations with trump, and he has dinner with trump in the white house. and there's one incident in the book where i talk about where facebook and the white house, or zuckerberg and the white house were talking about an issue, and zuckerberg was kind of sympathetic to the white house view, but he was complaining that his staff was on a different side of the issue. and then there was snickering among the white house after saying mark is with us, but he's afraid of the liberal staff. as a c.e.o. today, especially in

these high-tech companies, you have to take into account what your staff thinks. the reason jamie dimon and mark zuckerberg can take different approaches is because dimon has employees all over the country, where is facebook is more concentrated in liberal areas in california and more likely to have a more liberal staff. so that staff isn't so excited about seeing the c.e.o. of their company befriending donald trump. >> the barely a democrat strategy might be the right idea for zuckerberg, but it's very, very difficult to execute. >> yeah, it's harder for zuckerberg to do barely democrat than it is for dimon. zuckerberg's employees want him to be a full-in democrat. >> you also go into the hunter biden laptop story, which i have enjoyed ignoring as completely as i can since it popped up. but you document some pretty bad behavior among some of the

progressive staff at several social media companies and trying to downplay that story. i think that might have created a little bit of a streisand effect, where it actually, once people caught on to what they were doing, they actually amplified the story against what they're going for, and it ties into something we've been talking about in antitrust cases related, at least the republican ones that are more grievance-oriented, something i call the dozen key strokes arguments if you want to type in nypost.com, it's 11 key strokes, and then you can read about hunter biden's laptop all you want. the social media companies might try to jigger the algorithm into their favor, but i don't know, other limits to their power? >> of course there's limits to the power, and one of the things i talk about in the book, i would say that we have more free speech today than ever before. if you look at supreme court jurisprudence, you can say what you want. the question is, do you have a platform on which to say it? so if facebook is limiting your

ability to get your message out, it's not a first amendment violation, but it may be censorship or a form of send sonship. that's really where the issue is today. it's not about you being suppressed and told you can't speak, it's about whether you can get your message out, and do these social media companies amplify messages they like and kind of mute messages they don't like. >> that's a good answer, i like that. >> thanks. i try. >> i think in a perceptive book, i think maybe the most perceptive line you have is near the end on page 258. you said c.e.o.'s have helped create an environment in which government tells corporations what to do, but in doing so it helps the corporations maintain their dominant positions in the marketplace. it is this symbiosis, widely recognized or not, that helps explain the bipartisan resentment we see these days. that again ties into a lot of the antitrust work that c.e.i.

does. there's a rent-seeking component, where you have c.e.o.'s rigging the system for favors, and politicians get to a populist and anti-corporate at the same time. so there really is the symbiosis right there. that symbiosis has always been there, since the rockefeller days, and i think it always will be. but i don't know, do you see any avenues for reform that might -- >> let me push back a little bit. i'm not saying the c.e.o.'s are looking for favors per se. what i'm saying is that complexity is a subject. so the more complex the rules are, the easier it is for a large player to stay in business, because they can hire a big staff of regulatory attorneys and lobbyists and compliance officers, whereas a small, innovative company doesn't have the resources to do that. and it's harder for them to break in. the reason we have new tech companies is because new technologies create these opportunities for new players to enter the market. but the fact of the matter is

there is an ability of large legacy companies to maintain dominant positions longer than they would have otherwise because of regulatory barriers to smaller companies that can't quite fathom how to deal with the regulatory environment. >> if say the government were to issue new content moderation algorithm requirements or some kind of safety compliance, facebook and twitter might be a little upset about having to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in compliance, but the upside for them is that it squashes the startup before it even gets big. >> yeah, and they won't say they're upset. whenever you hear the government say we need regulation in the tech industry, these companies say, we want to work with you on developing these regulations. some of the insights are helpful. but other insights are insights that help maintain the dominant positions of the companies. >> with that, i think we're almost ready for the q&a portion. so if you have any confess,

please raise your hand. before we get to that, one last question. what's next for tevi troy? are you going to complete the trill only gee, or do you have something in mind for your next project, or is it too early to disclose? >> these books take a long time. i was working for four solid years on this book in terms of developing the idea and then trying to find a willing publisher, and then doing the research, and then writing the book, and i actually have a rule that i never start writing a book until and unless i have a signed contract from a publisher. so it takes a long time to do these things. and i do promise my wife, as i said in the acknowledge the, the end of each book, it's going to be the long one because it is so much work. maybe i'll break it again, but i don't know any next book in mind, but i love the process, the researching, writing, and i love telling people about it. because i'm such an addict, i probably will be write something else in the future. >> well, i for one am ok with

that. with that, do we have any questions from the crowd, and would you prefer us to wait for the microphone before the person starts speaking? we'll start, we had a question up front. please wait for the microphone, and then ask your question. >> thank you so much for coming to speak. one of the darker aspects of "the power and the money" is the so-called military industrial complex. it has been stated that the absence of armed conflict is a cash flow problem for some defense contractors and among conspiracy theorists. i don't mean that pejoratively or not. the j.f.k. assassination may have been about the relationship of defense contractors and the pentagon and what the policy was going to be going forward.

i have not heard that in the questions here today. i wonder if you addressed it at all or have any thoughts on that subject. >> yeah, thank you for the good question. i spent a lot of time thinking about which c.e.o.'s to profile. and i developed these index cards that listed the c.e.o., the industry they work for, the years in which they worked, and how many presidents they interacted with. and what i found at the end of the process, i did not bring in any of these defense aerospace companies, because they're so entangled with government. they don't have markets outside of government in many cases. and so it's a less interesting question. ryan asked this point earlier about government here and business is here, and i say that's not completely the case. but with these defense companies, it's all government as the client, and it just makes for a different interaction. also, i really couldn't name that many famous or kind of household name-famous c.e.o.'s

in that industry. what i was trying to do in "the power and money" is to have famous c.e.o.'s who had multiple interactions with multiple presidents over the course of a year. it has mob more than one president they dealt with, and also an interesting interaction. one person i don't profile is jeff bezos. he's obviously a household name and been around for more than one presidency. but he doesn't have that many interesting interactions with presidents. for that reason, i don't have the defense contracts in there, but it's not because i did not think about this them. >> do we have any other questions? please wait for the microphone. >> thank you so much. this has been a very insightful question. i'm finishing up on a biography on booker t. washington and theodore roosevelt. my question is on theodore roosevelt. do you have any portion of your

book that discusses, maybe using roosevelt as an example of presidents who are perhaps very difficult to deal with because they had like an anti-corporate view or big trust busters. do you have c.e.o.'s that perhaps still tried to meet with him or use him as an example of how it would be hard to foster a connection between c.e.o.'s and presidents? >> thanks, first of all. i'm very interested in that roosevelt and booker t. relationship. because one thing, i talk about this in "the power and the money," roosevelt would befriend authors and thinkers. you'd bring them into the white house to discuss ideas with him. and some of his antitrust ideas came from some of the people he was reading. so i think that's an important part of roosevelt's persona. he would much rather meet with a thinker or artist than he would with a corporate c.e.o. for the c.e.o.'s themselves, he was eager to bash them, and he certainly bashed john d. rockefeller plenty. in fact, rockefeller is already

retired from day-to-day operations of the business once roosevelt becomes presses, but that doesn't stop him, because he knows that rockefeller is the big name, is the big target, is the bull's eye that he can go after. and it helps him carry out his mission of trying to break up standard oil, which he successfully does, although after his presidency, it happens in 1911 when roosevelt's successor, taft, is now president, roosevelt is no longer president, but that's when he gets his goal of breaking up standard oil, because the supreme court has deemed it ok for that to happen. >> we have in the middle there. >> thank you so much for being here. appreciate it. i was going to ask you about health care. thinking about health insurance in particular. it seems like we've had two presidents, democratic presidents, both clinton and obama who did a lot in this area, but the industry, i assume the c.e.o.'s in these industries

behave very differently it seems to me with, they were largely responsible for the killing hillary clinton and bill clinton's efforts, and they seem like they were involved very much in obamacare. so do you have any thoughts on that? >> absolutely. i follow this stuff very closely. one of the reasons we're in this situation now today, where both democrats and republicans hate corporations is in large part because of the obamacare fight. because for many years, republicans were defending pharmaceutical companies and felt that they carried the water of the pharmaceutical companies at political cost, because they were constantly bashed by the democrats in the late 2000's. and then during the obama care fight, pharma tozin back the affordable care act, it passed with their help, and a lot of republicans said, what the heck? i mean, we've been carrying your water for all these years.

we've taken slings and arrows, and when we really need something, you fight this affordable care act, you side with the other side, and i think that has fostered some of the animus that republicans have toward corporations. i think that's part of this larger story. the trump administration certainly was no friend of the pharmaceutical companies. i think there's definitely strategic companies the decisions make that can affect how they are viewed by the various parties. great question. >> we have patricia in the back. >> hi, thank you. i was wondering when you thought, how the nonprofit piece works into this. i know the gates foundation, there's a lot of other big foundations championed by large c.e.o.'s, kinds of a means of building soft power and getting a sort of advocacy and values, i would even put universities, large universities into that. how do you see that as building

power and influence between corporations on to the government and maybe even creating like a symbiotic relationship, because they're both encouraging the growth of this thing. that isn't enacting a new value set on the american people. >> yeah, thank you for that question. there's a lot of this in the power of money, kind of a recurring theme that you have multiple c.e.o.'s, mostly founder type c.e.o.'s who use their wealth to create foundations. there are a couple of reasons. one is tax job. it really only happens after the creation of the income tax that you see the c.e.o.'s, particularly ford and rockefeller create the foundations so as to protect their money, but also to philanthropic events that advance their interest. now, i happen to think that henry ford today would roll over in his grave if he saw what the ford foundation supported today. but that's a different story. and then you see this in more recent days with bill gates and

the creation of the gates foundation, and the gates foundation actually creates a seamless transition for gates when he leaves microsoft, in part because of the fights with the federal government judge during the clinton years, and he goes and transitions to what i said earlier was kind of this philanthropist. he becomes gates the philanthropist guy after he makes that transition. >> any other questions? we have the left side there. >> you mentioned mark zuckerberg several times. could you give us your opinion on both the content and the timing of the letter he sent to capitol hill a couple of days ago, acknowledging the pressure under which he and his company were put during covid. it was an interesting kind of mea culpa, but maybe it wasn't.

i'd be interested in your opinion on that. >> the great thing about writing a book about presidents and c.e.o.'s, they're constantly in the headslines. if i'm looking for opportunities, there's constantly something new that comes up that i could write about or opine on. i think that's one of the benefits of writing this book. obviously the zuckerberg letter, the so-called mea culpa fits in with this category, and i thought it was super interesting that he's trying to signal that, well, maybe we shouldn't have done all that cooperation with the biden administration on suppressing different ideas about covid, now we walk around, we don't see so many people wearing masks. some people are looking back at that era that wasn't that long ago and saying, hey, maybe we shouldn't have acted that way. interestingly, the biden administration put out a letter or statement that pushed back against what zuckerberg was saying. and biden has said very negative things about zuckerberg.

so i think facebook, meta as it's now called, could potentially be in a bad spot if harris were to win the election. but i think they're just trying to figure out how to navigate this difficult world, and if trump wins, i think there's a chance that facebook could have good relations with a trump administration. if harris wins, i think they're betting that there's very little chance they'd have good relations. so i think that might be what's going on. >> any other questions? we have one in the middle. >> thanks for the discussion, by the way. how has the resurgence of socialism ads an ideology at all played into this? we see the rise of figures like bernie sanders and elizabeth warren. are the c.e.o.'s concerned about that? does that affect their relationship, or do they focus march narrowly on their own individual concerns for the

companies they represent? >> well, i'm pretty sure the c.e.o.'s don't like it. that's a safe bet. but the way i describe it is that if you're a c.e.o., you pretty much can belt the democrats are not going to like and you be critical of you, whether they're socialists or not. the republicans, there's more variation. sometimes you have periods where republicans are very critical of companies like the era of the progressives with teddy roosevelt, like the era today. but it waxes and wanes. i could see us getting to a place where republicans are again more comfortable with companies, not overnight, but i think the best guess is republicans can potentially be a friend sometimes, democrats are unlikely to be friends. i think that's how it plays out. >> any further questions? we have one toward the back. >> yeah, you mentioned before, talked about bailouts briefly.

i was wondering how that plays in with this relation. >> aspect of politics. leak you say, there's lots of times politicians find it advantageous to vilify corporations and they're terrible, but when they actually fail, they bail them out. and so in recent book called "what went wrong with capitalism," he talks about how this rise of bailout culture, and how this used to have more opposition say a hundred years ago, the idea would have been ridiculous. but now, it's very normal. we saw during covid, airlines, things like that, very normal for companies to expect bailouts. to what extent is it because they are close personally and relationally with politicians, and how has that developed that case? >> i think absolutely the case relationships make a difference. there's an inconsistency in government, like what they chose

not to bail out bear stearns, and then they made a different decision. you can see an instant where a president or senior regulator has a closer relationship to a company and takes a slightly different approach. i mentioned earlier in the conversation, this idea of selective enforcement. there's so many regulations out there. there's no way you can enforce every regulation against every company. you just can't. but if there's a company that kind of runs afoul of the government or if the government doesn't like a particular company, they can certainly enforce every regulation against that company if they want to. and i think that creates a situation where the c.e.o.'s want to think about how can i maintain good ties with all the potential antagonists that i can face, so i don't get hit with that selective enforcement problem. autopsy i think we have time for one more question, if anyone has one. we have one in the back right there. >> i was curious, in terms of

the independent agencies, the f.c.c., e.p.a., in which the president has a little less control, talk about how presidents can influence those agencies, even if they don't directly control those. >> it's a good question. when you worked in the bush white house, sometimes we'd have frustration with independent regulatory bodies that didn't do what we wanted, and there was a limit. at the same time, the president does get to puck the chairperson and the majority on those agencies. and there are a lot of conversations in the white house before those people are selected to make sure that the people will be in line with what the president wants to accomplish. that doesn't mean they always stay on the same page. that doesn't mean you don't have people go rogue. but for the most part, it's done on the fronted. you pick people to what i think the administration is trying to accomplish, and then you have to have this level of remove going forward and hope for the best. >> and with that, a few

housekeeping notes, but i think we can wrap things up. tevi, this has been a fantastic conversation. thank you. great q&a. great questions from the audience. the book is "the power and the money: the epic clashes between commanders in chief and titans of industry." it's on sale at amazon and all other book sellers. those of you in the audience can use this card here that you should have to get your own company. a few housekeeping notes, on september 19, c.e.i. is hosting our annual julian simon memorial award dinner that will be at the national cathedral. you can sign up for that at cei.org. and we are always doing events like this, both here at our headquarters in d.c. and also on capitol hill and around town. so please keep an eye on cei.org/events. with that, thank you very much for a wonderful event. have a good day. [captioning performed by national con