welcome to today's competitive

enterprise book forum with. the great toby troy and his new book, the power and the money how the epic clashes between commanders in chief and titans of industry. i'm your host today. i'm ryan young, senior economist here at cei. for those of you who are new to cei or don't know what we're about, we are a think tank based here in d.c. we focus on the regulatory aspects, several different public policy issues from the regulatory 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 grand ular than than individual is toby troy who might be one of the most distinguished speakers we have had here outside of the occasional nobel laureate tv affiliations with the bipartisan

center yeshiva university's strauss center and the mercatus 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 to two. and we're not done yet, he has a ph.d. in american from the university of texas at austin and i hold in my hand some proof that he has put that ph.d. to good use. so tevye, welcome to cei. we're happy to have you. and also since, in lieu of books for sale, we have these qr codes that you can scan to purchase your own copy of the book is hot off the press. it came out on august 20, so just about one week ago and i highly recommend the book well as its predecessor, which is called white house, which is about in-house staff clashes at the white house that have

occurred over over the many years. so, toby, my first question for you, since not everyone yet read the book, what's your 30 seconds elevator pitch version? what's it about? well, thanks, ryan, for having me. thanks to c.i. for hosting this event. my is about presidents and ceos 150 year history of presidents in the united states and their clashes, sometimes collaborations with big name ceos of top companies and this goes back to john d rockefeller in the 1870s, and it goes all the way to elon musk and mark zuckerberg today. and that story of how these ceos built their companies and how president often reacted to them and built the regulatory is really the story of the development of modern america. that's pretty good. and i will say spend a lot of good yarns in this book. you are a fantastic storyteller and that comes through time and again from rockefeller or all the way up to mark zuckerberg

today. what inspired this book? did you have some kind of flashbulb moments? did it build upon earlier work? what got you interested in expressing the relationship between business and governments in this way? we're talking about ceos, presidents. well, ryan, as you said earlier, i've written other books, is my fifth book on the presidency. and as i look at it, i realized that all of my books are about presidents and blank the blank is something that ever covered before. and also that speaks to our current moment. you kindly mentioned my book, white house in the late 20 tens, people were talking about all the infighting in the trump white house. so i decided to do a deep dive exploration of infighting, the white house, to see if it had happened in previous before the trump administration. and spoiler alert it did. i was just going to ask you that and so now i was looking for 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. i mean, the you know, the iphones we carry cars, we drive the fuel that powers cars. i mean, these all come from big corporations. but at the same time, ceos seem more unpopular than ever. and we're in a weird moment where both and republicans seem hate corporations. and so i thought now is as good a time as any to explore the history of ceos and their big corporations and big a theme in this book and in some of your past books is conflicts. a fight house was about conflict inside the white house between staffers who work for the same boss belong to the party. this book, the power and the money is external conflicts between presidents and ceos who are outside the white house. is that through line from book to book, intentional or did it just happen to be that way? well, you kind of said i spend good yarn and i think good come from good material. and that often comes from conflict. a bunch of people sitting around

a fireplace and singing kumbaya. isn't that interesting? a book but a book about people undercutting each other and fighting and having titanic egos and having high stakes, which is what we have both in this book in power of the money and also in fight house. i think that makes an interesting tale. and so, yes conflict is definitely part of my brand. another theme i noticed is something we at cei try to emphasize and that the difference between being pro-business and being pro-market. if you're pro-business, you might think that what's good for gm is good for america, or that the best way to exit a financial crisis is to out large financial institutions that's very pro those. but we at cei prefer a pro-market approach where you want an open and fair process that anybody can participate in and where you succeed by creating value for customers and consumers. you mentioned that parties are pretty hostile ceos. there's an anti-business streak

going on there, but there's also a pro-business streak going on. at the same time. can you unravel a little bit and also maybe comment on if either party has any semblance, a pro-market streak as distinct from a pro-business or anti-business streak? well, i think that was six, six, six. exactly. and well-stated about the distinction between pro-business, pro-market and i think it is an important distinction. and i with you on the pro-market side, but you're right, the ceos they don't have the interests of the market in mind. they have the interests of their business in mind. and, you know, that's their job their job is to create shareholder value. i remember when i worked you've mentioned that i worked in regulatory. the first one i worked in was the department of labor and my boss was elaine chao, who is a very skilled and very smart secretary. she was at the time the head of labor. she later became head of transportation and. i remember she said to me, don't count on these corporate executive in the foxhole. they might. they won't be with you on a

tough fight. they're with you when you're doing something that helps their business, but they're not with you in the long, larger ideological. and i think that really stuck with me. they have the sense that businesses are there and they're lobbying on behalf business and that's what they do. now, there have been some exceptions in my book. i do, about a couple of corporate executives who really tried to see the country needed at key moments of j.p. morgan helped bail the economy out in two crucial moments in the crises of 1893 and 1907. you had john de rockefeller try to help prop up the 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 he has rockefeller. i'm roosevelt visit roosevelt visits the willow run facility and it's so vast that they have to travel around in a car. of course, they travel around in

a ford 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 and across from him in the jump seat. his son, edsel and edsel who knew how much his father hated the roosevelt said his dad was giving him the stink eye the whole time, so but for the most part, these corporate executives have been interested in being pro-business meaning their business. a great example of this is lee iacocca. he first shows up in character in the power of, the money as a kind of pro-free market anti guy who comes to the white house to argue against nader write regulations being on the auto industry and then as time goes on evolves and the auto industry gets these challenges. competition from japan and abroad and suddenly they want government intervention. and so he is buddies with jimmy carter in leading to the

chrysler bailout of the 1970s and then in the 1980s, he's with ronald reagan for anti market regulatory actions that would help his company. now, ronald reagan, very little patience for it and has this great story in the power of the money where reagan doesn't accept iacocca's arguments in favor of a gas tax and he tells him that reagan would be blamed every time people pumped up their cars with gas. they call it the reagan tax and he says to iacocca, that's why i'm on this side of the desk and you're on that side. so iacocca is attempts to bring his anti market interests met their limits with ronald reagan. that's that seems. to me, that's a common tale. a journey like iacocca is moving from relatively to solidly pro-business. that happens to coincide with free market policy or not. have you seen a similar trajectory in any of today's more famous ceos? when you look at someone like bill gates, i think also has an

interesting evolution. bill gates of the 1980s was not the bill gates that we think of today as kind of the avuncular philanthropist. i mean, he was a hard business executive. there were all these jokes about microsoft, such as the microsoft program joke is, which is windows ain't done, lotus don't run. lotus, the competing ibm product. and so they would set up the ibm, the microsoft, so that the competitors would work as well on their operating systems. and gates takes he takes a very hard charged approach to not only business and pushing out his competitors, but also to government. and when governments to look into his business, he's all in fight. and it doesn't necessarily work for him because the the not business is, as he says, faster than government. but it's not bigger and it's not stronger than government. i think gates of 1980s is a very

different than the gates we know of today. most ceos are humans too. they don't just have our virtues they also have all of our faults. and that can include giving to temptations for easy from possibly unethical sources. another theme that jumped out at me a lot of our work at cei focuses formal institutions and institutions. think of those the rules of the game. the way the regulatory process is structured, the separation of powers, or the way our system is built. those are and a lot of our work focuses on those formal institutions as they exist, how we can improve them. your book focuses on institutions, but it's more about informal institutions. personal relationships. gentlemen's agreements. that sort of thing. could it be that a lot of we tankers are missing out on

something very important? yeah, i think what you're at is really the intangibles. and one of the points i make in the power of the is this idea that if there are two companies or two industries who are conflicting with one another on an important issue, they basically are going to fight themselves to a draw in terms of lobbying resources, in terms advertising resources. there's only so much you can spend on lobbying. and what i argue in the power of the money is sometimes ceos can be the tiebreaker. if you have a ceo who has good relations, washington, who wants to be involved in washington, he can shape the debate in a way that a ceo who's focused on, let's say, the bottom line and the logistics of the company is not going to be able to. so ceos can bring this added advantage to a company if they get involved in washington and are strategic and talented and skillful in the way they do it. so part of the modern ceos skill set isn't just management or entrepreneur shipper decision

making. part of it's also their rolodex. is that something that's become more truer over time or, less to or about the same? the rolodex definitely important. but the rolodex in washington often in particular, is what i focus on in the power of the money. you look at someone like jamie diamond, who is the ceo of jpmorgan chase and a very skillful operator. i talk about him a lot in the book. and one thing i notice that jumped out to me about jamie. there are a couple of things that he's he's really smart about. so number one is when he started ceo, he used to come to dc twice a year and he realized that wasn't enough. he started coming twice month. that's a big use of resources. and the number one value you have in, if you're in the c-suite is the ceo's time and they are choosing to use the ceo's time in that way by bringing him to twice a month and in doing so he can't meet the same people. i mean, you can't come meet the secretary of the treasury every time you get to meet other officials. and so regardless of who wins this upcoming election, jamie

dimon is going to know, people in senior roles in either administration. the second thing that diamond does that i think is clever, is he has this construction where he describes as barely a democrat. now, democrats hear that and say, oh, well, there's this corporate ceo, not a republican. he's a democrat. i like that. and republicans hear that and they hear the barely so they hear the first two words. democrats hear the third word. and when republicans hear the barely, they think, hey, this guy, maybe he's a but he's against the excesses of the woke left he's not a squad so he's okay with us. though he might be nominally a democrat. he's someone who we can deal with. do you think that kind of triangulation, whether with diamond or with other executives playing the same game, do you think that sincere? do you think they're putting on a show or do you think it's a little of both. it's definitely a little bit of both. but what i argue in the power of money is that if you view how ceos deal with washington as some kind of a sound board, you

want to push the engagement to the highest level, want to be as engaged as you can, but you want to pull down the partizanship. you don't want to pick one side too strongly because if the other side's in power, well, then you're in trouble. so i think diamond is very clever and artful about the way he has the engagement at 11, if you will. but he brings the partizanship down relatively low. and in fact, sometimes when he oversteps in the trump administration, he made some offhand comment about how if he against trump for president, he would win. and he recognized almost immediately that was a problem. trump trump puts out a pretty critical tweet of him and diamond apologizes and says he's not doing that. so he recognize this is what the limits are and where he can go, where he can. there's a common tendency with most people to view things in binaries. and one example of that is people tend to think of things as either you have the government over here and you have the private sector over

here and never the twain shall. i don't think that's true. whether you're talking about the airline or the health care industry or, the auto industry, or these days increasing liy the semiconductor industry, it's not really part of either. and there's a whole emerging in political economy called entangled to political. it kind of says it's not either or, it's both business and government are entangled and in each industry, each company is entangled in a unique way. i think your book is a perfect example of entangled political economy. so my question for you from rockefeller to the present, which is the scope of your book has that entanglement changed in any fundamental way? it is, are things more entangled. less entangled. differently entangled. well, absolutely. and ryan, if you do encounter one of those people who think that governments here and businesses here and never the twain shall meet. send them my way. i will show them the power of the money.

and tell them to read it to disabuse them of that notion. but what i talk about in the book is the or maybe of how things have changed over time. the rockefeller chapter intentionally called the blank slate because rockefeller was building his empire without any government intervention or the ability of government to intervene were no regulatory bodies. there was no sherman antitrust act, there were no regulations that could have stopped what he was doing. whereas over time the government has developed massive regulatory apparatuses plus a massive number of regulation. and they can shape what do. that doesn't mean that companies can't make a profit. companies are very successful and some of them make huge profits. but it means that government regulations and actions are shaping what the companies do to advance what government wants them to accomplish in ways and i don't the word entanglement so much as enmeshment. i think the two sides are enmeshed in a way that they

absolutely weren't back in the rockefeller era and they're increasingly so over time. do you think there are any ways to possibly reduce that entanglement? it'll never go away. the real world just isn't built that way. but do you think there are some ways reduce its or reduce it's harmful or do you think we're doomed? not in general. but do you think we're doomed to an of cronyism and public partnerships? well, i'm never one to believe we're doomed. i got involved in this business because i'm inherently an optimist. my first boss in washington was a guy named wattenberg who was a congenital optimist. and he told that things can improve. and we've seen many improve over our lifetimes. 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 candidates over time maybe not right maybe not either of them right now. but presidents have talked and presidential candidates have

talked about regulatory reform. there are a lot of interesting ideas out there. cia has talked about regulatory reform there. i think there should be some kind of regulatory scorecard where agencies have to say what the costs are of all their regulations, what the benefits and actually not over a certain amount in terms of costs, benefits and and i think they should be able to enforce that with some kind of hammer, whether it's a congressional hammer or omb hammer within the administration. so i think regulatory reform can get things back to a more stable equilibrium where they're not as enmeshed. it's never going to go away, as you say. but i think things can improve. and that's that again, that's why i'm in this business. that's why i write the things i write out there. there's a lot we can do on transparent. so you've hit on a couple of ideas that i've been working on for as long as i've been here, but you have a history, ph.d. i have a history. so as an old history major, one

of the things i enjoyed studying in your book is not the history itself, the facts and stories, but the way approach it. there one way to view history is as the product of great forces. that's more of the leo tolstoy view history. nepal didn't do what he did because his great personality, there were larger forces reaction against the enlightenment and the birth of nationalism that led him to do what he did. there's also opposite the great forces view of history, the personalities view of history with such as ceos and presidents. do you think that 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, the ebbs and flows of populism over the decades. things like that have more to with how the stories in your book turn. i think personalities hugely important. you look at someone like john de who built the energy industry in

this company. he his company standard oil, because was establishing a standard for what oil products should be. before that oil either ineffective or unreliable or combustible. and so he said if you buy standard oil products, you know what you are getting. he was a kind of former private sector regulation. i mean, 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 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 these last 150 years. but also, the degree to which these personnel, these both presidential and corporate shaped it i mean, any mature thinker will say both 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. it can change with the people involved. i'm but your book is about personalities. so you've told good stories from your book so far, but do you have a favorite personality or a favorite story that reveals personality that you encountered while you were writing the book? one of my favorite characters in the is someone who hadn't that much of before. i wrote the book is lew wasserman. he was a hollywood agent, came from relatively obscure background in cleveland. they still never found his birth certificate, and he raises the head of hollywood's most powerful agency. and then he wants to buy a studio. now, 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 is very different than today. but he was standing aloof from government. and then bobby justice department starts investigating him and he doesn't look much like that. and recognizes that this government thing is something got to deal with and so he

starts befriending presidents. he befriends a john f kennedy a little bit and then kennedy is tragically assassinated. but then he becomes very close friends with lyndon johnson and. in fact, in 1964, as johnson on the cusp of a great landslide victory, wasserman to johnson, i have a favor to ask you. johnson kind of braces, but what's favor going to be? because people ask him stuff all the time and wasserman says, i want you to promise that i'll never have to serve in government. and so it's just such a relief to johnson that he is happy to grant that favor because so many people are in treating for government positions. so wasserman befriends and really starts the pipeline of liberal money from hollywood to washington and that really wasn't a big thing before. wasserman he also is to make friendships on both sides of the aisle and his friendship with ronald reagan based on when he was reagan's agent and got reagan his first million dollar contract in hollywood. that friendship is something that carries over into the white

house. and it's sometimes in some occasions that i write about in the book actually affects policy. speaking of wasserman i think one reason that he might gotten into the political game in the first place is because as you tell in the book, in 1962, when his company mci merged with universal, there was an antitrust action against that that temporarily blocked from happening. do think his entree into politics and his preference for staying behind the scenes was based off of that incident, trying to avoid a repeat? or do you think it was just his temperament as an to let the stars be the stars? he'll make things happen behind the scenes? well, in way it's both. i mean, he is spurred to go into politics based on that 1962 incident. you talk about with the antitrust investigation from kennedy's justice department, but always had this theory about staying the background. and he had rules for agents. first of all, his agents had to wear black, no color, no splash and white. but then he also didn't want his

agents to become the stars themselves. and he would say stay out of the spotlight, fades your suit. so he had a very specific way of going about things. and i he took that attitude to his with washington. i mean, 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 when wasserman is leaving, lbj bedroom and he thinks going to yell at him and he apologizes for keeping the president up so late. and she says, oh, no, you don't understand. he lives for these conversations because this concept of the loneliness of leadership, ceos and presidents really have no peer sometimes, and 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 with in business. he applied them to washington, and i think they were pretty effective for. now, of course, some ceo and presidential interactions

ethical boundaries. well, we'll put it that way. which way does causality run? do corrupt politicians or do politicians corrupt ceos. well, it obviously could go both. but in my book, the of the money, i intensely trying not to pick people who unethical or who went to jail or did anything bad. i may not agree with their political decisions, their strategic decisions, but i'm really not trying to foster this idea of everything's corrupt and everybody is 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 about shareholder value, how they are operating in a very challenging environment where government has more and more power and sometimes like roosevelt against rockefeller, see advantages in targeting as villains and they're just to make a go of it and make their companies successful even as government

imposes certain roadblocks along the way. a lot of the ceos that we meet in the power, in the money work, in media, in various forms prints, hollywood, tv in the early days, journalism about the 1930s, henry luce pioneered technique, either him or some of his journalists, a technique called the breakfast technique. can you tell the story of what that is. henry luce is the founder of time magazine. he finds it founded 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, equally to in california, as in new york as in iowa. as in kansas. his insight is to create something like that. and by the twenties, the technology exists that this can happen to distribution

mechanisms are there and the interest is there. and so he is in a special focus on personalities, particularly on the president. he has an item in time, the president's week, where they talk about what the president's been up to as a presidential historian. it's a great archive for things that presidents or think, things they said or events they were at. and he also has this thing, the breakfast technique, where he would take or he would 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 is this great example of outlandish who is the 1936 candidate for president was the governor of kansas. he's assumed by many that he's going to win 36 election because the polls say he's going to win but he loses very because pollsters at the time not recognize that the only people answering polls. people are telephones and people are telephones were wealthier and therefore more inclined to vote against roosevelt and for landed.

so it did not it was not a statistic significant poll in any way. but in any event, the interview with landon includes the fact that he had kidneys for breakfast and there's a guy named lance morrow who writes for wall street journal frequently was a frequent job who was a writer for time for many years. and he said even recently this so this is 90 years ago he says no one who read that article ever forgot the kidneys kidneys. yep. that is now into my brain. but it seems like it's at least an attempt. maybe not in landon's case, but an attempt to humanize a great who are rich and famous and, successful, and make them seem little more like you and me are. their modern equivalent to the technique, like maybe politicians tic talks, something like that. politicians are always trying to find ways to show themselves to be human or regular. i mean, donald has spelling errors in his in his tweets. i don't think they're there.

they're i mean, i think there's some method to them also, i think that you see politicians have podcast today, but you think about the different senators who have twitter where they bring more of their personality into it. so i do think that politicians try show themselves to be regular people. and it's not always the case because they're not always regular people. and, you know, a lot of them, but a lot of them are. when i was in the white house, used to tell staff they were intimidated, famous names they read in the newspaper. they put on their pants or their skirts, one leg at a time like everybody else. and they are people. they just have a they have jobs that sometimes can go to their heads. yeah. but that same impulse 100 years ago, it still exists today sometimes wonder if some of the politicians involved are actually human. but speaking of human universals in how they express themselves

differently over time. you talk about how time magazine during the 1950s was very pro eisenhower, very to the point where even impinged on their credibility. you write on page 88, the famed marshall mcluhan wrote of time's rapid fire. prose encouraged a sub, a rational response. that sounds to me like an old timey version of trump adviser steve bannon's flood zone strategy and also way that a lot of the very online people engage with politics today maybe were not uncharted waters after all. what if that's the first time everybody, anybody ever put marshall mcluhan and steve bannon in the same sentence? i think bannon would appreciate it and mcluhan would have been mortified, but i'd be mortified. but in any event, i think that there something going on there

with the, i guess, the mcluhan approach to our time magazine. and time did lean hard in for eisenhower at luce's explicit direction. some of the staff members did not want to be as supportive of eisenhower. but luce recognized that an opportunity in eisenhower and he wanted to have a who he was friendly with in stark contrast to roosevelt, but whom he hated and he, even after roosevelt died, lucille said, it is my duty to 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 that i found that were told by or about ceos. and that in itself is, i think, worth the price of admission. but the 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 are facebook

has come under fire for similar reasons they're not in the tank for eisenhower don't think anybody is these days but a lot of republicans went into grievance mode and so that they're in the tank for democrats and there are a lot of people on both sides saying that facebook pushes on people and can change election results. i'm a little not fully skeptical, mostly skeptical of that, partially, i can't name a single person who has changed their votes because of they saw on facebook. and the other reason is that algorithms tend to push content not to new people, but to people who are already interested in the thing being pushed. so when you have russian bots pushing pro-trump and, anti-democrat propaganda, their reach is limited to people who mostly already buy into point of view. so it's not so much changing elections, so much as reinforce,

saying what people already believe. i don't know. do you think there's something to that or do you think facebook, other social media sites are having a more pernicious effect? facebook a tool. what i have found in my studies of presidential history is that as new technological tools, as new media tools are developed campaigns adapt and use them. and the ones who adapt to them first and are skillful about it can be more successful. so franklin roosevelt was brilliant. his 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 went about a prayer. without that gadget. and then in the 2000s, you start to see these kind of internet enabled technologies, 2000 for the bush campaign, which i worked, had this micro-targeting strategy that was very effective. it was pre facebook, but it was a useful way of identifying who their voters were and with respect 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 up, his high tech apparatus in their campaign. also in 2012. so there's a lot of pro-obama sentiment among facebook executives and they actually went and helped obama campaign in 2016. the trump campaign pretty cleverly uses facebook not to convince people who were going to vote some way to another way, but actually to suppress the hillary vote. and i don't mean suppressing in a furious way, but to discourage people, people who are kind of not so excited about trump, not so excited about hillary. they would out information about hillary to make people inclined to vote. those people might have been hillary voters, and that was benefit to the trump campaign. so 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 and is seen by both sides. some kind of a villain or a bugaboo which has made life very difficult for mark zuckerberg, who figures prominently in the later chapters of the book. can you talk a little bit about how he has tried to thread needle that probably cannot be threaded? yeah, look. in 2010 i talk about how zuckerberg hosted a george w bush book event after bush's memoir comes out and. i speculate, and i'm not the only one to speculate. i cite a source this that this was after the republican won congress in 2010 and maybe they recognized that they needed to be nicer to the republicans. obama does events with with zuckerberg at facebook headquarters and jokes about the hoodie and and actually notices that zuckerberg's nervous and kind of makes fun of him for kind of being all sweaty at these events so 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, 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 in the white house were talking about an issue. 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 they were snickering among the white house staff saying, well mark's with us, but he's afraid of his liberal staff. so you as a ceo today, especially in these high tech companies, you have to take into account what your staff thinks. and the reason jamie, and let's say mark zuckerberg can take different approaches because dimon's got employees all over the country, whereas facebook is more not completely, but more concentrated in liberal areas in california, and they're more to have a more liberal staff and so

that staff isn't so excited about seeing the ceo of their company befriending donald trump. so the barely democrats strategy might be the right idea. zuckerberg but it's very, very difficult. execute yeah, it's harder for zuckerberg to do the barely a democrat than it is for for dimon and. in fact, zuckerberg's employees don't want him to be barely a democrat. they want him be a full democrat. you also go into the hunter biden laptop story, which i have enjoyed ignoring as completely as i can for since it popped up. but you documents pretty bad behavior among some of the progressive staff at several social media 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, that actually amplified the story completely against what they're going for. and it ties into something we've

had see i've been talking about in antitrust cases related to the republican ones that are more grievance oriented, something i call the dozen keystrokes argument where if you want to type in ny post dot com it's 11 keystrokes and then you can read about biden's laptop all you want. so the social media companies try to jigger the algorithm into favor but i know other limits to their power. well, of course there's limits to the power. and one of the things i talk about in the book is i would say that we have more free speech today than ever before. if you look at supreme court jurisprudence, you pretty much say what you want. the question is, do you have a platform on which to say it? and 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 censorship. and i think that's really where the issue today, it's not about you being suppressed and told you can't speak. it's about whether you can get your 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 that you have is near the end on page 258, you said that ceos have helped an environment in which government tells corporations what to do, but in doing so, it helps corporations maintain their dominant 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 cia does. there's a rent seeking component where you have ceos rigging the system for favors and politicians get to appear populist, anti-corporate at the same time. so there really is that symbiosis right there. that symbiosis has always been there since the rockefeller

days. and i think it always will be. but i. oh, do you see any avenues for reform that might let me push back a little bit? i'm not saying the ceos are looking for favors per se. what i'm saying is that complexity is a subsidy. and so the more complex the rules are, the easier it is for a large player to stay in 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 do that and it's harder for them to break in. you know, the reason we have these new tech companies, 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 positions longer than they would have otherwise because of regulatory barriers to smaller companies? they can't quite fathom how to deal with the regulatory environment, like if, say, the government were to issue new

content, moderation, algorithm requirement or some kind of safety compliance facebook and 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, and they won't say they're upset. in fact, whenever you hear the government say, we need regulation, the tech industry or whatever, these companies say, yes, we want to work with you, government on developing these regulations. and, you know, some of their insights are helpful. but other insights are insights that help maintain the dominant positions of the companies. and with that, i think we're almost ready for q&a portion. so if you have any questions, raise your hands. but before we get to that. i'm one last question. what's next for tobi troy? are you going to complete the trilogy of lighthouse and the power and the money, or do you have something else in mind for your project or is it too early? disclose well, as you know, these books a long time i was

working for solid years on this book in terms of developing the idea and then trying to find a willing and then doing research and then writing the book. and i actually have a rule that i never start writing book until and unless i have a signed contract, a publisher. so it a long time to do these things and. i do promise my wife, as i said in the at the end of each book, that they're going to be the last one because it takes so much work. i've broken the promise a couple of times. maybe i'll break it again. we'll see. but i don't yet have my next book in mind. but i do love the process, love the researching, i love the writing and love going out and telling people about it. so because i'm such an addict, i probably will write something else in the future. well, i 1 a.m. okay with that. so with that we have any questions from the crowd and would you prefer us to wait for the microphone before the person starts speaking? so we'll start. we had a question upfront with you. please wait for the microphone and, then ask your question.

okay. thank so much for for coming to speak, you know, one of the darker aspects of power in the money is so-called military industrial complex, where it 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 either pejoratively or not pejoratively. the jfk assassination may have been about the relationship of defense contractors, the pentagon, and what the policy was going to be going forward. i, i have not heard that touched upon in the questions here today. i wonder if you addressed it at all or you have any thoughts on that subject. yeah, thank you for the good question. i spent a lot of time thinking about which ceos to profile and. i developed these index cards that the ceo the industry they

work for the years in which they and how many presidents they interacted with and what i found at the end of this process is i did not bring in any of these defense, aerospace companies because they're so entangled government. they don't have markets outside of government, many cases. and so it's a less interesting question. you know, ryan, at this point about earlier about, you know, governments here and businesses here. and i say that that's not completely the case. but with these defense companies, it's all government as the client and it just for a different interaction. also, i really couldn't name that many famous or of household name famous ceos in that industry. and so what i was to do in the power of the money is have famous ceos who had multiple interaction with multiple presidents over a course of a year. it has to be more than one president that they dealt with. and then also had interesting and exciting. so one person i don't profile is jeff bezos. he's obviously a household name

and he obviously has been around for more than one presidency, but he doesn't that many inter interesting interactions multiple presidents. so for that reason i don't have the defense companies in there but. it does. it's not because i didn't think about it to have any other questions. stone over there, please wait for the microphone. yeah. thank you so much. this has been a very insightful discussion. i just had a question regarding specific president and i'm actually just finishing up like a dual biography on booker t washington and theodore roosevelt. and my question is targeted on theodore roosevelt. and i just want see if do you have any portion of your book that discusses like maybe using roosevelt as an example of like presidents who are perhaps very difficult to deal with because they have like an anti-corporate view or they're a big trust busters or the against monopolies and did you have like ceos that perhaps still tried to meet with him or just used him as an example of how it would be hard to?

foster like a connection between and presidents. yeah, well, thanks. first of all, i'm very interested in that roosevelt and booker t relationship because. one thing that i talk about that's relevant to the power of money is that roosevelt would befriend and thinkers and he would bring them into the white house to discuss ideas with him and some his antitrust ideas came from some of the people he was reading. and so i think that's an important part of roosevelt's persona. he would much rather meet with a thinker or an artist or an intellectual than he would with a corporate ceo for, the corporate ceos themselves. he was eager to bash them. and he certainly bashes john de rockefeller plenty. in fact, rockefeller is already retired from day to day operations of the business once roosevelt becomes president. but that doesn't stop because he knows that rockefeller is the big name, is the big target, is the bull's eye that he go after. and it helps him carry out his mission of trying to break standard oil, which he successfully does, although after his presidency.

it happens in 1911 when roosevelt successor taft is now president roosevelt's, no longer president. but that's one that's when he gets his goal of breaking up standard oil, because the supreme court has it okay for that to happen. we have a in the middle there. thank you so much 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 the industry and i assume the ceos, these industries behaved very differently. it seems to me, you know, they were largely responsible for killing hillary clinton's and bill clinton's efforts, and they seem like they were involved very much in the obamacare care. so do you have any thoughts on that? absolutely. as you know, as a former deputy of health and i follow this stuff very closely and the one

of the reasons we're in the 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, felt that they carried the water of the pharmaceutical companies at political cost because they were constantly being bashed by the starting in the late 1990s, early 2000, and then during the obamacare fight, billy tauzin and pharma back the affordable care act allow, i would say it to pass but 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 for defending you. and when we really need something you to fight this affordable care act that we like you side with the other side. and i think that has fostered of the animus that republicans have towards corporations. and i think that's part of this larger story. and, you know, the trump administration certainly was no friend of the pharmaceutical

companies. so i think there are definitely strategic decisions that the companies make that can affect how they are viewed by the various parties. greg, great question. we have patricia in the back. hi. thank you. i was wondering when you thought that how the nonprofit works into this. i know the gates foundation, there's a lot of other big foundations by large ceos and companies. it's kind of a means of building soft and getting a sort of advocacy c like influence. even i would even put universities, large universities into that. how do you see that as building power and influence between corporations onto the government and maybe even creating like a symbiotic relationship because they're both encouraging the growth of this thing that isn't like an enacting a new value on the american people. yeah thank you for that

insightful question. and there's lot of this in the power of money. it's kind of a recurring theme that you have multiple ceos, mostly founder type, who use their wealth to create foundations. there are a couple of reasons for it. one is it's a tax charge. it really only happens after the creation of the income tax that you see, the ceos, particularly ford and rockefeller create these foundations. so to protect their money. but also to to fill anthropic efforts that advance their interests. 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 this in more recent days with with bill gates in the creation of the gates foundation and the gates foundation creates a seamless transition for gates when he leaves microsoft, in part because of the fight the federal government during the clinton years and he goes and transitions what i said earlier was kind of this avuncular he

becomes gates philanthropy guy rather than gates there rapacious businessmen after he makes that transition. any other questions we have boehner, cohen on 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 a couple of days ago? acknowledge urging the pressure under which he and his company put during covid. it was interesting kind of the oppo mea culpa, but maybe it was it. i'd be interested. your opinion on that. thank you. yeah. the great thing about writing a book about presidents and ceos is there constantly in the headlines and, you know, if i'm looking for op ed opportunities, there's constantly something new that comes up that that i could write about or opine on and. so i think that's kind of one of the benefits of writing this

book about presidents, ceos, obviously, the zuckerberg letter, the so-called mea culpa that you talk about, fits in with this category. and i thought it was indeed super interesting that he's trying to signal that, well, maybe shouldn't have done all that cooperation with the biden administration on suppressing different ideas about covid. now we walk. we don't you know, we don't see so many people wearing you know, 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, though, the biden administration put out a letter that or statement that pushed back against what zuckerberg saying. so and biden has said very negative things about zuckerberg. so i think facebook or media, as it's now called, could potentially be in a bad spot if harrison were to win the election. but but i think there 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. and if harris wins, i think they're betting they there's very little chance they'd have relations with out of frustration. so i think that might what's going on. and the other question, we have shawn higgins there towards the middle. yes. thanks for the discussion, by the way, how has the resurgence of social of socialism an ideology at all played into? we see, you know, the rise of figures like bernie sanders and elizabeth warren, the ceos at all concerned about that. does that affect their relationship or do focus more narrowly on their own individual concerns? the companies they represent? well, i'm pretty sure the ceos don't like it. that's a safe bet. but the way i describe it is that if you're a ceo, pretty much can bet that the democrats are not to like you and you're going to be critical of you, whether they're socialist or

not. whereas the republicans, there's more variation. and so sometimes you have periods where republicans are very critical of companies like the era of the progressive was with teddy roosevelt, like the era today. but it waxes and wanes. and i could see us getting to a place where republicans are again, more comfortable with companies not overnight. but i think the bet there is that republicans potentially be a friend sometimes democrats are unlikely to be friends. and i think that's how it plays out. any further questions? we have one towards the back. yeah, you mentioned talk about bailouts little bit briefly. i was sort of wondering what how that plays in with this relational aspect of politics because obviously, you know like you say, there's lots of times where politicians find it fantasias to vilify a corporation said that they're terrible but then they actually fail they bail them out and so

in recent. called what was wrong with capitalism by keir sharma. he talks about how this rise of bailout culture how you know this used to have more opposition in say 100 years ago the idea would have been ridiculous whereas now it's become very normal we just sort of during covid with the airlines things like that it's become very normal for companies to just kind of expect bailouts. to what extent is it because they are close personally and relationally with politicians? and how has that develop that process? yes. so i think it's absolutely the case that relationships can make a difference. you see the government there's an inconsistency in government. let's look back at the financial crisis when. they chose not to bail out bear stearns and then they did made a different decision with shearson. obviously, there were larger implications if shearson had gone down, but you could see an instance where a president, a senior regulator, has a closer relationship, 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 there's a company that kind of runs afoul of the government. or if the government doesn't, a particular company, they can enforce every regulation against that company if they want to. and i think that creates a situation where the ceos want to think about, how can i maintain good ties with? all the potential antagonists that i could face so that i don't get hit with selective enforcement problem. i think we 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 ftc, the epa or so, which the president has has a little direct control over and talked about talked about how presidents can influence those agencies, even if they don't directly control those. yeah, it's a good question. when i worked during the bush white house, sometimes we would have frustration with these

independent regulatory bodies that didn't necessarily do what we wanted. and there was a limit to how much we could contact with them. at the same time, the president does get to 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 doesn't mean they always stay on the same page. that mean that you don't have these people sometimes go rogue, but for the most part it's done the front end. you pick people who you think will be sympathetic to what the administration is trying to accomplish. and then because of the rules about independent agencies, you have to have this level of remove going forward and you just for the best. and with that a few housekeeping notes. but i think we can wrap things up. this has been a fantastic conversation. thank you. great q&a. great questions from, the audience. the book is power and the money the epic clashes between commanders in chief and titans of industry. it's on sale at amazon and.

all other booksellers, those of you in the audience, use this little card here that you should have to get your own copy. the few notes on september 19. cii is hosting our annual julian simon memorial award dinner that will be at the national cathedral. you can sign up for that at cia dot org and are always doing events like this both here at our headquarters in d.c., also on capitol hill and around town. so keep an eye on c.i. dawgs events. and with that, thank you very much for a wonderful event. have a good day day.