The Dispatch Podcast - The Deciders | Interview: Tevi Troy

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

Tevi Troy, author of The Power and the Money, joins Jamie to discuss the clash and collusion of business and politics. The Agenda: —When the CEO met the preisdent —Barack Obama and Elon Musk —Selective enforcement of policies —Risk of political bets —Are Republicans anti-business? —Strategies for a better country —Overworking FEMA Show Notes: —The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry —Ye Olde Deep State —Shall We Wake the President? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Jamie Weinstein. My guest today is Tevi Troy. He is a former official in the George W. Bush administration and a presidential historian and a prolific author of many books, including his most recent, the power and the money, the epic clashes between commanders and chief and Titans of Industry. He's also a friend of the dispatch, a reader of the website, a friend of many of the people at the dispatch, and a all around good guy. I think you're going to find this conversation interesting. We get into topics of Donald Trump and CEOs and Joe Biden and CEOs and how CEOs have affected those administrations. It might affect the future administration of either Donald Trump or the vice president. We also discuss the current hurricanes and how he might fix FEMA as he once wrote a book on that topic as well. So without further ado, let's get right to it. Here is Mr. Tevi Troy. Kevin, Troy, welcome to the Dispatch podcast. Thanks for having, Jamie.

It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Well, Tevi, you are a friend of the dispatch, and I know Jonah had you on recently to discuss your new book, which will be a topic of our conversation as well, the power and the money, the epic clashes, between commanders and chief and titans of industry. But maybe we just begin, for those who may not have heard Jonah's interview, just reminding the listeners of basically the gist of the book. Sure. The Power of the Money is a history of presidents and CEOs.

Big name CEOs. Think of Ford, Rockefeller, Zuckerberg, Musk, Gates, and their interactions with presidents. All of the CEOs I profile dealt with multiple presidents, so you can compare and contrast how they dealt with the different presidents. And the story of the book is not just about these individual interactions, which are in themselves fascinating, but also the 150-year history

of how business and government have become ever more intertwined over the last century and a half and how Jonah, as well, Jonah always says, complexity is a subsidy. It's a subsidy that helps big corporations. So while the corporations

are sometimes in the crosshairs of government, they also benefit from the regulatory state which helps keep upstarts or young, new, innovative companies out, and it helps them limit their competition. So they gnash their team, about government, but they also benefit from it. Well, the book does discuss CEOs in the modern era who have interacted, and one of those

trying to tie it to what we're seeing right now in the presidential campaign last week. Of course, Elon Musk was in Pennsylvania endorsing Donald Trump. He is one of the CEOs or Titans of Industry that you discuss in your book. Before asking you anything specific, maybe just kind of explain as you do in the book his relationship with government and presidents in the past. Yeah, Elon Musk is fascinating. I could not have written the book without including Elon Musk. He basically gets his start in the Obama administration.

Obama goes down to Florida to visit SpaceX, helps put SpaceX on the map. The Obama administration's green incentives help lead to Tesla's rise because of the incentives to buy electric vehicles. And so Elon Musk becomes a multi-billionaire, the richest person on the planet, in large part, because of government largesse and government contracts and government incentives. But then, in recent years, he's become increasingly disillusioned with the Democrats. He doesn't like what he calls the woke mind virus. And now he's endorsing Donald Trump in 2024. If he votes for Trump in 24, which I assume he will because he endorsed him, it will be the first time he has voted for a Republican for president because he voted for Obama in 12, Hillary in 16, and Biden in 20. So it's a very interesting journey.

How has his relationship been with the Biden White House? I know that there's been some animosity at points over, and you can explain it better, but over what they include and what they don't include, perhaps, in subsidies, but just explain that relationship with the Biden administration. Yeah, it's been terrible. I mean, Biden really doesn't like him and has made it clear. And when they had an electric vehicle summit at the White House, they didn't include Tesla. And Musk's kind of said, what the heck?

I mean, you can't have an electric vehicle conversation in the U.S. and not discuss Tesla. but it was clearly a slight. The Wall Street Journal wrote a very good editorial that I cited in the book, in The Power of the Money, where it listed all these investigations that have been taking place against Musk companies, whether it's labor or environmental or trade, and these investigations,

I don't think in the Wall Street Journal didn't suggest that there were some memo written by the Biden administration, say, go after this guy. But what the journal said is the message from the C.E. your levels in the government to the bureaucracy, we're pretty clear. If you go after this guy, we won't mind. And this is an issue that I talk about a lot in relation to business and government, which is selective enforcement. There's so many regulations, Jamie, as you know, just so many of them, that government can enforce them all. They just couldn't. There's just no

capacity to do so. But if they pick a specific CEO or a specific company and they want to go after that company, they sure can bring a lot to bear to make that company's life miserable. We'll speak to that. I mean, are there examples of outspoken C.E. CEOs who picked the wrong horse and then the other guy gets into office and they start seeing themselves audited or they're, as you said, the selective enforcement. I mean, is there a history of CEOs getting in trouble because the guy that they wanted to win, didn't win, and the other guy is now vindictive? Well, I would say that the Musk example is the starkest, but if you look at my book throughout, there's been historical examples of CEOs betting on the wrong guy and suffering

as a result, specifically Henry Luce, who is the founder and CEO of Time Magazine, and he bet against Franklin Roosevelt multiple times, not a good bet because Roosevelt won every presidential election where he was at the top of the ticket. There were specific things that the Roosevelt administration did to target Luce. Like, for example, Luce wanted to go cover the war zone during World War II, and Roosevelt put out this heavy-handed pronouncement that editors or publishers couldn't go to the war zones. It was clearly directed at Luce. but Luce couldn't get around it. Then when Roosevelt does die,

Luce hates him so much that he says, even though Roosevelt's dead, it is my duty to go on hating him. And then also I would be remiss if I didn't mention your own boss or CEO, Jonah, who has been audited more times than you would think normal during the Obama administration. And, you know, I'm not willing to say

that there was some kind of targeting, but it is weird. I don't know if that was a joke or not, actually. Is that true or are you joking? What it was audited a number of times in the Obama administration and thought that is interesting. I did not know that. But back to Elon for a moment, because I think he's just an interesting example. In the Trump administration, he wasn't necessarily warmly received the first Trump administration either. I mean, there was this tweet I know where Trump says something longs of, you know, he came and begged me for help and I could have told him to, you know, to bow before me and he was something like that.

I don't know if you remember it more specifically. It's similar tweets to Zuckerberg, too. But look, look, everyone has a complicated relationship. with the Trump administration, I would say. But what happened with Musk is there was a business council at the beginning of the Trump administration, and Musk was willing to join it. And all these people kind of dumped on Musk saying, you know, how can you join this? How can you collaborate with the enemy and all this stuff?

And Musk said, look, he's the president. I mean, wouldn't you rather, I'm there and I try and influence things. But then when Trump pulled out of the Paris Accords, it was too much to bear. And Musk and a bunch of other CEOs did step off this business council. But they still developed a bit of a relationship and the fact that Musk was willing to work with the Trump administration, kind of differentiated himself from some other tech CEOs. And I think it opened the door to the relationship with Musk and Trump that is now obviously a much strong relationship today. So I guess it all leads to how do we read Elon's latest decision to support Trump? Is this something born out of ideological conviction that we may have seen him through his tweets over the last several years moving in a certain way?

Or is it, you know, we know that some of his businesses need continued government help or support or contracts, and he's not doing very well dealing with the Biden administration, and this is a hope that he'll have better relations with Trump administration. Yeah, and let me just say in terms of not doing well in the Biden administration, it's not like they have lost their government contracts during the Biden administration. His companies provide a service, and they continue to provide that service. But one does wonder what a Harris administration would potentially do to, musk given how forcefully musk has come out for trump but i i wrote in politico that i just think it's a

risky bet because if harris wins i think that's bad for musk but even if trump wins what if you have a bunch of kind of wealthy suburbanized saying well we don't want musk's cars because he he supported trump or or people don't want to go back to x or twitter because of musk support for trump so i write in the book about Henry Luce, who I mentioned earlier, and how he, initially I said he was against Roosevelt, and that hurt him in certain ways. But then he was completely for Eisenhower. And that hurt him as well, because Time Magazine, his baby, was seen as too much in the tank for Republicans in Eisenhower in the 1950s. And that hurt the magazine's reputation. So I just think it's a risky bet to be too all in on any one candidate if you're a CEO. And in fact, I give this advice

that if you are a CEO, you have to be involved in government because government has such say over whether your company is successful or not. So you want to increase the participation, but you want to dial down the partisanship. You want to be as involved as you can be without being overly partisan. Speak to how Trump handled business in the first administration, because we might get a second administration. He obviously is unique among at least recent presidents, I think all presidents, in terms of his business background. He knew many of the figures in industry in his previous life as a celebrity New York business person. He has a club Mar-a-Lago where he would regular interact with, you know, members and, you know,

promise them tax cuts, but at the same time do things that a lot of business people didn't like, like terrorists. Could you game Trump as a CEO in the first Trump administration? How did he handle advice from, you know, titans of industry? Well, first, you're right. He does have a lot of interesting relationships. with CEOs that I do document in the book. So, for example, he was friends with Lee Ayacocca in the 80s, and he saw that Ayacocca had the best-selling book in America in 1984 and 1985, tough thing to pull off.

And Trump wanted to model himself on that, and he wrote his book, The Art of the Deal, and in part modeled on what Ayacocca did. He was friends with Jack Welch, and Jack Welch was a fan of his. So he's had a lot of these relationships over the time. And there are certain CEOs like Tim Cook, I think, who played the Trump administration pretty well. He's obviously from Apple, and you would think Apple is a Silicon Valley pretty liberal company, but Cook recognized that you needed to have these relationships regardless of who's in power.

And he was very good, not just a schmoozing Trump, but also schmoozing senior people within the Trump administration. Were CEOs able, I mean, again, you had in a way unique access to Trump that he would take calls. I think in your book, he mentioned Tim, Tim Cook was smart because he called him personally. and he said he would take calls from other people. They just, they weren't, they weren't willing to call. Trump, really, you could access him in ways that it might not be easy, easy for other administrations. Marlago comes to mind. Was he susceptible to flattery or, you know, to get someone's agenda done?

Or did he, you know, like to talk to people, but stick to what he wanted to do? Let's see. Was Trump susceptible to flattery? I mean, I think we all know that, the answer to that question. But look, no, Cook did a really good job in terms of. of buttering up the Trump administration. And he worked with Trump in terms of highlighting some jobs that he created in the U.S. And he said it was based on the corporate tax cuts. And corporations did benefit from those tax cuts. And the economy did as well. I mean,

we can criticize Trump. And I certainly have my criticisms. But the tax count was a boon to the economy. At the same time, I wasn't a big fan of the tariffs. And a lot of businessmen weren't. But there is where you could game the system. If you could call Trump and say, well, you know, you should put on tariffs on China, but not on my product. That was something where, because tariffs, one of the reasons Trump likes them is because it's not really a congressionally mandated thing where he has to go through Congress to get it. He can control the dial of who gets it and who doesn't. And so that's where a lot of us lobbying took place.

I mean, we talked about Elon, but the does seem to be, you know, I don't know what the exact polls in Silicon Valley are, but there's certainly high profile switches to Trump in that, in that world. the all-in podcast. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but that's kind of the big podcast in that world. And it does seem like those tech guys, Chimath Papatia, one of the co-hosts there, was a big Democratic donor. The bulwark found out this week or looked back in the archives and found him saying, after January 6th, I would take every single person arrested and give them zero days in jail and add it all and give it up to Trump. He's a complete piece of the S-H-I-word, F-U-word, scumbag. And now,

now he's hosting fundraisers for him. I guess how do we, how should we read the decision of some people in Silicon Valley other than Elon to move towards Trump where, as before, they seemed pretty, pretty strongly opposed? Again, is this an ideological shift maybe because of COVID lockdowns or do they see, you know, potential gains for AI or cryptocurrency under the Trump administration where maybe the Kamal Harris administration would be tougher in those those times? type of budding industries.

Yeah, you mentioned Harris, but the truth is a lot of these guys made their decisions when Biden was the presumptive candidate. And Biden looked like the weak horse. So that politics definitely play a role. But I think business just found the Trump administration a more friendly environment, even if it was erratic and even if they didn't like certain things like the tariffs. In general, they felt like it was an administration that wanted to see business do well, wanted to celebrate the economy and talk up the economy.

So I think that's part of it. Then also we have all the cultural issues. And we talked about Elon and his thoughts about the woke mind virus. I mean, a lot of people don't like some of the excesses of the woke left and are pushing back against that. And they see Trump as an agent for that pushback. We saw this week. I don't know if you saw it. Debbie, where it was it last week, Ben Horowitz of Andresen Horowitz, the big venture firm,

who made his bet during when Biden was the nominee to support Trump is now pulling that back in supporting his old friend from San Francisco, the vice president. So it does seem that maybe, maybe some of those bets were because it was Trump versus Biden and not expecting another candidate in the race. But I got to say that's what you say is in play, because, you know, people on the left are not going to forgive you if you supported Trump at any point. So I think that's a problem. And, you know, obviously Trump will be madder at someone who betrayed him, meaning by supporting

him and then not supporting him. So I always think switching horses at midstream is one of the more dangerous strategies. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain, on top of everything else, is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy

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All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Zuckerberg is another figure in the book. Another figure that seems to transform, not necessarily vocally supporting a candidate now, but claiming that he's kind of getting out of politics. What was the, and me, explain your, your, your, you're part of the book on Zuckerberg and his interesting journey in trying to navigate

politics and Facebook. So Zuckerberg, you have to look at in the context of Bill Gates. He sees Bill Gates as his hero. Like Gates, Zuckerberg was coding at an early age. And he went to Harvard and he dropped out and he started this multi-billion dollar company. So he kind of sees Gates as a model. And Gates was burned by the government, meaning the Clinton administration went hard after Microsoft in the 1990s. And Microsoft was slow to respond. And they were a little to contentious in their response. They didn't try and make peace with the government, and Microsoft suffered as a result. And so when Gates meets Zuckerberg, and Zuckerberg sees Gates as a hero, Gates tells him

get an office there now, and by there he means Washington, D.C. And so Zuckerberg did start looking to Washington early. In 2008, you had some senior Facebook execs, including Chris Hughes, one of the founders, were helping Obama's tech strategy in the campaign. In 2012, there were even more Facebook execs involved. In 2016, Trump successfully uses Facebook, not necessarily with the company's help, but he uses Facebook as a way to get his message out and also to discourage Hillary, soft Hillary supporters from voting.

So Zuckerberg recognizes the political power of his platform. It's clearly a liberal company, and most people there do support the Democrats. But Zuckerberg was unwilling to wash his hands of Trump. And he had dinner with Trump in the Trump years, and he tried to build a relationship with him. It ended up falling apart during the 2020 election in COVID and Black Lives Matter and all that stuff led to the end of their relationship. But they did have a relationship for a while during the first three years in the Trump presidency. Correct me if I'm wrong. But reading your book, I got the sense that you're more successful as a CEO trying to influence policy if two things were true.

one is you're a genuine friend of the president from before he was running for president that you had a longstanding relationship and two the issue was kind of technical it wasn't talking about tax cuts it was something that might the president might not even really understand or be aware of and you could explain your reasoning to him and again and in the example that comes to mind is Wasserman with Reagan and I don't actually even understand the issue something with the FCC commission but is that correct I mean Are those two factors the most likely, your ability most likely to sway the president to change course on an issue? Yeah, look, having a preexisting relationship with the president is always helpful, even if you're not a CEO. And this issue with Wasserman, I'm not going to border listeners by going into the financial interest in syndication rules, the thin rules. But basically, there was a regulation that was free market that would have harmed the studios relevant to the networks and would have benefited the networks more than Studios, Wasserman went to Reagan, and he was going on behalf of the studios, and he convinced Reagan not to pursue the regulation, which was kind of contrary to Reagan's free market inclinations. And so his relationship with Reagan was instrumental in making that happen.

And I think that we've had a lot of instances where the CEOs know the presidents from before. And then you have people like Jamie Diamond, who carefully cultivate relationships with senior political figures long before they become president so that he'll know everyone once they get to power. Diamond, when he started at Chase, J.P. Morgan Chase, he was coming to Washington twice a year, and now he's changed and he comes to Washington twice a month. So that's how important Washington is in this conception. We talked about Trump and how he handles business. Obviously, the next president could either be him or Kamala Harris. Do you have a sense how she will handle business and CEOs, what existing relationships she has that might shift her one way or the other?

It's hard to read because she's running a kind of hide-the-ball campaign. I mean, in 2008, Obama was running, and I knew health care was going to be his big issue. I can't tell you what Harris's big issue is, and I don't think anybody who's following her interviews, even now that she's going on, Stephen Colbert and the View. And she just doesn't really get into the policy details, maybe because she's not comfortable with it, maybe because she thinks that it won't help her with voters. So it is hard to say, but she did have this letter of 88 CEOs or business leaders that endorsed her. And first I said, oh, wow, that seems like a big deal. Then I looked a little more into it.

Half of them are formers. So business leaders who wouldn't want to make the risk of endorsing her while they were in their companies, but now they're done with their companies. A lot of the other ones are either in the tech world or Hollywood where they're already very liberal and it's not much of a risk to support the Democrat. in fact, it's a benefit and it would be a risk to support the Republican in those worlds. And then there are other people like Larry Summers, who's very smart, but he's not really a business leader.

He's a former Treasury Secretary and Academic. So I don't think that letter itself indicates that there's this massive move in the business world towards Democrats or hair. The name that pops up a lot is Tony West, I guess, is her brother-in-law, who's on, I think he's at Uber now, May, was at Pepsi before, but he's kind of in this corporate world that they hope that he'll shape her to more business-friendly. Do you know anything about batter relationship? Does you rely on him at all for advice in this area?

Yeah, look, I think there's a difference between pro-business and pro-market. And I think West is probably in the pro-business camp, less than the pro-market camp. So don't expect free market policies, but you can expect policies that potentially benefit one sector, one favored sector over another. The most vocal person probably in the business world for the vice president these days is Mark Cuban. He seems to be going on all the podcasts that influence the culture to make the case that now that she's running for president as opposed for a senator from a liberal state like California, you know, she's more interested in being business friendly, claims that he's

had conversations with her about this. But what do you make of, I mean, that's, is there any parallel to that where someone who probably wasn't particularly close to a president decides to become maybe the leading advocate in the business community for that candidate? Yeah, look, I've got to be somewhat skeptical of what Kudman's saying here. As you know, Jamie, I worked in a White House, and what carries sway in a White House is what were the public pronouncements of the president when they were running for office and their previous offices. Now that's how we determine what the policies are going to be.

Then obviously, if there are issues where it's not clear what the policy has been or the policy preference have been, then you do policy time, which is a, a process where you go through and you ask the different levels of government what, what we think, and then finally, eventually you ask the president. So this hide the ball strategy that she's pursuing makes it very hard to guess what she's going to do. I do think the Cuban relationship is interesting. I can't think of anything that's quite like that, although I do think of someone like Henry Luce, who went all in for Al Thlandon in 1936. That didn't work, because obviously Roosevelt won, and then I did mention that he went all in for Eisenhower and was more successful there.

And sometimes you do have these CEOs who kind of adopt a candidate. But as I said, I think it's a risky strategy. Both of their vice presidential candidates seem at least rhetorically, perhaps more anti-business maybe than the top of their ticket. What do you make of Walls and Vance? Yeah, as you probably know, I wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal making that case last week that you've got these two vice presidential candidates. Both of them were pretty critical of business. Now, they do it from slightly different angles. Walls does the kind of typical democratic rhetoric.

of businesses have to pay their fair share, whereas Vance is much more of a critic of kind of the elites and DEI and ESG type policies. But from the business perspective, they're getting hit either way. They're getting criticized and they're not looking at these either candidate and the vice presidential level as a friendly. And I think CEOs and their Washington offices should be wary of what might happen with those guys. I mean, on the other hand, Vance, perhaps owes his Senate seat, at least in part to the funding of Peter Thiel and the Super PAC there, is very close to Silicon Valley.

Do you think he really is ideologically anti-business, or is this a attack that he took? I mean, how do you, I mean, square those two things that he has some pretty big business backers. The all-in-podcast guys, again, are very big supporters of him. And yet, you know, rhetorically on a lot of things he seems anti-business. I think he's very skeptical of corporate America, Fortune 500 companies, specifically of the Hollywood or the tech guys. He's skeptical of companies that take on ESG or DEI-type policies. And a lot of companies do that. So I think that's where his skepticism comes from.

We all know that he worked in Silicon Valley doing investments in that world. So it'd probably be more favorable towards Silicon Valley and policies that helped. the tech world, but I wouldn't look for any kind of business carve-outs under a potential advance of infiltration in the future. You mentioned Jamie Diamond, his frequent ships at D.C. I was fortunate to be able to host him a couple times for an off-the-record journalist dinner in D.C. He is very charismatic. Do you think that he could run for president? I mean, do you have the sense that he could be, I mean, Trump was not really a kind of corporate America CEO, but he could be the first

corporate America CEO to enter campaign politics? Of all the CEOs I profile, he definitely is the one who's most likely to be president at some point. He did kind of dip his toe in the water in 2020 when he said if he ran against Trump, he'd beat him. But Trump reacted hard against that, and Jamie pretty quickly backed away and apologized. But I do think he's got some potential. But the fact of the matter is, and I talk about this in the book, is that I'm not sure CEOs want to get involved in Washington. There's a lot of downsides. There's political humiliation potentially.

there's criticism. Even if, let's say, you go for a cabinet slot, you may not get confirmed. Look at something like Andy Puzzler, who Trump picked for Secretary of Labor, and then these unpleasant stories, nothing criminal, but unpleasant stories from his divorce hearing came out,

and then suddenly he was off the list, even after he had, he kind of gave up what he was doing, and he said, I want to pursue this, but at the end of the day, he didn't get the job, and he got politically embarrassed. And then when they get the job,

And Jack Walsh recognized this. He never, even though he's asked multiple times, he never pursued the cabinet's law. Because he recognized that the skill set you have in business, and specifically him, he was Neutron Jack. He would eliminate the lowest performing workers every year. He would eliminate divisions that were unprofitable. You can't do that when you're in the federal government. It's not like a cabinet secretary can say, okay, UGS 14, who are the least performing, you're going to go. You don't have the capacity to do that.

And so I think CEO might be frustrated coming into the government world and trying to treat it like a Bivis. If you were to advise a company who wanted to engage the government on a certain policy, what is the best path to gain influence in any administration? Is there a tried and true method that helps you get your agenda passed in Washington? Or is it all just throwing things at the wall and hoping something sticks? No, I wouldn't say it's sad that you've got to be a little more strategic than the Spaghetti Against the Wall approach, but I think you need to show up. You've got to be there. You can't just assume it's going to happen. One thing I talk about in the book is this study by a

lobbying or a communications firm that found that if there's a big fight between two companies or between two industries, they generally match one another in the amount of resources they're willing to spend on lobbying. So the CEOs who show up can actually be a tiebreaker. They could be the thumb on the scale. And so you look at someone like Tim Cook from Apple, he's not naturally inclined to be hobnobbing in Washington. He's more of a logistics operating guy, but he recognized how important it was to Apple, to his company, to get stuff done in Washington. And he just made himself someone who's good at it. I mean, you've written on all sorts of issues, not just business and politics. I wonder,

and you care a lot about the issues, if you were president, if you were, let's say, not even president, King for a day, what three issues would you change? What laws would you create to set America on the path to lead the 21st century? Yeah, that's a great question. First of all, I would do a very serious scrub of all the regulations and try and reduce it so that businesses can innovate and be more successful. And I think we have this $35 trillion debt. We're not going to get out of it with our current policies. We need a growth strategy. So that would be number one. I think I would also try and get rid of race preferences, this way, that way, or anyway, just let's be neutral about this kind of stuff. And then third, I would rethink our education policies because what we've been

doing for the last 30 years, 40 years really, is just spending more and more on higher education. And it just gives the school's incentive to raise their prices, raise tuition over and over again. So we could kind of pull back that. Maybe they'd hire fewer administrators that I think are destroying our once elite universities, including our shared alma alma mater, Cornell. And so I think we improve the schools, stop focusing on race. so much. And Ronald Reagan used to say, liberty binds us together. It's not our race or our gender or our ethnicity. It's really the shared conception of liberty that brings us together. So that would be too and then really do a regulatory scrub so that we're just not so burdened by regulations. And you know

the Harvey's still silver-glaid thing, two felonies a day. There are so many laws on the books that anybody could be violating a government rule at any time and doesn't even know it. And finally, Tevi, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you. You're also the author of of shale we wake the president, two centuries of disaster management from the White House. Obviously, we had a major hurricane strike just last month. And now we're, as we speak, another major, major hurricane is going to hit. Again, what do you make so far of the disaster response? And how would you fix FEMA to make it better able to handle, you know, these massive storms that we seem to be getting hit by more regularly?

Yeah. And thanks for mentioning that. Let me just mention you mentioned one of my looks. Let me just say, one of the things I love about writing books is I get to meet different people. And I met you through one of my first books, my book about Presidents and Pop Culture, and we did an interview there, and we befriended each other. And I'm glad we've had that friendship for over a dozen years now. So I think books are a great way to get out there and no more people, and no more issues, too.

But in terms of disasters, I think they just asked FEMA to do too much. I think FEMA should be about major disasters. And I think one of the problems now is that FEMA is just pulled in so many different directions and these relatively minor disaster declarations take a couple of FEMA staffers here and a couple of FEMA staffers there and suddenly this major disaster that there's this hurricane bearing down on us comes and they don't have what they need to deal with. Have a joy. Thank you for joining the dispatch podcast. Thanks. I listen to the podcast and it's great.