Speaker 1: We have had these outside people who've advised before. Obviously
Doge is new. We've never had somebody who's a multi
hundred billionaire before, so there are new aspects to it,
but there definitely echoes if you look back at the history.
Speaker 2: You are listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival Network, where
you get valuable information you just can't find anywhere else
to thrive in today's trying times. You need the Financial
Survival Network now more than ever. Go to Financial Survivalnetwork
dot com and get your free newsletter and gift. Financial
Survival Network now more than.
Speaker 3: Ever, and welcome you are listening to and watching the
Financial Survival Network. Hey, we're just about it. The end
of February, really interesting book author came across my desk,
The Power and the Money. If that sounds familiar, then
you should listen on. His name is Tevy, Troy Tevy.
It's your fourth book, I believe, probably more actually fifth,
all right, so you are officially an author, yeah, can't
hide it. So the epic clashes between Commanders in chief
and titans of industry so brings us full skirk full
circle to now Trump and Musk Doge. So far they've
been on the same page. You know, we've never really
seen a titan of industry this tightly entwined in an
administration to the point where you'd almost call them like
a part of the kitchen cabinet, Trump's kitchen cabinet. Uh,
what are your take? What's your take on it?
Speaker 1: Well, it's interesting that the term kitchen cabinet goes way
back and also, you know, includes a lot of people
who were major businessman industrialists. Reagan had his kitchen cabinet,
So we have had outside business advisors before. We've also
had types of industry, as I talk about in my
book and the Power of the Money, who are really
who go all in with the presidency. I talk about
Henry Luce, who is the founder, editor and publisher of
Time magazine. He went all in for Eisenhower in nineteen
fifty two, provided staff for Eisenhower Musk provides the twenty
somethings with backpacks. He used his platform to advance Eisenhower
Musk uses x. He even had his wife become ambassadored
to Italy in the Loose administration. In the Eisenhower administration,
so we have had these outside people who've advised before. Obviously,
doge is KNW. We've never had somebody who's a multi
hundred billionaire before, so there are new aspects to it,
but there are definitely echoes if you look back at
the history.
Speaker 3: Yeah so, but this one's a little different because Musk
is there on an operational level. Right. Usually these are
advisors and they do supply some support, maybe some logistics,
some propaganda, right, But this one's really different. It's like
like Musk was wearing a shirt the other day at
a meeting and then said tech support. And basically, the
government's loaded with zillions of computer systems. None of them
work right, none of them talk to each other. Their
software is breaking down left and right. It's written in
the equivalent of aramaic Cobyl. You know. That's the equivalent
that nobody speaks anymore Cobyl. You know. The joke is
when a Cobyl programmer who's active with the government checks
into a hospital, he doesn't just get standard treatment. He
gets an entire team because they got to keep this
guy alive, even if it's on life support. So the
level of his involvement with the current administration is unparalleled
in history, isn't it.
Speaker 1: He definitely is very closely involved, and there's they seem
to be doing a lot and kind of breaking some
along the way. So yeah, I mean, again, I'm a historian.
When people say something's unprecedented, I like to look for precedents.
But the Doge thing and Musk is something new that
I've not seen before in this way.
Speaker 3: And you know so, is that the definition of fascism
the marriage of industry and government into one happy package?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know about that. I mean, having a
business advisor doesn't make it fascist. I mean, you know
how much more uncomfortable Let's say the FDR administration, which
used heavy handed tactics to get business to do what
it would wanted, and if you asked me, I was
closer to fascism than what we have today. So I'm
not comfortable with that term in this context.
Speaker 3: Good good, Well, me neither. But it is an argument
that you do have to take seriously because what regardless
what your views of the proper function of government is.
You know, these corporations wield unheralded power. I mean a Google,
an Apple, even Tesla have more power than their modern predecessors.
And how you see the news, how you absorb it,
how you ingest information. These companies Facebook, they all have
unherlded power, and you don't want them coming together in
some unheralded triumvirate with government, although arguably they did in
the past administration.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, look in two thousand and eight of
twenty twelve, the tech companies got together to help get
Obama elected. You had all these Facebook staffers embedded on
the Obama campaign. Some of them went into the Obama administration.
So yeah, I mean this stuff has happened before. You've
definitely had business leaders who've gone got backed presidential administrations.
Speaker 3: They provided vice.
Speaker 1: At the end of the day, the president's the decision
maker if he's not comfortable with someone. So for example,
Hugh Johnson was a general who was brought in to
run that National Recovery Administration under Roosevelt, the guy who
acted in those fascistic ways I talked about, And in
nineteen thirty three he was on the cover of Time
magazine as a Man of the Year. He was gone
in nineteen thirty four. So the president gets to make
these choices. Hey, and we could go back to who
was it McNamara, Yeah, macmari are a huge corporate CEO.
You know from the auto industry, comes and starts works
at the Pentagon and tries to run the Vietnam War
not very well. So yeah, the stuff is happening before you.
In my book in the Power of the Money, I
talk about Jack Welch who knew ten different presidents. So
one of the interesting things about Power of the Money
is these are all CEOs who dealt with multiple presidents.
Jack Welts knew ten different presidents, and many of them
asked him to join his administration and join their administrations,
have him come into the cabinet sectory, and he always
said no, because he knew, first of all, if you're
a cabinet secretory, you're subordinate to the president. The president's
always above you, and the CEOs are used to be
on top. And then the second thing is his method
was he would hire, he would fire the lowest performing
workers at GE every year. You can't easilly do that
in the federal government. I'm just thinking, that's kind of
what we're going through now. I mean, I call this
life imitating office space.
Speaker 3: Where what have you done? What do you do here?
You know? And that's that's a legitimate question, especially in
the government. It should be asked repeatedly because these agencies,
these commissions, they've hung on, bureaus whatever, hung on for decades,
long since outliving their mission.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like, I totally agree with that. But it's not
clear that whatever firings are happening are actually going to
be permanent. There's some people resign, and you know, if
you resign, then you know that that's that. But a
lot of these firings going to be tested in court.
A lot of these people have some civil service protections.
So it's just not clear to me that the two
plus million person federal workforce is going to be significant
smaller if we talk a year from now.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, the other thing is the moral aspect of
or the emotional warfare that it's a big sy op
on these people, you know, and how many of them
can take it and finally just throw up their arms
and leave, And those might not be the people that
you really want to get rid of in the first place. Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Look, I'm sorry if it's offensive to people, are
hurtful to people to be asked what they do, but
you got to do that in the private sector all
the time. I mean, if you're in the private secretory
and these quarterly reports where you ask what your goals
were and whether you accomplish them and whether you're doing
well or not. I mean when I've had jobs like that,
I hate filling them out, but you know, it's part
of the job.
Speaker 3: You get paid. It's called work.
Speaker 1: Because they pay you to do something that you wouldn't
do ordinarily. That's why it's work. And so that's why
I will be if you actually love what you're doing
and you do it if you weren't paid. That's a passion,
but could also well, that's why I do what I do.
That's why I write my books and I you know,
I do give the lectures do you think tank stuff?
I do leadership training based on my knowledge of the presidency.
So I do things that I like to do because
I don't like having a boss tell me what to do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I should remind people mind you out there.
The book is The Power and the Money, the epic
clashes between Commanders in Chief and titans of industry, and
it was it's gotten all sorts of awards and alkaloids.
It was came out in the summer, but it's probably
more applicable now than ever with the current administration. So,
getting back to what you said there, Tevy like accountability,
it's not so bad. I always my concept for trimming
the federal workforce was this. You wait for a day
when it snows in d See, and you know, DC
gets an inch of snow, it's shut down instantaneously, and
then they put out the call for only essential workers
to come to the office. And then once all that
you find out who all those essential workers are, you
fire all the other ones because if they're not essential,
what do you need them for? Right?
Speaker 1: The good point I've always wondered about that. You know,
if these people are essential, what about everybody else? If
they're non essential, why am I paying my tax dollars
to support them? It's a great question.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that's how we get rid of non essential workers. Right.
And even if you weren't essential, but you made it
to the office with an inch of snow in DC,
you deserve to keep your job.
Speaker 1: It definitely shows a willingness to overcome challenges.
Speaker 3: Hey, So you know, part of the way organizations change
over time or dramatically over time is by breaking the paradigm,
by by really changing the way you think about work,
about what the government's purpose is, so we've been in
this eighty year kind of spiral. Actually, it's believe it
or not, it's ninety years now since the New Deal
nineteen thirty four, right, and we're starting to like really
redefine government. What is its purpose? Do you create a
new agency for every new problem, or do you let
the market work its way out or do you find
other ways to deal with it?
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, I mean you remember Tim Polenti, he
ran for president briefly back in twenty twelve. He had
this thing called the Google test. He said, before we
come up with a government doing some new thing, why
don't we google it and see if somebody's already doing
it in the private sector, and if they are, don't
create a new government entity to do it, because it's
already being done.
Speaker 3: And now with AI, we could just ask it for
this solution and it would probably figure out better than
any bureaucrat in the Ivory Tower. Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Look, I mean, we've got over one hundred transfer
program that transfer billions of dollars from one group to another.
Do we really need one hundred You know, maybe we
have some kind of guaranteed annual income and negative incompacts
or something we say, okay, we're just going to give
you a check. You get a certain level of money,
but you don't have to have one hundred different programs,
all administered by bureaucrats, all who take a cut. All
of these are inefficient, a lot of them have a
problematic incentives. So yeah, I mean there is just too
much of this in the federal government and we do
need to pare it down.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love the concept of that, and really, how
many we don't you know that? Also the idea of
that email with the five things, what five things you
did last week? It's also like do you exist? Right?
They must called it a pulse check? Right, do you exist?
Do you come into the office or are you a
fictitional a fictitious person or a dead person? And we
just keep doing the transfers into your account. The Department of.
Speaker 1: Labor, there was this one division where where and they
were the ones that were supposed to be the watchdogs
over the labor unions. They would just go to the
bar every afternoon. You can find these guys drinking away.
You're starting at noon. Because they weren't gonna watchdog over
the lee unions. They didn't have any interest in doing that.
Speaker 3: So it's probably better that those guys do work from
home because then when they get drunk, they won't be
driving and presenting a hazard to the entire you know,
driving public. Right, this is back in the days when
people actually showed up. Yeah, well, you know, Woody Allen's
old saying's got to be updated now because he used
to say eighty percent of life is showing up, but
now it's maybe eighty percent of life is showing up
on a zoom call.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, what are they doing on the zoom calls?
I mean, you saw Jamie Diamond's leaked transcript about how
he's ripping on people going on zooms and how they
roll their eyes and making net Snyde comments. But they're
actually doing work. So yeah, Zoom is not a real substitute,
even though I'm enjoying this interview on zoom and we
got to let on it otherwise in the olden Dave
for what.
Speaker 3: We do is quote unquote content creators. Right, it's a
boom for us, believe, But the zoom is the product there,
the zoom call is the product. But you know, I
do see uses for it. There's a lot of companies
that's expanded their capabilities because they're global and these people
would never see each other except that company get togethers
if then so, yeah, technology is great, but technology in
itself is not the solution. It's only a tool as
part of a solution, which always has to be human
induced AI. So this is the biggest trend now, in
my opinion, in the world if you haven't used it,
which supposedly eighty five percent of the population has not
even checked out chat, GPT or Gemini or any of
the others out there. From your standpoint to as the
way the government functions, the where society functions, what's your
take on it, I.
Speaker 1: Think it has an amazing possibility to mean, you, look,
this is the FDA, for example, we are on the
cusp of some kind of biomedical revolution. We've got all
these advances, and what's the number one thing slowing it
down is the FDA review process. And I always say,
we don't enough people, we don't enough time, we can't
review all the documents. Well why do you have AI
review the documents? And they could look for the anomalies
that better than a human can, They can find if
there are potential adverse risks in a new product, and
they look at all the submissions, which you know, sometimes
these documents are the hundreds of thousands of pages. They
can look through it in the blink of an eye
and maybe we can move the whole FDA approval process faster.
So I think I see tons of possibilities for AI.
Speaker 3: And not to mention what's happening with DOGE, the ability
to scan through every single line item in the US
budget and come up with the waste inefficiency or.
Speaker 1: Yeah, look look at AID. What's with them in these
transgender comic books and they you know, the DEI operas.
I mean, I don't understand why does it help us
if we go to a country and try and force
DEI down the throats of this other country. They're just
going to They're gonna like us left, They're not going
to appreciate it. I get it. If USAID is all
about providing food and medicine, that's great, but that's not
what they're doing. They're providing this kind of ideological indoctrination
that you that we get on our college campuses. I
don't want on on college campuses, and I don't want
it when we're giving it to Mozambique either, yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, I was trying to get tickets on ticket Master
to the to the trans opera in Slovenia, but I couldn't.
They were all sold out.
Speaker 1: So you think the Slovenians really want to see a
trans opera? Do you think it makes them feel better
about the United States of America or worse?
Speaker 3: This is like cultural rot sickness, and and it's an
attack on these other cultures which are more conservative than ours,
and they don't appreciate it. And like you say, they
hate us even more for meddling and indoctrinating.
Speaker 1: So I'd beware of saying concerted cultures that are more
conservative than ours, because you know, we're pretty conservative here
in the try household, and I'm sure in your household
as well. So oh yeah, yeah, but let's not say that,
you know, the radicals own the culture.
Speaker 3: Right, but we accept a lot more than what our
parents or our grandparents would have, you know what they.
Speaker 1: Yeah, perhaps you're a detriment.
Speaker 3: That could well be the case, but whatever, it's all
been normalized to some extent, at least our acceptance of
it in others. Maybe not in our household, but yeah,
it's it's been an incredible eye opener like you and
I Like you worked in the government. You knew the waste,
the corruption, the fraud, it was all there. You knew it,
but you didn't know the specifics of it. Knew it
from a macro level. Now you're getting to find out
what it is from a micro level, and it is shocking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I gotta say, I'm a little embarrassed about this.
But when I worked in the government, I would see
these grants go to left wing groups and I say, well,
can't we stop this, and everyone saying no, people have
tried it before, it can be done. Well, maybe it
can be done. Maybe, and maybe we should have tried
harder when I was in the bushy ears, because this
stuff has been going on for a long time. It's
just now with AI and with social media, we get
to find out about it. Used to you would have
these these media filters, wouldn't let the story get out.
But now we can see the truth.
Speaker 3: Hey, the worst, the most egregious thing I saw is
the illegal invasion we put a USA paid to six
billion dollars that we know about. Mind you, a lot
of it gets laundered. We don't know about it. Six
billion dollars in the last two years to bring these
illegals in and you know, give them luxury hotels and
you know, debit cards and cars and houses and businesses.
I mean, this is like insanity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all I had to do was say stop. And
you know if you know, but border apprehensions are way
down because we said no, it's no longer an open door.
We're going to stop you. You can't come in this
country legally. I love immigrants. I'm very pro immigration, but
pro legal immigration. How do you think these people are
waiting online for their visa feel when somebody just sneaks
over the border and then it leads to Americans say, oh,
we don't want immigrants. It's not that we don't want imigrants.
We don't want illegal immigrants.
Speaker 3: We want legal.
Speaker 1: Immigration because it's the lifebload of our economy. It brings
in new idea. Forty percent of the people in the
pharmaceutical industry are immigrants. I think they're great, but those
people came here legally.
Speaker 3: I look at my top ten friends I live here
in Florida, and at least four or five of them,
you know, emigrated here legally.
Speaker 1: So you know, to say, its great energy and ideas
and money to this country. And you know that's what
we worth thirty five trillion dollars in debt. We can't
just live off our pathetic birth rate, which is you know,
we're not even replacing ourselves. We do need people to
come here to pay taxes and to build a country
and to be innovators. But we've got to do it legally.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we want to know something about them and
know that they're not diseased. And my ancestors came through
Ellis Island that were quarantined for a couple of weeks.
They couldn't come into the country to lin knew. We
knew they were diseased free. And that's just one example. Hey, again,
the book is The Power and the Money, the epic
clashes between Commanders in Chief and titans of industry, and
it's by Tevy Troy. Tevy been a great guest. Really
appreciate your coming here. You've got a website we can
follow your work. Can go to Tebi Troy dot org.
You can buy the Power of the Money wherever fine
books are sold. You could follow me at Tevy Troy
on x or Twitter, whatever you prefer. And I just
got to say I love your shirt. Thanks. Hey, well,
we always like to say wherever fine books used to
be sold Amazon and wherever fine books used to be slid.
The link will be in the show notes, both to
Tevy's website and to the book on Amazon. Hey, appreciate
you coming on. We're definitely going to have you on
again and can't wait for your next book. Hey.
Speaker 1: Thanks, I look forward to your review and the mention
of the newsletter and all this great stuff.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival Network, your
solution to today's trying times. For the latest, go to
Financial Survivalnetwork dot com. Financial Survival Network now more than ever,