Live Conversation with Former Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross

Published: Aug 14, 2024 Duration: 01:10:04 Category: Nonprofits & Activism

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Introduction well good evening everybody how's everybody doing good good well welcome to the Reagan Library my name is David trulio it is my privilege to be the president and CEO of the Ronald Reagan presidential foundation and Institute and as we do for all of our official programming we I'm going to ask you to stand and and let's honor the flag and all those who who serve under it by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all the Pledge of Allegiance is actually briefly mentioned in Secretary Ross's book but before we go further I will recognize a few people who uh from this I'll recognize a few people who are here with us in the audience so um first the the wife of our very special guest Hillary gir Ross we have the Toby professor of international relations and politics at Pepperdine School of Public Policy Dr kirron Skinner and we have our former congressman from this area Elton gagley and his wife [Applause] Janice we are in for a truly special evening tonight we're here with a man who's led a really remarkable life a true American Dream story now I'm going to start with a very short version of His official bio and then I'll pivot to his to to some facts about him that are not in the official bio but the official bio says Wilbur Ross served as a secretary of Commerce in the Trump Administration following 55 years of experience in Investment Banking and private equity in this capacity he advised president Donald Trump on Commercial and economic Affairs and helped American entrepreneurs and businesses create jobs and Economic Opportunity over the course of his career Wilbur Ross restructured more than $400 billion dollar in assets earning him a distinguished reputation on Wall Street in 2011 Bloomberg markets named him one of the 50 most influential people in global Finance I'll now briefly touch on a few of the fascinating aspects of secretary Ross's life that come through in powerful detail over the course of a very readable and wisdom filled forthcoming book risks and returns creating success in business and life so first of all secretary Ross overcame tragic loss as a young man and worked hard to put himself through school when he was Commerce Secretary overseeing the census which is his responsibility or was his responsibility as secretary he actually had a leg up because he himself had been a census worker many decades earlier in a rough part of Boston by the way to help pay for school he was an accomplished Marksman that's something that prepared him for his uh his his professional journey and that's something we we'll touch on in our discussion he would eventually become neighbors with John Lennon he was a guest of Sir Richard Branson at Richard Branson's Private Island he knows King Charles and Warren Buffett and he's really led a remarkable life in including back in 1990 he even played bankruptcy hard ball with none other than Donald Trump over the Taj Mahal cassino in in Atlantic City and he was and and and he must have made a good impression because decades later he was invited to be the secretary or the the president's Commerce Secretary for his shrewd business dealings he earned the moniker the king of bankruptcy but not because he went bankrupt quite the opposite he advised companies and investors and bond holders worked on numerous high-profile bankruptcies from PanAm to Texico now at the age of 63 when most successful people are looking forward to retirement he decided to take a bold new step and launch a startup business and no surprise it was wildly successful throughout risks and returns we see how Wilbur Ross applied himself was always prepared and took thoughtful risks that paid off handsomely but there's more a lot more and we we're going to cover it tonight he's a highly accomplished collector he is a generous philanthropist he sees great Economic Opportunity in outer space and his book is loaded with insights and wisdom for anyone who is eager to work hard take on the odds and accomplish great things it's an ethos that resonates with the story of our 40th president a president with humble beginnings who was diligent who didn't relent and went on to the the very top of our government it's also worth noting that like Ronald Reagan Wilbur Ross was a Democrat before he became a Republican and if anyone wants to become a republican tonight we can take care of that uh uh after the event so we're honored to have the secretary with us here at the Reagan library and uh by the way here we here at the Reagan Library Mr secretary we were sanctioned by the People's Republic of China just like you were so um uh glad to be in the same club uh with you on that so ladies and Gentlemen please join me in welcoming a Wall Street Legend an American Dream story a patriot and the 39th Secretary of the Department of Commerce Wilbur Wilbur Ross Childhood Ross come right over well thank you for being here and making the trip I thought we would start at the beginning which is tell us a little bit about your upbringing what what were your mom and dad like what was it like growing up in New Jersey well my mother and father were both a democratic political operatives in Hudson County New Jersey which is an INF famously U Democratic area and my first exposure to it was when I was a very young boy they took me down to see Frank heg the mayor of Jersey City and the boss um he had just gotten a new apartment on the top of the Jersey City Medical Center which had just then been constructed gorgeous apartment floored ceiling glass panoramic view of New Jersey New York City and so he asked me well what did I think about it well I'd never seen anything like it so I was a little bit goggle eyed I said well mayor heg may I ask you a question how did you get such a marvelous apartment and he said you'd be amazed it was a present I said a present that's quite an amazing present and he said yes you'd be astonished at how many nice presents people give me your parents will explain it on the way back to your house so that was the the first sort of blush with that um I was a scrawny kid and and a bookworm when I was young still both are pretty much true um and so I was not very good at baseball or basketball or football but one day my paternal grandfather uh took me to a recreation hall that had a bowling ear he was a very good bowler he had actually bowled three 300 games which are perfect games anyhow I wasn't too interested in Bowling the ball was too heavy for me to play with anyway but it also had a rifle range and so I turned out I had a very natural affinity for Marksmanship and went on at age 14 I won the New Jersey state championship at age 16 I set the US record over the Olympic small bo rifle course and that was my first real lesson in management well and you you point out in the book that Marksmanship Marksmanship played a big role in your future success you said intense concentration on hitting the target became a metaphor for my entire life yes can you elaborate on that well that's true because unlike many sports which are true team sports well we had a team I was at a military Jesuit military school well we had a team at the end of the day it was just you and the Target and the question was how many times could you hit it where you were supposed to hit it and not have him fail you so there was only one thing to concentrate on and you had to learn to control your breathing and keep your emotion down and all that sort of self-control activity but um it turned out to be good training and it helped me to focus and focus I think is a singularly important thing in everything uh that you do concentration and focus if you get distracted too easily waste time you theend typical bureaucrat shuffling paper rather than dealing with the paper um so it was very important to me but this one event where I set the record taught me a little bit about management uh Winchester by then was my sponsor and that was very good because I needed help to buy the ammunition and stuff like that and and entry fees for the tournaments and they wanted me to take time off from school and really get ready for the Olympics which I decided not to do but this day was shooting at its Outdoors 100 meters and a 22 caliber rifle uh is very the shells and the bullets are very susceptible to win so they would have two Targets one was the real Target and one was the practice Target so as the wind changed you'd shoot at the practice Target to adjust your sights so you could deal with it so they gave me this fellow as a spotter to count the rounds that I had fired and make sure that I didn't over count or undercount so when they announced the record it seemed too low on the prone part it was prone kneeling and standing prone is the simplest CU you're supported you're lying on the ground and I felt it was nine or 10 points too low so Winchester paid the protest fee and it turned out he had not counted correctly and so I set the record without having fired as many shots as you were supposed to so made a kind of a Bittersweet thing but what I learned from it was you can delegate Authority but at the end of the day responsibility stays with you and therefore you really have to monitor so instead of being a little lazy about it which turned out I was I didn't keep track myself I just totally relied on him the last time I ever totally relied on on a supporting uh person so it was an important lesson and it happened to come in a very strange package namely the joy of setting a record and the annoyance at having been so stupid not to shoot the right number of rounds so Micromanager amazing and and obviously this this crucial lesson stuck with you and we're talking about it six decades probably later right yeah I I wasn't in the shooting business in order to learn that lesson but it it stuck with me probably as a result I tend to be a bit of a micromanager which I've noticed is something a lot of entrepreneurs uh end up doing well I I do want to in a moment get to your career on Wall Street of course but tell us about some of your jobs growing up yeah well the first job that I had with a a real employer not just mowing lawns or doing things like that I was hired right after I got my driver's license as a car Parker at Mammoth Park Jockey Club Club in Oceanport New Jersey so the first day I showed up with about 19 other teenagers to learn what we had to do to be car Parkers Louis the lot boss who is a Teamster naturally the teamsters and it being New Jersey if it moved they had to organize it so the uh parking attendance were organized by the teamsters and Louis the loty explained to us that there would be accidents naturally especially at the end of the day when everybody's in a hurry to get the car back and he said now here's the drill if they you dang up the guy's car and he notices that before he leaves the track the track will have to pay for the damage and you'll get set down from your job for a week and if thaten happens twice you get fired so here's what you do if you've damaged the guy's car you have to distract him as you bring the car to him and if it's a convertible if the top were down put the top up while you're coming and so he'll scream and yell what are you doing putting my top up but he won't go the music up too was another one he won't notice the front headlight is busted or if it's not a convertible turn on the radio real loud and turn on the windshield wipers and the same thing he'll say what the heck are you doing but he won't notice the damage so here was a management person teaching kids how to defraud the business's customers I thought this is a very unusual concept of business it didn't seem quite right even as a kid but it got worse than that he went on to say now you know you're just getting paid minimum wage and you'll get a few little tips in those days a quarter was a a pretty good tip um so uh you can live off that as best you can or you can buy concessions from me I thought buy concessions what on Earth could this be and the concessions were things like this you would be amazed how many people leave locked in the car while they're at the track for six or eight hours on a hot sunny day a child Andor a pet a dog or a cat or something so one of the concessions was you would park their car in the shade under the trees so that whoever was trapped in the car would have a little less unpleasant experience and the idea was you would keep half of the $2 and he would get the other half of the $2 so there were various concessions like that they were innocent enough but here we had a guy who is a paid employee a lower level management guy and he was making all this money on the side another strange aspect of of working for a fairly large a company so that was gave me a very poor idea of capitalism because this was my first real exposure to a decent sized business and I later learned it was happily not at all typical American Business people are based on my experience the most Law Abiding and the most moral of any business community that I've been exposed to so I got a funny set of immersion into a little strange segment it also taught me something else because one of the kids decided he didn't need to buy a concession he was he was inventing his own concession and here's what his concession was if you were the first car he parked he would tell you I know who's going to win the first race and he would tell you it's the one horse and if you were the next one he would tell you I know who's going to win the first race and he'd tell you the two horse and they tell you the three the four the five so every nine or 10 cars because there were usually nine or 10 entries every nine or 10 cars he'd have a winner and that winner would usually come back to him after the first race because they naturally wanted to know who was going to win in the second race and he said I gave you the first race free now you have to give me 10 bucks for me to tell you the winner of the second race then he'd go through the same thing and if he would have a few winners even of the second when they came back he would charge them $25 to tell them who was going to win the third the game very rarely lasted after three races you ran out of the number of people versus the number of horses strangest part about it to me was none of the people who lost ever came back and complained at him and my guess is it's because the wives probably said to them it was usually the husband who B on this scam my guess is the wives probably said you're a real idiot would you think a kid running around a parking lot had any idea who the heck was going to win the race and so the guy was probably a little too embarrassed to come back not talk me about scams it's always somebody who's trying to do something a little over the edge who's victim to a scam if they don't have a little sense of lony they won't fall for it because it's always the scammer is alleging alleging he'll give you something you're not entitled to so it was a good lesson uh and it lived up to the Wall Street motto if it seems too good to be true it probably is too good to be true so you thought you were going to go back to Mentorship parking cars one summer when you were in college but you got a call from a mentor mentorship features prominently in your book so tell us if you would about that call and what launched you on your career on Wall Street yeah uh the fact faculty advisor at Yale to my fraternity was one of the senior officers of the Investment Portfolio management Yale as you probably know has had a very famous very successful portfolio management for years so he called me on April 1st and you'll see April 1st is a recurring theme in my life anyway he called me on April 1st and he said Wilber what are you going to do this summer and I said well Mr esle I'm suppose I'll go park cars again just like I've been doing and he said no I'm leaving the university I'm joining as a partner investment Boutique in New York and you're going to come with me as my clerk and you're going to learn something that could be useful to you in later life I thought wow but because it was April Fool's Day I thought maybe it was just he's me so I waited a few minutes and I called him back and I said are you serious and he said yes he was and I did and this was a total contrast so here's my second real experience in Corporate America there's a firm called Buckner and Co Pete Buckner was one of the son-in-laws of Tom of Wilson who had founded IBM so he knew a lot of wealthy people and was wealthy and he was also a very religious man and that was the one bad part about the job I was living out in still in Northburg and New Jersey and you had to be in the office in Midtown Manhattan at 8:00 a.m. well so I had to leave the house at 6:30 to get there why 8:00 a.m. because that was when Mr Buckner would read a section from the Bible and then you would meditate on it for a minute or two and then you'd get on with talking about the days investment program so I went from a pretty corrupt atmosphere at the racetrack to an atmosphere that could not be more different but happily was much more like the rest of my life and Career in Finance obviously this was a very special call that you got that brought you in but you you decided that you wanted to make a career out of being in finance and what so what was your thinking around that and and what what led you further down this path well it was a a bunch of things I've always been pretty analytical always been a bookworm and those are two very useful characteristics for being on Wall Street um and in fact a professor I had later on gave me a memorable saying he said the only stupid question is the question you forgot to ask and there's a lot of wisdom to that anyhow so I I enjoyed it they taught me very quickly about accounting and it turned out I have pretty good knack for that so I learned the beauties of Double Entry a bookkeeping accounting but I'd like the process and I like listening to them as they went through their deliberation what they were buying into turned out they often bought Securities that were out of favor sometime distressed one of them was defaulted West Virginia Turnpike bonds the bonds were financed uh with debt naturally based on projections about how much traffic there would be on the toll road and it turned out yeah there was traffic and it grew but not as rapidly as they had hoped so the bonds went into default and every day they were buying these bonds buying these bonds they finally helped organize the restructuring of the Turnpike Authority and they doubled their money in no time at all so that was interesting because at first I was puzzled I with this is bad it's in default it's a a very bad situation how could that be a good investment well it turned out was a very good depends on the price right yeah right so that was I didn't realize it at the time but that was something that eventually led me to the distressed world and so tell us more about that journey into the distressed world that you as as I mentioned earlier The King of Bankruptcy you were the king of bankruptcy what what Drew you to that in the book you talk about the US bankruptcy code and how that is essentially a National Asset that my word not yours but can you tell us a little bit more about that yeah um I I started out working at an investment Boutique institutional research firm and did pretty well uh there um I then went to work for a very hot shot money manager called emry de and he and as I was getting out of the military I had had gotten deferral from my uh second lieutenancy in the Army to let me go to business school so when I got out I had to go into the military and in those days in theory you would go in for six months and then seven and a half years of reserves but it happened to be the Cuban Missile Crisis so I got to spend 18 months instead of six Emy de the week before I was to join the firm died and on his deathbed sold the business to Robert winthrip of the Massachusetts winthrip's very wealthy man and who had been a very good client of theirs um so I suddenly changed jobs and I hadn't even shown up yet then a week later in or a couple weeks later in came Jack dorren who then was the CEO of Campbell Soup one of our main clients and between himself in this pension fund of Campbell Soup they had several billion dollars with us so he was obviously trying to learn was the new regime this new fellow who had bought the firm going to be comparable in performance to the old one so at one point he said to Mr winre Bob I notice our portfolios have a lot of shares of Lucky Friday Silver Mines in them why do we have lucky Friday Silver Mines Mr winre turned to me and he said Wilbur do my portfolios have lucky Friday Silver Mines too and I said yes sir all of our portfolios have some lucky Friday Silver Mines because and here's why went into the story Sten said well thank you I understand it that ended the lunch the following Monday they pulled the $3 billion of accounts because it was clear the new head of the firm had no idea what was they were doing so two weeks later he went to a board meeting at City Bank dick Perkins then was the CEO of City Bank and he was complaining about this mistake he had made buying d and how embarrassing it was to be called out the way that he was so Perkins said well I have a solution for you Sam Milbank is wanting to retire from wood strs a nice Old Line Wall Street firm if you would replace his 10 million of capital with yours they'll call it Wood Brothers and winstrip nobody will ever again put you on the spot so he did so now I changed jobs for the second time at least this time I had gotten a paycheck in between so it wasn't quite as bad as the first change Wood Brothers was a very conservative firm very professional but conservative so they didn't like the idea of the Venture Capital fund that we had had as part of our operation so they fired the entire staff of that fund and made me a VP with one of their Partners the V president and my job was to get them out of all their Investments and if I could do that within three years with no litigation and no bad PR they would give me a big bonus so that's when I started to learn handson about negotiating with lenders negotiating trying to turn things uh around well let's fast forward to 1990 or thereabouts and you get into one negotiation which gets a little tense shall we say and it it had to do uh it had to do with the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City yes and none other than than Donald Trump so tell us about that yeah uh I had gotten into distress on a big-time basis because of Mike milin mik Mike was then run the key player at drexo Burnham and what he was doing was pioneering the creation of deliberately lowquality Deb instruments and I think he did the country in a lot of ways a great service with that but anyhow it seemed to me that that would inevitably mean there will also be more workouts because if you're putting that much leverage on companies some of them are going to get it wrong some will go bust some need an outof Court restructuring so I teamed up with a very aggressive young lawyer and we started going around to Drexel's clients and saying Mike has been picking you off when the workout comes because his client is the issuer so he's trying to get the best deal for the issuer and that's fine but because he's negotiating with you Bond holders one by one you have no leverage on him you don't even know what else other Bond holders are thinking so we will organize the bond holders into a group negotiate as a group now you have the leverage because he has to deal with you and he can't make different deals with different people so it got mik a little bit cross that we were changing the game some but it turned out to be a very good business so segue to 1990 Along Comes the Taj Mahal uh Merl Lynch and Bear Sterns provided virtually all the financing for it through an $800 million mortgage Bond offering for a company that had yet to open its first door so it was literally a startup F financing of a mortgage B well it never paid one coupon bonds as you know they pay coupon every 6 months this one never paid a single coupon so Bond holders are obviously pretty angry with that so the uh Thursday evening before Labor Day weekend they hire me to be their advisor along with my lawyer friend so Trump called me up and I knew him slightly just from around New York City but he called and he said you got to come down tomorrow and I'll start uh having you do due diligence and we'll get going on on the restructuring that was the last thing I wanted to do was to go to Atlantic City on Labor Day weekend but anyhow I showed up at the 63rd Street heliport and there was this helicopter about the same size as the Marine one that's here but this one was silver colored and it had in five foot high red nail polish red letters t Ru m p so there was no no real doubt whose plane it was so I get into it we go down to the Steel Pier in Atlantic City the little stub that was left and trumps there in a in a big stretch limo and I noticed on the front of the car there were two flags one was naturally the American flag and the other was a trump flag so it was almost as though you were getting a ride with a dictator of some Latin American country so we we drive the about 150 ft to the casino but we don't go in through the boardwalk entrance we drive all the way around to the back with meanwhile people wanting to take pictures Donald Donald screaming yelling a big aborus crowd scene um and in the back he did a big bus business buses would pick people up at all the little towns from New England down to Atlantic City and then they would come to the casino more agulation by the crowds we get inside Place totally wared people asking him to sign their beanie hat sign their shirt sign their little pad one woman Eden had him sign her naked back now what she was ever going to do with a signature on her naked back I have no idea but anyhow it was a real outpouring of interest on the part of his customers so he gave a very detailed tour of the facility and it was clear he he understood the business pretty well he was had his hands on what was going on so that kind of impressed me then we went to his office and he said you know your bond holders they're going to be lucky to get the 20 cents on the dollar which is where the bonds are trading so I I won't try to beat you down from there if you'll take 20 cents we can make a deal right now and I said well sorry Mr Trump but that's not my job my job is to get them 100 cents plus their acrude uh interest and he said well never going to happen that's we so we got into a little bit of a pitched argument and after an hour or two of it I finally said to him well is that your position and he said yes it is and I said well then I'll see you sometime next week I'm leaving so I walked out on him and he tells the story to this day it was the first time anybody ever just walked out on him and in a strange way it gave us a bond because that was the kind of thing that he might be uh inclined to do so we got to understand each other a little we then had a very public several months of bi ing where he was threatening to get me fired as the Trumps threats advisor to the bond holders and uh saying all this and that and the other thing and it was all playing itself out in the news media and at one point I said Donald Trump is looking for a Christmas present and it's not even Halloween yet so it's premature and it's also premature for the trick or treat that he's trying to play on the bound holders so it was that kind of lively you had fun with did you have fun with us sounds yeah yeah that that was sort of fun then eventually we go through all those Shenanigans and we finally got to the point where I thought there's not much we were meanwhile we were getting him up some but he still wasn't up to 100 cents so I went with the lawyer one day to see him in the morning and I said Donald this is really it we either are going to get from you the hundred cents with the interest or we'll get it out of the courtroom and uh he said no I'm just not going to do it I already went further than I had intended to so I said well we'll see you in court and I walked out on him again and uh went back to office and we put out a press release about an hour later that said the bond holder Committee of the Taj Mahal is going to hold an important press conference at the Marriott Marquee at 5:00 this evening so he immediately when I hit the newswire he called me up scream very unhappy screaming and yelling what is this about you're doing a press conference at the Marriott U Marquee that was obviously not one of his hotels so I said well I told you we will see you in court we're going to announce we're filing an involuntary bankruptcy petition on you and you're going to be in bankruptcy at about 6 o' this evening so he said just give me a little while to think about that he called back we made a few more little changes and instead he said okay we made our deal we got our 100 cents and we also got 49% of the stock to make up for all the hardship of not getting paid on time so we then made the press conference at the Plaza hotel which had been one of his hotels and was right across the street from his office so uh he explained that they had made a deal and then I had to explain the technical part because we wanted to tread gingerly the idea that it was still going to go into bankruptcy but it would be a friendly one a so-called consensual proceeding where it was just to make sure there were no stragglers hanging out so I had to explain that it's a bankruptcy but it isn't like a real regular bankruptcy so as a gambler you don't have to worry that he won't be able to pay when you break the bank and all that and it won't affect the employees it won't affect anything it'll just be a technical thing going through of the courts so that we that's what the way the press play it up I was feeling pretty good because this had been a real struggle and a real public thing so I get in the car I'm going home and I'm tired as can be because you know you use up a lot of nervous Energy phone rings in the car this is your mother calling oh um have you lost all self-respect what do you mean mom she said well after all those mean things that he said about you how could you possibly do business with him I've been playing marang with my lady friends and we all agree this is a disgrace you should not have ever made a deal with him and I said Mom I'm just earning a living doing trying to help my clients um make out and she said well if you had become a lawyer like your father was and like I always wanted you to do you wouldn't have to hang around with people like that and then she hung up so let's let's fast forward again now Trump Presidency you're at this point you're in your late '70s yeah and Donald Trump gets elected president and he calls you up or you you actually go interview with him and he offers you a job yeah well it it really started a little bit before that when he announced he was running uh for the third time he had he had toyed with running a couple of times before but this time when he came down that big fancy staircase at the Trump Tower uh Hillary and I were watching it on TV and I it seemed us like maybe he was a little more serious this time and as it turned out he was deadly serious and he really was running and I felt he was the only one of the candidates who truly understood the agony of middle class America and that they were fed up being worked over fed up being being left behind fed up not getting an ability to keep up with inflation and therefore I thought he had an excellent chance not only to win but to fix the problems because the other candidates as far as I could tell didn't even understand the problem well how the hell are you going to fix the problem if you don't understand it so one morning I was on squawkbox on CNBC and they asked me they said well if Trump was elected as the nominee for the Republican Party would you support him and they were frankly thinking I would say hell no because that was what most of Wall Street was saying and I said no of course I will support him and I explained wi so that was the start of our romance with some lot of time in between and uh it turned out to be right I think it was partly due to his experience both in the hotel business and in the casino business because he had a lot of middle and lower middle class customers in both so he had more interaction more real one-on-one relationship with those parts of the American public than Bush or any of the other Mainline Republican candidates and certainly more than the Democratic uh candidates so I started raising some funds for him and started writing editorials wrote I don't know 30 or 40 editorials mostly for regional uh newspapers uh explaining why I thought he should be president and and explaining some of the policy programs that uh he would be putting in Transition Team so we get to the convention that goes very nicely and at the convention he appointed Chris Christie to be the head of the transition team whenever there's a person who's not the incumbent elected president they make a transition team who' help them figure out who to put into the various positions all sorts of important activities and in fact the government pays for it the GSA had a fairly big building on 17th Street in Washington which was where the transition office was based and initially they had two one for Hillary and one for Trump but Hillary turned out not to need hers so the only populated one was trumps um but uh how did I actually get the appointment shortly after the election uh I got a call from uh someone on the transition committee saying could you go out to his Golf Club in New Jersey uh on the Friday uh of right after Thanksgiving they didn't say what it was about but you could figure that it would have something to do with the new Administration and I had talked with the transition people earlier and said to them what I would like since they were asked me what I would like to do I said if he doesn't give it to minuchin which I think he probably will because Steve was his kind of Chief fundraiser said if they don't give TR to minuchin I would like treasury if they do give minuchin treasury i' would like Commerce so that was as far as it had gotten so I get out there and um the Press was mob scen outside the front door to uh his uh golf club but the pretty young lady one of his AIDS had had us drive around to the back go up the back stairs to a kind of holding bin where they were serving cold cuts and drinks and what have you So eventually my turn came and to get ready for it I had put together a 100 day program I'd been analyzing Commerce and things that I thought could be done with it and about it and how it would fit in with his agenda so I had made a whole bunch of copies of it had it in a b briefcase and so when I got ushered in it was trump it was Pence it was Kelly and Conway it was Ron prus who then was the chair of the RNC was a whole lot of people Steve Bannon all a lot of his advisors all seated in around a little table with a chair by it so I greeted everybody sat down I started to open my briefcase to take out my brilliant 100 day plan because that was going to be my big sales pitch and Trump stood up and he said well there's no need for a sales pitch we've decided to give you Commerce and so that was Bing like that and it was in some ways typical of his decision making he had already made his mind up so there was no need to go through the ritual of a formal presentation they knew what they were going to do he didn't want to waste time because he's impatient he's always impatient about things happening and so we did that and so he said no you can't tell anyone except for Hillary until we make the announcement and meanwhile the FBI will do character check and all this and that and we will announce you and minuchin simultaneously as the new kind of economic uh Team uh and so that's what happened and that was that was more complicated getting through the Congressional hearings than it was getting the nod from Trump the transition team had set up a tutoring session so every day starting right after the J the 1 of January every day I would spend my whole day in the transition office part of it where they had people who had formerly served in the Commerce Department educating me on all the details of it and the rest of the day pretending I was at the hearing and they literally set up a room to look just like a senate hearing room and they were up high and you were down in front and you had this little desk with a little clock because at hearings the world is divided into five minute intervals each the chairman makes a little talk five minutes then the ranking member which is the most senior opposing party and went back and forth like that and then you would get your five minutes so very ritualistic and they were impersonating them so well they even impersonated the accents one had a big Boston accent one had a big southern accent so it was meant to really prepare you for the environment and they had done very careful homework what were the kinds of questions each person was likely to ask you so um I felt pretty well prepared and then next step was make the rounds courtesy calls on first uh on Schumer uh and then on the committee chairs and the committee members and the senior people in the Senate only the Senate gets to vote on on cabinet the house doesn't get to vote and knew Schumer before this yeah I knew Schumer before and tell us how he reacted in fact when I had been a Democrat and a Democratic fundraiser and in fact at age 29 I became the treasur of the democratic State Committee in the state of New York so I was pretty involved structurally and a new Schumer from that I actually at one point gave him one of his early fundraisers anyhow so I spent an hour chatting with them very amiably and at the end of it since I had learned on Wall Street one thing always ask for the order and so I said well Mr leader um since we've had this history I hope I can count on your support for my uh designation as Commerce Secretary and he said Wilbur not a chance in the world said not a chance in the world why is that he said you must remember I'm the loyal opposition and he didn't vote for me uh it was a a very bipartisan vote I got 72 yeses 27 Nays and one non voting uh person so we got confirmed all right the confirmation hearing itself was another scene a lady showed up there dressed as Marie Antoinette and as I started to make my remarks she started throwing bits of cake out at the audience let them eat cake you know so the Sergeant at Arms ushered her out so that was the end of that and so I said which brought everybody to laugh I said you can probably appreciate she was not part of my prepared remarks so you made it through so what was it like being Secretary of Commerce tell everybody please what what does the Accomplishments Secretary of Commerce do and what accomplishments are you most proud of yeah well Commerce is like a huge conglomerate it has more different activities than any other branch of government we have the National Weather Service we operate 17 space satellites we have the foreign commercial Services which has offices in 72 diplomatic posts around the world to try to promote American Business uh we have the uh patent office the trademark office um uh the department of uh Science and Technology we have um the Census Bureau we have the Bureau of economic advice we emit 40% of all the factual information that comes out of the US government so it has a huge reporting kind of a function a lot of those announcements that come at 8:30 in the morning on a Wednesday or a Friday about unemployment about this and that a lot of those come from uh the department of uh Commerce and in my case there were also some duties that got added uh president Trump appointed me to the National Security Council to the principal's group so that meant I got the same briefings he did every morning and that was the most fascinating part of the job some days it was a little scary but it was always fascinating and they also he reactivated the space Council and so I become qu became quite enthralled with the prospects for commercialization of space and for space activity in general and in fact the only editorial the New York Times ever published for me was one I wrote on space and why space would be important and they didn't put that in the business section they put it in the science section that was as close as they could come to giving a TR Trump appointee editorial space uh in the New York Times so uh there were those and then aanka Trump invited me to be the co-chair with her of the Workforce Development activity we had concluded that one of the big problems especially back then was that there were Millions more jobs available than unemployed people but many of the people weren't qualified to perform the jobs and so this idea was we went around to big companies all around the us we did a real barnstorming getting them to agree to provide paid apprenticeships to people either the older people who had lost their jobs or wanted to upgrade or younger people needing to work for the first time we got the companies to agree to provide almost 10 million apprenticeships over the next fiveyear period so we were very proud of it but you had to make a lot of house calls to get 10 million companies to uh commit so those were was some of the functions of uh Commerce and you were on The Cutting Edge of President Trump's China policy the other the policy side we had two main functions one was working with them on trade policy because uh a lot of the Tariff capabilities were in Commerce and the export control capabilities to keep militarily sensitive products from being exported to bad people so those were two giant things the other part of it was we are also statutorily the Telecom advisor to the president and Telecom then as now was a very hot area all kinds of things going on so it was fundamentally a 16-hour day uh job up but it was exhilarating uh and it was exciting because you were making big things happen and you got to feel like you're a little part of the history book uh in in motion our time is starting to draw to a Reagan Era close you prospered greatly in the 80s you were a democrat in the 80s you eventually became a republican what was it like living through the Reagan Era and what does Ronald Reagan mean to you well I think he's the shining example of what the presidency should be and what its priorities should be um why the Republican party to a fairly large degree kind of lost track of that during intervening years I've never been able quite to figure out but the there was a lot of misplaced emphasis post uh Ronald Reagan so I think he is correctly a role model for us going forward now the exact things he did we don't have to do all over there is no Berlin wall but there are the equivalent of Berlin walls all over the place that need to be dealt with we don't exactly have Star Wars but we're getting there and so there's a real life similarity between that challenge and and his um he too pioneered Workforce Development and things that led to an improved Workforce and he his social policies did not go in the direction that we've seen more recently particularly on the Democratic side this notion of paying people more not to work than they ever got paid when they were working strikes me as the death nail for the American dream in fact I learned not too long ago there's actually a Reddit site on the internet that is devoted to anti-work anti-work 6 million people are subscribers to this site and they post some of the most incredible things you can imagine a frequent post will be something like I just can't force myself to go to work anymore so the notion that work is an aberration or something that you have to be pushed into doing rather than something that's normal and constructive is a very poor notion and it is the complete antithesis of Ronald Reagan for that matter of Donald Trump and a lot of other uh people so I I think that the spirit of Reagan must be recaptured and must be fulfilled or we're going to go seriously off course because the the world fundamentals have gotten more complicated than they were back when he was leading the charge but his basic principles are right now some of the details like he was more of a free Trader than I think we can afford to be these days because there have been so many trade abuses and we haven't really talked much about that uh today but so some of the specifics are necess necessarily different but I think directionally there's no question in my mind his Direction was and continues to be the right direction as you look to in closing are as you look to America's future are you optimistic uh is there a call to action certainly your advice your book is full of advice but what is your call to action to the American people I I think the biggest threat to America is our educational system because they are no longer properly preparing young people for the the realities of the business economy nor are they even properly preparing them for adulthood in in my book and I'll give you a couple little tidbits but we're also involved with Milken Institute long since uh the bankruptcy days anyhow uh milin Institute was very concerned that the LA school system has dropped teaching high school math so they sent one of their people one of the staffers over to talk to the man who's responsible for it and the fellow said to him well how can this be right how are you not teaching high school math in what's clearly becoming an increasingly technological environment how can this possibly make any sense and the guy's answer was mathematics is a racist activity and we said mathematics is a racist activity what an earth can you possibly be thinking and he said name me a black mathem ition the idea that you should view math through that kind of a very narrow prism is just weird but and I'll give you two more examples one of Midwestern universities surveys each year people 18 to 25 years of age and they ask them a whole bunch of unusual questions trying to get a feel for what these kids are thinking of well I call them kids at my age you can afford to call 25-year-old a kid anyway um so one of the questions that was on the most recent survey was where was slavery invented you know what the most popular answer was United States United States it's not true even even though it's thousands of years inaccurate and thousands of miles inaccurate that was the most popular answer the one that amused me the most that one didn't amuse me at all because it showed such a fundamental lack of understanding not that I was for slavery not that I think it was justified I mean there a lot of horrible things about it but at least they ought to know what it came from and how it came to be and what's the actual history of it the second one was who was Andrew Jackson you all know Andrew Jackson was a president controversial president most popular answer Michael's brother when when you have a a new people to the electorate who don't know anything about our history and don't even know much about pop culture we're in trouble and if our educational system doesn't get reformed and doesn't get reformed quickly we're going to get what we deserve which is going back to primitive Society because that's all we're going to be capable of doing so I'm worried about China sure and we took a lot of measures against China that's why they sanctioned me um there are other problems too Russia Iran all these threats but the one thing that's within our immediate power to cure is the educational system and if we don't get on with it nothing else is going to make much difference longer term so that's both my optimistic thing if we fix it and my pessim mytic thing if we don't and I was very encouraged we were in Austin Texas yesterday bunch of venture capital people uh who turned out to be very conservative thinking people uh they put on a a book party for me and that group has founded with the Inception being this fall a university to teach the way that danale used to teach and to have the curriculum that schools like that used to have not a woke curriculum you might appreciate that the Reagan Foundation hosts an annual Reagan Institute Summit on education and for the last two years we've had the president of the University of Austin which is the the university you're referencing Be Our Guest I also want to call out we have here in the audience Dr Richard Schroeder who is our chief education and programming uh officer here at the Reagan Foundation we educate and train tens of thousands of students in person and the next Horizon for us is to reach the millions of students who will never be able to physically come but we obviously want to reach them and if we can't bring them here we want to go to them uh we need to close but I I can't uh commend the book enough to you it is full of advice full of insights uh some of them extremely timely in terms of what's in the news and I'm going to close by quoting you Mr secretary in your book uh one element of advice that you shared is quote you are ultimately the only person who can hold yourself back and you cannot build anything based on negativity do not be afraid of taking rational risks I have found that accepting them is the essential ingredient to achieving highlevel returns just make sure you think them through unquote so with that let's thank secretary Ross e

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