The Deciders | Mike Sommers: The Saturday Morning Call
Episode #2 is LIVE
It was a Saturday morning when the news broke that the U.S. had gone into Venezuela.
One of the first things the President said was that it was about oil.
Mike Sommers had spent years at the American Petroleum Institute arguing that these conflicts weren’t about oil. So before he talked to a single reporter, he made three phone calls — to his biggest member companies — and asked each of them point blank: did you know about this?
They all said no.
That’s what gave him the credibility to say it publicly.
That moment — and the instinct behind it — is exactly why Brody Mullins and I wanted Mike in the chair for the second episode of The Deciders.
Mike Sommers has run API since 2017. He came up through the Speaker’s Office under John Boehner. He knows how Washington actually operates — not the version of it that gets explained on television, but the version where decisions get made on Saturday mornings and the people who matter are the ones who already know what they’re going to say before they pick up the phone.
We talked about what it means to build an organization that’s influential no matter who’s in charge. About affordability, pipelines, and why cheap natural gas isn’t translating to lower electricity bills. About a multi-million dollar bet on a Taylor Sheridan show that nobody knew was going to be a hit.
And about what John Boehner told him when he walked in ready to resign.
The whole conversation is worth your time.