Speaker 1: Uh, it's behind the bastards the podcasts where I talk
Speaker 1: about my sleeping habits and Miles talks about his baby.
Speaker 1: How you doing, Miles, I.
Speaker 2: Just started recording. But yeah, I'm great. I'm great. So yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm good man, I'm good. Thanks for having me. It's
Speaker 2: been too long. It's been too long. I was wondering,
Speaker 2: been too long because I would be selfish. Baby. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I know. Well, now that that guy's out of my
Speaker 2: way and out of the you know, got that obstacle
Speaker 2: out of uh or my career obstacle out of the way,
Speaker 2: I'm back. Baby.
Speaker 1: He hit six months and you're just like locked in
Speaker 1: now it's like done.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you're old. No find a life exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Just you know, like sit in this cardboard box, Yeah,
Speaker 2: some of my old Ninja Turtle toys and like an
Speaker 2: air pod playing or whatever you know, call it home
Speaker 2: pod playing and you're good. Yeah, Miles. How do you
Speaker 2: feel about airplanes?
Speaker 1: However?
Speaker 2: I mean, I like, as a kid, I like going
Speaker 2: on airplanes. But you know, you all, you never know
Speaker 2: when you're on those things, you never know. That's my
Speaker 2: feeling on them.
Speaker 1: Like sometimes you get tricked and realize you're on a
Speaker 1: plane only belatedly you're like, Wow, what an odd, very
Speaker 1: long house with strange windows, And I'm.
Speaker 2: Always just thinking they're gonna crash.
Speaker 1: Oh really, Yeah, I don't think that happens always planes anymore.
Speaker 2: Yeah, not not as much. But I think I've seen
Speaker 2: too many like eighties movies that had like plane crashes
Speaker 2: in them, that like all get on and then like
Speaker 2: when I look at the other passengers on, like like
Speaker 2: music starts playing in my head and I'm like, these
Speaker 2: are the people that lost their lives on this flight. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, I think the thing that.
Speaker 1: I that I find unsettling is less like because planes
Speaker 1: are pretty statistically safe except for every now and then
Speaker 1: like that maybe that Malaysian pilot or those guys in France.
Speaker 1: You get like a pilot who just decides to end
Speaker 1: it all and take every one with them, And I
Speaker 1: find that slightly unsettling. You gotta trust them, you gotta
Speaker 1: trust them, you gotta trust them. And pilots are the
Speaker 1: kind of people who become pilots. You know, if you've
Speaker 1: ever known a pilot, oh boy, that's not a trustworthy
Speaker 1: breed right there.
Speaker 2: This is an anti pipe.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 2: I feel nothing for pilots one way or the other.
Speaker 2: So I feel nothing the.
Speaker 3: One person I don't know if it's a pilot, Yes,
Speaker 3: that does I was like, I was like, yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: maybe maybe it is a.
Speaker 2: Thing that I think about it. Yeah, I know somebody
Speaker 2: who has a pilot's license. Uh, and they're kind of
Speaker 2: like a more like a pirate than a pilot. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: I get the vibe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, miles flying outside of the occasional,
Speaker 1: largely irrational fear of death has become both safe and
Speaker 1: also deeply unpleasant. Like it sucks, Like I think for
Speaker 1: most people, if you have to get on a plane
Speaker 1: to go somewhere, the getting the plane part is pretty
Speaker 1: thoroughly an unpleasant process, right, Oh yeah, and it sucks,
Speaker 1: like comprehensively, Like it's not just that, like being on
Speaker 1: a plane sucks because you're crammed in with all these
Speaker 1: people and like, yeah, it's just this physically.
Speaker 2: Also, I fucking hate though. Now how basically they want
Speaker 2: to make seats as uncomfortable as fucking possible. So you're like, well,
Speaker 2: we have economy plus economy plus plus yeah, economy plus
Speaker 2: cubed business first Diamond, And you're like what the fuck
Speaker 2: can I just have like like just slightly more room
Speaker 2: because I'm over six feet tall, Like, just please.
Speaker 3: They also have the thing now where like they have
Speaker 3: the Okay, you can pay less, but you don't.
Speaker 4: Get to pick your seat. Yeah that that that used
Speaker 4: to like used to suggest.
Speaker 2: To be the way the planes worked. Yeah, everything to
Speaker 2: fucking add on. Now.
Speaker 1: It's good that we're talking about this because today we're
Speaker 1: talking about the guy who made it that way, right,
Speaker 1: We're talking about the dude who made all that be
Speaker 1: a factor in flying, who like turned it from a
Speaker 1: process where you just bought a ticket to go to
Speaker 1: a place and you were treated like a human being
Speaker 1: to this this bizarre, weird capitalist nightmare where you've got
Speaker 1: like eleven different options and all of them suck way
Speaker 1: more than being on a fucking train. That's who we're
Speaker 1: talking about. His name is Frank Lorenzo, and he made
Speaker 1: planes suck. Yeah's it was a fun little monster today
Speaker 1: getting some capitalism bad guy here.
Speaker 2: So I like this, Okay, so good. I don't have
Speaker 2: to deal with too much. I can just deal with
Speaker 2: my own frustrations that are based off of being on
Speaker 2: a plane rather than something deeply horrifically fucked up like
Speaker 2: every other time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean he's it's fucked up in that he's
Speaker 1: like your normal sort, he's like your uber capitalist kind
Speaker 1: of asshole. But it's also this thing where like the
Speaker 1: whole airline industry, like all of the pilots and ground
Speaker 1: crews and stewardesses and stuff who have been working in
Speaker 1: it for a while like blame this guy for reathing
Speaker 1: that sucks with air travel, and some of the things
Speaker 1: they blame him for are like things that they kind
Speaker 1: of did, Like it's not you know, it's not all
Speaker 1: on him, right, right, but uh yeah, it's it's an
Speaker 1: interesting story and it's it's it's pretty bastardy. So that's
Speaker 1: what we're gonna talk about this week. We're gonna about
Speaker 1: Frank fucking Lorenzo.
Speaker 2: Hm uh huh. So.
Speaker 1: Francisco Anthony Lorenzo was born on May twenty ninth, nineteen forty,
Speaker 1: in New York City the Wendy Apple but he was
Speaker 1: the third of three sons, and his parents were named
Speaker 1: Oligario and Anna Lorenzo. Everything's fine with his name except
Speaker 1: for the Anthony as a middle name. I don't trust
Speaker 1: people with an Anthony, right, name. Anthony's a first name,
Speaker 1: could be a last name. It's never it shouldn't be
Speaker 1: a middle name.
Speaker 2: Wait, why do you still feel so fucking strongly about
Speaker 2: what a middle name? I don't think it's right as
Speaker 2: a middle name.
Speaker 4: Why are you being so conspiratorial today?
Speaker 2: What do you mean? I don't know, it's an interesting
Speaker 2: I'm just we're gaining perspective and Robert's mind, like, because
Speaker 2: I think I feel like seventy percent of like Catholic
Speaker 2: men's middle name is Anthony. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, I don't trust the papists, you know.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, that makes sense. They're loyalty for Kyles. Yeah exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 2: what is a good middle name? Like tittlely bop? Anyway,
Speaker 2: so forgot all the middle names.
Speaker 1: So his dan ran a beauty salon and his mom
Speaker 1: worked at the beauty salon, and they were like pretty comfortable,
Speaker 1: Like they're not rich, but they're pretty solidly middle class.
Speaker 1: They're doing well enough that his dad is able to
Speaker 1: play the stock market as a hobby. He's again he's
Speaker 1: not like, you know, fucking printing paper, but he's got
Speaker 1: a portfolio that's worth like one hundred and twenty grand
Speaker 1: by the time he dies. Which you know, you're talking
Speaker 1: like the seventies, the eighties. That's not bad, that's not
Speaker 1: like he's doing pretty good.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that Oligario teaches his son
Speaker 1: about is the concept of risk. And when we say
Speaker 1: risk in this context, we mean gambling, right, Like when
Speaker 1: money people talk about risk, they're talking about like whether
Speaker 1: or not you have a good shot of like, you know,
Speaker 1: winning when you throw your your your dice at that
Speaker 1: roulette wheel or whatever. Frank was pretty good at this
Speaker 1: from the beginning. He showed an aptitude for numbers, and
Speaker 1: he was really fascinated specifically with how he could fuck
Speaker 1: around with numbers in order to make money. When he
Speaker 1: was in junior high school, he ran the school betting
Speaker 1: pool on the World Series, which was illegal at the time.
Speaker 2: But what are you a cop? Come on? So wow,
Speaker 2: So he was running just taking bets on the fucking
Speaker 2: world Yeah, takes bets on the World Series. Whimsical times. Yeah,
Speaker 2: good stuff.
Speaker 1: The single most enduring memory Frank had of his childhood
Speaker 1: was of the family apartment, which sat right under the
Speaker 1: approach for LaGuardia Airport. As a little kid, he'd spend
Speaker 1: hours watching the different planes from various airlines land. Now
Speaker 1: this is a period in which flying is pretty new, right,
Speaker 1: Like if you're watching planes fly overhead, and like the
Speaker 1: fifties and sixties, we've been doing that, you know, about
Speaker 1: as long as today Paul Rudd has been alive, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's what you gotta think if you're watching like planes
Speaker 1: in the sixties, like planes as a concept or about
Speaker 1: as old as Paul Rudd is to us.
Speaker 2: Wait, and what do we when we say Paul Rudd,
Speaker 2: what are we dating that from his birth or his
Speaker 2: entrance into our sort of pop culture consciousness?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would I would say from his birth. But like,
Speaker 1: either way, I don't remember a time without Paul Rudd,
Speaker 1: do you.
Speaker 2: I mean, for me, I think Clueless is the the
Speaker 2: punctuation point that is, like, that is the point where
Speaker 2: he that's the big bang, I would say.
Speaker 1: For yeah, that's the big bang for Paul Rudd, or
Speaker 1: at least for me. Yeah, yeah, the Permian explosion.
Speaker 2: Exactly. He's still redational waves of that movie from when
Speaker 2: Paul Rud came on the scene.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so he's watching the planes fly overhead. He doesn't
Speaker 1: know yet about the movie Clueless because it's the sixties
Speaker 1: but one day he presumably will watch it. So by
Speaker 1: the time Frank is making memories, Man had only been
Speaker 1: taking commercial international trips for about twenty five years. There
Speaker 1: was still a magic to air travel then, and it
Speaker 1: was only slightly dimmed by all of the people who'd
Speaker 1: gotten incinerated from the sky during World War Two. Airlines
Speaker 1: in those days were run by the same kinds of
Speaker 1: guys who'd helped invent air travel as like a thing.
Speaker 1: So these dudes like airlines CEOs today are just like
Speaker 1: any kind of ceo, right But back in the day,
Speaker 1: airline CEOs were all former pilots who'd like been test pilots,
Speaker 1: they'd like flown in wars, and they were often crazy people,
Speaker 1: right like, that was just the kind of person who
Speaker 1: could get these jobs. A representative example of the pack
Speaker 1: was Robert Foreman six, the CEO of Continental Airlines, which
Speaker 1: was the most prestigious air line in the country during
Speaker 1: Frank's childhood. Six became the CEO of that company in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty six and held the job until nineteen eighty,
Speaker 1: by which point he was like senile in the company
Speaker 1: was failing because he didn't know how to do anything anymore.
Speaker 1: He had dropped out of high school at seventeen and
Speaker 1: gotten fired from his sales job for taking flying lessons
Speaker 1: on company time. He'd received his flying license at twenty
Speaker 1: two and become an air racer. And he got like
Speaker 1: rich during World War Two because he used all of
Speaker 1: his airlines planes to take US troops to Europe for
Speaker 1: the Army Air Corps. Like that was just a thing
Speaker 1: the big airlines did as they were like I guess
Speaker 1: we're having a war, Everybody like take your Yeah. It's
Speaker 1: like it's like if we were like diverting seven thirty
Speaker 1: sevens to Ukraine so we could like kick explosives out
Speaker 1: of the back match.
Speaker 2: I mean why not yet? Yeah with Jet Blue. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's when you see Spirit Airlines flying overhead. Yeah.
Speaker 1: After the war, he got rich, particularly because like he
Speaker 1: was the dude who started inviting celebrities to take like
Speaker 1: you know trips on his planes to you know, vacation
Speaker 1: destinations or to Europe. Like the idea of the jet
Speaker 1: set is created in part by like Robert six, Like
Speaker 1: that's the dude that he is. He makes flying sexy.
Speaker 1: He also beat the absolute hell out of his wife
Speaker 1: and kids. But like that kind of goes without saying, right,
Speaker 1: the different time rich maniac and this part period of time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, probably, holy shit, not great, you're saying that whole
Speaker 2: like I know, like there are these places in la
Speaker 2: where it's like the inside of an old airplane where
Speaker 2: people can pretend it's like the glamorous air travel time.
Speaker 2: That's all because of this.
Speaker 1: Yes, Bobby six is the dude who like creates that
Speaker 1: cultural touchstone or helps him and then became a decrepit
Speaker 1: monkey skeleton in his ladder years. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: for some reason, a lot of guys have trouble giving
Speaker 1: up power and influence miles wild stuff. Thankfully our generation
Speaker 1: will never know anything about that.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 1: So then there was Edward Vernon Rickenbacker. Who, Man, that
Speaker 1: is a pilot name. That's a hell of a pilot name.
Speaker 2: He could be Veron. How about Vernon is a middle name.
Speaker 2: I'm fine with Vernon.
Speaker 1: Vernon's a fine middle name, you know, a little old timy,
Speaker 1: but yeah it works for me though. Yeah, no, tittally Bob. Sorry,
Speaker 1: So obviously Edward Vernon Rickenbacker. That's a World War One
Speaker 1: fighter pilot, and he was, in fact a World War
Speaker 1: One fighter pilot. He wins the Medal of Honor. He's
Speaker 1: actually the most decorated US flying ace of the war.
Speaker 1: And as a side hobby is a race car driver,
Speaker 1: because like, why wouldn't you be the coolest dude you
Speaker 1: could possibly be?
Speaker 2: It was of the sky.
Speaker 1: Yeah, every now and then, if he saw one by
Speaker 1: the edge of the track, he'd just like run him over,
Speaker 1: you know, get a German blonde hair, let's showio like
Speaker 1: most grand pilots. Yeah, gotta get the fuck out of
Speaker 1: that state. And his pin shot for Devil Daredevil read
Speaker 1: mainly it came from the fact that he was like
Speaker 1: the least lucky person on the planet. As a toddler,
Speaker 1: he was hit by a street car and knocked twelve
Speaker 1: feet down into an open sewer. His brother twice had
Speaker 1: to save him after he was hit by passing coal
Speaker 1: cars as a little kid. One time his school caught
Speaker 1: on fire and he nearly died trying to save his
Speaker 1: coat from the building. So, yeah, like this d sounds
Speaker 1: like a really normal When was he born in like I.
Speaker 2: Don't know, you know, late eighteen hundred something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah that sounds like, yeah, that sounds like a very
Speaker 2: normal childhood. I think back then it's like, yeah, everyone
Speaker 2: was fucking ran over into an open funting sewer as
Speaker 2: a baby.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's just like constantly it like getting maimed and beaten,
Speaker 1: and it's like, I guess the sky could be worse, right, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: German bullets aren't more dangerous than the street in nineteen thirteen,
Speaker 1: so that the it.
Speaker 2: Is just such a different time because like, you know,
Speaker 2: you look at those old pictures of like what jungle
Speaker 2: gyms used to look like for kids, like in the
Speaker 2: fucking twenties, and it was just a big gun on
Speaker 2: the ground. Yeah, exactly. It was like a knife pit
Speaker 2: with like a bunch of poles that were like twenty
Speaker 2: five feet high, with like you know, handles and shit
Speaker 2: on it. So kids could just sit on top and
Speaker 2: break their fucking necks.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, if they If they die, they die. So
Speaker 1: after the war, he founded a motor company, and this
Speaker 1: motor company went very quickly bankrupt, but he was famous
Speaker 1: because he'd been such a good fighter pilot, so he
Speaker 1: was still able to create another company. This one was
Speaker 1: an airline called Florida Airways, which collapsed because would you
Speaker 1: fly on Florida Airways, Like absolutely not, No, It.
Speaker 2: Sounds like you're gonna get robbed. Like they're like, you idiot,
Speaker 2: you really thought this was a fucking airline. Yeah, this
Speaker 2: your fucking money.
Speaker 1: Now you're gonna get robbed and you're gonna have to
Speaker 1: sit next to the guy until it lands in Sarasota, right, Like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, there's no flight, Robert, there's no flight Florida
Speaker 2: air that's a euphemism. It's a code word for a
Speaker 2: fucking like armed robbery breaking.
Speaker 1: Come on, Oh, yeah, he's flying Florida Airways now yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh, looks like you got two first class tickets of
Speaker 2: Florida Airways.
Speaker 1: So Florida Airways also collapses.
Speaker 4: Like that's not real. That has to be a fake name.
Speaker 1: No, No, that's that's the real that's the real name.
Speaker 1: And it becomes the foundation of a lot of modern
Speaker 1: air travel because he takes Florida Airways while it's failing,
Speaker 1: and again largely because he's just got so much famous
Speaker 1: guy clout, he's able to merge it with Eastern air
Speaker 1: Transport to create Eastern Airlines, which becomes one of the
Speaker 1: titans of the first Big age of air travel. He
Speaker 1: also was a cartoonist. Weirdly enough, basically if you wanted
Speaker 1: to do it as a job when you were nine.
Speaker 2: This guy lived it.
Speaker 1: He was in every way a cooler dude than the
Speaker 1: subject of our episode, Frank Lorenzo.
Speaker 2: I just used to be a flagpole center too.
Speaker 1: So by the time our boy Frank was in his
Speaker 1: late teens, his family was doing well enough that his
Speaker 1: father sent him to a super fan and see rich
Speaker 1: kids school, Forest Hills High in Queen's. In his description
Speaker 1: of Forest Hills, Lorenzo emphasized emphasizes what a fish out
Speaker 1: of water he was. He's this blue collar Spanish kid
Speaker 1: and a school filled with white collar Jewish kids. But
Speaker 1: like his dad's like playing the market as a hobby
Speaker 1: and as a business owner. So he's like, it's not
Speaker 1: that blue collar. Like he over emphasizes it. There's a
Speaker 1: little bit of like, I don't know, Jewish panic type
Speaker 1: deal where he's like, well, compared to all of these
Speaker 1: these Jewish kids, I was real commoner, you know stuff.
Speaker 1: It's like, come on, man, chill at, chill out, Frank.
Speaker 2: So the fuck up.
Speaker 1: It does sound like it was an insufferable school, because again,
Speaker 1: everybody there is pretty rich. One of his classmates was
Speaker 1: John Winnekure, who went on to edit Paris's International Herald Tribune.
Speaker 1: Simon and garf Uncle were one year below him. I
Speaker 1: wish there was something more interesting about that, but like
Speaker 1: that's that's the only fact I found about it. The
Speaker 1: one real warning sign Frank exhibited at this point is
Speaker 1: that he volunteered to work as a hall monitor, which is, oh, yeah, cop, no,
Speaker 1: absolutely not.
Speaker 2: That's uh yeah, I found it acceptable. I found out
Speaker 2: my partner her majesty was like a hall monitor. Like,
Speaker 2: when I found that out, it I thought I had
Speaker 2: like an existential crisis almost where I was like, what
Speaker 2: the Like, you're a cop and you wanted to do that.
Speaker 2: It's like yeah, and you got the you got to
Speaker 2: wear the sash and shit, I'm like, this is fucked up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's uh, that's bleak, you know I I uh,
Speaker 1: I feel like hall monitors.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's it's like the DEA for not wanting to be
Speaker 1: in math class. Yeah right, it's it's yeah, it's r
Speaker 1: O t C for you know, baby whatever, baby cops.
Speaker 1: I mean, you don't actually get to do anything in
Speaker 1: r O t C except what looked like a piece
Speaker 1: of ship and that stupid uniform to get to wear.
Speaker 2: It though, and fucking salute the flag. Honor the flag, man.
Speaker 1: I'll have a lot of fucking saluting the flag. Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: So did the ROTC kids you have? I had ROTC
Speaker 2: kids like uh in my school that were basically like
Speaker 2: have like doing stolen valor, like wearing metals and shit,
Speaker 2: like on a weird jacket. As they put the flag out,
Speaker 2: I was like, is.
Speaker 1: This, Oh man, they got in our ROTC We got swords.
Speaker 1: We got swords for a while, and then one of
Speaker 1: the kids drew his to like attack some other kids,
Speaker 1: and then they were like, I guess we can't have
Speaker 1: them all wearing swords anymore.
Speaker 2: Were they super sharp? No? I mean they were.
Speaker 1: They were like swords, but they were like parades ceremony.
Speaker 1: They had not been sharpened, but like, yeah it was
Speaker 1: still a sword.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that was obviously how that was going to go.
Speaker 2: Of course, yeah that was going to go.
Speaker 1: And it made me just think that everyone at school
Speaker 1: should have to wear a full saber at all times.
Speaker 1: But that's that's a separate belief.
Speaker 2: So honestly, I joined ROTC for the sword. Like if
Speaker 2: I heard it's like a lot of people did a
Speaker 2: lot of people did. I'm doing it for the sword.
Speaker 2: Do it for the sword, y'all? Do it for the sword.
Speaker 1: So at this point his life goal, Frank's life goal
Speaker 1: was to study engineering when he went off to college.
Speaker 1: He graduated in the late fifties and was accepted to
Speaker 1: Columbia University, and this right up from Texas Monthly describes
Speaker 1: his time in college pretty well. The making of Frank
Speaker 1: Lorenzo seems to have begun at Columbia University, where he
Speaker 1: graduated in nineteen sixty one and later endowed a scholarship
Speaker 1: in his father's name. He was well known there amid
Speaker 1: the two thousand students. He joined the top fraternity, Sigma Kai,
Speaker 1: and served in student government as secretary treasurer of the
Speaker 1: Undergraduate Dormitory Council.
Speaker 4: That was worst fraternity at my college.
Speaker 2: They liked Sigma Kai.
Speaker 4: They got like removed for doing that shit.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, he's just waite, Sophie. He's a piece of
Speaker 1: shit in this school, all right.
Speaker 4: Cook cool.
Speaker 1: Former classmates use words like glib and slick to describe him.
Speaker 1: He tended to skate close to the edge, recalls classmate
Speaker 1: David C. Furman, Lorenzo's college nickname around his flat Frankie
Speaker 1: smooth Talk. The monikers seemed particularly well suited and lighted.
Speaker 4: Ship up right now.
Speaker 2: No, he was Frankie. He was Frankie Smooth Talk.
Speaker 1: So and and so the thing that he fucking does
Speaker 1: in college that's so funny is like he's in this
Speaker 1: campus political organization that's that's linked to all of the
Speaker 1: Christian fraternities like Sigma Kai, to try to make sure
Speaker 1: that the Christian fraternities get a bunch of student officers,
Speaker 1: and they're specifically they're opposed. It's not like a left
Speaker 1: versus right thing. The Christian fraternities are fighting the Jewish fraternities.
Speaker 1: So first off, you could guess there's some problematic shit
Speaker 1: being said in the background. And so yeah, he's he's
Speaker 1: like basically he's there Roger Stone. And the night before
Speaker 1: the final day of balloting for seats on the student
Speaker 1: governing board, Lorenzo meets with a bunch of other like
Speaker 1: these Christian frat guys in a dorm room to discuss quote,
Speaker 1: the possibility of voting twice. So he and all of
Speaker 1: these other guys like make a list of students who
Speaker 1: probably wouldn't vote and then go vote illegally in their
Speaker 1: names to rig the election. So he's like he's he's
Speaker 1: the Roger Stone, or at least the e Howard Hunt
Speaker 1: to like shady kind of bigoted college politics.
Speaker 2: Wow, what an entry way.
Speaker 3: M h.
Speaker 2: It's like, yeah, yeah, we had to dilute the Jewish vote,
Speaker 2: but yeah, some voter fraud. What Yeah, exactly, I got
Speaker 2: this shareholder meeting covered what I feel like I'm going
Speaker 2: to get.
Speaker 1: I feel like I can guarantee you they didn't say
Speaker 1: we're going to beat the Jewish frats. They used a
Speaker 1: different word.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh yeah, oh yeah, I was doing the version.
Speaker 1: Yeah no, these guys are definitely a slur heavy frat.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: One of the things I find really funny is that
Speaker 1: Lorenzo's like, he's like their Roger Stone, but he's terrible
Speaker 1: at committing crimes. So he is the only member of
Speaker 1: this conspiracy who gets caught voting twice, the student paper reported.
Speaker 1: At first, he denied everything and claimed that he had
Speaker 1: tried it as a stunt to test the election commission
Speaker 1: to see if anyone can actually get away with voting twice.
Speaker 1: So he actually does the whole like I was just
Speaker 1: testing to make sure that your guys had good security.
Speaker 2: Oh good, good, good to know, good to know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's like this shit that the fucking guy's on to
Speaker 2: catch a predator. Say, yeah, when they get caught, Like
Speaker 2: I was here to warn the kid about what can
Speaker 2: happen when you talk to people on the internet. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's why I came. Uh huh, yeah, he does that.
Speaker 2: You know, guys, you know who else engages an anti
Speaker 2: sent note, We shouldn't say that, So how do we
Speaker 2: Let's just pull the ads right now. Oh, all right,
Speaker 2: and we are back. We're back, and we're talking about
Speaker 2: our buddy, Frank Lorenzo, the Roger Stone of anti Semitic
Speaker 2: college election shit. So the newspaper continues that story. After
Speaker 2: he pretended to be testing the election system, Lorenzo soon
Speaker 2: cracked under the pressure of the board's questioning and admitted
Speaker 2: to voting twice. He and five others were banned from
Speaker 2: ever voting again in a Columbia election. So he has
Speaker 2: permanently he has a school politics felon. He's permanently lost his.
Speaker 1: Right to vote at Columbia University. It's funny, now, this
Speaker 1: was before culture war politics had become as monetizable as
Speaker 1: they are today. Like, I think there's if this kid
Speaker 1: is going to school in the present, he never becomes
Speaker 1: a business guy. He like joins Turning Point USA straight
Speaker 1: out of college and like tries to milk this for forever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he has a podcast on Daily Wire. Oh yes, absolutely so.
Speaker 1: Yeah Lorenzo. Because the campus Pressed doesn't have much to
Speaker 1: focus on, Lorenzo kind of becomes their Nixon for a while.
Speaker 1: When classes start back up in the fall, the paper
Speaker 1: starts a campaign to make him resign from his position
Speaker 1: on the dorm room Council based due to his quote
Speaker 1: lack of any semblance of self respect and honor. Now
Speaker 1: every someone, especially because it's like you're on the dorm
Speaker 1: room council. Now. I've never went to Columbia, but I
Speaker 1: did briefly live in a dorm in college before I
Speaker 1: dropped out. And the only thing I know about our
Speaker 1: dorm room officers is that I bought liquor from them
Speaker 1: when I was eighteen.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, exactly, yeah, they were selling you. They were
Speaker 2: selling you like diluted drugs basically. But I love that,
Speaker 2: even for the bar to be basically subterranean, that they
Speaker 2: would still say, Yeah, you're just lack of what do
Speaker 2: you say, so what was it self? Re lack of
Speaker 2: any semblance of self respect and honor. It's so funny.
Speaker 2: So Lorenzo eventually decides to resign, and he writes a
Speaker 2: public letter announcing that he's giving up his job. But
Speaker 2: he doesn't give a specific reason for why he quit.
Speaker 2: He just says, the political events of the past semester
Speaker 2: make by resignation mandatory. So you can see just kind
Speaker 2: of instinctively like this dude, this dude has what it
Speaker 2: is going to have what it takes to succeed in
Speaker 2: business or politics.
Speaker 1: Totally from the available information. It kind of seems like
Speaker 1: the rest of his time in school goes by without
Speaker 1: anything a podcast about shitty people can make content out of.
Speaker 1: At least over the time he was there, Frank's interest
Speaker 1: veered from engineering and towards economics, a clear sign that
Speaker 1: he was going to be a shitty person. He also
Speaker 1: started reading biographies of various famous business tycoons, like Andrew Carnegie,
Speaker 1: who once sent an army of Pinkerton detectives to launch
Speaker 1: a seaborne invasion of a mill occupied by striking workers,
Speaker 1: which sparked a massive gun battle, like a twelve hour
Speaker 1: gun battle that ended with strikers hucking dynamite into the
Speaker 1: Pinkerton boats and rolling a flaming train car at the
Speaker 1: barges in the river to break the beachhead. Now we
Speaker 1: can assume that when he read about this, Frank made
Speaker 1: a note of how violence with nothing but money behind
Speaker 1: it didn't work for Carnegie. It was only once he
Speaker 1: got the government on his side that he was able
Speaker 1: to crush the strike. And this is a thing that
Speaker 1: Frank's going to make a note of, right that, like,
Speaker 1: you can't just have guys with guns going to break
Speaker 1: up strikers, because there's always going to be more strikers
Speaker 1: than you have guys with guns. You got to get
Speaker 1: the Feds on your back because they always have the
Speaker 1: most guns.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the best toys, and the best toys for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, while he was a frat boy, Frank was not
Speaker 1: wealthy enough for his parents to pay his tuition. He
Speaker 1: had to work odd jobs throughout school, selling ties at
Speaker 1: Macy's and at one point driving a Coola truck, which
Speaker 1: required him to join the Teamsters union. If he ever
Speaker 1: commented on the pay and benefits he received, due to
Speaker 1: his union membership. We have no record of it, but
Speaker 1: he does have to spend some time as a union man,
Speaker 1: which will be relevant in a little bit. Once he
Speaker 1: graduated from Columbia, Frank applied to Harvard Business School, where
Speaker 1: he wanted to get an MBA. He was a member
Speaker 1: of it, the generation of young business executives who had
Speaker 1: become what we're called corporate raiders in the seventies and eighties. Right,
Speaker 1: This is We've talked about this in our Jack Welsh episodes.
Speaker 1: It's kind of period. This transitionary period from like the
Speaker 1: sixties to the seventies is sort of the birth of
Speaker 1: the ideas that we now just see as like how
Speaker 1: capitalism works.
Speaker 2: That like private equity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, private equity company's only responsibilities to a shareholders like
Speaker 1: you know, strip mind resources for short term profits, lay
Speaker 1: people off, to dig the stock price up so you
Speaker 1: guys can get money.
Speaker 2: You know, people died because the business became so poorly
Speaker 2: one because we're extracting all the money out of him.
Speaker 2: Yeah whatever was fine, fine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is kind of the era at least that
Speaker 1: he's going to Harvard in is like the guys who
Speaker 1: are going to preside over that transition in capitalism are
Speaker 1: all kind of in school at the same time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the guys who are voting twice in college elections
Speaker 2: set up an intricate system of shell companies to be
Speaker 2: able to dodge any kind of legal liability when people die.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly what else you don't want to not dodge
Speaker 1: legal liability when people die? Miles think you want to
Speaker 1: be like that genius CEO of Ocean Gate, you know,
Speaker 1: Stockton Rush dodge all liability by imploding. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, doesn't this Stockton. I feel like whenever I hear
Speaker 2: that name, it sounds like a fucking arena football team.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Stockton Rushes. Yeah, the Stockton Rushers. I don't
Speaker 1: know if there's a Fort Stockton. So yeah, you guys,
Speaker 1: you could like pivot off this. You know, it takes
Speaker 1: take advantage of the SEO opportunity.
Speaker 2: Makes some weird joke football.
Speaker 1: So where Lorenzo really shined is at social organizations at Harvard.
Speaker 1: He's not he doesn't love the classes, you know, he
Speaker 1: does well, but like he kind of comes out of
Speaker 1: Harvard being like, well that was more or less for
Speaker 1: the name, right, like to be able to say, like
Speaker 1: I graduated from Harvard, but he does do well running
Speaker 1: the Harvard Cafeteria news stand, which is the only store
Speaker 1: on the business school campus. He apparently makes bank doing this,
Speaker 1: so yeah, might as well start with grifting other Harvard kids.
Speaker 1: His first job after at graduation was at TWA, an
Speaker 1: airline that at the time was headed by Floyd Hall.
Speaker 1: Like the other airline CEOs we talked about, Hall was
Speaker 1: a two fisted Army pilot who had fought in World
Speaker 1: War Two and then worked for the airline as a
Speaker 1: pilot before becoming CEO. Floyd got hired away to Eastern
Speaker 1: Airlines right as Lorenzo started working at TWA, which signified
Speaker 1: like a new era of management, Like Floyd kind of
Speaker 1: leaves TWA and gets replaced by a dude who's not
Speaker 1: a pilot, not a war hero. And it's kind of
Speaker 1: part of this transition where Americans are starting to see
Speaker 1: airlines not as like these kind of symbols of progress
Speaker 1: and American greatness, but as like, you know, assets to
Speaker 1: be mined for profit. Right it's the business is becoming
Speaker 1: more of a normal business. It's losing its kind of prestige.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote from Texas Monthly again as a
Speaker 1: manager of financial analysis. Lorenzo distinguished himself as a man
Speaker 1: who could push past details to the heart of the matter,
Speaker 1: but he was too ambitious to patiently work his way
Speaker 1: up the corporate ladder. A year later, at twenty six,
Speaker 1: he resigned to go into business with a soft spoken
Speaker 1: a Harvard classmate from New England, Bob Carney, who worked
Speaker 1: for two New York investment houses. The two formed Lorenzo
Speaker 1: carnean Company. Although the company at the time was a secretary.
Speaker 1: We thought we could make some money in airlines, Carnee recalls.
Speaker 1: We had an entrepreneurial burge. Each partner put up one
Speaker 1: thousand dollars. Lorenzo Carney was essentially a consulting firm in
Speaker 1: search of investment opportunities. So they don't really have a
Speaker 1: plan for what their business is going to do. They
Speaker 1: just like start a business and like, if we can
Speaker 1: just get an airline to pay us for something, we'll
Speaker 1: figure it out. So they try a few things they
Speaker 1: struggle to get a start, like leasing out planes and shit,
Speaker 1: but they're not able to actually like make a profit.
Speaker 1: So they spin off from this business that doesn't work
Speaker 1: to yet another business, Jet Capital Corporation, and somehow it's
Speaker 1: kind of unclear to me exactly how this works, but
Speaker 1: like they start a company and I just sort of
Speaker 1: like start going around to investors with money in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine and going like and then a cool name,
Speaker 1: Jet Capital Corporation, Can we have some money?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, yeah. I didn't want to get in on this. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I wonder was this like the Internet kind of where
Speaker 2: enough people kind of knew but probably just weren't savvy enough.
Speaker 2: Like they're pretty confident, and they're called Jet Capital Corporation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's kind of one of those things, right, And
Speaker 1: so they get one point four million dollars and they
Speaker 1: don't have really much of a business plan, but they
Speaker 1: don't need one. And as soon as they get this
Speaker 1: pile of money, Frank, you know, there's some other stuff
Speaker 1: they are doing, some consulting, but Frank pretty immediately is like,
Speaker 1: that's all small potatoes. What I want to do is
Speaker 1: I want to like take this money and use it
Speaker 1: as a basis to get more money so we can
Speaker 1: just purchase an airline. Now, basically, as he's kind of
Speaker 1: like talking this up, he's going around, he's going to parties.
Speaker 1: He's able to like make friends with some guys from
Speaker 1: Chase Manhattan Bank, and these dudes are eventually like, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: you know, we have this this boutique airline in Texas
Speaker 1: that's doing really shitty, Like if we can help you,
Speaker 1: guys put some money together, you can buy this airline
Speaker 1: and try to rescue it and make a bunch of money.
Speaker 1: And it's here that I should probably pause to explain
Speaker 1: how fucking airlines work in this period of time.
Speaker 2: Because it's weird flying again.
Speaker 1: Like you know, nineteen eighteen is kind of when it
Speaker 1: first becomes a business in the United States, because that's
Speaker 1: the year the Post Office starts doing air mail routes,
Speaker 1: and air mail is like the first big business that
Speaker 1: like planes are involved in in the country. US Army
Speaker 1: pilots are all of like the people actually flying the routes,
Speaker 1: and they established this national system of runways and airfields
Speaker 1: that kind of this is what eventually turns into the
Speaker 1: airports that are all over the country. It all starts
Speaker 1: as like Post Office air mail, like landing strips and shit.
Speaker 1: This is all supported by something called the nineteen twenty
Speaker 1: five Contract Airmail app. This gives the Post Office the
Speaker 1: right to award roots to private carriers, which kind of
Speaker 1: creates the private industry for flying and shit. So the
Speaker 1: years that follow this are this kind of messy slurry
Speaker 1: of these new airlines flighting for routes and the government
Speaker 1: struggling to make sure there's places for them to land.
Speaker 1: It's really messy. But all four of the major airlines
Speaker 1: that dominate the sky today, which are like United, American,
Speaker 1: trans World, and Eastern, originate from this period, right, Like,
Speaker 1: these are the guys that all of our modern airlines
Speaker 1: are basically the big ones at least are basically directly
Speaker 1: or kind of indirectly descended from right, come off history, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So passenger service, you're not like flying people, right, because
Speaker 1: planes are terrifying death traps, like they can barely take
Speaker 1: letters places. But this starts to change by the late
Speaker 1: thirties under the watchful eye of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who
Speaker 1: is like, you know, a modern dude, but also pretty
Speaker 1: bullish on regulation. So under Roosevelt, in nineteen thirty eight,
Speaker 1: Congress passes the Civil Aeronautics Act, which gives regulatory authority
Speaker 1: over air travel to something called the Civil Aviation Authority.
Speaker 1: And so the Civil Aviation Authority quickly gets a better
Speaker 1: acronym called CAB because they change their name to the
Speaker 1: Civil Aeronautics Board, and these are this is like the
Speaker 1: precursor to the FAA. Right, CAB is like what we
Speaker 1: have before the FAA. But while today the FAA basically
Speaker 1: just it seems like their job is mostly to make
Speaker 1: sure people continue to not die from passenger flights, CAB
Speaker 1: has another role, which is to make sure that there's
Speaker 1: not competition in the air travel business. Right Like, that's
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of this it's very alien to modern
Speaker 1: Americans because the government's like, all right, we're gonna have planes.
Speaker 1: This is going to be a business, but we don't
Speaker 1: want them competing. Right If planes compete, if like airlines
Speaker 1: are competing, then like a bunch of ugly shit's gonna happen.
Speaker 1: They'll be like fighting for the bottom in order to
Speaker 1: be like the cheapest carrier, And like we don't want
Speaker 1: it to work that way, right, Like, that doesn't seem
Speaker 1: like a good way for planes to work.
Speaker 2: What the kind of parallel reality is this?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really strange. It's just like such a different
Speaker 1: attitude towards all and part of it's because like the
Speaker 1: business is so new, right, there's like a bunch of
Speaker 1: government subsidies, like if you're doing certain roots or like
Speaker 1: you will get money per flight from the government too,
Speaker 1: to kind of help. Because there's this understanding that like,
Speaker 1: well just kind of naturally, like a lot of shit's
Speaker 1: not going to make sense financially, like flying to a
Speaker 1: bunch of different states and shit, there's just not going
Speaker 1: to be enough business for it to make sense. So
Speaker 1: we want to we want to establish like we want
Speaker 1: to establish a network of flights and airlines, and the
Speaker 1: only way to do that is if the government kind
Speaker 1: of helps these companies out. But if we're going to
Speaker 1: help them out, they shouldn't just be you know, making
Speaker 1: as much money as possible, right, Like we need to
Speaker 1: put in some limitations so so that like it's it
Speaker 1: doesn't get as messy as other things have gotten. I
Speaker 1: think they're kind of looking at how all the nasty
Speaker 1: shit that happens with like trains during like the late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds, and going, well, we want to avoid some
Speaker 1: of that, so cut too, Yeah, cut to today, so
Speaker 1: things are good for a while, you get your Second
Speaker 1: World War, you know, which means that suddenly there's a
Speaker 1: lot of money going into growing the airline fleet, a
Speaker 1: lot of it gets pressed into military service, and then
Speaker 1: when the war ends, there's all these pilots, these guys
Speaker 1: who just like got trained up for free by the government,
Speaker 1: and then suddenly like nobody's paying them to incinerate cities
Speaker 1: in Asia or Europe, and then they're like, well, I
Speaker 1: guess we should find something else to do.
Speaker 2: All right, Oh can I still get drunk while I
Speaker 2: do it? Yeah? Yeah, absolutely, No one said you can't
Speaker 2: be drunk, you just flying suits?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 2: Oh okay, for sure, man, poor mea martini. Let's go.
Speaker 1: So, because cab was fundamentally pretty anti competitive, it works
Speaker 1: out this system with all of the major airlines. So
Speaker 1: there's kind of two like types of airlines. There's little
Speaker 1: ones where you're just kind of flying within a state,
Speaker 1: and the little airlines they're kind of they're a lot
Speaker 1: less regulated, right, the pilots aren't considered to be the
Speaker 1: same quality of pilots. But it means that like little
Speaker 1: airlines can do shit like offer discounted tickets and whatnot,
Speaker 1: all this shit that's going to become like standard, whereas
Speaker 1: big airlines aren't allowed to do this, right, if you're
Speaker 1: flying interstate in international route routes, you like, can't you
Speaker 1: just have to kind of like offer one kind of
Speaker 1: ticket for a flight, which makes everything simple, Like when
Speaker 1: you're booking a plane, you're just like, well, yeah, I
Speaker 1: just want like a ticket, you know, to fucking Sarasota
Speaker 1: or whatever. But it also means the system is horribly
Speaker 1: inefficient because since the big airlines are just kind of
Speaker 1: offering one ticket price, you know, for each flight, this
Speaker 1: makes it simple, but it means that like if a
Speaker 1: flight lifts off for like if like you know, it's
Speaker 1: all it's about to be fly day and there's only
Speaker 1: thirty percent of the seats on the planet been filled,
Speaker 1: they can't stop start offering like cheap seats to try
Speaker 1: to fill it up. So it's horribly inefficient. And this
Speaker 1: is a big part of why you get every so
Speaker 1: off and these like people posting pictures of old planes
Speaker 1: being like wow, flying used to be so nice. Why
Speaker 1: can't it be that way again? Well, like, part of
Speaker 1: why flying was so nice is that barely anyone was
Speaker 1: ever on planes, right, like, like, yeah, it was a
Speaker 1: lot nicer when nobody was on them, because people suck.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're just like about, yeah, we have fourteen seats. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it looks like a living room.
Speaker 1: Yeah there are there are five rich dudes on board.
Speaker 1: Everybody is completely hammered, like the the like, instead of
Speaker 1: getting a single ginger ale, you get like a handle
Speaker 1: of gin and a Cuban cigar.
Speaker 2: You know, it was it was nice, right, It's like,
Speaker 2: do you have seat belts? They're like, what are you
Speaker 2: a priest? This is laudanum. Take all the laudanum you want.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what the fuck is this? Our pilot made some
Speaker 1: bathtub heroine. Everybody chill out. It's gonna be choppy.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 1: So a big part of like why flying is nice
Speaker 1: is that, like most people aren't able to do it.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty five, which is when Frank gets hired
Speaker 1: by TSA, only about twenty percent a little less of
Speaker 1: the US population had ever been on an aircraft, right,
Speaker 1: And so in sixty five, less than twenty percent of
Speaker 1: the country's ever even been on a plane. By the
Speaker 1: year two thousand, half of the US population flies at
Speaker 1: least once a year. So wow, And basically everyone who
Speaker 1: gets to adulthood is on a plane at least once right,
Speaker 1: very rarely. Yeah, it's just like life now. So the
Speaker 1: other thing that's happening, right is the seventies dawn is
Speaker 1: this generation of nbas who are Lorenzo's peers, are all
Speaker 1: starting to reach high positions in their field. So a
Speaker 1: lot of these guys are again the first of what
Speaker 1: we now call corporate raiders. The best touchdown of this
Speaker 1: if you watch the movie Hook, that's who Robin Wilson's
Speaker 1: character is supposed to be, right Like, he's this or not.
Speaker 1: Robin will Jesus Christ, Robin Williams, Robin Williams, I didn't
Speaker 1: sleep last night. Robin Williams is supposed to be a
Speaker 1: corporate raider, right like, he's a yeah, he's like this
Speaker 1: guy whose job is to buy up companies and then
Speaker 1: like strip them for assets. You know, he's a pirate,
Speaker 1: right Like, that's the point of the Yeah. So to
Speaker 1: give you an idea of the kind of men that
Speaker 1: Lorenzo called colleagues and what they're doing to the rest
Speaker 1: of American capitalism in this period of time, I want
Speaker 1: to read a quote from a summary of the book
Speaker 1: Corporate Raiders and their Minions by John where Close. Quote
Speaker 1: the raiders who Close describes are colorful, to say the least.
Speaker 1: Among them, there's Robert Campo, who sought to maintain his
Speaker 1: youth with injections of fetal lambraine cells, and who's blitz
Speaker 1: creak across the department store sector of the North American
Speaker 1: American economy ended with the bankruptcy of Federated department stores
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety. Carl Icon, who supposedly said if you
Speaker 1: want love, buy a dog and gutted twa, and Robert Maxwell,
Speaker 1: who overpaid for McMillan, contributing to the collapse of his
Speaker 1: media empire and leading to his suicide by sea. Thanks
Speaker 1: to these characters, companies can't coast anymore. Close likens the
Speaker 1: Raiders effect to the West Indian slavery bolts in the
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds, saying the new M and A transformed public
Speaker 1: corporations the establishment's repositories of power and wealth into very public,
Speaker 1: very visible, very vulnerable sugar plantations, open to all with
Speaker 1: the will, the intelligence, and sometimes the personality disorders needed
Speaker 1: to gain entry. The corporate raiders, explains Close. They're also
Speaker 1: the ancestors of today's shareholder activists. They don't buy underperforming
Speaker 1: companies they buy into them and force their managers to
Speaker 1: up their game. So they're all crazy assholes, right, Like
Speaker 1: that's who gets these jobs?
Speaker 2: Feeding sambrain cell in jails. Yes, is like some fucking
Speaker 2: Peter deal shit, Like what the fuck is this?
Speaker 1: When you read about these guys, it does make it
Speaker 1: clear that, like, oh, a huge part of like the
Speaker 1: massive PR blitz to make the tech industry feel like
Speaker 1: something special was just to briefly convince people that these
Speaker 1: guys weren't the same as it ever was, right that
Speaker 1: like all of these secheads were just like no, there's
Speaker 1: who could code? Yeah, exactly, some of them can't even code,
Speaker 1: you know, they're just injecting fetal lambrin And I wish
Speaker 1: more of them would would do the suicide by sea thing.
Speaker 2: Also, what's what does that mean? Is that like a
Speaker 2: is that a specific way.
Speaker 1: Or yeah, going out on your yacht to jump off
Speaker 1: or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's let's let's look up Robert Maxwell. Let's do
Speaker 2: the research. I should I wonder yeah, or it's like
Speaker 2: or is it like a thing where you wear like
Speaker 2: a meat suit and then you jump into like shark
Speaker 2: infested waters and like just let the sea do itself.
Speaker 1: Oh, man, this guy looks like ship. Look at this dude.
Speaker 1: Holy fuck, Sophie Google Robert Maxwell? What a monster? Oh
Speaker 1: this is Gillan Maxwell's dad. Yes, I have heard of this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he dies mysteriously at sea and there's probably something to
Speaker 1: do with the aside.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is killing Maxwell's dad. Look at this fucking weirdo.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. Hell yes, those eyebrows.
Speaker 1: We'll do an episode on this guy at some point.
Speaker 1: He's dressed like Tucker Carlson, but he looks like if
Speaker 1: Tucker Carlson melted in the sun.
Speaker 2: Or him, and like John Taffer from bar Rescue became
Speaker 2: one guy.
Speaker 1: He does have the look of like a fucking Paul Verhoven,
Speaker 1: like secondary bad guy.
Speaker 2: It's so funny.
Speaker 1: Anyway, let's all think about Gilan Maxwell. I guess I
Speaker 1: don't know whatever. Here's ads.
Speaker 4: What a wow looking person.
Speaker 2: First of all, yeah, it does look like shit. He
Speaker 2: looks karma. It looks like.
Speaker 4: When a potato starts to get moldy and sprouts. That's
Speaker 4: what it looks like.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Ah, we're back and we're talking about Robert Maxwell. What
Speaker 1: a what a what a weird asshole? So these corporate raiders,
Speaker 1: these guys who like are are Lorenzo's peers. Sometimes what
Speaker 1: they're doing is they're finding lazy, underperforming companies that have
Speaker 1: like a lot of useless positions and have wasted it
Speaker 1: basically coasted during the years when the American economy was
Speaker 1: like a freebie, right, the rest of the world was
Speaker 1: destroyed by war, and we just like you could do
Speaker 1: anything as a business guy and make money. But that's
Speaker 1: starting to end by the seventies, right, So some of
Speaker 1: these guys are just like finding companies that were not
Speaker 1: set up well and ending inefficiencies. But a lot of
Speaker 1: them are just like gutting good businesses for short term gains.
Speaker 1: A good modern example of this would be what happened
Speaker 1: to the company that makes instant pots. They merged with
Speaker 1: the maker of pyres in twenty nineteen, right before a
Speaker 1: giant sales spurt due to the pandemic, but since that
Speaker 1: growth wasn't sustainable, like, especially since instant pots, you don't
Speaker 1: have to like buy instant pots, yea every author, Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: So if corporations functioned in anything that resembled like a rational,
Speaker 1: healthy manner, this would be fine, right, You'd be like, well,
Speaker 1: we had that nice year or two where we made
Speaker 1: a bunch of extra money and now we can you
Speaker 1: are a nice, steady business. But because capitalism has been
Speaker 1: you know, particularly because of like the kind of these
Speaker 1: corporate raidar dudes are the guys who run everything. Now,
Speaker 1: what they do as soon as there's this big like
Speaker 1: windfall is they take on a four hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: million dollar loan and they kind of justify this by saying, oh,
Speaker 1: we got to build new production facilities, we got to
Speaker 1: pay for R and D on a new product. But
Speaker 1: that's not what they do. And I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: from Crane's Chicago Business newsletter next. That debt refinanced two
Speaker 1: hundred and ninety four million in existing debt, including one
Speaker 1: hundred million tied to the twenty nineteen acquisition, and helped
Speaker 1: support a two hundred and forty five million dollar dive
Speaker 1: it into shareholders. Essentially, none of the debts supported investment
Speaker 1: in the business. So basically, the good luck of the
Speaker 1: pandemic year let them con their way into getting half
Speaker 1: a billion dollars of debt they were never going to
Speaker 1: be able to pay off, most of which they gave themselves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's like all that shit. Like even
Speaker 2: we were just talking on on aley'zeitg. So this guy
Speaker 2: who talks about like private equity and how Yeah, another
Speaker 2: way they do it is like when they buy these businesses,
Speaker 2: they'll force these companies they take over to sell all
Speaker 2: of their property to the private equity firm and then
Speaker 2: begin leasing it back to them so they can immediately
Speaker 2: start seeing a profit.
Speaker 1: And you're like, that's not really business, You're just running
Speaker 1: a con yeah, which is.
Speaker 2: You're just yeah, you're sucking it dry from the inside. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So back to Frank, he and his business partner have
Speaker 1: managed to get together the money to buy a Houston
Speaker 1: based carrier called Texas International Airlines. A lot of that
Speaker 1: money comes from Chase Manhattan. Texas International air is a small,
Speaker 1: tottering local kind of local. It was basically in terms
Speaker 1: of its size, it was a local Texas airline, but
Speaker 1: because it does one flight to Mexico, it's an international,
Speaker 1: which means it's regulated by CAB, which like fucks it over. Actually,
Speaker 1: because they can't do a lot of the shit smaller
Speaker 1: airlines they're able to do to kind of like make
Speaker 1: a profit. It was nicknamed Teeter Airlines, which is because like,
Speaker 1: it's such a like the flights are so shitty, Like
Speaker 1: they have trash planes, they have the worst pilots. It's
Speaker 1: just not great. In the last five years, the company
Speaker 1: had lost twenty million dollars over expanding its fleet and
Speaker 1: taking on debt. It was a long shot that Lorenzo
Speaker 1: would be able to write the ship once he bought
Speaker 1: the company, but Chase Manhattan had faith in him, and
Speaker 1: he was medically incapable of doubting himself. So there's a
Speaker 1: shareholders meeting in August of nineteen seventy two where Lorenzo
Speaker 1: gets elected president and CEO of Texas International air This
Speaker 1: makes him the youngest airline president in history. That'szy. He's
Speaker 1: thirty two, so that is pretty young to be running
Speaker 1: an airline. A couple other cool things happened that year
Speaker 1: for him. He gets his pilot's license. He marries this
Speaker 1: lady who had been like a legal assistant and was
Speaker 1: the daughter of a wealthy Florida real estate mogul. Also
Speaker 1: around the same time, his brother, who had been a
Speaker 1: stock broker, dies of heart failure. His brother's like forty three,
Speaker 1: which convinces Frank to become a marathon runner. Tragic if
Speaker 1: only he had just continued to be very unhealthy and
Speaker 1: do cocaine. We need, like, you know how they have
Speaker 1: like campaigns and some vulnerable areas to like have people like,
Speaker 1: oh there's a lot of heart disease in this in
Speaker 1: this neighborhood or whatever. We should like do these ads
Speaker 1: trying to keep people away from fast food. We need
Speaker 1: to have the opposite for like Harvard grads, We're like, you.
Speaker 2: Ever tried cocaine? You ever just done like a shitload
Speaker 2: of cocine.
Speaker 1: Mix that stuff with downers too, Like, just grind your
Speaker 1: valum up with your blow.
Speaker 2: You're good man. The best thing to do is probably
Speaker 2: smoke like three grams of meth and then just take
Speaker 2: a bunch of benzos man to go to sleep. Yeah,
Speaker 2: benze a, you're gonna feel like Superman, dude. That's how
Speaker 2: fucking That's how like Leah Coca used to do it. Dude, Like,
Speaker 2: if you're trying to get like next level with it,
Speaker 2: that's how you got to do it, dude. Yeah, split
Speaker 2: your heart in two directions.
Speaker 1: We need to pay a new generation of influenzas to
Speaker 1: spit pitch speedballs at business guys. So under the rule
Speaker 1: of the Civil Air Board. Truly local airlines are again
Speaker 1: subject to like fewer of these anti competitive regulations, and
Speaker 1: so they can do stuff like offer discount last minute fairs.
Speaker 1: Because TI is in this awkward position, they can't really
Speaker 1: do that, and they're up against their big competitors are Southwest,
Speaker 1: which is a small local airline, and so it's got
Speaker 1: more room to maneuver and bran if so, Lorenzo succeeds
Speaker 1: in kind of sliding in between these these two competitors
Speaker 1: and he's able to like pull together some profitability. He's
Speaker 1: actually pretty good at this aspect of the business. He
Speaker 1: drops markets that weren't profitable, in flights that had a
Speaker 1: poor return. He fires a bunch of employees in order
Speaker 1: to cut payroll into something manageable. And in nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 1: the year after he takes over TI, Texas International posts
Speaker 1: its first profit in like five or six years. He'd
Speaker 1: made a lot of big promises to his employees that like,
Speaker 1: once the company was back in the black, he'd ensure
Speaker 1: that they got rewards for all the hard work they
Speaker 1: did to get TIA back into good health. But as
Speaker 1: soon as they start making a profit, he's like, oh, no,
Speaker 1: I didn't mean that you guys are getting any more money.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I say that. No, that was a lie. See
Speaker 2: you want to get fired for fucking lying? Yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: then shut up. I never said I would never say
Speaker 2: some shit like that.
Speaker 1: So obviously people are not happy. So the ground workers Union,
Speaker 1: which is like, you know, the guys, it's pretty it
Speaker 1: should be obvious what the groundworkers Union is for planes.
Speaker 1: They're the guys on the ground doing shit. They start
Speaker 1: agitating and in December of seventy four they decide to
Speaker 1: go on strike. So airline workers are at this point
Speaker 1: the most some of the most powerful unionized people in
Speaker 1: the country. And when the airline workers would go on strike,
Speaker 1: the only kind of way, you know. Again, so when
Speaker 1: you've got a strike, right, a company that's going to
Speaker 1: engage in strike breaking is probably going to bring in scabs.
Speaker 1: And scabs, it's understood always do like a shittier version
Speaker 1: of the job that regular employees do. And you know,
Speaker 1: when it comes to people like that's a problem with
Speaker 1: air travel.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So if you've got like a coal mine and you
Speaker 1: bring in scabs, the scabs are going to make you
Speaker 1: less money. Maybe they're a little more likely to die.
Speaker 1: But like, if you get a bunch of scabs killed
Speaker 1: in a coal mine, the coal miners aren't going to
Speaker 1: have that big an issue with it because they hate
Speaker 1: the scabs, and no one else is really going to
Speaker 1: care because it's just shit happening in the coal mine.
Speaker 1: Whereas if you bring a bunch of scabs in to
Speaker 1: the air industry and a plane crashes.
Speaker 2: A lot of people might get angry at you.
Speaker 1: You know, So you you have as a company in
Speaker 1: this period, you have like less options for kind of
Speaker 1: fucking over your unionized employees because it's it's air travel.
Speaker 2: You know. You also have to Yeah, what's that pool
Speaker 2: of people. I can only imagine when you're like, all
Speaker 2: right now the bottom of the barrel for airline.
Speaker 1: Workers, illegal plane fuelers, and ship Yeah, they're probably not
Speaker 1: great at the.
Speaker 2: Yeah I could do that, Yeah very Yeah I filled
Speaker 2: up my car. Yeah, I basically do the thing that's
Speaker 2: the precursor to stealing catalytic converters in your modern times.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So they also airlines also, if they're fighting a strike,
Speaker 1: have to contend with the fact that, you know, because
Speaker 1: running an airline is more expensive than most things. If
Speaker 1: you're keeping planes grounded, and you're like canceling flights. It's
Speaker 1: like slightly less expensive to do that than it is,
Speaker 1: just like set fire to piles of money, you know,
Speaker 1: like you are, you are burning so much cash whenever
Speaker 1: you're you're knocked down by a strike. So for years,
Speaker 1: the way airlines would handle strike threats is to just
Speaker 1: pretty much, very quickly concede to the union right to
Speaker 1: give them at least some of what they wanted and
Speaker 1: get folks.
Speaker 2: Back to work. It was nearly always worth it.
Speaker 1: But Frank Lorenzo hates unions, and he's like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: why the fuck are we going to concede to these fuckers?
Speaker 2: Fuck them?
Speaker 1: So depending on who you ask, he's either kind of
Speaker 1: just too proud, right, like he'll burn his airline to
Speaker 1: the ground rather than lose face to a bunch of strikers,
Speaker 1: or he's like a calculated risk taker and he's like,
Speaker 1: you know, doing the math and figuring out, ah, well,
Speaker 1: you know we can hold out this much longer, and
Speaker 1: you know these workers can only hold out this long,
Speaker 1: and this is like a I'm not really sure which
Speaker 1: version of Frank Lorenzo is more accurate. Probably a little
Speaker 1: bit of a and a little bit of b right. So,
Speaker 1: for four and a half months after the groundworkers union
Speaker 1: votes to strike, no TI plane flies they like, they
Speaker 1: shut down traffic entirely. He furloughs the entire workforce pretty much.
Speaker 1: Executive salaries are cut to the bone, and eventually, through
Speaker 1: this grinding battle of attrition, he manages to pull out
Speaker 1: a victory. And the only reason Frank is able to
Speaker 1: survive is that when the other airlines see him actually
Speaker 1: going to war with like one of his big unions,
Speaker 1: they put together eleven million dollars and strike aid. Like
Speaker 1: other airlines are giving him money to be like here
Speaker 1: you go, buddy, like keep up the good fight, right yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: welcome over.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Unions do the same thing, right, Like, it's just this
Speaker 1: is like an owner's union, right, it's good.
Speaker 2: Fucking grim man, Yeah it is. We love what you're doing, man,
Speaker 2: just vaporizing fucking will to fuck disguis. We've got you. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: Like. Um. So, the union comes to the table and
Speaker 1: it ends the strike with very minor concessions from TI
Speaker 1: and Lorenzo is now a hero of the capitalist class.
Speaker 1: He is not only this kind of like daring corporate
Speaker 1: raider type guy who brought his company to profitability by cutting.
Speaker 2: It to the bone.
Speaker 1: But when his selfish workers put his success at risk,
Speaker 1: he had like gone to war with them and won.
Speaker 1: In an interview he gave not long after the settlement,
Speaker 1: he told a reporter, the groundworkers union has demonstrated little
Speaker 1: concern for the well being of any of us, for
Speaker 1: that of any of our cities, and of course for
Speaker 1: the company, which must somehow pay the bill. By nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy six, TI was making more than three million dollars
Speaker 1: in net profits. It was now healthier than ever, but
Speaker 1: still too small for Lorenzo's liking. He knew that he
Speaker 1: was going to need to introduce a major innovation to
Speaker 1: make his companies stand out from the pack. Here's how
Speaker 1: Texas Monthly describes what happened next. If TI was to survive,
Speaker 1: Lorenzo had to find a way to beat Southwest's low fares.
Speaker 1: Prohibited from discounting regular fares, TI had experimented with reductions
Speaker 1: on largely unregulated stand by tickets. The airline had, for instance,
Speaker 1: promoted a new route from Houston's Hobby Field to Dallas
Speaker 1: Fort Worth Airfield, by offering stand by fares keyed to
Speaker 1: the day of the month, one dollar for travel on
Speaker 1: August first, six dollars for travel on August sixth, and
Speaker 1: so on. Searching for a steady way to fill those
Speaker 1: empty seats, the company came up with peanut fares, in
Speaker 1: which the passengers could lock into cheap fares on certain
Speaker 1: flights with light passenger loads. This is the birth of
Speaker 1: the modern system we have of like, oh, you got
Speaker 1: the super saver seats, and you've got like the extra economy,
Speaker 1: and you've got like the economy plus.
Speaker 4: Let you know, yea, this is where that all begins.
Speaker 4: This is so triggering to like airport misery.
Speaker 1: Yeah really yeah, this is like the start of a
Speaker 1: lot of that, and it is. It's a mixed bag, right,
Speaker 1: Like this is a good idea. It works really well financially,
Speaker 1: it's also more efficient, but it's against cab regulations, and
Speaker 1: so Lorenzo has to lobby the agency to make his
Speaker 1: peanut faars legal and he succeeds. In January nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 1: TI gets granted a one year trial to like attempt
Speaker 1: to do these new kinds of fairs, and it works
Speaker 1: really well, Like TI passenger loads on a lot of
Speaker 1: flights go from like thirty or forty percent to ninety
Speaker 1: percent or more.
Speaker 2: Booh yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's it's one of those things where like Branef
Speaker 1: starts complaining because this starts eating into their business. And
Speaker 1: TI they're like TIS advertising, you know that all of
Speaker 1: their seats are discounted and they aren't. And the agency
Speaker 1: like there's some minor rules against Lorenzo, but it doesn't
Speaker 1: actually stop him from like basically doing this shit. And
Speaker 1: the idea as soon as like he introduces these new
Speaker 1: kinds of like discounted fares and gets away with it,
Speaker 1: it starts spreading like wildfire throughout the rest of the industry.
Speaker 1: And I'll say this, what Frank does here is more
Speaker 1: of a mixed bag than we tend to get with
Speaker 1: our like corporate bastards. There's a decent argument that Frank's
Speaker 1: innovation here it leads to a huge drop in pricing
Speaker 1: for consumers across the market, and that this is a
Speaker 1: big part of what opens air travel up to groups
Speaker 1: of people who would never have been able to afford
Speaker 1: to fly recreationally. Like frequent flyers hate this because frequent
Speaker 1: flyer the only people who can afford to be frequent
Speaker 1: flyers in this period are either independently wealthy or their
Speaker 1: corporate flyers whose companies are paying for the expensive seats,
Speaker 1: and they love that the planes are empty and nice,
Speaker 1: but like.
Speaker 2: Now the barbarian hordes are fucking there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, the poor have taken to the skies. You
Speaker 1: get all so argue that, like, well, this is a
Speaker 1: lot less wasteful and shitty for the environment than flying
Speaker 1: in planes that are seventy percent in empty. Obviously, the
Speaker 1: fact that this causes air travel to explode has a
Speaker 1: net horrible increase on like, you know, carbon emissions and shit.
Speaker 1: I don't think you could really morally put that on
Speaker 1: Frank because he's not He doesn't.
Speaker 2: I don't think he knows much about it. He's not
Speaker 2: like any Exxon exec. He doesn't. Yeah, he's any technology,
Speaker 2: it becomes inevitable, like it's your equity, right, Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: it was always going to get cheaper and eventually would
Speaker 2: get to a place where other people could fly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So at the same time he's doing this, a national
Speaker 1: movement has kind of coalesced around the idea of deregulating airlines.
Speaker 1: As I mentioned, earlier this the business of big time
Speaker 1: air travel was deliberately not a competitive industry in the US,
Speaker 1: and the same way at least that most businesses were competitive.
Speaker 1: The sheer expense and the fact that these companies received
Speaker 1: government subsidies, you know, had allowed kind of air travel
Speaker 1: to get off the ground. But now that we're in
Speaker 1: kind of the seventies and stuff the late seventies in particular,
Speaker 1: a lot of these old airlines are kind of hemorrhaging money,
Speaker 1: and this makes a pretty good case that deregulation is necessary.
Speaker 1: The cause was opposed actually by the business a lot
Speaker 1: of the guys that Frank considered peers, and it was
Speaker 1: also generally opposed from owners of airlines because they're like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, there's shit that's fucked up about the business,
Speaker 1: but we understand it the way it is, and if
Speaker 1: you like deregulate, then we're going to have a bunch
Speaker 1: of competition, and a lot of our airlines are going
Speaker 1: to die if we won't be getting subsidies, and shit,
Speaker 1: we're not going to be able to make this stuff work.
Speaker 1: But this kind of alliance of free market right wing
Speaker 1: economists and liberal democrats get together and agree on deregulating
Speaker 1: the air, and like democrats like it because cheap flights
Speaker 1: will be good for the economy, and like it'll open
Speaker 1: up air travel to working people, and the free market
Speaker 1: guys like it because that's what they fucking do. And
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote from a contemporary article in the
Speaker 1: New York Times here writing about deregulation of the air.
Speaker 1: Equally compelling was the sense of inanity associated with so
Speaker 1: many empty seats. In nineteen seventy three, airplanes were flying
Speaker 1: from New York to Los Angeles with thirty seven percent
Speaker 1: of their seats filled, says Stephen Bryer, then a lawyer
Speaker 1: on Kennedy's staff and now a federal judge. This assured
Speaker 1: the business flyer of an empty seat on which to
Speaker 1: place his briefcase. But look at how high the fare
Speaker 1: had to be in order to make this possible. What
Speaker 1: was really going on was that the briefcase was paying
Speaker 1: full fare. The expense accounts said, many of them Republican businessmen,
Speaker 1: who might otherwise have found government economic controls anathema. Loved
Speaker 1: federal airline regulation. Service was attentive, delays were rare, planes
Speaker 1: and airports were uncrowded. So what affairs were high the
Speaker 1: company picked up the tab. An unusual coalition of free
Speaker 1: market economists and liberal Democrats fought to loosen the reins
Speaker 1: on airlines. As Brier puts it, the outcome was going
Speaker 1: to favor the typical middle class individual. It would be
Speaker 1: very different from the subsequent deregulation of the telephone service,
Speaker 1: he says, in which the outcome favored business customers at
Speaker 1: the expense of the residential customer. Despite practically unanimous opposition
Speaker 1: from airline executives, deregulation was signed into law by President
Speaker 1: Jimmy Carter in nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 2: MM.
Speaker 1: Yeah, now, this is not going to entirely work the
Speaker 1: way they want it to, right, there's as we all know,
Speaker 1: as we're all living through. But it does make air
Speaker 1: travel a lot cheaper initially. Now we'll talk later about
Speaker 1: kind of where things go from there, but it does
Speaker 1: to some extent work the way they want it to.
Speaker 1: So Frank Lorenzo was initially frightened by deregulation because he
Speaker 1: doesn't know how this is going to work, But once
Speaker 1: it becomes clear that this is happening, he starts looking
Speaker 1: for ways to make it work for him. A lot
Speaker 1: of guys are doing that at the time, and one
Speaker 1: of them is a dude called Donald Burr. He's the
Speaker 1: founder of People's Express, which is like one of the
Speaker 1: first big budget airlines. You might think of it as
Speaker 1: like Spirit or Frontier, and kind of the big thing
Speaker 1: for People's Express is that it's a no frills airline.
Speaker 1: There's no luxury at all, and every seat on the
Speaker 1: plane has the same low cost point, right, And his
Speaker 1: plan is to it's this weird hybrid of shit because
Speaker 1: he's Burr is like, we're going to keep costs low
Speaker 1: by cutting out luxuries and also not using union labor.
Speaker 1: But also in order to kind of compensate for that,
Speaker 1: Burr is like, all of our employees will get stock
Speaker 1: in the company. That's why it's People's Express, like where
Speaker 1: all everyone like owns a part of the company. It's
Speaker 1: it's an interesting vision. You don't really have stuff like
Speaker 1: this that much anymore, is it.
Speaker 2: Like, so it was legitimately like worker owned airline to
Speaker 2: an extent, like they had like forty eight percent of
Speaker 2: the tame.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're not going to actually be in control and
Speaker 1: this doesn't work out in the long run. Although this
Speaker 1: does I think become frontier, like that is kind of
Speaker 1: where it anyway, whatever, that's the idea that Burr has.
Speaker 1: Now Lorenzo sees this, this plan by Burr as fundamentally flawed. First,
Speaker 1: fuck giving workers stock. But more to the point, he
Speaker 1: knows that rich people are always going to want to
Speaker 1: pay more for a nice flying experience. And Lorenzo's like,
Speaker 1: you know what, it might actually be worth even more
Speaker 1: to rich people to pay for an ice flight if
Speaker 1: they get to watch columns of poor people file passed
Speaker 1: and cram themselves into like a cattle pin, right, Like,
Speaker 1: we might actually be able to make more money on
Speaker 1: rich people if they get to see poor people.
Speaker 2: Having a worse style. Of course, Yeah, we've reinforced the
Speaker 2: class structure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's going to make these folks thrilled. Here's the
Speaker 1: New York Times. The wave of the future, Lorenzo insisted,
Speaker 1: was a flexible pricing system with a wide variety of
Speaker 1: fairs and services tailored to different tastes and pocketbooks. Such
Speaker 1: a system, enforced today, with some passengers paying five hundred
Speaker 1: dollars seated next to others paying one hundred and fifty,
Speaker 1: makes it possible to extract a premium from the business
Speaker 1: flyer while simultaneously offering bargains that entice the discretionary traveler.
Speaker 1: In Lorenzo's terms, it creates travel. In nineteen eighty, Burr
Speaker 1: left Texas International to start People Express, taking with him
Speaker 1: Gerald L. Gittner, the marketing vice president, and several other executives.
Speaker 1: That same year, Lorenzo established Texas Air as a holding
Speaker 1: company for Texas International, a symbol of his expansive intentions
Speaker 1: and expand he did. His first move was the creation
Speaker 1: of a low fair carrier, New York Air. Lorenzo initially
Speaker 1: set about wooing business flyers in the Boston, New York
Speaker 1: Washington shuttle market, monopolized by Eastern airlines. New York Air
Speaker 1: usually charged less than Eastern, but offered more in the
Speaker 1: way of reserve seats, snacks, and beverages, an enthusiastic service.
Speaker 1: The non union employees earned less than their counterparts at
Speaker 1: other airlines. So like, you know, he's he's he's doing
Speaker 1: this mix of cutting shit to the bone and making
Speaker 1: sure there's special options for people who are willing to
Speaker 1: like pay banks, so that rich people can like you know,
Speaker 1: have a reason to be on flights too. And this
Speaker 1: this winds up being a lot smarter than like this
Speaker 1: kind of like weirdly sort of communist plan that Burris
Speaker 1: pushing where everyone has the same seat, and it's just
Speaker 1: it's more financially successful. So you know, as this is
Speaker 1: all going on, the seventies are drawing to a close,
Speaker 1: the Reagan eighties are starting up. Everything's coming up. Frank
Speaker 1: Lorenzo unions are taking hits left and right. He's making
Speaker 1: more money than ever. Cocaine is flowing like wine, and
Speaker 1: it was time for another bold move. He was going
Speaker 1: to take over the grand dam of the sky. Continental
Speaker 1: Airlines like and Continental is back in the day. So
Speaker 1: today United Airlines uses their like logo and livery right.
Speaker 1: Continental back in the day is like when you see
Speaker 1: like pictures of really nice flights, it's often Continental. They
Speaker 1: are the fucking Gucci airline. Like this is the nice shit, right,
Speaker 1: this is Robert Six's airline.
Speaker 2: Yeah it is.
Speaker 1: It is like the fanciest airline out there, but it's
Speaker 1: hemorrhaging money. And fucking Frank Lorenzo is like, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: buy this motherfucker and I'm gonna gut it, and we
Speaker 1: are going to talk about that and how he kind
Speaker 1: of kills a lot of aspects of the way unions
Speaker 1: had worked and the labor, like labor had successfully like
Speaker 1: fought for shit, Like he goes to war with these people,
Speaker 1: and it's a pretty nuts experience. But that's all in
Speaker 1: part two for right now. What I want to talk about, Miles,
Speaker 1: is your fucking pluggables. How are they doing?
Speaker 2: Oh, they're good. You can plug them in, you can
Speaker 2: unplug them. Check out the Daily Zeitgeist or four or
Speaker 2: Miles and Jack on Mad boostis that's trash TV, basketball
Speaker 2: and daily news, whichever one you want. Hell yeah, So
Speaker 2: there you go.
Speaker 1: And you can also get this podcast without ads at
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Speaker 1: probably this is.
Speaker 4: And we we at cool Zone Media have a new
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Speaker 3: including cooler Zone Media.
Speaker 1: Yeah, where you'll get it without without ads. So you
Speaker 1: want to have to hear about the Reagan coin, uh,
Speaker 1: which which fits in well with today's topic.
Speaker 4: It really does. That's another fucking episode. Behind the Bastards
Speaker 4: is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from
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