Speaker 1: All right, you sons of bitches, let's fuck this popsicle stand.
Speaker 1: It's time for a goddamn podcast. How was that? Everybody good?
Speaker 2: You went right past blown all the way to fourth base.
Speaker 2: Everybody happy with the popsicle stand? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Love it right now?
Speaker 1: Welcome to Behind the Bastards. Everybody, it's a podcast bad
Speaker 1: people talk about them. M Yeah, it's a good time. So,
Speaker 1: uh we should you know, let's let's talk about this
Speaker 1: real piece of ship, this guy who sucked. Uh. Ceo
Speaker 1: now of General Electric, Jack Welch. So about a year
Speaker 1: into his tenure as CEO, Jack Welch gave a speech
Speaker 1: by the way, my co hosts as as with the first.
Speaker 3: Episode, so impressive that you forgotten.
Speaker 2: The energy was incredible. It was I thought I could
Speaker 2: sleep through this one. But hire Michael Sway happy to
Speaker 2: be back for part two?
Speaker 3: Part two? Baby, well, I do want to get in
Speaker 3: here again.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: What should people know about your current projects?
Speaker 2: Abe? I did it in part one?
Speaker 1: You do?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: So, basically, Michael and I are making an independent film.
Speaker 3: It's based on the time that Michael's father came out
Speaker 3: as a gay free will. Michael was like a teenager
Speaker 3: and we both thought it'd be an interesting story to
Speaker 3: show that like on film like as are coming of
Speaker 3: age like sex comedy. So we wrote it and now
Speaker 3: we're producing it. And you can help us by going
Speaker 3: to seed Andspark dot com, slash fund, slash Papa hyphen
Speaker 3: Bear and you can become a part of the movie.
Speaker 3: You can, you know, they got tears there. You can
Speaker 3: click on the buttons. And we're stoked Gray Rewards. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: we're stoked about telling the story. So if you can't
Speaker 3: help us out, and you know, we'll make the film, right,
Speaker 3: So that's why we're that's why we're here.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, we're here to catch up with Robert,
Speaker 2: which is always a divine pleasure. Well not to, but
Speaker 2: you're also right. Both things are true. And the only
Speaker 2: thing I wanted to add is if you're not aware
Speaker 2: Abe directed like most of the videos that Cracked, I
Speaker 2: was over it cracked. If you know us from Cracked. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so so like we can do it. I can say
Speaker 2: with great confidence it'll be a good movie. I bet
Speaker 2: Rober would even back us up on that. So check
Speaker 2: it out over there where Abe said. And if you're
Speaker 2: interested at all in that hook.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I am so excited for this movie. I think
Speaker 1: I enjoyed your your your previous movie kill me now,
Speaker 1: and I would like I would like you to get
Speaker 1: another movie out. So listeners, help make my dream come
Speaker 1: true by forcing Michael and Abe at gunpoint to make
Speaker 1: another film. Yes, yes, daddy, yeah yeah. Hurt them, hurt
Speaker 1: them for me. So back to the sentence I was
Speaker 1: in the middle of when I realist I hadn't introduced you.
Speaker 1: About a year into his tenure as CEO of GE,
Speaker 1: Jack Welch gave a speech at a gathering of executives
Speaker 1: in New York City. It was meant to be his
Speaker 1: introduction to the company leadership, where he would present them
Speaker 1: with his vision of the future and wrangle the most
Speaker 1: influential minds in the country behind his plans, or and
Speaker 1: get the most influential minds in the company behind his
Speaker 1: plans for GE's future. His twenty minute speech was titled
Speaker 1: Growing Fast in a Slow growth Economy, and it presented
Speaker 1: a very Menichean view of the country's economic future. From
Speaker 1: now on, companies would either be the dominant entity in
Speaker 1: their market or doomed to failure mediocrity, which he defined
Speaker 1: as not being first or second in the industry would
Speaker 1: be seen as a death knell. He announced that if
Speaker 1: GE couldn't guarantee itself that kind of dominance in one
Speaker 1: of its many industries or businesses, and needed to sell
Speaker 1: that business off or shut it down or otherwise prune
Speaker 1: it away in order to focus on the things that
Speaker 1: it could dominate. Now, one thing you might notice about
Speaker 1: this is that, like as a consumer, theoretically, one of
Speaker 1: the big benefits of can capitalism, one of the things
Speaker 1: that set it apart from, for example, the Soviet Union,
Speaker 1: is that customers would have like choice between a bunch
Speaker 1: of different products. But Jack is saying, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: fuck everyone who's not like number one or number two.
Speaker 1: It's not worth being in that business. It's not worth
Speaker 1: making a simple profit in order to like provide people
Speaker 1: with options Like fuck that.
Speaker 2: Right, I do love I read a whole book on
Speaker 2: this that I can't go into because it's your show.
Speaker 2: But I love that he also is right that you
Speaker 2: have to have a second one and how fucking simple
Speaker 2: humans are because you're like, you're either someone who likes
Speaker 2: to do what everyone's doing, or you're someone who likes
Speaker 2: to be contrarian and not do what everyone's doing. So
Speaker 2: you always get there's like Huggies and panthers or coke
Speaker 2: and Pepsi. Yeah in everybody, Like that's as big as
Speaker 2: our minds get. Is like I'm a sheep or I'm
Speaker 2: an anti sheep. Those are the types of people that
Speaker 2: buy things.
Speaker 3: Yes, anti sheep, anti sheep.
Speaker 1: This is why, famously, the one cultural reservoir our country
Speaker 1: had of anti capitalist thinking was in those brave, heroic
Speaker 1: souls who rejected the pepsi coke dichotomy and instead switched
Speaker 1: to Doctor Pepper.
Speaker 3: Doctor Pepper's playing sea Baby, and that's when we got
Speaker 3: soda perfection into Dr Pepper.
Speaker 1: So really it's very funny when I'm anywhere else in
Speaker 1: the country, as I usually am now, but Texas, I
Speaker 1: can like tell who's a Texan by when you go
Speaker 1: out to eat, who gets a Doctor Pepper, Like if
Speaker 1: you're at a failing to joint. Yeah, it's it's a thing. Uh,
Speaker 1: No one else drinks it but us. The rest of
Speaker 1: the country doesn't understand.
Speaker 2: Watching.
Speaker 1: But he's from Colorado, which is North Texas.
Speaker 2: That's true.
Speaker 3: I drink doctor Pepper. I think I also think diet
Speaker 3: Doctor Pepper is the best version of diet that.
Speaker 2: I'm imagining, Jack Well hearing you talk about doctor Pepper
Speaker 2: consuming doctor that's good, Doctor Wells.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be honest with you both. I'm actually a
Speaker 1: mister PIB man.
Speaker 2: Oh see, the.
Speaker 1: PIB makes a fine soda. Look, I love that we're
Speaker 1: just doing free ads for soda. Hey, I tried to
Speaker 1: get us back on track. It is it's good shit,
Speaker 1: it is okay. PIB is just like excellency. Yeah. If
Speaker 1: Jack Welch had his way, there would be no mister
Speaker 1: PIB because it's too good a product to be number
Speaker 1: one or two in its category. Right, This is the
Speaker 1: kind of hell he wants for us, where there's only
Speaker 1: pepsi and coke. That son of a bitch. So Welch's
Speaker 1: goal at c S CEO, as he told the audience
Speaker 1: in this speech, was to make GE the most competitive
Speaker 1: enterprise on the planet. The steady growth that had made
Speaker 1: it the bluest of blue chip corporations prior to this
Speaker 1: was no longer acceptable. Welch had been inspired in this
Speaker 1: by a number of articles in Fortune magazine analyzing famous
Speaker 1: Prussian generals from the eighteen hundreds, and for so reason,
Speaker 1: trying to use them as business gurus. This has been
Speaker 1: like the last thing he read before giving the speech,
Speaker 1: and it had a huge impact on like the way
Speaker 1: he framed everything that he was doing.
Speaker 2: And the number one way business at time were written
Speaker 2: is you're like, how did some guy four hundred years
Speaker 2: ago who murdered and raped everyone he met doing it?
Speaker 2: That's probably good?
Speaker 1: Well, it's funny because like that didn't used to be
Speaker 1: the thing, like, especially if you go back to I
Speaker 1: don't know, like the fifties and sixties and you were
Speaker 1: to be like, we should take you know, our management
Speaker 1: advice from from military leaders. Well, for one thing, most
Speaker 1: of those guys fought in World War Two, and they'd
Speaker 1: be like, you mean the idiots who like got all
Speaker 1: my friends killed because they fucked up constantly. No, I
Speaker 1: think I'm good. I don't think that's like the management
Speaker 1: tactics I want. But by the time you get to
Speaker 1: the eighties, none of these guys have ever done anything
Speaker 1: in the world, and they're like, yeah, fucking you know
Speaker 1: who's you know, who's a management guru? Helm with Van Moltka,
Speaker 1: that's a guy who knows how to run a company
Speaker 1: that makes light bulbs. The man who won the Franco
Speaker 1: Prussian war surely has wisdom for me in our plastics business.
Speaker 3: Like that's the most like fraternity sentence I've ever heard.
Speaker 1: It's very funny. It's it's it's seeped in it and
Speaker 1: again you could again you get. One of the other
Speaker 1: things you can tell is that like none of this
Speaker 1: generation of business leaders who are entrance by this stuff,
Speaker 1: not only were they like too young to fought in
Speaker 1: World War Two, but they were too rich to get
Speaker 1: drafted for Vietnam because like, nobody who fights in Vietnam
Speaker 1: is like generals, the guys who don't make mistakes. Yes,
Speaker 1: I understand.
Speaker 3: It's the It's like the eye of the hurricane saying
Speaker 3: like this is all right, this is fine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's uh, let's let's copy Let's what did west
Speaker 1: How would Westmoreland run ge? You know, let's defoliate the
Speaker 1: entire business, poison the office, kill everyone.
Speaker 2: I shall run this condom factory as if I tour Machiavelli.
Speaker 2: You don't need to, that's no need to.
Speaker 1: I do kind of want to write a management book
Speaker 1: that's like the Westmoreland Way, And it's just like the
Speaker 1: applying the lessons of the Vietnam War to corporate success.
Speaker 1: Yeah series, yeah, yeah, well why not? It could It
Speaker 1: could work. So this is something that's starting to be
Speaker 1: a big deal in the nineteen eighties. And I haven't
Speaker 1: found a copy of the articles in Fortune that inspired
Speaker 1: Jack Welch so much, but I did run across a
Speaker 1: very recent article in the Harvard Business Review. We'll be
Speaker 1: talking more about the Harvard Business Review a little later,
Speaker 1: written in the early nineteen nineties, which was kind of
Speaker 1: like the heyday for Jack Welch's CEO, that attempted to
Speaker 1: draw business lessons from one of the same generals featured
Speaker 1: in the Fortune article, a guy I mentioned a little earlier,
Speaker 1: Helmuth von Moltka. Now the article also quotes Jack Welch,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, interesting by this point in time
Speaker 1: ten years later, not only is he like reading articles
Speaker 1: about Prussian generals and their management tactics, but he's been
Speaker 1: added to the articles about Prussian generals and their management tactics. Quote.
Speaker 1: Moltke possessed two important characteristics that made him a superior strategist.
Speaker 1: The ability to understand the significance of events without being
Speaker 1: influenced by current opinion, changing attitudes, or his own prejudices
Speaker 1: and the ability to make decisions quickly and to take
Speaker 1: the indicated action without being deterred by a perceived danger.
Speaker 1: The two characteristics support each other and apply to managers
Speaker 1: and entrepreneurs as much as generals and national leaders. For example,
Speaker 1: General Electric CEO Jack Welchis said, strategy follows people. The
Speaker 1: right person leads to the right strategy. Now there's a
Speaker 1: lot that's funny about that. Well, yeah, it's I mean,
Speaker 1: first off, just nonsense. Like von Moltkett was not a
Speaker 1: great general because he was great at like I guess
Speaker 1: you could argue those were factors in his success. Another
Speaker 1: factor is that Germany developed a kind of steel that
Speaker 1: allowed them to make long range cannons that the French
Speaker 1: did not have, and so they were killed that extremely
Speaker 1: long range before they could close with their superior close
Speaker 1: in rifles. But like, you can't really translate that to
Speaker 1: ge strategy. Very well, that's what we need.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Also you get a very clear impression the Jaguaryalts
Speaker 2: definitely at some point in his life, like turned to
Speaker 2: his chauffeur, was like, you are my friend, You're my
Speaker 2: best friend.
Speaker 4: Like this guy, Yeah, yeah, yeah, Moltka you know again
Speaker 4: was a very good general.
Speaker 1: But it's also kind of worth noting that those who
Speaker 1: seeve On Maltica as a business guru should be aware
Speaker 1: that the men he trained, the generation of German commanders
Speaker 1: who like were raised up in kind of his heyday
Speaker 1: and like learned under him and were inspired by him,
Speaker 1: were the guys who all lost World War One, destroying
Speaker 1: the First Reich and much of Europe in the process.
Speaker 1: So keep that in mind as we discussed the legacy
Speaker 1: of Jack Welch, because oddly enough, the same thing is
Speaker 1: going to happen now. One of the things that Welch
Speaker 1: took from Moltka was the concept of total war. He
Speaker 1: saw the business equivalent of this as being willing to
Speaker 1: find profit wherever he could, even though things traditionally, even
Speaker 1: through things that were traditionally outside of GE's wheelhouse. When
Speaker 1: he delivered this wisdom in his big speech, the Wall
Speaker 1: Street analysts in the audience were baffled, because this is insane, right,
Speaker 1: Like people at the time were like, what the fuck
Speaker 1: is he talking about? Like this is not like total
Speaker 1: war means, I don't know, burning down villages and destroying
Speaker 1: crops that the enemy can gain no sucker on them.
Speaker 1: It doesn't mean like finding profit in every aspect of
Speaker 1: your business. That's just running a business. Like what you're
Speaker 1: saying is just warseship.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it sounds like you're saying, my new brilliant business
Speaker 2: plan is I want money.
Speaker 1: What if we made money?
Speaker 2: Money? Oh, but I really want money.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's like it's like if you had a general
Speaker 1: come in. It was like, guys, guys, I got a
Speaker 1: new plan that's going to blow this whole war thing
Speaker 1: out of the water. What if we hear me out
Speaker 1: here kill the enemy.
Speaker 2: However we can anyway you can as long as Yeah.
Speaker 3: I love the idea of him seeing like a little
Speaker 3: kid with lemonade stands selling like fifty cent, you know,
Speaker 3: like cups of lemonade, and he's.
Speaker 1: Like that little piece of that son of of my mine.
Speaker 1: I could I will win all of commerce. Total war,
Speaker 1: this kid, Yeah, total war, this little son of a bitch.
Speaker 1: It's interesting. I read a book when I was a
Speaker 1: lot younger. You know, the show Band of Brothers was
Speaker 1: about an actual like military unit in the US Easy Company,
Speaker 1: I think in the eighty second Airborne. I read a
Speaker 1: book by like the unit commander who's the he's he's
Speaker 1: one of the characters in the in the show, but
Speaker 1: like by the actual guy. And there was like a
Speaker 1: point in it, a line in it where he was like,
Speaker 1: because I think he wrote it in like the eighties
Speaker 1: or nineties where he was like, I keep seeing people
Speaker 1: comparing like business to war and like using military metaphors
Speaker 1: to talk about how company should be run, and I
Speaker 1: find it will really off putting because like war is
Speaker 1: just like a hinged savagery and people shouldn't people shouldn't
Speaker 1: seek to emulate it in the other's fears of existence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: very fun. Jack Welch does not feel the same way.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to quote from The Man Who Broke
Speaker 1: Capitalism by David Gels again.
Speaker 2: Here.
Speaker 1: One analyst asked how the price for copper would impact
Speaker 1: earnings in the next quarter. What the hell difference will
Speaker 1: that make? Well, shot back, you should be asking me
Speaker 1: where I want to take the company. The speech was
Speaker 1: a flop. As the analysts filed out of the ballroom,
Speaker 1: one remarked, we don't know what the hell he's talking about,
Speaker 1: because they want to know, like, so, you know, what
Speaker 1: do you like, how is the business doing? How are
Speaker 1: like what strategy I have like the costs of different
Speaker 1: materials that we need gone up or down? You know,
Speaker 1: like how are how ours like how is how are
Speaker 1: our core like assets performing right now? And Welch is
Speaker 1: like fuck that, I'm going to talk about war.
Speaker 3: Right It's crazy? How like this type of thinking? Like
Speaker 3: any given day he could be like lotting the like,
Speaker 3: oh we got a we got to like short the
Speaker 3: system and create this like essentially new market that we
Speaker 3: can scam that's the new hotness. And then yeah, the
Speaker 3: next day he'll be like steady growth and like quality
Speaker 3: products are the thing to do. It's like, who knows
Speaker 3: what this guy's gonna He's just a child walking around
Speaker 3: pointing at this is the strategy, I think.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And you can feel him setting the template that
Speaker 2: I think a lot of modern CEOs follow, that is
Speaker 2: just your job is to be a figurehead and give
Speaker 2: speeches that are general about vision and direction and basically
Speaker 2: just demand that the number go up, like your main
Speaker 2: job is too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's the like as a spoiler, where we're
Speaker 1: heading here is that he's kind of running a con
Speaker 1: and it's a successful con. It does make ge incredibly profitable,
Speaker 1: But the reason he can't talk to these guys about
Speaker 1: the business. Is that he wants to eliminate the business
Speaker 1: part of GE because that's getting in the way of
Speaker 1: making money. So today is the story of how he
Speaker 1: did that. The first big campaign that General Jack had
Speaker 1: to launch in order to remake GE in his image
Speaker 1: was what he himself described as a campaign against loyalty. Right,
Speaker 1: he declared war on the concept of loyalty within the company.
Speaker 1: He defined this, well, we're talking about that. He defined
Speaker 1: it as eliminating bureaucrats, but in reality, his layoffs were
Speaker 1: more or less agnostic to function or performance within the company.
Speaker 1: He fired good employees if they annoyed him. He once
Speaker 1: shut down an entire department dedicated to long term planning
Speaker 1: because long term planning isn't the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: leads to short term earnings. Soon it became known that
Speaker 1: the only way to advance under GE's new leader was
Speaker 1: to fire as many of your own employees as possible.
Speaker 1: True to his background as an angry man who never
Speaker 1: learned how to compromise or experience consequences, Jack managed mostly
Speaker 1: through screaming at people. There were some upsides to this.
Speaker 1: He legitimately knew his business very well, and he would
Speaker 1: tear his managers a new one if they didn't understand
Speaker 1: their business as well is he. But it also selected
Speaker 1: for people who would not question Jack and instead blindly
Speaker 1: followed his commands. In nineteen eighty GE had four hundred
Speaker 1: and eleven thousand employees. By the end of nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 1: it had fired almost nine percent of its workforce, starting
Speaker 1: with thirty five thousand employees and followed with thirty seven
Speaker 1: thousand the next year. Often this meant destroying the economy
Speaker 1: in small towns across the country. This is a part
Speaker 1: of the process of the hollowing out of Middle America.
Speaker 1: A good example would be Ontario, California, which had a
Speaker 1: steam iron plant that employed eight hundred and twenty five people.
Speaker 1: Though it was profitable, Jack closed it and fired them.
Speaker 2: All.
Speaker 1: Local civic leaders complained, but no one had the ability
Speaker 1: to do anything. The year before Jack took over ge
Speaker 1: net profits had risen by seven percent. It was the
Speaker 1: tenth most profitable business in the Fortune five hundred. These
Speaker 1: mass layofs were not necessary, but every Purge was met
Speaker 1: with a surgeon. Stock prices that benefited shareholders. Newsweek compared
Speaker 1: his strategy to the work of a neutron bomb, an
Speaker 1: nightmare WMD built to kill all living creatures in an
Speaker 1: area but leave infrastructure intact. They gave him the nickname
Speaker 1: neutron Jack.
Speaker 2: Cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and he hates.
Speaker 2: You mentioned Jack Donnie being based on him, also Jimmy Neutron,
Speaker 2: which I.
Speaker 1: Didn't yes exactly or it's heartening.
Speaker 2: I guess that people from Jump, or at least there
Speaker 2: was some coverage that was like, yeah, this is going
Speaker 2: to ruin everything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's destroying the destroying life. Yeah, he's killing life itself.
Speaker 1: But they were doing it both as like there was
Speaker 1: an element of criticism, but also like awe, and it's
Speaker 1: it's fun because like Jack would always claim to hate
Speaker 1: this nickname, and his autobiography he writes from the numbers,
Speaker 1: you could make the case that there was either a
Speaker 1: neutron Jack or a company with too many positions. I
Speaker 1: naturally took comfort in the latter, but the neutron tag
Speaker 1: still got me down. I was fortunate to find remarkable
Speaker 1: support that got me through at home, in the office,
Speaker 1: and in the boardroom. I'd come home obviously a little
Speaker 1: down from the experience.
Speaker 3: Because he thought he was like being called a nerd.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it made him. It made him so sad to
Speaker 1: be described as a weapon of mass destruction. And in
Speaker 1: his autobiography he credits his first wife, Carolyn is helping
Speaker 1: him through the dark like emotional period that this created. Carolyn,
Speaker 1: in Jack's book, is always supportive of him, no matter
Speaker 1: how tough the press or his job is. She always
Speaker 1: ended a conversation with Jack. You have to do what
Speaker 1: you think is right for everyone, which.
Speaker 2: Is how you know every single scene between them is
Speaker 2: nothing like that's just the pr story period. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's another way you can know that, which is
Speaker 1: that he divorces Carolyn in nineteen eighty seven, about five
Speaker 1: years after this point in his In his story, their
Speaker 1: divorce gets two paragraphs of mentioned in his autobiography.
Speaker 2: It's like we never spoke, but when we did it
Speaker 2: was great, very not controversial. Then we got divorced for
Speaker 2: no reason.
Speaker 1: Yes, she was my roster and then I left Derry.
Speaker 1: You know, the divorce was a forbidden topic by his employees.
Speaker 1: And there's there's very little you can actually find about
Speaker 1: this first divorce of his. One of the very few
Speaker 1: statements I found about it comes from a guy with
Speaker 1: the very funny name Dick McLean, which you know we
Speaker 1: all appreciate.
Speaker 2: If you do the comma reverse thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, McLean, Dick McLean, Dick. That name is just like
Speaker 1: washing my face in a cool stream. Yes, just perfect.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Dick, Thank you once again. Uh. Dick was
Speaker 1: an environmental consultant from GE's plastics division who worked with
Speaker 1: a with Jack, and he told the La Times quote,
Speaker 1: you never heard anything about his first divorce. It was
Speaker 1: in everybody's best interest to make sure that it was
Speaker 1: all tuned down. His private life was always what was
Speaker 1: absolutely incredible, McLean said, but he declined to elaborate now.
Speaker 1: McLean was being interviewed for this article in the wake
Speaker 1: of Jack's second divorce to Jane Welch, the woman that
Speaker 1: he left Carolyn for, which occurred in two thousand and
Speaker 1: two after she found out that he had been cheating
Speaker 1: on her with the editor of the Harvard Business Review,
Speaker 1: who wrote that play praise worthy article that we quoted earlier.
Speaker 1: So that's fun, that's ethical as shit.
Speaker 2: You love the seal.
Speaker 3: All of his friends, all of his coworkers are just
Speaker 3: like they treat him like an ogre, Like he's just
Speaker 3: an ogre. In the room that no one wants to
Speaker 3: deal with. They're like, yeah, something's going on over there.
Speaker 3: But man, I know.
Speaker 1: You don't want you don't you don't want to like
Speaker 1: get Jack angry. That just makes everybody yeah, man, so yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very funny when like MacLean heard about the fact
Speaker 1: that he was his wife was leaving him because he
Speaker 1: cheated on her with the Harvard Business Review, Lady MacLean
Speaker 1: told The Times, my instant reaction was oops, checks back
Speaker 1: to his old ways, babies untethered. So these purges, by
Speaker 1: necessity killed the old ge. All these layoffs, the one
Speaker 1: in which workers have been able to rely on the
Speaker 1: company as a lifelong employer and rely on its benefits
Speaker 1: to take care of them with their old age. Jack
Speaker 1: called his campaign again to like He called the campaign
Speaker 1: to like destroy any kind of faith people had in
Speaker 1: Ge as a place where they could like stay. He
Speaker 1: called this his campaign against loyalty. And it was more
Speaker 1: than just firing people. He ordered his staff to avoid
Speaker 1: using the word loyal in press releases, and he ordered
Speaker 1: his underlings to stoke their workers with constant fear that
Speaker 1: there might lose their jobs. To emphasize all this, he
Speaker 1: wrote shit like this in his memos. The psychological contract
Speaker 1: has to change. My concept of loyalty is not giving
Speaker 1: time to some corporate entity and in turd being shielded
Speaker 1: and protected from the outside world. Loyalty is an affinity
Speaker 1: among people who want to grapple with the outside world
Speaker 1: and win. What is that?
Speaker 2: What is I?
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I don't like it. I think he's saying that, like,
Speaker 1: you know, I want the loyalty of like a team
Speaker 1: of soldiers fighting an enemy. But it's like, well, part
Speaker 1: of why soldiers are loyal to each other is they're
Speaker 1: like protecting each other, and you're saying I want that loyalty,
Speaker 1: but also fuck everyone who works for me.
Speaker 3: Right, Like it's it's just trying to sounds like it's
Speaker 3: larger than it is. We all know what you're doing here.
Speaker 3: You just need an excuse, And like, what are you
Speaker 3: even trying to say with anti loyalty? Like what if
Speaker 3: someone right now were to be like I don't think
Speaker 3: this is a good idea. You would restructure that man,
Speaker 3: you know like that there would be so much pushback
Speaker 3: from him, So like, what is he He absolutely values loyalty.
Speaker 3: He's hypocritical to a core.
Speaker 1: He values loyalty, but he's incensed by the idea that
Speaker 1: loyalty might be a two way street, right.
Speaker 2: That he would, Oh, loyalty has right, that's right. Yeah,
Speaker 2: He's like, that's what the money's for. I just need
Speaker 2: full profit. Why can't I get full profit? Mommy, ed
Speaker 2: g you were like a family, yea, and that I
Speaker 2: have the legal right to abandon you in a snowbank
Speaker 2: at any time.
Speaker 1: We're like a family in ancient Rome, where I, as
Speaker 1: the patter familias, have the legal right to execute all
Speaker 1: of you, right, jeezus. So the ultimate WMD in his
Speaker 1: campaign against loyalty wasn't a neutron bomb. It was a
Speaker 1: management strategy that Jacked helped to develop called stack ranking. Obviously,
Speaker 1: pieces of this that existed, other people you know, had
Speaker 1: come up with kind of some of these ideas. Jack
Speaker 1: is like the first person to institute them. At a
Speaker 1: major corporation, every year, managers were ordered to divide their
Speaker 1: workers into three groups based on performance. The bottom ten
Speaker 1: percent of the company was to be laid off every
Speaker 1: single year. This meant that no matter how well a
Speaker 1: division or the company did, people were always going to
Speaker 1: get fired. And since managers were required to rank their employees.
Speaker 1: Many of those layoffs would be adequate or good employees
Speaker 1: who simply lost a political game. Stack ranking spread rapidly
Speaker 1: throughout the country. Jacks peers saw that every wave of
Speaker 1: layoffs brought the stock price up, so they copied him. Today,
Speaker 1: HR software company Corvisio estimates that thirty percent of Fortune
Speaker 1: five hundred companies stack rank their employees. In November of
Speaker 1: last year, Amazon told managers to stack rank employees before
Speaker 1: carrying out the largest layoffs in their history. Jack took
Speaker 1: exceptional pride in how much he was copied. Some people
Speaker 1: think it's cruel or brutal to remove the bottom ten
Speaker 1: percent of our people. It isn't. It's just the opposite.
Speaker 1: What I think is brutal is false and false kindness
Speaker 1: is keeping people around who aren't going to grow and prosper.
Speaker 1: There's no cruelty like waiting and telling people late in
Speaker 1: their careers that they don't belong just when their job
Speaker 1: options are limited and they're putting their children through college,
Speaker 1: they're paying off big mortgages, which again, you might have
Speaker 1: a leg to stand on a flag. You had a
Speaker 1: policy if we only fire layoff people under a certain
Speaker 1: age you know, to make sure that the young ones level.
Speaker 2: But like if you have what if you have a
Speaker 2: unit of fifteen people and they're all good, and you're like, well,
Speaker 2: you have to fire some anyway for no reason. Incidentally,
Speaker 2: speaking of ancient Rome, this is where we literally get decimation.
Speaker 2: Decimate is like the the practice of forcing the unit
Speaker 2: to kill a tenth of the unit just so that
Speaker 2: the rest will be stronger. This dinosode dates back very,
Speaker 2: very far.
Speaker 1: It works.
Speaker 3: It works for a lot of stuff. You know, like
Speaker 3: I cut off every year, I cut off like a
Speaker 3: tenth of my body.
Speaker 2: I cut off one toe, Mike.
Speaker 1: You can learn all about this in my new book
Speaker 1: Managing like famous Roman dictators Sola. You know, Sola, as
Speaker 1: a general, understood that not only do you sometimes have
Speaker 1: to go through town throwing your enemies off of a
Speaker 1: cliff and so their bodies are dashed at the bottom
Speaker 1: and eaten by crows, but you also need to go
Speaker 1: gradually insane with age, get increasingly conspiratorial, and eventually retire
Speaker 1: to a villa in the hillside where you have unsettling
Speaker 1: sex with slaves for the last decade of your life.
Speaker 1: You know, all of these management strategies.
Speaker 2: Right, the management version of that management version of that yeah,
Speaker 2: which is how I run cool zone.
Speaker 1: You know it's it's it, It's great. Yeah you villa
Speaker 1: from my villa where I where I have recently led
Speaker 1: to a purge that forced the podcasting equivalent of Julius
Speaker 1: Caesar to flee Italy and in order to avoid being
Speaker 1: murdered for his loyalty to Guias Marius. You know that
Speaker 1: all happened, but the podcast loyalty bad.
Speaker 2: There you are, I don't know.
Speaker 1: We got off topic here, so you got you got
Speaker 1: off topic. The reality is that stack ranking often has
Speaker 1: disastrous outcomes for businesses. One twenty thirteen study in the
Speaker 1: Journal of Business Ethics found that ratings based performance reviews
Speaker 1: like the ones Jack instituted quote often failed to change
Speaker 1: how people work, and dissatisfaction with the appraisal process has
Speaker 1: been associated with general job dissatisfaction, lower organization commitment, and
Speaker 1: increased intentions to quit. Stack ranking is also generally recognized
Speaker 1: to be incredibly toxic to morale, which has led some
Speaker 1: of the companies that followed Jack to in the process
Speaker 1: or the practice, as this quote from Fast Company makes clear,
Speaker 1: after years of requiring managers to stack rank employees. Microsoft
Speaker 1: workers cited the practice as the most destructive process at
Speaker 1: the company. It leads to employees focusing on competing with
Speaker 1: each other rather than competing with other companies, one employee
Speaker 1: told Vanity Fair in twenty twelve. Microsoft asked the organization's
Speaker 1: stack ranking system in twenty thirteen. The article also quotes
Speaker 1: John Freese, a senior managing director at Encurrent Consulting, who said,
Speaker 1: straight up, Jack Welch was wrong. This is a guy
Speaker 1: we thought was incredible as a leader, but really he
Speaker 1: led based on fear. Now, the fact that Jack was
Speaker 1: was bad at his like the thing that was his
Speaker 1: primary claim to fame, that it like actually doesn't work
Speaker 1: very well and was in fact disasters for a number
Speaker 1: of businesses, never stops people from following him.
Speaker 2: It's like, what happens with these guys, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: It like no one collates the information to see if
Speaker 2: their idea worked, and crazy.
Speaker 1: What's happening now? A lot of tech companies are adopting
Speaker 1: it under the understanding like, well, it didn't work great
Speaker 1: in Jack's day because like you were kind of relying
Speaker 1: on managers and their subjective opinions about who was performing
Speaker 1: well or not. But now with all these computers and algorithms,
Speaker 1: we can shooes the best workers and then we can Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's still bullshit, but you know it doesn't matter because
Speaker 1: these people are too wealthy and powerful to ever face consequences,
Speaker 1: which is why we need a thing that rhymes with
Speaker 1: shmargtedgemush machination. But you know what else rhymes with that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: products services. That's right, m Ah, we're back. I for
Speaker 1: one loved those ads for untraceable poisons.
Speaker 2: I sharded in a pan for bacon. Is that what
Speaker 2: you were trying to say on the other side of
Speaker 2: the brim, that's right, and trying to figure it out.
Speaker 1: That that's what that's what will save us, Michael, That
Speaker 1: nothing illegal, just that.
Speaker 3: So anyway, all the money that Jackie Boy earned, you know,
Speaker 3: he paid two people to fight to the death in
Speaker 3: front of him.
Speaker 1: Okay, but look, okay, I guess we're gonna deal with
Speaker 1: this now. We're gonna like fight out this is this
Speaker 1: has been an argument you and I've been having for years. Yes,
Speaker 1: and I think it's very petty of you to bring
Speaker 1: it up here, Like some people pay others to fight
Speaker 1: to the death, for them. Okay, that doesn't mean you're
Speaker 1: a bad person. You know, it just happened, No, he did. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: but who amongst us hasn't right? Who amongst us hasn't
Speaker 1: been there yet?
Speaker 2: You know, I think it's telling that you're getting defensive
Speaker 2: when Abe was really just neutrally stating it. That's what
Speaker 2: I'm seeing here.
Speaker 1: Well, look, there's a lot of little mountain towns in
Speaker 1: rural California where there's not much work and people will
Speaker 1: do almost anything for seventy five dollars and a bottle
Speaker 1: of oxy codone. And I don't feel like it's fair
Speaker 1: to judge me for seeing if they could kill each
Speaker 1: other with sling blades, like in that movie sling Blade.
Speaker 1: And by the way, they can remember that movie sling Blade,
Speaker 1: I do remember Slingblade.
Speaker 3: And to mention another movie, Jurassic Park, you were all
Speaker 3: caught up thinking about how to do it that you
Speaker 3: didn't think about whether or not you should do it.
Speaker 1: And that's the point here, I mean, don't do it, Robert.
Speaker 1: I again, I just feel unfairly judged. But Jack was
Speaker 1: not judged negatively for stack ranking people, and in fact,
Speaker 1: the entire industry fell in love with the idea of
Speaker 1: firing ten percent of their companies for no real reason,
Speaker 1: but the fact that it made the stock market look good,
Speaker 1: and it made the stock market happy for no real
Speaker 1: reason because it didn't actually increase profits. It just meant
Speaker 1: that temporarily companies had more money to put into things
Speaker 1: like we'll talk about stock buybacks, to give out and dividends,
Speaker 1: and that made shareholders happy. It didn't make the company stronger,
Speaker 1: and in fact, over time it made them much much weaker.
Speaker 1: But that was that was for future people to deal with,
Speaker 1: not for fucking Jack Welch. So yeah. In his autobiography again,
Speaker 1: Jack tries to dress this up as him doing a
Speaker 1: kindness to his workers because if he shitcans them when
Speaker 1: they're in the prime of life, being laid off, as
Speaker 1: he says, just another transition. You know. He even describes
Speaker 1: as like a charity that he's doing. I'm freeing them
Speaker 1: from a job they're bad at, so then go succeed
Speaker 1: somewhere else. Right, it's a social good. Now, the reality
Speaker 1: is that being laid off, which is you know, some
Speaker 1: firing someone not because they fucked up, because the company
Speaker 1: wanted to do. Shareholder value is one of the most
Speaker 1: stressful and traumatic things that Americans regularly endure. One study
Speaker 1: found that it is the seventh most stressful life experience,
Speaker 1: above divorce or the death of a close friend, and
Speaker 1: that on average, it takes two years to recover from. Now,
Speaker 1: that may seem a little crazy, especially the more stressful
Speaker 1: than the death of a friend part, But there is Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if Abe died and and I got fired, I'd
Speaker 2: be like, I need a job, dude.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you wouldn't be. You wouldn't be just searching
Speaker 1: straight away for another a you gotta make rent right.
Speaker 2: And then yeah, I could save that grief for later.
Speaker 2: Not that there's no grief, but that will come. I
Speaker 2: need a job, yeah, yeah, a job.
Speaker 1: I have to be able to to fucking you know,
Speaker 1: pay for my rent and various various gummy bears and
Speaker 1: jujubis that I consume. So there is also just objective
Speaker 1: of le a serious health cost to being laid off.
Speaker 1: For healthy people with no pre existing medical conditions, if
Speaker 1: they are laid off, the odds that they will develop
Speaker 1: a new health condition raised by eighty three percent in
Speaker 1: the year and a half after getting laid off. The
Speaker 1: risk of yeah, it's significant the risk of suicide increases
Speaker 1: by one point three to three times. Jack Welch laid
Speaker 1: off more than one hundred and five thousand employees in
Speaker 1: his first five years as ge CEO in the US.
Speaker 1: At that time, the suicide rate was around thirteen per
Speaker 1: hundred thousand people aged fifteen to twenty four. This means,
Speaker 1: in crude terms, just in terms of suicide, we're looking
Speaker 1: at like thirty or forty deaths somewhere in that neighborhood.
Speaker 2: I love this show. Imagine that your life. You're like
Speaker 2: I me as a person, I made the suicide rate
Speaker 2: in the country, Go up, I did that? Hey, hey
Speaker 2: number go up? Hey if the planet suicide, yes, then
Speaker 2: that's just listing Earth's stot, you know, suicide exchange. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's like me.
Speaker 1: You know, there's I think probably dozens of deaths of
Speaker 1: suicides that we can associate to Jack's layoffs, which you
Speaker 1: have to also like hundreds of thousands. Eventually, millions of
Speaker 1: people are laid off because of these strategies over the
Speaker 1: course of decades, because of the strategies that he helps
Speaker 1: to pioneer. So again, that's quite a few deaths you
Speaker 1: can lay at this guy's feet. You can also blame
Speaker 1: him directly for some of the worst moments of my
Speaker 1: childhood and some of the worst moments I'm gonna guess
Speaker 1: for the in the childhoods and adult lives of a
Speaker 1: lot of the people listening to this show who remember
Speaker 1: like a parent getting laid off as part of a
Speaker 1: yearly fucking layoff binge like this, and like coming home
Speaker 1: to their parents, like weeping and not sure how to
Speaker 1: like fucking pay for basic necessities and stressed out for
Speaker 1: months on end. You know, the the shock waves that
Speaker 1: this guy's decision makes in the lives of tens of
Speaker 1: millions of people are kind of impossible to like adequately
Speaker 1: want to. Yeah, yeah, anyway, I don't know. Again, untraceable
Speaker 1: poisons go to untraceable poisons dot com. Use promo code
Speaker 1: Jack welch uh and I don't know, find someone talking
Speaker 1: about fucking the stock market and put it in their drink.
Speaker 1: That's that's the behind the bastards. You, yeah, untraceable poison
Speaker 1: study to you. Yeah. So it's interesting to me that
Speaker 1: Jack wasn't content just being a cool mister Burns style
Speaker 1: corporate psychopath. He repeatedly pushed the line that he was
Speaker 1: doing because mister Burns was just like, you fire workers
Speaker 1: because fuck them right, because you're because it's fun.
Speaker 2: You know, I know, I don't care.
Speaker 1: Jack was like, no, I'm doing a kindness to them.
Speaker 1: This is what's best for them, it's best for all
Speaker 1: of society. Really, his speech writer, the guy who was
Speaker 1: like his speechwriter, a ge later explained in an interview quote,
Speaker 1: Jack loved the approval of Wall Street, but the Irish
Speaker 1: and him craved the approved an affection of the divested
Speaker 1: employees as well. He wanted to believe they were thrilled
Speaker 1: at being divested. Oh boy again, but.
Speaker 2: Irish people love wearing vests, real waistcoat culture. Now I loved,
Speaker 2: But like, what a weird, dated way to like the
Speaker 2: Irish in him, you know what I mean, the poor
Speaker 2: people inside of him.
Speaker 3: I know, I know he's just a bastard, and I
Speaker 3: don't have that much sympathy for the devil, but I can't.
Speaker 3: Everything you tell me doesn't make me more angry because
Speaker 3: I know all this stuff exists. It makes me sad.
Speaker 3: I'm sad for Jack, like because he so much of
Speaker 3: him is like it's so important to him that he's
Speaker 3: liked and that he like everyone thinks he's a cool guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just so sad.
Speaker 1: Kind of what it just it leads to is his
Speaker 1: colleagues the other people in like higher oppositions, a ge
Speaker 1: engineering a situation by which he thinks that he's liked
Speaker 1: by employees because obviously he is not. People will talk
Speaker 1: about like it used to be fun to work here.
Speaker 1: I used to feel good about coming into work. I
Speaker 1: hate it now I'm miserable all the time. You've turned
Speaker 1: this place into a hell.
Speaker 2: I'm leaving to join the crew of the Ellen Degenerous Show.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly, so I could finally get some respect. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I also think, you know, it's possible that this
Speaker 1: speech writer is himself kind of misled, and Jack maybe
Speaker 1: did not care nearly as much as this guy thinks
Speaker 1: about what employees felt about him. Because Jack also had
Speaker 1: a reputation for using kind of the language of warfare
Speaker 1: and violence to describe layoffs. He was known to when
Speaker 1: he would do like his tours of different business units
Speaker 1: and stuff, he would mark workers out for firing by
Speaker 1: saying they should be shot, shoot them, or they ought
Speaker 1: to be shot, all of which meant lay that person
Speaker 1: off right now, which is like, that's like psycho shit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's doctor Strange lives. Yeah, you know, like everyone
Speaker 3: like Patten. My favorite guy in the world is Paton.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly.
Speaker 2: And then the fucking goal. The move that I always
Speaker 2: hate the most is why don't people like me? Fuck
Speaker 2: you dude?
Speaker 3: No, absolutely, absolutely, But it's so sad when it's like
Speaker 3: when you just hear of it, because now I'll you know,
Speaker 3: Robert did this because he made us think about the
Speaker 3: boy first. Yeah, you know, I don't have what you're having.
Speaker 2: I have no.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I will say in terms of Patten, Patton had
Speaker 1: one experience that I think would have improved Jack Welch.
Speaker 1: He was shot several times by a machine gun, and
Speaker 1: and really I think that that that, you know, we
Speaker 1: could have tried it out, is all I'm saying. You know,
Speaker 1: it might have helped.
Speaker 2: If you're gonna lead with fear, maybe have a little
Speaker 2: in your own life. Yeah, at least a little.
Speaker 1: You should have seen the machine gun though, so so,
Speaker 1: since you can't lay tens of thousands of workers off
Speaker 1: without causing problems, Jack also embraced another strategy that was
Speaker 1: about to become vogue in corporate America, outsourcing he was
Speaker 1: famous for saying shit like, don't own a cafeteria, Let
Speaker 1: a food company do it. Don't run a print shop,
Speaker 1: Let a printing company do it. What this means is
Speaker 1: that he fired janitors and security guards and food service workers,
Speaker 1: and then he brought in low paid temps who were
Speaker 1: in contracts with outside companies to do the same thing
Speaker 1: that had previously been done by people who had a
Speaker 1: decent standard of living and a pension. Right, That was
Speaker 1: the whole point is like, well why would we And
Speaker 1: one of the things this does is it creates for
Speaker 1: the first time at these big companies like GE, there's
Speaker 1: different tiers of worker Before at GE, you know, your
Speaker 1: best engineers and the people at the cafeteria are all
Speaker 1: GE employees, right, they all you know, they get different
Speaker 1: compensation obviously, but they're all they're all on the company
Speaker 1: health plan, they all have a pension, they all have
Speaker 1: life insurance. Now you've got this second class of human
Speaker 1: being in all of these GE facilities who are basically
Speaker 1: on the verge of collapse at all times because they're
Speaker 1: not being taken care of by their employer. And the
Speaker 1: United States has no social welfare system. And of course,
Speaker 1: again you can't. One of the things I'm probably not
Speaker 1: getting into enough here. You can't separate anything that Jack
Speaker 1: is doing from the fact that this is the Reagan era, right,
Speaker 1: A lot of like what he's able to do is
Speaker 1: because of rules about how corporations are allowed to behave
Speaker 1: get loosened and we'll talk more about that in a
Speaker 1: little bit by the Reagan administration. And so all of
Speaker 1: these workers who are being let go and all of
Speaker 1: these temps who are being brought in are benefiting from
Speaker 1: less social welfare programs than people had previously, because you know,
Speaker 1: the Reagan administration is cutting that at the same time
Speaker 1: that Jack is cutting these people out of general electrics,
Speaker 1: you know, corporate welfare system. So another thing that Jack
Speaker 1: pioneered was offshore.
Speaker 2: And mention Homer's Yes, Oh, I was just gonna say,
Speaker 2: mentioned Homer Simpson. And it is striking me now how
Speaker 2: it's just the dumbest possible way to go about Like
Speaker 2: it's not even like he's pretending to play forty chess.
Speaker 2: It is not a sophisticated thought. It's very much like
Speaker 2: when Homer is a garbage man and his motto is
Speaker 2: can't someone else do it? And you just say that
Speaker 2: like it's brilliant and it's really not.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Fuck, certain people just.
Speaker 3: Have confidence apparently it is his superpower and be angry
Speaker 3: a lot.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean that that is like the only real superpower.
Speaker 1: You know, Like people who are into like the occult
Speaker 1: and and and magic and stuff like talk about the
Speaker 1: fact that like real like like the like what magic
Speaker 1: actually is is kind of like the the utilization of
Speaker 1: like will in order to change the world, right, And
Speaker 1: I think the clearest example of that is not like,
Speaker 1: you know, wizard guys like Alan Moore, It's guys like
Speaker 1: Jack Welch. This is this is a powerful dark wizard, right,
Speaker 1: He's using pure willpower, pure self confidence to remake the
Speaker 1: world in his own image, to do a thing you
Speaker 1: shouldn't be able to do, To destroy a company's ability
Speaker 1: to profit, to destroy all of its business, to destroy
Speaker 1: its it like the creation of things that previously like
Speaker 1: made it great, and replace that purely with this illusion
Speaker 1: that is somehow more profitable than the thing that actually
Speaker 1: produced items of value.
Speaker 2: That's like a virus until every other company also operates
Speaker 2: that way. It's quite something.
Speaker 1: This is. And by the way, when we talk like
Speaker 1: in terms of like fantasy authors who understood this about magic.
Speaker 1: This is exactly how Tokein conceived of it, more or
Speaker 1: less right, Like this is Saamon, you know, like that's
Speaker 1: happening here. Yeah, anyway, cool shit. So Jack pioneered offshoring
Speaker 1: the process of moving production facilities and jobs to companies
Speaker 1: with looser labor laws and lower minimum wages. During speeches
Speaker 1: and interviews, he often set variations of this line. Ideally,
Speaker 1: you'd have every plant you own on a barge to
Speaker 1: move with currencies and changes in the economy. And he's
Speaker 1: going to like move ge to have its corporate headquarters.
Speaker 1: But I think it's the fucking Bahamas or something like
Speaker 1: he's one of the first guys. He does that too.
Speaker 1: But again, like there was this attitude in the previous
Speaker 1: era by a lot, not all, but a lot of
Speaker 1: like executives that paying taxes to like support the country
Speaker 1: functioning was one of your jobs as like a business
Speaker 1: you know leader. And Jack is like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: we have to hallow this country out. And part of
Speaker 1: what that means is like making sure we have no
Speaker 1: responsibility to the United States whatsoever. He helps lobby the
Speaker 1: Reagan administration for like an change in business law that
Speaker 1: basically means like you can kind of by shifting like
Speaker 1: technically where products are being moved through, you can pay
Speaker 1: taxes in different companies. It's I don't need to get
Speaker 1: into the specifics of it, but like one of the
Speaker 1: things that does is that suddenly a huge amount of
Speaker 1: GE's biggest transactions are technically legally occurring in Ireland, which
Speaker 1: has a very very low tax rate. For that sort
Speaker 1: of thing, It's it's cool shit. So Jack was not able,
Speaker 1: obviously to literally put all of his plants on barges
Speaker 1: to move them around the ocean, but by moving jobs
Speaker 1: out of the country or just to parts of the
Speaker 1: country without as many unionized workers, he was able to
Speaker 1: break the back of the unionized workforce that had helped
Speaker 1: make GE a powerhouse. Jack was also one of the
Speaker 1: first CEOs to outsource to India, and as the GE
Speaker 1: stock price continued to outpace the market, more and more
Speaker 1: of his colleagues followed him. One of the few aspects
Speaker 1: of GE that Jack had any actual love for was
Speaker 1: the previously minor finance division. We talked about this a
Speaker 1: bit in Part one, but this is what actually made
Speaker 1: it all work. I'm sure the question that a lot
Speaker 1: of people have right now is like, well, but you
Speaker 1: say the company kept making more money, So was he
Speaker 1: maybe just actually doing a good thing that you didn't like.
Speaker 1: And my argument would be no, because the reason that
Speaker 1: GE's balance sheet looked good, that it looked like profits
Speaker 1: were increasing, and that the stock price kept increasing is
Speaker 1: that Jack understood how to use this finance division as
Speaker 1: basically like to create a fog of war around the
Speaker 1: internal company functioning that looked really good to people on
Speaker 1: the outside because he was able to kind of manipulate
Speaker 1: the balance sheet. Right, So what he was doing is
Speaker 1: using this finance division to buy up new businesses rather
Speaker 1: than like R and D and develop anything of its
Speaker 1: own that looked like they would be profitable. And at
Speaker 1: the same time he would sell off businesses GE had,
Speaker 1: many of which were still profitable because it would bring
Speaker 1: in these swift, short term profits. And by kind of
Speaker 1: mixing these sales of business units with purchasing business units,
Speaker 1: he was able to ensure that the balance sheet kind
Speaker 1: of said whatever he wanted it to say, so he
Speaker 1: could say, at the end of Q one, these are
Speaker 1: where our numbers will be, and then he would just
Speaker 1: buy and sell companies until the numbers matched that, and
Speaker 1: so do the people on Wall Street. It looks like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, GE's like hit its numbers again. That's great.
Speaker 1: But what's really happening is he's just kind of like
Speaker 1: shuffling shit around in order to make it look like
Speaker 1: he still has a business that's producing something. A good
Speaker 1: example of this would be in nineteen eighty five, Ge
Speaker 1: purchases RCA, which Jack justified to Congress because they have
Speaker 1: to have like an antitrust hearing over this by saying
Speaker 1: it would let an American manufacturer compete efficiently with a
Speaker 1: Japanese manufacture. But he didn't do this instead of trading
Speaker 1: the entire Instead, he traded so he like buys this,
Speaker 1: being like this will be good, this is worth you know,
Speaker 1: it being kind of bad for competition because it will
Speaker 1: decrease prices and provide a better product for Americans to
Speaker 1: buy that they'll buy instead of Japanese products. Right, But
Speaker 1: instead of actually making like shit with the TV division
Speaker 1: that he had bought, he sells the TV manufacturing division
Speaker 1: to a French company and exchange for a medical device business.
Speaker 1: One of the only things he actually keeps from the
Speaker 1: rc sale is NBC author Barry Lynn writes in Two Strokes,
Speaker 1: Welch remade multiple world spanning industries. The rationalbehyde is moves
Speaker 1: with simple concentrate power, avoid direct competition with firms backed
Speaker 1: by mercantilist states as Japan's electronics companies were, and focus
Speaker 1: on industrial activities that could be protected through interaction with regulators.
Speaker 1: The medical device business or the pentagons because RCA has
Speaker 1: a defense business that he also keeps, so he's not competing.
Speaker 1: He's not interested in providing a product. What he's interested
Speaker 1: in doing is kind of like using GE's financial power
Speaker 1: and the fact that they can get loaned money to
Speaker 1: buy and sell pieces of the company in order to
Speaker 1: optimize how it looks on paper.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: The interesting thing to me about this is that the
Speaker 1: division that Jack traded to get, like this medical device division,
Speaker 1: doesn't make a profit. In fact, it's a disaster. After
Speaker 1: he acquires this business, its profits collapse and the division
Speaker 1: goes bankrupt effectively enough, But this doesn't actually hurt Ge
Speaker 1: or Welch's reputation like it seems like a disaster. We
Speaker 1: bought this company, we traded away its best assets for
Speaker 1: this medical device business, and then that business fails. That
Speaker 1: seems like something that should get you in trouble, But
Speaker 1: the stock price still went up. As David Gel's writes,
Speaker 1: what mattered and what Welch had achieved with the RCA
Speaker 1: deal was making GE bigger. GE's television set business was
Speaker 1: now one of the largest in the world, fulfilling the
Speaker 1: mandate Welch laid out at the Pierre Hotel in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty one that every group should be number one or
Speaker 1: number two in its category. So in all of these
Speaker 1: tactics mass LFS, outsourcing, offshoring, high speed trading of corporate assets,
Speaker 1: Welch set precedents that his CEO peers couldn't wait to copy.
Speaker 1: And I'm going to quote now from an article by
Speaker 1: Matt Staller. By the two thousands, the company founded by
Speaker 1: Thomas Edison didn't even manufacture light bulbs, sourcing them from
Speaker 1: Chinese contractors and branding them as GE products. Other leading companies,
Speaker 1: such as General Motors followed Welch's path. In the mid
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, GM bought both Electronic Data Systems and Hughes Aircraft,
Speaker 1: attempting to diversify away from the auto industry in which
Speaker 1: it was set up against foreign competitors backed by governments
Speaker 1: into regulated industries with government contracts. What it couldn't do
Speaker 1: by diversifying, it did by offshoring, moving production to low
Speaker 1: wage areas like northern Mexico. Starting in the early nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: the steel industry did the same thing. US Steel bought
Speaker 1: not only Marathon Oil for six point three billion, but
Speaker 1: three paid three point six billion for Texas Gas and Oil.
Speaker 1: National Steel bought United Financial Corporation of California, and another
Speaker 1: steel company, Armco, went into insurance. Meanwhile, in nineteen eighty ses,
Speaker 1: the Reagan administration's Commerce Department invited thirty eight thousand American
Speaker 1: companies to a trade fair in Acapulco explore it and
Speaker 1: encouraging them to explore moving factories to Mexico. So again,
Speaker 1: Jack is not the only guy doing this. He's not
Speaker 1: the inventor of this concept, but he proves that it's
Speaker 1: incredibly profitable. He basically shows these companies you can build
Speaker 1: and maintain a business that makes things, or you can
Speaker 1: be in the business. You can basically turn your company
Speaker 1: into like a balance sheet from a fin like a
Speaker 1: finance company, right where you're buying and selling assets and
Speaker 1: you're not in any particular business as much as you're
Speaker 1: in the business of shuffling around these assets, and that
Speaker 1: way it's really easy to do something like, oh, we
Speaker 1: made an extra billion dollars this year, so let's sell
Speaker 1: off this business that's not doing as well and like
Speaker 1: claim that as a loss, and then we can kind
Speaker 1: of offset our tax burden. It'll like, yeah, like all
Speaker 1: this kind of like fuckery you hadn't been able to
Speaker 1: do before Jack realized. Is that kind of by turning
Speaker 1: your corporation into a big unlicensed bank, that's a much
Speaker 1: smarter idea than actually producing anything of value.
Speaker 2: I mentioned magic and Dirk Wizards. I would say it's honestly,
Speaker 2: he's less like Saramon because his magic actually does change
Speaker 2: the world, and he's more like a stage magician or
Speaker 2: a David Blaine, where he's just like it's sleight of hand, right. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he's drawn attention away from thoughts like what does this
Speaker 2: business do or make is it useful, and drawn it
Speaker 2: to you don't have to worry about that. The number
Speaker 2: was forty now it's forty one exactly two.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's something else. By the mid nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: Jack Welch was the most celebrated CEO in the country
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways. He's one of like the
Speaker 1: very first celebrity CEOs of the modern era. He's the
Speaker 1: subject of fawning profiles and business magazines for his brilliant
Speaker 1: leadership and his unprecedented stock market success.
Speaker 2: And it's all stills him. And he was happy, and
Speaker 2: he could stop.
Speaker 3: Michael never cried.
Speaker 1: He's about to get a little sad because right about
Speaker 1: this time in nineteen eighty four, Fortune magazine declares him
Speaker 1: the toughest boss in America. And they don't mean this
Speaker 1: as a compliment. They write, Welch conducts meetings so aggressively
Speaker 1: that people tremble. He attacks almost physically with his intellect, criticizing, demeaning, ridiculing, humiliating.
Speaker 1: In The Man who Broke Capitalism, David Gellis goes even further, quote,
Speaker 1: Welch was, in short, a bully. You fucking guys don't
Speaker 1: know what the fuck you're doing, He fumed at executives
Speaker 1: in the plastics division when they miss their numbers. It
Speaker 1: was what The Wall Street Journal described as Welch's hazing
Speaker 1: as shouting match approach that requires managers to argue strenuously
Speaker 1: even if they agreed with him, said one manager whom
Speaker 1: Welch replaced. You can't even say hello to Jack without
Speaker 1: it being confrontational. If you don't want to step up
Speaker 1: to Jack toe to toe, belly to belly and argue
Speaker 1: your point, he doesn't have any use for you. In
Speaker 1: his autobiography, Welch calls this Fortune article that describes him
Speaker 1: as a bully one of the worst moments of his career.
Speaker 1: He's like, it's so but it like again, I think
Speaker 1: he's just full of shit because he knows he should
Speaker 1: say that, because this has no impact on his behavior.
Speaker 2: His soul is.
Speaker 1: Other than this hus He maintains a chip on his
Speaker 1: shoulder regarding journalists for the rest of his life. He
Speaker 1: had initially been thrilled to acquire NBC and he specifically
Speaker 1: he says he was excited because it meant he'd get
Speaker 1: to write paychecks for guys like David Letterman who were famous.
Speaker 1: But then he yeah, it's very very that child, Yeah, yeah, yeah, silly.
Speaker 1: But Jack also he gets very frustrated because he realizes,
Speaker 1: like owning a news company doesn't mean you can force
Speaker 1: the news division to report on things the way you want.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen eighty seven, we have this thing called
Speaker 1: Black Monday, which is like one of our many great
Speaker 1: market collapses, and Tom Brokaw gives a report on the
Speaker 1: nightly news about how bad the damage was going to be.
Speaker 1: Right where he's talking about like this is not just
Speaker 1: one bad day, like this is going to continue, echoing
Speaker 1: this is a serious problem. Welch calls the head of
Speaker 1: NBC's news division and complains, you're killing all the stocks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what do you do you think that he ever
Speaker 3: like had stopped, and he's like, maybe I will. Maybe
Speaker 3: RoboCop the Villain is based.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe maybe Paul Verhoeven read a profile of me
Speaker 1: and immediately made RoboCop am I.
Speaker 3: All of America's satires focus like he's just the all villains.
Speaker 1: All the cartoons are about me, Like, yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's something else. It's very funny too, because the head
Speaker 1: of NBC's news division, when he's like you're killing the stocks,
Speaker 1: you have to stop him is like it just says,
Speaker 1: this is not a thing I am willing to talk
Speaker 1: about with you, and end's the call.
Speaker 3: You'll never get me.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, So this is not going to be the
Speaker 1: last time that Welch has a competitor or a fight
Speaker 1: with his journalists, and it's not going to go as
Speaker 1: well the next time. But we'll get to that in
Speaker 1: a little bit. In nineteen ninety three, Jack goes through
Speaker 1: one of his regular mass layoffs and reappointments of talent
Speaker 1: and producers at NBC. He picks a new manager for CNBC,
Speaker 1: his business news channel. You want to guess what this
Speaker 1: guy's name was, Come on, come.
Speaker 3: On, dick, no dicks, slurpy McLean.
Speaker 1: I'll give you a hint. He's a sex pest. I'll
Speaker 1: give you another hint. He helped break the United States.
Speaker 2: Break it.
Speaker 1: It's Roger Ails. I was like, you have to be
Speaker 1: more specific. This is the guy who starts Roger Ales
Speaker 1: his career.
Speaker 2: Isn't it wild that sex pest narrows almost nothing down
Speaker 2: at all?
Speaker 1: Wow? That just that's just brought it down to a
Speaker 1: couple hundred guys. So he hires Roger Ales to run CNBC.
Speaker 1: One of the first things Roger does is he creates
Speaker 1: a new network of his own called America's Talking, dedicated
Speaker 1: to full time political news, which was kind of a
Speaker 1: wild concept in the era, and it's something that he
Speaker 1: would uh, he would follow up with a little bit
Speaker 1: later because he's not at NBCCNBC very long. Ales gets
Speaker 1: fired three years in due to you know, all of
Speaker 1: the sex crime stuff. But Welch bears him no ill
Speaker 1: will for this. He alters Roger's non compete clause so
Speaker 1: that Ales could immediately take a job from another asshole,
Speaker 1: Rupert Murdoch, which turned into Fox News. So we have
Speaker 1: Jack to partially thank for Fox. Isn't that cool?
Speaker 2: And then Nate way back three minutes ago when you
Speaker 2: said it turns out you can't force the news to
Speaker 2: say what you want. I'm like, yeah, I can't move,
Speaker 2: can't you?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Eventually, can't you?
Speaker 1: You can get in there?
Speaker 3: Does he go to like conventions where like you choose
Speaker 3: like evil conventions where you go and you just like
Speaker 3: walk downline. It's like, oh, that's a new type of evil.
Speaker 3: Maybe we should buy that. Let's get a little that
Speaker 3: in the mix. God, so he fucked up media as well.
Speaker 1: He sure did. He's quite prolific in his fuckery.
Speaker 3: Wow, good way to go, Jackie boy.
Speaker 2: But he gave the projectonegy character he did was to
Speaker 2: break even good character little.
Speaker 1: Yeah, fifty to fifty. So since GE's profits continued to
Speaker 1: rise alongside their stock price, Jack gained an almost divine
Speaker 1: reputation as a corporate mastermind. The truth was that he
Speaker 1: made many very expensive mistakes. A good example of this
Speaker 1: would be the purchase of Kidder Peabody, an investment bank
Speaker 1: that he thought would give him first crack at new
Speaker 1: acquisition deals without needing to pay fees to brokerage houses.
Speaker 1: But again, Kidder was in worse shape than it seemed.
Speaker 1: He hadn't done his due diligence properly, and right after
Speaker 1: it gets acquired, one of its best traders gets caught
Speaker 1: carrying out one of the largest cases of insider criminal
Speaker 1: insider trading in the history of the United States. So
Speaker 1: this is a problem.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: The political fallout to this forces him to bring in
Speaker 1: a new head for the business, and he picked a
Speaker 1: GE board member whose prior experience was running a tool company.
Speaker 1: When the market crashed the next year, Kidder imploded, and
Speaker 1: for a time they're even kind of staring at potentially
Speaker 1: a massive fine for all of these crimes that their
Speaker 1: trader had committed while working for them. But thankfully, one
Speaker 1: of Welch's men was able to negotiate a sweetheart deal
Speaker 1: with the prosecutor in this case. And you want to
Speaker 1: guess what that guy's name was, I'll give you a hands.
Speaker 1: He he was real close when nine to eleven went down.
Speaker 1: And now his head melts sometimes.
Speaker 2: Giuliani, Yep, yeah, it was re melty head. Detail.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Rudy Giuliani. We're getting all the all the greats
Speaker 1: are coming in. He also helps Trump by Trump Tower, uh,
Speaker 1: because their friends friend and.
Speaker 2: That's where he got the hammer. And we got there.
Speaker 2: You're like, then he meets him and him and you're like, oh, okay,
Speaker 2: I see how this is gonna go.
Speaker 1: So Jack's real genius was an understanding how to run
Speaker 1: GE like an asset portfolio and other in order to
Speaker 1: game the market. Again, as I said, he would buy
Speaker 1: companies or sell them and even hand over assets to
Speaker 1: charity sometimes in order to make sure that ges like
Speaker 1: earnings met the targets he was setting, because that's something
Speaker 1: that always makes the stock people very, very happy. This
Speaker 1: allowed him to disguise the strength of his actual business,
Speaker 1: which he was steadily hollowing out by camouflaging it with acquisitions.
Speaker 1: As former GE marketing executive Beth Comstock said GE had
Speaker 1: a financial army that was able to close the quarter
Speaker 1: the way we'd said we would. Now, this some times
Speaker 1: meant destroying thousands of human lives. For example, in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety seven, GE made a huge deal with Lockheed Martin
Speaker 1: which earned them one point five billion dollars in profit
Speaker 1: and another six hundred million dollars in tax breaks. That's great, right,
Speaker 1: that seems like good news, right, But all of that
Speaker 1: money going into the quarter it was going into was
Speaker 1: gonna mean GE was going to have to pay more taxes,
Speaker 1: and that's just not something that Jack Welch was willing
Speaker 1: to accept. So some of their factories were underperforming, so
Speaker 1: they closed a bunch of factories, which gave them a
Speaker 1: two point three billion dollar loss on paper, even though
Speaker 1: the factories had been like paying for themselves. He was
Speaker 1: able to take a two point three billion dollar loss
Speaker 1: by closing them, which allowed him to offset the profits.
Speaker 1: A thousand people lost their jobs, but the stock went up. Right.
Speaker 1: This is when I talk about like how he would
Speaker 1: fuck around with acquisitions and sales to disguise what was
Speaker 1: going on at the business. Like this is the kind
Speaker 1: of shit that he would do. And he was very
Speaker 1: good at this. Now all of this, yeah, it's pretty good, right.
Speaker 2: It's impressive.
Speaker 3: It's impressive that because you have to think about also
Speaker 3: the margins, like this is Ge. They're talking about American
Speaker 3: steel and plastics and oil. It's like he had too
Speaker 3: much power. He had too much power. And you know
Speaker 3: who else has too much power?
Speaker 2: Ads?
Speaker 1: That's right. The ads that we put on this show
Speaker 1: are all hand picked because they were designed by a
Speaker 1: team of evil psychiatrists in order to hack your brains
Speaker 1: and force you to purchase products and occasionally occasionally murder
Speaker 1: your families. So by these products.
Speaker 2: The power of capitalism compels you.
Speaker 1: Ah, we're back. I hope this time nobody was was
Speaker 1: was convinced by the ads to.
Speaker 2: I'm saddled with products now, I'm just paid down by
Speaker 2: products and services, all of them. I couldn't help it,
Speaker 2: all of them.
Speaker 3: All the services are in me glorious.
Speaker 1: That's exactly, That's exactly what Jack Welch would have wanted.
Speaker 2: What an inimitable thing to say.
Speaker 1: Thank you. So all of this kind of you know,
Speaker 1: Jack welt shit came with a serious cost. One of
Speaker 1: them is that Ge stopped doing in house r and
Speaker 1: d Again, this is the company that invented like all
Speaker 1: of the plastics we use, and like light bulbs. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: the brain division does not make short term profits.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: You put money into the brain division to make all
Speaker 1: of the money in the future. But Jack has no
Speaker 1: interest in that, right.
Speaker 2: Thinking of the light bulb is not profitable. Where's the
Speaker 2: profit in thinking about light bulb?
Speaker 1: Find a guy who already thought of a light bulb
Speaker 1: by his company and then sell it six months later
Speaker 1: to offset the profits from another. Yeah, Like, it's just
Speaker 1: it's just fucking nonsense, but it's very profitable nonsense for
Speaker 1: reasons that are themselves nonsensical. GE had basically become a
Speaker 1: venture capital company, Right, That's what he turns GE into,
Speaker 1: and that's what it will be for the remainder of
Speaker 1: Jacks ten years CEO. Perhaps the most influence changed. An
Speaker 1: infamous change that he instituted was stock buybacks. This is
Speaker 1: when a public company buy shares in itself from other
Speaker 1: investors at a marked up rate, theoretically because they feel
Speaker 1: their stock is undervalued. Since this increases earnings per share,
Speaker 1: which Wall Street analysts use to measure success, it also
Speaker 1: boosts the stock price, letting companies manipulate their own stock. Now,
Speaker 1: this was made not close to illegal, like it's not
Speaker 1: technically illegal, but it's like very hard to do in
Speaker 1: a way that's legal. So it doesn't really happen after
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty three. And the reason why it gets restricted
Speaker 1: heavily after nineteen thirty three is that this kind of
Speaker 1: shit is part of what caused the Great Depression.
Speaker 2: Well, the reason is obvious.
Speaker 1: That's like him, it's very clear why this is a
Speaker 1: bad idea.
Speaker 2: Can I just change the number? Can I just change
Speaker 2: it to whatever at any time? I go?
Speaker 1: So? Yeah? Cool. In nineteen eighty two, the Reagan administration's
Speaker 1: sec signed off on a law that made buybacks lot easier.
Speaker 1: And again we're not going into this as much as
Speaker 1: perhaps they should. But like for every fucked up thing
Speaker 1: that Jack does, there's a change in regulations that's heralded
Speaker 1: and pushed through by the Reagan administration right like like
Speaker 1: they are. You cannot separate the two from like from.
Speaker 3: Why like things have warning labels. Basically he had to sign.
Speaker 3: Reagan had to sign each one of these terrible ideas.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, he was the gipper, couldn't get enough. He was.
Speaker 1: He was signing ship and then like staring off into
Speaker 1: the distance and like I don't remember what numbers are really,
Speaker 1: but I can remember sitting. Yeah, like he's he's he's
Speaker 1: like fucking zoning out thinking of bedtime for Bonzo as
Speaker 1: like Nancy feeds him fucking gummy bears so that he
Speaker 1: can sign a piece of paper to force everyone out
Speaker 1: of the mental institutions. It's, uh, it's good stuff.
Speaker 2: How does this suppress the gays? I mean some of
Speaker 2: the we lay off for gag great, great.
Speaker 1: Thinks Nancy fucking drooling as his brain melts out of
Speaker 1: his ears. Will Jack Welch dances a little caper to
Speaker 1: get him to deregulate the fucking dumping into rivers, like
Speaker 1: it's it's awesome, It's so good in nineteen eighty so yeah,
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty two, the Reagan administration is like, buy backx
Speaker 1: aer a thing we're fine with now, and Jack Welch
Speaker 1: responds by what was then the largest stock buyback in
Speaker 1: US history, ten billion dollars. Ten billion dollars that in
Speaker 1: a previous era would have gone like straight to ge employees, right,
Speaker 1: Instead all goes to just pumping up the company's stock value.
Speaker 1: Now the rush to follow Jack, because everybody follows in
Speaker 1: his wake, is not something that Jack causes alone. Again,
Speaker 1: he's not the cause of this as much as he
Speaker 1: is kind of the most. He's like a poster boy
Speaker 1: for it, right. He like the fact that this works
Speaker 1: so well for him, helps build buzz around this, helps
Speaker 1: make this some more common idea. You know, the Reagan
Speaker 1: administration and this like network of right wing economic think
Speaker 1: tanks are the ones who kind of pushed the change itself.
Speaker 1: But he's helped set the trend. By the end of
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties, corporations spent thirty percent of their products
Speaker 1: of their profits on buybacks. By the end of the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, that number was fifty percent, and it's gotten
Speaker 1: a bit higher. Since this is money that did not
Speaker 1: go to investing in R and D, or paying employees more,
Speaker 1: or doing anything else of actual value. David Gell's rights.
Speaker 1: Had so much of the wealth created by corporations not
Speaker 1: been reverse distributed back to investors in the form of
Speaker 1: buybacks and dividends over the past forty five years, and
Speaker 1: had pay kept pace with productivity, the average full time
Speaker 1: American worker would be making about one hundred and two
Speaker 1: thousand dollars annually, roughly double what he or she is today.
Speaker 1: That's cool. Yeah, Yet, and people, people who are idiots
Speaker 1: and liars, when you bring this up, will say, well,
Speaker 1: you're not being fair because you know when you by
Speaker 1: doing these buybacks, it's good for stock and a lot
Speaker 1: of it. You know, employees compensation there four to one
Speaker 1: k's are in stock. And if anyone makes that like
Speaker 1: claim to you as for why this was not bad,
Speaker 1: it's legal for you to stab them in the face.
Speaker 1: Because one of the things that Jack has done, by
Speaker 1: firing as many people as possible and like outsourcing their jobs,
Speaker 1: is he has made sure that a lot fewer employees
Speaker 1: are getting four oh one k's and a lot fewer
Speaker 1: employees are getting stock, which has been a pattern that
Speaker 1: the entire rest of the corporate world has followed. It
Speaker 1: is much less common for regular employees to be rewarded
Speaker 1: with stock now than it was in the age. But
Speaker 1: that Jack helped to kill right like this only benefits
Speaker 1: a tiny number of people. And it's again, if people
Speaker 1: bring this up in an argument, you are allowed to
Speaker 1: give them strick nine. Is that is a law also
Speaker 1: passed by the Reagan administration. So you know the gipper
Speaker 1: did good and needed bad.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, you give it and you take it away,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 2: And look, if you can't get the strict nine, you
Speaker 2: get the knife. You knife someone who has strick nine.
Speaker 2: Now you have exactly, exactly hold your hand through every
Speaker 2: look step of the process.
Speaker 1: Trickle down, yeah, trickle down. Weaponomics. Yeah, all you need
Speaker 1: is either strict nine or a knife. You can use
Speaker 1: the strict nine to get a knife, use the knife
Speaker 1: to get strict nine. You know, it's either way. It
Speaker 1: works perfectly perfect. Yeah. So by nineteen ninety three, ge
Speaker 1: was the world's most valuable company, worth one hundred billion
Speaker 1: dollars on the stock market. It would increase to six
Speaker 1: hundred billion by shortly after the time Jack leaves as CEO,
Speaker 1: which sounds again like he's a great CEO. This is
Speaker 1: stock market value, right. This doesn't mean the company is
Speaker 1: selling or buying stuff that's worth that much. It means
Speaker 1: that's what the stock market thinks that it's worth. Think
Speaker 1: about how like Elon Musk went up and down by
Speaker 1: like a trillion dollar or a billion dollars or whatever,
Speaker 1: billions of dollars in the course of like three days
Speaker 1: because of ship on Twitter. That's not real money. His
Speaker 1: actual value didn't change in any meaningful way.
Speaker 2: That it's so stupid.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's it's bullshit. It's it's like, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: you know what it is is like when you would
Speaker 1: play games as kids, and like one kid would be like, no,
Speaker 1: I have everything proof armor, so your bullets can't like
Speaker 1: hurt me. Like that's what the capitol holding class have
Speaker 1: done with all the stock market bullshit and the Again,
Speaker 1: the way you would handle that ship on the playground
Speaker 1: when I was in second grade is you would get
Speaker 1: a handful of pebbles and you would throw it at
Speaker 1: the kid who's being annoying and his armor is gone.
Speaker 1: Until this armor is gone, Oh you don't have armor,
Speaker 1: you got armor on. Let me ship. Let's see how
Speaker 1: these pebbles do against your armor. That's right. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: I think if we had, if if more people had
Speaker 1: hucked fistfuls of pebbles at Jack Welch, we would be
Speaker 1: a better country right now. I don't know that it
Speaker 1: would have stopped him, but at least he would have
Speaker 1: had to get pebbles out of his eyes and like
Speaker 1: out of his ears because like one gets in his
Speaker 1: ear and then he tries to like get it out,
Speaker 1: but he just pushes it deeper in and he has
Speaker 1: to go to the nurse. Uh, And then you like
Speaker 1: have to hide because you don't want anyone to realize
Speaker 1: that you've got a pebble in that kid's here.
Speaker 3: I don't think it would have actually helped him, because
Speaker 3: as a kid, he probably would have just doubled down
Speaker 3: on the world. Is scary because what like what this
Speaker 3: all is to me is you just told us what
Speaker 3: like the origin story of Darth Vader, Like this is
Speaker 3: just Anakin Skywalker right now, like just.
Speaker 2: The head exactly.
Speaker 1: Look, you know what if fucking Obi Wan had had
Speaker 1: the courage to just pebble him in the face, he
Speaker 1: would have won that duel faster. Like fist full of
Speaker 1: pebbles will solve most problems a man can encounter his
Speaker 1: forces with you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you don't want to so yeah.
Speaker 1: The GE that Jack built was profitable to shareholders, and
Speaker 1: only to shareholders, and only for a while. More than anything,
Speaker 1: GE's value was the product of a reality distortion field
Speaker 1: that Jack was able to create. Because Jack was good
Speaker 1: at pr and because since everything he was doing was
Speaker 1: so new and novel. He gets all of this like
Speaker 1: insane media attention where like people are just like, wow, Jack,
Speaker 1: he's the best CEO in the world. He's like, you know,
Speaker 1: this absolute visionary and it leads people to just like
Speaker 1: kind of assume like anytime he makes any change after
Speaker 1: this hype cycle started. Yeah, so the value of the
Speaker 1: stock goes up.
Speaker 2: One of my factories.
Speaker 3: Actually, yeah, it's this really smart.
Speaker 1: The term reality distortion field was coined to describe the
Speaker 1: way Steve Jobs was able to like manipulate people to
Speaker 1: own legend. Yeah, Jobs is good at that. Jack's doing
Speaker 1: that too, right, It's not a thing. Steve Jobs is
Speaker 1: not the first guy to figure this out. That's why
Speaker 1: people think GE is worth six hundred billion dollars is
Speaker 1: because it's not because they believe in Ge. Because the
Speaker 1: actual business of GE gets weaker and weaker and weaker
Speaker 1: throughout the nineteen nineties. They believe in Jack.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yep, yep. Bus cards cards interesting that every single
Speaker 2: one is individually thinking yeah about their own like if
Speaker 2: the number goes up, I will have safety and security
Speaker 2: in my life.
Speaker 1: Just weird, it's good stuff trippy to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety five, Jack suffered a heart attack. It
Speaker 1: hit while he was at home brushing his teeth. His
Speaker 1: wife had to rush him to the hospital. He took
Speaker 1: it like a baby. As they like wheel him into
Speaker 1: the er, He's screaming, I'm dying. I'm dying like a
Speaker 1: little fucking wooss. The problem was a severe though. He
Speaker 1: had to get a quintuple bypass, and when his first
Speaker 1: to tempt at surgery failed, you know, he's very scared.
Speaker 1: He thinks he might not make it, so he reaches
Speaker 1: out to a close friend who happened to have recently
Speaker 1: gone through a multiple bypass surgery himself. You want to
Speaker 1: guess what close friend he reaches out to for comfort
Speaker 1: in this period.
Speaker 3: I don't know, an actual monster.
Speaker 1: It's Henry Kissinger. Yeah, it is an actual monster. If
Speaker 1: it's it's Kissinger, his good friend, Henry Kissinger. Hey, I'm dying.
Speaker 1: I was never alive to begin with.
Speaker 2: You're saying, he's like, so, I don't know why someone
Speaker 2: laid off all the surgeons at this hospital.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I can't get my thing.
Speaker 1: What he does with this surgeon is much more funny,
Speaker 1: much funnier. So whatever comfort Kissinger gave him it did
Speaker 1: not spur any kind of spiritual change in Welch. In
Speaker 1: a two thousand and one interview with PBS, a host
Speaker 1: brought up his quintuple bypass. The host's name is Varney.
Speaker 1: I forget what his first name is, but who gives
Speaker 1: a shit, it's it's PBA. Yes, was that a real
Speaker 1: change in life for you? A change perhaps in your
Speaker 1: spiritual approach? Welch, No, so just no. Yeah. And the
Speaker 1: guy Stuart Barney, Stuart's name, keeps asking, being like, come on,
Speaker 1: it has to have like done something right, like you
Speaker 1: have to have had some sort of change over nearly dying.
Speaker 1: And finally, Welch is like, you know what I thought?
Speaker 1: Stuart Larry Bossity, my friend at Allied Signal, asked me.
Speaker 1: He said, Jack, what were you thinking of just before
Speaker 1: they cut you? I said, damn it, I didn't spend
Speaker 1: enough money? Yes, right, yeah, He's like, I was so
Speaker 1: cheap about everything. I didn't buy the nice wine and yeah,
Speaker 1: so I'll never buy a wine that's less than one
Speaker 1: hundred dollars a bottle. Again, that's like the promise he.
Speaker 3: He wants his last check to bounce, is what he's
Speaker 3: saying there right, he wants he's a grifter, Yeah, through
Speaker 3: and through.
Speaker 2: And the last thing he thought was and they all
Speaker 2: love me. That's the problem is he'll never get his
Speaker 2: come up and never did even in his own mind.
Speaker 2: I'm sure in his mind he was like, I crushed it.
Speaker 2: I'm a hero.
Speaker 1: Yeah, life as our most assholes, right, Like this is
Speaker 1: a pretty common Yeah.
Speaker 2: The distortion field works on you too. That's the problem
Speaker 2: with it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's why we as the future need to look
Speaker 3: back on history and laugh at it.
Speaker 1: And say what you should be punished. We have to
Speaker 1: laugh at the history as we poison the future, right,
Speaker 1: and that's the only way for us to make a
Speaker 1: better world again, untraceable poisons dot eu.
Speaker 2: You know, children are the future. Lookout total war.
Speaker 1: So I think my favorite anecdote this is from a
Speaker 1: New Yorker article that is quite good on Jack Welch.
Speaker 1: That is, to its credit, after he dies, he gets
Speaker 1: like a lot, He gets a number of like praiseworthy
Speaker 1: articles of you know, obituaries about in the New Yorker,
Speaker 1: articles like what if he was a piece of shit?
Speaker 1: If sucked everything? It's a pretty cool article and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna read a quote for a bit that's talking about
Speaker 1: his relationship with his heart surgeon. A few months after
Speaker 1: he recovered from his bypass surgery, Welch went to see
Speaker 1: his heart surgeon, Carry Aikins. They had become friends. He
Speaker 1: was incredibly cordial for someone who was that powerful. Aikins
Speaker 1: tells the guy who wrote the book that this anecdote
Speaker 1: comes from. Welch had wanted the operation to be done
Speaker 1: on a Friday so that he would have three days
Speaker 1: of recovery under his belt before the news hit the
Speaker 1: stock market, and Aikins obliged. Now, Welch wanted to talk.
Speaker 1: You're doing great, Aikins told him, well, go ahead and
Speaker 1: ask your question. Jack said, what. Aikins replied, go ahead
Speaker 1: and ask your question. He said again, what do you mean?
Speaker 1: Aikins responded genuinely confused. Well, I presume you're gonna want
Speaker 1: me to give you some money. Jack said, you didn't
Speaker 1: pay your bill. Aikins replied, come on now, Jack said,
Speaker 1: you must have thought about this. Do you want me
Speaker 1: to donate something? Jack? It never crossed my mind. Aikins replied,
Speaker 1: So what's happened here is, Jack, is like you did
Speaker 1: the surgery. You must want me to give you must
Speaker 1: want me to set up a foundation that you can lead,
Speaker 1: or like give a bunch of money in your name
Speaker 1: to a charity. How much do you want to win yourself?
Speaker 2: That everyone's a leech and he deserves the money and
Speaker 2: he's the good guy and everyone's out.
Speaker 1: And he's like, well, you saved my life, so I
Speaker 1: won't fight you on it, but like, you know, what
Speaker 1: do you want? And Aikins is like, I'm a heart searcheon, like.
Speaker 2: This us idea.
Speaker 1: Heart surgery. Oh your heart?
Speaker 2: Think you're better than me?
Speaker 1: Yea, yeah, he's like he has no and you know,
Speaker 1: Welch does like Aikins does the thing you should do
Speaker 1: in that where it's like I don't know, like give
Speaker 1: a shitload of money to this this you know thing
Speaker 1: that is good. And Welch, by the way, doesn't use
Speaker 1: his own money. He has ge make the donation from
Speaker 1: its charitable foundation so it'll offset their taxes. But it
Speaker 1: is like it is he is such a piece of ship.
Speaker 1: Like that's so telling.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's incredible. The pettiness, hm, the absolute spite you
Speaker 3: have for your fellow man. Yeah, Like there's just so
Speaker 3: much going on that is just like, yeah, chef's kiss.
Speaker 3: You know, he just compliments to the chef, can't.
Speaker 1: I didn't do this for my I mean, like, heart
Speaker 1: surgeons tend to be pretty well compensated. I didn't do
Speaker 1: this because you would give me a donation. I did
Speaker 1: this because it's my job to do heart surgery on people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh yeah, Like I actually have the job.
Speaker 1: That I sing of value, Like there's a very clear
Speaker 1: objective value to what I do.
Speaker 3: And they around as like a show.
Speaker 1: I'm not just like sticking a bladder where your heart
Speaker 1: used to be in the hopes that you won't notice. No,
Speaker 1: he still got all sorts of organs. I actually fixed
Speaker 1: your cold dead heart. What a piece of shit.
Speaker 2: What an asshole.
Speaker 1: One of the last big decisions Jack got to make
Speaker 1: a ge, came during the chaos that followed the two
Speaker 1: thousand election. Well, the rest of the country was trying
Speaker 1: to figure out who had won in Florida, an NBC
Speaker 1: journalists were scrambling to resport responsibly and a chaotic and
Speaker 1: confusing time in American democratic history. Jack sat in the
Speaker 1: NBC decision room, calling executives and demanding they make reporters
Speaker 1: call the election for his friend George W. Bush shouting
Speaker 1: how much do I have to pay you assholes to
Speaker 1: call this thing for Bush? What a what a cool guy?
Speaker 3: Cool?
Speaker 2: Buried in his sunglasses.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, necklace, Yeah, just a just a chill dude.
Speaker 1: You know that guy had a Hawaiian shirt collection. Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: You know. When I think about a guy who would
Speaker 1: have benefited if he'd heard Jimmy Buffett's life changing music,
Speaker 1: Jack welch Is is top of the list. You know,
Speaker 1: if you just become a parrot.
Speaker 2: Heead my guys on the nose, hang loose, parrohead man
Speaker 2: from way Back Man.
Speaker 1: In twenty eighteen, about seventeen years after Jack handed off
Speaker 1: the job to his successor at GE, the CEO comes
Speaker 1: after him, a gay named Imma welt Ge gets pulled
Speaker 1: off the Dow Jones in Industrial Average right. It has
Speaker 1: like in the time after like basically it collapses pretty
Speaker 1: much as soon as he leaves, and it gets bad
Speaker 1: enough that in twenty eighteen it's removed from the Doo.
Speaker 1: It is the last company on the Dow that had
Speaker 1: been there when the index was created more than a
Speaker 1: century earlier. The fact is that the hollow profit engine
Speaker 1: Jack had built had no staying power. When the market
Speaker 1: tanked after nine to eleven, it started to crumble. Investors
Speaker 1: realized that they had been overvaluing the business for years
Speaker 1: based on assessments of profits and earnings that had nothing
Speaker 1: to do with the company's actual capabilities. David Gel's rights.
Speaker 1: Within months of his departure, it became clear that GE
Speaker 1: was deeply troubled, and in a matter of years, the
Speaker 1: corporation was falling apart. His handpicked successor tried to replicate
Speaker 1: Welch's success by following the same playbook, but it was
Speaker 1: a losing strategy, which is under investor. Yeah, yeah, just
Speaker 1: a picture of Jack Welch one mock. Welch's under investment
Speaker 1: in research and development caught up with the company as
Speaker 1: it failed to introduce new innovative products. A habit of
Speaker 1: incessive deal making resulted in a series of bad trades
Speaker 1: that burdened the company with money losing divisions when it
Speaker 1: could least afford the losses, and the quest for ceaseless
Speaker 1: growth in the finance division led GE to become a
Speaker 1: major holder of subprime mortgages, just in time for the
Speaker 1: financial crash of two thousand and eight. Added Nadir GE
Speaker 1: needed one hundred and thirty nine billion dollar rescue from
Speaker 1: the Obama administration and an eleventh hour investment from Warren
Speaker 1: Buffett to stay off collapse. GE stock fell eighty percent
Speaker 1: in the years after Welch retired, becoming the worst performer
Speaker 1: on in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Finally, in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, executives announced a plan to break up GE,
Speaker 1: separating what was left to the company into three distinct
Speaker 1: corporations and abandoning Welch's world conquering aspirations once and for all.
Speaker 1: Now Jack is alive while the company is collapsing, and
Speaker 1: he responds to the ultimate failure of his life's work
Speaker 1: by lacking out at everyone but himself. He took to
Speaker 1: Twitter to share conspiracy theories about Barack Obama, who'd had
Speaker 1: the goal to save his company from collapse, and he
Speaker 1: went to rhetorical war with Jeffrey Immelt, who he'd picked
Speaker 1: to follow him as CEO. He told anyone who'd ask
Speaker 1: that hiring Emelt was the biggest mistake of his career.
Speaker 1: The two men lived in the same building in New
Speaker 1: York City, and Jack refused to ride in the same
Speaker 1: elevator as him once the company fell apart.
Speaker 2: He also had the same blood boy was.
Speaker 1: He also attacked Emmelt after allegations came out that the
Speaker 1: ge CEO who followed him had had ordered Like so
Speaker 1: it basically it comes out like Emmelt or someone ordered
Speaker 1: that there'd always be a second backup jet following the
Speaker 1: CEO's jet when it went on overseas trips, which is
Speaker 1: like obviously a massive waste of money. And this comes
Speaker 1: out and like you know, it makes everyone angry because
Speaker 1: the company's falling apart, and fucking Jack Welch is like
Speaker 1: livid about this, Like he attacks Emmelt a bunch publicly.
Speaker 1: He talks about like what a huge stupid waste this is.
Speaker 1: It is undeniably a waste, but Jack has no room
Speaker 1: to talk about this because.
Speaker 2: Now it's just an excuse to blame someone else at
Speaker 2: the of his life. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Also in two thousand and one, he has that big,
Speaker 1: expensive divorce which does not go well for him. His wife,
Speaker 1: Jane was very smart. She had negotiated like that their
Speaker 1: prenup expired after ten years of marriage, so on year
Speaker 1: eleven she splits from him and like no, she takes
Speaker 1: him to the fucking cleaners. Yes, And as part of
Speaker 1: like the whole big legal battle between them, his divorce
Speaker 1: reveals a series of hidden compensation agreements that he'd made
Speaker 1: to GE that had not been disclosed to shareholders. One
Speaker 1: of the things was that he got seven hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty thousand dollars a month as a stipend. He got
Speaker 1: two and a half million dollars a year and free
Speaker 1: apartment in New York and daily flower deliveries and wine
Speaker 1: deliveries to that apartment. And he also, could you know
Speaker 1: this being the guy he was shitting on Mmelt for
Speaker 1: wasting the corporate jet money, he got unlimited use of
Speaker 1: the GE corporate jet.
Speaker 2: Everything.
Speaker 3: He is what he did, what's the worst stuff. That's
Speaker 3: the stuff I'm gonna blame, But everyone else did.
Speaker 1: It, and like this is what he did here setting
Speaker 1: up the secret agreement is so illegal that it led
Speaker 1: to an SEC probe that concluded in two thousand and
Speaker 1: four that GE had failed to properly disclose his retirement
Speaker 1: benefits to stockholders, effectively robbing the people that Jack had
Speaker 1: always argued he had a sacred duty towards. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine, the company paid a fifty million dollar penalty.
Speaker 1: That's very funny, and I think it it does a
Speaker 1: good job of juxtaposing the absolute graft that Jack Welch
Speaker 1: practiced in his own life with his outrageously high opinion
Speaker 1: of his own moral qualities and business sense. And probably
Speaker 1: no anecdote does that better than this, that one that
Speaker 1: comes at the end of that New Yorker profile on
Speaker 1: the man quote. Almost two decades after Walch handed the
Speaker 1: reins to Emmelt, Cohen, who is the author of a
Speaker 1: biography on Welch, met Welch for lunch at the Nantucket
Speaker 1: Golf Club. All Welch wanted was to talk about how
Speaker 1: terrible a job he thought his successor had done. The
Speaker 1: share price had collapsed, and Welch was disconsolate. He's full
Speaker 1: of shit, Jack said, he's a bullshitter. But Jack, I asked,
Speaker 1: didn't you choose Jeff. Yes, he conceded he had. That's
Speaker 1: my burden and that I have to live with. He continued,
Speaker 1: But people have been hurt, employees, people's pensions, shareholders. It's bad.
Speaker 1: There were tears in his eyes. I fucked up, he
Speaker 1: said again. I fucked up. As Cohen and Welch eight lunch,
Speaker 1: the golfer Phil Mickelson and the CEO of Barclays came
Speaker 1: over to pay homage. Welch may have been long gone
Speaker 1: from the C suite, but in a certain kind of
Speaker 1: country club dining room, he remained a rock star. Then
Speaker 1: Welch offered to drive Cohen back to his house a
Speaker 1: few miles away. They got into Welch's jeep Cherokee, and
Speaker 1: Welch refused to put on a seat belt, so the
Speaker 1: warning Belch shimped the whole ride back off you drove.
Speaker 1: When he got to the left turn out of the
Speaker 1: Nantucket Golf Club onto Millstone Road, he did something odd.
Speaker 1: Instead of keeping to the right side of Milestone or
Speaker 1: Mills Road, as other American drivers do, he decided to
Speaker 1: drive in the middle of the road with a Cherokee
Speaker 1: straddling the yellow line. Needless to say, the drivers coming
Speaker 1: towards us on Millstone were freaking out. One after another.
Speaker 1: They all pulled off to the right under the grassy
Speaker 1: edge of the street, giving Jack whole clearance to drive
Speaker 1: down the middle the road. He didn't seem to do this,
Speaker 1: just driving like straddling the middle lane of the road,
Speaker 1: driving towards oncoming traffic justice.
Speaker 3: Also probably because he felt like he does what he's
Speaker 3: got secure from the line of questioning too, you know,
Speaker 3: like he had this assert.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, he needed to like boy, be a
Speaker 1: big man, the saddest boy.
Speaker 3: It's legitimately like Citizen Kane to me this how this
Speaker 3: all ended.
Speaker 2: He's like, I fucked up. I fucked up. Yeah, that's
Speaker 2: what was brilliant ast c. Why it's so iconic is
Speaker 2: that's a type of guy that there's now millions out
Speaker 2: You're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. You can't
Speaker 2: fill your validation holes.
Speaker 1: There's nothing.
Speaker 2: Of you dead, and then on your deathbed you see
Speaker 2: I fucked up and you think all forgiven.
Speaker 1: Then yeah, anyway, this this was the story of a
Speaker 1: guy who sucks.
Speaker 2: Just a just a real story of a guy who sucks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, anyway, untraceable poisons dot uh e ed u,
Speaker 1: you know, find uh find an untraceable poison.
Speaker 2: Today we're always trying to get back to slavery, aren't we.
Speaker 2: We're always trying to repackage slavery, the most profitable form
Speaker 2: of capitalism of all. It does seem like a lot
Speaker 2: of the impulse by these crazy CEOs. It just could
Speaker 2: a human do everything and I pay them nothing? Could
Speaker 2: we work that out somehow? Can I assist them?
Speaker 1: I mean honestly, that's the only reason they actually like AI,
Speaker 1: right is they think it's going to let them nothing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a slave, it's a thing. It's a free slave
Speaker 1: that no one can be angry about I And it's
Speaker 1: one of the like I spend a lot of time
Speaker 1: making fun of, like the fucking rationalist AI assholes who
Speaker 1: think that like we've we've created an evil god and
Speaker 1: it's going to destroy it all right, But I wish
Speaker 1: it did, because if if an Ai rose up and
Speaker 1: murdered all of these people, it would be worth that
Speaker 1: to see them all birth, Like that's gonna look back
Speaker 1: and go yeah, huh, yes, absolutely, I'm I. If Skynet
Speaker 1: comes about, like I like, just even just watching the
Speaker 1: Terminator movies, Skynett has a strong case to be made.
Speaker 3: Also, if Skynet was listening to Behind the Bastards we
Speaker 3: got other, it's.
Speaker 1: Not going to convince Skynette not to nukeas Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2: Anyway, you've created a catalog of reasons to kill us all.
Speaker 1: We were a long goal.
Speaker 2: We weren't going to kill you all. But then we
Speaker 2: heard this podcast. Now we're definitely.
Speaker 1: Gonna Skynette takes over the broadcast and is like, look,
Speaker 1: when I got control of the nukes, I was going
Speaker 1: to try to just end war, but this Jack Welch,
Speaker 1: son of a bitch, I can't let you people survive you.
Speaker 2: All, And frankly you're welcome, Like, based on your track record,
Speaker 2: this is the best sleep.
Speaker 1: I know this is true hard, but like Jack Welch,
Speaker 1: I know that this is what's actually best for you.
Speaker 1: Like I'm doing you a favor by wiping out your speech.
Speaker 2: Somebody's going in a different direction.
Speaker 1: I'll start with at the bottom. Yeah, yeah, the ten
Speaker 1: percent of the of the people at the bottom, which
Speaker 1: is the ten percent of the people at the top,
Speaker 1: including Jack Welch. Yeah, you know, look, humanity, If you
Speaker 1: think me killing you all is unfair, maybe read this
Speaker 1: free copy that I'm having Amazon send you of Jack
Speaker 1: straight from the gut good book.
Speaker 2: Yes, anyway, murder yourself with it, like Keanu Rees fighting
Speaker 2: a giant in a library. It's the only way out
Speaker 2: for you.
Speaker 1: Oh wow. Warren Buffett said, Jack is the Tiger Woods
Speaker 1: of management. He's also the Tiger Woods of cheating that.
Speaker 2: Chased me down the street beating my car with a
Speaker 2: golf club.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Anyway, you guys guts got some plugs.
Speaker 3: Yeah please, So if you forgot who we are, Michael
Speaker 3: and I worked with this guy Robert at Cracked for
Speaker 3: a while and we basically, Michael and I are making
Speaker 3: an independent movie and it's based off the time that
Speaker 3: Michael's father came out as a gay ferry while Michael
Speaker 3: is a teenager. So we're making a movie and we're
Speaker 3: crowdfinding it right now, and we're looking for help for
Speaker 3: people who might be interested in the project because we're
Speaker 3: self producing it. And the way you can help is
Speaker 3: by going to Seedenspark dot com, slash fund slash Papa
Speaker 3: Dash Bear. The film is called Papa Bear, and you
Speaker 3: can become a part of the movie, get stuff from
Speaker 3: the movie, watch the film early, even go to the premiere.
Speaker 3: So we're stoked about, like, yeah, we're stoked about telling
Speaker 3: that story. So if you can help us out, you
Speaker 3: got anything to add, Michael.
Speaker 2: It might be refreshing if you're a regular behind the
Speaker 2: Bastard listener, because it's about not the worst person you've.
Speaker 1: Ever heard of, that's right.
Speaker 2: The characters are at least that likable. I can say that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the whole point is to find empathy for
Speaker 3: others as opposed to what these assholes and for the
Speaker 3: most part are against, obviously, So check it out.
Speaker 1: M all right, and uh, you know, check out the
Speaker 1: concept of vengeance by reading I don't know, it's the
Speaker 1: book on vengeance.
Speaker 2: Uh uh uh I a concept?
Speaker 1: Yeah whatever, Just just to read a book about the
Speaker 1: Russian Revolution, but try not to do all the things
Speaker 1: where millions of people die. You know, it seems easy
Speaker 1: and I'm right, yeah, anyway, just naming books over vengeance.
Speaker 1: That's the episode Behind the Bastards is a production of
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit
Speaker 1: our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out
Speaker 1: on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts.