Speaker 1: It's a podcast. Shit, it's behind the Bastards a podcast
Speaker 1: that I was I was trying, like in the thirty
Speaker 1: seconds before we started to think of like a good
Speaker 1: funny introduction, like you know, shouting Hitler atonally or.
Speaker 2: You know, I like, it's a podcast.
Speaker 1: That's all I came up with.
Speaker 3: That's fine.
Speaker 1: I considered Sophie doing like doing like a War of
Speaker 1: the World style intro where I pretend to be a
Speaker 1: newscaster letting everyone know that like a new virus has
Speaker 1: been found, has reached the coasts of the United States
Speaker 1: and is spreading rapidly through populated areas. But we already
Speaker 1: we all did that, so it's not really funny. So
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know, Sophie, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm you know, it's a podcast. I failed. I failed,
Speaker 1: But you know who's not a failure.
Speaker 2: Sophie, Oh yeah, I do.
Speaker 1: The guests that we have for this spectacular podcast episode today,
Speaker 1: the glorious Michael Swam and the inimitable Abraham Epperson.
Speaker 3: I'm glorious. But you could imitate it if you try to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you could imitate. You could imitate Michael, but but.
Speaker 4: Not a but and I have I have no discernment
Speaker 4: of quality, but you can't replicate it.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 3: No one said it's good.
Speaker 1: It's just hard.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's just like whoa, that's hard to do.
Speaker 5: I love this.
Speaker 1: I love that we we had a pitch meeting about
Speaker 1: my compliments to turn them into insults. That was nice.
Speaker 1: It's really making me nostalgic for the old days. A cracked.
Speaker 3: And by the way, by doing a War of the worlds,
Speaker 3: I totally thought you meant get sick and die like
Speaker 3: just keel over. Robert was the best of us all,
Speaker 3: but he wouldn't handle as simple Covid.
Speaker 1: No, I I'm you know, uh covid who the CDC
Speaker 1: says it's over, So we're good. Yeah, I'm not even
Speaker 1: worried about it anymore. Michael abe as I. As I
Speaker 1: stated a little earlier, we all used to work together
Speaker 1: at the old place, at the shop, at the comedy
Speaker 1: website that was based off of a comedy magazine that
Speaker 1: nobody read in the nineteen sixties, but the website did.
Speaker 3: Quite well for a time. Matt TV the website if you.
Speaker 1: Will, Yeah, yeah, you guys are back on The last
Speaker 1: time we had both of you together was talking about
Speaker 1: the end of l Ron Hubbard and listening to his
Speaker 1: gligorious his glorious song. Thank you for listening. And today
Speaker 1: I've got you on to talk about a very special
Speaker 1: piece of shit, one one of the rare bastards who
Speaker 1: has had a major impact on the life of every
Speaker 1: single person listening to this podcast. But before we get
Speaker 1: into that, you guys have a project that you're working
Speaker 1: on that's very exciting, and I want to I want
Speaker 1: to start with a plug up front so that we
Speaker 1: can get to that before people souls leave their bodies
Speaker 1: with depression.
Speaker 2: And I'm supposed to remind you that you also have
Speaker 2: a podcast because Danill threatened my life.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, all right, well let's dispense with that quickly.
Speaker 3: I do a podcast with Adam Ganzer where we talk
Speaker 3: about video games. It's called One Upsmanship. I love it
Speaker 3: dearly and it's a weekly show. That's great. But wait,
Speaker 3: there's more. Wow, and thank you, Robert, because ye value,
Speaker 3: we're definitely here just to announce that we're clear. Since
Speaker 3: the hybrid episode, we're totally clear, So good for us.
Speaker 3: And with that new found power, we've decided to try
Speaker 3: and make an indie movie. It would be our second
Speaker 3: indie movie. The first one's called kill Me Now. If
Speaker 3: you want to see if we suck at it, you
Speaker 3: could go watch kill Me Now on YouTube.
Speaker 4: It's available.
Speaker 3: One's entirety thank you, and it's been a long time
Speaker 3: and we're ready for number two. If you knew us
Speaker 3: from Cracked, or like, if you knew like After Hour's agency,
Speaker 3: Crack does not compute hundreds of sketches. We were kind
Speaker 3: of the engine behind that. And this movie is based
Speaker 3: on the hilarious, poignant true story of when my dad
Speaker 3: came out as a gay furry. It's super funny, but
Speaker 3: it's also got a lot of heart. It weaves a
Speaker 3: bunch of other stuff in there as well. And Abe,
Speaker 3: do you have anything to add?
Speaker 4: Yeah, url, Yeah, you can go help us out by
Speaker 4: going to seed andspark dot com, slash fund, slash Papa
Speaker 4: Dash Bear, and you can become part of the movie,
Speaker 4: get stuff from the movie, watch the film early, even
Speaker 4: go to a premiere. We're stoked about telling the story.
Speaker 4: So if you can't help us get what we need
Speaker 4: to make it right, Yeah, Yeah. At the lowest tier,
Speaker 4: you're basically pre buying a ticket because you'll just get
Speaker 4: a private link to the movie when it's ready. We
Speaker 4: have other funding like going on behind the scenes, but
Speaker 4: the crowdfunding piece, which is going wrong right now of course,
Speaker 4: is super crucial. And there's cooler stuff than that to get.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you're doing it at the highest level, you
Speaker 1: will literally be able to call yourself a producer and
Speaker 1: wear suspenders and like a nice iron shirt and do
Speaker 1: mountains of cocaine while smoking a cigar. Don't forget the hat,
Speaker 1: cheating on your your wife. You get a signed hat,
Speaker 1: all sorts of good stuff do we pros.
Speaker 3: We execute the adoption papers with your name on him,
Speaker 3: and you become my dad. You are legally wow, wow,
Speaker 3: Mike's dad.
Speaker 1: You know, considering the movie is about your dad, that
Speaker 1: does kind of seem like a little bit of a
Speaker 1: kick in the face.
Speaker 4: It's weird.
Speaker 1: It's like it's a gift of the magi type situation
Speaker 1: where like I was able to make a movie about you, dad,
Speaker 1: but now you're no longer my dad.
Speaker 3: But as you forget him, yeah, it own rights, It
Speaker 3: comes out of your brain and disappears. But yeah, that's
Speaker 3: Papa Bear. Papa Bear Bear look it up. But yeah,
Speaker 3: let's check it out. Yeah, of horrors do you have
Speaker 3: for it? Excited to be here?
Speaker 1: A real a real horror. So we we should start
Speaker 1: a little bit here by talking about capitalism. You know,
Speaker 1: something that we're all intimately familiar with and one of
Speaker 1: the most and things to understand if you want to know,
Speaker 1: kind of like why the US and its friends won
Speaker 1: the Cold War, is that for a lot of people
Speaker 1: in the United States and other Western countries, capitalism seemed
Speaker 1: like a pretty fucking good deal from the time of
Speaker 1: the New Deal up through the late seventies to early eighties. Now,
Speaker 1: obviously this was predicated on extraction from countries outside of
Speaker 1: the United States and Western Europe, from the Global South,
Speaker 1: whatever you want to call them, and it was also
Speaker 1: funded by supporting the subjugation by dictatorships of people living
Speaker 1: in those countries in order to extract resources. But within
Speaker 1: the United States itself, in particular, Americans saw a forty
Speaker 1: or so year long period where the standard of living
Speaker 1: and the average amount of wealth held per person increased
Speaker 1: it a pretty dramatic and extremely consistent rate. Prior to
Speaker 1: the New Deal, corruption and abuse within capitalism were pretty
Speaker 1: much universal and the biggest companies were the ones that
Speaker 1: were generally the best at holding their workers down at gunpoint.
Speaker 1: But after their Great Depression, there were new regulations introduced,
Speaker 1: and this, combined with progressive social welfare policies ushered in
Speaker 1: by the FDR administration, helped lead the United States towards
Speaker 1: the titanic growth of the post war years. Inequality plummet.
Speaker 1: It managers and workers, you know, were generally obviously paid differently,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't like you see today, right, Like a
Speaker 1: guy working the line at a factory was not getting
Speaker 1: like one five hundredth of the amount of money that
Speaker 1: like the CEO of the company got. They were living
Speaker 1: kind of in the same vague planet, you know, when
Speaker 1: it came to income, and a lot of the days
Speaker 1: business gurus argued that this was necessary for healthy economic functioning.
Speaker 1: This was actually the most efficient way for the system
Speaker 1: to work. In nineteen forty three, Johnson and Johnson's CEO
Speaker 1: authored a company credo that spoke to a lot of
Speaker 1: people in big business in the United States. He argued
Speaker 1: that the company's first responsibility was to its customers, its
Speaker 1: second was to its employees, who he said deserved a
Speaker 1: sense of security with just management and short working hours
Speaker 1: and fair wages. Duty was to management, and then last
Speaker 1: and least, it had a duty to its investors and shareholders. Quote, yeah,
Speaker 1: that was the last. That's the CEO of Johnson and Johnson.
Speaker 1: Business must make a sound profit, high taxes paid, new
Speaker 1: factories built, new products launched. When these things have been done,
Speaker 1: the owners and stockholders should receive a fair return. So
Speaker 1: that's pretty different.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: It feels like all things have become grotesquely extreme to
Speaker 3: the point of like ruining everything.
Speaker 4: You know, it takes time.
Speaker 3: At the beginning, I feel like they didn't realize how
Speaker 3: far they could go on, how much they could get
Speaker 3: away with. It takes time to wake up and go, wait,
Speaker 3: could we take it all? Like oh oh ghit.
Speaker 1: It takes time, and I think it also takes you know,
Speaker 1: part of why this state of affairs came to be.
Speaker 1: It didn't like these companies didn't start treating workers well
Speaker 1: and sharing profits with them because it was nice. They
Speaker 1: did it because the country, like the United States, nearly
Speaker 1: collapsed into like a revolution, right, Like things were that
Speaker 1: bad at the very worst of the Great Depression, the
Speaker 1: govern was worried, like are we going to do a
Speaker 1: Russia and that fear faded. You know, that's kind of
Speaker 1: the story we're telling today. So I'm going to get
Speaker 1: ahead of myself. But if you want to look at
Speaker 1: kind of the company during what's called the Golden Age
Speaker 1: of capitalism, which is this period from the end of
Speaker 1: World War Two up to kind of the Reagan era,
Speaker 1: the company that best embodied both the strengths of that
Speaker 1: capitalist system that existed then and the kind of innovation
Speaker 1: that could come from it is General Electric. Now, over
Speaker 1: the years it was founded kind of in the late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds, and in the years since its founding, its
Speaker 1: engineers and scientists brought the world like half of the
Speaker 1: things that we consider like crucial aspects of daily modern life.
Speaker 1: They invented incandescent light bulbs, They invented the electric plant.
Speaker 1: They shipped radios around the world and invented many of
Speaker 1: the first radios. They crafted the first vacuum tubes, They
Speaker 1: invented the garbage disposal. They created a wide variety of
Speaker 1: moldible and transparent plastics that became ubiquitous in house old products,
Speaker 1: and also every creature living in the ocean. Obviously, you
Speaker 1: know that part's not great, but on the a positive side,
Speaker 1: the silicon rubber that they invented was a like made
Speaker 1: space travel possible, Like you don't get human beings into
Speaker 1: space without it.
Speaker 4: All these are bangers. These are all bangs.
Speaker 1: These are all bangers. They're all impressive. Yeah. So this
Speaker 1: is like, for about one hundred straight years, from the
Speaker 1: late eighteen hundreds to the nineteen eighties, ge was not
Speaker 1: just a company that made a lot of money. It
Speaker 1: was a company that regularly invented things, or at least
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's workers did the scientists that it
Speaker 1: paid invented things that changed life for people all around
Speaker 1: the world. That was us chairs y Yeah, yeah, fucking
Speaker 1: ginkin of stuff. Yeah. And their workforce was compensated, you know,
Speaker 1: as you'd expect given their success. G Yeah, as many
Speaker 1: light bulbs as you can fit in your your cheek
Speaker 1: pouches like a squirrel. No, they were the company. They
Speaker 1: were one of the companies that they essentially invented the
Speaker 1: kind of modern concept of an employee retirement plan. They
Speaker 1: gave workers profit sharing. They were the first company I
Speaker 1: think to have like provide insurance for workers. They invested
Speaker 1: in the ongoing and ongoing education for their workforce. They
Speaker 1: had a corporate campus that featured swimming pools and spas
Speaker 1: and tennis courts and football fields and free classes and
Speaker 1: stuff like tap dancing that had no profit, you know,
Speaker 1: making benefit for GE, but made the workers happy. They
Speaker 1: kind of pioneered the shit that we now associate with
Speaker 1: like the golden age of the tech industry, right like
Speaker 1: that Gesy, like the twenties, Yeah, exactly. And this was
Speaker 1: part of an understanding by the management elite of the
Speaker 1: era that a happy workforce was one that would not
Speaker 1: tear you apart and shoot your family in a dank basement.
Speaker 1: Men like GE CEO Gerald Swape had the Czar on
Speaker 1: his mind when he described the company ethos as welfare
Speaker 1: capitalism in nineteen twenty two. This was a term that
Speaker 1: like a CEO, felt proud to use, like our company
Speaker 1: practices welfare capitalism. In nineteen twenty seven, company chairman Own
Speaker 1: Young gave a speech at Harvard where he attacked businessmen
Speaker 1: who tried to quote squeeze out of labor, its last
Speaker 1: ounce of effort and last penny of compensation. Executives he
Speaker 1: argued needed to quote think in terms of human beings.
Speaker 1: Who put their lives in labor in a common enterprise
Speaker 1: for mutual advantage. And there's nothing more alien to kind
Speaker 1: of the business grules of our day than the concept
Speaker 1: of mutual advantage.
Speaker 4: Now they were still rich, right, Like.
Speaker 1: Yes, a lot they had plenty of money.
Speaker 3: Yes, they still led lives of plenty right.
Speaker 1: And I should state a lot of times in one
Speaker 1: of the main sources that we're going to wind up
Speaker 1: using for this episode, this this erraor gets a romanticized.
Speaker 1: Part of why it gets romanticized is that a lot
Speaker 1: was nicer back than Like compensation of workers in the
Speaker 1: United States was much nicer. The system itself was still
Speaker 1: pretty soaked in blood. For example, GE ex executives may
Speaker 1: have cared greatly for their workforce in the United States,
Speaker 1: but they had no issue with the idea that GE
Speaker 1: products would be used to murder civilians in foreign countries.
Speaker 1: GE's T seven hundred helicopter engine powered the Blackhawk after
Speaker 1: its adoption in nineteen seventy eight. They also made the
Speaker 1: engines for basically all of the helicopters that the United
Speaker 1: States used to annihilate large chunks of jungle in Vietnam.
Speaker 1: They made the engines for the planes that dropped the
Speaker 1: defoliates that gave everybody fucking cancer. They were one of
Speaker 1: the top ten largest contractors used by the US government
Speaker 1: to make nuclear weapons over the course of the Cold War.
Speaker 1: You know, they're not just like making nukes, but nukes.
Speaker 1: There's a bunch of parts that nukes involved, and so
Speaker 1: GE was one of the primary suppliers of those parts.
Speaker 1: At the height of the Vietnam War, they made more
Speaker 1: than one point six billion dollars a year in military contracts,
Speaker 1: making them the second highest paid defense contractor of the
Speaker 1: bloodiest chapter of the Cold War. So that's all bad, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it's not. I'm not trying to like whitewash this stuff here.
Speaker 1: Different than light bulbs. I'll give you this. It's different
Speaker 1: than light bulbs, light bulbs and death bulbs.
Speaker 3: Light bulbs, rubber gaskets, the bicycle wheel bulletsuke, telicopters.
Speaker 1: You're all gonna die, Michael. They did, in fact invent
Speaker 1: the laser, by the way, that was also a GE invention.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I love this. This is fantastic. You throw a dead.
Speaker 3: Cat in the room and you're like, oh, they invented
Speaker 3: dead cats.
Speaker 4: There's something about the blindness created by overcoming trauma. Like
Speaker 4: I'm sure you're gonna get into it, but it like
Speaker 4: doesn't make the crimes go away. Like if the skeletons
Speaker 4: in the closet were like kind of made in order
Speaker 4: to build the closet, that doesn't justify anything. And that's
Speaker 4: my standpoint. But it's like amazing to see what America
Speaker 4: has done in order to be Like, you can't make
Speaker 4: fun of General Electric. They're goddamn General Electric, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I mean, and they are. That was very
Speaker 1: much like they were seen as an institution, like almost
Speaker 1: a branch of the government. And part of it was
Speaker 1: the degree to which, like so many Americans, hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands were employed by them, and it was like kind
Speaker 1: of cradle to grave employment. If you've got a job
Speaker 1: with GE in this period, that was your job for life.
Speaker 1: And then when you retired they would pay you a pension,
Speaker 1: you know, like a yeah, if you if you keep
Speaker 1: the US military machine rich in killing machines, GE will
Speaker 1: take care of you, right, Like that was the bargain,
Speaker 1: you know. So I want to quote now from a
Speaker 1: book by a guy named David Gels called The Man
Speaker 1: who Broke capitalism and spoilers. The man that the book
Speaker 1: is about is who will be talking about today. Quote.
Speaker 1: An annual report from nineteen fifty three described how GE
Speaker 1: worked in the balanced best interests of all. The report
Speaker 1: trumpeted how much the company had paid in taxes, the
Speaker 1: virtues of paying its suppliers well, and how critical it
Speaker 1: was to take care of its employees. That year, GE
Speaker 1: proudly stated that it spent some thirty seven percent of
Speaker 1: its sales on pay and benefits for its workers, resulting
Speaker 1: in the biggest payroll in the company's history, with more
Speaker 1: people at work than ever before. Next to the statistic
Speaker 1: was an illustration of a grinning factory worker walking away
Speaker 1: from the assembly line holding bags of money. Only after
Speaker 1: enumerting all the ways in which it was helping the government, suppliers,
Speaker 1: and employees, did the company mention how much it allocated
Speaker 1: for investors, the sum a modest three point nine percent
Speaker 1: of sales. I think about how weird that is, right Like,
Speaker 1: right now we're going through this thing where like the
Speaker 1: head of the Federal Reserve is talking about how bad
Speaker 1: it is that wages have kept rising and that's like
Speaker 1: a problem, Like we need to discipline laborers, so they
Speaker 1: expect less. But in nineteen fifty three, Ges being like,
Speaker 1: we're giving everything that we have to our workers. Isn't
Speaker 1: that dope? How much money we're paying our employees, Like
Speaker 1: this is what you would brag about.
Speaker 3: And it was so many issues. It's like vice versa.
Speaker 3: Which party you'd think, like conservative traditionalists would be like,
Speaker 3: this makes more sense, Like I would say, no, it's weirder. Now.
Speaker 3: What's weird is if you have a human enterprise and
Speaker 3: the person who makes the most money from it has
Speaker 3: no they didn't work there, they didn't invent it, they
Speaker 3: didn't form the business, they have nothing to do with it.
Speaker 3: Like that's weird. It's weird to me that that's how
Speaker 3: it works.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I can't imagine what you're thinking of when you
Speaker 1: say that, working in the film and entertainment industry, Michael.
Speaker 1: But so, the idea that was common at the time
Speaker 1: among the people who ran companies like GE was that
Speaker 1: corporations had a responsibility both to the United States as
Speaker 1: a whole and to their workers. GE's head of employee
Speaker 1: benefits listed quote maximalizing employment security as a prime company
Speaker 1: goal in nineteen sixty two because the ability of workers
Speaker 1: to feel secure in their future was, in his words,
Speaker 1: the most productive asset the company had. Obviously, again, I
Speaker 1: hope I haven't underemphasized the inequalities that in the system,
Speaker 1: but those inequalities were sternalized primarily right, The inequalities with
Speaker 1: an American capitalism were outside of the United States, primarily
Speaker 1: right within the US there was actually, like quite certainly
Speaker 1: a less unequal system than we have today. And we
Speaker 1: can see how kind of widespread these ideas were in
Speaker 1: the simple fact that from nineteen forty eight to nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine, worker pay in the United States grew at
Speaker 1: the same or close to the same rate as worker productivity.
Speaker 1: But since nineteen seventy nine this has changed dramatically. From
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine to twenty twenty, net productivity rose sixty
Speaker 1: one point eight percent, while the hourly pay of typical
Speaker 1: workers grew at about seventeen point five percent over four decades.
Speaker 1: So it went from they grew at kind of the
Speaker 1: same rate during this quoite golden age of capitalism to
Speaker 1: worker pay grew less than a third, at less than
Speaker 1: a third of the rate that productivity grew. Right, What
Speaker 1: does that mean? I mean that means workers are getting shafted, right, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no other way to look at that. Now, a
Speaker 1: lot of different factors had to come together to change
Speaker 1: this state of affairs, and obviously there's not one single
Speaker 1: person that's solely responsible for why everything got a lot
Speaker 1: worse within the here's his name, but there is. He
Speaker 1: is the guy who He's not the guy who caused
Speaker 1: all of this, but he is the guy who his
Speaker 1: his career is the dividing line between the golden age
Speaker 1: of capitalism and the era we live in now, this
Speaker 1: grim age of billionaire CEOs and starving workers on food
Speaker 1: stamps and like zero innovation. Effectively, like, there's a single
Speaker 1: guy whose life is sort of the dividing line between
Speaker 1: those two periods. He was the CEO of General Electric
Speaker 1: and his name was Jack Welch. He is such a
Speaker 1: bad person. You guys are really going to have a
Speaker 1: terrible time with this episode. I'm excited for this.
Speaker 4: So I've seen Yeah, I've seen this guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's very famous. He wrote he wound he like
Speaker 1: in his retirement, wrote like twenty different five management books
Speaker 1: that are all the same book, right, Like, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: they're all like nonsense, uh corporate like uh uh bullshit
Speaker 1: to keep in your fucking bookcase behind you while you
Speaker 1: do a zoom call, so everybody thinks that you uh,
Speaker 1: you know what you're.
Speaker 3: Talking about exactly, and everyone wins way and all that stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's he's a real great guys.
Speaker 4: Name is Welch. I just want to before we begin,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he's going to Welch on a lot of bets.
Speaker 5: So so the two books that I've used as sources
Speaker 5: for much of this episode are the book that I
Speaker 5: quoted from earlier, The Man who Broke Capitalism by David Wells,
Speaker 5: and Jacksone autobiography Jack Straight from the Gut.
Speaker 1: It's a horrible book. The first book, The Man who
Speaker 1: Broke Capitalism, is pretty well written, and it's a pretty
Speaker 1: damning indictment of Welch's career. It is written by a
Speaker 1: guy who really believes in capitalism, and so there's one
Speaker 1: of its flaws is that it definitely takes the like
Speaker 1: things were so good before this guy came along and
Speaker 1: like ruined this wonderful system. And it's like, I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: like I agree he made things works, but like during
Speaker 1: the Golden Age of Capitalism. We like underwrote coups in
Speaker 1: Guatemala and Korea and El Salvador and Chile and whatnot
Speaker 1: in order to like secure resources for US corporations. And yeah,
Speaker 1: that like it wasn't great before. You know, Jack Welch
Speaker 1: didn't do any of that, but he did. He did
Speaker 1: take capitalism in the US from a system that benefited
Speaker 1: Americans at the expense of other people to a system
Speaker 1: that benefited like forty guys at the expense of the
Speaker 1: rest of the world. And that is bad. I guess
Speaker 1: I don't know how you can parse that out morally
Speaker 1: however you want. That's not my job. I'm not going
Speaker 1: to solve this for you. But he's a real piece
Speaker 1: of shit. So let's talk about that.
Speaker 3: Ah wait, wait, I thought at the end of Behind
Speaker 3: the Bastards, at the very end of the series, you
Speaker 3: would reveal the answer that would solve everything, right is
Speaker 3: that now where we're I?
Speaker 1: I you know, Michael, I do have an answer for you.
Speaker 1: It would have been the answer to Jack Welch if
Speaker 1: someone had done it earlier in his career, but it
Speaker 1: could still be the answer to a lot of bastards. Legally,
Speaker 1: I'm not allowed to say it on air. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: it rhymes with schmargeted, schmash machination. Okay, like that's that's
Speaker 1: that's the answer. So Welsch's autobiography is probably the most
Speaker 1: self serving piece of trash I've read in my life,
Speaker 1: and I have read Saddam Hussein's writing Deal The Deal.
Speaker 1: I kind of think so because because at least Welsh
Speaker 1: did all of the terrible things that he's talking about.
Speaker 1: It opens with these telling lines and strap yourselves in boys,
Speaker 1: this this one's rough. This may seem a strange way
Speaker 1: to begin an autobiography. A confession. I hate having to
Speaker 1: use the first person. Nearly everything I've done in my
Speaker 1: life has been accomplished with other people. Yet when you
Speaker 1: write a book like this, you're forced to use the
Speaker 1: narrative I, when it's really the WI that counts. Now,
Speaker 1: that could be nice, right, But what Jack is actually
Speaker 1: setting up here is not that like I've been forced
Speaker 1: to use I, and that means I'm not going to
Speaker 1: give enough credit to other people. What he's actually setting
Speaker 1: up here is that, like in this book, he takes
Speaker 1: credit for every good thing that happens at GE during
Speaker 1: its tenure, and I think he just in the initial
Speaker 1: draft of this gave himself credit for everything good that happened,
Speaker 1: and then his editor came in and was like, you
Speaker 1: sound like a giant prick, So you have to add
Speaker 1: something at the start of the book saying you're sorry
Speaker 1: for using I all the time. That is that is
Speaker 1: exactly what I suspect happened. You know that, Like an
Speaker 1: editor came in and was like, Jack, you got to
Speaker 1: like write something at the start here because you sound
Speaker 1: like a dick. Yeh. He continues with one of the
Speaker 1: funniest sentences I've ever seen in an autobiography. Please remember
Speaker 1: that every time you see the word I in these pages,
Speaker 1: it refers to all those colleagues and friends and some
Speaker 1: I might have missed.
Speaker 3: Now we move on again.
Speaker 4: Yeah, hell yes, hell yeah, the absolute gall arrogance.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love it. It's so good. As soon as
Speaker 1: I because I was trying to decide, we don't do
Speaker 1: a lot of like CEO bastards, because like you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of them are terrible, but they're usually boring,
Speaker 1: so we're more likely to do like you know, we'll
Speaker 1: talk about the Beaupul disaster in India, rather than like
Speaker 1: doing the life of the CEO of Union Carbide or whatever,
Speaker 1: because most of them just aren't very interesting.
Speaker 3: When I was trying to they raised the price. Then
Speaker 3: they raised it again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah again. Yeah. But Jack Welch. As soon as
Speaker 1: I read that, I was like, all right, this guy's
Speaker 1: gotta be enough of a piece of shit for an episode,
Speaker 1: And boy, howdy, he sure is. John Francis Welch, Junior
Speaker 1: was born on November nineteenth, nineteen thirty five, in Peabody, Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: just in time to miss the Great Depression and fully
Speaker 1: benefit from the more restrained, thoughtful era of capitalism that
Speaker 1: followed it. His dad was a conductor for the railroad.
Speaker 1: He was a union man, and while he worked long hours,
Speaker 1: he benefited from benefits and pay good enough that he
Speaker 1: was able to buy a house for his family. His mother,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about more in a second. They had Jack
Speaker 1: late in life. She was thirty six and his dad
Speaker 1: was forty one. They had spent years trying to make
Speaker 1: a baby, and unfortunately, with Jack they succeeded. He was
Speaker 1: an only child, and in his own recollection quote, my
Speaker 1: mother poured her love into me as if I were
Speaker 1: a found treasure. Jack finds it very important that you
Speaker 1: believe his family weren't financially comfortable. He wasn't born with
Speaker 1: a silver spoon, is literally how he writes it in
Speaker 1: his book, because he's not a very imaginative person. This
Speaker 1: is technically true in that his family was working class.
Speaker 1: It's untrue in the fact that he was born in
Speaker 1: the single luckiest era financially to have been born in
Speaker 1: the history of the human race. Again, his dad, working
Speaker 1: a single job, without a high school income, was able
Speaker 1: to buy a home and put his child through college
Speaker 1: without taking on debt. Just a just a different world. Now.
Speaker 1: Neither his mom or dad graduated from high school. They
Speaker 1: were with Irish immigrants, and their house was across the
Speaker 1: street from a factory, which his dad continued considered to
Speaker 1: be a plus because it meant that there were no
Speaker 1: neighbors partying on the weekends. Jack's dad collected magazines and
Speaker 1: newspapers from writers on the train during his work day,
Speaker 1: and he brought them home. Jack started reading the news,
Speaker 1: you know, as a result of this, and yeah, that's
Speaker 1: how he kind of like got into the world. Jack's
Speaker 1: dad also introduced his son to golf, telling him that
Speaker 1: all the big shots on the train talked about their
Speaker 1: golf score constantly, so Jack should probably learn how to
Speaker 1: golf if he wanted to make a lot of money.
Speaker 4: Wait, it's just like a golfing newsreading boy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, crimes. The CEO wouldn't be boring.
Speaker 4: Is like, don't worry, suck on peppermint candies and drink milk. Like,
Speaker 4: what's going on it.
Speaker 1: We'll get to We'll get to what else is going
Speaker 1: on here? Jack's dad is a you know, it's the
Speaker 1: kind he's the kind of you kind of get some
Speaker 1: of the workaholism from this. His dad was dedicated enough
Speaker 1: to his job that, like, if the weather was going
Speaker 1: to be bad, he'd have his wife drive him to
Speaker 1: the station and he'd sleep there overnight before a shift.
Speaker 1: He did not spend a lot of time with his son.
Speaker 1: He worked from five am to eight pm every single day.
Speaker 1: So Jack's primary influence was his mom, and if his
Speaker 1: autobiography is in any way credible, she was obsessively devoted
Speaker 1: to him and somewhat manically focused on making him a success.
Speaker 1: Quote one of her favorite expressions was, don't kid yourself.
Speaker 1: That's the way it is. If you don't study, you'll
Speaker 1: be nothing, absolutely nothing. There are no shortcuts. Don't kid yourself.
Speaker 1: So she's just like yelling at him to be so. Like.
Speaker 1: For an example of how kind of unhinged this woman is,
Speaker 1: she would force her son, when he was like a preteen,
Speaker 1: to go and gamble with the money that he had
Speaker 1: earned as like a caddy, so that he understood what
Speaker 1: it felt like to lose money.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, that's the weird lesson literally like home.
Speaker 1: That's an insane lesson.
Speaker 3: Soldier honed in a dojo to be good with money. Yeah,
Speaker 3: to understand risk.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, that's just a crazy thing to do, but
Speaker 1: it worked. I guess so good. Yeah. Ge So, from
Speaker 1: his earliest years in school, his mother was obsessed with
Speaker 1: the fact that he needed to excel, he writes in
Speaker 1: his autobiography. She knew how to be tough with me,
Speaker 1: but also how to hug and kiss. She wanted to
Speaker 1: make sure I knew how wanted and loved I was.
Speaker 1: I'd come home with four a's and a B on
Speaker 1: my report card, and my mother would want to know
Speaker 1: why I got the B. But she would always in
Speaker 1: the conversation congratulating and hugging me for the a's. My
Speaker 1: mother never managed people, but she knew all about building
Speaker 1: self esteem. I grew up with a speech impediment, a
Speaker 1: stammer that wouldn't go away. Sometimes it led to comical,
Speaker 1: if not embarrassing incidents. In college. I have an order
Speaker 1: to tune a fish on white toast on Fridays when
Speaker 1: Catholics in those days couldn't eat meat. Inevitably, the waitress
Speaker 1: would return with not one but a pair of sandwiches,
Speaker 1: having heard my order as to tuna sandwiches.
Speaker 4: All right, yeah, yeah, you're just rambling.
Speaker 6: This is just rambling. No, this is his this is
Speaker 6: his life. First off one studying point two is it's
Speaker 6: really weird to open up your conversations about your mother
Speaker 6: and say that she's a good hugger and kisser.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she's a good hugger. She's a good kisser. She
Speaker 1: made me gamble so that I learned to be a
Speaker 1: business man. Uh yeah. She told him that he stuttered
Speaker 1: because he was too smart and his tongue couldn't keep
Speaker 1: up with his brain, which is sweet, except for the
Speaker 1: man that this guy grows into is someone who clearly
Speaker 1: had more self esteem than was responsible to give a child. Again,
Speaker 1: this is controversial, but I think it should be illegal
Speaker 1: to be nice to children, otherwise they turn out like this.
Speaker 1: I don't there's no other way to look at this,
Speaker 1: you know. So he grows up extremely confident. One of
Speaker 1: kind of the signs of how confident he is is that,
Speaker 1: like you know, in when he was in high school,
Speaker 1: he was on the football team and the hockey team.
Speaker 4: Well, of course, so much protein. Yeah time, he's a
Speaker 4: big tuneaboy.
Speaker 1: Well, no, he's tiny. He's the shortest guy in his Basically.
Speaker 4: It went into his brain, all the power in his brain.
Speaker 4: He's yeah, smart.
Speaker 1: He he kind of says that basically his mom made
Speaker 1: him so confident that he didn't notice he was so
Speaker 1: super tiny. But eventually, like he stops being able to
Speaker 1: compete in these sports because he's this little bitty shrimp
Speaker 1: of a man. And that's why he gets really into golf, because,
Speaker 1: you know, golf, you don't have to be good at anything.
Speaker 1: To be good at golfing, all you have to do
Speaker 1: is know how to talk about the stock market, right,
Speaker 1: That's that's all golfing's really.
Speaker 4: I'm sure many golfers disagree with you, but let's run
Speaker 4: with it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, who gives a fuck with golfers say, that's running
Speaker 1: the other other than everyone who runs the country.
Speaker 3: Yeah, also running the other card off the road with
Speaker 3: your cart for bonus points. But you know that's all.
Speaker 1: Now, that part of golf I actually do. That's the
Speaker 1: one good.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I like that.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I like the many cars they have.
Speaker 1: Absolutely so. Jack's autobiography is the standard self mythologizing of
Speaker 1: the corporate ubermensche, and it's honestly pretty worthless for anything
Speaker 1: but the broadest details of his actual childhood and the
Speaker 1: insight that we get from knowing what kind of stuff
Speaker 1: he wants us to believe about him. But there is
Speaker 1: one passage in it in which he exposes something that
Speaker 1: I think might be him actually sharing some vulnerability, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to read that now. I was incredibly dependent
Speaker 1: on my parents. Many times, when my mother left the
Speaker 1: house to pick up my dad, the train would be late.
Speaker 1: When I was twelve or thirteen, the delays would drive
Speaker 1: me crazy. I'd run out of the house and down
Speaker 1: Lovett Street, my heart racing to see if they were
Speaker 1: around the corner on the way home. Out of fear
Speaker 1: that something had happened to them. I just couldn't lose them.
Speaker 1: They were my world. It was a fear that I
Speaker 1: shouldn't have had, because my mother raised me to be strong, tough,
Speaker 1: and independent. She always feared she would die young, a
Speaker 1: victim of the heart disease that struck down everyone in
Speaker 1: her family. So that's like the one glimpse that we
Speaker 1: get that maybe this kid had a soul at some point.
Speaker 4: Like it's actually heartbreaking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean that's I think that's also a
Speaker 1: pretty natural fear with kids that like, yeah, yeah, my
Speaker 1: parents will die, you know.
Speaker 4: Like you you painted a portrait of the world for
Speaker 4: me to fear, and so I feel it, and now
Speaker 4: that I'm alone, I'm scared.
Speaker 1: That's almost interesting. It does kind of reveal, yeah, that, like,
Speaker 1: whatever his picture of the world was, it was a
Speaker 1: dangerous one out there.
Speaker 3: And even if, like even if the death is just
Speaker 3: a metaphor for like being thirsty for dad, which they
Speaker 3: don't mean in a sexual way, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: No, I mean, it's fine, it's fine.
Speaker 3: Let's take her fifteen hours a day. Yeah, kid might
Speaker 3: just be like if he does, if his dad doesn't
Speaker 3: show up on time, every second feels like I'm just
Speaker 3: losing this scant time I have with my dad.
Speaker 4: That makes sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I mean it's it's it's a it's the
Speaker 1: only actual like sign. We get that this man might
Speaker 1: have one point had a soul, right, but you know
Speaker 1: who doesn't have a soul? Michael A.
Speaker 3: Boss baby?
Speaker 1: Is what I hear?
Speaker 4: Boss Baby?
Speaker 1: Boss Baby? No, boss Baby does not have a soul
Speaker 1: other than those souls. Yeah, clothes don't, by the way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is you know everyone's talking about AI. I think
Speaker 1: we ought to be we ought to be cloning. You know,
Speaker 1: once we really get cloning figured out, then none of
Speaker 1: us have to work because it's fine to force clones
Speaker 1: to do it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's what boss baby.
Speaker 3: You remember when Dolly the Sheep happened and people were like,
Speaker 3: even though they made a law against it, here we
Speaker 3: go the the bet cats out of the bag. That
Speaker 3: we've reached the tipping point. Someone in a six of
Speaker 3: labs going to start making clones.
Speaker 4: Where we are? Where are all the clones?
Speaker 3: I'm disappointed.
Speaker 1: It's extremely because I was watching that show Severance recently,
Speaker 1: which isn't about cloning, but close enough, and I was like, Mala,
Speaker 1: this would be great. What if we just what if
Speaker 1: we could just create a slave race that we own
Speaker 1: and have them do all the work I think to break.
Speaker 1: We're back, and uh yeah, we're talking about how how
Speaker 1: morally uncomplicated it would be to sever people's consciousness and
Speaker 1: then create little little child brained slaves in order to
Speaker 1: to to do our our obscure corporate labor. What a
Speaker 1: good idea that show is Ben Stiller's beautiful version of
Speaker 1: the vision.
Speaker 3: Ben Stiller's vision. Really, Yeah, I think the furthest still
Speaker 3: go down that road with you is lab grown organs
Speaker 3: that are our organs to replace organs.
Speaker 4: I'd totally go with that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But I mean I don't want a lab grown
Speaker 1: organ unless it comes from a thing with a brain
Speaker 1: that knows that it's dying for me.
Speaker 4: I wanted to pain, Yeah, I wanted to.
Speaker 1: I wanted to know a fear before I take its
Speaker 1: liver because I've destroyed mine. Yeah it Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: what I've learned from Jack Welch. So it will surprise
Speaker 1: you to hear that he was an altar boy for
Speaker 1: much of his childhood a super Catholic family. Although it's interesting,
Speaker 1: he just he always talks about how strict his mom was.
Speaker 1: But the one story that he shares about her disciplining
Speaker 1: him is not at all an example of her being strict.
Speaker 1: At age eleven, he stole a ball from a carnival
Speaker 1: that was in town, and when she found out, she
Speaker 1: first tried to make him go confess to the priest.
Speaker 1: But he was terrified of his priest and he was
Speaker 1: worried that, like he'd be recognized in confession. So he
Speaker 1: like begged his mom to just let him throw the
Speaker 1: ball away, just like toss it into a canal, And
Speaker 1: he writes, after negotiating with her, she let me have
Speaker 1: my way. She drove me down to the bridge on
Speaker 1: North Street and watched as I threw the ball into
Speaker 1: the water. And considering the kind of corporate ghoulisc I
Speaker 1: love that. His like big story of discipline is like
Speaker 1: my mom, I stole something and my mom got angry.
Speaker 1: But my mom, but I convinced her to just let
Speaker 1: me poison the poison the water.
Speaker 4: Sucked the system. In other words, she.
Speaker 1: Just jump it into the water.
Speaker 3: Well, she filed the serial number, and she's like this
Speaker 3: never happen.
Speaker 4: He is terrified to even write his mother as a
Speaker 4: like a figure of evil in his own autobiography, I'm
Speaker 4: not like obviously she's not evil evil, but like, no,
Speaker 4: it is amazing what she did a number on this kid.
Speaker 1: Maybe, yeah, I think there's certainly something she did. I
Speaker 1: don't think we actually get a great context for what
Speaker 1: she was actually like, because what I get from this
Speaker 1: story is like, oh, she was like protecting him at
Speaker 1: all costs and did not care about particularly teaching him
Speaker 1: that like that kind of behavior was wrong. Like, she
Speaker 1: was not the kind of person who felt like it
Speaker 1: was important to instill a moral grounding in her kid.
Speaker 1: She was the kind of person who felt like it
Speaker 1: was important that he'd be part of the church because socially,
Speaker 1: that's what you do. But more than anything, she wanted
Speaker 1: him to be a success and to make money, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's what she actually valued, and that's what she
Speaker 1: selected for in her parenting. That's what I get from
Speaker 1: Jack's book, right, you know, I didn't know his mom anyway.
Speaker 1: It's pretty cool. In high school, Jack played, you know,
Speaker 1: like I said, all of the major sports, but because
Speaker 1: he was so short, after a while, he stopped being
Speaker 1: able to compete at anything but golf and hockey, a
Speaker 1: sport where short people could excel as long as they
Speaker 1: were violent and from a young age. Jack had a
Speaker 1: horrible temper and a problem with losing, which made him
Speaker 1: a great hockey player. Yeah right, yeah, yeah it begin
Speaker 1: So here's another story from his autobiography. The other team
Speaker 1: scored and we lost again for the seventh time in
Speaker 1: a row. In a fit of frustration, I flung my
Speaker 1: hockey stick across the ice of the arena, skated after it,
Speaker 1: and headed back to the locker room. The team was
Speaker 1: already there, taking off their skates and uniforms, all of us.
Speaker 1: The door open, and my Irish mother strode in. The
Speaker 1: place fell silent. Every eye was glued to this middle
Speaker 1: aged woman in a floral pattern dress as she walked
Speaker 1: across the floor, past the wooden benches where some of
Speaker 1: the guys were already changing. She went right for me,
Speaker 1: grabbing the top of my uniform. You punk, she shouted
Speaker 1: in my face. If you don't know how to lose,
Speaker 1: you'll never know how to win. If you don't know this,
Speaker 1: you shouldn't be playing now.
Speaker 3: You throw that hockey stick in the river, young man,
Speaker 3: And we never speak of this again.
Speaker 1: I kind of think he's lying here. Maybe parts of
Speaker 1: this are true. What his mom says, there is like
Speaker 1: something you would write in a business book published in
Speaker 1: two thousand and four. Yeah, yeah, a person doesn't say that.
Speaker 3: Nobody says that, nor do you Nor do you remember
Speaker 3: like floral dress swishing across the floor as memoy. You know,
Speaker 3: he's trying to write what's going on?
Speaker 1: Like maybe if she's being like you know, maybe she
Speaker 1: got angry and yelled at him for being like, you know,
Speaker 1: a bad sport. But she didn't. She didn't say that line.
Speaker 1: That's a lie. That Like he hired consultants to think
Speaker 1: up for him, and she beat the shit at of
Speaker 1: me for a solid forty five minutes. Now that's a
Speaker 1: story I would have believed.
Speaker 4: It's the Ron Howard version of his life.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Obviously his real love was golf, which is a
Speaker 1: love he would he would maintain his entire life. Jack
Speaker 1: notes that he and all of the other boys who
Speaker 1: worked as caddies at the country club competed vigorously to
Speaker 1: caddy for like one of the two guys at the
Speaker 1: club who actually tipped. He makes a point to note
Speaker 1: that all of the rich people basically refuse to tip. Interesting. Interesting.
Speaker 1: He was eventually forced to quit when the guy he
Speaker 1: was caddying for asked him to take off his socks
Speaker 1: and shoes and wade into the water to get a ball.
Speaker 1: Jack refused, and when the guy insisted, he grabbed the
Speaker 1: guy's clubs and threw them into the water, which cost
Speaker 1: him a Club Caddy sponsors, a Club Caddy scholarship. So again,
Speaker 1: you know, guy with a temper right, guy who can't
Speaker 1: really control his anger, Guy whose anger seems to be
Speaker 1: primarily based around being feeling disresaffected.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exact golf a classic recipe for a bastard.
Speaker 4: Yeah, these golf clubs can't contain me, Like it's the
Speaker 4: energy is so uh, it's beautiful. Yeah, it's a beautiful insecurity.
Speaker 1: Yeah you could. Oh yeah, it's it's quite a it's something.
Speaker 1: So he lost out on an ROTC scholarship with the
Speaker 1: Navy as well. Why is unclear. In his book, he
Speaker 1: makes a big deal about like me and my friends
Speaker 1: we all passed the exam together. My dad had the
Speaker 1: state representatives send in letters on my behalf. But then
Speaker 1: my friends got their scholarship and I got turned down.
Speaker 1: And I have no idea why. It's this big mystery
Speaker 1: in my life. And it's like, I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: maybe it didn't do well, like like, maybe you're an asshole,
Speaker 1: and like the guy he's responsible for giving the scholarship
Speaker 1: were like, I don't think this guy's a team player.
Speaker 1: And this is literally the Navy. You know, there's a
Speaker 1: number of things that could have been but maybe you
Speaker 1: just didn't do very well, right, Like, it's not a mystery.
Speaker 1: I had a bunch of friends who applied to west
Speaker 1: Point and didn't get into West Point. And it's not
Speaker 1: a mystery. It's competitive. But Jack can't, like his ego
Speaker 1: has to I think assume that there was something mysterious
Speaker 1: behind the scenes that cost him the scholarships, right, because
Speaker 1: I didn't did Yeah.
Speaker 3: Clearly as Catholic priest told them about that he stole
Speaker 3: a ball.
Speaker 1: That he took that ball. Yeah. So at any rate,
Speaker 1: he did eventually get into college at Amherst, and he
Speaker 1: started in nineteen fifty three, which is the same year
Speaker 1: that Ge released that earnings report, being like, we are
Speaker 1: giving all of our money to our employees, fuck our stockholders.
Speaker 1: Isn't that dope? His time in college was pretty boring.
Speaker 1: I would describe him as a normy also as basic.
Speaker 1: One of the few details we get is that he
Speaker 1: brags it's so sad. He has like a light in
Speaker 1: there where he's like, I was in a fraternity. We
Speaker 1: ranked quote at or near the top and beer consumption
Speaker 1: and had better parties than most. He does not give
Speaker 1: a single example of a party. He does not relate
Speaker 1: a single human interaction during his time at.
Speaker 4: College objectively better parties.
Speaker 1: It's like someone told a robot what you do at college,
Speaker 1: and he was like, we drank the most beer and
Speaker 1: had the best parties. Yeah, yeah it is. It is
Speaker 1: what an AI would write if you like fetit. This
Speaker 1: guy's fucking life story, like be the coolest. Yeah we
Speaker 1: did an animal house.
Speaker 4: That's roight.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. So he eventually got a master's degree in
Speaker 1: chemical engineering because he found it kind of interesting and
Speaker 1: there were jobs. He goes into way hard science, but
Speaker 1: he was not motivated by science, right. He's never someone
Speaker 1: who's like in love with the idea of learning new things.
Speaker 1: He's someone who's like, well, science is like there's good
Speaker 1: jobs and money, you know, chemical engineer, right, And we
Speaker 1: can see that in this anecdote he gives about flying
Speaker 1: with after he gets his master's degree, flying out for
Speaker 1: a job interview in Louisiana with a friend after graduation.
Speaker 1: This is quite telling. On the airplane for my Ethel interview,
Speaker 1: Ethel is the country or company. I was traveling with
Speaker 1: one of my associates from the University of Illinois when
Speaker 1: something odd happened. The stewardess came back and said, mister Welch,
Speaker 1: would you like a drink? She then turned to my
Speaker 1: colleague and said, doctor Gardner, would you like a drink?
Speaker 1: I thought doctor Gardner sounded a lot better than mister
Speaker 1: golf club so hard. So that's it, right, Like He's
Speaker 1: sitting with a friend and a stewardess calls his friend
Speaker 1: a doctor, and he's like, well, that sounds better than
Speaker 1: that's that's why he decides to get a PhD. Is
Speaker 1: there super doctor?
Speaker 3: Is this?
Speaker 1: Is there a double doctor? It's purely it's purely about Cloud.
Speaker 1: He doesn't ever express like an interest in chemical engineering,
Speaker 1: like a love of science, you know, a desire, like
Speaker 1: an appreciation for academics. It's I was getting a cocktail
Speaker 1: once and yeah.
Speaker 4: I swear to god, you're doing the origin story of
Speaker 4: like Homer Simpson.
Speaker 3: Well, also the impulse that is dominant. He's the original
Speaker 3: line goes up.
Speaker 2: Guy.
Speaker 3: All he cares about is line goes up. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the same kind of energy of like fucking
Speaker 1: Ben Shapiro. I see what he's like, Solis crypto guys
Speaker 1: having an AI write a script that like nobody would
Speaker 1: ever want to watch, Like there's no plot in it,
Speaker 1: there's no character development, but it's formatted the way a
Speaker 1: script is, and so people are like, look, it's a script.
Speaker 1: It's like no. Yeah, Like Jack's like, I need to
Speaker 1: be a doctor because it sounds good because people respect
Speaker 1: me if I'm a doctor. So I'm going to go,
Speaker 1: I'm going to spend three more years in college becoming
Speaker 1: a PhD in chemical engineering. I think that this is,
Speaker 1: like probab, the single anecdote that does the most to
Speaker 1: describe the soul of Jack Welch, a man so fundamentally
Speaker 1: empty he pursued a PhD to impress airlines stewardesses. But
Speaker 1: also like that's that's a part of him and that's real.
Speaker 1: But he's also a man who was capable of becoming
Speaker 1: a doctor of chemical engineering, which is not an easy
Speaker 1: thing to do just for clout right, Like that says
Speaker 1: something about the man that is impressive. It's not good,
Speaker 1: but it's impressed. It's impressive.
Speaker 4: And driven.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, Yeah, he's driven. And it's like the worst
Speaker 1: kind of driven, Like well, it's an empty and soulless
Speaker 1: kind of it's the.
Speaker 4: Kind of driven that is created by like a like
Speaker 4: an upbringing that allows him to be like I'm scared
Speaker 4: when I'm alone, you know, like it's the the abuse
Speaker 4: pays forward.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's cool. Uh, it's his His mom really
Speaker 1: did a great job on him. So his thesis for
Speaker 1: his PhD was on Condon's in nuclear power plants. And
Speaker 1: really the only time he talks about like doing science
Speaker 1: in his entire autobiography is to mention that while he
Speaker 1: was working on his thesis, this was the most important
Speaker 1: thing in his life. And then he never brings any
Speaker 1: of this up again. This is never a factor in
Speaker 1: his life afterwards. He never thinks about like science really
Speaker 1: in any meaningful way other than how to like monetize it.
Speaker 1: He's what I'm saying is that he's got an incredible
Speaker 1: ability to compartmentalize, right, and that's really going to be
Speaker 1: his most valuable asset in business, is that he's so
Speaker 1: good at just like shutting off parts of himself and
Speaker 1: then flipping them on when he needs to. And that's
Speaker 1: you know that word. It's one of those things. Like
Speaker 1: the traits that make Jack good at the terrible things
Speaker 1: he's about to do are also the same kind of
Speaker 1: traits that make like a surgeon a good surgeon. You know,
Speaker 1: if you're like cutting into people, you have to be
Speaker 1: able to like not care about cutting into a human being.
Speaker 1: I think most of us find viscerally upsetting for a while.
Speaker 1: You have to be able to just like, yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: just like doing a thing. You know, it's the same
Speaker 1: as wiring a fucking stereo system or whatever, and you
Speaker 1: can't carry it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, and it's a thing and not be doing
Speaker 3: it because it's a weird sex thing or you like
Speaker 3: it or you're getting off.
Speaker 1: That's no more than I'm going to say at least
Speaker 1: twenty percent of surgeons it is a weird sex thing.
Speaker 3: Or being like God, but you gotta see surgeons.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what this podcast wants to Welcome to Behind
Speaker 1: but the Bastards, a podcast about surgeons.
Speaker 4: Yeah, all these surgeons out there, we see, Yeah, let's
Speaker 4: do a pole pot.
Speaker 1: But on anyone able to remove a tumor, like just
Speaker 1: just go after them. No, I mean, but that is
Speaker 1: he does have that like that same thing or that
Speaker 1: like thing that you know, let's you know, some people
Speaker 1: are are I don't know people to kind of do that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I I don't know, Like that's a term
Speaker 1: that's not an actual diagnosis. We kind of use it.
Speaker 1: Most people interchange. I don't think it's some obviously, Like
Speaker 1: it is pretty well documented that psychopaths. There's a very
Speaker 1: high rate of psychopaths among like surgeons, and among any
Speaker 1: kind of job that sort of requires that kind of compartmentalization,
Speaker 1: police officers, priests, you know, anybody who's got to be
Speaker 1: able to like compartmentalize. There's a high rate of folks
Speaker 1: like that. I don't know that Jack could have been
Speaker 1: diagnosed with anything. But it's also like it's not like
Speaker 1: a clean line, Like it's not like having hepatitis. You're
Speaker 1: not just like a psychopath or not. There's traits that
Speaker 1: we use to determine whether or not someone is likely
Speaker 1: a psychopath. And some people may not be psychopaths, but
Speaker 1: they have some of those traits and they're not all
Speaker 1: bad things. And Jack, whatever you could diagnose him as
Speaker 1: Jack has a lot of those traits, and one of
Speaker 1: them is that he's able to just kind of shut
Speaker 1: off parts of himself with robot like efficiency, So that's cool.
Speaker 1: After graduating, he gets hired by General Electric in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty his first job, and basically only works for GE, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's his whole life, his first job. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: gets hired by GE in nineteen sixty and he gets
Speaker 1: sent to a town called Pittsfield, which is at the
Speaker 1: time kind of a minor outpost in GE's corporate empire.
Speaker 1: He attracted notice as a manager pretty quickly. Just a
Speaker 1: year in, he was told he was getting a thousand
Speaker 1: dollars raise, and he was initially pretty happy with this
Speaker 1: because he'd be working hard. He'd been working hard. But
Speaker 1: then he found out that all of his coworkers got
Speaker 1: the same raise, and it like he loses his mind
Speaker 1: over this, Like he is like so furious, he can't focus,
Speaker 1: he can't sleep, he can't think. He announces that he's quitting.
Speaker 1: He tells all of his colleagues that he's quitting. He
Speaker 1: like puts in his notice that he's leaving the company
Speaker 1: because everyone got the same raise.
Speaker 4: The equality.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is this is his fucking joker moment, right,
Speaker 1: this is his like, this is how he got his
Speaker 1: scars because he like he decides to quit and his
Speaker 1: boss apparently doesn't want to lose him and so meets
Speaker 1: with him and like offers him additional money. So jack
Speaker 1: agrees to stay. And it's weird because in his book
Speaker 1: he both he claims that when his boss like came
Speaker 1: and said, hey, we don't want to lose you, that
Speaker 1: he he almost like cried because he did he realized
Speaker 1: quotes somebody loved me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's very important to Jacky Boy, Jackie boy.
Speaker 1: But he also, you know, despite the fact this situation,
Speaker 1: it's like with the ball, it completely went his way.
Speaker 1: He didn't suffer any consequences for throwing a fit and
Speaker 1: in fact he benefited, but.
Speaker 3: Still really worried about it.
Speaker 1: He's angry about it. He never gets over this for
Speaker 1: decades later in his autobiography, he's angry about it forever. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he spends the rest of his life angry over the
Speaker 1: fact that he had almost only gotten the standard raish
Speaker 1: and he even admits in his autobiography it quote probably
Speaker 1: drove his behavior to an extreme and he's like, but.
Speaker 3: When I say that, of course, I mean we really
Speaker 3: you're to blame as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, everyone else, my manager for not giving me more
Speaker 1: money up front. It's also worth noting that he got
Speaker 1: far enough along in the quitting process that his coworkers
Speaker 1: all bought him going away presence, which he did not
Speaker 1: give back.
Speaker 3: Smart dude.
Speaker 1: But in his autobiography he just writes, I don't remember
Speaker 1: if I gave them back or not, which is also funny.
Speaker 3: I don't. Yeah, my secretary will have that information for
Speaker 3: you or whatever.
Speaker 1: An unpleasant man.
Speaker 3: Who meanwhile he unboxes like a brand new cigar cutter
Speaker 3: and reads the tag off and yeah that's a cigar.
Speaker 4: Yeah, just burns a dollar bill.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's Sydney Musburger from the Hudsucker Praxy in my mind.
Speaker 4: Now he's also he's also Jack Doneghe, who was a
Speaker 4: ge like a fictional character.
Speaker 1: It's very funny, aim that you bring up Jack Donaghy,
Speaker 1: because not only is Jack Donaghe from a third Rock
Speaker 1: based on Jack Welch. Jack shows up in uh in
Speaker 1: that show, in that show, right, yeah, yeah, he's in
Speaker 1: several episodes, so uh yeah, that's wild. But you know,
Speaker 1: what's not wild.
Speaker 3: Water park after it gets shut down?
Speaker 1: That's right. Uh No, Schlitterbond was not wild after it
Speaker 1: killed all those kids and they had to shut down
Speaker 1: the best rides. That's right.
Speaker 3: That's what they mean by wet and wild. Yeah, the
Speaker 3: wet and kids die here. Great, Yeah, yeah, yeah when
Speaker 3: kids here. Not enough people know about Schlitterbond. Look, it's
Speaker 3: a water park outside of Austin that you can drink
Speaker 3: as much as you want on the Lazy River and
Speaker 3: only occasionally do kids drown at it. That's a good water.
Speaker 1: Park, only occasionally. Yeah, that's a great This has been
Speaker 1: a paid ad for slitter Bond water park that doesn't
Speaker 1: kill most of the kids who go there. Five stars,
Speaker 1: all right, dah, and we're back. So Jack, you know,
Speaker 1: decides to stay. And he is a good employee. He
Speaker 1: gets promoted fairly quickly. He's an effective a relatively effective
Speaker 1: manager for the most part. But he was not a
Speaker 1: perfect employee, and he made a number of what you
Speaker 1: might call booboos early on in his career, as this
Speaker 1: passage from David Gells's book makes clear. One day in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty three, Welch was at his office in Pittsfield,
Speaker 1: overlooking the factory on Plastics Avenue. Having risen to become
Speaker 1: a manager charged with developing a new plastic, Welch was
Speaker 1: impatient to bring a product to market and had been
Speaker 1: driving his team to move faster, run more experiments, whatever
Speaker 1: it took. As Welch sat at his desk and explosion
Speaker 1: rocked the factory, Debris and broken glass littered the scene
Speaker 1: as smoke shrouded the building. Somehow no one was badly injured,
Speaker 1: but it soon became clear that Welch is head of
Speaker 1: the plant and the one pushing his team so hard
Speaker 1: pore responsibility for the disaster, Pressuring employees to innovate. Welch
Speaker 1: had them experimenting with an untested process, moving oxygen through
Speaker 1: a highly vollile solution in a large tank. Something caused
Speaker 1: a spark, setting off the explosion, and yeah, he blows
Speaker 1: up his first factory.
Speaker 4: And it is Daniel Plainview is going.
Speaker 1: On in his autobiography. He just writes that, like, we
Speaker 1: were doing an experiment, and you know, it's just one
Speaker 1: of these things that happened the factory. You know, there
Speaker 1: was an explosion and it was no one's fault, but
Speaker 1: it was my fault because I'm the manager, and you know,
Speaker 1: the manager, you got to take He frames it as like,
Speaker 1: I'll say it's my fault because as the manager, the
Speaker 1: buck stops with me, and the reality is, well, you
Speaker 1: you ordered them to do something dangerous and irresponsible and
Speaker 1: an explosion occurred. It was your fault because all.
Speaker 3: Cover for you. I'll take the heat for this one off.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I love like, yeah, the opportunism of turning that
Speaker 4: scenario into like I'm falling on my sword here is
Speaker 4: exactly precisely why he does well in business, and he's
Speaker 4: it's deplorable. Yeah, it's horrible human.
Speaker 3: My gut is telling me I am not responsible for this.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 3: It's what my gut says. I don't know.
Speaker 1: It's like fucking several driving your Lexus through a fucking
Speaker 1: crosswalk and hitting a bunch of kids and being like,
Speaker 1: all right, this is clearly a mistake. But you know what, kids,
Speaker 1: I'll take the fall for this one. I'm the adult
Speaker 1: in this situation. You know, I'll take the blame on
Speaker 1: this one.
Speaker 4: It's like, literally, I think you should leave. Yeah, it's
Speaker 4: the hot dogs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're all trying to find the guy who did
Speaker 1: this very very funny. Jack Welch blows up his first factory.
Speaker 1: Now Mom walks in grabs him by the collar. Stop
Speaker 1: blowing up factories. I'm not an on I never did.
Speaker 1: I'm not a hiring people guy. I think that's generally
Speaker 1: best avoided. But I would say, if one of my subordinates,
Speaker 1: you know here at cool Zone blew up a factory
Speaker 1: that we, you know, made podcasts out of, I would
Speaker 1: I would probably impose consequences on them. But Jack Head, really,
Speaker 1: what are you talking about here? You know the factory, Sophie.
Speaker 1: Have I not told you about the factory?
Speaker 2: I talked about the factory.
Speaker 4: But which employer are we referring to?
Speaker 1: That's my question. It's the it's the it's the arms
Speaker 1: company that we use cool Zone as a shell to
Speaker 1: a to ah. We're on air ship artillery primers through anyway,
Speaker 1: we don't need to talk about that. So Jack suffers
Speaker 1: no consequences for blowing up this factory. Again, Ge is
Speaker 1: like a ridiculously paternalistic company at this point, and his
Speaker 1: bosses are like, hey, failure is a part of life,
Speaker 1: Jackie boy, you know, just don't blow up another factory
Speaker 1: and everything's fine, and honestly, to their credit, this works
Speaker 1: out well for them financially because the next thing that
Speaker 1: he does is he convinces his bosses to invest in
Speaker 1: a new factory which created a plastic called Noural. Now
Speaker 1: he convinces it to do this before Noural is a
Speaker 1: functional product. In fact, the plastic in its first form
Speaker 1: was too brittle to work. But Jack told his chemists,
Speaker 1: find a way to make this not be a terrible mistake,
Speaker 1: and they do somehow, and the boy did it well
Speaker 1: as many factories as it takes. So Jack gets promoted
Speaker 1: to head the company's plastics division at thirty two, and
Speaker 1: he becomes GE's youngest general manager. This promotion brings him
Speaker 1: stock options for the first time, and over the coming
Speaker 1: years he started to develop an obsession with stock price,
Speaker 1: one that overwhelmed any interest he had in the actual
Speaker 1: products that his employees were making. Despite the fact that
Speaker 1: his hard working scientists had been the ones to turn
Speaker 1: Neural from another failure into a hit, Jack had no
Speaker 1: loyalty to them or to anyone else who worked at GE,
Speaker 1: and in fact, he grew increasingly frustrated with the paternalistic
Speaker 1: nature of the company. With the understanding that it showed
Speaker 1: its employees, which again is the only reason he wasn't
Speaker 1: shitcanned for blowing up that factory. Now, the CEO of
Speaker 1: GE at this time was an Englishman named Reg Jones,
Speaker 1: who was some people will say, like one of the
Speaker 1: most if not the most respected CEOs in the country
Speaker 1: at that point. He was apparently good. I mean, the
Speaker 1: GE increased steadily in value during the time that he
Speaker 1: was there, and he was he was kind of notably
Speaker 1: the kind of CEO that doesn't exist anymore. He lived
Speaker 1: in like a normal person house. He made two hundred
Speaker 1: grand a year, which was more money in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: but like nothing close to what executives make these days, right,
Speaker 1: like that, not even in the same ballpark of like
Speaker 1: a modern the ceo the salary of like the CEO
Speaker 1: of GE today, or the CEO of a company that
Speaker 1: you know was like gee.
Speaker 3: Who could easily afford a ballpark for example.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for example. He was also kind of famous for
Speaker 1: like whenever he would find out about like employees suffering
Speaker 1: deaths in the family, he wouldn't just like send them
Speaker 1: a letter or whatever, Like, he would devote company resources
Speaker 1: to helping people, you know, pay for funerals and deal
Speaker 1: with grieving. Like he was generally seen as a pretty
Speaker 1: nice guy. But Reg also was kind of as the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies rolled along. As we all remember from I
Speaker 1: don't know, high school history class, that's where you get
Speaker 1: your stagnation and your inflation, and you get your stagflation,
Speaker 1: and the economy is not doing so great. Japan and
Speaker 1: Germany are both kind of rising as industrial powers, and
Speaker 1: it turns out that they make better products than a
Speaker 1: lot of American companies. So people are starting to the
Speaker 1: US economy is starting to, like this kind of golden
Speaker 1: age of capitalism is starting to sort of like get jankier.
Speaker 1: You know, we can kind of see the Reagan era
Speaker 1: heading towards us very quickly in the mirror. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's and Reg was intelligent enough to see this coming.
Speaker 1: He knew the economy was changing, and so in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven he starts the process of finding the guy
Speaker 1: who's going to replace him. You know, it takes a
Speaker 1: couple of years, and when he's given a list of
Speaker 1: like the short list of executives being considered to take
Speaker 1: over his job, he sees that Jack Welch isn't on
Speaker 1: there because no one likes Jack. He's an asshole. But
Speaker 1: Reg is like, I think you know, Jack is you know,
Speaker 1: someone who thinks differently than everyone else at the company.
Speaker 3: But he blew up that factory factory.
Speaker 1: What the story you'll get? And this is kind of
Speaker 1: a mystery. No one really knows why Reg picks him.
Speaker 1: But Reg is like, I don't know, maybe this Probably
Speaker 1: the most likely thing is that REGs like, this guy's
Speaker 1: an asshole. The economy is getting worse. Maybe we need
Speaker 1: a piece of shit to run the company during this
Speaker 1: period of time.
Speaker 3: Hard to say, but Ivana Guet talks about money River,
Speaker 3: which is just I do think it's really true that
Speaker 3: many times people who become insanely wealthy and powerful, it
Speaker 3: really boils down to a moment where someone who is
Speaker 3: already insanely wealthy and powerful before them went, I don't
Speaker 3: know you like you're set now that's that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And this is about to be that moment for Jack.
Speaker 1: So he's put on this short list. And basically the
Speaker 1: way GE does this is once they've got this kind
Speaker 1: of shortlist together, for the next couple of years, Jack
Speaker 1: and all of the other guys considered for the job
Speaker 1: are told, hey, we're watching you to see if you're
Speaker 1: good enough to be to CEO. You know, do your
Speaker 1: fucking best, and they give them new responsibilities to kind
Speaker 1: of see what they can handle and judge them. So
Speaker 1: most of his competitors for the job focused on either
Speaker 1: maintaining profits and you know, keeping a steady rate of
Speaker 1: increase in profits at whatever divisions they were running, or
Speaker 1: at shepherding new research into production in the hopes that
Speaker 1: it would be a new big business for Ge and
Speaker 1: it would look good for them. Jack knew that that
Speaker 1: shit either didn't look impressive right, just kind of maintaining
Speaker 1: profit and that a division isn't easy to rag about
Speaker 1: in this kind of a competition, or it took too
Speaker 1: long right. New research, as he knows, is risky sometimes
Speaker 1: the factory explodes. He doesn't want to take that risk.
Speaker 1: But he had a faster, dumber way of increasing profits
Speaker 1: mass layoffs. So this was not really a thing for
Speaker 1: American businesses at this point. Obviously, sometimes people get fired.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you got to lay people off because the company's
Speaker 1: not working right, Like it was a thing that maybe
Speaker 1: people would get laid off of a business failed. Sure,
Speaker 1: but the idea that a company that is profitable and
Speaker 1: even though the economy is more challenging right now, GE
Speaker 1: is profitable. GE is making a shitload of money. The
Speaker 1: idea that a company is profitable as GE would fire
Speaker 1: a shitload of employees just to improve their margins. That
Speaker 1: didn't happen at this period of time in American capitalism.
Speaker 1: Jack is like, what if we did that? So this
Speaker 1: is my idea. Yeah, this is what I leave the
Speaker 1: human race. You're welcome firing people there for no reason.
Speaker 1: Did this guy create like the rank and yank thing.
Speaker 1: That's exactly where we're headed, buddy, Holy yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't want to get ahead of ourselves though. So GE
Speaker 1: operated a massive complex in Louisville, Kentucky called Appliants Park.
Speaker 1: It was this is such a big factory kind of
Speaker 1: complex that it has its own zip code. It was
Speaker 1: very profitable, and it also like kind of supported the
Speaker 1: whole city, right, Like a huge amount of Louisville's economy
Speaker 1: is people who work at Appliants Park, right, It's what
Speaker 1: keeps the city alive kind of effectively in this period,
Speaker 1: Jack didn't think it was profitable enough. Though, Again it's profitable.
Speaker 1: He just doesn't think it's profitable enough, so he shit
Speaker 1: cans a huge percentage of the workforce, gutting a huge
Speaker 1: chunk of the economy in Louisville, but making a short
Speaker 1: term like stockbump for Ge right, because cutting all of this,
Speaker 1: all this salary and benefits and stuff, looks good on
Speaker 1: the balance and that makes the shareholders happy. His colleagues
Speaker 1: celebrated his courage in doing this. David Gel's writes quote
Speaker 1: layoff spread to other divisions as well. Welch amassed more responsibility,
Speaker 1: and as he toured GE's facilities around the country, he
Speaker 1: took the opportunity to remind the rank and file who
Speaker 1: was now in charge. In Cleveland, at the light bulb factory,
Speaker 1: he berated a manager for the relative high costs of
Speaker 1: GE's bulbs, screaming that competitors in communist Europe made similar
Speaker 1: products for half the price. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, he tore
Speaker 1: into another executive when he stepped on and off one
Speaker 1: of the company's new digital bathroom scales and it came
Speaker 1: back with different results. When he met a manager who
Speaker 1: failed to impress, he would snap, what the fuck do
Speaker 1: I pay you for? Beyond being an unsentimental cost cutter,
Speaker 1: someone who was willing to lay off a few hundred
Speaker 1: workers to meet a quarterly earnings target. Welch had never
Speaker 1: outgrown his adolescent temper. And I find that really interesting
Speaker 1: the light bulb story, because the kind of broad story
Speaker 1: you get about the Cold War is like, yeah, capitalism
Speaker 1: went up against communism and communism lost, and it's like, well,
Speaker 1: the United States went up against the Soviet Union and
Speaker 1: all of our sundry satellites and the Soviet Union collapsed.
Speaker 1: But a big part of what was happening in that
Speaker 1: period is the United States economy boomed in part because
Speaker 1: it adopted a number of socialist policies, even at the
Speaker 1: corporate level, welfare capitalism, right, That was a big part
Speaker 1: of what made the US economy work during that period
Speaker 1: of time. But the whole time there were guys like
Speaker 1: Welch who were like, you know, instead of not looking
Speaker 1: at like the shitty quality of a lot of products
Speaker 1: produced in communist countries and being like, boy, capitalism makes
Speaker 1: much better products, looking at them and going, man, if
Speaker 1: we made shit like that, we could save a lot
Speaker 1: of money that we could then man to rich people,
Speaker 1: which is where we are now.
Speaker 3: It's the banal tragedy. I totally get this guy through
Speaker 3: and through because he's the guy we have now still
Speaker 3: to this day. Yeah, and it is. It's actually chilling
Speaker 3: to think of that open ended answer. Uh yeah, we're profitable,
Speaker 3: but are we profitable enough?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 4: How much is enough?
Speaker 3: Man, is a scary place we're going again.
Speaker 1: It's not like, because this is always like the fucking
Speaker 1: hard nosed capitalism is the best. People are like, well,
Speaker 1: what we should just have a You should just pay
Speaker 1: people for a failing business. You know that you can't
Speaker 1: do that. It's like, look, these are hard decisions, but
Speaker 1: they have to be made. You can't just give you know,
Speaker 1: this is a business, not a charity. No. No, G's
Speaker 1: light bulb business was profitable. It was making money. He
Speaker 1: just wanted to make shittier, cheaper light bulbs so that
Speaker 1: more money could go to the forty people at the
Speaker 1: very top of things. And he was willing to destroy
Speaker 1: the city of Louisville in order to do this.
Speaker 4: I wonder if went on his deathbed like, this guy's dead. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: he's dead as shit, but very recently yeah, okay, so
Speaker 4: I wonder I do think it was a painful death.
Speaker 4: Oh well there's that. Yeah. Uh, I wonder on his
Speaker 4: deathbed if he was just like he like looked into
Speaker 4: someone's eyes and was like, was I a cartoon character?
Speaker 1: It is? I'm We'll talk a little bit about how
Speaker 1: Jack handled imminent death, abe, because it's even funnier than that.
Speaker 1: So Jack was obsessed with a small, relatively unappreciated part
Speaker 1: of the company, GE Credit Corp. The company finance division.
Speaker 1: And this was like a small It was created basically
Speaker 1: to like let customers like finance purchases, right, Like you're
Speaker 1: buying a washing machine that's expensive, you can't pay it
Speaker 1: all up front, so you finance it with the company, right.
Speaker 1: But what Jack realized is that like the company could
Speaker 1: be doing a lot more with its finance division, because
Speaker 1: a corporate finance division when you've got a company as
Speaker 1: big as GE could have with it and with as
Speaker 1: good a credit writing as G because GE is like
Speaker 1: triple A, right, like it's the best company in the country.
Speaker 1: Pretty much like they've got that anyone will lend to them,
Speaker 1: which meant that GE's finance division could operate as a bank,
Speaker 1: like an unlicensed bank. So he starts spanning it and
Speaker 1: offering mortgages and private credit cards and investing in other
Speaker 1: companies and buying other companies. And it's one of those
Speaker 1: things where he's like in his autobiography when he kind
Speaker 1: of realizes that he could use this as an unlicensed bank.
Speaker 1: He writes, compared to the industrial operations, I did know
Speaker 1: this business seemed an easy way to make money. You
Speaker 1: didn't have to invest heavily in R and D, build
Speaker 1: factories and bend metal. It's like making shits hard and risky. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, with every step we just go. But if money's
Speaker 3: just math and it's just abstract, if we took this
Speaker 3: percentage into this percentage, the money would just make money.
Speaker 3: And now we're at a point where I don't I
Speaker 3: just think if you think that way, I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 3: you don't understand what life is for. You're not engaging
Speaker 3: with the universe.
Speaker 1: No, And we like you're not again, you're not a
Speaker 1: person that we need to have in the world, right
Speaker 1: because ge again not to like why again g He
Speaker 1: was heavily involved in the military industrial complex, but outside
Speaker 1: of that, it like it made things that objectively would
Speaker 1: be necessary in any society. It made light bulbs that worked, Right,
Speaker 1: that's a value to society. Having light bulbs that function.
Speaker 1: It made washing machines and dryers that worked, that's a
Speaker 1: value to society. Jack is like, what if we made
Speaker 1: payday loans? Like, what if we created ways to just
Speaker 1: like make interest money off of people? And we'll talk
Speaker 1: about the other fucky things he does with this bank
Speaker 1: because it's his primary instrument for like making GE a
Speaker 1: quote unquote success in his eyes. But we're I'm getting
Speaker 1: ahead of myself yet again. So the late seventies, things
Speaker 1: keep getting worse for the American economy. You know, obviously
Speaker 1: inflation is pretty brutal this period of time. You know,
Speaker 1: GE is again still making a profit. They are sailing
Speaker 1: kind of through these stormy waters. But the profit isn't enough,
Speaker 1: right Jack see's the one and a half billion a
Speaker 1: year that the company is netting as brutally insufficient.
Speaker 3: It's never enough for his trained daddy to come home
Speaker 3: and hug him.
Speaker 1: He will, yeah, exactly what he It will make his
Speaker 1: dad not have worked himself half to death at the train.
Speaker 1: So during this period, while Jack is kind of competing
Speaker 1: to be the new CEO, there's a new attitude developing
Speaker 1: in the American business community about how capitalism ought to function.
Speaker 1: The death knell of the Golden Age of capitalism was
Speaker 1: heralded by books about business that started to get really popular,
Speaker 1: like In Search of Excellence by Thomas Peters and Robert
Speaker 1: Waterman Junior. And this is this is an interesting idea
Speaker 1: because business historian Lewis Hyman describes kind of the central
Speaker 1: message of In Search of Excellence as you don't really
Speaker 1: need all these workers. You should be able to buy
Speaker 1: what you need from the market. You don't need to
Speaker 1: have these big corporations. You can get by without job security. Now.
Speaker 1: One of the authors of this book is a partner
Speaker 1: at Mackenzie, our old buddy, Pete Bodagig's former employer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: In Search of Excellence is the other author is like
Speaker 1: the guy who basic kind of guts the old Hewlett
Speaker 1: Packard to build the new one. And these are these
Speaker 1: are guys, these are MBA's right, they're not engineering guys.
Speaker 1: At firms like Hewlett Packard and like ge, a lot
Speaker 1: of the people running it had been engineers previously. It's
Speaker 1: the same with companies like Lockheed, but in this period
Speaker 1: they're being replaced by guys who just know like business,
Speaker 1: and these are guys who are they're obsessed with like
Speaker 1: concepts like kaisen from Japan, which is like a manufacturing
Speaker 1: concept that they kind of often misunderstand and misapply. They're
Speaker 1: they're they're trend seekers, right, Like they see companies succeeding
Speaker 1: and they're like, what are they doing? Like how can
Speaker 1: we copy it? Part of how what they copy is
Speaker 1: this kind of like manic, insane work culture that is,
Speaker 1: you know, prevalent in places like Japan. What they're not
Speaker 1: going to copy is like, you know, these Japanese companies
Speaker 1: whose workers are like working themselves half to death produce excellent,
Speaker 1: reliable products. That's not necessary, right, Like we don't actually
Speaker 1: need to make good cars. We can we can if
Speaker 1: we make our workers work that hard and produce cheap shit,
Speaker 1: will make even more money. Right. That's a big part
Speaker 1: of the management philosophy, especially in search of excellence. Pushes
Speaker 1: if you're.
Speaker 3: Still loyal to American products, which of course patriotism was. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I would say more prevalent than or like extreme, the
Speaker 3: point being, now your ship breaks down, you got to
Speaker 3: buy it twice as fast, exactly, like it works all
Speaker 3: around just me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as opposed to like, I don't know Toyota, whose
Speaker 1: philosophy is we will make a car that will outlive humanity.
Speaker 3: Right speak at your funeral.
Speaker 1: Yeah it more but back then, you know.
Speaker 4: But think of the yachts. Yeah, Robert, think.
Speaker 1: Of the yachts.
Speaker 3: When you hang yourself using your fifty year old pair
Speaker 3: of Levi's jeans, your car will be there.
Speaker 1: So another popular book that kind of helped set up
Speaker 1: the next age of American capitalism was Future Shock. The
Speaker 1: author I got named powered Alvin Toffler. Again, I'm going
Speaker 1: to actually quote from that that business story in Lewis Hyman.
Speaker 1: Here the author basically invinces the idea of project management
Speaker 1: and talks about a future where there's no stability and
Speaker 1: no security. It's a blueprint for work under neoliberalism, and
Speaker 1: it's everywhere. It's a best seller. There's lots of these
Speaker 1: popularizers that bring ideas about workplace and security into a
Speaker 1: kind of connection with rethinking what the corporation is after
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies. And perhaps the single most important of
Speaker 1: these kind of apostles of this new age of capitalism
Speaker 1: is a guy named Milton Friedman. Now that's a name
Speaker 1: I'm going to guess most people have at least heard right.
Speaker 1: He's kind of like the dude behind the Chicago School
Speaker 1: of Economics. He is an economist himself. He's extremely influential.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that Friedman argues is that
Speaker 1: social welfare programs are not like a responsible thing for
Speaker 1: a society to invest in, specifically particularly if they're using
Speaker 1: tax dollars from companies and from rich people to fund
Speaker 1: these programs. He rails against the idea that corporations have
Speaker 1: any responsibility to society or to its their employees. In
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy, Freedman rights, the social responsibility of business is
Speaker 1: to increase its profits. What does it mean to say
Speaker 1: that business has responsibilities? Only people can have responsibilities. Businessmen
Speaker 1: who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual
Speaker 1: forces that have been undermining the basis of a free
Speaker 1: society these past decades.
Speaker 3: And then we've evolved that to the point where we
Speaker 3: just go or you could just say corporations are people,
Speaker 3: even though that's like saying two plus two equals five,
Speaker 3: or an umbrella is alive.
Speaker 1: But okay, well, now Michael, umbrellas are alive. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: bad example, And every time you close them, they die.
Speaker 1: So it's like drawing a katana, right, Like you have
Speaker 1: to know that you have to commit to that umbrella
Speaker 1: if you're going to open it, because you're taking a life.
Speaker 1: So sure that this is the only thing I believe spiritually.
Speaker 4: So think about that next time raised.
Speaker 1: This is what you're taught as an Episcopalian. That's all
Speaker 1: I remember from Sunday School. This is a weeping man
Speaker 1: screaming at me never to use an I'm going to
Speaker 1: think of it.
Speaker 4: That was a bus stop.
Speaker 1: But so, in Friedman's eyes, the only responsibility corporations have
Speaker 1: is to maximize shareholder value. Any sacrifice necessary to achieve
Speaker 1: this end is acceptable. Now this is a little bit
Speaker 1: of an aside, but one of the people that Friedman
Speaker 1: had the biggest influence on is a Chilean politician named
Speaker 1: Augusto Pinochet. Right, so, Friedman gives a bunch of and
Speaker 1: a bunch of Chicago School economists are kind of brought
Speaker 1: in by Pinochet in order to give him advice. Once
Speaker 1: he takes over the country by murdering it's elect democratically
Speaker 1: elected leader. With the backing of the CIA, Pinochet dismantles
Speaker 1: Chile's public properties, he auctions off state businesses to the
Speaker 1: highest bidder, and he kills every environmental and financial regulation
Speaker 1: in the country. This creates in the short term, massive
Speaker 1: wealth for a small number of people, but it also
Speaker 1: leads to de industrialization that by the early nineteen eighties
Speaker 1: had caused unemployment in the country to increase to ten
Speaker 1: times its pre Pinochet rate. By nineteen eighty two, Pinochet
Speaker 1: had been forced to fire his Chicago School advisors and
Speaker 1: renationalize several of the financial institutions he deregulated. In other words,
Speaker 1: the what we know from the example of Chile is
Speaker 1: that following these kind of economic policies that Friedman is
Speaker 1: advocating that Jack Welch is reading about in these books
Speaker 1: and falling in love with makes a shitload of money
Speaker 1: for a while, and then it leaves your economy hollowed
Speaker 1: out and unable to survive and causes like massive social
Speaker 1: and economic disasters.
Speaker 3: And it's crazy that these people think that they're fucking
Speaker 3: geniuses because they can turn money into more money.
Speaker 4: Because they sure credit.
Speaker 3: But they can't see that, Yeah, if you strip mine
Speaker 3: the mountain, then you don't have the mountain, or like
Speaker 3: if you burn the hole for there's no force, you
Speaker 3: fucking idiot, Like, is this not obvious?
Speaker 1: It'd be like if I was like, look, you know,
Speaker 1: I have a new idea for a business where I
Speaker 1: can provide functional organs to people who need them. And
Speaker 1: because doctors and nurses are already in hospitals, I'm just
Speaker 1: having men with guns kill them and take their organs.
Speaker 1: In the short term, you can probably make a lot
Speaker 1: of money, sit out huge business, but very quickly you
Speaker 1: run out of people who can put those organs and bodies.
Speaker 3: And I do believe truly in my heart that with
Speaker 3: many of these people, their inner thought about that is
Speaker 3: I will be dead before then, so yes, doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think their inner thought is more just like
Speaker 1: the droning of a dial toned like that's all that
Speaker 1: ghosts on. They just do what they do.
Speaker 3: Jack Welch, Yeah, I actually believe it's an addiction of
Speaker 3: some kind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, I think there's Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: I think all of the things we're talking about are
Speaker 1: true or just compulsions. So, just as Chile is teetering
Speaker 1: towards the brink of economic collapse thanks to its freedmanlike policies,
Speaker 1: Freedman disciple Jack Welch was picked to be the new
Speaker 1: CEO of General Electric. His colleagues reported shock and sometimes
Speaker 1: horror at this decision, but Regg Jones had made his
Speaker 1: selection and there was no going back now, although an
Speaker 1: event that occurred right before the transfers power certainly gave
Speaker 1: him second thoughts David Gel's writes. Five weeks before Welch
Speaker 1: officially took over, Jones threw him a party at the
Speaker 1: Helmsley Palace, an upscale hotel in New York City. Among
Speaker 1: the sixty or so guests were CEOs for many of
Speaker 1: the nation's largest companies. As the night wore on, Welsh
Speaker 1: had a bit too much to drink. When Jones asked
Speaker 1: him to address the crowd, Welch couldn't get through his
Speaker 1: remarks without slurring his words. Back at GE headquarters the
Speaker 1: next morning, Jones stormed into Welch's office. I've never been
Speaker 1: so humiliated in my life, he told Welch, you embarrassed
Speaker 1: me in the company. Welch was terrified that this might
Speaker 1: cost him the job, but yet again he avoided any
Speaker 1: accountability for his actions. Jones went through with his decision,
Speaker 1: and right before the final transfer of power. He invited
Speaker 1: Welch into his office. Jack said, I give you the
Speaker 1: Queen Mary. This is designed not to sink. Jack, without
Speaker 1: even taking a second to think, immediately replied, I don't
Speaker 1: want the Queen Mary. I plan to blow up the
Speaker 1: Queen Mary. I want speedboats.
Speaker 3: I want to shoot at Tesla to the moon with
Speaker 3: a fucking mannequin in it for social media cloud. That's
Speaker 3: what I want.
Speaker 4: That's who I am. And then we're thumbed up and
Speaker 4: then high fived, and then we flew out of there
Speaker 4: on our fucking spaceship.
Speaker 3: Then we just threw up piles of money, and then
Speaker 3: we ate the money that we threw up the air.
Speaker 1: Yeah. What I what I love about this, What I
Speaker 1: love about this is that like if we're if we're
Speaker 1: following this, this this metaphor right logically, Okay, the Queen
Speaker 1: Mary is the boat that we are all on. And
Speaker 1: if you blow up the boat that we're on and
Speaker 1: then you replace it with speedboats, well only a few
Speaker 1: of us can fit on the speedboats and everyone else dies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is. It is actually a very good analogy. He's
Speaker 1: doing a Titanic, but he's like, wow, the Titanic really
Speaker 1: created a lot of value for the survivors that made it.
Speaker 4: There's a supplying demand's structure rehaul, you know, during the
Speaker 4: sinking of the Titanic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is. It is such a piece of ship.
Speaker 1: He's I just what a reminder like we have. We're
Speaker 1: barely getting started. This is the end of part one.
Speaker 1: But boy, howdy does it get a lot worse. But
Speaker 1: you know what doesn't get worse, you guys, you just
Speaker 1: get better with a like a fine salami.
Speaker 4: I tell myself that every day.
Speaker 3: I tell my fine salami that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you guys want to plug anything?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was That was the cue to plug your
Speaker 2: plug plug.
Speaker 3: We did it at the top.
Speaker 4: You double plug.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well you get to double plug. We only let
Speaker 1: our We only learn our real friends, do they?
Speaker 3: Well, speaking of double plug in our fine salami, we're
Speaker 3: doing a movie about the complex proposition.
Speaker 1: Format to be a sex thing.
Speaker 4: Yes, well that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: Go over to my torrent site right now and find
Speaker 1: double plugging a fine salami right right.
Speaker 4: On the time, sausage.
Speaker 3: We are doing a movie, as we said at the top,
Speaker 3: but we'll say it again because it's been a bit
Speaker 3: about the complex proposition of formulating your own sexual identity
Speaker 3: and how everyone's journey in that regard is unique and irreducible.
Speaker 3: And it's called Papa Bear and it's very funny. But
Speaker 3: then in the third act has heart you know, like
Speaker 3: you know kind of movies I'm talking about. It's one
Speaker 3: of those poignant coming of age shit. We're really good
Speaker 3: at videos and movies. If you know us and our work,
Speaker 3: you probably already know that. If you're interested in finding
Speaker 3: out more about the project, it's over at seed and
Speaker 3: spark dot com, slash fund, slash Papa hyphen Bear.
Speaker 4: Thanks so much, thank.
Speaker 1: You, thank you both so much. You can find me
Speaker 1: nowhere because stay away from social media, it's bad for you.
Speaker 1: But you can find my book After the Revolution literally
Speaker 1: anywhere you can buy books. You like Amazon, you like
Speaker 1: bookshop dot com or whatever you like going to Barnes
Speaker 1: and Noble. For some reason, it's everywhere. Go go go
Speaker 1: read it.
Speaker 2: That's the episode.
Speaker 1: That's the episode.
Speaker 2: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
Speaker 2: dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts,