Part One: Jack Welch Is Why You Got Laid Off

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's a podcast. Shit, it's behind the Bastards a podcast
that I was I was trying, like in the thirty
seconds before we started to think of like a good
funny introduction, like you know, shouting Hitler atonally or.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
You know, I like, it's a podcast.

Speaker 1 (00:19):
That's all I came up with.

Speaker 3 (00:20):
That's fine.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
I considered Sophie doing like doing like a War of
the World style intro where I pretend to be a
newscaster letting everyone know that like a new virus has
been found, has reached the coasts of the United States
and is spreading rapidly through populated areas. But we already
we all did that, so it's not really funny. So
I don't know. I don't know, Sophie, I don't know.

(00:42):
I'm I'm you know, it's a podcast. I failed. I failed,
But you know who's not a failure.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
Sophie, Oh yeah, I do.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
The guests that we have for this spectacular podcast episode today,
the glorious Michael Swam and the inimitable Abraham Epperson.

Speaker 3 (01:06):
I'm glorious. But you could imitate it if you try to.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
Yeah, you could imitate. You could imitate Michael, but but.

Speaker 4 (01:13):
Not a but and I have I have no discernment
of quality, but you can't replicate it.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
That's right, that's right, that's right.

Speaker 3 (01:22):
No one said it's good.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
It's just hard.

Speaker 4 (01:24):
Yeah, it's just like whoa, that's hard to do.

Speaker 5 (01:26):
I love this.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
I love that we we had a pitch meeting about
my compliments to turn them into insults. That was nice.
It's really making me nostalgic for the old days. A cracked.

Speaker 3 (01:36):
And by the way, by doing a War of the worlds,
I totally thought you meant get sick and die like
just keel over. Robert was the best of us all,
but he wouldn't handle as simple Covid.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
No, I I'm you know, uh covid who the CDC
says it's over, So we're good. Yeah, I'm not even
worried about it anymore. Michael abe as I. As I
stated a little earlier, we all used to work together
at the old place, at the shop, at the comedy

(02:10):
website that was based off of a comedy magazine that
nobody read in the nineteen sixties, but the website did.

Speaker 3 (02:17):
Quite well for a time. Matt TV the website if you.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
Will, Yeah, yeah, you guys are back on The last
time we had both of you together was talking about
the end of l Ron Hubbard and listening to his
gligorious his glorious song. Thank you for listening. And today
I've got you on to talk about a very special
piece of shit, one one of the rare bastards who

(02:42):
has had a major impact on the life of every
single person listening to this podcast. But before we get
into that, you guys have a project that you're working
on that's very exciting, and I want to I want
to start with a plug up front so that we
can get to that before people souls leave their bodies
with depression.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
And I'm supposed to remind you that you also have
a podcast because Danill threatened my life.

Speaker 3 (03:05):
Oh yeah, all right, well let's dispense with that quickly.
I do a podcast with Adam Ganzer where we talk
about video games. It's called One Upsmanship. I love it
dearly and it's a weekly show. That's great. But wait,
there's more. Wow, and thank you, Robert, because ye value,
we're definitely here just to announce that we're clear. Since

(03:25):
the hybrid episode, we're totally clear, So good for us.
And with that new found power, we've decided to try
and make an indie movie. It would be our second
indie movie. The first one's called kill Me Now. If
you want to see if we suck at it, you
could go watch kill Me Now on YouTube.

Speaker 4 (03:41):
It's available.

Speaker 3 (03:41):
One's entirety thank you, and it's been a long time
and we're ready for number two. If you knew us
from Cracked, or like, if you knew like After Hour's agency,
Crack does not compute hundreds of sketches. We were kind
of the engine behind that. And this movie is based
on the hilarious, poignant true story of when my dad

(04:02):
came out as a gay furry. It's super funny, but
it's also got a lot of heart. It weaves a
bunch of other stuff in there as well. And Abe,
do you have anything to add?

Speaker 4 (04:11):
Yeah, url, Yeah, you can go help us out by
going to seed andspark dot com, slash fund, slash Papa
Dash Bear, and you can become part of the movie,
get stuff from the movie, watch the film early, even
go to a premiere. We're stoked about telling the story.
So if you can't help us get what we need
to make it right, Yeah, Yeah. At the lowest tier,

(04:34):
you're basically pre buying a ticket because you'll just get
a private link to the movie when it's ready. We
have other funding like going on behind the scenes, but
the crowdfunding piece, which is going wrong right now of course,
is super crucial. And there's cooler stuff than that to get.

Speaker 1 (04:49):
Yeah, if you're doing it at the highest level, you
will literally be able to call yourself a producer and
wear suspenders and like a nice iron shirt and do
mountains of cocaine while smoking a cigar. Don't forget the hat,
cheating on your your wife. You get a signed hat,
all sorts of good stuff do we pros.

Speaker 3 (05:12):
We execute the adoption papers with your name on him,
and you become my dad. You are legally wow, wow,
Mike's dad.

Speaker 1 (05:19):
You know, considering the movie is about your dad, that
does kind of seem like a little bit of a
kick in the face.

Speaker 4 (05:24):
It's weird.

Speaker 1 (05:27):
It's like it's a gift of the magi type situation
where like I was able to make a movie about you, dad,
but now you're no longer my dad.

Speaker 3 (05:34):
But as you forget him, yeah, it own rights, It
comes out of your brain and disappears. But yeah, that's
Papa Bear. Papa Bear Bear look it up. But yeah,
let's check it out. Yeah, of horrors do you have
for it? Excited to be here?

Speaker 1 (05:49):
A real a real horror. So we we should start
a little bit here by talking about capitalism. You know,
something that we're all intimately familiar with and one of
the most and things to understand if you want to know,
kind of like why the US and its friends won
the Cold War, is that for a lot of people
in the United States and other Western countries, capitalism seemed

(06:10):
like a pretty fucking good deal from the time of
the New Deal up through the late seventies to early eighties. Now,
obviously this was predicated on extraction from countries outside of
the United States and Western Europe, from the Global South,
whatever you want to call them, and it was also
funded by supporting the subjugation by dictatorships of people living

(06:30):
in those countries in order to extract resources. But within
the United States itself, in particular, Americans saw a forty
or so year long period where the standard of living
and the average amount of wealth held per person increased
it a pretty dramatic and extremely consistent rate. Prior to
the New Deal, corruption and abuse within capitalism were pretty

(06:53):
much universal and the biggest companies were the ones that
were generally the best at holding their workers down at gunpoint.
But after their Great Depression, there were new regulations introduced,
and this, combined with progressive social welfare policies ushered in
by the FDR administration, helped lead the United States towards
the titanic growth of the post war years. Inequality plummet.
It managers and workers, you know, were generally obviously paid differently,

(07:16):
but it wasn't like you see today, right, Like a
guy working the line at a factory was not getting
like one five hundredth of the amount of money that
like the CEO of the company got. They were living
kind of in the same vague planet, you know, when
it came to income, and a lot of the days
business gurus argued that this was necessary for healthy economic functioning.
This was actually the most efficient way for the system

(07:38):
to work. In nineteen forty three, Johnson and Johnson's CEO
authored a company credo that spoke to a lot of
people in big business in the United States. He argued
that the company's first responsibility was to its customers, its
second was to its employees, who he said deserved a
sense of security with just management and short working hours
and fair wages. Duty was to management, and then last

(08:02):
and least, it had a duty to its investors and shareholders. Quote, yeah,
that was the last. That's the CEO of Johnson and Johnson.
Business must make a sound profit, high taxes paid, new
factories built, new products launched. When these things have been done,
the owners and stockholders should receive a fair return. So
that's pretty different.

Speaker 2 (08:21):
Right.

Speaker 3 (08:21):
It feels like all things have become grotesquely extreme to
the point of like ruining everything.

Speaker 4 (08:26):
You know, it takes time.

Speaker 3 (08:27):
At the beginning, I feel like they didn't realize how
far they could go on, how much they could get
away with. It takes time to wake up and go, wait,
could we take it all? Like oh oh ghit.

Speaker 1 (08:39):
It takes time, and I think it also takes you know,
part of why this state of affairs came to be.
It didn't like these companies didn't start treating workers well
and sharing profits with them because it was nice. They
did it because the country, like the United States, nearly
collapsed into like a revolution, right, Like things were that
bad at the very worst of the Great Depression, the

(08:59):
govern was worried, like are we going to do a
Russia and that fear faded. You know, that's kind of
the story we're telling today. So I'm going to get
ahead of myself. But if you want to look at
kind of the company during what's called the Golden Age
of capitalism, which is this period from the end of
World War Two up to kind of the Reagan era,
the company that best embodied both the strengths of that

(09:22):
capitalist system that existed then and the kind of innovation
that could come from it is General Electric. Now, over
the years it was founded kind of in the late
eighteen hundreds, and in the years since its founding, its
engineers and scientists brought the world like half of the
things that we consider like crucial aspects of daily modern life.
They invented incandescent light bulbs, They invented the electric plant.

(09:46):
They shipped radios around the world and invented many of
the first radios. They crafted the first vacuum tubes, They
invented the garbage disposal. They created a wide variety of
moldible and transparent plastics that became ubiquitous in house old products,
and also every creature living in the ocean. Obviously, you
know that part's not great, but on the a positive side,

(10:07):
the silicon rubber that they invented was a like made
space travel possible, Like you don't get human beings into
space without it.

Speaker 4 (10:14):
All these are bangers. These are all bangs.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
These are all bangers. They're all impressive. Yeah. So this
is like, for about one hundred straight years, from the
late eighteen hundreds to the nineteen eighties, ge was not
just a company that made a lot of money. It
was a company that regularly invented things, or at least
it's you know, it's workers did the scientists that it
paid invented things that changed life for people all around

(10:37):
the world. That was us chairs y Yeah, yeah, fucking
ginkin of stuff. Yeah. And their workforce was compensated, you know,
as you'd expect given their success. G Yeah, as many
light bulbs as you can fit in your your cheek

(10:58):
pouches like a squirrel. No, they were the company. They
were one of the companies that they essentially invented the
kind of modern concept of an employee retirement plan. They
gave workers profit sharing. They were the first company I
think to have like provide insurance for workers. They invested
in the ongoing and ongoing education for their workforce. They

(11:19):
had a corporate campus that featured swimming pools and spas
and tennis courts and football fields and free classes and
stuff like tap dancing that had no profit, you know,
making benefit for GE, but made the workers happy. They
kind of pioneered the shit that we now associate with
like the golden age of the tech industry, right like
that Gesy, like the twenties, Yeah, exactly. And this was

(11:42):
part of an understanding by the management elite of the
era that a happy workforce was one that would not
tear you apart and shoot your family in a dank basement.
Men like GE CEO Gerald Swape had the Czar on
his mind when he described the company ethos as welfare
capitalism in nineteen twenty two. This was a term that
like a CEO, felt proud to use, like our company

(12:04):
practices welfare capitalism. In nineteen twenty seven, company chairman Own
Young gave a speech at Harvard where he attacked businessmen
who tried to quote squeeze out of labor, its last
ounce of effort and last penny of compensation. Executives he
argued needed to quote think in terms of human beings.
Who put their lives in labor in a common enterprise

(12:25):
for mutual advantage. And there's nothing more alien to kind
of the business grules of our day than the concept
of mutual advantage.

Speaker 4 (12:34):
Now they were still rich, right, Like.

Speaker 1 (12:36):
Yes, a lot they had plenty of money.

Speaker 3 (12:38):
Yes, they still led lives of plenty right.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
And I should state a lot of times in one
of the main sources that we're going to wind up
using for this episode, this this erraor gets a romanticized.
Part of why it gets romanticized is that a lot
was nicer back than Like compensation of workers in the
United States was much nicer. The system itself was still
pretty soaked in blood. For example, GE ex executives may
have cared greatly for their workforce in the United States,

(13:03):
but they had no issue with the idea that GE
products would be used to murder civilians in foreign countries.
GE's T seven hundred helicopter engine powered the Blackhawk after
its adoption in nineteen seventy eight. They also made the
engines for basically all of the helicopters that the United
States used to annihilate large chunks of jungle in Vietnam.
They made the engines for the planes that dropped the

(13:24):
defoliates that gave everybody fucking cancer. They were one of
the top ten largest contractors used by the US government
to make nuclear weapons over the course of the Cold War.
You know, they're not just like making nukes, but nukes.
There's a bunch of parts that nukes involved, and so
GE was one of the primary suppliers of those parts.
At the height of the Vietnam War, they made more
than one point six billion dollars a year in military contracts,

(13:48):
making them the second highest paid defense contractor of the
bloodiest chapter of the Cold War. So that's all bad, right, Like,
it's not. I'm not trying to like whitewash this stuff here.
Different than light bulbs. I'll give you this. It's different
than light bulbs, light bulbs and death bulbs.

Speaker 3 (14:05):
Light bulbs, rubber gaskets, the bicycle wheel bulletsuke, telicopters.

Speaker 1 (14:12):
You're all gonna die, Michael. They did, in fact invent
the laser, by the way, that was also a GE invention.

Speaker 4 (14:18):
Yeah, I love this. This is fantastic. You throw a dead.

Speaker 3 (14:23):
Cat in the room and you're like, oh, they invented
dead cats.

Speaker 4 (14:26):
There's something about the blindness created by overcoming trauma. Like
I'm sure you're gonna get into it, but it like
doesn't make the crimes go away. Like if the skeletons
in the closet were like kind of made in order
to build the closet, that doesn't justify anything. And that's
my standpoint. But it's like amazing to see what America

(14:47):
has done in order to be Like, you can't make
fun of General Electric. They're goddamn General Electric, you know.

Speaker 1 (14:55):
Yeah, no, I mean, and they are. That was very
much like they were seen as an institution, like almost
a branch of the government. And part of it was
the degree to which, like so many Americans, hundreds of
thousands were employed by them, and it was like kind
of cradle to grave employment. If you've got a job
with GE in this period, that was your job for life.

(15:17):
And then when you retired they would pay you a pension,
you know, like a yeah, if you if you keep
the US military machine rich in killing machines, GE will
take care of you, right, Like that was the bargain,
you know. So I want to quote now from a
book by a guy named David Gels called The Man

(15:37):
who Broke capitalism and spoilers. The man that the book
is about is who will be talking about today. Quote.
An annual report from nineteen fifty three described how GE
worked in the balanced best interests of all. The report
trumpeted how much the company had paid in taxes, the
virtues of paying its suppliers well, and how critical it
was to take care of its employees. That year, GE

(15:58):
proudly stated that it spent some thirty seven percent of
its sales on pay and benefits for its workers, resulting
in the biggest payroll in the company's history, with more
people at work than ever before. Next to the statistic
was an illustration of a grinning factory worker walking away
from the assembly line holding bags of money. Only after
enumerting all the ways in which it was helping the government, suppliers,
and employees, did the company mention how much it allocated

(16:21):
for investors, the sum a modest three point nine percent
of sales. I think about how weird that is, right Like,
right now we're going through this thing where like the
head of the Federal Reserve is talking about how bad
it is that wages have kept rising and that's like
a problem, Like we need to discipline laborers, so they
expect less. But in nineteen fifty three, Ges being like,

(16:42):
we're giving everything that we have to our workers. Isn't
that dope? How much money we're paying our employees, Like
this is what you would brag about.

Speaker 3 (16:50):
And it was so many issues. It's like vice versa.
Which party you'd think, like conservative traditionalists would be like,
this makes more sense, Like I would say, no, it's weirder. Now.
What's weird is if you have a human enterprise and
the person who makes the most money from it has
no they didn't work there, they didn't invent it, they
didn't form the business, they have nothing to do with it.

(17:12):
Like that's weird. It's weird to me that that's how
it works.

Speaker 4 (17:15):
Now.

Speaker 1 (17:16):
Yeah, I can't imagine what you're thinking of when you
say that, working in the film and entertainment industry, Michael.
But so, the idea that was common at the time
among the people who ran companies like GE was that
corporations had a responsibility both to the United States as
a whole and to their workers. GE's head of employee

(17:38):
benefits listed quote maximalizing employment security as a prime company
goal in nineteen sixty two because the ability of workers
to feel secure in their future was, in his words,
the most productive asset the company had. Obviously, again, I
hope I haven't underemphasized the inequalities that in the system,
but those inequalities were sternalized primarily right, The inequalities with

(18:02):
an American capitalism were outside of the United States, primarily
right within the US there was actually, like quite certainly
a less unequal system than we have today. And we
can see how kind of widespread these ideas were in
the simple fact that from nineteen forty eight to nineteen
seventy nine, worker pay in the United States grew at

(18:23):
the same or close to the same rate as worker productivity.
But since nineteen seventy nine this has changed dramatically. From
nineteen seventy nine to twenty twenty, net productivity rose sixty
one point eight percent, while the hourly pay of typical
workers grew at about seventeen point five percent over four decades.
So it went from they grew at kind of the

(18:45):
same rate during this quoite golden age of capitalism to
worker pay grew less than a third, at less than
a third of the rate that productivity grew. Right, What
does that mean? I mean that means workers are getting shafted, right, Like, yeah,
there's no other way to look at that. Now, a
lot of different factors had to come together to change
this state of affairs, and obviously there's not one single

(19:07):
person that's solely responsible for why everything got a lot
worse within the here's his name, but there is. He
is the guy who He's not the guy who caused
all of this, but he is the guy who his
his career is the dividing line between the golden age
of capitalism and the era we live in now, this
grim age of billionaire CEOs and starving workers on food

(19:30):
stamps and like zero innovation. Effectively, like, there's a single
guy whose life is sort of the dividing line between
those two periods. He was the CEO of General Electric
and his name was Jack Welch. He is such a
bad person. You guys are really going to have a
terrible time with this episode. I'm excited for this.

Speaker 4 (19:52):
So I've seen Yeah, I've seen this guy.

Speaker 1 (19:54):
Yeah, he's very famous. He wrote he wound he like
in his retirement, wrote like twenty different five management books
that are all the same book, right, Like, yeah, it's
they're all like nonsense, uh corporate like uh uh bullshit
to keep in your fucking bookcase behind you while you
do a zoom call, so everybody thinks that you uh,

(20:16):
you know what you're.

Speaker 3 (20:17):
Talking about exactly, and everyone wins way and all that stuff.

Speaker 1 (20:22):
Yeah, he's he's a real great guys.

Speaker 4 (20:26):
Name is Welch. I just want to before we begin,
you know.

Speaker 1 (20:30):
Yeah, and he's going to Welch on a lot of bets.

Speaker 5 (20:33):
So so the two books that I've used as sources
for much of this episode are the book that I
quoted from earlier, The Man who Broke Capitalism by David Wells,
and Jacksone autobiography Jack Straight from the Gut.

Speaker 1 (20:50):
It's a horrible book. The first book, The Man who
Broke Capitalism, is pretty well written, and it's a pretty
damning indictment of Welch's career. It is written by a
guy who really believes in capitalism, and so there's one
of its flaws is that it definitely takes the like
things were so good before this guy came along and
like ruined this wonderful system. And it's like, I don't know, man,

(21:12):
like I agree he made things works, but like during
the Golden Age of Capitalism. We like underwrote coups in
Guatemala and Korea and El Salvador and Chile and whatnot
in order to like secure resources for US corporations. And yeah,
that like it wasn't great before. You know, Jack Welch
didn't do any of that, but he did. He did

(21:34):
take capitalism in the US from a system that benefited
Americans at the expense of other people to a system
that benefited like forty guys at the expense of the
rest of the world. And that is bad. I guess
I don't know how you can parse that out morally
however you want. That's not my job. I'm not going
to solve this for you. But he's a real piece
of shit. So let's talk about that.

Speaker 3 (21:55):
Ah wait, wait, I thought at the end of Behind
the Bastards, at the very end of the series, you
would reveal the answer that would solve everything, right is
that now where we're I?

Speaker 1 (22:05):
I you know, Michael, I do have an answer for you.
It would have been the answer to Jack Welch if
someone had done it earlier in his career, but it
could still be the answer to a lot of bastards. Legally,
I'm not allowed to say it on air. Yeah, that
it rhymes with schmargeted, schmash machination. Okay, like that's that's
that's the answer. So Welsch's autobiography is probably the most

(22:29):
self serving piece of trash I've read in my life,
and I have read Saddam Hussein's writing Deal The Deal.
I kind of think so because because at least Welsh
did all of the terrible things that he's talking about.
It opens with these telling lines and strap yourselves in boys,
this this one's rough. This may seem a strange way

(22:51):
to begin an autobiography. A confession. I hate having to
use the first person. Nearly everything I've done in my
life has been accomplished with other people. Yet when you
write a book like this, you're forced to use the
narrative I, when it's really the WI that counts. Now,
that could be nice, right, But what Jack is actually
setting up here is not that like I've been forced

(23:13):
to use I, and that means I'm not going to
give enough credit to other people. What he's actually setting
up here is that, like in this book, he takes
credit for every good thing that happens at GE during
its tenure, and I think he just in the initial
draft of this gave himself credit for everything good that happened,
and then his editor came in and was like, you
sound like a giant prick, So you have to add
something at the start of the book saying you're sorry

(23:34):
for using I all the time. That is that is
exactly what I suspect happened. You know that, Like an
editor came in and was like, Jack, you got to
like write something at the start here because you sound
like a dick. Yeh. He continues with one of the
funniest sentences I've ever seen in an autobiography. Please remember
that every time you see the word I in these pages,

(23:55):
it refers to all those colleagues and friends and some
I might have missed.

Speaker 3 (23:59):
Now we move on again.

Speaker 4 (24:01):
Yeah, hell yes, hell yeah, the absolute gall arrogance.

Speaker 1 (24:09):
Yeah, I love it. It's so good. As soon as
I because I was trying to decide, we don't do
a lot of like CEO bastards, because like you know,
a lot of them are terrible, but they're usually boring,
so we're more likely to do like you know, we'll
talk about the Beaupul disaster in India, rather than like
doing the life of the CEO of Union Carbide or whatever,
because most of them just aren't very interesting.

Speaker 3 (24:30):
When I was trying to they raised the price. Then
they raised it again.

Speaker 1 (24:33):
Yeah, yeah again. Yeah. But Jack Welch. As soon as
I read that, I was like, all right, this guy's
gotta be enough of a piece of shit for an episode,
And boy, howdy, he sure is. John Francis Welch, Junior
was born on November nineteenth, nineteen thirty five, in Peabody, Massachusetts,
just in time to miss the Great Depression and fully

(24:55):
benefit from the more restrained, thoughtful era of capitalism that
followed it. His dad was a conductor for the railroad.
He was a union man, and while he worked long hours,
he benefited from benefits and pay good enough that he
was able to buy a house for his family. His mother,
we'll talk about more in a second. They had Jack
late in life. She was thirty six and his dad

(25:16):
was forty one. They had spent years trying to make
a baby, and unfortunately, with Jack they succeeded. He was
an only child, and in his own recollection quote, my
mother poured her love into me as if I were
a found treasure. Jack finds it very important that you
believe his family weren't financially comfortable. He wasn't born with

(25:38):
a silver spoon, is literally how he writes it in
his book, because he's not a very imaginative person. This
is technically true in that his family was working class.
It's untrue in the fact that he was born in
the single luckiest era financially to have been born in
the history of the human race. Again, his dad, working
a single job, without a high school income, was able

(25:59):
to buy a home and put his child through college
without taking on debt. Just a just a different world. Now.
Neither his mom or dad graduated from high school. They
were with Irish immigrants, and their house was across the
street from a factory, which his dad continued considered to
be a plus because it meant that there were no
neighbors partying on the weekends. Jack's dad collected magazines and

(26:20):
newspapers from writers on the train during his work day,
and he brought them home. Jack started reading the news,
you know, as a result of this, and yeah, that's
how he kind of like got into the world. Jack's
dad also introduced his son to golf, telling him that
all the big shots on the train talked about their
golf score constantly, so Jack should probably learn how to
golf if he wanted to make a lot of money.

Speaker 4 (26:43):
Wait, it's just like a golfing newsreading boy.

Speaker 3 (26:46):
Yeah, yeah, crimes. The CEO wouldn't be boring.

Speaker 4 (26:51):
Is like, don't worry, suck on peppermint candies and drink milk. Like,
what's going on it.

Speaker 1 (26:57):
We'll get to We'll get to what else is going
on here? Jack's dad is a you know, it's the
kind he's the kind of you kind of get some
of the workaholism from this. His dad was dedicated enough
to his job that, like, if the weather was going
to be bad, he'd have his wife drive him to
the station and he'd sleep there overnight before a shift.
He did not spend a lot of time with his son.
He worked from five am to eight pm every single day.

(27:20):
So Jack's primary influence was his mom, and if his
autobiography is in any way credible, she was obsessively devoted
to him and somewhat manically focused on making him a success.
Quote one of her favorite expressions was, don't kid yourself.
That's the way it is. If you don't study, you'll
be nothing, absolutely nothing. There are no shortcuts. Don't kid yourself.

(27:43):
So she's just like yelling at him to be so. Like.
For an example of how kind of unhinged this woman is,
she would force her son, when he was like a preteen,
to go and gamble with the money that he had
earned as like a caddy, so that he understood what
it felt like to lose money.

Speaker 3 (27:59):
Oh wow, that's the weird lesson literally like home.

Speaker 1 (28:02):
That's an insane lesson.

Speaker 3 (28:05):
Soldier honed in a dojo to be good with money. Yeah,
to understand risk.

Speaker 1 (28:11):
Yeah yeah, that's just a crazy thing to do, but
it worked. I guess so good. Yeah. Ge So, from
his earliest years in school, his mother was obsessed with
the fact that he needed to excel, he writes in
his autobiography. She knew how to be tough with me,
but also how to hug and kiss. She wanted to

(28:32):
make sure I knew how wanted and loved I was.
I'd come home with four a's and a B on
my report card, and my mother would want to know
why I got the B. But she would always in
the conversation congratulating and hugging me for the a's. My
mother never managed people, but she knew all about building
self esteem. I grew up with a speech impediment, a
stammer that wouldn't go away. Sometimes it led to comical,
if not embarrassing incidents. In college. I have an order

(28:53):
to tune a fish on white toast on Fridays when
Catholics in those days couldn't eat meat. Inevitably, the waitress
would return with not one but a pair of sandwiches,
having heard my order as to tuna sandwiches.

Speaker 4 (29:05):
All right, yeah, yeah, you're just rambling.

Speaker 6 (29:09):
This is just rambling. No, this is his this is
his life. First off one studying point two is it's
really weird to open up your conversations about your mother
and say that she's a good hugger and kisser.

Speaker 1 (29:24):
Yeah, she's a good hugger. She's a good kisser. She
made me gamble so that I learned to be a
business man. Uh yeah. She told him that he stuttered
because he was too smart and his tongue couldn't keep
up with his brain, which is sweet, except for the
man that this guy grows into is someone who clearly
had more self esteem than was responsible to give a child. Again,

(29:48):
this is controversial, but I think it should be illegal
to be nice to children, otherwise they turn out like this.
I don't there's no other way to look at this,
you know. So he grows up extremely confident. One of
kind of the signs of how confident he is is that,
like you know, in when he was in high school,
he was on the football team and the hockey team.

Speaker 4 (30:07):
Well, of course, so much protein. Yeah time, he's a
big tuneaboy.

Speaker 1 (30:13):
Well, no, he's tiny. He's the shortest guy in his Basically.

Speaker 4 (30:17):
It went into his brain, all the power in his brain.
He's yeah, smart.

Speaker 1 (30:22):
He he kind of says that basically his mom made
him so confident that he didn't notice he was so
super tiny. But eventually, like he stops being able to
compete in these sports because he's this little bitty shrimp
of a man. And that's why he gets really into golf, because,
you know, golf, you don't have to be good at anything.
To be good at golfing, all you have to do
is know how to talk about the stock market, right,

(30:46):
That's that's all golfing's really.

Speaker 4 (30:47):
I'm sure many golfers disagree with you, but let's run
with it.

Speaker 1 (30:50):
Yeah, who gives a fuck with golfers say, that's running
the other other than everyone who runs the country.

Speaker 3 (30:56):
Yeah, also running the other card off the road with
your cart for bonus points. But you know that's all.

Speaker 1 (31:02):
Now, that part of golf I actually do. That's the
one good.

Speaker 2 (31:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:05):
I like that.

Speaker 4 (31:05):
Yeah. I like the many cars they have.

Speaker 1 (31:08):
Absolutely so. Jack's autobiography is the standard self mythologizing of
the corporate ubermensche, and it's honestly pretty worthless for anything
but the broadest details of his actual childhood and the
insight that we get from knowing what kind of stuff
he wants us to believe about him. But there is
one passage in it in which he exposes something that
I think might be him actually sharing some vulnerability, and

(31:31):
I'm going to read that now. I was incredibly dependent
on my parents. Many times, when my mother left the
house to pick up my dad, the train would be late.
When I was twelve or thirteen, the delays would drive
me crazy. I'd run out of the house and down
Lovett Street, my heart racing to see if they were
around the corner on the way home. Out of fear
that something had happened to them. I just couldn't lose them.
They were my world. It was a fear that I

(31:51):
shouldn't have had, because my mother raised me to be strong, tough,
and independent. She always feared she would die young, a
victim of the heart disease that struck down everyone in
her family. So that's like the one glimpse that we
get that maybe this kid had a soul at some point.

Speaker 4 (32:05):
Like it's actually heartbreaking.

Speaker 1 (32:07):
Yeah, yeah, I mean that's I think that's also a
pretty natural fear with kids that like, yeah, yeah, my
parents will die, you know.

Speaker 4 (32:14):
Like you you painted a portrait of the world for
me to fear, and so I feel it, and now
that I'm alone, I'm scared.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
That's almost interesting. It does kind of reveal, yeah, that, like,
whatever his picture of the world was, it was a
dangerous one out there.

Speaker 3 (32:32):
And even if, like even if the death is just
a metaphor for like being thirsty for dad, which they
don't mean in a sexual way, you know what I mean.

Speaker 1 (32:39):
No, I mean, it's fine, it's fine.

Speaker 3 (32:41):
Let's take her fifteen hours a day. Yeah, kid might
just be like if he does, if his dad doesn't
show up on time, every second feels like I'm just
losing this scant time I have with my dad.

Speaker 4 (32:53):
That makes sense.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
Yeah, no, I mean it's it's it's a it's the
only actual like sign. We get that this man might
have one point had a soul, right, but you know
who doesn't have a soul? Michael A.

Speaker 3 (33:07):
Boss baby?

Speaker 1 (33:08):
Is what I hear?

Speaker 4 (33:09):
Boss Baby?

Speaker 1 (33:10):
Boss Baby? No, boss Baby does not have a soul
other than those souls. Yeah, clothes don't, by the way. Yeah,
which is you know everyone's talking about AI. I think
we ought to be we ought to be cloning. You know,
once we really get cloning figured out, then none of
us have to work because it's fine to force clones
to do it.

Speaker 4 (33:29):
Yeah, that's what boss baby.

Speaker 3 (33:31):
You remember when Dolly the Sheep happened and people were like,
even though they made a law against it, here we
go the the bet cats out of the bag. That
we've reached the tipping point. Someone in a six of
labs going to start making clones.

Speaker 4 (33:43):
Where we are? Where are all the clones?

Speaker 3 (33:45):
I'm disappointed.

Speaker 1 (33:46):
It's extremely because I was watching that show Severance recently,
which isn't about cloning, but close enough, and I was like, Mala,
this would be great. What if we just what if
we could just create a slave race that we own
and have them do all the work I think to break.

(34:11):
We're back, and uh yeah, we're talking about how how
morally uncomplicated it would be to sever people's consciousness and
then create little little child brained slaves in order to
to to do our our obscure corporate labor. What a
good idea that show is Ben Stiller's beautiful version of

(34:33):
the vision.

Speaker 3 (34:34):
Ben Stiller's vision. Really, Yeah, I think the furthest still
go down that road with you is lab grown organs
that are our organs to replace organs.

Speaker 4 (34:41):
I'd totally go with that.

Speaker 1 (34:43):
Yeah, But I mean I don't want a lab grown
organ unless it comes from a thing with a brain
that knows that it's dying for me.

Speaker 4 (34:49):
I wanted to pain, Yeah, I wanted to.

Speaker 1 (34:53):
I wanted to know a fear before I take its
liver because I've destroyed mine. Yeah it Yeah, this is
what I've learned from Jack Welch. So it will surprise
you to hear that he was an altar boy for
much of his childhood a super Catholic family. Although it's interesting,

(35:13):
he just he always talks about how strict his mom was.
But the one story that he shares about her disciplining
him is not at all an example of her being strict.
At age eleven, he stole a ball from a carnival
that was in town, and when she found out, she
first tried to make him go confess to the priest.
But he was terrified of his priest and he was
worried that, like he'd be recognized in confession. So he

(35:35):
like begged his mom to just let him throw the
ball away, just like toss it into a canal, And
he writes, after negotiating with her, she let me have
my way. She drove me down to the bridge on
North Street and watched as I threw the ball into
the water. And considering the kind of corporate ghoulisc I
love that. His like big story of discipline is like
my mom, I stole something and my mom got angry.

(35:58):
But my mom, but I convinced her to just let
me poison the poison the water.

Speaker 4 (36:02):
Sucked the system. In other words, she.

Speaker 1 (36:05):
Just jump it into the water.

Speaker 3 (36:06):
Well, she filed the serial number, and she's like this
never happen.

Speaker 4 (36:12):
He is terrified to even write his mother as a
like a figure of evil in his own autobiography, I'm
not like obviously she's not evil evil, but like, no,
it is amazing what she did a number on this kid.

Speaker 1 (36:32):
Maybe, yeah, I think there's certainly something she did. I
don't think we actually get a great context for what
she was actually like, because what I get from this
story is like, oh, she was like protecting him at
all costs and did not care about particularly teaching him
that like that kind of behavior was wrong. Like, she
was not the kind of person who felt like it

(36:55):
was important to instill a moral grounding in her kid.
She was the kind of person who felt like it
was important that he'd be part of the church because socially,
that's what you do. But more than anything, she wanted
him to be a success and to make money, right,
Like that's what she actually valued, and that's what she
selected for in her parenting. That's what I get from

(37:15):
Jack's book, right, you know, I didn't know his mom anyway.
It's pretty cool. In high school, Jack played, you know,
like I said, all of the major sports, but because
he was so short, after a while, he stopped being
able to compete at anything but golf and hockey, a
sport where short people could excel as long as they
were violent and from a young age. Jack had a

(37:37):
horrible temper and a problem with losing, which made him
a great hockey player. Yeah right, yeah, yeah it begin
So here's another story from his autobiography. The other team
scored and we lost again for the seventh time in
a row. In a fit of frustration, I flung my
hockey stick across the ice of the arena, skated after it,
and headed back to the locker room. The team was

(37:57):
already there, taking off their skates and uniforms, all of us.
The door open, and my Irish mother strode in. The
place fell silent. Every eye was glued to this middle
aged woman in a floral pattern dress as she walked
across the floor, past the wooden benches where some of
the guys were already changing. She went right for me,
grabbing the top of my uniform. You punk, she shouted
in my face. If you don't know how to lose,
you'll never know how to win. If you don't know this,

(38:18):
you shouldn't be playing now.

Speaker 3 (38:20):
You throw that hockey stick in the river, young man,
And we never speak of this again.

Speaker 1 (38:25):
I kind of think he's lying here. Maybe parts of
this are true. What his mom says, there is like
something you would write in a business book published in
two thousand and four. Yeah, yeah, a person doesn't say that.

Speaker 3 (38:40):
Nobody says that, nor do you Nor do you remember
like floral dress swishing across the floor as memoy. You know,
he's trying to write what's going on?

Speaker 1 (38:52):
Like maybe if she's being like you know, maybe she
got angry and yelled at him for being like, you know,
a bad sport. But she didn't. She didn't say that line.
That's a lie. That Like he hired consultants to think
up for him, and she beat the shit at of
me for a solid forty five minutes. Now that's a
story I would have believed.

Speaker 4 (39:11):
It's the Ron Howard version of his life.

Speaker 1 (39:15):
Yeah. Obviously his real love was golf, which is a
love he would he would maintain his entire life. Jack
notes that he and all of the other boys who
worked as caddies at the country club competed vigorously to
caddy for like one of the two guys at the
club who actually tipped. He makes a point to note
that all of the rich people basically refuse to tip. Interesting. Interesting.

(39:40):
He was eventually forced to quit when the guy he
was caddying for asked him to take off his socks
and shoes and wade into the water to get a ball.
Jack refused, and when the guy insisted, he grabbed the
guy's clubs and threw them into the water, which cost
him a Club Caddy sponsors, a Club Caddy scholarship. So again,
you know, guy with a temper right, guy who can't

(40:02):
really control his anger, Guy whose anger seems to be
primarily based around being feeling disresaffected.

Speaker 3 (40:09):
Yeah, exact golf a classic recipe for a bastard.

Speaker 4 (40:13):
Yeah, these golf clubs can't contain me, Like it's the
energy is so uh, it's beautiful. Yeah, it's a beautiful insecurity.

Speaker 1 (40:25):
Yeah you could. Oh yeah, it's it's quite a it's something.
So he lost out on an ROTC scholarship with the
Navy as well. Why is unclear. In his book, he
makes a big deal about like me and my friends
we all passed the exam together. My dad had the
state representatives send in letters on my behalf. But then

(40:45):
my friends got their scholarship and I got turned down.
And I have no idea why. It's this big mystery
in my life. And it's like, I don't know, man,
maybe it didn't do well, like like, maybe you're an asshole,
and like the guy he's responsible for giving the scholarship
were like, I don't think this guy's a team player.
And this is literally the Navy. You know, there's a
number of things that could have been but maybe you

(41:07):
just didn't do very well, right, Like, it's not a mystery.
I had a bunch of friends who applied to west
Point and didn't get into West Point. And it's not
a mystery. It's competitive. But Jack can't, like his ego
has to I think assume that there was something mysterious
behind the scenes that cost him the scholarships, right, because
I didn't did Yeah.

Speaker 3 (41:26):
Clearly as Catholic priest told them about that he stole
a ball.

Speaker 1 (41:29):
That he took that ball. Yeah. So at any rate,
he did eventually get into college at Amherst, and he
started in nineteen fifty three, which is the same year
that Ge released that earnings report, being like, we are
giving all of our money to our employees, fuck our stockholders.
Isn't that dope? His time in college was pretty boring.

(41:52):
I would describe him as a normy also as basic.
One of the few details we get is that he
brags it's so sad. He has like a light in
there where he's like, I was in a fraternity. We
ranked quote at or near the top and beer consumption
and had better parties than most. He does not give
a single example of a party. He does not relate
a single human interaction during his time at.

Speaker 4 (42:14):
College objectively better parties.

Speaker 1 (42:17):
It's like someone told a robot what you do at college,
and he was like, we drank the most beer and
had the best parties. Yeah, yeah it is. It is
what an AI would write if you like fetit. This
guy's fucking life story, like be the coolest. Yeah we
did an animal house.

Speaker 4 (42:40):
That's roight.

Speaker 1 (42:40):
Yeah. Yeah. So he eventually got a master's degree in
chemical engineering because he found it kind of interesting and
there were jobs. He goes into way hard science, but
he was not motivated by science, right. He's never someone
who's like in love with the idea of learning new things.
He's someone who's like, well, science is like there's good
jobs and money, you know, chemical engineer, right, And we

(43:04):
can see that in this anecdote he gives about flying
with after he gets his master's degree, flying out for
a job interview in Louisiana with a friend after graduation.
This is quite telling. On the airplane for my Ethel interview,
Ethel is the country or company. I was traveling with
one of my associates from the University of Illinois when
something odd happened. The stewardess came back and said, mister Welch,

(43:26):
would you like a drink? She then turned to my
colleague and said, doctor Gardner, would you like a drink?
I thought doctor Gardner sounded a lot better than mister
golf club so hard. So that's it, right, Like He's
sitting with a friend and a stewardess calls his friend
a doctor, and he's like, well, that sounds better than

(43:49):
that's that's why he decides to get a PhD. Is
there super doctor?

Speaker 3 (43:54):
Is this?

Speaker 1 (43:56):
Is there a double doctor? It's purely it's purely about Cloud.
He doesn't ever express like an interest in chemical engineering,
like a love of science, you know, a desire, like
an appreciation for academics. It's I was getting a cocktail
once and yeah.

Speaker 4 (44:12):
I swear to god, you're doing the origin story of
like Homer Simpson.

Speaker 3 (44:17):
Well, also the impulse that is dominant. He's the original
line goes up.

Speaker 2 (44:22):
Guy.

Speaker 3 (44:22):
All he cares about is line goes up. Yeah, yeah,
that's right.

Speaker 1 (44:26):
Yeah, it's the same kind of energy of like fucking
Ben Shapiro. I see what he's like, Solis crypto guys
having an AI write a script that like nobody would
ever want to watch, Like there's no plot in it,
there's no character development, but it's formatted the way a
script is, and so people are like, look, it's a script.
It's like no. Yeah, Like Jack's like, I need to

(44:46):
be a doctor because it sounds good because people respect
me if I'm a doctor. So I'm going to go,
I'm going to spend three more years in college becoming
a PhD in chemical engineering. I think that this is,
like probab, the single anecdote that does the most to
describe the soul of Jack Welch, a man so fundamentally
empty he pursued a PhD to impress airlines stewardesses. But

(45:09):
also like that's that's a part of him and that's real.
But he's also a man who was capable of becoming
a doctor of chemical engineering, which is not an easy
thing to do just for clout right, Like that says
something about the man that is impressive. It's not good,
but it's impressed. It's impressive.

Speaker 4 (45:26):
And driven.

Speaker 1 (45:27):
Yeah yeah, Yeah, he's driven. And it's like the worst
kind of driven, Like well, it's an empty and soulless
kind of it's the.

Speaker 4 (45:35):
Kind of driven that is created by like a like
an upbringing that allows him to be like I'm scared
when I'm alone, you know, like it's the the abuse
pays forward.

Speaker 1 (45:50):
Yeah, it's it's cool. Uh, it's his His mom really
did a great job on him. So his thesis for
his PhD was on Condon's in nuclear power plants. And
really the only time he talks about like doing science
in his entire autobiography is to mention that while he
was working on his thesis, this was the most important

(46:10):
thing in his life. And then he never brings any
of this up again. This is never a factor in
his life afterwards. He never thinks about like science really
in any meaningful way other than how to like monetize it.
He's what I'm saying is that he's got an incredible
ability to compartmentalize, right, and that's really going to be
his most valuable asset in business, is that he's so

(46:32):
good at just like shutting off parts of himself and
then flipping them on when he needs to. And that's
you know that word. It's one of those things. Like
the traits that make Jack good at the terrible things
he's about to do are also the same kind of
traits that make like a surgeon a good surgeon. You know,
if you're like cutting into people, you have to be

(46:52):
able to like not care about cutting into a human being.
I think most of us find viscerally upsetting for a while.
You have to be able to just like, yeah, I'm
just like doing a thing. You know, it's the same
as wiring a fucking stereo system or whatever, and you
can't carry it.

Speaker 3 (47:07):
Yeah, right, and it's a thing and not be doing
it because it's a weird sex thing or you like
it or you're getting off.

Speaker 1 (47:13):
That's no more than I'm going to say at least
twenty percent of surgeons it is a weird sex thing.

Speaker 3 (47:19):
Or being like God, but you gotta see surgeons.

Speaker 1 (47:25):
Yeah, that's what this podcast wants to Welcome to Behind
but the Bastards, a podcast about surgeons.

Speaker 4 (47:31):
Yeah, all these surgeons out there, we see, Yeah, let's
do a pole pot.

Speaker 1 (47:35):
But on anyone able to remove a tumor, like just
just go after them. No, I mean, but that is
he does have that like that same thing or that
like thing that you know, let's you know, some people
are are I don't know people to kind of do that. Yeah,
you know, I I don't know, Like that's a term
that's not an actual diagnosis. We kind of use it.

(47:58):
Most people interchange. I don't think it's some obviously, Like
it is pretty well documented that psychopaths. There's a very
high rate of psychopaths among like surgeons, and among any
kind of job that sort of requires that kind of compartmentalization,
police officers, priests, you know, anybody who's got to be
able to like compartmentalize. There's a high rate of folks

(48:20):
like that. I don't know that Jack could have been
diagnosed with anything. But it's also like it's not like
a clean line, Like it's not like having hepatitis. You're
not just like a psychopath or not. There's traits that
we use to determine whether or not someone is likely
a psychopath. And some people may not be psychopaths, but
they have some of those traits and they're not all
bad things. And Jack, whatever you could diagnose him as

(48:42):
Jack has a lot of those traits, and one of
them is that he's able to just kind of shut
off parts of himself with robot like efficiency, So that's cool.
After graduating, he gets hired by General Electric in nineteen
sixty his first job, and basically only works for GE, right,
Like that's his whole life, his first job. Yeah, he

(49:06):
gets hired by GE in nineteen sixty and he gets
sent to a town called Pittsfield, which is at the
time kind of a minor outpost in GE's corporate empire.
He attracted notice as a manager pretty quickly. Just a
year in, he was told he was getting a thousand
dollars raise, and he was initially pretty happy with this
because he'd be working hard. He'd been working hard. But

(49:26):
then he found out that all of his coworkers got
the same raise, and it like he loses his mind
over this, Like he is like so furious, he can't focus,
he can't sleep, he can't think. He announces that he's quitting.
He tells all of his colleagues that he's quitting. He
like puts in his notice that he's leaving the company

(49:47):
because everyone got the same raise.

Speaker 4 (49:49):
The equality.

Speaker 1 (49:50):
Yeah, this is this is his fucking joker moment, right,
this is his like, this is how he got his
scars because he like he decides to quit and his
boss apparently doesn't want to lose him and so meets
with him and like offers him additional money. So jack
agrees to stay. And it's weird because in his book
he both he claims that when his boss like came

(50:11):
and said, hey, we don't want to lose you, that
he he almost like cried because he did he realized
quotes somebody loved me.

Speaker 4 (50:18):
Yeah, that's very important to Jacky Boy, Jackie boy.

Speaker 1 (50:25):
But he also, you know, despite the fact this situation,
it's like with the ball, it completely went his way.
He didn't suffer any consequences for throwing a fit and
in fact he benefited, but.

Speaker 3 (50:35):
Still really worried about it.

Speaker 1 (50:37):
He's angry about it. He never gets over this for
decades later in his autobiography, he's angry about it forever. Yeah. Yeah,
he spends the rest of his life angry over the
fact that he had almost only gotten the standard raish
and he even admits in his autobiography it quote probably
drove his behavior to an extreme and he's like, but.

Speaker 3 (50:58):
When I say that, of course, I mean we really
you're to blame as well.

Speaker 1 (51:01):
Yeah, everyone else, my manager for not giving me more
money up front. It's also worth noting that he got
far enough along in the quitting process that his coworkers
all bought him going away presence, which he did not
give back.

Speaker 3 (51:17):
Smart dude.

Speaker 1 (51:18):
But in his autobiography he just writes, I don't remember
if I gave them back or not, which is also funny.

Speaker 3 (51:23):
I don't. Yeah, my secretary will have that information for
you or whatever.

Speaker 1 (51:28):
An unpleasant man.

Speaker 3 (51:31):
Who meanwhile he unboxes like a brand new cigar cutter
and reads the tag off and yeah that's a cigar.

Speaker 4 (51:37):
Yeah, just burns a dollar bill.

Speaker 3 (51:40):
Yeah, he's Sydney Musburger from the Hudsucker Praxy in my mind.

Speaker 4 (51:43):
Now he's also he's also Jack Doneghe, who was a
ge like a fictional character.

Speaker 1 (51:52):
It's very funny, aim that you bring up Jack Donaghy,
because not only is Jack Donaghe from a third Rock
based on Jack Welch. Jack shows up in uh in
that show, in that show, right, yeah, yeah, he's in
several episodes, so uh yeah, that's wild. But you know,
what's not wild.

Speaker 3 (52:14):
Water park after it gets shut down?

Speaker 1 (52:16):
That's right. Uh No, Schlitterbond was not wild after it
killed all those kids and they had to shut down
the best rides. That's right.

Speaker 3 (52:24):
That's what they mean by wet and wild. Yeah, the
wet and kids die here. Great, Yeah, yeah, yeah when
kids here. Not enough people know about Schlitterbond. Look, it's
a water park outside of Austin that you can drink
as much as you want on the Lazy River and
only occasionally do kids drown at it. That's a good water.

Speaker 1 (52:44):
Park, only occasionally. Yeah, that's a great This has been
a paid ad for slitter Bond water park that doesn't
kill most of the kids who go there. Five stars,
all right, dah, and we're back. So Jack, you know,

(53:12):
decides to stay. And he is a good employee. He
gets promoted fairly quickly. He's an effective a relatively effective
manager for the most part. But he was not a
perfect employee, and he made a number of what you
might call booboos early on in his career, as this
passage from David Gells's book makes clear. One day in

(53:34):
nineteen sixty three, Welch was at his office in Pittsfield,
overlooking the factory on Plastics Avenue. Having risen to become
a manager charged with developing a new plastic, Welch was
impatient to bring a product to market and had been
driving his team to move faster, run more experiments, whatever
it took. As Welch sat at his desk and explosion
rocked the factory, Debris and broken glass littered the scene
as smoke shrouded the building. Somehow no one was badly injured,

(53:57):
but it soon became clear that Welch is head of
the plant and the one pushing his team so hard
pore responsibility for the disaster, Pressuring employees to innovate. Welch
had them experimenting with an untested process, moving oxygen through
a highly vollile solution in a large tank. Something caused
a spark, setting off the explosion, and yeah, he blows

(54:18):
up his first factory.

Speaker 4 (54:19):
And it is Daniel Plainview is going.

Speaker 1 (54:23):
On in his autobiography. He just writes that, like, we
were doing an experiment, and you know, it's just one
of these things that happened the factory. You know, there
was an explosion and it was no one's fault, but
it was my fault because I'm the manager, and you know,
the manager, you got to take He frames it as like,
I'll say it's my fault because as the manager, the
buck stops with me, and the reality is, well, you
you ordered them to do something dangerous and irresponsible and

(54:46):
an explosion occurred. It was your fault because all.

Speaker 3 (54:49):
Cover for you. I'll take the heat for this one off.

Speaker 4 (54:53):
Yeah, I love like, yeah, the opportunism of turning that
scenario into like I'm falling on my sword here is
exactly precisely why he does well in business, and he's
it's deplorable. Yeah, it's horrible human.

Speaker 3 (55:11):
My gut is telling me I am not responsible for this.

Speaker 4 (55:16):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (55:16):
It's what my gut says. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (55:19):
It's like fucking several driving your Lexus through a fucking
crosswalk and hitting a bunch of kids and being like,
all right, this is clearly a mistake. But you know what, kids,
I'll take the fall for this one. I'm the adult
in this situation. You know, I'll take the blame on
this one.

Speaker 4 (55:38):
It's like, literally, I think you should leave. Yeah, it's
the hot dogs.

Speaker 1 (55:44):
Yeah, we're all trying to find the guy who did
this very very funny. Jack Welch blows up his first factory.
Now Mom walks in grabs him by the collar. Stop
blowing up factories. I'm not an on I never did.
I'm not a hiring people guy. I think that's generally
best avoided. But I would say, if one of my subordinates,

(56:06):
you know here at cool Zone blew up a factory
that we, you know, made podcasts out of, I would
I would probably impose consequences on them. But Jack Head, really,
what are you talking about here? You know the factory, Sophie.
Have I not told you about the factory?

Speaker 2 (56:23):
I talked about the factory.

Speaker 4 (56:25):
But which employer are we referring to?

Speaker 1 (56:27):
That's my question. It's the it's the it's the arms
company that we use cool Zone as a shell to
a to ah. We're on air ship artillery primers through anyway,
we don't need to talk about that. So Jack suffers
no consequences for blowing up this factory. Again, Ge is

(56:48):
like a ridiculously paternalistic company at this point, and his
bosses are like, hey, failure is a part of life,
Jackie boy, you know, just don't blow up another factory
and everything's fine, and honestly, to their credit, this works
out well for them financially because the next thing that
he does is he convinces his bosses to invest in
a new factory which created a plastic called Noural. Now

(57:11):
he convinces it to do this before Noural is a
functional product. In fact, the plastic in its first form
was too brittle to work. But Jack told his chemists,
find a way to make this not be a terrible mistake,
and they do somehow, and the boy did it well
as many factories as it takes. So Jack gets promoted

(57:36):
to head the company's plastics division at thirty two, and
he becomes GE's youngest general manager. This promotion brings him
stock options for the first time, and over the coming
years he started to develop an obsession with stock price,
one that overwhelmed any interest he had in the actual
products that his employees were making. Despite the fact that
his hard working scientists had been the ones to turn

(57:59):
Neural from another failure into a hit, Jack had no
loyalty to them or to anyone else who worked at GE,
and in fact, he grew increasingly frustrated with the paternalistic
nature of the company. With the understanding that it showed
its employees, which again is the only reason he wasn't
shitcanned for blowing up that factory. Now, the CEO of

(58:19):
GE at this time was an Englishman named Reg Jones,
who was some people will say, like one of the
most if not the most respected CEOs in the country
at that point. He was apparently good. I mean, the
GE increased steadily in value during the time that he
was there, and he was he was kind of notably
the kind of CEO that doesn't exist anymore. He lived

(58:40):
in like a normal person house. He made two hundred
grand a year, which was more money in the nineteen seventies,
but like nothing close to what executives make these days, right,
like that, not even in the same ballpark of like
a modern the ceo the salary of like the CEO
of GE today, or the CEO of a company that
you know was like gee.

Speaker 3 (59:01):
Who could easily afford a ballpark for example.

Speaker 1 (59:03):
Yeah, for example. He was also kind of famous for
like whenever he would find out about like employees suffering
deaths in the family, he wouldn't just like send them
a letter or whatever, Like, he would devote company resources
to helping people, you know, pay for funerals and deal
with grieving. Like he was generally seen as a pretty
nice guy. But Reg also was kind of as the

(59:25):
nineteen seventies rolled along. As we all remember from I
don't know, high school history class, that's where you get
your stagnation and your inflation, and you get your stagflation,
and the economy is not doing so great. Japan and
Germany are both kind of rising as industrial powers, and
it turns out that they make better products than a
lot of American companies. So people are starting to the

(59:48):
US economy is starting to, like this kind of golden
age of capitalism is starting to sort of like get jankier.
You know, we can kind of see the Reagan era
heading towards us very quickly in the mirror. It's it's
it's and Reg was intelligent enough to see this coming.
He knew the economy was changing, and so in nineteen
seventy seven he starts the process of finding the guy

(01:00:09):
who's going to replace him. You know, it takes a
couple of years, and when he's given a list of
like the short list of executives being considered to take
over his job, he sees that Jack Welch isn't on
there because no one likes Jack. He's an asshole. But
Reg is like, I think you know, Jack is you know,
someone who thinks differently than everyone else at the company.

Speaker 3 (01:00:30):
But he blew up that factory factory.

Speaker 1 (01:00:34):
What the story you'll get? And this is kind of
a mystery. No one really knows why Reg picks him.
But Reg is like, I don't know, maybe this Probably
the most likely thing is that REGs like, this guy's
an asshole. The economy is getting worse. Maybe we need
a piece of shit to run the company during this
period of time.

Speaker 3 (01:00:50):
Hard to say, but Ivana Guet talks about money River,
which is just I do think it's really true that
many times people who become insanely wealthy and powerful, it
really boils down to a moment where someone who is
already insanely wealthy and powerful before them went, I don't
know you like you're set now that's that?

Speaker 1 (01:01:12):
Yeah, And this is about to be that moment for Jack.
So he's put on this short list. And basically the
way GE does this is once they've got this kind
of shortlist together, for the next couple of years, Jack
and all of the other guys considered for the job
are told, hey, we're watching you to see if you're
good enough to be to CEO. You know, do your
fucking best, and they give them new responsibilities to kind

(01:01:34):
of see what they can handle and judge them. So
most of his competitors for the job focused on either
maintaining profits and you know, keeping a steady rate of
increase in profits at whatever divisions they were running, or
at shepherding new research into production in the hopes that
it would be a new big business for Ge and
it would look good for them. Jack knew that that
shit either didn't look impressive right, just kind of maintaining

(01:01:58):
profit and that a division isn't easy to rag about
in this kind of a competition, or it took too
long right. New research, as he knows, is risky sometimes
the factory explodes. He doesn't want to take that risk.
But he had a faster, dumber way of increasing profits
mass layoffs. So this was not really a thing for

(01:02:19):
American businesses at this point. Obviously, sometimes people get fired.
Sometimes you got to lay people off because the company's
not working right, Like it was a thing that maybe
people would get laid off of a business failed. Sure,
but the idea that a company that is profitable and
even though the economy is more challenging right now, GE
is profitable. GE is making a shitload of money. The
idea that a company is profitable as GE would fire

(01:02:41):
a shitload of employees just to improve their margins. That
didn't happen at this period of time in American capitalism.
Jack is like, what if we did that? So this
is my idea. Yeah, this is what I leave the
human race. You're welcome firing people there for no reason.
Did this guy create like the rank and yank thing.

(01:03:05):
That's exactly where we're headed, buddy, Holy yeah, yeah, I
don't want to get ahead of ourselves though. So GE
operated a massive complex in Louisville, Kentucky called Appliants Park.
It was this is such a big factory kind of
complex that it has its own zip code. It was
very profitable, and it also like kind of supported the

(01:03:26):
whole city, right, Like a huge amount of Louisville's economy
is people who work at Appliants Park, right, It's what
keeps the city alive kind of effectively in this period,
Jack didn't think it was profitable enough. Though, Again it's profitable.
He just doesn't think it's profitable enough, so he shit
cans a huge percentage of the workforce, gutting a huge

(01:03:47):
chunk of the economy in Louisville, but making a short
term like stockbump for Ge right, because cutting all of this,
all this salary and benefits and stuff, looks good on
the balance and that makes the shareholders happy. His colleagues
celebrated his courage in doing this. David Gel's writes quote

(01:04:08):
layoff spread to other divisions as well. Welch amassed more responsibility,
and as he toured GE's facilities around the country, he
took the opportunity to remind the rank and file who
was now in charge. In Cleveland, at the light bulb factory,
he berated a manager for the relative high costs of
GE's bulbs, screaming that competitors in communist Europe made similar
products for half the price. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, he tore

(01:04:30):
into another executive when he stepped on and off one
of the company's new digital bathroom scales and it came
back with different results. When he met a manager who
failed to impress, he would snap, what the fuck do
I pay you for? Beyond being an unsentimental cost cutter,
someone who was willing to lay off a few hundred
workers to meet a quarterly earnings target. Welch had never
outgrown his adolescent temper. And I find that really interesting

(01:04:52):
the light bulb story, because the kind of broad story
you get about the Cold War is like, yeah, capitalism
went up against communism and communism lost, and it's like, well,
the United States went up against the Soviet Union and
all of our sundry satellites and the Soviet Union collapsed.
But a big part of what was happening in that
period is the United States economy boomed in part because

(01:05:17):
it adopted a number of socialist policies, even at the
corporate level, welfare capitalism, right, That was a big part
of what made the US economy work during that period
of time. But the whole time there were guys like
Welch who were like, you know, instead of not looking
at like the shitty quality of a lot of products
produced in communist countries and being like, boy, capitalism makes
much better products, looking at them and going, man, if

(01:05:38):
we made shit like that, we could save a lot
of money that we could then man to rich people,
which is where we are now.

Speaker 3 (01:05:45):
It's the banal tragedy. I totally get this guy through
and through because he's the guy we have now still
to this day. Yeah, and it is. It's actually chilling
to think of that open ended answer. Uh yeah, we're profitable,
but are we profitable enough?

Speaker 2 (01:06:03):
Well?

Speaker 4 (01:06:03):
How much is enough?

Speaker 3 (01:06:04):
Man, is a scary place we're going again.

Speaker 1 (01:06:08):
It's not like, because this is always like the fucking
hard nosed capitalism is the best. People are like, well,
what we should just have a You should just pay
people for a failing business. You know that you can't
do that. It's like, look, these are hard decisions, but
they have to be made. You can't just give you know,
this is a business, not a charity. No. No, G's
light bulb business was profitable. It was making money. He
just wanted to make shittier, cheaper light bulbs so that

(01:06:29):
more money could go to the forty people at the
very top of things. And he was willing to destroy
the city of Louisville in order to do this.

Speaker 4 (01:06:38):
I wonder if went on his deathbed like, this guy's dead. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
he's dead as shit, but very recently yeah, okay, so
I wonder I do think it was a painful death.
Oh well there's that. Yeah. Uh, I wonder on his
deathbed if he was just like he like looked into
someone's eyes and was like, was I a cartoon character?

Speaker 1 (01:07:04):
It is? I'm We'll talk a little bit about how
Jack handled imminent death, abe, because it's even funnier than that.
So Jack was obsessed with a small, relatively unappreciated part
of the company, GE Credit Corp. The company finance division.
And this was like a small It was created basically
to like let customers like finance purchases, right, Like you're

(01:07:28):
buying a washing machine that's expensive, you can't pay it
all up front, so you finance it with the company, right.
But what Jack realized is that like the company could
be doing a lot more with its finance division, because
a corporate finance division when you've got a company as
big as GE could have with it and with as
good a credit writing as G because GE is like
triple A, right, like it's the best company in the country.

(01:07:50):
Pretty much like they've got that anyone will lend to them,
which meant that GE's finance division could operate as a bank,
like an unlicensed bank. So he starts spanning it and
offering mortgages and private credit cards and investing in other
companies and buying other companies. And it's one of those
things where he's like in his autobiography when he kind

(01:08:11):
of realizes that he could use this as an unlicensed bank.
He writes, compared to the industrial operations, I did know
this business seemed an easy way to make money. You
didn't have to invest heavily in R and D, build
factories and bend metal. It's like making shits hard and risky. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:08:27):
Yeah, with every step we just go. But if money's
just math and it's just abstract, if we took this
percentage into this percentage, the money would just make money.
And now we're at a point where I don't I
just think if you think that way, I'm like, yeah,
you don't understand what life is for. You're not engaging
with the universe.

Speaker 1 (01:08:45):
No, And we like you're not again, you're not a
person that we need to have in the world, right
because ge again not to like why again g He
was heavily involved in the military industrial complex, but outside
of that, it like it made things that objectively would
be necessary in any society. It made light bulbs that worked, Right,
that's a value to society. Having light bulbs that function.
It made washing machines and dryers that worked, that's a

(01:09:08):
value to society. Jack is like, what if we made
payday loans? Like, what if we created ways to just
like make interest money off of people? And we'll talk
about the other fucky things he does with this bank
because it's his primary instrument for like making GE a
quote unquote success in his eyes. But we're I'm getting

(01:09:30):
ahead of myself yet again. So the late seventies, things
keep getting worse for the American economy. You know, obviously
inflation is pretty brutal this period of time. You know,
GE is again still making a profit. They are sailing
kind of through these stormy waters. But the profit isn't enough,
right Jack see's the one and a half billion a

(01:09:51):
year that the company is netting as brutally insufficient.

Speaker 3 (01:09:55):
It's never enough for his trained daddy to come home
and hug him.

Speaker 1 (01:09:58):
He will, yeah, exactly what he It will make his
dad not have worked himself half to death at the train.
So during this period, while Jack is kind of competing
to be the new CEO, there's a new attitude developing
in the American business community about how capitalism ought to function.
The death knell of the Golden Age of capitalism was

(01:10:20):
heralded by books about business that started to get really popular,
like In Search of Excellence by Thomas Peters and Robert
Waterman Junior. And this is this is an interesting idea
because business historian Lewis Hyman describes kind of the central
message of In Search of Excellence as you don't really
need all these workers. You should be able to buy

(01:10:41):
what you need from the market. You don't need to
have these big corporations. You can get by without job security. Now.
One of the authors of this book is a partner
at Mackenzie, our old buddy, Pete Bodagig's former employer. Yeah,
In Search of Excellence is the other author is like
the guy who basic kind of guts the old Hewlett

(01:11:01):
Packard to build the new one. And these are these
are guys, these are MBA's right, they're not engineering guys.
At firms like Hewlett Packard and like ge, a lot
of the people running it had been engineers previously. It's
the same with companies like Lockheed, but in this period
they're being replaced by guys who just know like business,
and these are guys who are they're obsessed with like

(01:11:22):
concepts like kaisen from Japan, which is like a manufacturing
concept that they kind of often misunderstand and misapply. They're
they're they're trend seekers, right, Like they see companies succeeding
and they're like, what are they doing? Like how can
we copy it? Part of how what they copy is
this kind of like manic, insane work culture that is,
you know, prevalent in places like Japan. What they're not

(01:11:44):
going to copy is like, you know, these Japanese companies
whose workers are like working themselves half to death produce excellent,
reliable products. That's not necessary, right, Like we don't actually
need to make good cars. We can we can if
we make our workers work that hard and produce cheap shit,
will make even more money. Right. That's a big part
of the management philosophy, especially in search of excellence. Pushes

(01:12:07):
if you're.

Speaker 3 (01:12:08):
Still loyal to American products, which of course patriotism was. Yeah,
I would say more prevalent than or like extreme, the
point being, now your ship breaks down, you got to
buy it twice as fast, exactly, like it works all
around just me.

Speaker 1 (01:12:23):
Yeah, as opposed to like, I don't know Toyota, whose
philosophy is we will make a car that will outlive humanity.

Speaker 3 (01:12:29):
Right speak at your funeral.

Speaker 1 (01:12:31):
Yeah it more but back then, you know.

Speaker 4 (01:12:34):
But think of the yachts. Yeah, Robert, think.

Speaker 1 (01:12:38):
Of the yachts.

Speaker 3 (01:12:39):
When you hang yourself using your fifty year old pair
of Levi's jeans, your car will be there.

Speaker 1 (01:12:46):
So another popular book that kind of helped set up
the next age of American capitalism was Future Shock. The
author I got named powered Alvin Toffler. Again, I'm going
to actually quote from that that business story in Lewis Hyman.
Here the author basically invinces the idea of project management

(01:13:06):
and talks about a future where there's no stability and
no security. It's a blueprint for work under neoliberalism, and
it's everywhere. It's a best seller. There's lots of these
popularizers that bring ideas about workplace and security into a
kind of connection with rethinking what the corporation is after
the nineteen seventies. And perhaps the single most important of
these kind of apostles of this new age of capitalism

(01:13:28):
is a guy named Milton Friedman. Now that's a name
I'm going to guess most people have at least heard right.
He's kind of like the dude behind the Chicago School
of Economics. He is an economist himself. He's extremely influential.
And one of the things that Friedman argues is that
social welfare programs are not like a responsible thing for

(01:13:49):
a society to invest in, specifically particularly if they're using
tax dollars from companies and from rich people to fund
these programs. He rails against the idea that corporations have
any responsibility to society or to its their employees. In
nineteen seventy, Freedman rights, the social responsibility of business is
to increase its profits. What does it mean to say

(01:14:12):
that business has responsibilities? Only people can have responsibilities. Businessmen
who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual
forces that have been undermining the basis of a free
society these past decades.

Speaker 3 (01:14:26):
And then we've evolved that to the point where we
just go or you could just say corporations are people,
even though that's like saying two plus two equals five,
or an umbrella is alive.

Speaker 1 (01:14:37):
But okay, well, now Michael, umbrellas are alive. Yeah, so
bad example, And every time you close them, they die.
So it's like drawing a katana, right, Like you have
to know that you have to commit to that umbrella
if you're going to open it, because you're taking a life.
So sure that this is the only thing I believe spiritually.

Speaker 4 (01:14:58):
So think about that next time raised.

Speaker 1 (01:15:01):
This is what you're taught as an Episcopalian. That's all
I remember from Sunday School. This is a weeping man
screaming at me never to use an I'm going to
think of it.

Speaker 4 (01:15:12):
That was a bus stop.

Speaker 1 (01:15:13):
But so, in Friedman's eyes, the only responsibility corporations have
is to maximize shareholder value. Any sacrifice necessary to achieve
this end is acceptable. Now this is a little bit
of an aside, but one of the people that Friedman
had the biggest influence on is a Chilean politician named

(01:15:34):
Augusto Pinochet. Right, so, Friedman gives a bunch of and
a bunch of Chicago School economists are kind of brought
in by Pinochet in order to give him advice. Once
he takes over the country by murdering it's elect democratically
elected leader. With the backing of the CIA, Pinochet dismantles
Chile's public properties, he auctions off state businesses to the

(01:15:56):
highest bidder, and he kills every environmental and financial regulation
in the country. This creates in the short term, massive
wealth for a small number of people, but it also
leads to de industrialization that by the early nineteen eighties
had caused unemployment in the country to increase to ten
times its pre Pinochet rate. By nineteen eighty two, Pinochet

(01:16:16):
had been forced to fire his Chicago School advisors and
renationalize several of the financial institutions he deregulated. In other words,
the what we know from the example of Chile is
that following these kind of economic policies that Friedman is
advocating that Jack Welch is reading about in these books
and falling in love with makes a shitload of money

(01:16:37):
for a while, and then it leaves your economy hollowed
out and unable to survive and causes like massive social
and economic disasters.

Speaker 3 (01:16:47):
And it's crazy that these people think that they're fucking
geniuses because they can turn money into more money.

Speaker 4 (01:16:52):
Because they sure credit.

Speaker 3 (01:16:53):
But they can't see that, Yeah, if you strip mine
the mountain, then you don't have the mountain, or like
if you burn the hole for there's no force, you
fucking idiot, Like, is this not obvious?

Speaker 1 (01:17:03):
It'd be like if I was like, look, you know,
I have a new idea for a business where I
can provide functional organs to people who need them. And
because doctors and nurses are already in hospitals, I'm just
having men with guns kill them and take their organs.
In the short term, you can probably make a lot
of money, sit out huge business, but very quickly you

(01:17:24):
run out of people who can put those organs and bodies.

Speaker 3 (01:17:27):
And I do believe truly in my heart that with
many of these people, their inner thought about that is
I will be dead before then, so yes, doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 (01:17:37):
Yeah, I think their inner thought is more just like
the droning of a dial toned like that's all that
ghosts on. They just do what they do.

Speaker 3 (01:17:44):
Jack Welch, Yeah, I actually believe it's an addiction of
some kind.

Speaker 1 (01:17:47):
Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, I think there's Yeah. I think
I think all of the things we're talking about are
true or just compulsions. So, just as Chile is teetering
towards the brink of economic collapse thanks to its freedmanlike policies,
Freedman disciple Jack Welch was picked to be the new
CEO of General Electric. His colleagues reported shock and sometimes
horror at this decision, but Regg Jones had made his

(01:18:09):
selection and there was no going back now, although an
event that occurred right before the transfers power certainly gave
him second thoughts David Gel's writes. Five weeks before Welch
officially took over, Jones threw him a party at the
Helmsley Palace, an upscale hotel in New York City. Among
the sixty or so guests were CEOs for many of
the nation's largest companies. As the night wore on, Welsh

(01:18:31):
had a bit too much to drink. When Jones asked
him to address the crowd, Welch couldn't get through his
remarks without slurring his words. Back at GE headquarters the
next morning, Jones stormed into Welch's office. I've never been
so humiliated in my life, he told Welch, you embarrassed
me in the company. Welch was terrified that this might
cost him the job, but yet again he avoided any
accountability for his actions. Jones went through with his decision,

(01:18:55):
and right before the final transfer of power. He invited
Welch into his office. Jack said, I give you the
Queen Mary. This is designed not to sink. Jack, without
even taking a second to think, immediately replied, I don't
want the Queen Mary. I plan to blow up the
Queen Mary. I want speedboats.

Speaker 3 (01:19:18):
I want to shoot at Tesla to the moon with
a fucking mannequin in it for social media cloud. That's
what I want.

Speaker 4 (01:19:24):
That's who I am. And then we're thumbed up and
then high fived, and then we flew out of there
on our fucking spaceship.

Speaker 3 (01:19:31):
Then we just threw up piles of money, and then
we ate the money that we threw up the air.

Speaker 1 (01:19:35):
Yeah. What I what I love about this, What I
love about this is that like if we're if we're
following this, this this metaphor right logically, Okay, the Queen
Mary is the boat that we are all on. And
if you blow up the boat that we're on and
then you replace it with speedboats, well only a few
of us can fit on the speedboats and everyone else dies. Yeah,

(01:19:57):
it is. It is actually a very good analogy. He's
doing a Titanic, but he's like, wow, the Titanic really
created a lot of value for the survivors that made it.

Speaker 4 (01:20:09):
There's a supplying demand's structure rehaul, you know, during the
sinking of the Titanic.

Speaker 1 (01:20:16):
Yeah, it is. It is such a piece of ship.
He's I just what a reminder like we have. We're
barely getting started. This is the end of part one.
But boy, howdy does it get a lot worse. But
you know what doesn't get worse, you guys, you just
get better with a like a fine salami.

Speaker 4 (01:20:38):
I tell myself that every day.

Speaker 3 (01:20:40):
I tell my fine salami that.

Speaker 1 (01:20:43):
Yeah, you guys want to plug anything?

Speaker 2 (01:20:47):
Yeah, that was That was the cue to plug your
plug plug.

Speaker 3 (01:20:50):
We did it at the top.

Speaker 4 (01:20:51):
You double plug.

Speaker 1 (01:20:53):
Yeah, well you get to double plug. We only let
our We only learn our real friends, do they?

Speaker 3 (01:20:57):
Well, speaking of double plug in our fine salami, we're
doing a movie about the complex proposition.

Speaker 1 (01:21:04):
Format to be a sex thing.

Speaker 4 (01:21:06):
Yes, well that's what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 (01:21:09):
Go over to my torrent site right now and find
double plugging a fine salami right right.

Speaker 4 (01:21:14):
On the time, sausage.

Speaker 3 (01:21:17):
We are doing a movie, as we said at the top,
but we'll say it again because it's been a bit
about the complex proposition of formulating your own sexual identity
and how everyone's journey in that regard is unique and irreducible.
And it's called Papa Bear and it's very funny. But
then in the third act has heart you know, like

(01:21:38):
you know kind of movies I'm talking about. It's one
of those poignant coming of age shit. We're really good
at videos and movies. If you know us and our work,
you probably already know that. If you're interested in finding
out more about the project, it's over at seed and
spark dot com, slash fund, slash Papa hyphen Bear.

Speaker 4 (01:21:58):
Thanks so much, thank.

Speaker 1 (01:22:00):
You, thank you both so much. You can find me
nowhere because stay away from social media, it's bad for you.
But you can find my book After the Revolution literally
anywhere you can buy books. You like Amazon, you like
bookshop dot com or whatever you like going to Barnes
and Noble. For some reason, it's everywhere. Go go go

(01:22:20):
read it.

Speaker 2 (01:22:22):
That's the episode.

Speaker 1 (01:22:24):
That's the episode.

Speaker 2 (01:22:28):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts,

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