Behind the Bastards - Part One: Jack Welch Is Why You Got Laid Off
Aired: 2023-05-09
Duration: 01:32:13


=== Nostalgia for the Old Days (07:43) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:00:15]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:00:21]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
[00:00:30]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[00:00:36]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:00:46]  Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.
[00:00:51]  So I'm Leanne.
[00:00:52]  This is my best friend Janet.
[00:00:53]  Hey.
[00:00:53]  And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
[00:00:55]  Absolutely.
[00:00:56]  A redacted amount of years later.
[00:00:58]  We're still joined at the hip.
[00:01:00]  Just a little bit bigger hips.
[00:01:01]  This is a podcast.
[00:01:02]  We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
[00:01:09]  Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
[00:01:11]  Oh, they hit a BOGO.
[00:01:12]  Well, then you done.
[00:01:13]  Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:18]  I'm Ana Navarro.
[00:01:20]  And on my new podcast, Bleep with Ana Navarro, I'm talking to the people closest to the biggest issues happening in your community and around the world.
[00:01:28]  Because I know deep down inside right now, we are all cursing and asking what the bleep is going on.
[00:01:35]  Every week, I'm breaking down the biggest issues happening in our communities and around the world.
[00:01:40]  I'm talking to people like Julie K. Brown, who broke the explosive story on Jeffrey Epstein in 2018.
[00:01:46]  The Justice Department, through we counted four presidential administrations, failed these victims.
[00:01:53]  Listen to Bleep with Ana Navarro on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:02:00]  It's a podcast.
[00:02:02]  Shit.
[00:02:04]  It's Behind the Bastards, a podcast that I was, I was trying, like in the 30 seconds before we started to think of like a good funny introduction, like, you know, shouting Hitler atonally or, you know, one of our other, it's a podcast.
[00:02:19]  That's all I came up with.
[00:02:20]  That's fine.
[00:02:21]  I considered Sophie doing like, doing like a War of the Worlds style intro where I like 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.
[00:02:35]  But we already, we all did that.
[00:02:37]  So it's not really funny.
[00:02:40]  So I don't know.
[00:02:40]  I don't know, Sophie.
[00:02:41]  I don't know.
[00:02:42]  I'm, I'm, you know, I liked a podcast.
[00:02:45]  I failed.
[00:02:47]  I failed.
[00:02:48]  But you know who's not a failure, Sophie.
[00:02:50]  Oh, yeah, I do.
[00:02:52]  The guests that we have for this spectacular podcast episode today.
[00:02:58]  The glorious Michael Swain and the inimitable Abraham Epperson.
[00:03:04]  Ooh.
[00:03:06]  I'm glorious, but you could imitate it if you tried.
[00:03:09]  Yeah, you could imitate.
[00:03:11]  You could imitate Michael, but not A.
[00:03:13]  But and I have, I have no discernment of quality, but you can't replicate it.
[00:03:19]  That's right.
[00:03:20]  That's right.
[00:03:20]  Thank you.
[00:03:21]  That's right.
[00:03:22]  No one said it's good.
[00:03:23]  It's just hard to do.
[00:03:24]  Yeah, it's just like, whoa, that's hard to do.
[00:03:27]  I love that we had a pitch meeting about my compliments to turn them into insults.
[00:03:31]  That was nice.
[00:03:32]  It's really making me nostalgic for the old days at cracked.
[00:03:36]  And by the way, by doing a war of the worlds, I totally thought you meant get sick and die.
[00:03:40]  Like just keel over.
[00:03:43]  Robert was the best of us all, but he couldn't handle a simple COVID.
[00:03:49]  No, I'm, you know, COVID.
[00:03:54]  The CDC says it's over.
[00:03:55]  So we're good.
[00:03:56]  Yeah.
[00:03:57]  I'm not even worried about it anymore.
[00:04:00]  Michael, Abe, as I stated a little earlier, we all used to work together at the old place, the shop at the comedy website that was based off of a comedy magazine that nobody read in the 1960s.
[00:04:16]  But the website did quite well for a time.
[00:04:18]  Mad TV, the website, if you will.
[00:04:22]  Yeah, you guys are back on.
[00:04:24]  The last time we had both of you together was talking about the end of L. Ron Hubbard and listening to his glorious, his glorious song.
[00:04:33]  Thank you for listening.
[00:04:35]  And today, I've got you on to talk about a very special piece of shit.
[00:04:40]  One of the rare bastards who has had a major impact on the life of every single person listening to this podcast.
[00:04:47]  But before we get into that, you guys have a project that you're working on that's very exciting.
[00:04:52]  And I want to start with a plug up front so that we can get to that before people's souls leave their bodies with depression.
[00:04:59]  And I'm supposed to remind you that you also have a podcast because Daniel threatened my life.
[00:05:05]  Oh, yeah.
[00:05:06]  All right.
[00:05:06]  Well, let's dispense with that quickly.
[00:05:08]  I do a podcast with Adam Ganzer where we talk about video games.
[00:05:11]  It's called One Upsmanship.
[00:05:13]  I love it dearly.
[00:05:14]  And it's a weekly show that's great.
[00:05:16]  But wait, there's more.
[00:05:19]  Wow.
[00:05:19]  And thank you, Robert.
[00:05:20]  What a value.
[00:05:21]  We're definitely here just to announce that we're clear since the Hubbard episode.
[00:05:26]  We're totally clear.
[00:05:27]  We're going clear.
[00:05:28]  So good for us.
[00:05:30]  And with that newfound power, we've decided to try and make an indie movie.
[00:05:35]  It would be our second indie movie.
[00:05:36]  The first one's called Kill Me Now.
[00:05:38]  If you want to see if we suck at it, you could go watch Kill Me Now on YouTube.
[00:05:41]  It's available in its entirety.
[00:05:43]  Thank you.
[00:05:44]  And it's been a long time and we're ready for number two.
[00:05:48]  If you knew us from cracked, or like if you knew like After Hours, Agents of Crack does not compute hundreds of sketches.
[00:05:55]  We were kind of the engine behind that.
[00:05:57]  And this movie is based on the hilarious, poignant true story of when my dad came out as a gay furry.
[00:06:04]  It's super funny, but it's also got a lot of heart.
[00:06:06]  It weaves a bunch of other stuff in there as well.
[00:06:08]  And Abe, do you have anything to add?
[00:06:11]  Yeah.
[00:06:12]  Yeah.
[00:06:13]  You can go help us out by going to seedandspark.com/slash fund/slash papa-bear, and you can become part of the movie, get stuff from the movie, watch the film early, even go to a premiere.
[00:06:27]  We're stoked about telling this story.
[00:06:28]  So if you can't help us get what we need to make it right, yeah.
[00:06:32]  Yeah, at the lowest here, you're basically pre-buying a ticket because you'll just get a private link to the movie when it's ready.
[00:06:40]  We have other funding like going on behind the scenes, but the crowdfunding piece, which is going on right now, of course, is super crucial.
[00:06:47]  And there's cooler stuff than that to get.
[00:06:49]  Yeah.
[00:06:49]  Yeah.
[00:06:50]  If you if you donate 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.
[00:07:04]  Don't forget the hat.
[00:07:05]  Cheating on your wife.
[00:07:07]  Don't forget the signed hat.
[00:07:08]  You get a signed hat, all sorts of good stuff.
[00:07:12]  We execute the adoption papers with your name on them and you become my dad.
[00:07:15]  You are legally Mike's dad.
[00:07:19]  You know, considering the movie is about your dad, that does kind of seem like a little bit of a kick in the face.
[00:07:24]  It's weird.
[00:07:25]  Yeah.
[00:07:26]  Like you're at all.
[00:07:27]  It's like it's a gift of the Magi type situation where I was able to make a movie about you, dad, but now you're no longer my dad.
[00:07:34]  But as you buy it, you forget him.
[00:07:36]  Yeah, it unwrites.
[00:07:37]  It comes out of your brain and disappears.
[00:07:40]  But yeah, that's Papa Bear.
[00:07:42]  Papa Bear.

=== Capitalism as a Good Deal (15:06) ===

[00:07:43]  Papa Bear.
[00:07:43]  Look it up.
[00:07:44]  But yeah, let's check it out.
[00:07:45]  Yeah.
[00:07:46]  What kind of horrors do you have for us?
[00:07:47]  Excited to be here.
[00:07:48]  Starting with you.
[00:07:50]  A real horror.
[00:07:52]  We should start a little bit here by talking about capitalism, you know, something that we're all intimately familiar with.
[00:07:58]  And one of the most important things to understand, if you want to know kind of like why the U.S. and its friends won the Cold War, is that for a lot of people in the United States and other Western countries, capitalism seemed like a pretty fucking good deal from the time of the New Deal up through the late 70s to early 80s.
[00:08:17]  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.
[00:08:26]  And it was also, you know, funded by supporting the subjugation by dictatorships of people living in those countries in order to extract resources.
[00:08:33]  But within the United States itself, in particular, Americans saw a 40 or so year-long period where the standard of living and the average amount of like wealth held per person increased at a pretty dramatic and extremely consistent rate.
[00:08:48]  Prior to the New Deal, corruption and abuse within capitalism were pretty much universal, and the biggest companies were the ones that were generally the best at holding their workers down at gunpoint.
[00:08:58]  But after the 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.
[00:09:10]  Inequality plummeted.
[00:09:12]  Managers and workers, you know, were generally obviously paid differently, but it wasn't like you see today, right?
[00:09:17]  Like a guy working the line at a factory was not getting like one 500th of the amount of money that like the CEO of the company got.
[00:09:26]  They were living kind of in the same vague planet, you know, when it came to income.
[00:09:30]  And a lot of the days, business groups argued that this was necessary for healthy economic functioning.
[00:09:35]  This was actually the most efficient way for the system to work.
[00:09:38]  In 1943, Johnson Johnson's CEO authored a company, Credo, that spoke to a lot of people in big business in the United States.
[00:09:47]  He argued that the company's first responsibility was to its customers.
[00:09:51]  Its second was to its employees, who he said deserved a sense of security with just management and short working hours and fair wages.
[00:09:59]  Its next duty was to management.
[00:10:01]  And then last and least, it had a duty to its investors and shareholders.
[00:10:05]  Quote, yeah, that was the last.
[00:10:07]  That's the CEO of Johnson Johnson.
[00:10:09]  Business must make a sound profit, high taxes paid, new factories built, new products launched.
[00:10:15]  When these things have been done, the owners and stockholders should receive a fair return.
[00:10:19]  So that's pretty different, right?
[00:10:21]  It feels like all things have become grotesquely extreme to the point of like ruining everything.
[00:10:26]  You know, it takes time.
[00:10:27]  At the beginning, I feel like they didn't realize how far they could go and how much they could get away with.
[00:10:34]  It takes time to wake up and go, wait, could we take it all?
[00:10:37]  Like all?
[00:10:38]  Oh, shit.
[00:10:39]  It takes time.
[00:10:40]  And I think it also takes, you know, part of why this state of affairs came to be.
[00:10:44]  It didn't like these companies didn't start treating workers well and sharing profits with them because it was nice.
[00:10:49]  They did it because the country, like the United States nearly collapsed into like a revolution, right?
[00:10:55]  Like things were that bad at the very worst of the Great Depression.
[00:10:59]  The government was worried, like, are we going to do a Russia?
[00:11:03]  And that fear faded.
[00:11:04]  You know, that's kind of the story we're telling today.
[00:11:07]  So I'm going to get ahead of myself.
[00:11:08]  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 II up to kind of the Reagan era, the company that best embodied both the strengths of that capitalist system that existed then and the kind of innovation that could come from it is General Electric.
[00:11:28]  Now, over the years, it was founded kind of in the late 1800s.
[00:11:31]  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.
[00:11:41]  They invented incandescent light bulbs.
[00:11:43]  They invented the electric plant.
[00:11:45]  They shipped radios around the world and invented many of the first radios.
[00:11:50]  They crafted the first vacuum tubes.
[00:11:52]  They invented the garbage disposal.
[00:11:54]  They created a wide variety of moldable and transparent plastics that became ubiquitous in household products and also every creature living in the ocean.
[00:12:02]  Obviously, you know, that part's not great.
[00:12:05]  But on the positive side, the silicon rubber that they invented was a like made space travel possible.
[00:12:11]  Like you don't get human beings into space without it.
[00:12:14]  All these are bangers.
[00:12:15]  These are all bangers.
[00:12:17]  These are all bangers.
[00:12:18]  They're all impressive.
[00:12:21]  So this is like for about a hundred straight years from the late 1800s to the 1980s.
[00:12:26]  GE was not just a company that made a lot of money.
[00:12:28]  It was a company that regularly invented things, or at least its, you know, its workers did.
[00:12:33]  The scientists that it paid invented things that changed life for people all around the world.
[00:12:38]  They're like, that was us.
[00:12:39]  Chairs.
[00:12:40]  Yeah, fucking chairs.
[00:12:41]  Pair.
[00:12:42]  You ever heard of it?
[00:12:43]  Yeah.
[00:12:43]  Yeah.
[00:12:44]  Oxygen.
[00:12:46]  Yeah.
[00:12:47]  And their workforce was compensated, you know, as you'd expect given their success.
[00:12:52]  All GEDs.
[00:12:54]  Yeah.
[00:12:55]  As many light bulbs as you can fit in your cheek pouches like a squirrel.
[00:13:00]  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.
[00:13:07]  They gave workers profit sharing.
[00:13:10]  They were the first company, I think, to have like provide insurance for workers.
[00:13:14]  They invested in the ongoing, in ongoing education for their workforce.
[00:13:18]  They 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 making benefit for GE, but made the workers happy.
[00:13:31]  They kind of pioneered the shit that we now associate with like the golden age of the tech industry, right?
[00:13:37]  Like that all started with Jersey in like the 20s.
[00:13:40]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:13:42]  And this was 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.
[00:13:50]  Men like GE CEO Gerald Swope had the czar on his mind when he described the company ethos as welfare capitalism in 1922.
[00:13:59]  This was a term that like a CEO felt proud to use.
[00:14:03]  Like our company practices welfare capitalism.
[00:14:06]  In 1927, company chairman Owen 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.
[00:14:18]  Executives, he argued, needed to quote think in terms of human beings who put their lives and labor in a common enterprise for mutual advantage.
[00:14:27]  And there's nothing more alien to kind of the business ghouls of our day than the concept of mutual advantage.
[00:14:33]  Now they were still rich, right?
[00:14:35]  Like yes, they had a lot of plenty of money.
[00:14:38]  Yes.
[00:14:38]  They still led lives of plenty.
[00:14:40]  Right.
[00:14:41]  And I should state a lot of times, and one of the main sources that we're going to wind up using for this episode, this era gets romanticized.
[00:14:48]  Part of why it gets romanticized is that a lot was nicer back then.
[00:14:51]  Like compensation of workers in the United States was much nicer.
[00:14:55]  The system itself was still pretty soaked in blood.
[00:14:58]  For example, GE executives may have cared greatly for their workforce in the United States, but they had no issue with the idea that GE products would be used to murder civilians in foreign countries.
[00:15:08]  GE's T-700 helicopter engine powered the Blackhawk after its adoption in 1978.
[00:15:14]  They also made the engines for basically all of the helicopters that the United States used to annihilate large chunks of jungle in Vietnam.
[00:15:22]  They made the engines for the planes that dropped the defoliants that gave everybody fucking cancer.
[00:15:27]  They were one of the top 10 largest contractors used by the U.S. government to make nuclear weapons over the course of the Cold War.
[00:15:34]  You know, they're not just like making nukes, but nukes, there's a bunch of parts that nukes involve.
[00:15:38]  And so GE was one of the primary suppliers of those parts.
[00:15:42]  At the height of the Vietnam War, they made more than $1.6 billion a year in military contracts, making them the second highest paid defense contractor of the bloodiest chapter of the Cold War.
[00:15:53]  So that's all bad, right?
[00:15:55]  Like, it's not, I'm not trying to like whitewash this stuff here.
[00:15:59]  It's different than light bulbs.
[00:16:01]  I'll give you light bulbs.
[00:16:03]  They need light bulbs and death bulbs.
[00:16:05]  Light bulbs, rubber gaskets, the bicycle wheel, bullets, nukes, helicopters, lasers.
[00:16:11]  You're all going to die.
[00:16:13]  Michael, they did in fact invent the laser, by the way.
[00:16:16]  That was also a GE invention.
[00:16:20]  I love this.
[00:16:20]  This is fantastic.
[00:16:22]  You throw a dead cat in the room and you're like, oh, they invented dead cats.
[00:16:25]  Yes.
[00:16:26]  There's something about the blindness created by overcoming trauma.
[00:16:30]  Like, I'm sure you're going to get into it, but it like doesn't make the crimes go away.
[00:16:35]  Like, if the skeletons in the closet were like kind of made in order to build the closet, that doesn't justify anything.
[00:16:43]  And that's my standpoint.
[00:16:44]  But it's like amazing to see what America has done in order to be like, you can't make fun of General Electric.
[00:16:52]  They're goddamn General Electric.
[00:16:54]  You know?
[00:16:55]  Yeah.
[00:16:55]  No, I mean, and they are, that was very much like they were seen as an institution, like almost a branch of the government.
[00:17:03]  And part of it was the degree to which like so many Americans, hundreds of thousands were employed by them.
[00:17:10]  And it was like kind of cradle to grave employment.
[00:17:12]  If you got a job with GE in this period, that was your job for life.
[00:17:16]  And then when you retired, they would pay you a pension, you know?
[00:17:20]  Like, like a county job to do.
[00:17:22]  Yeah.
[00:17:24]  If you keep the U.S. military machine rich in killing machines, GE will take care of you, right?
[00:17:30]  Like that was the bargain, you know?
[00:17:33]  So I want to quote now from a book by a guy named David Gells called The Man Who Broke Capitalism.
[00:17:39]  And spoilers, the man that the book is about is who we'll be talking about today.
[00:17:43]  Quote, an annual report from 1953 described how GE worked in the balanced best interests of all.
[00:17:49]  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.
[00:17:57]  That year, GE proudly stated that it spent some 37% 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.
[00:18:08]  Next to the statistic was an illustration of a grinning factory worker walking away from the assembly line, holding bags of money.
[00:18:14]  Only after enumerating all the ways in which it was helping the government, suppliers, and employees, did the company mention how much it allocated for investors.
[00:18:21]  The sum, a modest 3.9% of sales.
[00:18:25]  And think about how weird that is, right?
[00:18:27]  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.
[00:18:34]  And that's like, that's like a problem.
[00:18:36]  Like they need to, we need to discipline laborers so they expect less.
[00:18:40]  But in 1953, GE's being like, we're giving everything that we have to our workers.
[00:18:44]  Isn't that dope how much money we're paying our employees?
[00:18:47]  Like this is what you would brag about.
[00:18:49]  And it's with so many issues.
[00:18:51]  It's like vice versa.
[00:18:52]  Which party you would think like conservative traditionalists would be like, this makes more sense.
[00:18:57]  Like I would say, no, it's weirder now.
[00:19:00]  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.
[00:19:07]  They didn't invent it.
[00:19:08]  They didn't form the business.
[00:19:10]  They have nothing to do with it.
[00:19:12]  Like that's weird.
[00:19:13]  It's weird to me that that's how it works now.
[00:19:16]  Yeah.
[00:19:16]  I can't imagine what you're thinking of when you say that working in the film and entertainment industry, Michael.
[00:19:23]  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.
[00:19:37]  GE's head of employee benefits listed, quote, maximalizing employment security as a prime company goal in 1962, because the ability of workers to feel secure in their future was, in his words, the most productive asset the company had.
[00:19:51]  Obviously, again, I hope I haven't underemphasized the inequalities in the system, but those inequalities were externalized primarily, right?
[00:20:01]  The inequalities within American capitalism were outside of the United States primarily, right?
[00:20:07]  Within the U.S., there was actually like quite certainly a less unequal system than we have today.
[00:20:15]  And we can see how kind of widespread these ideas were in the simple fact that from 1948 to 1979, worker pay in the United States grew at the same or close to the same rate as worker productivity.
[00:20:27]  But since 1979, this has changed dramatically.
[00:20:31]  From 1979 to 2020, net productivity rose 61.8%, while the hourly pay of typical workers grew at about 17.5% over four decades.
[00:20:43]  So it went from they grew at kind of the same rate during this quote golden age of capitalism to worker pay grew less than a third at less than a third of the rate that productivity grew, right?
[00:20:54]  What does that mean?
[00:20:55]  I mean, that means workers are getting shafted, right?
[00:20:57]  Like, yeah, there's no other way to look at that.
[00:21:01]  Now, a lot of different factors had to come together to change this state of affairs.
[00:21:05]  And obviously, there's not one single person that's solely responsible for why everything got a lot worse within the United States.
[00:21:11]  Here he is.
[00:21:12]  Here's his name.
[00:21:13]  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 stamps and like zero innovation, effectively.
[00:21:33]  Like there's a single guy whose life is sort of the dividing line between those two periods.
[00:21:39]  He was the CEO of General Electric, and his name was Jack Welch.
[00:21:44]  He is such a bad person.
[00:21:47]  You guys are really going to have a terrible time with this episode.
[00:21:50]  I'm excited for this.
[00:21:52]  So I've seen, yeah, I've seen this guy.
[00:21:54]  Yeah.
[00:21:55]  He's very famous.
[00:21:56]  He wrote, he wound, he like in his retirement wrote like 20 different fucking management books that are all the same book, right?
[00:22:03]  Like, it's, they're all like nonsense, uh, corporate like bullshit to keep in your fucking bookcase behind you while you do a Zoom call.
[00:22:14]  So everybody thinks that you, you know, what you're talking about.
[00:22:17]  Care about motivating your workers and exactly.
[00:22:19]  Oh, in everyone wins way and all that stuff.
[00:22:22]  Yeah, he's a real great guy.
[00:22:25]  His last name is Welch.
[00:22:27]  I just want to point that out before we begin.
[00:22:29]  You know, and he's going to Welch on a lot of bets.
[00:22:32]  So break on a deal.
[00:22:35]  All right.
[00:22:35]  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 Jack's own autobiography, Jack, straight from the gut.
[00:22:49]  Ew.

=== Jack Welch's Vulnerability (12:03) ===

[00:22:50]  It's a horrible book.
[00:22:52]  The first book, The Man Who Broke Capitalism, is pretty well written and it's a pretty damning indictment of Welch's career.
[00:22:59]  It is written by a guy who really believes in capitalism.
[00:23:02]  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.
[00:23:10]  And it's like, I don't know, man, like, I agree, he made things work, 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 U.S. corporations.
[00:23:26]  And yeah, that like, it wasn't great before.
[00:23:29]  You know, Jack Welch didn't do any of that.
[00:23:32]  But he did take capitalism in the U.S. from a system that benefited Americans at the expense of other people to a system that benefited like 40 guys at the expense of the rest of the world.
[00:23:43]  And that is bad, I guess.
[00:23:46]  I don't know how you can parse that out morally however you want.
[00:23:48]  That's not my job.
[00:23:49]  I'm not going to solve this for you.
[00:23:52]  But he's a real piece of shit.
[00:23:53]  So let's talk about that.
[00:23:55]  Wait, wait, wait.
[00:23:56]  I thought at the end of Behind the Bastards, at the very end of the series, you would reveal the answer.
[00:24:01]  That would solve everything, right?
[00:24:03]  Is that not where we're headed?
[00:24:05]  You know, Michael, I do have an answer for you.
[00:24:07]  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.
[00:24:13]  Legally, I'm not allowed to say it on air.
[00:24:15]  Okay, but yeah, it's that.
[00:24:17]  It rhymes with schmargoted schmashmashination.
[00:24:20]  Okay.
[00:24:21]  Like that's, that's, that's the answer.
[00:24:24]  So Welch's autobiography is probably the most self-serving piece of trash I've read in my life.
[00:24:30]  And I have read Saddam Hussein's writing.
[00:24:33]  Art of the deal?
[00:24:34]  Worse than Art of the Deal?
[00:24:35]  I kind of think so.
[00:24:37]  Because Welsh did all of the terrible things that he's talking about.
[00:24:43]  It opens with these telling lines.
[00:24:46]  And strap yourselves in, boys.
[00:24:48]  This one's rough.
[00:24:49]  This may seem a strange way to begin an autobiography.
[00:24:52]  A confession.
[00:24:54]  I hate having to use the first person.
[00:24:56]  Nearly everything I've done in my life has been accomplished with other people.
[00:25:00]  Yet when you write a book like this, you're forced to use the narrative I when it's really the we that counts.
[00:25:06]  Now, that could be nice, right?
[00:25:09]  But what Jack is actually setting up here is not that like, oh, I've been forced to use I and that means I'm not going to give enough credit to other people.
[00:25:15]  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.
[00:25:22]  And I think he just in the initial draft of this gave himself credit for everything good that happened.
[00:25:28]  And then his editor came in and was like, you sound like a giant prick.
[00:25:31]  So you have to add something at the start of the book saying you're sorry for using I all the time.
[00:25:36]  That is exactly what I suspect happened, you know?
[00:25:40]  That like an editor came and was like, Jack, you got to like write something at the start here because you sound like a dick.
[00:25:47]  He continues with one of the funniest sentences I've ever seen in an autobiography.
[00:25:52]  Please remember that every time you see the word I in these pages, it refers to all those colleagues and friends and some I might have missed.
[00:25:59]  Now we move on.
[00:26:00]  We're talking about that again.
[00:26:01]  Yeah.
[00:26:02]  Hell yes.
[00:26:04]  Hell yeah.
[00:26:05]  The absolute gall and arrogance.
[00:26:09]  Yeah.
[00:26:09]  I love it.
[00:26:10]  It's so good.
[00:26:12]  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.
[00:26:19]  So we're more likely to do like, you know, we'll talk about the Bhopal 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.
[00:26:30]  When I was trying to...
[00:26:31]  Like they raised the price, then they raised it again.
[00:26:33]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:26:35]  Yeah.
[00:26:36]  But Jack Welch, as soon as I read that, I was like, all right, this guy's got to be enough of a piece of shit for an episode.
[00:26:42]  And boy, howdy, he sure is.
[00:26:44]  John Francis Welch Jr. was born on November 19th, 1935 in Peabody, Massachusetts, just in time to miss the Great Depression and fully benefit from the more restrained, thoughtful era of capitalism that followed it.
[00:26:59]  His dad was a conductor for the railroad.
[00:27:01]  He was a union man.
[00:27:03]  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.
[00:27:09]  His mother, we'll talk about more in a second.
[00:27:13]  They had Jack late in life.
[00:27:14]  She was 36 and his dad was 41.
[00:27:18]  They had spent years trying to make a baby.
[00:27:20]  And unfortunately, with Jack, they succeeded.
[00:27:23]  He was an only child.
[00:27:25]  And in his own recollection, quote, my mother poured her love into me as if I were a found treasure.
[00:27:32]  Jack finds it very important that you believe his family weren't financially comfortable.
[00:27:36]  He wasn't born with a silver spoon, is literally how he writes it in his book, because he's not a very imaginative person.
[00:27:43]  This is technically true in that his family was working class.
[00:27:47]  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.
[00:27:55]  Again, his dad, working a single job without a high school income, was able to buy a home and put his child through college without taking on debt.
[00:28:04]  Just a different world.
[00:28:06]  Now, neither his mom or dad graduated from high school.
[00:28:09]  They were both Irish immigrants, and their house was across the street from a factory, which his dad considered to be a plus because it meant that there were no neighbors partying on the weekends.
[00:28:18]  Jack's dad collected magazines and newspapers from writers on the train during his workday and he brought them home.
[00:28:24]  Jack started reading the news as a result of this.
[00:28:28]  And yeah, that's how he kind of like got into the world.
[00:28:31]  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.
[00:28:38]  So Jack should probably learn how to golf if he wanted to make a lot of money.
[00:28:42]  Wait, so he's just like a golfing newsreading boy.
[00:28:46]  Yeah, you promised the CEO wouldn't be boring, Roger.
[00:28:50]  He's like, did he also suck on peppermint candies and drink milk?
[00:28:55]  Like, what's going on here?
[00:28:58]  We'll get to what else is going on here.
[00:29:00]  Jack's dad is, you know, it's the, he's the kind of thing, you kind of get some of the workaholism from this.
[00:29:05]  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.
[00:29:14]  He did not spend a lot of time with his son.
[00:29:17]  He worked from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. every single day.
[00:29:20]  So Jack's primary influence was his mom.
[00:29:23]  And if his autobiography is in any way credible, she was obsessively devoted to him and somewhat manically focused on making him a success.
[00:29:32]  Quote, one of her favorite expressions was, Don't kid yourself.
[00:29:35]  That's the way it is.
[00:29:36]  If you don't study, you'll be nothing, absolutely nothing.
[00:29:39]  There are no shortcuts.
[00:29:40]  Don't kid yourself.
[00:29:42]  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.
[00:29:55]  Oh, hell yeah.
[00:29:55]  So that he understood what it felt like to lose money.
[00:29:59]  Oh, wow.
[00:29:59]  That's a weird lesson.
[00:30:01]  So literally like that's an insane lesson.
[00:30:04]  He's like a super soldier honed in a dojo to be good with money.
[00:30:08]  Yeah.
[00:30:09]  And to understand risk and loss and damage.
[00:30:12]  Yeah.
[00:30:12]  That's just a crazy thing to do.
[00:30:14]  But it worked, I guess.
[00:30:15]  So good for her.
[00:30:18]  GE CEO.
[00:30:20]  So from his earliest years in school, his mother was obsessed with the fact that he needed to excel.
[00:30:26]  He writes in his autobiography, she knew how to be tough with me, but also how to hug and kiss.
[00:30:31]  She wanted to make sure I knew how wanted and loved I was.
[00:30:34]  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.
[00:30:38]  But she would always end the conversation congratulating and hugging me for the A's.
[00:30:42]  My mother never managed people, but she knew all about building self-esteem.
[00:30:46]  I grew up with a speech impediment, a stammer that wouldn't go away.
[00:30:49]  Sometimes it led to comical, if not embarrassing, incidents.
[00:30:52]  In college, I often ordered a tuna fish on white toast on Fridays when Catholics in those days couldn't eat meat.
[00:30:58]  Inevitably, the waitress would return with not one, but a pair of sandwiches, having heard my order as two tuna sandwiches.
[00:31:04]  My mother's certainty.
[00:31:08]  You're just rambling.
[00:31:09]  This is just rambling.
[00:31:11]  No, this is his, this is his life.
[00:31:13]  First off, that's point one.
[00:31:15]  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.
[00:31:23]  Yeah, she's a good hugger.
[00:31:25]  She's a good kisser.
[00:31:26]  She made me gamble so that I learned how to be a businessman.
[00:31:32]  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.
[00:31:47]  Again, this is controversial, but I think it should be illegal to be nice to children.
[00:31:51]  Otherwise, they turn out like this.
[00:31:53]  There's no other way to look at this, you know?
[00:31:57]  So he grows up extremely confident.
[00:31:59]  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.
[00:32:07]  Well, of course, double tune.
[00:32:08]  He has so much protein.
[00:32:09]  Yeah.
[00:32:10]  So much utensils every time.
[00:32:11]  He's a big tuna boy.
[00:32:13]  Well, no, he's tiny.
[00:32:14]  He's the shortest guy in his school, basically.
[00:32:17]  It went into his brain.
[00:32:18]  All of the power went into his brain.
[00:32:21]  He's too smart.
[00:32:22]  He kind of says that basically his mom made him so confident that he didn't notice he was so super tiny.
[00:32:28]  But eventually, like, he stops being able to compete in these sports because he's this little bitty shrimp of a man.
[00:32:34]  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.
[00:32:41]  All you have to do is know how to talk about the stock market, right?
[00:32:45]  That's that's all golfing's really.
[00:32:47]  I'm sure many golfers disagree with you, but let's run with it.
[00:32:50]  Yeah.
[00:32:51]  Who gives a fuck what golfers say?
[00:32:52]  Yeah, that's also running the other card.
[00:32:54]  Other than everyone who runs the country.
[00:32:56]  Yeah.
[00:32:56]  Right.
[00:32:57]  Also running the other card off the road with your cart for bonus points.
[00:33:00]  But, you know, that's golf.
[00:33:02]  No, that part of golf, I actually do.
[00:33:04]  That's the one good.
[00:33:04]  Yeah, I like the mini cars they have.
[00:33:07]  Absolutely.
[00:33:09]  So Jack's autobiography is the standard self-mythologizing of the corporate Uber Minch.
[00:33:14]  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.
[00:33:24]  But there is one passage in it in which he exposes something that I think might be him actually sharing some vulnerability.
[00:33:31]  And I'm going to read that now.
[00:33:33]  I was incredibly dependent on my parents.
[00:33:35]  Many times when my mother left the house to pick up my dad, the train would be late.
[00:33:39]  When I was 12 or 13, the delays would drive me crazy.
[00:33:41]  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.
[00:33:49]  I just couldn't lose them.
[00:33:50]  They were my world.
[00:33:50]  It was a fear that I shouldn't have had because my mother raised me to be strong, tough, and independent.
[00:33:55]  She always feared she would die young, a victim of the heart disease that struck down everyone in her family.
[00:34:00]  So that's like the one glimpse that we get that maybe this kid had a soul at some point.
[00:34:05]  Like it's actually heartbreaking.
[00:34:07]  Yeah.
[00:34:07]  Yeah.
[00:34:08]  I mean, that's, I think that's also a pretty natural fear with kids that like, yeah, my parents will die, you know?
[00:34:14]  Like, you painted a portrait of the world for me to fear.
[00:34:19]  And so I fear it.
[00:34:20]  And now that I'm alone, I'm scared.
[00:34:23]  That's all.
[00:34:24]  That is interesting.
[00:34:25]  It does kind of reveal, yeah, that like that, whatever his picture of the world was, it was a dangerous one out there.
[00:34:32]  And one of those, like, even if the death's just a metaphor for like being thirsty for dad, which I don't mean in the sexual way, but you know what I mean?
[00:34:39]  No, no, maybe it's working.
[00:34:40]  Yeah, it's fine.
[00:34:41]  It's fine.
[00:34:41]  Let's say it's 15 hours a day.
[00:34:44]  The 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.
[00:34:53]  That makes sense.

=== Fear of the Painted World (03:40) ===

[00:34:54]  Yeah.
[00:34:54]  No, I mean, it's, it's, it's uh, it's the only actual like sign we get that this man might have at one point had a soul.
[00:35:01]  Right.
[00:35:01]  But you know who doesn't have a soul, Michael?
[00:35:04]  Abe.
[00:35:06]  Boss baby is what I hear.
[00:35:08]  Boss Baby.
[00:35:09]  Boss Baby.
[00:35:10]  No, boss baby does not have a soul.
[00:35:12]  Um, other than the souls that it collects.
[00:35:15]  Yeah.
[00:35:16]  Clones don't have souls, by the way.
[00:35:18]  Yeah.
[00:35:18]  Which is, you know, everyone's talking about AI.
[00:35:20]  I think we ought to be, we ought to be cloning, you know.
[00:35:22]  Once we really get cloning figured out, then none of us have to work because it's fine to force clones to do it.
[00:35:29]  Yeah, that's what boss baby it up.
[00:35:31]  You remember when Dolly the Sheep happened and people were like, even though they made a law against it, here we go.
[00:35:37]  The bet cat's out of the bag.
[00:35:38]  We've reached the tipping point.
[00:35:39]  Someone in a secret lab is going to start making clones.
[00:35:43]  Where are all the clones?
[00:35:44]  I'm disappointed we did.
[00:35:45]  It's extremely sad.
[00:35:46]  Because I was watching that show Severance recently, which isn't about cloning, but close enough.
[00:35:51]  And I was like, man, this would be great.
[00:35:53]  What if we just, what if we could just create a slave race that we own and have them do all the work?
[00:36:00]  I think I'm going to go to break.
[00:36:08]  On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:36:18]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:36:25]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
[00:36:34]  Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
[00:36:38]  That's great.
[00:36:40]  It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
[00:36:49]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[00:36:55]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:37:06]  Hey, Ernest, what's up?
[00:37:07]  Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
[00:37:13]  On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
[00:37:20]  From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
[00:37:30]  Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
[00:37:34]  But once you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
[00:37:38]  That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
[00:37:44]  If you want to learn how to build wealth, understand the markets, and think like an owner, Earn Your Leisure is the podcast for you.
[00:37:51]  Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:37:58]  I'm Iris Palmer, and my new podcast is called Against All Odds.
[00:38:02]  And that's exactly what the show is about: doing whatever it takes to beat the odds.
[00:38:06]  Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns.
[00:38:15]  I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Fiva Lingoria.
[00:38:21]  I think I had like $200 in my savings account, and my mom goes, What are you going to do?
[00:38:26]  And I was like, I'll figure it out.
[00:38:27]  We had a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month, and we all could not afford.
[00:38:31]  Like, I was like, How am I going to make $100 a month?

=== Building Wealth Like an Owner (15:04) ===

[00:38:34]  I'm opening up like I've never before.
[00:38:36]  For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me.
[00:38:42]  Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:38:56]  We're back.
[00:38:57]  And yeah, we're talking about how morally uncomplicated it would be to sever people's consciousness and then create little child-brained slaves in order to do our obscure corporate labor.
[00:39:14]  What a good idea that show is.
[00:39:16]  Ben Stiller's beautiful version of the vision.
[00:39:19]  It's Ben Stiller's vision, really.
[00:39:21]  I think the furthest I'll go down that road with you is lab-grown organs that are our organs to replace organs.
[00:39:26]  I'd totally go with that.
[00:39:28]  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.
[00:39:34]  I want it to have felt pain before it died.
[00:39:38]  I want it to know fear before I take its liver because I've destroyed mine.
[00:39:43]  Yeah.
[00:39:46]  Yeah.
[00:39:46]  This is what I've learned from Jack Welch.
[00:39:49]  So it won't surprise you to hear that he was an altar boy for much of his childhood, super Catholic family.
[00:39:57]  Although it's interesting, 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.
[00:40:07]  At age 11, he stole a ball from a carnival that was in town.
[00:40:11]  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 and confession.
[00:40:19]  So he like begged his mom to just let him throw the ball away, just like toss it into a canal.
[00:40:25]  And he writes, after negotiating with her, she let me have my way.
[00:40:29]  She drove me down to the bridge on North Street and watched as I threw the ball into the water.
[00:40:33]  And considering the kind of corporate ghoul this, I love that his like big story of discipline is like, I stole something and my mom got angry.
[00:40:43]  But I convinced her to just let me poison the poison the water with it.
[00:40:47]  She kept the system.
[00:40:48]  In other words, just dump it into the water.
[00:40:51]  Well, she filed off the serial number and she's like, this never happened.
[00:40:55]  This never happened.
[00:40:57]  He is terrified to even write his mother as a figure of evil in his own autobiography.
[00:41:09]  I'm not like, obviously, she's not evil evil, but like.
[00:41:13]  No, it's amazing what she did a number on this kid.
[00:41:17]  Maybe, yeah, I think there's certainly something she did.
[00:41:20]  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.
[00:41:36]  Like she was not the kind of person who felt like it was important to instill a moral grounding in her kid.
[00:41:43]  She was the kind of person who felt like it was important that he be part of the church because socially that's what you do.
[00:41:48]  But more than anything, she wanted him to be a success and to make money, right?
[00:41:53]  Like that's what she actually valued.
[00:41:56]  And that's what she selected for in her parenting.
[00:41:59]  That's what I get from Jack's book, right?
[00:42:01]  You know, I didn't know his mom.
[00:42:04]  Anyway, it's pretty cool.
[00:42:07]  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 in anything but golf and hockey, a sport where short people could excel as long as they were violent.
[00:42:19]  And from a young age, Jack had a horrible temper and a problem with losing, which made him a great hockey player.
[00:42:26]  Yeah.
[00:42:26]  All right.
[00:42:28]  So here's another story from his autobiography.
[00:42:31]  The other team scored and we lost again for the seventh time in a row.
[00:42:35]  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.
[00:42:41]  The team was already there, taking off their skates and uniforms.
[00:42:44]  All of a sudden, the door opened and my Irish mother strode in.
[00:42:47]  The place fell silent.
[00:42:48]  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.
[00:42:56]  She went right for me, grabbing the top of my uniform.
[00:42:58]  You punk, she shouted in my face.
[00:43:00]  If you don't know how to lose, you'll never know how to win.
[00:43:02]  If you don't know this, you shouldn't be playing.
[00:43:05]  Now you throw that hockey stick in the river, young man, and we never speak of this again.
[00:43:10]  I kind of think he's lying here.
[00:43:12]  Maybe parts of this are true.
[00:43:14]  What his mom says there is like something you would write in a business book published in 2004.
[00:43:20]  Cone brothers.
[00:43:23]  A person doesn't say that.
[00:43:25]  Nobody says that.
[00:43:26]  No, nor do you, nor do you remember like floral dress swishing across the floor as men like guys.
[00:43:33]  You know, he's trying to write.
[00:43:35]  So I'm just going on taking lines.
[00:43:37]  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.
[00:43:45]  That's a line that like he hired consultants to think up for him.
[00:43:48]  And she beat the shit out of me for a solid 45 minutes.
[00:43:53]  That's a story I would have believed.
[00:43:55]  Right.
[00:43:56]  It's the Ron Howard version of his life.
[00:44:00]  Yeah.
[00:44:00]  Yeah.
[00:44:02]  Obviously, his real love was golf, which is a love he would maintain his entire life.
[00:44:07]  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.
[00:44:18]  He makes a point to note that all of the rich people basically refused to tip.
[00:44:23]  Interesting.
[00:44:24]  Interesting.
[00:44:25]  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.
[00:44:32]  Jack refused.
[00:44:33]  And when the guy insisted, he grabbed the guy's clubs and threw them into the water, which cost him a club caddy sponsorship, a club caddy scholarship.
[00:44:43]  So again, you know, guy with a temper, right?
[00:44:46]  Guy who can't really control his anger, guy whose anger seems to be primarily based around being feeling disrespected.
[00:44:54]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:44:55]  The classic recipe for a bastard.
[00:44:58]  Yeah.
[00:44:59]  These golf clubs can't contain me.
[00:45:02]  Like it's such the energy is so it's beautiful.
[00:45:07]  Yeah.
[00:45:08]  It's a beautiful insecurity.
[00:45:10]  Yeah.
[00:45:10]  You could.
[00:45:11]  Oh, yeah.
[00:45:13]  It's, it's quite a, it's something.
[00:45:15]  So he lost out on an ROTC scholarship with the Navy as well.
[00:45:19]  Why is unclear?
[00:45:21]  In his book, he makes a big deal about like me and my friends, we all passed the exam together.
[00:45:26]  My dad had the state representatives send in letters on my behalf.
[00:45:30]  But then my friends got their scholarship and I got turned down and I have no idea why.
[00:45:34]  It's this big mystery in my life.
[00:45:36]  And it's like, I don't know, man.
[00:45:37]  Maybe I didn't do well.
[00:45:39]  Like, like, maybe you're an asshole and like the guys responsible for giving the scholarship were like, I don't think this guy's a team player.
[00:45:46]  And this is literally the Navy.
[00:45:48]  You know, there's a number of things that could have been, but maybe you just didn't do very well, right?
[00:45:54]  Like, it's not a mystery.
[00:45:55]  I had a bunch of friends who applied to West Point and didn't get into West Point.
[00:45:58]  And it's not a mystery.
[00:45:59]  It's competitive.
[00:46:00]  But Jack can't like his ego has to, I think, assume that there was something mysterious behind the scenes that cost him the scholarship.
[00:46:08]  That's right.
[00:46:09]  Because it can't just be.
[00:46:10]  Yeah.
[00:46:11]  Clearly, his Catholic priest told them about that he stole a ball.
[00:46:14]  That he took that ball.
[00:46:18]  Yeah.
[00:46:19]  So at any rate, he did eventually get into college at Amherst and he started in 1953, which is the same year that GE released that earnings report being like, we are giving all of our money to our employees.
[00:46:31]  Fuck our stockholders.
[00:46:32]  Isn't that dope?
[00:46:34]  His time in college was pretty boring.
[00:46:37]  I would describe him as a normie, also as basic.
[00:46:41]  One of the few details we get is that he brags.
[00:46:44]  It's so sad.
[00:46:45]  He has like a line in there where he's like, I was in a fraternity.
[00:46:48]  We ranked, quote, at or near the top in beer consumption and had better parties than most.
[00:46:53]  He does not give a single example of a party.
[00:46:56]  He does not relate a single human interaction during his time in college.
[00:47:00]  Objectively better parties.
[00:47:02]  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.
[00:47:10]  It is an AI.
[00:47:12]  Yeah, it is.
[00:47:13]  It is what an AI would write if you like fetit this guy's fucking life story, like be the coolest, yeah.
[00:47:21]  We did an animal house, yeah, that's right, yeah, yeah.
[00:47:27]  So, he eventually got a master's degree in chemical engineering because he found it kind of interesting and there were jobs.
[00:47:33]  Um, he goes into a hard science, but he was not motivated by science, right?
[00:47:38]  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, being a chemical engineer, right?
[00:47:48]  Um, and we can see that in this anecdote he gives about flying with a after he gets his master's degree, flying out for a job interview in Louisiana with a friend after graduation.
[00:47:59]  Um, this is quite telling on the airplane for my Ethel interview, Ethel is the country or company.
[00:48:05]  Uh, I was traveling with one of my associates from the University of Illinois when something odd happened.
[00:48:09]  The stewardess came back and said, Mr. Welch, would you like a drink?
[00:48:12]  She then turned to my colleague and said, Dr. Gardner, would you like a drink?
[00:48:16]  I thought Dr. Gardner sounded a lot better than Mr. Welch.
[00:48:21]  I fucking golf club that bitch so hard.
[00:48:25]  Um, so that's it, right?
[00:48:27]  Like his, he's sitting with a friend, and a stewardess calls his friend a doctor, and he's like, Well, that sounds better than Mr. Doctor.
[00:48:34]  That's that's why he decides to get a PhD.
[00:48:38]  Is there a super doctor?
[00:48:39]  Is this a double doctor?
[00:48:42]  It's purely, it's purely about clout.
[00:48:45]  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.
[00:48:53]  It's, I was getting a cocktail once, and yeah, I swear to God, you're doing the origin story of like Homer Simpson.
[00:49:02]  Well, also, the impulse that is dominant, he's the original line goes up guy.
[00:49:07]  All he cares about is line goes up, yeah.
[00:49:09]  Yeah, yeah, that's right, yeah, yeah, it's the same kind of energy of like fucking Ben Shapiro.
[00:49:14]  I see why he's like soulless crypto guys having an AI write a script that like nobody would ever want to watch.
[00:49:21]  Like, there's no plot in it, there's no character development, but it's formatted the way a script is.
[00:49:27]  And so people are like, Look, it's a script.
[00:49:29]  It's like, no, yeah, like Jack's like, I need to be a doctor because it sounds good because people respect me if I'm a doctor.
[00:49:36]  So I'm going to go, I'm going to spend three more years in college becoming a PhD in chemical engineering.
[00:49:43]  I think that this is like probably 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 airline stewardesses.
[00:49:54]  But also, like, that's that's a part of him, and that's real.
[00:49:57]  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?
[00:50:05]  Like, that says something about the man that is impressive.
[00:50:08]  It's not good, but it's impressive.
[00:50:10]  It's impressive.
[00:50:11]  He's driven.
[00:50:12]  Yeah.
[00:50:14]  He's driven.
[00:50:15]  And it's like the worst kind of driven.
[00:50:17]  Like it's an empty and soulless kind of driven.
[00:50:20]  It's the kind of driven that is created by like an upbringing that allows him to be like, I'm scared when I'm alone.
[00:50:30]  You know, like it's the abuse pays forward.
[00:50:34]  Yeah, it's cool.
[00:50:37]  It's his, his mom really did a great job on him.
[00:50:41]  So his thesis for his PhD was on condensation in nuclear power plants.
[00:50:46]  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 thing in his life.
[00:50:57]  And then he never brings any of this up again.
[00:50:59]  This is never a factor in his life afterwards.
[00:51:02]  He never thinks about like science really in any meaningful way other than how to like monetize it.
[00:51:08]  He's what I'm saying is that he's got an incredible ability to compartmentalize, right?
[00:51:12]  And that's really going to be his most valuable asset in business, is that he's so good at just like shutting off parts of himself and then flipping them on when he needs to.
[00:51:23]  And that's, you know, that work.
[00:51:25]  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.
[00:51:35]  You know, if you're like cutting into people, you have to be able to like not care.
[00:51:39]  about cutting into a human being.
[00:51:41]  I think most of us find viscerally upsetting for a while.
[00:51:44]  You have to be able to just like, yeah, I'm just like doing a thing.
[00:51:46]  You know, it's the same as wiring a fucking stereo system or whatever.
[00:51:51]  And you can't carry it.
[00:51:52]  Yeah.
[00:51:52]  Right.
[00:51:52]  And it's a thin line and not be doing it because it's a weird sex thing or you like it or you're getting off.
[00:51:58]  That's no more than, I'm going to say at least 20% of surgeons, it is a weird sex thing.
[00:52:03]  Or getting off on the power or being like, I am not God.
[00:52:07]  But you got to see you.
[00:52:08]  We see you surgeons.
[00:52:10]  That's what this podcast wants to say.
[00:52:12]  Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about surgeons.
[00:52:16]  Yeah.
[00:52:17]  All you surgeons out there, we see you.
[00:52:19]  Yeah.
[00:52:19]  Let's do a pole pot, but on anyone able to remove a tumor, like just go after them.
[00:52:27]  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, I don't know, able to kind of do that.
[00:52:38]  Yeah.
[00:52:38]  You know, I don't know.
[00:52:40]  Like, that's a term.
[00:52:40]  That's not an actual diagnosis.
[00:52:42]  We kind of use it most people interchangeably.
[00:52:45]  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.
[00:53:04]  There's a high rate of folks like that.
[00:53:05]  I don't know that Jack could have been diagnosed with anything, but it's also like, it's not like a clean line.
[00:53:12]  Like it's not like having hepatitis.
[00:53:13]  You're not just like a psychopath or not.
[00:53:15]  There's traits that we use to determine whether or not someone is likely a psychopath.
[00:53:20]  And some people may not be psychopaths, but they have some of those traits.
[00:53:24]  And they're not all bad things.
[00:53:25]  And Jack, whatever you could diagnose him as, Jack has a lot of those traits.
[00:53:29]  And one of them is that he's able to just kind of shut off parts of himself with robot-like efficiency.
[00:53:37]  So that's cool.

=== Psychopathic Traits and Raises (02:43) ===

[00:53:38]  After graduating, he gets hired by General Electric in 1960.
[00:53:43]  His first job, and basically, he only works for GE, right?
[00:53:47]  Like that's his whole life.
[00:53:49]  His first job, yeah, he gets hired by GE in 1960 and he gets sent to a town called Pittsfield, which is at the time kind of a minor outpost in GE's corporate empire.
[00:53:59]  He attracted notice as a manager pretty quickly.
[00:54:02]  Just a year in, he was told he was getting a $1,000 raise.
[00:54:07]  And he was initially pretty happy with this because he'd be working hard.
[00:54:10]  He'd been working hard, but then he found out that all of his coworkers got the same raise.
[00:54:15]  And it like he loses his mind over this.
[00:54:18]  Like he is like so furious.
[00:54:21]  He can't focus.
[00:54:22]  He can't sleep.
[00:54:23]  He can't think.
[00:54:25]  He announces that he's quitting.
[00:54:26]  He tells all of his colleagues that he's quitting.
[00:54:28]  He like puts in his notice that he's leaving the company because everyone got the same raise.
[00:54:34]  The equality.
[00:54:35]  Yeah.
[00:54:36]  This is this is his fucking Joker moment, right?
[00:54:39]  This is his like, this is how he got his scars.
[00:54:42]  Because he like, he decides to quit and his boss apparently doesn't want to lose him.
[00:54:47]  And so meets with him and like offers him additional money.
[00:54:50]  So Jack agrees to stay.
[00:54:52]  And it's weird because in his book, he both, he claims that when his boss like came to him and said, hey, we don't want to lose you, that he, he almost like cried because he realized, quote, somebody loved me.
[00:55:02]  The validation, yeah.
[00:55:05]  Yeah, that's very important to me.
[00:55:06]  Jackie boy.
[00:55:07]  Jackie boy.
[00:55:10]  But he also, you know, despite the fact this situation, it's like with the ball, it completely went his way.
[00:55:15]  He didn't suffer any consequences for throwing a fit.
[00:55:18]  And in fact, he benefited.
[00:55:20]  He's still really worried about it.
[00:55:22]  He's angry about it.
[00:55:24]  He never gets over this.
[00:55:26]  Decades later, in his autobiography, he's angry about it.
[00:55:29]  Forever.
[00:55:30]  Yeah.
[00:55:30]  Yeah.
[00:55:31]  He spends the rest of his life angry over the fact that he had almost only gotten the standard raise.
[00:55:36]  And he even admits in his autobiography, it quote, probably drove his behavior to an extreme.
[00:55:42]  And he's like, but when I say that, of course, I mean we really, you're to blame as well.
[00:55:46]  We, yeah, yeah, everyone else, my manager for not giving me more money up front.
[00:55:51]  It's also worth noting that he got far enough along in the quitting process that his co-workers all bought him going away presents, which he did not give back.
[00:56:02]  Smart dude.
[00:56:04]  In his autobiography, he just writes, I don't remember if I gave them back or not, which is also funny.
[00:56:08]  I don't remember.
[00:56:09]  My secretary will have that information for you or whatever.
[00:56:13]  Just an unpleasant man.
[00:56:16]  Who's he say?
[00:56:17]  Meanwhile, he unboxes like a brand new cigar cutter and rips the tag off.
[00:56:21]  And that's a cigar.

=== Schlitterbahn Water Park Ad (03:43) ===

[00:56:22]  Yeah.
[00:56:23]  Just burns a dollar bill.
[00:56:24]  Yeah.
[00:56:25]  He's Sidney Musberger from the Hudsucker Proxy in my mind now.
[00:56:29]  He's also Jack Donaghy, who is a GE, like a fictional character in Third Rock.
[00:56:37]  It's very funny, Abe, that you bring up Jack Donaghy because not only is Jack Donaghy from Third Rock based on Jack Welch, Jack Welch shows up in that show.
[00:56:48]  In that show, right?
[00:56:49]  Yeah.
[00:56:49]  Yeah.
[00:56:49]  He's in several episodes.
[00:56:50]  Wow.
[00:56:51]  That is so, yeah, that's wild.
[00:56:54]  But you know what's not wild?
[00:56:58]  A water park after it gets shut down.
[00:57:01]  Yeah.
[00:57:01]  That's right.
[00:57:02]  No, Schlitterbon was not wild after it killed all those kids and they had shut down the best rides.
[00:57:08]  That's right.
[00:57:09]  That's what they mean by wet and wild.
[00:57:11]  Yeah.
[00:57:11]  They mean wet and kids die here.
[00:57:14]  Great.
[00:57:14]  Yeah.
[00:57:16]  Wet and kids die here.
[00:57:17]  Not enough people know about Schlitterbon.
[00:57:19]  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.
[00:57:28]  That's a good water park.
[00:57:30]  Only occasionally.
[00:57:32]  Yeah.
[00:57:33]  That's a great water park.
[00:57:34]  This has been a paid ad for Schlitterbon.
[00:57:36]  A water park that doesn't kill most of the kids who go there.
[00:57:41]  Five stars.
[00:57:43]  All right.
[00:57:48]  On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgetista Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[00:57:59]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[00:58:05]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
[00:58:15]  Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
[00:58:19]  That's great.
[00:58:20]  It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
[00:58:29]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[00:58:35]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the IT Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:58:46]  Hey, Ernest, what's up?
[00:58:47]  Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
[00:58:53]  On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
[00:59:01]  From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
[00:59:10]  Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
[00:59:14]  But once you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
[00:59:18]  That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities, not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
[00:59:24]  If you want to learn how to build wealth, understand the markets, and think like an owner, Earn Your Leisure is the podcast for you.
[00:59:31]  Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[00:59:38]  I'm Iris Palmer, and my new podcast is called Against All Odds.
[00:59:42]  And that's exactly what the show is about.
[00:59:44]  Doing whatever it takes to beat the odds.
[00:59:46]  Get ready to hear from some of your favorite entrepreneurs and entertainers as they share stories about defying expectations, overcoming barriers, and breaking generational patterns.
[00:59:55]  I'm talking to people like award-winning actress, producer, and director, Fiva Longoria.
[01:00:01]  I think I had like $200 in my savings account, and my mom goes, what are you going to do?

=== Profitable Explosions in Finance (15:50) ===

[01:00:06]  And I was like, oh, I'll figure it out.
[01:00:07]  We had a one-bedroom apartment for like $400 a month, and we all could not afford.
[01:00:11]  Like, I was like, how am I going to make $100 a month?
[01:00:14]  I'm opening up like I've never before.
[01:00:17]  For those of you who think you know me from what you've seen on social media, get ready to see a whole new side of me.
[01:00:22]  Listen to Against All Odds with Iris Palmer as part of the Michael Tura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:00:36]  Da!
[01:00:37]  And we're back.
[01:00:40]  So Jack, you know, decides to stay.
[01:00:43]  And he is a good employee.
[01:00:45]  He gets promoted fairly quickly.
[01:00:47]  He's an effective, a relatively effective manager for the most part.
[01:00:51]  But he was not a perfect employee.
[01:00:54]  And he made a number of what you might call boo-boos early on in his career, as this passage from David Gells's book makes clear.
[01:01:03]  One day in 1963, Welch was at his office in Pittsfield, overlooking the factory on Plastics Avenue.
[01:01:09]  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.
[01:01:18]  As Welch sat at his desk, an explosion rocked the factory.
[01:01:21]  Debris and broken glass littered the scene as smoke shrouded the building.
[01:01:25]  Somehow, no one was badly injured, but it soon became clear that Welch, as head of the plant and the one pushing his team so hard, bore responsibility for the disaster.
[01:01:34]  Pressuring employees to innovate, Welch had them experimenting with an untested process, moving oxygen through a highly volatile solution in a large tank.
[01:01:42]  Something caused a spark, setting off the explosion.
[01:01:46]  And yeah, he blows up his first factory.
[01:01:50]  And it's Daniel Plainview is going on.
[01:01:54]  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.
[01:01:59]  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.
[01:02:05]  And, you know, the manager, you got to take, he frames it as like, all say it's my fault because as the manager, the buck stops with me.
[01:02:11]  And the reality is, well, you, you ordered them to do something dangerous and irresponsible and an explosion occurred.
[01:02:18]  It was your fault because I'll cover for you.
[01:02:21]  I'll take the heat for this one, y'all.
[01:02:23]  Yeah.
[01:02:23]  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 deplorable.
[01:02:38]  Yeah, it's a deplorable human.
[01:02:42]  My gut is telling me I am not responsible for this.
[01:02:46]  I don't, it's what my gut says.
[01:02:48]  I don't know.
[01:02:49]  It's like fucking several times together.
[01:02:51]  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?
[01:03:02]  I'll take the fall for this one.
[01:03:03]  I'm the adult in this situation.
[01:03:05]  You know, I'll take the blame on this one.
[01:03:08]  It's like literally a, I think you should leave.
[01:03:11]  Yeah, it's on Netflix.
[01:03:13]  Yeah, it's the hot dogs.
[01:03:14]  Yeah, we're all trying to find the guy who did this.
[01:03:18]  Very, very funny.
[01:03:19]  Jack Welch blows up his first factory.
[01:03:21]  Now, mom walks in, grabs him by the collar.
[01:03:24]  Stop blowing up factories.
[01:03:26]  I'm not a bad on.
[01:03:28]  I never did.
[01:03:29]  I'm not a firing people guy.
[01:03:32]  I think that's generally best avoided.
[01:03:33]  But I would say if one of my subordinates, you know, here at CoolZone blew up a factory that we, you know, made podcasts out of, I would probably impose consequences on them.
[01:03:47]  But Jack had really.
[01:03:48]  What are you talking about here?
[01:03:50]  You know, the factory, Sophie.
[01:03:51]  Have I not told you about the factory?
[01:03:53]  I told you about the factory, but which employer are we referring to?
[01:03:57]  That's my question.
[01:04:00]  It's the arms company that we use CoolZone as a shell to ship artillery primers through.
[01:04:09]  Anyway, we don't need to talk about that.
[01:04:13]  So Jack suffers no consequences for blowing up this factory.
[01:04:16]  Again, GE is like a ridiculously paternalistic company at this point.
[01:04:21]  And his bosses are like, hey, failure is a part of life, Jackie boy.
[01:04:25]  You know, just don't blow up another factory and everything's fine.
[01:04:29]  And honestly, to their credit, this works out well for them financially.
[01:04:33]  Because the next thing that he does is he convinces his bosses to invest in a new factory, which created a plastic called Noral.
[01:04:41]  Now, he convinces it to do this before Noral is a functional product.
[01:04:45]  In fact, the plastic in its first form was too brittle to work.
[01:04:49]  But Jack told his chemists, find a way to make this not be a terrible mistake.
[01:04:54]  And they do somehow.
[01:04:56]  And Noral becomes a million-dollar business.
[01:04:59]  Did it.
[01:05:01]  We'll blow up as many factories as it takes.
[01:05:05]  So Jack gets promoted to head the company's plastics division at 32, and he becomes GE's youngest general manager.
[01:05:13]  This promotion brings him stock options for the first time.
[01:05:16]  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.
[01:05:25]  Despite the fact that his hardworking scientists had been the ones to turn Noral from another failure into a hit, Jack had no loyalty to them or to anyone else who worked at GE.
[01:05:35]  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 shit canned for blowing up that factory.
[01:05:48]  Now, the CEO of 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.
[01:05:59]  He was apparently good.
[01:06:00]  I mean, the GE increased steadily in value during the time that he was there.
[01:06:05]  And he was kind of notably the kind of CEO that doesn't exist anymore.
[01:06:09]  He lived in like a normal person house.
[01:06:13]  He made 200 grand a year, which was more money in the 1970s, but like nothing close to what executives make these days, right?
[01:06:21]  Like that, not even in the same ballpark of like a modern salary of like the CEO of GE today or the CEO of a company that, you know, was like GE.
[01:06:31]  Who could easily afford a ballpark, for example?
[01:06:34]  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.
[01:06:43]  Like he would devote company resources to helping people, you know, pay for funerals and deal with grieving.
[01:06:49]  Like he was generally seen as a pretty nice guy.
[01:06:53]  But Reg also was kind of, as the 1970s 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.
[01:07:03]  You get your stagflation, and the economy is not doing so great.
[01:07:07]  Japan and Germany are both kind of rising as industrial powers.
[01:07:11]  And it turns out that they make better products than a lot of American companies.
[01:07:16]  So people are starting to, the U.S. economy is starting to like this kind of golden age of capitalism is starting to sort of like get jankier.
[01:07:23]  You know, we can kind of see the Reagan era heading towards us very quickly in the mirror.
[01:07:30]  It's, it's, it's, and Reg was intelligent enough to see this coming.
[01:07:33]  He knew the economy was changing.
[01:07:35]  And so in 1977, he starts the process of finding the guy who's going to replace him.
[01:07:41]  You know, it takes a couple of years.
[01:07:43]  And when he's given a list of like the shortlist of executives being considered to take over his job, he sees that Jack Welch isn't on there because no one likes Jack.
[01:07:52]  He's an asshole.
[01:07:53]  But Reg is like, I think, you know, Jack is someone who thinks differently than everyone else at the company.
[01:08:00]  But he blew up that factory.
[01:08:01]  He blew up that factory.
[01:08:04]  The story you'll get, and this is kind of a mystery.
[01:08:07]  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 Reg is like, this guy's an asshole.
[01:08:15]  The economy is getting worse.
[01:08:17]  Maybe we need a piece of shit to run the company during this period of time.
[01:08:20]  Hard to say.
[01:08:22]  But Ivanaga 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 was already insanely wealthy and powerful before them went, I don't know, you like you're set now.
[01:08:41]  That's that.
[01:08:42]  Yeah.
[01:08:43]  And this is about to be that moment for Jack.
[01:08:45]  So he's put on this short list.
[01:08:47]  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 the CEO.
[01:09:00]  You know, do your fucking best.
[01:09:02]  And they give them new responsibilities to kind of see what they can handle and judge them.
[01:09:07]  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 it's 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.
[01:09:23]  Jack knew that that shit either didn't look impressive, right?
[01:09:27]  Just kind of maintaining profit, and that a division isn't easy to brag about in this kind of a competition, or it took too long, right?
[01:09:34]  New research, as he knows, is risky.
[01:09:36]  Sometimes the factory explodes.
[01:09:38]  He doesn't want to take that risk.
[01:09:40]  But he had a faster, dumber way of increasing profits.
[01:09:44]  Mass layoffs.
[01:09:46]  So this was not really a thing for American businesses at this point.
[01:09:50]  Obviously, sometimes people get fired.
[01:09:52]  Sometimes you got to lay people off because the company's not working, right?
[01:09:55]  Like it was a thing that maybe people would get laid off if a business failed, sure.
[01:09:59]  But the idea that a company that is profitable, and even though the economy is more challenging right now, GE is profitable.
[01:10:06]  GE is making a shitload of money.
[01:10:08]  The idea that a company as profitable as GE would fire a shitload of employees just to improve their margins, that didn't happen at this period of time in American capitalism.
[01:10:20]  Jack is like, what if we did that?
[01:10:23]  So this is my life.
[01:10:26]  This is what I leave the human race.
[01:10:28]  You're welcome.
[01:10:29]  Firing people for no reason.
[01:10:31]  Did this guy create like the rank and yank thing?
[01:10:35]  That's exactly where we're headed, buddy.
[01:10:37]  Holy I don't want to get ahead of ourselves, though.
[01:10:41]  So GE operated a massive complex in Louisville, Kentucky called Appliance Park.
[01:10:48]  This is such a big factory kind of complex that it has its own zip code.
[01:10:52]  It was very profitable and it also like kind of supported the whole city, right?
[01:10:57]  Like a huge amount of Louisville's economy is people who work at Appliance Park, right?
[01:11:03]  It's what keeps the city alive kind of effectively in this period.
[01:11:06]  Jack didn't think it was profitable enough, though.
[01:11:09]  Again, it's profitable.
[01:11:10]  He just doesn't think it's profitable enough.
[01:11:13]  So he shit cans a huge percentage of the workforce, gutting a huge chunk of the economy in Louisville, but making a short-term like stop stock bump for GE, right?
[01:11:24]  Because cutting all of this, all this salary and benefits and stuff looks good on the balance sheet, and that makes the shareholders happy.
[01:11:32]  His colleagues celebrated his courage in doing this.
[01:11:36]  David Gells writes, quote, layoffs spread to other divisions as Welch amassed more responsibility.
[01:11:43]  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.
[01:11:49]  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.
[01:11:59]  In Bridgeport, Connecticut, he tore 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.
[01:12:07]  When he met a manager who failed to impress, he would snap, what the fuck do I pay you for?
[01:12:11]  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.
[01:12:20]  And I find that really interesting, 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.
[01:12:31]  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.
[01:12:40]  But a big part of what was happening in that period is the United States economy boomed in part because it adopted a number of socialist policies, even at the corporate level, welfare capitalism, right?
[01:12:52]  That was a big part of what made the U.S. economy work during that period of time.
[01:12:56]  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 we made shit like that, we could save a lot of money that we could then hand to rich people, which is where we are now.
[01:13:16]  It's the banal tragedy.
[01:13:17]  I totally get this guy through and through because he's the guy we have now still to this day.
[01:13:22]  Yeah.
[01:13:23]  And it is, it's actually chilling to think of that open-ended answer.
[01:13:30]  Yeah, we're profitable, but are we profitable enough?
[01:13:33]  Well, how much is enough, man?
[01:13:35]  This is a scary place we're going.
[01:13:38]  Because again, it's not like, because this is always like the fucking hard-nosed capitalism is the best.
[01:13:44]  People are like, well, what?
[01:13:45]  We should just have a, you should just pay people for a failing business, you know, that you can't do that.
[01:13:48]  It's like, look, these are hard decisions, but they have to be made.
[01:13:51]  You can't just give, you know, this is a business, not a charity.
[01:13:53]  No, no, GE's light bulb business was profitable.
[01:13:55]  It was making money.
[01:13:56]  He just wanted to make shittier, cheaper light bulbs so that more money could go to the 40 people at the very top of things.
[01:14:04]  And he was willing to destroy the city of Louisville in order to do this.
[01:14:08]  I wonder if on his deathbed.
[01:14:12]  Like this guy's dead, yeah.
[01:14:13]  Yeah, he's dead as shit, but very recently, unfortunately.
[01:14:16]  Yeah, okay.
[01:14:17]  So I wonder.
[01:14:17]  But I do think it was a painful death.
[01:14:19]  Oh, well, there's that.
[01:14:21]  Yeah.
[01:14:23]  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?
[01:14:34]  It is.
[01:14:35]  We'll talk a little bit about how Jack handled imminent death, Abe, because it's even funnier than that.
[01:14:43]  So Jack was obsessed with a small, relatively unappreciated part of the company, GE Credit Corp, the company finance division.
[01:14:52]  And this was like a small check.
[01:14:53]  It was created basically to like let customers like finance purchases, right?
[01:14:57]  Like you're buying a washing machine that's expensive.
[01:15:00]  You can't pay it all up front.
[01:15:01]  So you finance it with the company, right?
[01:15:03]  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, and with as good a credit rating as GE, because GE is like AAA, right?
[01:15:18]  Like it's the best company in the country, pretty much.
[01:15:21]  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.
[01:15:29]  So he starts expanding it and offering mortgages and private credit cards and investing in other companies and buying other companies.
[01:15:38]  And it's one of those things where he's like in his autobiography, when he kind 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.
[01:15:50]  You didn't have to invest heavily in R D, build factories and bend metal.
[01:15:54]  It's like making shit's hard and risky.

=== Friedman's Economic Policies (12:39) ===

[01:15:57]  Yeah.
[01:15:57]  Yeah.
[01:15:59]  With every step, we just go.
[01:16:01]  But if money's just math and it's just abstract, if we took this percentage and did this percentage, the money would just make money.
[01:16:07]  And now we're at a point where I don't, I just think if you think that way, I'm like, you don't understand what life is for.
[01:16:13]  You're not engaging with the universe.
[01:16:15]  No.
[01:16:16]  And we like you're not, again, you're not a person that we need to have in the world, right?
[01:16:20]  Because GE, again, not to like white, again, GE 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.
[01:16:30]  It made light bulbs that worked, right?
[01:16:32]  That's a value to society, having light bulbs that function.
[01:16:35]  It made washing machines and dryers that worked.
[01:16:38]  That's a value to society.
[01:16:40]  Jack is like, what if we made payday loans?
[01:16:44]  Like, what if we, what if we created ways to just like make interest money off of people?
[01:16:49]  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.
[01:17:00]  But I'm getting ahead of myself yet again.
[01:17:02]  So the late 70s, things keep getting worse for the American economy.
[01:17:06]  You know, obviously inflation is pretty brutal at this period of time.
[01:17:10]  Yeah, GE is again, still making a profit.
[01:17:13]  They are sailing kind of through these stormy waters, but the profit isn't enough, right?
[01:17:19]  Jack sees the one and a half billion a year that the company is netting as brutally insufficient.
[01:17:25]  It's never enough for his train daddy to come home and hug him.
[01:17:28]  He will make it what he actually does.
[01:17:30]  It will make his dad not have worked himself half to death at the train.
[01:17:35]  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.
[01:17:47]  The death knell of the golden age of capitalism was heralded by books about business that started to get really popular, like In Search of Excellence by Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman Jr.
[01:17:59]  And 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.
[01:18:10]  You should be able to buy what you need from the market.
[01:18:12]  You don't need to have these big corporations.
[01:18:14]  You can get by without job security.
[01:18:16]  Now, one of the authors of this book is a partner at McKinsey, our old buddy Pete Butigig's former employer.
[01:18:25]  Yeah, In Search of Excellence is the other author is like the guy who basically kind of guts the old Hewlett-Packard to build the new one.
[01:18:34]  And these are guys, these are MBAs, right?
[01:18:36]  They're not engineering guys at firms like Hewlett-Packard, like GE.
[01:18:41]  A lot of the people running it had been engineers previously.
[01:18:44]  It's the same with companies like Lockheed.
[01:18:46]  But in this period, they're being replaced by guys who just know like business.
[01:18:50]  And these are guys who are obsessed with concepts like Kaizen from Japan, which is like a manufacturing concept that they kind of often misunderstand and misapply.
[01:19:00]  They're trend seekers, right?
[01:19:02]  Like they see companies succeeding and they're like, what are they doing?
[01:19:05]  Like, how can we copy it?
[01:19:06]  Part of how what they copy is this kind of like manic, insane work culture that is, you know, prevalent in places like Japan.
[01:19:14]  What they're not going to copy is like, you know, these Japanese companies whose workers are like working themselves half to death produce excellent, reliable products.
[01:19:22]  That's not necessary, right?
[01:19:24]  Like we don't actually need to make good cars.
[01:19:27]  We can, we can, if we make our workers work that hard and produce cheap shit, we'll make even more money, right?
[01:19:32]  That's a big part of the management philosophy.
[01:19:35]  Well, especially in search of excellence, pushes.
[01:19:38]  You're still loyal to American products, which, of course, patriotism was, I would say, more prevalent than, or like extreme.
[01:19:46]  The point being, now your shit breaks down.
[01:19:48]  You got to buy it twice as fast.
[01:19:50]  Exactly.
[01:19:50]  Like it works all around for just me.
[01:19:53]  Yeah.
[01:19:53]  As opposed to like, I don't know, Toyota, whose philosophy is we will make a car that will outlive humanity.
[01:19:59]  Right.
[01:19:59]  It will speak at your funeral.
[01:20:01]  Yeah.
[01:20:02]  Not anymore, but back then.
[01:20:04]  You know, but think of the yachts.
[01:20:06]  Yeah.
[01:20:06]  Robert.
[01:20:07]  Think of the yachts.
[01:20:08]  Think of the yachts.
[01:20:09]  When you hang yourself using your 50-year-old pair of Levi's jeans, your car will be there.
[01:20:16]  So another popular book that kind of helped set up the next age of American capitalism was Future Shock.
[01:20:23]  The author, a guy named Alvin Toffler.
[01:20:27]  Again, I'm going to actually quote from that business historian, Louis Hyman here.
[01:20:33]  The author basically invents the idea of project management and talks about a future where there's no stability and no security.
[01:20:39]  It's a blueprint for work under neoliberalism, and it's everywhere.
[01:20:42]  It's a bestseller.
[01:20:43]  There's lots of these popularizers that bring ideas about workplace insecurity into a kind of connection with rethinking what the corporation is after the 1970s.
[01:20:53]  And perhaps the single most important of these kind of apostles of this new age of capitalism is a guy named Milton Friedman.
[01:21:01]  Now, that's a name I'm going to guess most people have at least heard, right?
[01:21:06]  He's kind of like the dude behind the Chicago School of Economics.
[01:21:10]  He is an economist himself.
[01:21:12]  He's extremely influential.
[01:21:13]  And one of the things that Friedman argues is that social welfare programs are not like a responsible thing for a society to invest in, specifically, particularly if they're using tax dollars from companies and from rich people to fund these programs.
[01:21:28]  He rails against the idea that corporations have any responsibility to society or to their employees.
[01:21:35]  In 1970, Friedman writes, The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.
[01:21:41]  What does it mean to say that business has responsibilities?
[01:21:44]  Only people can have responsibilities.
[01:21:47]  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.
[01:21:56]  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.
[01:22:07]  But okay.
[01:22:08]  Whoa, whoa, now, Michael, umbrellas are alive.
[01:22:11]  Yeah, it's a bad example.
[01:22:12]  And every time you close them, they die.
[01:22:15]  So it's like drawing a katana, right?
[01:22:17]  Like you have to know that you're, you have to commit to that umbrella if you're going to open it because you're taking a life.
[01:22:23]  It's a sure death.
[01:22:25]  This is the only thing I believe spiritually.
[01:22:28]  So think about that next time.
[01:22:30]  You know, it rains.
[01:22:31]  This is what you're taught as an Episcopalian.
[01:22:34]  That's all I remember from Sunday school.
[01:22:37]  Is a weeping man screaming at me never to use an umbrella.
[01:22:42]  Come to think of it, that was a bus stop, but same dude.
[01:22:47]  So in Friedman's eyes, the only responsibility corporations have is to maximize shareholder value.
[01:22:53]  Any sacrifice necessary to achieve this end is acceptable.
[01:22:56]  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 Augusto Pinochet, right?
[01:23:06]  So Friedman gives a bunch of advice, and a bunch of Chicago school economists are kind of brought in by Pinochet in order to like give him advice once he takes over the country by murdering its democratically elected leader with the backing of the CIA.
[01:23:20]  Pinochet dismantles Chile's public properties.
[01:23:24]  He auctions off state businesses to the highest bidder, and he kills every environmental and financial regulation in the country.
[01:23:31]  This creates, in the short term, massive wealth for a small number of people, but it also leads to deindustrialization that by the early 1980s had caused unemployment in the country to increase to 10 times its pre-Pinochet rate.
[01:23:44]  By 1982, Pinochet had been forced to fire his Chicago school advisors and re-nationalize several of the financial institutions he deregulated.
[01:23:53]  In other words, 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 for a while.
[01:24:08]  And then it leaves your economy hollowed out and unable to like survive and causes like massive social and economic disasters.
[01:24:17]  And it's crazy that these people think that they're fucking geniuses because they can turn money into more money because they short credit.
[01:24:23]  But they can't see that.
[01:24:25]  Yeah, if you strip mine the mountain, then you don't have the mountain.
[01:24:28]  Or like if you burn the whole forest, then there's no forest.
[01:24:31]  You fucking idiot.
[01:24:32]  Like, is this not obvious?
[01:24:34]  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.
[01:24:42]  And because doctors and nurses are already in hospitals, I'm just having men with guns kill them and take their organs.
[01:24:48]  In the short term, you can probably make a lot of money sitting out.
[01:24:52]  Huge business, but very quickly, you run out of people who can put those organs in bodies.
[01:24:58]  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.
[01:25:05]  So it doesn't matter.
[01:25:07]  Yeah, I think their inner thought is more just like the droning of a dial toad.
[01:25:11]  Like that's all that goes on.
[01:25:13]  They just do what they do.
[01:25:14]  Jack Welch.
[01:25:15]  Yeah.
[01:25:15]  I actually believe it's an addiction of some kind.
[01:25:17]  Yeah.
[01:25:18]  Yeah.
[01:25:18]  Totally.
[01:25:18]  Yeah.
[01:25:19]  I think there's, yeah, I think, I think all of the things we're talking about are true.
[01:25:22]  Or just compulsion.
[01:25:23]  So just as Chile is teetering towards the brink of economic collapse, thanks to its Friedman-like policies, Friedman disciple Jack Welch was picked to be the new CEO of General Electric.
[01:25:34]  His colleagues reported shock and sometimes horror at this decision.
[01:25:38]  But Reg Jones had made his selection and there was no going back now.
[01:25:42]  Although an event that occurred right before the transfer of power certainly gave him second thoughts.
[01:25:47]  David Gells writes, Five weeks before Welch officially took over, Jones threw him a party at the Helmsley Palace, an upscale hotel in New York City.
[01:25:55]  Among the 60 or so guests were CEOs for many of the nation's largest companies.
[01:25:59]  As the night wore on, Welch had a bit too much to drink.
[01:26:02]  When Jones asked him to address the crowd, Welch couldn't get through his remarks without slurring his words.
[01:26:07]  Back at GE headquarters the next morning, Jones stormed into Welch's office.
[01:26:11]  I've never been so humiliated in my life, he told Welch.
[01:26:14]  You embarrassed me in the company.
[01:26:16]  Welch was terrified that this might cost him the job, but yet again, he avoided any accountability for his actions.
[01:26:23]  Jones went through with his decision.
[01:26:25]  And right before the final transfer of power, he invited Welch into his office.
[01:26:29]  Jack, he said, I give you the Queen Mary.
[01:26:32]  This is designed not to sink.
[01:26:34]  Jack, without even taking a second to think, immediately replied, I don't want the Queen Mary.
[01:26:40]  I plan to blow up the Queen Mary.
[01:26:42]  I want speedboats.
[01:26:48]  I want to shoot a Tesla to the moon with a fucking mannequin in it for social media clout.
[01:26:53]  That's what I want.
[01:26:54]  That's who I am.
[01:26:55]  And then we thumbs up and then high-fived.
[01:26:57]  And then we flew out of there on our fucking spaceship.
[01:27:01]  Then we just threw up piles of money and then we ate the money that we threw up.
[01:27:06]  Yeah.
[01:27:07]  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, right?
[01:27:16]  Okay, the Queen Mary is the boat that we are all on.
[01:27:19]  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.
[01:27:27]  Yeah, it is actually a very good analogy.
[01:27:32]  He is doing a Titanic, but he's like, wow, the Titanic really created a lot of value for the survivors.
[01:27:37]  For the few that made it.
[01:27:39]  There's a supply and demand structure re-haul, you know, during the sinking of the Titanic.
[01:27:47]  Yeah.
[01:27:47]  It is.
[01:27:48]  It is such a piece of shit.
[01:27:50]  He's, I just, what, what a reminder.
[01:27:52]  Like, we have, we're, we're barely getting started.
[01:27:54]  Um, this is the end of part one, but boy, howdy, does it get a lot worse?
[01:27:59]  But you know what doesn't get worse?
[01:28:02]  You guys.
[01:28:03]  You just get better with A's.
[01:28:05]  Like a fine salami.
[01:28:08]  I tell myself that every day.
[01:28:10]  I tell my fine salami that.
[01:28:13]  Yeah.
[01:28:16]  Do you guys want to plug anything?
[01:28:17]  Yeah, that was the, that was the cue to plug your plug.
[01:28:19]  That was the cue to plug.
[01:28:20]  We did it at the top.
[01:28:22]  You double plug.
[01:28:23]  Yeah, we do get to double plug.
[01:28:25]  We only let our, we only let our real friends do that.
[01:28:28]  Well, speaking of double plugging our fine salamis, uh, we're doing a movie about the complex proposition of forming.
[01:28:34]  It has to be a sex thing.

=== Double Plugging Fine Salami (03:36) ===

[01:28:36]  Yes.
[01:28:37]  Well, that's what I'm saying.
[01:28:38]  All right.
[01:28:39]  I'm going to like go over to my torrent site right now and find double plugging a fine salami right on right on the top there.
[01:28:45]  A summer sausage.
[01:28:48]  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.
[01:29:01]  And it's called Papa Bear and it's very funny, but then in the third act, has heart, you know, like, you know what kind of movies I'm talking about.
[01:29:10]  It's one of those poignant coming of age shit.
[01:29:14]  We're really good at videos and movies.
[01:29:16]  If you know us and our work, you probably already know that.
[01:29:20]  If you're interested in finding out more about the project, it's over at seedandspark.com slash fun slash papa hyphen bear.
[01:29:29]  Thanks so much.
[01:29:30]  Thank you.
[01:29:31]  Thank you both so much.
[01:29:33]  You can find me nowhere because stay away from social media.
[01:29:37]  It's bad for you.
[01:29:38]  But you can find my book after the revolution literally anywhere you can buy books.
[01:29:43]  You like Amazon.
[01:29:44]  You like bookshop.com or whatever.
[01:29:47]  You like going to Barnes  ⁇ Noble for some reason.
[01:29:49]  It's everywhere.
[01:29:50]  Go read it.
[01:29:52]  That's the episode.
[01:29:54]  That's the episode.
[01:29:58]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:30:01]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:30:17]  On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
[01:30:27]  What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
[01:30:33]  We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
[01:30:42]  If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
[01:30:48]  Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
[01:30:59]  Earners, what's up?
[01:31:00]  Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
[01:31:05]  On each episode of the podcast Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
[01:31:12]  From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, our goal is simple.
[01:31:17]  Make financial literacy accessible for everyone.
[01:31:20]  Because when you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
[01:31:24]  Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Earn Your Leisure, and listen now.
[01:31:28]  I'm Ana Navarro, and on my new podcast, Bleep with Ana Navarro, I'm talking to the people closest to the biggest issues happening in your community and around the world.
[01:31:38]  Because I know deep down inside right now, we are all cursing and asking what the bleep is going on.
[01:31:45]  Every week, I'm breaking down the biggest issues happening in our communities and around the world.
[01:31:50]  I'm talking to people like Julie Kay Brown, who broke the explosive story on Jeffrey Epstein in 2018.
[01:31:56]  The Justice Department, through we counted four presidential administrations, failed these victims.
[01:32:03]  Listen to Bleep with Ana Navarro on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:32:09]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:32:12]  Guaranteed human.