True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 362: Boeing, Boeing, Bong
Aired: 2024-03-18
Duration: 01:23:38


=== Middleton Rumors Revealed (06:34) ===

[00:00:00]  I got a.
[00:00:01]  Um, this isn't like typical cold open.
[00:00:05]  But I have to talk about the Middleton stuff because so much has changed.
[00:00:12]  What's changed.
[00:00:12]  So much has changed.
[00:00:13]  What's changed.
[00:00:14]  So remember, initially I was like oh, maybe she really did have just like Crohn's disease and maybe she had a.
[00:00:24]  She was shitting crazy she had.
[00:00:26]  Well, I don't, it's none of my business, but you know, maybe like a section of her colon was removed and that's why and I, you know, laid out some ideas, more colon.
[00:00:37]  I'm thinking not, you don't think so.
[00:00:40]  Well, now everyone thinks that well, did you see what Piers Morgan said?
[00:00:43]  I didn't.
[00:00:43]  Now okay, so let me what we can call him if you want to do that.
[00:00:49]  I wasn't here.
[00:00:49]  For that one we should back up, which is that all of that is out the window now.
[00:00:57]  Any kind of rational explanation, anyone that any like any explanation that takes the palace, Kensington Palace at face value gone, that's gone.
[00:01:07]  We don't do it anymore.
[00:01:08]  She's got.
[00:01:09]  Every single person thinks that this is I mean, this is a rumor.
[00:01:14]  Is that?
[00:01:15]  I'm just gonna say that I don't?
[00:01:16]  I'm not saying that I think this has happened or whatever.
[00:01:20]  I'm just reporting on what others have alleged.
[00:01:22]  Right, that actually Will beat the shit out of her.
[00:01:27]  Really, you think that he, like I, didn't say I thought that okay, I'm saying you think that is as a survey of what the rumors are.
[00:01:36]  It is that remember when on January excuse me, let me back up on December 28th, there was an ambulance scene leaving Sardingham and it had to be yeah, you got to keep up with this stuff Sardingham, which is where the royals were for Christmas potentially, and it had a police escort which made people believe that perhaps that was when Kate had her unplanned, clearly abdominal surgery.
[00:02:06]  That, or whatever, whatever right doesn't make sense, but something happened.
[00:02:09]  So people are now suggesting that actually Will has a history of violence, as some evidence in Harry's memoir spare would suggest, and they are saying that there was perhaps An incident at that moment that now the palace is trying to cover up, which would potentially explain why.
[00:02:33]  Because this is still the thing that gets me.
[00:02:36]  Why did Harry fly from Los Angeles to good old England to meet with Charles the King for 45 minutes?
[00:02:46]  What had to be discussed in person for only 45 minutes that could not have been done over Zoom or on the phone, which is recorded?
[00:02:53]  Your brother unfortunately committed an old boy style hallway massacre on his entire family, Harry.
[00:03:02]  What do you think it's something like that?
[00:03:04]  I have no idea.
[00:03:05]  What was he telling Harry?
[00:03:06]  I have no, I don't know.
[00:03:07]  No one knows.
[00:03:08]  But it's weird.
[00:03:08]  There's no way you're like, oh, I'm just flying to England for 45 minutes to just be like, it's crazy you have cancer, dad.
[00:03:16]  Bye.
[00:03:17]  I thought the rumor now was that she caught William cheating.
[00:03:20]  So, okay, that's part of it.
[00:03:22]  So she caught him cheating and he was like, well, you'll never see anything again.
[00:03:26]  Rumors about her cheating have been around for a long time.
[00:03:31]  And that's with the Marchioness of Chumley.
[00:03:35]  I think it's Chumley, but it doesn't look like that.
[00:03:38]  It looks like Chumley.
[00:03:40]  I understand.
[00:03:40]  He was cheating on his wife with the Marchioness.
[00:03:43]  Well, the sort of Hills Have Eyes type character from Pawn Star.
[00:03:46]  I'm going to say something even crazier right now.
[00:03:48]  I think she's pretty.
[00:03:52]  We're talking about a different Chumley.
[00:03:54]  No, I think there's something about her that's very striking.
[00:03:56]  I have to look this lady up.
[00:03:58]  Particularly in her party days.
[00:04:00]  Obviously, she's aged.
[00:04:02]  A little bit of a recession.
[00:04:03]  She's British.
[00:04:04]  What's Elizabeth Chumley?
[00:04:07]  Rose.
[00:04:07]  She's Rose.
[00:04:09]  Rose Chumley?
[00:04:10]  No, she's the Marchioness of Chumley.
[00:04:12]  Rose Hanbury.
[00:04:13]  Yeah, Rose Hanbury.
[00:04:15]  Rose Hanbury.
[00:04:16]  She kind of just looks like Kate.
[00:04:18]  She's a bit more serious.
[00:04:20]  You think she's more serious?
[00:04:22]  Yeah.
[00:04:23]  She does look grave in some.
[00:04:25]  Oh, she's at a funeral.
[00:04:26]  Yeah.
[00:04:27]  Oh.
[00:04:27]  But she looks.
[00:04:28]  I do find her very striking, I will say, in a way that Kate is maybe not.
[00:04:32]  Kate clearly found Will very striking as well.
[00:04:34]  Well, possibly.
[00:04:36]  So you think that Kate, not you think, what you were repeating to me is what other people think, that Kate discovered Will's philandering.
[00:04:45]  Yeah, and either said she wanted a divorce, and maybe Will wasn't pleased.
[00:04:49]  He did jiu-jitsu.
[00:04:51]  But so Piers Morgan said he was like, Will is hiding something.
[00:04:57]  Interesting.
[00:04:59]  So what does he know?
[00:05:01]  I don't know.
[00:05:02]  Where is she?
[00:05:06]  Where is she?
[00:05:30]  We should get Piers on the show.
[00:05:32]  I don't really have anything to say to him.
[00:05:34]  I have a lot of things I could probably, I don't have anything I need to say to him, but I have a lot of things I could say to him, if that makes sense.
[00:05:40]  I'm going to be honest, I don't have a lot of big opinion of this.
[00:05:43]  Alec Baldwin to me.
[00:05:45]  What?
[00:05:45]  Does that strike you as?
[00:05:46]  Do you think he shot someone?
[00:05:47]  The same—no, Piers could never—first of all, it's England, so he would have stabbed someone in the gut with a zombie knife, but— But no, he just seems like he's kind of the larger guy, full of himself, pompous.
[00:06:02]  But there's like a core, there's something missing.
[00:06:04]  There's like a hollow man, you know?
[00:06:06]  It's like a, there's, there's like a, he's, maybe he's soulless or something.
[00:06:10]  I feel like he's like not in my periphery.
[00:06:12]  Like I don't acknowledge, I forget that he's on TV.
[00:06:15]  What TV is he on?
[00:06:16]  British TV?
[00:06:18]  Is he on American TV?
[00:06:19]  I think he's on like what he's on.
[00:06:22]  The Brits, like the way that they deal with TV over there doesn't make sense to me.
[00:06:26]  So I'm not sure.
[00:06:28]  In my head, they have, like, five channels.
[00:06:30]  BBC One.

=== A Portrait of George W. Bush (03:18) ===

[00:06:35]  Right.
[00:06:35]  And the rest of it is kind of – it's like Sky News and Channel 4 and then BBC.
[00:06:39]  Yeah.
[00:06:40]  But I'm like, are they all by the, I don't care, I guess.
[00:06:43]  You have to have a license to watch TV over there.
[00:06:45]  Hello, everyone.
[00:06:46]  Hello.
[00:06:46]  I'm Liz.
[00:06:47]  My name is Chamli.
[00:06:50]  And we are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:06:56]  And this is true, Anon.
[00:06:57]  Hello.
[00:06:58]  Hello.
[00:06:59]  My name is Adolf Hitler Moyle.
[00:07:02]  It's a Yiddish name.
[00:07:03]  Nope, take that out.
[00:07:05]  Wait, I have one more thing I have to say, which was just a weird little anecdote, little story from when I was on my Rum Springer just now.
[00:07:20]  You knew I was going to go there.
[00:07:22]  I love referencing a Rum Springer.
[00:07:24]  Liz decided if she was going to stay within the podcasting community or go out and make her way in the world.
[00:07:30]  She came back.
[00:07:30]  And I came back.
[00:07:31]  I returned.
[00:07:32]  She's going to crack out.
[00:07:34]  I was in a restaurant, and I'm not going to name the restaurant.
[00:07:38]  But it was, you know, it was a Jewish restaurant.
[00:07:46]  No, it wasn't.
[00:07:47]  But it was decorated fine.
[00:07:50]  It was like very classic restaurant looking of like cozy inn.
[00:07:54]  Like, you know, it's like, ooh, nice lighting.
[00:07:56]  Oh, big cozy chair.
[00:07:58]  Oh, like lots of dried flowers.
[00:08:00]  Whatever, right?
[00:08:01]  Nice restaurant.
[00:08:03]  There was some art on the wall that was very odd.
[00:08:06]  And I was like, kind of taken aback.
[00:08:08]  I turn around and there's a huge painting.
[00:08:14]  And I was like, I had to ask a waiter.
[00:08:16]  I was like, it was a portrait.
[00:08:18]  And I was like, is that George W. Bush?
[00:08:21]  Was it?
[00:08:21]  They had a huge portrait of George W. Bush in their restaurant.
[00:08:25]  They're like expensive, nice restaurant.
[00:08:27]  Why did you go?
[00:08:28]  And I was like, why?
[00:08:31]  Like, what is that?
[00:08:32]  And the waiter, who was lovely, was like, clearly, he was like, yes, that's George W. Like, he gets this question every day.
[00:08:42]  Like, someone is like, does that have door knowing what?
[00:08:44]  And he's like, yeah, you know, the owner of the restaurant likes artists.
[00:08:49]  Yeah.
[00:08:50]  And, you know, it's not exactly a flattering portrait of him.
[00:08:53]  And I'm like, oh, in what way?
[00:08:54]  And he's like, well, if you get closer, you'll see, look at his ear.
[00:08:58]  And you'll see, actually, the portrait is made up of naked women.
[00:09:05]  Wait.
[00:09:07]  It was a portrait of George W. Bush that was entirely made up of naked women.
[00:09:11]  Like Chuck Close style?
[00:09:12]  Yeah.
[00:09:12]  You know, where it's like a kind of like...
[00:09:14]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:09:14]  No, I understand what you're saying.
[00:09:17]  That's incredible.
[00:09:18]  But in your restaurant.
[00:09:20]  What kind of food was it?
[00:09:21]  Like chops?
[00:09:23]  Like, local farm to table, nice swine.
[00:09:27]  Interesting.
[00:09:28]  Like, river trout.
[00:09:29]  We'll have a river trout.
[00:09:31]  Okay, so please.
[00:09:31]  And like a, you know, oh, grilled Romanesco sounds nice.
[00:09:36]  You know, like that kind of thing.
[00:09:37]  Yeah.
[00:09:38]  And then a fucking huge ass portrait of George W. Bush.
[00:09:41]  Made up of naked ladies.
[00:09:43]  Made up of naked.
[00:09:44]  I don't know if it was all naked ladies or just one naked lady because I didn't go up and look.
[00:09:47]  Just the ear could have been a naked lady.
[00:09:48]  Yeah, I was unclear.
[00:09:49]  I did look it up on like ArtNet or whatever to kind of suss out.
[00:09:52]  It's a real artist.

=== Passcode and Testaments (04:37) ===

[00:09:53]  It's not just like, you know, who knows.
[00:09:57]  But it was very odd, and I just needed to get that out because I felt very funny about it.
[00:10:01]  Yeah.
[00:10:02]  And like when that was acquired and when that was put up.
[00:10:05]  You don't understand how like it makes absolutely zero sense.
[00:10:10]  Like this big.
[00:10:11]  Okay, people can't see what Liz is doing.
[00:10:14]  So I'm not going to fucking tell them.
[00:10:15]  Her entire wingspan here.
[00:10:16]  Yeah, my wingspan, which is obviously, as everyone knows, seven, three.
[00:10:21]  It's crazy when people see us next to each other because it reminds, we get, people always call this podcast sort of the Lord of the Rings of podcasts.
[00:10:28]  They do?
[00:10:28]  Because you resemble the elfin creature, and people often say, I'm dwarfish in my stature.
[00:10:34]  And of course, young chops.
[00:10:35]  Wait, there's an elf and a dwarf.
[00:10:36]  There's an elf and a dwarf.
[00:10:37]  And actually, one of the more uplifting sort of side tales of Lord of the Rings is they become friends and lovers.
[00:10:42]  Is that like a buddy?
[00:10:43]  That's like a buddy kind of.
[00:10:45]  Does that go with the classic, you know how we have our classic big guy, little guy?
[00:10:48]  Yeah, classic.
[00:10:49]  Fat guy, skinny guy.
[00:10:51]  Yeah.
[00:10:51]  Classic combos.
[00:10:52]  Well, the elf.
[00:10:53]  Would elf be?
[00:10:53]  It's a big guy, little guy.
[00:10:55]  I mean, it's like a tall guy.
[00:10:56]  The elf isn't a.
[00:10:57]  Elf is not tall.
[00:10:58]  Elves are tall or short.
[00:11:00]  Like Santa's elves are short.
[00:11:02]  I thought elves were tiny.
[00:11:04]  I did too, because of my experience as a young man, unfortunately, rather traumatic experiences with some people who said they worked for Keebler.
[00:11:11]  But the classic, like, Lord of the Rings style elf is, I believe, tall and thin.
[00:11:19]  I feel like that's getting around the whole elf idea.
[00:11:21]  Listen, I don't know.
[00:11:22]  To me, an elf is a fairy sprite.
[00:11:23]  Yeah.
[00:11:24]  Sprite, as in tiny.
[00:11:25]  Yeah.
[00:11:26]  And, of course, the molesignor at the cathedral that I was raised in.
[00:11:29]  Oh, my God.
[00:11:30]  We are talking about planes today.
[00:11:32]  And I got to tell you, if you are listening to this podcast on a plane, get the Wi-Fi right now and sign that motherfucking e-will because you are going to die.
[00:11:43]  No, no, no.
[00:11:44]  I'll tell you this.
[00:11:45]  If you're on a plane right now, if you're on a plane right now, that's it.
[00:11:48]  You know something I actually genuinely do when I get on planes?
[00:11:53]  Pray?
[00:11:53]  When I fly, I do always text texts.
[00:11:58]  I leave someone a final text.
[00:12:00]  What is that?
[00:12:00]  What's a final text?
[00:12:01]  I leave my testament.
[00:12:04]  What is your testament?
[00:12:05]  You have a testament.
[00:12:06]  You have to know.
[00:12:06]  You'll know if the plane crashes, but you don't.
[00:12:08]  I do do this, though.
[00:12:09]  But to a different person each time?
[00:12:11]  Like, it's like the state of the union and you like it.
[00:12:14]  You've got, okay, this time it'll be the Secretary of Defense that stays away.
[00:12:18]  No, I just, I have, there's people that I send my testament to.
[00:12:22]  You don't testament it?
[00:12:22]  I send it, though.
[00:12:23]  I text it.
[00:12:24]  And then do you have to take it back when the plane doesn't crash?
[00:12:26]  The testament remains sealed unless in place of a dock crash.
[00:12:32]  It's in the dock because it's Google message.
[00:12:34]  It's detailed.
[00:12:35]  But then how does it stay sealed?
[00:12:37]  It's for their eyes only.
[00:12:38]  This is why you've never gotten one because you would tell people.
[00:12:41]  I'm always on the plane with you.
[00:12:42]  You might be on the testament, too.
[00:12:44]  What does that mean?
[00:12:45]  You'll see.
[00:12:46]  I don't know what this means.
[00:12:48]  But I do do that because.
[00:12:49]  Do you have a will?
[00:12:50]  What do you mean by a will?
[00:12:51]  What do I have to give people?
[00:12:53]  I don't know.
[00:12:53]  What's in your testament?
[00:12:54]  You don't know because it's sealed.
[00:12:56]  But it's not sealed.
[00:12:57]  It's just in a text.
[00:12:58]  Have you seen it?
[00:12:59]  Do you know what a seal is?
[00:13:00]  Yes.
[00:13:01]  It's something that prevents you from seeing something, which in this case is like a phone lock screen that belongs to somebody else.
[00:13:07]  So if you can get past a person you may not even know's phone lock screen to see my testament, it's fine.
[00:13:14]  It's been unsealed.
[00:13:16]  But until then, it's sealed.
[00:13:17]  I don't think that's how seals work.
[00:13:18]  It's how a seal works.
[00:13:19]  You're just saying it gets texted to someone that's someone else's phone that I don't have.
[00:13:22]  That's not a seal.
[00:13:24]  Well, things change.
[00:13:26]  You know what we should set you up with?
[00:13:28]  Is a living testament that is like a document that comes with like a passcode or whatever.
[00:13:34]  And if you die, then the passcode gets unlocked, which gets sent to people that you've already said.
[00:13:41]  And then they can access the test.
[00:13:42]  Now that would be sealed.
[00:13:44]  Yes.
[00:13:44]  Well, so I have a will too.
[00:13:46]  And my will is specifically set up to make two people who are currently friends into the worst of enemies.
[00:13:53]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:13:53]  And so it's, yeah, classic kind of thing.
[00:13:55]  That's how I'm trying to accrue as much power, money, influence as possible so that on the event of my death, I can ruin other people's lives.
[00:14:04]  That's like what I want to do.
[00:14:06]  It's always good to leave something.
[00:14:07]  And we are talking, indeed, today about deaths, about lives, and about airplanes.
[00:14:14]  I will say that real quick, we've got some travel coming up, which I'm very excited about.
[00:14:18]  That'll be nice.
[00:14:20]  And I triple-checked to make sure that I didn't book us on a 787 MAX.
[00:14:27]  I didn't.
[00:14:28]  However, we will be flying Boeing.

=== Boeing's Troubled Skies (15:25) ===

[00:14:30]  And for that, I'm sorry.
[00:14:32]  Well, my thing with that is lightning doesn't strike twice, except in the case of the two 737 MAX crashes happening within six months of each year.
[00:14:39]  But other, definitely, all right.
[00:14:40]  And if lightning does lightning strikes twice once, then it's not going to strike twice twice, if that makes sense.
[00:14:48]  Interesting.
[00:14:48]  Now, that means four times.
[00:14:49]  That means four times.
[00:14:50]  Or it's two doubles, but yeah, four times total.
[00:14:53]  I don't, that seems like incredibly unlikely to me.
[00:14:56]  So a lot of people have been asking us, when are you guys going to talk about this whistleblower that got his headburger?
[00:15:03]  We've gotten a lot of messages.
[00:15:04]  Yeah, I check them.
[00:15:05]  I don't respond to them and I sort of just don't open them, but I see what the first sentence is before it trails off into ellipses.
[00:15:11]  Sailing and just okay, I'm done with this.
[00:15:13]  What am I going to do?
[00:15:14]  Answer all of them?
[00:15:14]  But, and I've had people text me in my own life.
[00:15:17]  What's going on with this?
[00:15:19]  I can't claim to have been there in that holiday inn parking lot last week where John Barnett was found dead.
[00:15:26]  But we can talk a little bit about the circumstances surrounding the recent death of whistleblower John Barnett, formerly of Boeing and of Being Alive, also known as Swamp Dog, also known as Swampy.
[00:15:41]  And the circumstances surrounding his death are, no matter how you cut it, from the most conspiratorial to the least conspiratorial, pretty fucking tragic.
[00:15:53]  This guy had worked for Boeing for over 30 years.
[00:15:56]  And this is like, I, of course, have no loyalty to any place that I've worked except for just the idea of Florida Switzerland and this room that you're in right now and the people that you frequently.
[00:16:07]  I don't know what you're talking about.
[00:16:09]  Every time I go on other podcasts, it's a betrayal.
[00:16:12]  That's not how that works.
[00:16:13]  That's how I feel when I do it.
[00:16:15]  But I have a loyalty to the concept of podcasting, I guess.
[00:16:18]  So it does make sense.
[00:16:20]  This guy had worked for Boeing for 30 years.
[00:16:21]  And he was like really, you know, kind of one of those breed of engineers that is like dedicated to the company, you know, and to the engineering culture that Boeing was very famous for.
[00:16:34]  And he seemed to like be very proud of a lot of the work that he had done through most of his tenure at Boeing.
[00:16:41]  Yeah.
[00:16:42]  So he'd worked at the Everett plant, which is like the main plant in Washington state.
[00:16:46]  And then he was offered the opportunity to work at their new plant in Charleston, South Carolina.
[00:16:52]  I think this is about after 22 years for the company.
[00:16:54]  He moves over there and he's a QA guy, which if you know even the most cursory few things about Boeing's trajectory over the past couple decades is probably a pretty tough job at Boeing or a really easy job, depending on the.
[00:17:10]  QA, quality assurance, aka checking and making sure all those planes are working as they should.
[00:17:17]  Yes.
[00:17:18]  And in Charleston, which was a relatively new plane, I think it had opened in 2009.
[00:17:22]  That was where they were building the 787 Dreamliner.
[00:17:26]  Yes.
[00:17:27]  A whole project that was beset with.
[00:17:30]  Lots and lots of problems.
[00:17:31]  Lots and lots of problems.
[00:17:32]  Lots and lots and lots of problems.
[00:17:34]  There's a famous sort of like undercover video that somebody working on the Dreamliner took of like kind of strolling around the plant and asking people working on the planes, like, would you fly on the plane?
[00:17:44]  Everyone's like, no, I would not have to.
[00:17:46]  It's not what you want to hear from the guys building the plane.
[00:17:48]  Really?
[00:17:49]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:17:50]  Because they know a lot.
[00:17:51]  I don't even understand how planes fly.
[00:17:53]  Yeah.
[00:17:53]  And frankly, I think it's kind of an abomination that they do.
[00:17:56]  Well, we're going to get into that.
[00:17:57]  Yeah.
[00:17:58]  So he first blows the whistle on Boeing in 2016.
[00:18:02]  And because of retaliation around that, and because of the fact that he was essentially getting shifted from place to place, because he had just like, not even because of the external whistleblowing, because he had been bringing these problems to his superiors, he had been undergoing that, he was diagnosed with PTSD, tons of anxiety.
[00:18:20]  He had heart problems.
[00:18:21]  You know, this company that he had seen at, I mean, worked for for 30 years that, you know, had seen decline in quality and really fuck over one of its really loyal workers.
[00:18:33]  He had seen us essentially not only betraying him, but betraying like, you know, people who were supposed to fly in their planes.
[00:18:39]  So he'd been locked in a years-long legal battle with Boeing that was finally wrapping up.
[00:18:44]  He was set to give deposition for his third and final day at the tail end of this very long case.
[00:18:51]  I mean, the case had been going since about 2016, 2017.
[00:18:54]  So he's giving this deposition in Charleston.
[00:18:56]  Yes.
[00:18:57]  He just finished the second day, went home, got some.
[00:19:00]  Then he doesn't show up for the third day, and they're looking for him, and they find him with a bullet in his head in a car.
[00:19:08]  Yeah, in the front seat of his car, or I think truck in a holiday in parking lot where he had been staying.
[00:19:16]  And it appears that, I mean, at least from the time of this recording, they think that he shot himself sometime like 9.30 in the morning.
[00:19:24]  And it's, I think, immediately was very suspicious to a lot of people because it's strange to kill yourself in the midst of like really the final stretch of your like years-long legal battle.
[00:19:40]  Yeah.
[00:19:40]  Where you're constantly and consistently being proved right about your concerns about quality control at Boeing, including in very, very dramatic ways, like what we'll talk about that a little later, like what happened last month with Alaska Airlines.
[00:19:56]  And then to give up and give up in this, not only just give up on the case, but to kill yourself, I think struck a lot of people, including myself, as incredibly suspicious.
[00:20:09]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:20:10]  And I think also people, you know, knowing, yeah, like you said, even having a little cursory knowledge of what has been going on at Boeing and even from a high level of the kind of like corporate shenanigans at the company since basically the late 90s on, it all feels very reminiscent.
[00:20:28]  I've seen a lot of people thrown around the Michael Clayton.
[00:20:31]  Yes, it's very Michael Clayton.
[00:20:33]  No.
[00:20:33]  You know, it's like it's feeling reminiscent.
[00:20:35]  You know, it's feeling like a chemical company.
[00:20:37]  It's feeling like the tobacco companies.
[00:20:39]  It's feeling like the big, bad, evil company that for whatever reason we haven't really seen in a while.
[00:20:44]  You know what I'm saying?
[00:20:45]  It feels a little throwback a little bit.
[00:20:48]  Well, I think they're usually more adept at sort of like covering their tracks.
[00:20:51]  We've been so used to these shitty tech companies for a while that it's like, oh, forgot these big guys can throw their weight around too.
[00:20:58]  Well, there's a lot of like Michael Clayton-ish in this, but then there's also a lot of, I think fairly a lot of parallels drawn to the Epstein stuff.
[00:21:07]  Yes.
[00:21:07]  Well, we'll get into that.
[00:21:08]  Yeah.
[00:21:08]  Yeah.
[00:21:10]  There's certainly a lot, especially with a lot of the legal stuff surrounding Boeing, a ton of really sort of striking parallels there.
[00:21:17]  Okay, so Boeing, we're not going to get into too much of the history of this company because that's not what we do here.
[00:21:25]  But we'll say this.
[00:21:26]  Boeing is a huge, huge, huge, huge manufacturer for the United States.
[00:21:31]  They produce about 40% of all commercial aircrafts flying.
[00:21:36]  They are the largest export by far for America, and they have been for quite some time.
[00:21:44]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:21:46]  They also have the third biggest defense contract behind Lockheed Martin and RTX.
[00:21:51]  So they are, they have a real, real, real close relationship with the U.S. government and not just in a revolving doorway.
[00:21:59]  I mean, this is like a big pride pony for the U.S. government.
[00:22:06]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:22:07]  I mean, I think that's something that really cannot be understated here is that like Boeing really in some ways functions as like an arm of the U.S. government.
[00:22:14]  In the same way that like the U.S. often acts as like a salesman for a lot of things that are built here.
[00:22:20]  We don't build a lot of stuff here, but for a lot of companies that are here.
[00:22:23]  But defense companies, of which Boeing is one, and the aircraft company we have.
[00:22:29]  It's basically the only commercial airliner company that we have and really one of two in the world.
[00:22:37]  It is essentially like a private business that functions part of its sales arm is the U.S. government.
[00:22:45]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:22:45]  GE used to be pretty similar in a lot of ways.
[00:22:50]  And there are a lot of parallels between GE and the trajectory of that company and what's going on with Boeing that we would get into.
[00:22:56]  But 2024 in general, we should say, even aside from the dead whistleblower has been a very, very, very bad year for Boeing.
[00:23:05]  Yes.
[00:23:07]  You mentioned the thing on Alaska Air.
[00:23:09]  Everyone remembers this.
[00:23:09]  The panel of the plane just blew off, which is, I got to say, one of top 10 biggest fears when I'm flying.
[00:23:16]  You really don't want to, you know what?
[00:23:18]  I don't sit in the exit row.
[00:23:20]  I don't either.
[00:23:22]  I don't, because you know what would happen?
[00:23:24]  I don't know.
[00:23:25]  I think I'm good in an emergency, but I don't know if I would be in a mid-air emergency.
[00:23:29]  I am good at an emergency, but my fear is that something like this would happen, which is an emergency that I have no ability to interact with at all or fix.
[00:23:40]  And would probably, like most people in that flight, believe that I was about to die.
[00:23:45]  I'm afraid there would be a viral video of me going, please, God, don't let me die.
[00:23:49]  Kill everyone else on the plane.
[00:23:50]  Kill everyone else on the plane.
[00:23:51]  You're kill this baby.
[00:23:52]  Kill this old lady.
[00:23:53]  Kill everyone else on the plane.
[00:23:54]  Just let me live.
[00:23:54]  Just let me live.
[00:23:56]  Or even worse, someone's like, is there a podcaster on the plane?
[00:23:59]  Yeah, and I'd have to stand up and I would just have to start put my fucking, I'd put my phone up to my goddamn mouth and just start, put my fucking phone to the pilot's face and say, would you let your daughter do OnlyFans?
[00:24:09]  That's terrible.
[00:24:11]  Well, it's a good question.
[00:24:14]  What is a woman?
[00:24:15]  What is a woman?
[00:24:16]  Yeah, ask, what is a woman?
[00:24:18]  Would you let your daughter do OnlyFans?
[00:24:21]  So, yeah, the panel of the plane blows off midair.
[00:24:23]  We'll get to that more in a little bit, too.
[00:24:24]  One of the planes just lost a wheel.
[00:24:26]  It's a plane.
[00:24:27]  You don't need wheels.
[00:24:28]  It's not a car.
[00:24:28]  Yeah, there's a bunch of various breakdowns all over the place.
[00:24:31]  A ton of fires, fuel leaks, malfunctioning motors, random debris.
[00:24:35]  They keep finding random shit in fuel tanks, which I feel like is not a place where you want to find random shit.
[00:24:40]  No, you really don't.
[00:24:42]  In the midst of all this, the company has lost billions of shareholder value.
[00:24:47]  At least like there was like one weekend where they lost like a quarter of their value, which is quite significant.
[00:24:53]  And now, like we said, they've got the dead whistleblower.
[00:24:57]  It's really just a shit show.
[00:25:00]  Well, to put an even finer point on this, on the same day that John Barnett was found dead in his car, a Boeing plane in, I believe it was flying out to New Zealand suddenly like lost altitude, started dropping, very reminiscent of some of the other notable Boeing crashes.
[00:25:20]  And started like just diving.
[00:25:23]  50 people got injured.
[00:25:24]  And it was like so bad that it started diving such speeds and so sharply that people flew up and like hit the ceiling, knocking off plastic panels from the fucking ceiling.
[00:25:34]  Oh my gosh.
[00:25:36]  Scares the shit out of me.
[00:25:37]  I i'm gonna just keep thinking about this when i'm flying.
[00:25:39]  Well, it's to me.
[00:25:40]  It's tough too, because obviously you guys have seen me.
[00:25:42]  When I get on a plane, I immediately take my pants to my knees not in a sexual way and put my coat over me to get some airflow going, and i'm afraid that if something like this happened, my freaky thang would be out all over the flight.
[00:25:54]  Yeah, and on someone's video.
[00:25:55]  On someone's video, which is, of course, I can see them for revenge porn, but I don't.
[00:25:58]  It's not a let's get this, okay.
[00:26:00]  So most of the big blockbuster issues for Boeing stem from the 737 MAX, which we were talking about.
[00:26:10]  That was a plane that was allowed to resume flying just three years ago after two fatal crashes.
[00:26:16]  Yeah.
[00:26:17]  Since then, airlines have filed over 1,800 regulatory complaints about safety issues with the MAX, or what amounts to over one per day for the past three years.
[00:26:28]  So they allowed it back up in the air three years ago, and every single day since then, there's been an official complaint.
[00:26:35]  Jesus Christ.
[00:26:36]  Which is not, not good.
[00:26:38]  Now, I, you know, I don't know a lot about planes.
[00:26:42]  I'm just going to put that right at the top.
[00:26:45]  Yeah.
[00:26:46]  I will say this, however, and you don't know this about me, but it's true.
[00:26:49]  I spent a lot of my childhood on a flight simulator.
[00:26:52]  You did?
[00:26:53]  I am the granddaughter of not one, but two pilots.
[00:26:57]  And both of them love the old simulator and did not know what to do with granddaughter.
[00:27:04]  Yeah.
[00:27:05]  Well, so onto the computer it was.
[00:27:08]  Did they do the flight simulator?
[00:27:10]  Yeah.
[00:27:12]  Wow.
[00:27:13]  And they're like watching you do it and they're like, this is not going to.
[00:27:17]  No, they helped me with it.
[00:27:19]  They helped you with it?
[00:27:19]  Yeah.
[00:27:21]  Especially one of my grandfather.
[00:27:22]  Yeah, he was like sit there and teach me how to fly on the simulator.
[00:27:25]  Wow.
[00:27:26]  Microsoft or something different.
[00:27:28]  It was, you know, it was definitely Microsoft, but I also think that maybe it was a proprietary program.
[00:27:33]  Like he was teaching at one of the local colleges also.
[00:27:36]  He was teaching flying and other, maybe some engineering stuff.
[00:27:41]  I don't really know.
[00:27:42]  I don't remember exactly.
[00:27:43]  But yeah, so I was on there a lot.
[00:27:46]  Wow.
[00:27:47]  Yeah.
[00:27:48]  So I know a little bit.
[00:27:49]  So I'm going to try and explain this the best I can.
[00:27:52]  Yeah, I know nothing.
[00:27:53]  But I will say this.
[00:27:54]  The two major problems with the MAX seem to be engineering and manufacturing.
[00:28:00]  Okay, I know that.
[00:28:02]  So two things you don't want to be wrong with a plane.
[00:28:05]  This is what they tried to do.
[00:28:07]  So the 737, obviously, not the MAX, but the 737, you know, 800, let's say.
[00:28:12]  This was a plane that existed for Boeing for a long time.
[00:28:15]  It's the classic.
[00:28:16]  That's the classic, yeah.
[00:28:18]  The 747 and 737, yeah.
[00:28:20]  So they decided they're like, we want to, we're going to upgrade the 737.
[00:28:25]  And if you want to, you know, make a more efficient plane, you want to have a bigger engine, right?
[00:28:30]  Classic.
[00:28:31]  Bigger engine, more efficient.
[00:28:33]  Fuel use, go faster, more efficient.
[00:28:36]  Maybe I do understand how mechanical things work.
[00:28:38]  Because that is something I'm going to do.
[00:28:40]  You can put a bigger engine on it.
[00:28:41]  It goes faster.
[00:28:41]  Bigger engine.
[00:28:42]  So having a gigantor engine in the 737 meant that it would actually take up more space within the body of the plane, which they didn't want to change.
[00:28:52]  They didn't, which I'll get into in a little bit.
[00:28:54]  They didn't want to change the actual body of the aircraft, but they wanted to cram this gigantor engine in it to make it more efficient.
[00:29:01]  So what it did is the engine tip kind of extends out past the wing a little bit, right?
[00:29:06]  Okay, yeah.
[00:29:07]  This causes the nose of the plane to pitch upwards.
[00:29:11]  And I'm going to explain why.
[00:29:14]  This gets into kind of a principle of aerodynamics called the angle of attack.
[00:29:18]  Now, you put your hand outside a window, right?
[00:29:21]  You've done that before, not like Hitler.
[00:29:23]  No.
[00:29:23]  I'm not doing that.
[00:29:24]  You were doing that.
[00:29:25]  I'm not fucking doing that.
[00:29:26]  You're doing that.
[00:29:27]  You know what?
[00:29:28]  Put my hand outside the window.
[00:29:29]  Yes.
[00:29:29]  So I see a beautiful.
[00:29:31]  Yeah, like you're doing it like a tree.
[00:29:33]  Okay, I'm doing it.
[00:29:34]  Right?
[00:29:34]  You're doing the goalpost like into the football game.
[00:29:36]  I'm doing it.
[00:29:37]  Yeah.
[00:29:37]  But you're putting your hand out of the window, right?
[00:29:39]  You have it.
[00:29:40]  Out of the window, yeah.
[00:29:40]  Out the window.
[00:29:41]  And you're feeling the air on your hand, right?
[00:29:44]  Yeah.
[00:29:44]  Now, it's, let's say, actually, you're putting it out this way.
[00:29:47]  Okay.
[00:29:47]  Palm facing down.
[00:29:48]  Palm facing down.
[00:29:49]  The wind is going over your hand.
[00:29:50]  You can feel it, right?
[00:29:51]  Yeah.
[00:29:52]  But it's causing your hand to kind of pitch up.

=== Pitching Into Trouble (15:28) ===

[00:29:55]  Yeah.
[00:29:55]  Right?
[00:29:55]  Up until it keeps going, it keeps going.
[00:29:58]  It keeps pushing it even further up until a single point, and then it stalls out and your hand falls back down.
[00:30:04]  Yeah.
[00:30:04]  Right?
[00:30:05]  I think we've all kind of experienced that with our hand out.
[00:30:07]  The window of air.
[00:30:08]  No?
[00:30:08]  Yeah.
[00:30:09]  It pitches up.
[00:30:10]  And then that's basically how it works with planes, too, right?
[00:30:16]  You have the angle of attack is kind of the angle between the wing and the wind.
[00:30:20]  The wind blows over the wing.
[00:30:22]  And basically, if you lift the nose of the plane, right, the angle of attack is going to increase, right?
[00:30:29]  As the plane lifts up, the angle increases a bit, and that in turn lifts the angle of the wing.
[00:30:35]  Gotcha.
[00:30:35]  Right.
[00:30:36]  Okay, I think I understand.
[00:30:37]  So the plane's going up, the wing is going up down.
[00:30:40]  Now, pitch changes are fine when you're controlling the plane because the pilot knows how it's pitching.
[00:30:48]  But a pitch change with an increasing angle of attack is different because they're not controlling that, right?
[00:30:55]  So it's all well and good until, again, it pitches up so much that, again, like your hand, it reaches that one point and it stalls out.
[00:31:02]  Your plane's flying straight up and then it stalls and then goes down.
[00:31:05]  Exactly.
[00:31:06]  That's called the stall limit angle of attack.
[00:31:09]  And that's just like a principle of aerodynamics.
[00:31:11]  That is like not something you can like change, but it's when the wing stops lifting entirely.
[00:31:16]  And I mean, kind of the wind flow basically separates off the wing.
[00:31:20]  What I know about stalling is from like a Nintendo 64 game I used to play that I don't remember the name of or really anything about.
[00:31:27]  I just remember that if you tried to go up too quickly, it would say like stalling, stalling, stalling, and you couldn't do it.
[00:31:33]  Yeah.
[00:31:33]  Because the pitching.
[00:31:34]  Yeah.
[00:31:34]  Because the pitching.
[00:31:35]  Yeah.
[00:31:35]  So, I mean, all this to say is that like the relative pitch up of the nose can be extremely unstable because you're constantly risking that kind of fatal stall situation.
[00:31:48]  Gotcha.
[00:31:48]  Right?
[00:31:49]  Okay.
[00:31:50]  So Boeing was like, huh, we put this gigantic engine in the 737 MAX, and now it's causing the nose to kind of pitch up because the engine's pushing up on the wing a little bit.
[00:32:05]  What do we do?
[00:32:06]  Because we don't want to break open the plane and build a new plane.
[00:32:10]  So we are actually just going to install a software override.
[00:32:15]  Like a little, they're going to have like a little guy in there that fix it for you.
[00:32:20]  Yes.
[00:32:20]  We're just going to install a software program to basically fix the problem of our own engineering.
[00:32:27]  And the computer system then was meant to push the nose back down when it senses from one sensor that the plane might start exceeding the angle of attack limits.
[00:32:38]  Okay.
[00:32:38]  So the nose is pitching up, pitching up.
[00:32:41]  There's a little sensor on the plane and it's like ding And it overrides not just the pilot, but also the co-pilot and pushes the plane back down.
[00:32:53]  Okay, so it like swats it down because it's going up too fast.
[00:32:56]  Yes.
[00:32:58]  Now, so they installed this override system in the 737 MAX, but they don't really tell anybody.
[00:33:04]  No, it's actually not.
[00:33:05]  I mean, the big, the big, so the 737 MAX, from what I understand, I'm not an expert on this stuff, but from what I understand is like, was essentially a response to like a new product out by Airbus, which is, again, like their only real competitor.
[00:33:19]  And Boeing, because of some reason.
[00:33:22]  I think.
[00:33:22]  Yeah, some fucking plane.
[00:33:24]  But, you know, the Boeing, not as agile maybe as it once was, was kind of taken by surprise at this and was like, we got to come up with a new thing.
[00:33:32]  And this was their answer to that.
[00:33:34]  Which wasn't a new thing.
[00:33:35]  It was just the 737.
[00:33:37]  Yeah, but with their engines.
[00:33:38]  Yeah.
[00:33:38]  And with other stuff in it.
[00:33:40]  And one of the things that they wanted to get this thing out there as soon as possible without having the pilots go through flight simulator training because that was costly.
[00:33:49]  It would be, you know, there would be less adoption by, you know, like maybe less sales.
[00:33:54]  And so stuff like MCAS, they didn't exactly like advertise or tell anyone about or put in the manual.
[00:34:02]  Yeah, and it wasn't just because they wanted to like rush it to market.
[00:34:06]  It was because if they did, and if pilots were aware that there was this new sort of override system and there was a new sort of a new thing to learn and to manage, they would have to maybe report that this plane was a little bit different, maybe even significantly different than the 737.
[00:34:25]  Yeah.
[00:34:25]  And if the plane, the 737 MAX, was that significantly more different, that more, you know what I'm saying, than a previous 737, then it would mean that the FAA would need to recertify the plane, which would take years and would be very costly to Boeing.
[00:34:44]  And so in the interest of getting this out the door as quickly as possible, they're like, well, you know, this benign software is simply something to keep our brave pilots, our Sully Sellenbergers, safe.
[00:34:56]  Yes.
[00:34:57]  And so they didn't tell anybody.
[00:35:00]  Yeah.
[00:35:00]  And if you guys are thinking like, damn, that sounds extremely fucking stupid and potentially even criminal, you would be correct.
[00:35:08]  But Boeing doesn't really admit any of that until after two fatal crashes.
[00:35:13]  So the first of those crashes, and these are very famous crashes.
[00:35:17]  So bear with me if you know about this because there's a high likelihood that you do.
[00:35:22]  But the few of you are.
[00:35:24]  It's all building up to what's going on now.
[00:35:25]  We got to go through it.
[00:35:26]  For many baby listeners who were just simply fell off their turnip truck yesterday, this is for you.
[00:35:30]  The first of these crashes was Lion Air off the coast of Indonesia in late 2018.
[00:35:37]  This killed all 189 people on board, including famous country singer Towns Van Zant.
[00:35:44]  So the response to this one was insane.
[00:35:48]  I think Boeing probably had a decent idea of maybe what went on here.
[00:35:53]  And there's a lot of, you can read between the lines on a lot of the contemporary reporting at the time, because I think even a lot of reporters were a little skeptical about Boeing's and Lion Air, but via Boeing's like very aggressive and muscular response to this.
[00:36:08]  So there's a 2019 article from the New York Times entitled Lion Air Crash Families Say They Were Pressured to Sign No Suit Deal.
[00:36:17]  This details how the company was, the Lion Air, was enmeshed in the regulatory state of Indonesia, much like Boeing is kind of enmeshed in the America or the regulatory state of America or the apparatus of America.
[00:36:30]  And that Lion Air routinely kind of paid off officials and any sort of bodies that would regulate them in any sort of way with just giant plastic bags full of cash.
[00:36:41]  In that article, it also talks about how they were able to assemble this kind of crisis center right after the crash and fly as many of the family members of the people who were killed in the crash to that crisis center and pay them off with bags of $92,000, not actual bags, but they were essentially having people having people sign these pledges to not sue not only Lion Air, but any of the, I think it was something around 400 related companies,
[00:37:10]  like people who had manufactured the airplane, whatever, like essentially this agreement to not sue especially Boeing for $92,000.
[00:37:20]  Yeah, we were talking about this yesterday and I was saying, oh my God, it reminds me so much of that bullshit that Liz Warren was doing for, I can't even remember which company, Dow Chemical, I think it was.
[00:37:32]  She was working when she was being flown to Africa to have heart-to-hearts with some of the women who suffered complications from breast implants.
[00:37:44]  And she tried to pass it off as doing some good.
[00:37:48]  I don't know, she kind of tried to like do a woke spin on it because it was Africa.
[00:37:53]  So I guess she just tried to build off of that or something.
[00:37:57]  But yeah, it's just like fucking sending a bunch of fucking lawyers to get you sign away rights and give you hush money.
[00:38:03]  Classic, classic, classic.
[00:38:04]  I mean, this is, I mean, and to kind of zoom out a little bit, I mean, yeah, this is these Boeing, which is the sort of implication of a lot of contemporary reporting and reporting since is that Boeing was putting Lion Air up to this, that they're flying all these families out in the midst of their like sudden shock grief to be like, you're not going to sue anybody.
[00:38:22]  You're not going to sue anybody.
[00:38:23]  Here's $92,000.
[00:38:25]  Which Indonesia goes a long way.
[00:38:27]  The other thing is that Boeing was sort of blaming these third world pilots on like, you know, they're not so trained.
[00:38:34]  They're not so safe.
[00:38:35]  This kind of thing wouldn't happen in America.
[00:38:37]  But it comes out that MCAS was the reason for this crash.
[00:38:43]  Yeah, the same thing happened with the second crash, the Ethiopian Airlines flight.
[00:38:50]  That killed 157 people just months later in March 2019.
[00:38:57]  And one month before John Marnett gets quoted in the New York Times about problems at Boeing's manufacturing facilities.
[00:39:04]  But that flight is funny because the Ethiopian government comes out and maintains and says, this is like a quote from the report.
[00:39:12]  They say it was repetitive and uncommanded airplane nose down inputs, which put the airplane in an unrecoverable drive.
[00:39:19]  So essentially, that software program, that override, was pitching, was like pushing it down as the pilots were trying to pull it up and they couldn't.
[00:39:28]  Yeah, so I mean, at this point, too, like it was known, I mean, this is kind of part of the big scandal that happened with Boeing.
[00:39:35]  It's like it was known that MCAS was probably the reason for the, or was the reason for the Indonesian crash.
[00:39:44]  And so there had been like this like rush, like explanation from Boeing reps to like pilots around the world.
[00:39:49]  People were piloting this thing.
[00:39:50]  Like, oh, there's these, these measures you can take if it starts doing this.
[00:39:54]  And it later comes out that these guys, the pilots on this Ethiopian airline flight had done those measures and the plane still took them down.
[00:40:02]  Because it's just if one sensor is faulty, that means the plane is taking itself into a nosedive, which is fucking insane.
[00:40:09]  Yeah, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, which I think everyone kind of knows is pretty, I guess you would say, in bed with Boeing, like a lot of other regulatory bodies that we're going to talk about today, they disagreed vehemently with the Ethiopian government, and I believe they joined the French.
[00:40:29]  The way that these things get done internationally is a little complicated.
[00:40:35]  But they came out along with the French and said, no, no, no, it wasn't the software.
[00:40:41]  It was the pilots.
[00:40:42]  And also, it was a bird strike.
[00:40:44]  Yeah.
[00:40:44]  Yeah.
[00:40:46]  I don't, yeah.
[00:40:47]  I don't know if I buy that.
[00:40:59]  So, to be clear, John Barnett, the dead whistleblower, was not working on the 737 Max.
[00:41:07]  No.
[00:41:07]  No.
[00:41:07]  He was in South Carolina where the 787 Dreamliner was being flown.
[00:41:14]  This is like, this is the crazy thing about the whistleblower, I guess, culture at Boeing is it seems like there was a considerable number of them.
[00:41:25]  Like there seems to be a lot of people who had worked at Boeing for a while or either were maybe just like had two brain cells to rub together and was like, what we're doing at these plants is like absolutely absurd.
[00:41:37]  And like we are sending planes out that are not airworthy.
[00:41:41]  Yeah.
[00:41:42]  And so John Barnett was just one of many, but he became a pretty notorious one within Boeing.
[00:41:49]  Yeah, we mentioned that 2019 New York Times big magazine piece that came out and that's where he was initially quoted.
[00:41:59]  And this is from that, this is from that piece.
[00:42:02]  On several planes, John Barnett, a former quality manager who worked at Boeing for nearly three decades and retired in 2017, discovered clusters of metal slivers hanging over the wiring that commands the flight controls.
[00:42:15]  If the sharp metal pieces produced when fasteners were fitted into nuts penetrate the wires, he said, it could be catastrophic.
[00:42:23]  And then it goes on and it says that he had raised this point with his bosses at Boeing and they just reassigned him to a different area of the plant.
[00:42:33]  I mean, I was reading through a bunch of stuff from all the different whistleblowers from a lot of the different reporting.
[00:42:40]  And it seems to me that the big problem is they keep just like leaving shit in places where they shouldn't.
[00:42:46]  Listen, I've worked in one industrial environment in my life.
[00:42:51]  I'm not going to say that I'm an expert on this kind of stuff.
[00:42:54]  But and I'm trying to think if I ever left anything weird in anything, which I definitely didn't.
[00:43:00]  Like we were pretty careful on this stuff because if you left something in a machine, something bad could happen.
[00:43:05]  And so you would check to see if something was.
[00:43:08]  Like it could be dangerous.
[00:43:09]  It could be dangerous or whatever.
[00:43:11]  And I want to clarify too, like there was several people that I worked with who were active alcoholics who were very drunk most of the time.
[00:43:18]  And none of those people ever did that.
[00:43:20]  It is like, I mean, and you know, it's not too different.
[00:43:24]  You know, we're screwing in nuts and fucking, you know, working on a factory line.
[00:43:30]  These guys are leaving any old thing on the plane.
[00:43:32]  They're like leaving like ladders in the plane.
[00:43:34]  They're leaving like bolts and engines.
[00:43:36]  I mean, this is, it is a complete and total fucking like mess inside these planes.
[00:43:42]  Yeah.
[00:43:42]  And I think, I mean, a lot of people have spent a lot of time detailing all of this.
[00:43:46]  It's not because a bunch of stupid people are working at these plants.
[00:43:49]  It's because of management practices.
[00:43:51]  Yeah.
[00:43:52]  And everything getting broken apart.
[00:43:53]  You know, outsourcing is a huge story.
[00:43:56]  That is a huge part of all manufacturing in America.
[00:44:00]  And looking at what's happened to it over the past like 30, 40 years.
[00:44:07]  But it's also just like rushing to get shit out.
[00:44:10]  You know, it's the classic kind of story.
[00:44:14]  And a lot of this, I think, you know, people know this comes from all the very widely reported management changing at Boeing.
[00:44:20]  It's kind of classic 21st century leaning out of the company.
[00:44:24]  You know, let's find all the points in the process to smooth out operations.
[00:44:28]  Let's break it apart into all these different things, all these different places.
[00:44:32]  Let's do a bunch of labor arbitrage to like skim as much off the top as we can, lean, lean, lean, cut all the costs just to like placate all the shareholders so we can keep bumping the price up.
[00:44:43]  I mean, I think everyone knows this kind of story, but it is a really, really important part of what happened at Boeing and why this is all happening.
[00:44:52]  That is something that cannot be emphasized enough is that like, listen, Boeing is in parts like an arms manufacturer.
[00:44:59]  I'm not saying that like Boeing is like, this isn't us being like, we fucking love Boeing or whatever, but it is a verifiable fact that is present in pretty much any history of Boeing that like the culture in which these planes were made changed drastically after their merger in the 1990s.
[00:45:21]  Yes.
[00:45:22]  Yes, absolutely.

=== Boeing's Merger Impact (15:35) ===

[00:45:24]  A big change that happened with that was, I mean, that was basically McDonald, they merged with McDonnell, McDonnell Douglas, right?
[00:45:32]  And then even though McDonnell Douglas was a smaller company, basically Boeing let them just take over all management practice.
[00:45:41]  Absolutely.
[00:45:42]  And this is a very similar thing that I've seen play out in many of my own relationships when I was younger, where I had less resources and I was somewhat, I guess you could say, pathetic.
[00:45:50]  And I would sort of latch onto a host and kind of drain them of their will to live and money, et cetera, et cetera, until they became me.
[00:45:59]  That is like, McDonnell Douglas seems to have been kind of run on the McKinsey style lines.
[00:46:05]  We love McKinsey.
[00:46:06]  We love him.
[00:46:07]  I learned a lot about McKinsey last night, actually.
[00:46:09]  Tell you about that in a different way.
[00:46:13]  I'm not sure how to take that.
[00:46:14]  Are you changing the way things are practiced around here?
[00:46:18]  Yeah, but I met someone I think we should hire.
[00:46:21]  But the restructuring that Boeing went through over the next couple of decades has made it almost into an entirely different company.
[00:46:29]  It was really, I mean, this is the thing that Boeing was known for.
[00:46:31]  It was like engineering, engineer-focused practices.
[00:46:36]  McDonnell Douglas was basically something that was seen as being run by like the money guys.
[00:46:41]  Yes.
[00:46:42]  And obviously Boeing's being run by money guys too.
[00:46:46]  But like this is a, it is a, it is a fundamental difference in approach.
[00:46:52]  And for a lot of companies, you know, whatever, your crock pots or whatever, I mean, it's like, okay, the companies start making our product shittier and now Levi's suck now or whatever.
[00:47:02]  But like this is an airplane where people have to go into and not die.
[00:47:07]  And so the approach that Boeing started taking did not become conducive to safety.
[00:47:15]  Well, yeah.
[00:47:15]  And it seems like they didn't give a fuck about it, right?
[00:47:17]  Because I mean, this is when all the classic things you've always heard about shareholder capitalism, like anything you can do to push the shares up, right?
[00:47:26]  Which means, oh, let's do all the stock buybacks, right?
[00:47:29]  Investment doesn't go into the company.
[00:47:31]  It goes into buying stocks to push the stock price back up.
[00:47:33]  Boop, they did that too.
[00:47:34]  Everyone's doing that.
[00:47:35]  Okay, fine.
[00:47:36]  Let's also, let's move our headquarters out of Seattle.
[00:47:41]  Let's break up all of the big plants.
[00:47:44]  And actually, remember how we talked about John Vardenette?
[00:47:47]  He's in Charleston?
[00:47:48]  Well, he was in Charleston because they opened up that factory so they could get out of the heavily unionized state of Washington and into the right-to-work state of South Carolina.
[00:48:01]  Interesting.
[00:48:02]  Yeah, I mean, this is some reporting from 2016.
[00:48:05]  In months following the South Carolina announcement, Boeing executives publicly said they selected the state in large part of its non-union productivity.
[00:48:13]  When Vaughat Aircraft opened a North Charleston plant to make 787 fuselage sections in 2006, workers voted to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which also represents the 31,000 workers in Washington and Portland.
[00:48:29]  Okay.
[00:48:29]  A couple months after Boeing bought the plant in 2009, the workers voted the union out.
[00:48:35]  This was a major, major decision, right?
[00:48:38]  I mean, the other shift, the other big shift to South Carolina, and this is really important, is that it has a lot of political cachet.
[00:48:46]  It is a state with a significant number of members that are much, let's say, much more vocal and have much bigger ties to a lot of the establishment, let's say, legal houses, big guns in Washington.
[00:49:04]  Yeah.
[00:49:05]  Right.
[00:49:05]  And moving to that state was very important for that reason, alongside moving all of their office operations, not just out of Seattle to Chicago, but then from Chicago to Arlington, Virginia.
[00:49:18]  Okay, where this podcast is also technically headquartered.
[00:49:21]  Yeah, so I mean, you know, they're making all of these, you know, all of these really big, big decisions to basically strip out the company of anything that could possibly be seen as in the way of any last bit of profit that they could squeeze out just to bump up the stock price.
[00:49:41]  And just to like, you know, hammer this point home, I mean, the thing that you said about the safety, you know, that this is, these are airplanes that people have to fly in.
[00:49:48]  I mean, I think that's a really, really important point, which is that like, you know, the fundamental issue is the requirements of aerospace design when we're talking about like this fucking software issue on the 787.
[00:50:02]  But the requirements of safety in aerospace design are at odds with the ethos of, you know, Wall Street and these like McKinsey or Harvard Business Review management gurus that spew this kind of like lean it out, strip it out, break it out, break it down, sell it for parts.
[00:50:26]  Those things are at odds when you're talking about making planes that have to carry people from one place to the next safely.
[00:50:32]  It does seem to be an insurmountable problem for Boeing at this point.
[00:50:36]  Like it is, it is, it is abundantly clear from whether we're talking about the John Barnett stuff with the 787 or with the like very, very, well, we'll get into that in a second more, but like the 737 MAX case, I guess you could put it, because there was technically a legal case against them.
[00:50:57]  You see with both of those things, the causes are very clearly identifiable, right?
[00:51:03]  It's the fact that Boeing was in pursuit of boosting shareholder value, was leaning out the company and was causing planes to roll out of the assembly line unfinished or not safe for humans to fly in.
[00:51:20]  Yeah, I mean, think about it this way.
[00:51:22]  This is a perfect illustration.
[00:51:23]  In aviation, right, redundancy is everything.
[00:51:27]  You need two or three of one thing because if the first one fails, you need the second one.
[00:51:33]  It's the beginning one of the end.
[00:51:34]  Exactly.
[00:51:35]  No, but you need like two or three of the things.
[00:51:38]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:51:39]  Because you need them to be there if the first one fails, if the second one fails.
[00:51:43]  That is the exact opposite of anything that anyone from McKinsey or Harvard Business Review or any of this fucking bullshit would tell you.
[00:51:51]  They'd say, you don't need redundancy as the enemy.
[00:51:54]  You need to get rid of it.
[00:51:55]  Get rid of it.
[00:51:56]  Just have one.
[00:51:56]  Just have one sensor.
[00:51:57]  Just have one sensor.
[00:51:59]  Well, that's a fucking problem in aviation.
[00:52:01]  These things are at odds.
[00:52:02]  It's crazy to me because it seems like, listen, like the whole point of like why we like have the, I guess that you would say like the defenders of capitalism would say that like it boosts innovation and discovery and makes things actually more efficient to the efficiency of the market.
[00:52:24]  And it just doesn't seem like the, but like the way that like McKinsey and all these this, and I'm not saying McKinsey directly making these decisions at Boeing, but like this sort of mindset here, it seems like in the long run or even in the medium run or really actually even in the short run, it's actually less efficient than like the way that they had been doing it before, which is still capitalism, don't get me wrong.
[00:52:46]  But it just seems like this, it's like this, I don't know, obsession with these very, very short-term profits at the risk of, I mean, Boeing, I don't think he's at fundamental risk here, although I don't know.
[00:53:00]  But like the hollowing out and the complete destruction of these companies that are supposed to be the thing that like their entire, I don't know how to pronounce this, but raison detré.
[00:53:10]  How do you say it?
[00:53:11]  Raison debt.
[00:53:12]  Raison debt.
[00:53:13]  Their raison debt is to fucking keep these companies going and rocking, and they can't even do that.
[00:53:19]  Yeah.
[00:53:20]  Like the most like dim-witted, like mid-century mid-level Soviet bureaucrat could probably run Boeing better than John Calhoun or whatever.
[00:53:30]  Yeah.
[00:53:30]  I mean, who's coming up with what if we just programmed a computer to beat, you know, aerodynamics?
[00:53:37]  That's facts, though.
[00:53:38]  So you might be asking, this is always the question that I have with this kind of thing, is who can we hang?
[00:53:45]  Right.
[00:53:46]  And I think that that is a, is a, is a, listen, I love America.
[00:53:51]  I'm one of probably history's greatest patriots.
[00:53:54]  One thing that this country does very little of, in fact, basically none of at all, is hanging people that I don't like.
[00:54:03]  And I feel like I'm somebody who, as longtime listeners of the show will know, hates flying now because it's such a fucking pain in the I never liked it.
[00:54:12]  In fact, we did a whole episode about that.
[00:54:14]  That was just on the airlines.
[00:54:16]  Which we should mention, we should say, we should plug that.
[00:54:19]  You should listen to that.
[00:54:19]  We're going to link to it.
[00:54:20]  Yeah, to go.
[00:54:21]  There's a whole whole episode about why flying sucks.
[00:54:23]  After Liz and I got fucking marooned out in goddamn Austin, Texas, and we're forced to start a fucking cryptocurrency company.
[00:54:34]  But I always am like, well, who's getting in trouble for this, right?
[00:54:36]  Because I think about this.
[00:54:38]  Going back to when I was a male florist, I remember when fucking Jane Kim, the progressive in San Francisco, gave Twitter the Twitter tax break for mid-market, right?
[00:54:50]  And I remember being like, that's crazy that she's giving this company this big thing where like this struggling small Greek flower shop I work for is getting rained in the ass by the city.
[00:55:00]  And I was like, how come there's like different rules for different people than me in like the places that I go to?
[00:55:07]  Damn, that's facts.
[00:55:08]  That's facts.
[00:55:09]  And the same thing is kind of playing out with Boeing.
[00:55:12]  If I fucked up so bad at any job that I had that hundreds of people died, I would get in so much trouble.
[00:55:21]  Like imagine if I did a podcast episode.
[00:55:25]  We did a podcast episode, but I said, I was like, you should.
[00:55:30]  Turn the gas on in your house if you get cold and kind of leave it on because it's cheaper than getting heat with the little nest thing that you might have in there.
[00:55:39]  I don't really know how those things work.
[00:55:40]  I don't have one.
[00:55:41]  But let's say that I caused the deaths of hundreds of our listeners, right?
[00:55:44]  I would probably get in trouble here.
[00:55:46]  Maybe.
[00:55:47]  I would probably get a, I mean, thankfully there's not a lot of redundancy on the show.
[00:55:50]  So I would get, you can't really kick me out, but I would probably have to take a backseat for a while, right?
[00:55:57]  You might kill me.
[00:55:59]  I would not.
[00:55:59]  You wouldn't kill me, no.
[00:56:00]  You're too sensitive for that.
[00:56:02]  But he might kill me.
[00:56:03]  It's not about sensitivity.
[00:56:05]  I don't understand how so many people at Boeing can have basically directly caused hundreds of deaths and then nobody really gets in trouble.
[00:56:15]  Let me introduce you to the American legal system.
[00:56:17]  It's crazy.
[00:56:18]  It's crazy.
[00:56:19]  So the 737 MAX crashes were a big fucking scandal.
[00:56:25]  I mean, there's been like documentaries about the, I've watched several of them in the past few days, but I knew about this and I try not to look at scary aviation news because I have to fly not infrequently.
[00:56:36]  You know, it was made very clear basically by not only the reporting, but just by the bare facts of the events that Boeing was directly at cause in the deaths of hundreds of people in these two plane crashes.
[00:56:52]  But keep in mind, Boeing is the only U.S. commercial airliner manufacturer.
[00:56:59]  It is a huge supplier, like Liz said earlier, for the U.S. defense industry and provides a sort of stable of staff for U.S. presidents and administrations.
[00:57:09]  For example, Obama's chief of staff from 2011 to 2012 was former Commerce Secretary William M. Daly, Richard Daly's son, who resigned from the board of Boeing to take the gig.
[00:57:22]  I mean, to be honest with you, I would not personally take a job as another man's secretary, which is what a chief of staff is, but I guess things function differently in Chicago.
[00:57:31]  I'm just like, yeah, I wouldn't do that.
[00:57:33]  I don't really feel like Do you feel like that's like What's your problem with secretary?
[00:57:38]  I'm not saying that.
[00:57:39]  Oh, interesting.
[00:57:40]  You're saying that you think that I think it's gendered.
[00:57:43]  I don't, I'm not saying I think anything.
[00:57:44]  I'm asking you to tell me what you think.
[00:57:47]  I wouldn't take, I wouldn't leave my job to be another dude's secretary.
[00:57:52]  I'm just, I just don't think that that's just not for me.
[00:57:55]  That's not my journey.
[00:57:56]  That's not my journey.
[00:57:57]  But if it's yours, I support you.
[00:57:59]  Not you, but anybody who's thinking of doing it.
[00:58:02]  What?
[00:58:03]  That's not your journey, I'm saying.
[00:58:05]  Why?
[00:58:05]  How am I in trouble for this?
[00:58:07]  Trump replaced General Mattis.
[00:58:10]  Remember that fucking guy?
[00:58:11]  Not really.
[00:58:12]  Why did I say fucking so weird?
[00:58:13]  Remember that fucking guy?
[00:58:15]  You used to hear about him all the time.
[00:58:16]  He's Mad Dog Mattis.
[00:58:18]  Hopefully they put his money.
[00:58:19]  There's so many folks you don't hear about anymore.
[00:58:21]  It's one of those guys.
[00:58:22]  I think what they should have done, they should treat that guy like a goddamn bully XL.
[00:58:26]  He sounds like one.
[00:58:27]  Mattis sounds like Mad Dog Mattis.
[00:58:29]  Yeah, but even without the Mad Dog part.
[00:58:31]  But Trump replaced him with a Boeing guy.
[00:58:34]  There is a fantastic, I don't want to say super short, but it's like 27, 28 page piece by Columbia law professor John C. Coffey, sounds like an energetic guy, called Nosedive, Boeing in the Corruption of the Deferred Prosecution Agreement, that lays out a lot of the problems with the government's prosecution of the 737 MAX crashes.
[00:58:57]  Because you remember, these were big, this big deal.
[00:59:00]  There was a congressional hearings about this.
[00:59:02]  Boeing's in a hot seat.
[00:59:03]  There is a legal case against them from the DOJ.
[00:59:07]  All in all, Boeing ended up having to pay $2.5 billion in fines, which seems like a lot of money, right?
[00:59:14]  It does.
[00:59:16]  But I feel a twist coming on.
[00:59:18]  Oh, no, the twist is coming.
[00:59:20]  So this came at the end of Trump's term, which had seen itself like a drastic drop in corporate prosecutions, which aren't really a real thing anyways, but the numbers had dropped, even though the climate is basically always the same.
[00:59:35]  The case was bullshit from the get-go.
[00:59:38]  Coffee does a really good job of laying out how a lot of this probably went down.
[00:59:42]  But the case was brought forth in Texas.
[00:59:45]  Well, it was originally brought forth, I think in New York, with like, it was like the fraud division of DOJ because it was like they were alleging that like that Boeing had defrauded a lot of people, including the government, about the 730 MAX stuff, the 737 MAX stuff, which they did.
[01:00:01]  But then it was like a cybercrime lady took it in.
[01:00:04]  Yeah, and they decided to move it.
[01:00:06]  Well, they really wanted better jurisdiction.
[01:00:08]  I mean, that was the whole reason.
[01:00:10]  So they venue shopped this fucking case.
[01:00:13]  Classic, classic legal move.
[01:00:15]  Classic legal move.
[01:00:16]  Crazy that the government basically allowed them to do this.
[01:00:20]  And so what Boeing did was they stonewalled for the first six months.
[01:00:23]  And then when they got some movement on the Texas stuff, they decided to actually not cooperate, but to get down with the case.
[01:00:30]  It's prosecuted by this woman named Erin Neely Cox.
[01:00:33]  Yeah, I remember that name.
[01:00:34]  And judged by a right-wing corporate-friendly judge.
[01:00:39]  So the same day that this is sort of brought forth, there is a DPA signed, which is a deferred prosecution agreement.
[01:00:49]  We will get to that in a little bit.
[01:00:51]  But there's this big DOJ press release that comes out that is crowing about this $2.5 billion in fines that Boeing is going to have to pay.

=== Spirit's Contracted Fault (15:10) ===

[01:01:00]  And that does sound like a lot of money, right?
[01:01:03]  So if you actually get into the weeds, which Coffee does, it's actually not so much of a big fine.
[01:01:10]  So Boeing actually only pays $234 million as a, quote, criminal monetary penalty.
[01:01:17]  This is, according to the DOJ, representative of the money saved by not having pilots go through flight simulated training.
[01:01:24]  Crazy.
[01:01:25]  Exactly.
[01:01:25]  So it's like kind of like an arbitrary number.
[01:01:28]  And it's also, which the fucking DPA itself notes is on the low end of the recommended amounts.
[01:01:38]  So $1.77 billion goes to fucking airlines because they grounded the 737 MAX.
[01:01:45]  So they need to be paid out.
[01:01:46]  So they need to be paid out.
[01:01:48]  $500 million goes to basically families of survivors.
[01:01:53]  So JPMorgan immediately comes out and is like, actually, it's a pretty good deal.
[01:01:57]  It's a small, they call the fine itself.
[01:01:59]  They're like, this is small.
[01:02:01]  It's also, except for the $234 million penalty, tax deductible.
[01:02:06]  Ah, you got to love that.
[01:02:08]  Got to love that.
[01:02:10]  So actually, we paid that.
[01:02:12]  So yes, yes, we did because you know that Boeing probably has baller ass like tax lawyers that they got Jeffrey Epstein in there.
[01:02:20]  You know what I'm saying?
[01:02:20]  Like they are not, they are getting money back at the end of the year.
[01:02:24]  So Coffee says that the $1.77 billion to airlines actually wasn't necessary at all because they could just sue Boeing on their own.
[01:02:32]  It was included along with the $500 million to survivors to inflate the penalty to make it seem like the government didn't just give them a $200 million.
[01:02:42]  So it was basically just for the headline.
[01:02:44]  They're juicing the fucking numbers, Liz.
[01:02:46]  For the headline.
[01:02:47]  Exactly.
[01:02:47]  So that people wouldn't look away.
[01:02:49]  Because, I mean, imagine this, right?
[01:02:52]  I'm like, Boeing killed 350 people.
[01:02:57]  They had to pay $234 million.
[01:03:00]  You would be like, that seems small, right?
[01:03:02]  Yeah.
[01:03:02]  I mean, if they're like, oh, this plane needs to be grounded and they need to like figure all this shit out.
[01:03:06]  They kill, you know, they've got two crashes.
[01:03:09]  They're, you know, this is unsafe.
[01:03:12]  There's probably corporate cover-up here, total malfeasance.
[01:03:15]  That sounds like pennies.
[01:03:19]  Pennies.
[01:03:19]  And it fucking is pennies.
[01:03:21]  Beans.
[01:03:22]  Because all the rest of that money, the $1.77 billion, the $500 million to the survivors, all of that would have just gotten paid out anyway.
[01:03:30]  So they're just including it within the DPA so that the Department of Justice looks like it's doing something.
[01:03:36]  So then they blamed, and I hope you guys do not take a page from their book when we eventually get in trouble for my gas theories.
[01:03:46]  They just blamed like two guys who worked at Boeing, like two relatively mid-level guys.
[01:03:50]  Yes.
[01:03:50]  Mark Faulkner, who was sort of the main one, was he was a guy that they were like, he.
[01:03:56]  It does sound like his name, Mark Forkner.
[01:03:58]  I just want to say, it sounds like a guy that you put the blame on.
[01:04:01]  Right.
[01:04:02]  If I'm looking through the roster.
[01:04:04]  Mark Forkner.
[01:04:05]  We're tossing Mark Forkner onto the motherfucking story.
[01:04:07]  Really?
[01:04:07]  That's unfortunate because he's got scapegoat written all in that name.
[01:04:12]  Exactly.
[01:04:12]  Exactly.
[01:04:13]  He's lucky that John Lyre quit six months before the 737 MAX agreement went in.
[01:04:18]  So he was like a, he wasn't even a test pilot.
[01:04:21]  He's sort of called a test pilot and some stuff, but he was just like a guy who was involved, I think, in some of the flight simulator stuff.
[01:04:28]  And they got him on some pretty incriminating text messages.
[01:04:30]  But like the gist of it is, is like they essentially throw these guys under the bus for obeying the directives of guys above them.
[01:04:40]  So they were, as famously the Nuremberg defense went, just following orders.
[01:04:45]  And funny enough, Faulkner himself got off in his own trial, in his own civil suit.
[01:04:52]  Like a jury was like, oh, we believe your story because his defense he used said that he was being a scapegoat for the company.
[01:04:59]  No, it was, I think it was a criminal trial.
[01:05:00]  It was three days long.
[01:05:02]  And the jury came back and we're like, we're acquitting him of everything.
[01:05:04]  It was like wire fraud they put him under because he, you know, he did lie.
[01:05:08]  Yeah.
[01:05:08]  But like also all of his bosses lied.
[01:05:11]  And so nobody actually, like no single person actually genuinely got in trouble for this.
[01:05:19]  It was all like the blame shifting around.
[01:05:22]  Some money got paid off.
[01:05:24]  You know, Faulkner has to retire early or whatever.
[01:05:27]  But nobody, nobody, of course, no one went to jail.
[01:05:30]  Nobody ever goes to fucking jail.
[01:05:32]  But like there wasn't even a single person that this really got blamed on.
[01:05:35]  Boeing's leadership, you know, had some switch-ups in it.
[01:05:38]  And they had to create all these fake little like, you know, like, oh, this is our safety board or whatever.
[01:05:44]  But the main thing here is the deferred prosecution agreement.
[01:05:48]  So this might remind you of the non-prosecution agreement.
[01:05:54]  Similar sounding name.
[01:05:55]  Yes.
[01:05:55]  And it's pretty similar in a lot of the details.
[01:06:01]  So, and this time, we're going to pronounce it correctly.
[01:06:04]  Mo Tosick has an excellent article from February in the American Prospect that came out February this year titled Blowing the Door Off Boeing's quote Epstein Deal.
[01:06:16]  So in that, she interviews Paul Cassell, a lawyer who you might remember from some of the earlier True Anon episodes, a lawyer who sued the government on behalf of a couple of Epstein-Jane Does, which led to the sweetheart deal that got, you know, that whole Florida fluffle kind of getting the lid blown off of it, which led to the Miami Herald articles, which led to Epstein getting arrested again, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[01:06:40]  She points out that the guy running the team representing Boeing was former deputy AG Mark Phillip.
[01:06:47]  Mark Phillip had endorsed the Epstein sweetheart deal.
[01:06:51]  And he actually was like one of the, John Coffey talks about this a lot in his paper.
[01:06:57]  He was one of the people who essentially like pioneered the way that DPAs are written out now.
[01:07:06]  There is such a similar, I guess, mindset behind this of like these two teams of lawyers essentially getting together and like working the details of this out on their own.
[01:07:18]  Coffee seems to think that, or seems to imply very heavily, that like it's pretty clear that Boeing's lawyers got together with the DOJ to write out the statement of facts that accompany the DPA.
[01:07:29]  So like the stuff that is like in the record as like official, these are the facts.
[01:07:34]  And like to make it to basically absolve senior management of any blame.
[01:07:39]  There's certain lines in there that like explicitly say like this is not Boeing management's fault.
[01:07:44]  This is like essentially the fault of like a few mid-low level employees.
[01:07:49]  Oh, a few bad apples.
[01:07:51]  Exactly.
[01:07:51]  Yeah.
[01:07:53]  Both the Epstein article and the John Coffey paper both point out that the prosecutor of this case, Aaron Neely Cox, who I mentioned earlier, six months after this DPA is signed, goes and takes a job with Kirkland Ellis, who are the people representing Boeing in this case.
[01:08:11]  Nice little switcheroo.
[01:08:12]  Nice little job interview.
[01:08:14]  Nice little payoff.
[01:08:15]  There's so much else too of like the incestuousness between the legal stuff.
[01:08:20]  That's the thing that drives me crazy is that like if you are a company like this, you can't get in trouble because like half your lawyers work for the government and half the government's lawyers work for you.
[01:08:28]  Yes.
[01:08:28]  It's like it's all the same thing.
[01:08:31]  Yeah.
[01:08:31]  And half of your ex-lawyers work for the regulators who also now work for this is this has been pointed out.
[01:08:39]  The absurdity this has been pointed out too is that at one point the FAA is completely underfunded, right?
[01:08:44]  We talked about that in a previous episode.
[01:08:48]  FAA is completely underfunded.
[01:08:49]  The FAA was outsourcing their inspections of Boeing's planes to people that were being paid by Boeing.
[01:08:57]  So like the FAA inspections were being done by paid Boeing employees.
[01:09:01]  Yeah, part of this is actually because of the salary difference.
[01:09:05]  Like the FAA couldn't staff engineers that were worth their dime because the discrepancy, basically there's like a knowledge gap that widened and opened up a chasm between who could be at the FAA and then who was at Boeing, largely because of who they could recruit based on pay.
[01:09:24]  Yeah.
[01:09:25]  Right.
[01:09:25]  No one wants to hear that, but it's true.
[01:09:28]  And so the FAA being understaffed, undermanned, and basically the people that they had, maybe not the best and the brightest, let's put it that way.
[01:09:36]  They were like, you know what?
[01:09:37]  Maybe it's easier if you just do the regulating of your stuff.
[01:09:41]  And Boeing was like, sounds great to us.
[01:09:43]  Exactly.
[01:09:44]  So it's crazy because like it's it's it's this this like that's not regulation.
[01:09:50]  That's yeah, I mean you starve something.
[01:09:52]  I mean this is classic, the classic annoying move of like starving a you know regulatory apparatus, hollowing it out, and then being like, why are you guys doing such a shitty job?
[01:10:02]  We should just destroy the whole thing.
[01:10:04]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:10:05]  And so it's like it's now meme.
[01:10:08]  FAA is just a fucking, it's a fucking farce at this point.
[01:10:10]  Like it's not at all.
[01:10:13]  It seems completely incapable of people of keeping people safe in terms of flying or in terms of anything else, I guess.
[01:10:20]  That's kind of the remit.
[01:10:22]  So that DPA was set to expire two days after the Alaska Airlines door blew out.
[01:10:32]  Crazy timing.
[01:10:33]  So it was a three-year thing.
[01:10:34]  And so their whole thing with the DPA is like, all right, you have to like not get in trouble basically between now and then.
[01:10:41]  Can you do one thing?
[01:10:42]  Just do one thing.
[01:10:43]  Don't let any like doors fly off your plane, fly it or anything like that.
[01:10:47]  Just like, just pretend like wheels on.
[01:10:50]  The wheels on, everything's all whatever you got to do.
[01:10:52]  Just get one of those guys with really, really long arms, big wingspan to hold them from the inside.
[01:10:58]  Yeah.
[01:10:59]  Just got three days to go.
[01:11:01]  So the plane had been scheduled for maintenance that day, but they're like, you know what?
[01:11:07]  Actually, let her fly a few more.
[01:11:08]  We'll see what's it's all good.
[01:11:10]  Like they're like, we'll get to it tomorrow.
[01:11:12]  Finish your route.
[01:11:14]  And a big part of the problem, well, in fact, the main part of the problem, why the door flew off, is that there were fucked up rivets holding in the door.
[01:11:22]  So you know like how rivets work?
[01:11:24]  They hold something in.
[01:11:25]  Imagine if they did the opposite of that.
[01:11:28]  If they in fact facilitated it flying off.
[01:11:31]  That's kind of the rivet situation that they had going down that motherfucking plane.
[01:11:35]  Boeing knew these rivets were fucked up.
[01:11:39]  The process though involves like actually at Boeing to like get these planes made, which by the way, most of the plane is not even made at Boeing anymore.
[01:11:47]  So like it comes, it came to them fucked up.
[01:11:50]  But they just send it down the line.
[01:11:51]  They're like, all right, we'll fix this later.
[01:11:53]  We'll fix this later.
[01:11:55]  70% of the 737 MAX is actually made by a company named Spirit Aero Systems, which is a company that Boeing itself, in pursuit of this sort of McKinsey way of living.
[01:12:07]  Leaned out.
[01:12:08]  2005, they spun it off and they're like, it's your own company.
[01:12:12]  Yeah.
[01:12:12]  But you just make a lot of Boeing.
[01:12:14]  So they make some Airbus stuff too.
[01:12:16]  Spirit Aero Systems is led by Pat Shanahan, a former Boeing executive who had been acting Secretary of Defense under Trump until it was discovered that he had gone insane to insane links to support his son after his son brutally beat his mother with a baseball bat.
[01:12:31]  Not where I thought that sentence was going.
[01:12:33]  This is a quote from the Wall Street Journal.
[01:12:35]  It was actually a quote from Shanahan.
[01:12:38]  Use of a baseball bat in self-defense will likely be viewed as an imbalance of force, Shanahan wrote.
[01:12:43]  However, Will's mother harassed him for nearly three hours before the incident.
[01:12:47]  Not the kind of quote you want getting out there.
[01:12:49]  That's insane.
[01:12:50]  He was axed.
[01:12:51]  Yeah, now this guy is in charge of Spirit Aerosystems.
[01:12:54]  Isn't that insane?
[01:12:55]  That's crazy.
[01:12:56]  He sounds like Mad Dog Maddis there.
[01:12:58]  I mean, I guess you protect your kid.
[01:13:00]  That's very crazy.
[01:13:01]  Well, actually, the door itself was not assembled by Spirit.
[01:13:07]  It was made by contractors.
[01:13:09]  Wait, so Boeing bought—so Boeing spun out Spirit.
[01:13:14]  Yeah.
[01:13:14]  Yes.
[01:13:14]  Then contracted Spirit to make this, but then Spirit just contracted it to someone else.
[01:13:18]  Yes.
[01:13:18]  Got it.
[01:13:19]  Spirit contracted to somebody else.
[01:13:20]  And unfortunately, Liz, I have to tell you that no one can get in trouble for this because there's no documentation of the door being worked on that was ever filed.
[01:13:30]  And the video evidence of it happening in this factory has been erased.
[01:13:37]  Now, it's funny because I'm just reminded of some of the stuff we were looking at for this episode.
[01:13:42]  And Boeing management itself viewed internal documentation as a kind of hindrance, as too much of an excess to have around.
[01:13:53]  And so they didn't like to have really any paper trail of anything.
[01:13:57]  Yeah.
[01:13:58]  You know, again, another example of what running a lean operation can get you.
[01:14:04]  So if that's not insane enough, now that DOJ is opening, is rumored to be opening a new criminal investigation into Boeing.
[01:14:12]  It's unclear whether that's related to like the deep violations of the DPA or like an entirely new investigation.
[01:14:17]  I have a feeling because of Boeing's importance to the U.S. government and U.S. economy that will probably be a new investigation, but hopefully I'm wrong.
[01:14:25]  But now Boeing is in talks to reacquire spirit.
[01:14:31]  So there's just like money being moved around here at astronomical sums between people who have absolutely no stake in the safety of the people who fly on the airplanes that they're making like shit.
[01:14:53]  Before we wrap this up, I do want to say like, you know, thinking about what's going to happen with this company, it's tough because, you know, it is one of those things where you're like, no one's going to get in trouble for this.
[01:15:03]  No.
[01:15:04]  And it's unclear exactly what, it's, you know, what to get in trouble exactly for and where the blame should lie, right?
[01:15:12]  Because these companies that are so large also feel so arcane.
[01:15:17]  You know, it's like or a little like confusing as to how even things are run.
[01:15:21]  Yeah.
[01:15:21]  Because of the sort of, I don't know, like Kafka-S system that they've like set up to kind of spin all these things out and spin liability away from any sort of like central nervous system, kind of.
[01:15:32]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:15:33]  I was listening to one of the Odd Lots episode coverages of this, and they had this guy come on that was pretty interesting.
[01:15:40]  But he was talking about the kind of trajectory of Boeing and like where this could all kind of where it would maybe be heading.
[01:15:47]  And he was saying that it's like this like stripping down of the company wasn't just reflected in this like you know the classic outsourcing or how you've got you know you contract to the guy who contracts to the guy or you hire some guy in another country to do the software for the software override for the fucking you know what I mean for the engine whose components are made and everyone knows this story.
[01:16:09]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

=== Stripping Down Boeing (05:03) ===

[01:16:10]  But that it's not just like that stripping away or whatever, but like that recently Boeing literally dissolved their business strategy division, like the entire department.
[01:16:22]  And the guy on the show was like basically was just like, and it was some, you know, long, you know, longstanding aviation reporter, like, you know, guy who's been covering this stuff for years, probably from the Seattle Times or something like that.
[01:16:38]  Sorry if I don't remember, don't correct me.
[01:16:40]  Just listen to that episode.
[01:16:41]  It's interesting.
[01:16:43]  But he was just basically like, yeah, the only way to read that is that the company itself thinks that it does not have a future.
[01:16:50]  That it's literally getting rid of any sort of like future-oriented division within its company.
[01:16:56]  It's stripping itself down so much that, you know, and other people have mentioned this, but it's worth bringing up that it like, it's a lot like what happened with GE, right?
[01:17:06]  Where the company over time was stripped down, broken apart, leaned out.
[01:17:12]  And then when everyone had lost like consumer faith in the company itself and in the products and it delivering on any kind of actual sort of anything other than just like pumping its stock, basically it was broken up and sold off to parts and consumers were like, oh, good.
[01:17:32]  Like something, something responsible has finally been done.
[01:17:35]  Someone is, this has been broken off and everyone now doesn't have to deal with it.
[01:17:39]  And like, now it's been good.
[01:17:40]  But that's what the executives want.
[01:17:43]  Like that's the end goal is like you say, spinning off all of these divisions because then you can like lean it out even further, make money and fucking run.
[01:17:53]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:17:54]  And if you spin all this stuff up, it seems like I guess you can just kind of have the narrative that like, oh, we're like breaking up the company.
[01:18:00]  This company is too big and like too, it's like we need to like like its constituent parts will be somehow more democratic or more or more, you know, you can hold them accountable easy or something like that.
[01:18:12]  It's ridiculous.
[01:18:12]  Yeah.
[01:18:13]  And I mean, GE is as like any kind of in any real way doesn't exist anymore.
[01:18:17]  You know what I mean?
[01:18:18]  Like it's not really a company anymore.
[01:18:20]  And I mean the whole thing sounds like so perverse because it is.
[01:18:25]  Like, and this is what short-term profit maximizing incentivizes.
[01:18:30]  It incentivizes just the wholesale liquidation of the company.
[01:18:34]  And it's this like total like backwards thinking.
[01:18:37]  Like I think that sometimes I was thinking about this like when on the right over here, like, you know, we don't live in the 19th century anymore, which is something that you'd think would be obvious.
[01:18:49]  But, you know, firms aren't investing to make profits, right?
[01:18:58]  What they're trying to do is basically, you know, from basically World War II on, There was a kind of a clapback, we'll say, of the kind of rent landlord class that had been, you know, sort of tamped down a bit from, you know, the 19th century onward, right?
[01:19:19]  And by landlord class, I mean rent-seeking class or whatever, right?
[01:19:22]  And now firm, I mean, it really like came to a head in the 80s, obviously.
[01:19:26]  Everyone knows this.
[01:19:28]  But now firms don't sell like products.
[01:19:31]  They're not trying to do that.
[01:19:32]  They're basically trying to sell a right to charge a fee.
[01:19:35]  Yeah.
[01:19:36]  So what they want to do is strip away as much as they can to lean something out, to basically just have an asset that then they can charge for and collect a fee in perpetuity.
[01:19:47]  It's a rent.
[01:19:48]  Yeah.
[01:19:48]  Right.
[01:19:49]  And that's what all that's, we talk about McKinsey, right?
[01:19:52]  We talk about Harvard Business Review, McKinsey.
[01:19:55]  McKinsey's always the easy one to go to because they're the fucking biggest and they are.
[01:19:58]  They're the boogeyman.
[01:19:59]  You know what I mean?
[01:20:00]  Like that's what they do with these companies.
[01:20:02]  They say, get rid of all these things.
[01:20:04]  Why would you invest?
[01:20:05]  If you invest, that costs money.
[01:20:07]  You don't look at the long term.
[01:20:08]  It's short term, short-term profits.
[01:20:10]  How do you get that?
[01:20:11]  Strip everything out.
[01:20:12]  Sell it off for parts.
[01:20:14]  And it's like, it's this weird thing.
[01:20:15]  Like I always, you know, you kind of said this earlier.
[01:20:18]  And it's like you're like looking around at the sort of like, you know, like you're in sort of like old time at Toontown or whatever.
[01:20:25]  Here's all the companies that make all the widgets.
[01:20:27]  But it's like actual tombtown.
[01:20:29]  You get up front and it's just like a fucking wooden set.
[01:20:32]  But you look behind this company.
[01:20:34]  There's nothing.
[01:20:34]  They're ghost ships.
[01:20:36]  There's nothing there.
[01:20:37]  You know, and it's like, there's just nothing here.
[01:20:40]  There's nothing that's going to happen because that's the scary thing.
[01:20:43]  You talk about the legal system.
[01:20:44]  You talk about this.
[01:20:45]  There's no fail-safe to stop any of this.
[01:20:48]  It's just like a slow liquidation of everything.
[01:20:52]  Like you, it feels like, I said this to you, you know, when we were talking about this episode, it's like you see what these executives say.
[01:21:00]  You see, you look at their decisions.
[01:21:02]  You see how they're managing all of these kind of situations.
[01:21:05]  And it's like, is there a fire sale that I wasn't invited to?
[01:21:09]  Because it seems like nobody's making any plans for the future.

=== Showing Toontown (02:25) ===

[01:21:13]  Exactly.
[01:21:25]  Toontown fucking ass economy.
[01:21:27]  I'd like to take you to Toontown.
[01:21:30]  Sorry.
[01:21:31]  That was mean.
[01:21:32]  I'd like to take you there and to show you what could happen.
[01:21:35]  No, that's mean.
[01:21:36]  I don't see me.
[01:21:38]  You know what?
[01:21:38]  You could take me there.
[01:21:39]  I'll take you to Tomb Day.
[01:21:40]  If I get to see your testament.
[01:21:43]  You can't see my testament.
[01:21:44]  Why not?
[01:21:45]  You can't see my testament.
[01:21:46]  I have things that will be released.
[01:21:49]  I will be released.
[01:21:50]  You think I'll go to heaven?
[01:21:52]  Yeah.
[01:21:53]  Do you think that I'll be respected there?
[01:21:55]  Well, I don't know about that.
[01:21:56]  Because that's the thing.
[01:21:57]  I was like, I would go to heaven today if I knew I was going to get more respect there than I do here in this fucking dirty world.
[01:22:05]  Well, with that being said, my name is, well, Bryce Boeing, actually, of the Boeing family.
[01:22:13]  And frankly, like a Boeing plane, I'm full of nuts, bolts, and a little bit of fuel.
[01:22:17]  And a ladder.
[01:22:18]  And a ladder.
[01:22:19]  And a bunch of guys that are still locked in there.
[01:22:23]  Mm-hmm.
[01:22:25]  Oh, I'm Liz.
[01:22:26]  Happy to be back.
[01:22:27]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky, Young Bump.
[01:22:30]  I have like such marble mouth all the time.
[01:22:33]  It's because you spent, you guys understand this.
[01:22:36]  Liz talks about how she was gone for a few days.
[01:22:38]  Liz has been smoking cigars in the humidor.
[01:22:42]  Liz hangs out with a bunch of people that she won't let me meet.
[01:22:44]  And Cubans.
[01:22:46]  I'm afraid of her.
[01:22:47]  Well, two of them are Colombian.
[01:22:49]  And Albanian.
[01:22:50]  Well, yeah.
[01:22:51]  And we don't mention it to him, though.
[01:22:52]  Yeah.
[01:22:53]  But just smoking in this fucking humidor with these guys, it's like this little boys' club that Liz gets to go to, and me and Yong Chomsky can't hang out there.
[01:23:02]  And it's just like you come back and you're all refreshed.
[01:23:04]  You're wearing this big Hawaiian crazy McKinsey story.
[01:23:08]  You're wearing jaw purse.
[01:23:09]  And it's just like, you're a different person to me now.
[01:23:13]  But you know what?
[01:23:14]  I still respect you.
[01:23:15]  And I feel refreshed.
[01:23:16]  And this is Tronan.
[01:23:18]  We'll see you next time.
[01:23:19]  Bye.
[01:23:38]  Come out.