Behind the Bastards - Part One: Jack Welch Is Why You Got Laid Off

Episode Date: May 9, 2023

Robert is joined by Michael Swaim and Abe Epperson to discuss Hell's CEO, Jack Welch. (2 Part Series) Cracked alums Michael Swaim and Abe Epperson are making a new movie and you can help! Papa Bear is based on the hilarious, poignant true story of when Swaim's Dad came out as a gay furry. Click here (https://seedandspark.com/fund/papa-bear) to learn more and score cool rewards like posters, special thanks credits, or even a trip to the premiere!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Between April 1971 and September 1972, six young black girls were snatched off the streets in Washington, DC. This child was laying on the side of the road. The person said, I murdered your daughter. The killer believed that he may have been seen. I will admit the others when you catch me if you can, sign Freeway Phantom.

Listen to Freeway Phantom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The cheerleaders at a gym in Buffalo have been recording themselves to make a new documentary. We're the so-called news reporters. Because one year ago, a mass shooting changed their lives. He just walked around and shot all the black people. The cheer squad, most of whom are black,

had to figure out how to go on and how to compete. I wanted the win for them more than anything this season. Listen to the embedded podcast from NPR within the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Daniel Miller is a millennial con artist. I'm a social media influencer. Busted while recovering from Brazilian butt-lift surgery. She was yelling at the police for, like,

getting her butt tissue out of joint when they were handcuffing her. She's got hundreds of victims. To me, that's not a con artist. That just is a straight-up predator. And she just keeps getting away with it. This person is a danger. Listen to Queen of the Con, season three, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. It's a podcast. Shit. It's Behind the Bastards, a podcast that I was trying, like, in the 30 seconds before we started, to think of, like, a good, funny introduction, like, you know, shouting Hitler atonally or, you know, one of our other classics. It's a podcast. Shit.

That's all I came up with. That's fine. I considered Sophie doing, like, doing, like, a War of the World style intro, where I, like, pretend to be a newscaster, letting everyone know that, like, a new virus has been found, has reached the coasts of the United States and is spreading rapidly through populated areas.

But we already, we all did that, so that's not really funny. So I don't know. I don't know, Sophie. I don't know. I'm, I'm, you know... I liked it's a podcast. Shit. I failed. I failed. But you know who's not a failure, Sophie? Oh, yeah, I do. The guests that we have for this spectacular podcast episode today,

the glorious Michael Swame and the inimitable Abraham Epperson. I'm glorious, but you could imitate it if you tried hard. Yeah, yeah, you could imitate Michael, but, but not Abe. But, and I have, I have no discernment of quality, but you can't replicate it. That's right. That's right. Thank you. That's right. No one said it's good. It's just hard to do.

Yeah, it's just like, whoa, that's hard to do. I love that. I love that we had a pitch meeting about my compliments to turn them into insults. That was nice. It's really making me nostalgic for the old days. It cracked. And by the way, by doing a war of the worlds, I totally thought you meant get sick and die.

Like just keel over. Robert was the best of us all, but he couldn't handle a simple COVID. No, I, I, I, you know, COVID, who the CDC says it's over. So we're good. Yeah. I'm not even worried about it anymore. Michael Abe, as I, as I stated a little earlier, we all used to work together at the old place at the shop

at the comedy website that was based off of a comedy magazine that nobody read in the 1960s. But the website did quite well for a time. Mass TV, the website, if you will. Yeah. You guys are back on the last time we had both of you together was talking about the end of L Ron Hubbard and listening to his, his glorious, his glorious song. Thank you for listening.

And today I've got you want to talk about a very special piece of shit. One, one of the rare bastards who has had a major impact on the life of every single person listening to this podcast. But before we get into that, you guys have a project that you're working on that's very exciting. And I want to, I want to start with a plug up front so that we can get to that before people's souls leave their bodies with depression. And, and I'm supposed to remind you that you also have a podcast

because Dan'll, Dan'll threaten my life. Oh yeah. All right. Well, let's dispense with that quickly. I do a podcast with Adam Ganzer where we talk about video games. It's called One Upsmanship. I love it dearly and it's a weekly, weekly show that's great. But wait, there's more. Wow.

And thank you, Robert, because yeah. What a value. We're definitely here just to announce that we're clear since the Hubbard episode. We're totally clear. We're going clear. So good for us. And with that newfound power,

we've decided to try and make an indie movie. It would be our second indie movie. The first one's called Kill Me Now. If you want to see if we suck at it, you could go watch Kill Me Now on YouTube. It's available in the entirety. It's quite good. Thank you.

And it's been a long time and we're ready for number two. If you knew us from Cracked or like if you knew like After Hours, Agents of Crack does not compute. Hundreds of sketches. We were kind of the engine behind that. And, and this movie is based on the hilarious poignant true story of when my dad came out as a gay furry. It's super funny, but it's also got a lot of heart.

It weaves a bunch of other stuff in there as well. And Abe, do you have anything to add? Yeah, URL. Yeah. You can go help us out by going to seedandspark.com slash fund slash papa dash bear. And you can become part of the movie. You like get stuff from the movie, watch the film early,

even go to a premiere. We're stoked about telling the story. So if you can't help us get what we need to make it right. Yeah. Yeah. At the lowest tier, you're basically pre-buying a ticket. Because you'll just get a private link to the movie when it's ready. We have other funding like going on behind the scenes,

but the crowdfunding piece, which is going wrong right now, of course, is super crucial. And there's cooler stuff than that to get. Yeah. Yeah. If you if you donate at the highest level, you will literally be able to call yourself a producer and wear suspenders and like a nice iron shirt

and do mountains of cocaine while smoking a cigar. Don't forget the hat. Cheating on your wife. Don't forget the signed hat. You get a signed hat. All sorts of good stuff. We execute the adoption papers with your name on them, and you become my dad.

You are legally your dad. Wow. Wow. Mike's dad. You know, considering the movie is about your dad, that does kind of seem like a little bit of a kick in the face. It's weird. You're out all day.

It's like it's a gift of the Magi type situation where like I was able to make a movie about you dad, but now you're no longer my dad. But as you make it, you forget him. Yeah. It unrights. It comes out of your brain and disappears. But yeah, that's Papa Bear.

Papa Bear. Papa Bear. Look it up. But yeah, let's try it out. Yeah. Yeah. How horrors do you have for us? Excited to be here.

Strap in. A real horror. So we we should start a little bit here by talking about capitalism, you know, something that we're all intimately familiar with. And one of the most important things to understand, if you want to know kind of like why the US and its friends won the Cold War,

is that for a lot of people in the United States and other Western countries, capitalism seemed like a pretty fucking good deal from the time of the New Deal up through the late 70s to early 80s. Now, obviously this was predicated on extraction from countries outside of the United States and Western Europe from the global south,

whatever you want to call them. And it was also funded by supporting the subjugation by dictatorships of people living in those countries in order to extract resources. But within the United States itself in particular, Americans saw a 40 or so year long period where the standard of living and the average amount of like wealth held per person

increased at a pretty dramatic and extremely consistent rate. Prior to the New Deal, corruption and abuse within capitalism were pretty much universal. And the biggest companies were the ones that were generally the best at holding their workers down at gunpoint.

But after the Great Depression, there were new regulations introduced. And this combined with progressive social welfare policies ushered in by the FDR administration, helped lead the United States towards the titanic growth of the postwar years. Inequality plummeted, managers and workers were generally obviously paid differently,

but it wasn't like you see today, right? Like a guy working the line at a factory was not getting like one 500th of the amount of money that like the CEO of the company got. They were living kind of in the same vague planet when it came to income. And a lot of the day's business gurus argued that this was necessary

for healthy economic functioning. This was actually the most efficient way for the system to work. In 1943, Johnson & Johnson CEO authored a company, Credo, that spoke to a lot of people in big business in the United States. He argued that the company's first responsibility was to its customers.

Its second was to its employees, who he said deserved a sense of security with just management and short working hours and fair wages. Its next duty was to management and then last and least, it had a duty to its investors and shareholders. Yeah, that was the last. That's the CEO of Johnson & Johnson.

Business must make a sound profit, high taxes paid, new factories built, new products launched. When these things have been done, the owners and stockholders should receive a fair return. So that's pretty different, right? It feels like all things have become grotesquely extreme

to the point of ruining everything. You know, it takes time. At the beginning, I feel like they didn't realize how far they could go and how much they could get away with. It takes time to wake up and go, wait, could we take it all? Like, all? Oh, shit.

It takes time. And I think it also takes part of why this state of affairs came to be. These companies didn't start treating workers well and sharing profits with them because it was nice. They did it because the country, like, the United States nearly collapsed into, like, a revolution, right?

Like, things were that bad at the very worst of the Great Depression. The government was worried, like, are we going to do a Russia? And that fear faded, you know? That's kind of the story we're telling today. So I'm going to get ahead of myself. But if you want to look at kind of the company

during what's called the Golden Age of Capitalism, which is this period from the end of World War II up to kind of the Reagan era, the company that best embodied both the strengths of that capitalist system that existed then, and the kind of innovation that could come from it is General Electric.

Now, over the years, it was founded kind of in the late 1800s. And in the years since its founding, its engineers and scientists brought the world, like, half of the things that we consider like crucial aspects of daily modern life. They invented incandescent light bulbs. They invented the electric plant.

They shipped radios around the world and invented many of the first radios. They crafted the first vacuum tubes. They invented the garbage disposal. They created a wide variety of moldable and transparent plastics that became ubiquitous in household products and also every creature living in the ocean.

Obviously, you know, that part's not great. But on the positive side, the silicon rubber that they invented was a, like, made space travel possible. Like, you don't get human beings into space without it. All of these are bangers. These are all bangers. These are all bangers.

They're all impressive. Yeah. So this is, like, for about 100 straight years from the late 1800s to the 1980s, GE was not just a company that made a lot of money. It was a company that regularly invented things, or at least its, you know, its workers did, the scientists that it paid,

invented things that changed life for people all around the world. They're like, cups. That was us. Chairs. Fuckin' chairs. Pairs. Ever heard of it?

Yeah. Yeah. Foxygen. Thinkin' of stuff. Yeah. And their workforce was compensated, you know, as you'd expect, given their success. All the light bulbs you can eat. Yeah.

As many light bulbs as you can fit in your cheek pouches, like a squirrel. No, they were the company, they were one of the companies that they essentially invented the kind of modern concept of an employee retirement plan. They gave workers profit sharing. They were the first company, I think, to have, like, provide insurance for workers.

They invested in the ongoing, in ongoing education for their workforce. They had a corporate campus that featured swimming pools and spas and tennis courts and football fields and free classes and stuff like tap dancing that had no profit, you know, making benefit for GE, but made the workers happy. They kind of pioneered the shit that we now associate

with, like, the golden age of the tech industry, right? Right. Like, they all started with GE in, like, the 20s. Yeah, exactly. And this was part of an understanding by the management elite of the era that a happy workforce was one that would not tear you apart and shoot your family in a dank basement.

Men like GE's CEO Gerald Swope had the czar on his mind when he described the company ethos as welfare capitalism in 1922. This was a term that, like, his CEO felt proud to use, like, our company practices welfare capitalism. In 1927, company chairman Owen Young gave a speech at Harvard where he attacked businessmen who tried to, quote, squeeze out of labor its last ounce of effort

and last penny of compensation. Executives, he argued, needed to, quote, think in terms of human beings who put their lives in labor in a common enterprise for mutual advantage. And there's nothing more alien to kind of the business ghouls of our day than the concept of mutual advantage. And they were still rich, right? Like, you know what I mean?

Yes, they had a lot, they had plenty of money. Yes, they still led lives of plenty, right? And I should state a lot of times, and one of the main sources that we're going to wind up using for this episode, this this era gets romanticized. Part of why it gets romanticized is that a lot was nicer back then, like compensation of workers in the United States was much nicer. The system itself was still pretty soaked in blood.

For example, GE executives may have cared greatly for their workforce in the United States, but they had no issue with the idea that GE products would be used to murder civilians in foreign countries. GE's T-700 helicopter engine powered the Blackhawk after its adoption in 1978. They also made the engines for basically all of the helicopters that the United States used to annihilate large chunks of jungle

in Vietnam. They made the engines for the planes that dropped the defoliates that gave everybody fucking cancer. They were one of the top 10 largest contractors used by the US government to make nuclear weapons over the course of the Cold War. You know, they're not just like making nukes, but nukes, there's a bunch of parts that nukes involved.

And so GE was one of the primary suppliers of those parts. At the height of the Vietnam War, they made more than $1.6 billion a year in military contracts, making them the second highest paid defense contractor of the bloodiest chapter of the Cold War. So that's all bad, right? Like it's not, I'm not trying to like whitewash this stuff here. It's different than light bulbs.

I'll give you that. It's different than light bulbs. They made light bulbs and death bulbs. Light bulbs, rubber gaskets, the bicycle wheel, bullets, nukes, helicopters, lasers. You're all going to die. Michael, they did in fact invent the laser, by the way. That was also a GE invention.

I love this. This is fantastic. If you throw a dead cat in the room and you're like, oh, they invented dead cats. Something about the blindness created by overcoming trauma, like I'm sure you're going to get into it, but it like doesn't make the crimes go away. If the skeletons in the closet were like kind of made

in order to build the closet, that doesn't justify anything. And that's my standpoint. But it's like amazing to see what America has done in order to be like, you can't make fun of General Electric. They're goddamn General Electric. Yeah. No, I mean, and they are, that was very much like they were seen as an institution, like almost a branch of the government.

And part of it was the degree to which like so many Americans, hundreds of thousands were employed by them. And it was like kind of cradle to grave employment. If you got a job with GE in this period, that was your job for life. And then when you retired, they would pay you a pension, you know, like a county job today. Yeah, if you keep the US military machine rich

in killing machines, GE will take care of you, right? Like that was the bargain, you know? Yeah. So I want to quote now from a book by a guy named David Gells called The Man Who Broke Capitalism, and spoilers the man that the book is about is who we'll be talking about today. Quote, an annual report from 1953 described how GE worked

in the balanced best interests of all. The report trumpeted how much the company had paid in taxes, the virtues of paying its suppliers well, and how critical it was to take care of its employees. That year, GE proudly stated that it spent some 37% of its sales on pay and benefits for its workers, resulting in the biggest payroll in the company's history, with more people at work than ever before.

Next to the statistic was an illustration of a grinning factory worker walking away from the assembly line holding bags of money. Only after enumerating all the ways in which it was helping the government, suppliers, and employees, did the company mention how much it allocated for investors. The sum, a modest 3.9% of sales.

And think about how weird that is, right? Like, right now, we're going through this thing where, like, the head of the Federal Reserve is talking about how bad it is that wages have kept rising, and that's like a problem. Like, we need to discipline laborers, so they expect less. But in 1953, GE's being like, we're giving everything that we have to our workers.

Isn't that dope how much money we're paying our employees? Like, this is what you would brag about. And it's with so many issues, it's like vice versa, which party you would think like conservative traditionalists would be like, this makes more sense. Like, I would say, no, it's weirder now. What's weird is if you have a human enterprise and the person who makes the most money from it

has no, they didn't work there, they didn't invent it, they didn't form the business, they have nothing to do with it. Like, that's weird. It's weird to me that that's how it works now. Yeah, I can't imagine what you're thinking of when you say that working in the film and entertainment industry, Michael. But so the idea that was common at the time among the people who ran companies like GE

was that corporations had a responsibility both to the United States as a whole and to their workers. GE's head of employee benefits listed, quote, maximizing employment security as a prime company goal in 1962. Because the ability of workers to feel secure in their future was, in his words, the most productive asset the company had. Obviously, again, I hope I haven't under-emphasized the inequalities in the system,

but those inequalities were externalized primarily, right? The inequalities within American capitalism were outside of the United States primarily, right? Within the U.S., there was actually like quite, certainly a less unequal system than we have today. And we can see how kind of widespread these ideas were in the simple fact that from 1948 to 1979, worker pay in the United States grew at the same or close to the same rate

as worker productivity. But since 1979, this has changed dramatically. From 1979 to 2020, net productivity rose 61.8 percent, while the hourly pay of typical workers grew at about 17.5 percent over four decades. So it went from they grew at kind of the same rate during this, quote, golden age of capitalism to worker pay grew at less than a third of the rate

that productivity grew, right? What does that mean? I mean, that means workers are getting shafted, right? Like, yeah, there's no other way to look at that. Now, a lot of different factors had to come together to change this state of affairs. And obviously, there's not one single person that's solely responsible for why everything got a lot worse

within the United States. But here he is, here's his name. But there is, he is the guy who, he's not the guy who caused all of this, but he is the guy who his his career is the dividing line between the golden age of capitalism and the era we live in now. This grim age of billionaire CEOs

and starving workers on food stamps and like zero innovation effectively. Like there's a single guy whose life is sort of the dividing line between those two periods. He was the CEO of General Electric and his name was Jack Welch. He is such a bad person. You guys are really gonna have a terrible time with this episode.

I'm excited for this. I've seen, yeah, I've seen this guy. Yeah, he's very famous. He wrote, he won't, he like in his retirement, wrote like 20 different fucking management books that are all the same book, right? Like, yeah, they're all like nonsense, corporate like bullshit to keep in your fucking bookcase

behind you while you do a Zoom call. So everybody thinks that you know what you're talking about. Care about motivating your workers in it. Exactly. And everyone wins way and all that stuff. Yeah, he's a real great guy. His last name is Welch. I just want to put that out before we get in, you know?

Yeah, and he's got a Welch on a lot of bets. So break on it. All right, here we go. So the two books that I've used as sources for much of this episode are the book that I quoted from earlier, The Man Who Broke Capitalism by David Wells. And Jack's own autobiography, Jack, Straight from the Gut. Ew.

It's a horrible book. The first book, The Man Who Broke Capitalism, is pretty well written and it's a pretty damning indictment of Welch's career. It is written by a guy who really believes in capitalism. And so there's one of its flaws is that it definitely takes the like, things were so good before this guy came along and like ruined this wonderful system.

And it's like, I don't know, man. Like, I agree, he made things works, but like during the golden age of capitalism, we like underwrote coups in Guatemala and Korea and El Salvador and Chile and whatnot in order to like, secure resources for U.S. corporations. And yeah, that like, it wasn't great before. You know, Jack Welch didn't do any of that.

But he did take capitalism in the U.S. from a system that benefited Americans at the expense of other people and a system that benefited like 40 guys at the expense of the rest of the world. And that is bad, I guess. I don't know how you could parse that out morally however you want. That's not my job. I'm not going to solve this for you.

But he's a real piece of shit. So let's talk about that. Wait, wait, wait. I thought at the end of Behind the Bastards, at the very end of the series, you would reveal the answer that would solve everything, right? Is that not where we're headed? I, you know, Michael, I do have an answer for you.

It would have been the answer to Jack Welch if someone had done it earlier in his career. But it could still be the answer to a lot of bastards. Legally, I'm not allowed to say it on air. Okay, yeah, it's that answer. It rhymes with schmargated schmashination, okay? Like, that's the answer. So Welch's autobiography

is probably the most self-serving piece of trash I've read in my life. And I have read Saddam Hussein's writing. Art of the deal, worse than art of the deal. I kind of think so. Because at least Welch did all of the terrible things that he's talking about. It opens with these telling lines.

And strap yourselves in, boys. This one's rough. This may seem a strange way to begin an autobiography. A confession. I hate having to use the first person. Nearly everything I've done in my life has been accomplished with other people. Yet when you write a book like this,

you're forced to use the narrative I when it's really the we that counts. Now, that could be nice, right? But what Jack is actually setting up here is not that, like, oh, I've been forced to use I. And that means I'm not going to give enough credit to other people. What he's actually setting up here is that, like,

in this book, he takes credit for every good thing that happens at GE during its tenure. And I think he just, in the initial draft of this, gave himself credit for everything good that happened. And then his editor came in and was like, you sound like a giant prick. So you have to add something at the start of the book saying you're sorry for using I all the time.

That is exactly what I suspect happened, you know? That, like, an editor came in and was like, Jack, you got to, like, write something at the start here because you sound like a dick. He continues with one of the funniest sentences I've ever seen in an autobiography. Please remember that every time you see the word I in these pages, it refers to all those colleagues

and friends and some I might have missed. Now we move on. Hell, yes. Hell, yeah. The absolute gall. The arrogance. I love it. It's so good.

But as soon as I, because I was trying to decide, we don't do a lot of, like, CEO bastards, because, like, you know, a lot of them are terrible, but they're usually boring. So we're more likely to do, like, you know, we'll talk about the Bhopal disaster in India rather than, like, doing the life of the CEO of Union Carbide or whatever,

because most of them just aren't very interesting. When I was trying to decide... They raised the price, then they raised it again. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But Jack Welch, as soon as I read that, I was like, all right, this guy's got to be enough of a piece of shit for an episode.

Boy, howdy, he sure is. John Francis Welch Jr. was born on November 19, 1935 in Peabody, Massachusetts, just in time to miss the Great Depression and fully benefit from the more restrained, thoughtful era of capitalism that followed it. His dad was a conductor for the railroad.

He was a union man. And while he worked long hours, he benefited from benefits and pay good enough that he was able to buy a house for his family. His mother... We'll talk about more in a second. They had Jack late in life. She was 36 and his dad was 41.

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

is literally how he writes it in his book, because he's not a very imaginative person. This is technically true in that his family was working class. It's untrue in the fact that he was born in the single luckiest era financially to have been born in the history of the human race. Again, his dad working a single job

without a high school income was able to buy a home and put his child through college without taking on debt. Just a different world. Now, neither his mom or dad graduated from high school. They were both Irish immigrants, and their house was across the street from a factory, which his dad considered to be a plus because it meant that there were no neighbors partying on the weekends.

Jack's dad collected magazines and newspapers on the train during his work day, and he brought them home. Jack started reading the news as a result of this, and yeah, that's how he kind of got into the world. Jack's dad also introduced his son to golf, telling him that all the big shots on the train talked about their golf score constantly, so Jack should probably learn how to golf

if he wanted to make a lot of money. Wait, so he's just like a golfing news reading boy? Yeah, you promised the CEO wouldn't be boring, Robert. He's like, did he also suck on peppermint candies and drink milk? Like, what's going on here? We'll get to what else is going on here. Jack's dad is the kind of, you kind of get some of the workaholism from this.

His dad was dedicated enough to his job that if the weather was gonna be bad, he'd have his wife drive him to the station and he'd sleep there overnight before a shift. He did not spend a lot of time with his son. He worked from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. every single day. So Jack's primary influence was his mom. And if his autobiography is in any way credible,

she was obsessively devoted to him and somewhat manically focused on making him a success. Quote, one of her favorite expressions was, don't kid yourself, that's the way it is. If you don't study, you'll be nothing, absolutely nothing. There are no shortcuts, don't kid yourself. So she's just yelling at him to be, so for an example of how kind of unhinged this woman is,

she would force her son, when he was like a preteen, to go and gamble with the money that he had earned as like a cat. Oh, hell yeah. So that he understood what it felt like to lose money. Oh, wow, that's the weird lesson. So literally like honed. That's an insane lesson.

Go lose this money. This soldier honed in a dojo to be good with money. Yeah, to understand risk and loss and gain. Yeah. Yeah, that's just a crazy thing to do, but it worked, I guess, so good for her. Final form, G-E-C-O. So from his earliest years in school,

his mother was obsessed with the fact that he needed to excel. He writes in his autobiography, she knew how to be tough with me, but also how to hug and kiss. She wanted to make sure I knew how wanted and loved I was. I'd come home with four A's and a B on my report card, and my mother would want to know why I got the B, but she would always in the conversation congratulating

and hugging me for the A's. My mother never managed people, but she knew all about building self-esteem. I grew up with a speech impediment, a stammer that wouldn't go away. Sometimes it led to comical, if not embarrassing, incidents. In college, I often ordered a tuna fish on white toast on Fridays, when Catholics in those days couldn't eat meat.

Inevitably, the waitress would return with not one but a pair of sandwiches, having heard my order as two tuna sandwiches. All right, so I gotta... Yeah. You're just rambling. This is just rambling? No, this is his life.

First off, that's point one. Point two is it's really weird to open up your conversations about your mother and say that she's a good hugger and kisser. Yeah, she's a good hugger, she's a good kisser. She made me gamble so that I learned how to be a businessman. Yeah, she told him that he stuttered

because he was too smart, and his tongue couldn't keep up with his brain, which is sweet, except for the man that this guy grows into, is someone who clearly had more self-esteem than was responsible to give a child. Again, this is controversial, but I think it should be illegal to be nice to children. Otherwise, they turn out like this.

There's no other way to look at this, you know? So he grows up extremely confident. One of kind of the signs of how confident he is is that when he was in high school, he was on the football team and the hockey team. Well, of course, double tuna has so much protein. He's a big tuna boy. Well, no, he's tiny.

He's the shortest guy in his whole basically. It went into his brain. All of the power went into his brain. He's too smart. He kind of says that basically his mom made him so confident that he didn't notice he was so super tiny, but eventually he stops being able to compete in these sports

because he's this little bitty shrimp of a man, and that's why he gets really into golf, because golf, you don't have to be good at anything to be good at golfing. All you have to do is know how to talk about the stock market. That's all golfing is really about. I'm sure many golfers disagree with you, but let's run with it.

Who gives a fuck what golfers say? Yeah, that's also running the other card off the road. Other than everyone who runs the country. Also running the other card off the road with your card for bonus points, but that's golf. No, that that part of golf I actually do that's the one. Yeah, I like I like the mini cars. They have absolutely.

So Jack's autobiography is the standard self mythologizing of the corporate uber mention. It's honestly pretty worthless for anything, but the broadest details of his actual childhood and the insight that we get from knowing what kind of stuff he wants us to believe about him. But there is one passage in it in which he exposes something that I think might be him

actually sharing some vulnerability. And I'm going to read that now. I was incredibly dependent on my parents. Many times when my mother left the house to pick up my dad, the train would be late. When I was 12 or 13, the delays would drive me crazy. I'd run out of the house and down Lovett Street, my heart racing to see if they were around the corner

on the way home out of fear that something had happened to them. I just couldn't lose them. They were my world. It was a fear that I shouldn't have had because my mother raised me to be strong, tough and independent. She always feared she would die young, a victim of the heart disease that struck down everyone in her family.

So that's like the one glimpse that we get that maybe this kid had a soul at some point. It's actually heartbreaking. Yeah. I think that's also a pretty natural fear with kids that like, yeah, my parents will die. You painted a portrait of the world for me to fear. And so I fear it.

And now that I'm alone, I'm scared. That is interesting. It does kind of reveal, yeah, but like whatever his picture of the world was, it was a dangerous one out there. Even if the death's just a metaphor for like being thirsty for dad, which I don't mean in the sexual way,

but you know what I mean? No, no. It's fine. It's fine. You said he's working 15 hours a day. The kid might just be like, if his dad doesn't show up on time every second, feels like I'm just losing this scant time I have with my dad.

That makes sense. Yeah, no, I mean, it's the only actual like sign we get that this man might have at one point had a soul. Right. But you know who doesn't have a soul? Michael. Abe. Who?

Who? Boss Baby is what I hear. Boss Baby. Boss Baby? No, Boss Baby does not have a soul other than the souls that it collects. Yeah. Clones don't have souls, by the way.

Which is, you know, everyone's talking about AI. I think we ought to be cloning, you know? Once we really get cloning figured out, then none of us have to work because it's fine to force clones to do it. Yeah. Just Boss Baby it up. You remember when Dolly the sheep happened

and people were like, even though they made a law against it, here we go, the cat's out of the bag. We've reached the tipping point. Someone in a secret lab is going to start making clones. Where are all the clones? I'm disappointed we didn't continue with that. I was watching that show Severance recently,

which isn't about cloning, but close enough. And I was like, man, this would be great. What if we could just create a slave race that we own and have them do all the work, you know? I think we've got to go to break. Between April 1971 and September 1972, six young black girls were snatched off the streets in Washington, D.C.

It took four murders before the police finally realized that one person was responsible. I will admit the others when you catch me, if you can. Signed freeway fan. This child was laying on the side of the road. It appeared that she was probably either dragged out of the car or thrown out of the car. The person said, I murdered your daughter.

The killer believed that he may have been seen by the mother. My mother's father? That guy is, he's out of sync with even the worst people. I thought that they would catch him. I thought it was just a matter of time. Is it possible that the killer is still alive? Listen to Freeway Phantom on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The mastermind has never been caught. To find him, we had to go deep into a world of drugs and darkness. And then, there were these hints of a much bigger conspiracy. This year, I clearly gave a green light. I'm Osvalosian. Listen to Silenced, The Radio Murders, wherever you get your podcasts. If you want early access to new episodes or tier episodes, add free. Subscribe to the I Heart True Crime Plus subscription,

available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. This is a prepaid debit call from... Chief. An inmate at the Ohio State in a country. Keith Lamar convicted and sentenced to death for killing five men during one of the longest and deadliest prison riots in U.S. history. He said he didn't do it.

And, oh my God, I don't think he did do it. It's hard to believe that 22,000 pieces of evidence are actually inadmissible. Did the prosecution depend heavily on the use of inmate testimony? That's a huge red flag. Keith's life is not disposable just because you got it wrong, just because you needed somebody to blame. These people talking about tying me to a gurney

and pumping poison in my veins. I have exposed these people. I mean, you know, I know we're doing a podcast. This is my life. Listen to the real killer on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. And, yeah, we're talking about how morally uncomplicated

it would be to suffer people's consciousness and then create little child-brained slaves in order to do our obscure corporate labor. What a good idea that show is. Ben Stiller's beautiful version of the vision of the future. That's right. It's Ben Stiller's vision, really. I think the furthest I'll go down that road with you is lab-grown organs that are our organs.

To replace our organs, I totally go with that. Yeah, but I mean, I don't want a lab-grown organ unless it comes from a thing with a brain that knows that it's dying for me. I want it to have felt pain before it died. I want it to know fear before I take its liver because I've destroyed mine. This is what I've learned from Jack Welch.

It won't surprise you to hear that he was an altar boy for much of his childhood. Super Catholic family. Although it's interesting, he always talks about how strict his mom was, but the one story that he shares about her disciplining him is not at all an example of her being strict. At age 11, he stole a ball from a carnival that was in town,

and when she found out, she first tried to make him go confess to the priest, but he was terrified of his priest and he was worried that he'd be recognized and confession, so he begged his mom to just let him throw the ball away, just like toss it into a canal, and he writes, after negotiating with her, she let me have my way.

She drove me down to the bridge on North Street and threw the ball into the water, and considering the kind of corporate guleness, I love that his big story of discipline is like, I stole something and my mom got angry, but I convinced her to just let me poison the water with it. Yeah, fuck the system. In other words, she just jumped it into the water.

She filed off the serial number and she's like, this never happened. He is terrified to even write his mother as a figure of evil in his own autobiography. Obviously, she's not evil evil, but it is amazing what she did a number on this kid. Yeah, I think there's certainly something she did. I don't think we actually get a great context

for what she was actually like, because what I get from this story is like, oh, she was protecting him at all costs and did not care about particularly teaching him that that kind of behavior was wrong. She was not the kind of person who felt like it was important to instill a moral grounding in her kid. She was the kind of person who felt like it was important

that he be part of the church, because socially, that's what you do, but more than anything, she wanted him to be a success and to make money. That's what she actually valued, and that's what she selected for in her parenting. That's what I get from Jack's book, right? I didn't know his mom. Anyway, it's pretty cool.

In high school, Jack played, like I said, all of the major sports, but because he was so short, after a while, he stopped being able to compete in anything, but golf and hockey, a sport where short people could excel as long as they were violent. And from a young age, Jack had a horrible temper and a problem with losing, which made him a great hockey player.

So here's another story from his autobiography. The other team scored and we lost again for the seventh time in a row. In a fit of frustration, I flung my hockey stick across the ice of the arena, skated after it and headed back to the locker room. The team was already there, taking off their skates and uniforms. All of a sudden, the door opened and my Irish mother strode in.

The place fell silent. Every eye was glued to this middle-aged woman in a floral patterned dress as she walked across the floor past the wooden benches where some of the guys were already changing. She went right for me, grabbing the top of my uniform. You punk! She shouted in my face. If you don't know how to lose, you'll never know how to win. If you don't know this, you shouldn't be playing.

Now you throw that hockey stick in the river, young man, and we never stick at this again. I kind of think he's lying here. Maybe parts of this are true. What his mom says there is like something you would write in a business book published in 2004. A Cohen Brothers character and a poetic detail. A person doesn't say that. Nobody says that.

Nor do you remember floral dress swishing across the floor as men locked eyes. He's trying to write. What is going on? Maybe she got angry and yelled at him for being a bad sport, but she didn't say that line. That's a line that he hired consultants to think up for him. And she beat the shit out of me for a solid 45 minutes.

That's a story I would have believed. It's the Ron Howard version of his life. Obviously, his real love was golf, which is a love he would maintain his entire life. Jack notes that he and all of the other boys who worked as caddies at the country club competed vigorously to caddy for one of the two guys at the club who actually tipped. He makes a point to note that all of the rich people

basically refused to tip. Interesting. He was eventually forced to quit when the guy he was caddying for asked him to take off his socks and shoes and wade into the water to get a ball. Jack refused and when the guy insisted, he grabbed the guy's clubs and threw them into the water, which cost him a club caddy scholarship.

So again, you know, guy with a temper, right? Guy who can't really control his anger. Guy whose anger seems to be primarily based around being feeling disrespected. Golf, a classic recipe for a bastard. These golf clubs can't contain me. The energy is so... Oh, it's beautiful.

It's a beautiful insecurity. Yeah, you could... Yeah, it's quite a... It's something. So he lost out on an ROTC scholarship with the Navy as well. Why is unclear in his book? He makes a big deal about like me and my friends. We all passed the exam together. My dad had the state representatives

send in letters on my behalf. But then my friends got their scholarship and I got turned down and I have no idea why. It's this big mystery in my life. And it's like, I don't know, man, maybe it didn't do well. Like, maybe you're an asshole and like the guys responsible for giving the scholarship were like, I don't think this guy is a team player

and this is literally the Navy. You know, there's a number of things that could have been. But maybe you just didn't do very well, right? Like, it's not a mystery. I had a bunch of friends who applied to West Point and didn't get into West Point. And it's not a mystery, it's competitive. But Jack can't...

His ego has to, I think, assume that there was something mysterious behind the scenes that cost him the scholarship. Because he can't just be... Clearly his Catholic priest told them about that he stole a ball. Yes, and he took that ball. Yeah.

So at any rate, he did eventually get into college at Amherst and he started in 1953. Which is the same year that GE released that earnings report being like, we are giving all of our money to our employees. Fuck our stockholders, isn't that dope? His time in college was pretty boring.

I would describe him as a normie, also as basic. One of the few details we get is that he brags it's so sad. He has like a line in there where he's like, I was in a fraternity. We ranked, quote, at or near the top in beer consumption and had better parties than most.

He does not give a single example of a party. He does not relate a single human interaction during his time in college. Objectively better parties. It's like someone told a robot what you do at college and he was like, we drank the most beer and had the best parties.

It is an AI. Jesus. It is what an AI would write if you fed it this guy's fucking life story. Like be the coolest. Yeah. We did an animal house. Yeah.

That's right. So he eventually got a master's degree in chemical engineering because he found it kind of interesting and there were jobs. He goes into a hard science but he was not motivated by science, right? He's never someone who's like in love with the idea of learning new things.

He's someone who's like, well, science is like, there's good jobs and money. You know, being a chemical engineer. Right? And we can see that in this anecdote he gives about flying with a after he gets his master's degree, flying out for a job interview in Louisiana

with a friend after graduation. This is quite telling. On the airplane for my Ethel interview, Ethel is the country, or company, I was traveling with one of my associates from the University of Illinois when something odd happened. The stewardess came back and said, Mr. Welch, would you like a drink?

She then turned to my colleague and said, Dr. Gardner, would you like a drink? I thought Dr. Gardner sounded a lot better than Mr. Welch. I threw the golf clubs after it. Fucking golf club that bitch so hard. So that's it, right? He's sitting with a friend

and a stewardess calls his friend a doctor and he's like, well, that sounds better than Mr. I should be a doctor. That's why he decides to get a PhD. Is there a super doctor? Is this a thing? Is there a double doctor? It's purely about cloud.

He doesn't ever express an interest in chemical engineering, a love of science, a desire, an appreciation for academics. I was getting a cocktail once. I swear to God, you're doing the origin story of Homer Simpson.

Well, also, the impulse that is dominant. He's the original line goes up guy. All he cares about is line goes up. Yeah. It's the same kind of energy of fucking Ben Shapiro or one of these soulless crypto guys having an AI

write a script that nobody would ever want to watch. There's no plot in it. There's no character development, but it's formatted the way a script is. And so people are like, look, it's a script. It's like, no, yeah. Jack's like, I need to be a doctor

because it sounds good because people respect me if I'm a doctor. I'm going to spend three more years in college becoming a PhD in chemical engineering. I think that this is probably the single anecdote that does the most to describe the soul of Jack Welch, a man so fundamentally empty.

I'm not going to pursue a PhD to impress airline stewardesses, but also that's a part of him and that's real, but he's also a man who was capable of becoming a doctor of chemical engineering, which is not an easy thing to do. Just for clout, right?

That says something about the man that is impressive. It's not good, but it's impressive. He's driven. Yeah. He's driven and it's like the worst kind of driven. It's the kind of driven that is created

by a upbringing that allows him to be like, I'm scared when I'm alone. It's the abuse pays forward. Yeah, it's cool. His mom really did a great

job on him. His thesis for his PhD was on condensation in nuclear power plants and really the only time he talks about doing science in his entire autobiography is to mention that while he was working on his thesis, this was

the most important thing in his life and then he never brings any of this up again. This is never a factor in his life afterwards. He never thinks about like science really in any meaningful way other than how to like monetize it. What I'm saying is that he's got an incredible ability to compartmentalize,

right? And that's really going to be his most valuable asset in business. Is that he's so good at just like shutting off parts of himself and then flipping them on when he needs to? And that's, you know, that work. It's one of those things like

the traits that make Jack good at the terrible things he's about to do are also the same kind of traits that make like a surgeon a good surgeon, you know, if you're like cutting into people, you have to be able to like not care about cutting into a human being. I think most of us find viscerally

upsetting for a while. You have to be able to just like, yeah, I'm just like doing a thing. You know, it's the same as wiring a fucking stereo system or whatever. Yeah. And not be doing it because it's a weird sex thing or you like it or you're getting off of the power.

That's no more than, I'm going to say at least 20% of surgeons. It is a weird sex thing. We're getting off on the power. Or being like, I am a god. But you gotta at least be able to use surgeons. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about surgeons.

Yeah. All you surgeons out there, we see you. Yeah. Let's do a pull pot, but on anyone able to remove a tumor, like just just go after him. No, I mean, but that is he does have that like that same thing or that like thing that, you know, let's,

you know, some people are I don't know. Yeah. I don't know. Like that's a term that's not an actual diagnosis. We kind of use it most people interchangeably. I don't think it's obviously like it is pretty well

documented that psychopaths, there's a very high rate of psychopaths among like surgeons and among any kind of job that sort of requires that kind of compartmentalization, police officers, priests, you know, anybody who's got to be able to like compartmentalize, there's a high rate

of folks like that. I don't know that Jack diagnosed with anything, but it's also like it's not like a clean line. Like it's not like having hepatitis. You're not just like a psychopath or not. There's traits that we use to determine whether or not someone is likely a psychopath and some people

may not be psychopaths, but they have some of those traits and they're not all bad things. And Jack, whatever you could diagnose him as, Jack has a lot of those traits and one of them is that he's able to just kind of shut off parts of himself with robot like efficiency.

So that's cool. After graduating, he gets hired by General Electric in 1960. His first job and basic, he only works for GE, right? Like that's his whole life. His first job, yeah, he gets hired by GE in 1960

and he gets sent to a town called Pittsfield which is at the time kind of a minor outpost in GE's corporate empire. He attracted notice as a manager pretty quickly. Just a year in and he was told he was getting a thousand dollar raise and he was initially pretty happy with this

because he'd be working hard. He'd been working hard, but then he found out that all of his coworkers got the same raise and it like he loses his mind over this. He is like so furious. He can't focus. He can't sleep. He can't think.

He announces that he's quitting. He tells all of his colleagues that he's quitting. He like puts in his notice and he's leaving the company because everyone got the same raise. The equality. This is his fucking joker moment. This is how he got his

scars. Because he decides to quit and his boss apparently doesn't want to lose him and so meets with him and offers him additional money. So Jack agrees to stay and it's weird because in his book he both he claims that when his boss came

and said, hey, we don't want to lose you. He cried because he realized, quote, somebody loved me. The validation, yeah. Yeah, that's very important to him. Jackie boy. But he also, despite the fact this situation

it's like with the ball. It completely went his way. He didn't suffer any consequences for throwing a fit and in fact he benefited. But he's still really worried about it. He's angry about it. He never gets over this. Decades later he's angry about it.

Yeah, he spends the rest of his life angry over the fact that he had almost only gotten the standard raise and he even admits in his autobiography it, quote, probably drove his behavior to an extreme. And he's like, but when I say that, of course, I mean we

really year to blame as well. Yeah, everyone else, my manager for not giving me more money up front. It's also worth noting that he got far enough along in the quitting process that his co-workers all bought him going away presents, which he did not give back.

Smart dude. But in his autobiography he just writes I don't remember if I gave them back or not which is also funny. My secretary will have that information for you or whatever. Just such an unpleasant man. Who's to say?

Meanwhile he unboxes like a brand new cigar cutter and rips the tag off and hits a cigar. Burns a dollar bill. He's Sidney Musburger from the Hutt-Sekker praxis in my mind now. He's also Jack Donaghy, who is a

G, like a fictional character right through the rock. It's very funny, Abe, that you bring up Jack Donaghy. Because not only is Jack Donaghy from Third Rock based on Jack Welch, Jack Welch shows up in that show.

Yeah, he's in several episodes. That is smart. Yeah, that's wild. But you know what's not wild? A water park after it gets shut down? That's right. No, Schlitterbahn was not wild after it killed all those kids

and they had shut down the best rides. That's right. That's what they mean by wet and wild. They mean wet and kids die here. Great. Wet and kids die here. Not enough people know about Schlitterbahn. Look, it's a water park

outside of Austin that you can drink as much as you want on the Lazy River and only occasionally do kids drown at it. That's a good water park. Only occasionally. That's a great water park. This has been a paid ad for Schlitterbahn.

Water park that doesn't kill most of the kids who go there. We're giving it five stars. All right. Between April 1971 and September 1972 six young black girls were snatched off the streets in Washington, D.C.

It took four murders before the police finally realized that one person was responsible. I will admit the others when you catch me if you can. Signed freeway fan. This child was laying on the side of the road.

It appeared that she was probably either dragged out of the car or thrown out of the car. The person said, I murdered your daughter. The killer believed that he may have been seen by the mother. That guy is,

he's out of sync with even the worst people. I thought that they would catch him. I thought it was just a matter of time. Is it possible that the killer is still alive? Listen to Freeway Phantom on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

And yet, the mastermind has never been caught. To find him, we had to go deep into a world of drugs and darkness. And then, there were these hints of a much bigger conspiracy. This year, I clearly gave a green light.

I'm Osvalosian. Listen to Silenced, The Radio Murders, wherever you get your podcasts. If you want early access to new episodes or tier episodes, add free. Be sure to subscribe to the Apple Crime Class subscription,

available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. This is a prepaid debit call from Chief, an inmate at the Ohio State in a country. Keith Lamar, convicted and sentenced to death for killing five men during one of the longest and

deadliest prison riots in U.S. history. Selie didn't do it. And my white guy, I don't think he did do it. It's hard to believe that 22,000 pieces of evidence are actually inadmissible. Did the prosecution depend heavily

on the use of inmate testimony? That's a huge red flag. Keith's life is not disposable just because you got it wrong. Just because you needed somebody to blame. These people talking about tying me to a gurney and pumping poison in my veins. I have exposed these people.

I mean, I know we're doing a podcast. It's my life. Listen to the real killer on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So, Jack, you know, decides to stay.

And he is a good employee. He gets promoted fairly quickly. He's an effective, a relatively effective manager for the most part. But he was not a perfect employee. He made a number of what you might call boo-boos

early on in his career, as this passage from David Gels's book makes clear. One day, in 1963, Welch was at his office in Pittsfield, overlooking the factory on Plastics Avenue. Having risen to become a manager, charged with developing a new plastic, Welch was impatient to bring a product to market. It had been

driving his team to move faster, run more experiments, whatever it took. As Welch sat at his desk, an explosion rocked the factory. Debris and broken glass littered the scene as smoke shrouded the building. Somehow, no one was badly injured. But it soon became clear that Welch is head of the plant and the one pushing

his team so hard bore responsibility for the disaster. Pressuring employees to innovate, Welch had them experimenting with an untested process, moving oxygen through a highly volatile solution in a large tank. Something caused a spark, setting off the explosion. And

he blows up his first factory. What in the Daniel Plain view is going on? In his autobiography, he just writes that we were doing an experiment and it's just one of these things that happened the factory. There was an explosion and it was no one's fault

but it was my fault because I'm the manager. The manager, he frames it as all say it's my fault because as the manager, the buck stops with me. And the reality is, you ordered them to do something dangerous and irresponsible and an explosion occurred. It was your fault because it was your fault.

Don't worry guys, I'll cover for you. I'll take the heat for this one y'all. I love the opportunism of turning that scenario into like I'm falling on my sword here is exactly precisely why he does

well in business and he's deplorable. He's the deplorable human. My is telling me I am not responsible for this. It's what my gut says, I don't know. It's like fucking

drunk driving your Lexus through a fucking crosswalk and hitting a bunch of kids and being like alright, this is clearly a mistake but you know what kids, I'll take the fall for this one. I'm the adult in this situation you know, I'll take

the blame on this one. It's like literally I think you should leave on Netflix. It's the hotdog scene. We're all trying to find the guy who did this. Very, very funny. Jack Welch blows up his first factory. Now mom walks in grabs him

by the collar stop blowing up factories. I'm not a firing people guy. I think that's generally best avoided but I would say if one of my subordinates here at Coolzone blew up a factory

that we made podcasts out of, I would probably impose consequences on them. But Jack had really... What are you talking about here? You know the factory Sophie, have I not told you about the factory? I told you about the factory

but which employer are we referring to? That's my question. It's the arms company that we use Coolzone as a shell to ship artillery primers through. Anyway,

we don't need to talk about that. So Jack suffers no consequences for blowing up this factory. Again GE is like a ridiculously paternalistic company at this point and his bosses are like hey failure's a part of life Jackie boy just don't blow up another factory

and everything's fine. And honestly to their credit this works out well for them financially because the next thing that he does is he convinces his bosses to invest in a new factory which created a plastic called Noril.

Now he convinces it to do this before Noril is a functional product. In fact the plastic in its first form was too brittle to work. But Jack told his chemists find a way to make this not be a terrible mistake and they do somehow. Noril becomes a billion dollar business.

I did it. We'll blow up as many factories as it takes. So Jack gets promoted to head the company's plastics division at 32. And he becomes GE's youngest general manager. This promotion brings him stock

options for the first time. And over the coming years he started to develop an obsession with stock price. One that overwhelmed any interest he had in the actual products that his employees were making. Despite the fact that his hardworking scientists had been the ones to turn Noril from another

hit, Jack had no loyalty to them or to anyone else who worked at GE. And in fact he grew increasingly frustrated with the paternalistic nature of the company. With the understanding that it showed its employees which again is the only reason he wasn't shit canned for blowing up that factory.

Right. Now the CEO of GE at this time was an Englishman named Reg Jones who was some people will say like one of the most if not the most respected CEOs in the country at that point. He was apparently good. I mean GE increased steadily

in value during the time that he was there. And he was kind of notably the kind of CEO that doesn't exist anymore. He lived in like a normal person house. He made 200 grand a year which was more money in the 1970s but like nothing

close to what executives make these days. Right. Not even in the same ballpark of like a modern the salary of like the CEO of GE today or the CEO of a company that you know was like GE. Who could easily afford a ballpark for example. Yeah for example

he was also kind of famous for like whenever he would find out about like employees suffering deaths in the family he wouldn't just like send them a letter or whatever like he would devote company resources to helping people you know pay for funerals and deal with grieving like he was generally seen

as a pretty nice guy but Reg also was kind of as the 1970s rolled along as we all remember from I don't know high school history class that's we you get your stagnation and your inflation and you get your stagflation and the economy is not doing so great

Japan and Germany are both kind of rising as industrial powers and it turns out that they make better products than a lot of American companies so people are starting to the US economy is starting to like this kind of golden age of capitalism is starting to sort of like

jankier you know we can kind of see the Reagan era heading towards us very quickly in the mirror it's and Reg was intelligent enough to see this coming he knew the economy was changing and so in 1977 he starts the process

of finding the guy who's going to replace him you know it takes a couple of years and when he's given a list of like the short list of executives being considered to take over his job he sees that Jack Welch isn't on there because no one likes Jack he's an asshole but Reg is like

I think Jack is someone who thinks differently than everyone else at the company but he blew up that factory he blew up that factory the story you'll get and this is kind of a mystery no one really knows why Reg picks him but Reg is like

I don't know maybe this probably the most likely thing is that Reg is like this guy's an asshole the economy is getting worse maybe we need a piece of shit in the company during this period of time hard to say Yvonnega talks about Money River which is just I do think it's really true

that many times people who become insanely wealthy and powerful it really boils down to a moment where someone who is already insanely wealthy and powerful before them went I don't know you like you're set now that's that

and this is about to be that moment for Jack so he's put on this short list and basically the way GE does this is once they've got this kind of short list together for the next couple of years Jack and all of the other guys considered for the job are told hey we're watching you to see

if you're good enough to be the CEO do your fucking best and they give them new responsibilities to kind of see what they can handle and judge them so most of his competitors for the job focused on either maintaining profits and you know keeping a steady rate of increase in profits

at whatever divisions they were running or it's shepherding new research into production the hopes that it would be a new big business for GE and it would look good for them Jack knew that that shit either didn't look impressive just kind of maintaining profit and that a division isn't easy to brag about

in this kind of a competition or it took too long right new research as he knows is risky sometimes the factory explodes he doesn't want to take that risk but he had a faster dumber way of increasing profits mass layoffs so

this was not really a thing for American businesses at this point obviously some people get fired sometimes you got to lay people off because the company's not working right like it was a thing that maybe people would get laid off if a business failed sure but the idea that a company that is profitable and even though

the economy is more challenging right now GE is profitable GE is making a shitload of money the idea that a company as profitable as GE would fire a shitload of employees just to improve their margins that didn't happen at this period of time in American capitalism

Jack is like what if we did that so this is my life this is what I leave the human race you're welcome firing people for no reason did this guy create like the rank and yank thing

that's exactly where we're headed buddy holy yeah I don't want to get ahead of ourselves though so GE operated a massive complex in Louisville, Kentucky called appliance park this is such a big factory

kind of complex that it has its own zip code it was very profitable and it also like kind of supported the whole city right like a huge amount of Louisville's economy is people who work at appliance park it's what keeps the city alive kind of effectively in this period

Jack didn't think it was profitable enough though again it's profitable he just doesn't think it's profitable enough so he shit cans a huge percentage of the workforce gutting a huge chunk of the economy in Louisville but making a short term

like stock bump for GE because cutting all of this salary and benefits and stuff looks good on the balance sheet and that makes the shareholders happy his colleagues celebrated his courage in doing this David Gells writes

layoff spread to other divisions as Welch amassed more responsibility and as he toured GE's facilities around the country he took the opportunity to remind the rank and file who was now in charge in Cleveland at the light bulb factory he berated a manager for the relative high costs of GE's bulbs

screaming that competitors in communist Europe made similar products for half the price in Bridgeport, Connecticut he tore into another executive when he stepped on and off one of the company's new digital bathroom scales and it came back with different results when he met a manager who failed to impress he would snap what the fuck do I pay you for

beyond being an unsentimental cost cutter someone who was willing to lay off a few hundred workers to meet a quarterly earnings target Welch had never outgrown his adolescent temper and I find that really interesting the light bulb story because the kind of the kind of broad story you get about the cold war

is like yeah capitalism went up against communism and communism lost and it's like well the United States went up against the Soviet Union and all of our sundry satellites and the Soviet Union collapsed but a big part of what was happening in that period is

the United States economy boomed in part because it adopted a number of socialist policies even at the corporate level welfare capitalism right that was a big part of what made the US economy work during that period of time but the whole time there were guys like Welch who were like

you know instead of not looking at like the shitty quality of a lot of products produced in communist countries and being like boy capitalism makes much better products looking at them and going man if we made shit like that we could save a lot of money that we could then hand to rich people which is where we are now

it's the banal tragedy I totally get this guy through and through because he's the guy we have now still to this day and it is it's actually chilling to think of that open-ended answer

yeah we're profitable but are we profitable enough well how much is enough man this is a scary place we're going it's not like because this is always like the fucking hard-nosed capitalism is the best people are like well what we should just have a you should just pay people

for a failing business you know that you can't do that it's like look these are hard decisions but they have to be made you can't just give you know this is a business not a charity no no GE's light bulb business was profitable it was making money he just wanted to make shittier cheaper light bulbs so that more money could go to the 40 people at the very top of things

and he was willing to destroy the city of Louisville in order to do this I wonder if went on his death bed like this guy's dead yeah yeah he's dead as shit but very recently unfortunately but I do think it was a painful death

oh well there's that yeah I wonder on his death bed if he was just like looked into someone's eyes and was like was I a cartoon character it is I'm we'll talk a little bit about

how Jack handled imminent death Abe because it's even funnier than that so Jack was obsessed with a small relatively unappreciated part of the company GE credit corp the company finance division and this was like a small

it was created basically to like let customers like finance purchases right like you're buying a washing machine that's expensive you can't pay it all up front so you finance it with the company right but what Jack realized is that like the company could be doing a lot more with its finance

division because a corporate finance division when you've got a company as big as GE could have with it and with as good a credit rating as GE because GE is like AAA right like it's the best company in the country pretty much like they've got that anyone will lend to them which meant that GE's

finance division could operate as a bank like an unlicensed bank so he starts expanding it and offering mortgages and private credit cards and investing in other companies and buying other companies and it's one of those things where he's like in his autobiography when

he kind of realizes that he could use this as an unlicensed bank he writes compared to the industrial operations I did know this business seemed an easy way to make money you didn't have to invest heavily in R&D build factories and bend metal it's like making shits hard and risky shit anymore yeah

yeah you can just every every step we just go but if money is just math and it's just abstract if we took this percentage and did this percentage the money would just make money and now we're at a point where I don't I just think if you think that way I'm like yeah don't understand what

life is for you're not engaging with the universe no and we like you're not again you're not a person that we need to have in the world right because GE again not to like why again GE was heavily involved in the military industrial complex but outside of that it like it made things that objectively would

be necessary in any society it made light bulbs that worked right that's a value to society having light bulbs that function it made washing machines and dryers that worked that's a value to society Jack is like what if we made payday loans like what if

we what if we created ways to just like make interest money off of people and we'll talk about the other fucky things he does with this bank because it's his primary instrument for like making GE a quote-unquote success in his eyes but we're I'm getting

ahead of myself yet again so the late 70s things keep getting worse for the American economy you know obviously inflation is pretty brutal this period of time GE is again still making a profit they are sailing kind of through these stormy waters

but the profit isn't enough right Jack sees the one and a half billion a year that the company is netting as brutally insufficient it's never enough for his train daddy to come home and hug him he will never get what he actually wants it will make his dad not have worked himself

half to death at the train so during this period while Jack is kind of competing to be the new CEO there's a new attitude developing in the American business community about how capitalism ought to function the death knell of the golden age

of capitalism was heralded by books about business that started to get really popular like in search of excellence by Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman Jr and this is an interesting idea because business historian Lewis Hyman

describes kind of the central message of in search of excellence as you don't really need all these workers you should be able to buy what you need from the market you don't need to have these big corporations you can get by without job security now one of the authors of this book is a partner at McKinsey

our old buddy Pete Buttigieg's former employer yeah in search of excellence is the other author is like the guy who basically kind of guts the old Hewlett Packard to build the new one these are guys these are MBAs

they're not engineering guys at firms like Hewlett Packard like GE a lot of the people running it had been engineers previously the same with companies like Lockheed but in this period they're being replaced by guys who just know like business and these are guys who are they're obsessed

with like concepts like Kaizen from Japan which is like a manufacturing concept that they kind of often misunderstand and misapply they're trend seekers companies succeeding and they're like what are they doing like how can we copy it part of what they copy is this kind of like

manic insane work culture that is you know prevalent in places like Japan what they're not going to copy is like these Japanese companies whose workers are like working themselves out to death produce excellent reliable products that's not necessary right like

we don't actually need to make good cars we can if we make our workers work that hard shit will make even more money right that's a big part of the management philosophy especially if they're in search of excellence pushes if you're still loyal to American products

which of course patriotism was I would say more prevalent than or like extreme the point being now your shit breaks down you got to buy it twice as fast exactly like it works all around for just me as opposed to like I don't know Toyota whose philosophy is

we will make a car that will outlive humanity right it will speak at your funeral not anymore but back then but think of the yachts Robert think of the yachts when you hang yourself using your 50 year old pair of Levi's jeans

your car will be there so another popular book that kind of helped set up the next age of American capitalism was Future Shock the author a guy named Alvin Toffler again I'm going to actually quote

from that business historian Louis Hyman here the author basically invents the idea of project management and talks about a future where there's no stability and no security it's a blueprint for work under neoliberalism and it's everywhere it's a bestseller there's lots of these popularizers

that bring ideas about workplace and security into a kind of connection with rethinking what the corporation is after the 1970s and perhaps the single most important of these kind of apostles of this new age of capitalism is a guy named Milton Friedman

now that's a name I'm going to guess most people who have at least heard right he's kind of like the dude behind the Chicago school of economics he is an economist himself he's extremely influential and one of the things that Friedman argues is that social welfare

programs are not like a responsible thing for a society to invest in specifically particularly using tax dollars from companies and from rich people to fund these programs he rails against the idea that corporations have any responsibility to society

or to their employees in 1970 Friedman writes the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits what does it mean to say that business has responsibilities only people can have responsibilities businessmen who talk this way

are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades and then we've evolved that to the point where we just go or you could just say corporations are people even though that's like saying 2 plus 2 equals 5

or an umbrella is alive but okay now Michael umbrellas are alive yes so bad example every time you close them they die so it's like drawing a katana like you have to know you have to commit to

that umbrella if you're going to open it because you're taking a life so sure death this is the only thing I believe spiritually so think about that next time it rains this is what you're taught as an Episcopalian that's all I remember from Sunday school

this is a weeping man screaming at me never to use an umbrella my umbrella I'm going to think of it that was a bus stop but same dip so in Friedman's eyes the only responsibility corporations have is to maximize shareholder value

any sacrifice necessary to achieve this end is acceptable now this is a little bit of an aside but one of the people that Friedman had the biggest influence on is a Chilean politician named Augusto Pinochet right so Friedman gives a bunch of

and a bunch of Chicago school economists are kind of brought in by Pinochet in order to like give him advice once he takes over the country by murdering its democratically elected leader with the backing of the CIA Pinochet dismantles Chile's public properties

he auctions off state businesses to the highest bidder and he kills every environmental and financial regulation in the country this creates in the short term massive wealth for a small number of people but it also leads to deindustrialization that by the early 1980s had caused unemployment

in the country to increase to 10 times its pre-Pinochet rate by 1982 Pinochet had been forced to fire his Chicago school advisors and renationalize several of the financial institutions he deregulated in other words the what we know from the example of Chile

is that following these kind of economic policies that Friedman is advocating that Jack Welch is reading about in these books and falling in love with makes a shitload of money for a while and then it leaves your economy hollowed out and unable to like survive

and causes like massive social and economic disasters and it's crazy that these people think that they're fucking geniuses because they can turn money into more money but they can't see that yeah if you strip mine the mountain then you don't have the mountain

or like if you burn the whole forest and there's no forest you fucking idiot like is this not obvious it'd be like if I was like look I have a new idea for a business where I can provide functional organs to people who need them and because doctors and nurses are already in hospitals

I'm just having men with guns kill them and take their organs in the short term you can probably make a lot of money huge business but very quickly you run out of people who can put those organs and bodies and I do believe truly in my heart

that with many of these people their inner thought about that is I will be dead before then it doesn't matter I think their inner thought is more just like the droning of a dial tone like that's all that goes on behind the eyes of Jack Welch

I actually believe it's an addiction of some kind yeah totally I think all of the things we're talking about are true just as Chile is teetering towards the brink of economic collapse thanks to its Friedman-like policies Friedman disciple Jack Welch

was picked to be the new CEO of General Electric his colleagues reported shock and sometimes horror at this decision but Reg Jones had made his selection and there was no going back now although an event that occurred right before the transfer of power certainly gave him second thoughts

David Gales writes 5 weeks before Welch officially took over Jones threw him a party at the Helmsley Palace an upscale hotel in New York City among the 60 or so guests were CEOs for many of the nation's largest companies as the night wore on Welch had a bit too much and when Jones asked him to address the crowd

Welch couldn't get through his remarks without slurring his words back at GE headquarters the next morning Jones stormed into Welch's office I've never been so humiliated in my life he told Welch you embarrassed me in the company Welch was terrified that this might cost him the job but yet again he avoided

any accountability for his actions Jones went through with his decision and right before the final transfer of power he invited Welch into his office Jack he said I want to give you the Queen Mary this is designed not to sink Jack without even taking a second

to think immediately replied I don't want the Queen Mary I plan to blow up the Queen Mary I want speed boats I want to shoot a Tesla to the moon with a fucking mannequin in it for social media clout that's what I want that's who I am

and then we thumbsed up and then high-fived and then we flew out of there on our fucking spaceship and we just threw up piles of money and then we ate the money that we threw up the end what I love about this what I love about this is that like

if we're following this metaphor logically the Queen Mary is the boat that we are all on and if you blow up the boat that we're on and then you replace it with speed boats well only a few of us can fit on the speed boats and everyone else dies

it is actually a very good analogy he's doing a titanic but he's like wow the titanic really created a lot of value for the survivors for the few that made it there's a supply and demand structure rehaul

during the sinking of the titanic yeah it is it is such a piece of shit I just we're barely getting started this is the end of part one but boy howdy does it get a lot worse

but you know what doesn't get worse you guys you just get better with age like a fine salami I tell myself that every day I tell my fine salami that yeah you guys want to plug anything

yeah that was the cue to plug your plugables that was the cue to plug we did it at the top you double plug yeah you get to double plug we only let our real friends do that well speaking of double plug in our fine salamis we're doing a movie about

the complex proposition of forming there has to be a sex thing well that's what I'm saying I'm gonna go over to my torrent site right now and find double plugging a fine salami right on the top there a summer sausage we are doing a movie

as we said at the top but we'll say it again because it's been a bit about the complex proposition of formulating your own sexual identity and how everyone's journey in that regard is unique and irreducible and it's called Papa Bear and it's very funny

but then in the third act has heart you know like you know kind of movies I'm talking about it's one of those poignant coming of age shit we're really good at videos and movies if you know us and our work you probably already know that if you're interested

in finding out more about the project it's over at seedandspark.com slash fun slash papa hyphen bear thanks so much thank you both so much you can find me nowhere because stay away from

social media it's bad for you but you can find my book after the revolution literally anywhere you can buy books you like amazon you like bookshop.com or whatever you like going to barns and noble for some reason it's everywhere go go go read it that's the episode

that's the episode behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media for more from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the I heart radio app podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts between april 1971

and september 1972 six young black girls were snatched off the streets in washington dc this child was laying on the side of the road the person said i murdered your daughter the killer believed that he may have been seen i will admit the others when you

catch me if you can time freeway fan listen to freeway phantom on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts three years ago i got a tip just came out of nowhere the biggest flash of my life for decades

a deadly incident has been covered up for political reasons what was so big about this incident on npr's new podcast taking cover we unraveled the story behind the worst marine on marine friendly fire in modern history and why it was kept secret

what did y'all have to hide listen to taking cover on npr's embedded on the i heart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts daniel miller is a millennial con artist i'm a social media influencer busted while recovering from brazilian butt lift surgery

she was yelling at the police for getting her butt tissue out of joint when they were handcuffing her she's got hundreds of victims she's got hundreds of victims and she just keeps getting away with it listen to queen of the con season 3

on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts