Grubstakers - Episode 109: Henry Ford feat. Anders Lee

Episode Date: October 22, 2019

This week we cover the model T madman Henry Ford. Find out all about how he hired thugs to act as an independent police crew to keep his staff on task, the literal giant wooden melting pot turning native garb into suits while holding American flags and last but least his terrible relationship with his son. The outro is an interview with Ford and Edison. Check out Anders Lee on Twitter @andersleehere His podcast @PodDamnAmerica It has been over 2 months since I spoke to my friends across the mountains. As kids we set up a string between cans to talk to each other, but even that was cut. Thankfully I am paid in Microsoft points to help me support my family. When will this war end. When will all wars end. -Lakshmi Govinda 2019

I want to be held accountable for what I'm doing. This may sound like an exaggeration, but it was like the 9-11 of my career and certainly of making kombucha. Jesus is smart. This idea of income inequality, it always strikes me as a very, it's a deceptive term, income inequality. Well, let's flip it around. It comes from outcome inequality.

In five, four, three. I got the loop, Steve! Hello, welcome to Jay Leno's Garage. Today we're looking at the Ford Taurus G93A, which was made by Ford Germany. It's unique amongst Ford vehicles because it's the only one that was made with slave labor. Using people from the Eastern Front. Hi, welcome to Grubstakers. I'm Andy Palmer. I'm Yogi Pio.

Steve Jeffries. I'm Jay Leno. And we've got Jayio. Steve Jeffries. I'm Jay Leno. And we've got Jay Leno here in the studio. How's it going, Jay? Good. I'm just reading about Terry Hatcher. Oh, really? And Terry.

Anders Lee here. For some reason, my Jay Leno impression is just him saying Terry Hatcher. That's all I remember. I think that might actually be from 30 Rock. I think you're right about that. I think a real Jay Leno impression is saying Monica Lewinsky a whole bunch. Yeah. Monica Lewinsky.

Monica Lewinsky is a new name. Michael Jackson. They miss Sean already on the show. Unfortunately, Sean McCarthy can't join us. Well, he could join us, but we told him that he can't talk the whole episode. So you might hear him off mic occasionally because we've gagged and bound him. Because for the Ford episode, that's how they make their cars these days. By bounding and gagging Shons?

Yeah. Yeah. Just Irish people in general. Okay. Yeah. In honor of Ford, we're marginalizing the Irish. Yeah? Yeah.

As a stand-in for the Jews. Right. Right. I think he used a lot of us, right? Probably. The Irish? Yeah. Stand in for the Jews. Right. Right. I think he used a lot of us, right? Probably. The Irish? Yeah.

Well, he was part Irish. Or no, his dad was Irish by way of England, so I guess he was of English descent. Yeah. He's big into Italians, right? Who isn't these days? Yeah. Well, he had kind of the hierarchy, right? It was like, these people are good workers.

Right, right. I'm a good manager. And then Jews are good for nothing. You heard it here first. They're in the eyes of Ford, undermining the American worker and starting World War I. More on that later. So, yeah, we got Anders Lee, and we are talking Henry Ford, the great industrialist of the 20th century. Now, he made Chevy? That's what he did?

Yes, yes. He made Chevy and Toyota. Oh, okay. Well, you know what? Good brands. Upstanding gentleman, if you ask me. He actually invented ISIS. No, he made 4D

cars because that's what Ford was supposed to be was 4D. So he saw beyond the current three-dimensional automobile to a whole other... That was actually his family's original name and then it was anglicized to Ford at Ellis Island. They were sort of like cyber people from

England, Ireland. But they kind of had to hide that because cyber people were very frowned upon. More than the England, Ireland. But they kind of had to hide that because cyber people were very frowned upon. More than the Irish, really. Their belief to carry typhus. I can't be 4D in the United States. You can only do it in the home country. That's what the Celtic language is.

It's 4D. Yeah, it's right. It makes no sense because it's a whole other, it's a galaxy beyond us. Right. It makes no sense because it's a whole other galaxy beyond us. Hyper Cubes, go home. It's like the Jodie Foster contact. The map doesn't make sense, but if you look at it and you merge them together, like the Celtic language, that's when it all comes together.

Dude, we could do a whole thing about contact. Dude, I love Jodie Foster's contact. It's fascinating to watch that back-to-back with what's the newer one where it's like a similar concept. It's Matthew McConaughey again, isn't it? Are you talking about the one he made in space where it's all about time and shit? No, it's similar to that. The language one? Yes. Oh, Arrival?

Arrival. Amy Adams, yeah. Amy Adams. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're kind of like, it's such an interesting contrast because the 90s, like U.S. contact is all about like the U.S. saving the day. Right, right. They used the Clinton administration, like let them use the White House and White House clips to like make it look like there was an alien touching down.

Yeah. Wait, there was no alien touching down in Contact? Contact. An alien, down in Contact? Contact. An alien making contact. No, but in Contact, they do have a lot of the U.S. government is working with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey's team. And the entire thing is about faith-based.

Like, can we send someone to space that doesn't believe in God? And McConaughey's like, I believe in God. All right, all right. It's one of the few movies where he wears a shirt the entire time. And I got to say, it's pretty good. It's like that and Amistad. I think that's why it was a financial failure, though.

But that's an interesting thing. Because it was 90s. It was post-Cold War. The end of history. We just have these philosophical questions to grip with about faith and intergalactic stuff. And then, fast forward to Arrival. we just have these philosophical questions to grip with about faith and intergalactic stuff and then for the class word to arrival and it's like China is you know, this this is gonna be a Fucking huge thing to deal with with international affairs. We have computing head your own language and right

Scared that fucking everyone's gonna die like it's that's actually my My interpretation of independence day it's kind of the end of history thing where they're like we've got this giant military that serves no apparent purpose what is the only time we would use it a massive alien invasion yeah it's just just yeah it's just justifying the pentagon budget yeah i don't know i think interstellar is more like contact than arrival but i do see what you're saying because with contact there's the whole like she has a kid, has a CB radio,

and her dad dies, and she's trying to contact the aliens, but she's really trying to talk to her dad. Yeah. And then she finally dies, but he's fake. Yeah, right. It's the alien.

It's like that South Park taco poop and ice cream thing where that's the interpretation of the alien that they can accept. So in contact, it's her dad. That's the entire idea of the movie. And the cliffhanger is she didn't go through space at all.

She just fell through it. But the recording recorded 45 minutes and 13 seconds. Bum, bum, bum, bum. I like Contact a lot. I saw it at the right age. She was just on MDMA. Yeah, that's right. She rubbed a lot of aliens.

And so you're like, wow, these people like to lick us. All right. So Henry Ford, for those of you who don't know, he made some cars and got pretty rich doing that. He called them machines, though. He called them machines? Yeah, he didn't even call them cars. He was like, this is a machine. He was the enemy of John Henry.

Yeah. He was born... Let's do some bio. You guys want some bio? Let's do some bio. He was born in 1863 in Greenfield Township, Michigan. He grew up on a farm, and his parents were farmers, though he hated farm work.

And so then when he was 13, his mom died, and that kind of fucked him up. And then his dad gave him a watch, and he would obsessively take it apart and put it back together. And then he only got an eighth grade education. And in 1879, when he was 18, he left home for Detroit to become a machinist and had several odd jobs, occasionally coming home to work on the farm where he learned to operate a steam engine he he was really like his dad recognized that he was uh really into uh machines and working on machines and um i don't know he would put together his watch that's very interesting sometimes yeah billionaires have a very uh i mean rich people

in general have like a watch obsession that they happen yeah and sometimes it comes from like fathers giving sons watches often. Right. But it's usually a way of showing how much money you have. It's not showing how crafty you are for making your own watch. It's like you buy it from some fancy person. Well, in this case, he was actually fairly poor. He does have an actual rags-to-riches story, and that's about...

After he turns 34, he stops being a sympathetic figure um but well that's what happens to 34 year olds i mean come on you know after that who gives a fuck about him but yeah until then he's he's kind of like um an interesting guy he uh he marries in 1988 and then waits about uh five years to uh nut in wife, at which point they have one son, Edsel Ford, and then he never nuts in her again. Oh. You can't confirm that. You don't know.

You don't know if he nutted in her. He only bangs to procreate. This is the 19th century. I don't know, man. They could have done anal. You don't know. That's true. I mean, on one one hand he was very

like uh very obsessed with old-timey values but on the other hand those people are freaks yeah of course not that if you you're a freak if you do anal but we also don't i mean maybe they didn't have sex maybe he put his thing stuff in a tube and you you know. He was an engineer. Maybe he engineered some sort of funnel that he would masturbate into. As I said, he only nutted in her once. I'll say he only nutted in her vagina whilst she was ovulating. Wait, we know this on the record?

Maybe never. What position they had and that they definitely had intercourse? I mean, I'm sure they had missionary because he was pretty religious. But, I mean, they had and that they definitely had intercourse. I'm sure they had missionary because he was pretty religious. They had enough sex to have one child and no more. This is when people had eight children

because nine of them would die. I'm just saying it's not inconceivable that there was a Rube Goldberg style machine that he got into and it went around the house and into the other room. Since he loved to build them

right yeah you jizz into a micro wonder wheel and it goes around and it falls on a slide and it goes into another thing he's trying to see

his wife as little as possible right right we don't know what didn't happen you know he loves machines it actually took him

five years because like one of the donanos kept getting stuck in the machine oh no oh no margaret the dominoes come on we need the version you see on youtube is always like the 58th attempt right of course right he has like in his basement he has a huge v for vendetta like domino yeah and like the last domino hits a thing that pours his jizz into the machine. In the first iteration, it was more like

one of those Nickelodeon slime drops. And then he came up, he was like, hey, Ford-jizz-um, how about Ford-ism? That's how it comes out. All inspiration comes from inspiration. Whoa. Like a rug.

So, built Ford tough. So, in 1891, he caught his first break getting hired as an engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit. They do light bulbs? Yeah, they made light bulbs and just, I guess, whatever Edison thought he could get a patent from. Truth finding, illuminating, the truth.

Oh, okay. Yeah. I don't know, maybe it was where Edison recorded Muscle Man on a swing. Hey, that's a good video, man. It's got a lot of likes. It's voted funny. It's better to die than. So this was when he was in his late 20s,

and he had enough money from this to create his own little personal shop, and in that shop in 1896, he created his first car called the Ford Quadricycle. That's what he named it. A little presumptuous to just stick your name on your little car thing. Just sounds like somebody who really can't ride a bicycle. They need five wheels. Quadricycle, eh? It was made with four bicycle wheels. Four. Four, um... Quadricycle, eh? Yeah.

It was made with four bicycle wheels. Or four. Four means... Quad is four. Quad is four, so... No, the quad quinticycle was much less successful. That's right. Sextuple cycle.

That's what I'm into. And essentially, he got the funding to start his own um car business by just driving this thing around town and people were and you know cars were very rare back then so people were like oh shit look at look at that guy on his his little thing but they weren't terrified that he was riding around in this thing they're like what is this behemoth i mean they've seen well it was pretty small but they'd seen like steam engines oh. And so it wasn't like completely out of the... They didn't think like a train went off the tracks and ran into them. They're afraid of trains, but they're like, oh, this is like smaller.

Okay. It was cute. You know, it's interesting you mentioned that. When hot air balloons were coming up in France, they, because they weren't using like the smoke, they're using black smoke. So people thought they were like smoke monsters. So they'd have to have champagne so that they'd be like black smoke, so people thought they were smoke monsters. So they'd have to have champagne so that they'd be like,

no, no, we're not a monster. Here's champagne. And that's why they drink champagne every time you take off and land on a hot air balloon because you cheated death apparently. That makes so much sense. That's how France got nuclear powers.

They were just like, this is really risky. Let's have some champagne. Yeah, right. So he drove his Ford quadricycle around and apparently he um he became friends with a lumber baron named william h murphy uh who uh decided to invest in his first car company called the detroit automobile company and they uh created only one model of car which took a long time to get into production

because ford kept tinkering with it and uh they never got around to making a second one and investors got pissed off and shut down the company so uh ford who was left kind of high and dry decided that in order to stay in business he found this friend c harold willis and they designed and built a race car which he raced himself in October 1901 and I guess he won and that got him enough publicity that Murphy... Were there other cars being made then at that point? Who was he racing against?

Yeah there were other cars but like you know I'm sure half of them caught on fire. Sure yeah of course. In my head I was like I won this race I set up for myself for this car. Yeah buddy you're the only one competing. The pit stop is like two hours. Right, right, right, yeah.

Everything still works. He raced a fast Jew. Well, he was really running. He almost beat me by a nose. You defeated him with the... It's funny because in videos videos before he actually does have the like ah well i was building a car and he has like old-timey guy voice yeah transatlantic accent for the for the era probably that's like the first rich dude sounding voice you know oh again he was a poor worker but like the the like they affect it though yeah right the impression

of what a rich guy's voice starts with a guy like this you know i mean right right i mean obviously aristocratic like like that is the original rich person royalty type of voice but the self-made rich person voice is very like turn of the century type of thing ford really hated uh most other rich people actually and he considered himself like a man of the people, well, kind of a man of the people, but in his own insane conception of it. Right, right. Sort of the uniquely American,

like sort of egalitarian spirit, but it doesn't extend any further than like, you know, being a dick to other rich people. It's just like your material wealth is excusable because you don't wear, you know, white after Labor Day or something. Yeah, yeah. He wanted, like, Americans to get back to being, like, producers.

You know, so there's this producers thing that eventually fed into Fordism. Oh, interesting. Like that whole nationalistic, we can make everything here type of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That never works. He tried India for a long time, too.

He thought America had gotten complacent and lazy and stuff. Yeah. Towards the end of his life. And Jewish. Yeah. I mean, to him, like all other rich people were either Jews or controlled by the Jews. Right. And towards the end of his life, he went like, he had real Rosebud tendencies where he literally rebuilt his childhood home and would just comb antique dealers to fund the original types of furniture that his parents had.

That's so sad, yeah. Yeah. And even built the desk that he like, or like reconstructed the desk that he tinkered with his old watch on. Like that was how. That's just like Papa Johnered with his old watch on. That was how... That's just like Papa John buying back his first car. Did you hear that? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he got real weird at the end of his life.

Nostalgia is poison. I feel like that level of nostalgia might not exist nearly as much anymore. Also, people don't remember their childhood homes because people move around a lot more, I believe. But that level of like i'm gonna buy my parents their home again type of um well they were pretty dead at this point no i know but like i'm gonna buy the things that i i don't know maybe it's not dying maybe i'm projecting that but i um i remember in the movie american gangster he buys uh his like mom a dresser that they had when they were kids or something.

That's an important scene in the movie. Buying your childhood again. That's a huge part of what being rich in the last century was definitely all about. Now it's about surviving. Let's see. He races a car and Will Mitch Murphy is like, cool, let's start you a new company.

They reconfigured Detroit Automobile Company. And let's see, it became the Henry Ford Company. And then Murphy brought in an outside consultant and Ford quit that one. And that became Cadillac. So Ford got money from another acquaintance uh alexander y malcolmson who was a detroit coal dealer no idea what that y stands for and uh he founded ford malcolmson ltd and they uh ordered a bunch of parts from the dodge brothers of course they went on to make dodge. But they didn't pay them. And so after the Dodge brothers got real pissed off,

Malcolmson, I guess, got some more investors, convinced the Dodge brothers to become investors in their new company. And they changed the name to Ford Motor Company, which... Well, he's just practicing the art of the deal. That's really what he's getting into. Yeah. The art of fighting the international Jew. We'll get to that.

So, yeah, they renamed it Ford Motor Company, and that was founded in 1903. And once that was founded, they started making cars with really cool-sounding names like Model A, Model B, Model C. Ooh uh model k model double d they skipped some letters yeah they skipped some letters uh maybe well they didn't graduate you know they don't know the whole alphabet could have been more of an ass man um model double d model n model r and Model double D. Model N, Model R, and Model S. And then I guess he decided he was done when he got to Model T. Oh, that's the one we remember. Yeah, that's the one we remember. That's the one, the first catchy one. Yeah, right. Yeah, that was the one.

Model T. Sounds better than A, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's got a better ring to it, even though it was replaced by the Ford Model A, which was different from the other Model A. They need to restore the Alphabet. Yeah, yeah. Because they got the end of the Alphabet.

You don't. No one wants to buy the Model U. Yeah. Yeah, so they made the Model T, which Ford considered to be the perfect car. And that was kind of what, you know, as Xander said, the one we remember it launched ford into a household name because they heavily advertised it the first one cost uh 825 which is the equivalent of like 23 000 today um that's pretty decent yeah it i mean it's it's yeah probably about the the price of like a family car yeah sure uh new and um it was it was the cheapest on the market and uh ford because he he

when cars were first coming out like a lot the drive was to make luxury cars and that's part of why his first couple companies failed because he was very resistant to making luxury cars uh he wanted to make cars to be sold to the people for the people yeah, and and so It wasn't until like I guess the breakthrough of the Model T that he was really able to do it right that makes sense yeah, because you know people have to get used to the idea of what a car is and the Value of spending that much money on a transportation mobile But since his inherent hate of rich people made it so that he didn't want to make a luxury vehicle Right competition had to get to a point where or the technology just had to get to a point

where the average consumer would consider even buying that much. Does that make sense? Yeah. So was he in some ways sort of one of the first entrepreneurs to think of mass production in the sense of like, instead of just rich people selling stuff to rich people,

I'm going to sell it to everybody. Yeah. Is that, he was sort of a pioneer in that sense? Yeah, yeah. That's like what most people consider his biggest legacy was like, yeah, using mass production to sell it to everybody yeah he was sort of a pioneer in that sense yeah yeah that's that's like what most people consider his biggest legacy was like yeah using mass production to um uh to sell to the masses and uh one of his uh he a lot of people attribute this uh innovation to him in 1913 um but it wasn't his idea necessarily as much as it was like ford executives all working

together uh and the the big innovation of ford in the ford factory was they realized that in slaughterhouses uh in modern at the time slaughterhouses the um animals would come by um you know on meat hooks on sort of a conveyor belt, and each butcher would cut off a different part of the animal. And so that was much more efficient to have each butcher do one specific movement and then pass it to the next one. And so they realized that they could do that in reverse and just have each worker do one single thing on a conveyor belt, and that created the Ford production line.

And just be driven mad through the monotony of the same thing. Oh, yeah. So rather than having a room full of 40 different cars that are just being produced where they stand, and having a few people that just become sort of artisans. Like they just have one person who just does one or a few tasks. Yep. Over and over again on a conveyor belt system.

Yeah. Ford perfected alienation. Well, like they're so, I mean, mass production. Right. Had existed for over 100 years prior to Ford. Right. In England. But what he did.

Oh, he brought it to. Yeah. What he did was I'm going to apply the same principle but for consumer goods. We're not producing widgets that other companies use in their factories to produce stuff at a lower scale for consumers. He's like, I'm going to take a car and make it a consumer good for the average person.

And I bet also the process of only one person doing one job makes it so that you don't, like Stephen just said, instead of artisan mechanics that need to be paid top dollar because they know how to do everything, you're just paying a lower wage for more people to do the work. So you're engineering the skill out of the process. Right, right. Exactly.

And so you can speed up how fast the car is going on the production line and you have that sort of control right but otherwise it's pretty much just like a fixed cost for fixed little like you know you just have to hammer in one thing on a car and then it moves on yeah ford apparently had would say that it would take 7,000 and some different movements by a worker to create a Model T. And so then he would break them down into what each movement was, what kind of movement someone with just one arm could do.

And then reducing the overall number of specific movements it takes to build a car. Yeah. So it's's very mechanistic thought process to this. And he's like fundamentally alienating on lots of different levels. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, but it is kind of like how, you know, if you look at how watchmaking is done, each piece individually makes the entire thing function. So in that same vein, he's just making the process of making something

so specifically isolated that no one can potentially mimic it because you just require a person to learn so much more things than they'd ever have to before that's very interesting making each person a cog yeah precisely yeah literally yeah yeah but he did pay them five the five dollar day yes and that and was that a lot of money at the time or it was the equivalent of like 130 today and actually that was a direct result of the kind of monotony of the work yeah because there was massive turnover sure like there were estimates where if they had to hire a hundred if they needed to fill a hundred spots they would have to hire between like 300 and a thousand people and they had to do this without headphones i mean it was. No fucking psychopathic type of lifestyles.

All the way through, like, from this point to the end of Henry Ford's life, it sounds like working in a Ford plant was an absolute nightmare. Actually, so they didn't have headphones or Spotify, but they did have sometimes... Or Tidal. Let's not ignore Tidal. The shop would sometimes pay people to read the newspaper on, like, a loudspeaker or something.

That's the job I'd want at the Ford factory. So the workers would just pool their money together and get one of these assholes to read the newspaper. The Jews are at it again. That's what I was going to say. I would not be at all surprised if he played Hitler's speeches translated into English. I mean, that's certainly swept on the rug at this point. But yeah, at one point they had it on vinyl. Put that 44 back on.

We like the sound of the tone. I like hearing Hitler with the pops and hisses. Better live, you know. So that was, though, a pretty good... Wasn't the idea that he wanted workers to be able to buy the car

that they were making? Yes. So $5 a day was like enough like a decent it was it was a decent living wage yeah it was um i mean if you go the i don't know how someone working on five dollars a day could afford an 825 car but i assume that like well the model t would drop in price each year so it probably eventually got to the point where they could buy them there's financing there was not financing for it was very against financing until uh model a came out uh it he actually banned it in his dealerships oh really yeah yeah there was he was he was completely against financing i don't know if his anti-semitism maybe played a role in that

broader network okay yeah i mean it's going to take you over two years to be able to afford a model t yeah i mean it i mean he wasn't good at everything he like he it was more of a concept yeah like well the other car companies were doing financing but ford wasn't and he fought it tooth and nail until his son finally like pushed it through dead um but that was that was yeah that was later um but at the time etzel etzel yeah what a shitty etzel's up to some mischief yeah etzel had a that's all very unfortunate relationship with henry um which i'll also get to um but um back to how we arrived at the $5 wage. Yes. So the $5 wage turnover was insane. And so they realized that if they instituted a $5 wage and some profit sharing, they could retain workers. In order to get profit sharing, though, a worker had to stay there for six months and they had to meet specific social standards set down by Ford that included not

heavily drinking or gambling and also not being a deadbeat dad. And they had like a whole wing of Ford that would look into people's personal lives to check up on this. Uh, it was, which he discontinued after a few years, but like within the Ford factory, there was always a kind of Gestapo, which actually only got worse with Ford as Ford got older um with this guy Henry Bennett um or Harry Bennett um but up until that point uh they they instituted the five dollar workday and then there were a lot of immigrants that were working in the factories and so they did something even more insane, which is in order for these immigrants to get the $5 pay, they had to go through mandatory Americanization classes.

Really? Yeah, where they would just learn different factors of American life. And then at the end of it, they would have their graduation ceremony where the immigrants would jump into a big, like, wooden, quote, melting pot. You know, it's just this big bowl. And then their instructor would hold a spoon and stir it around.

And then when they jumped in, they would be wearing, quote, native garb. What? This is real? This is real. There's video of it. There's video of it garb. What? This is real? This is real. There's video of it. There's video of it? Yeah. What?

And then they would go out a door. After the instructor stirred the pot, they would go out of a door on the side wearing a suit and holding an American flag. Oh, man. So they would have to put on the suit and tie the stuff? Yeah.

Wow. Yeah. Man, so he was not only a mechanical engineer, but a social engineer as well. Yes, very much so. He pioneered that, yeah. But this was early 20th century, which is, from what I've heard from some historians, there was this trend of welfare capitalism. Sure, sure.

Which it seems Ford kind of fits in because you know they had like especially in the mining industry like very militant labor unions because they were treated like shit paid shit uh and so they you know had a lot of like violent union drives um and then eventually the bosses started saying like let's you know make it so they don't feel the need to do this you know and they would build like community planned communities for the workers and some of them actually had very nice facilities and playgrounds and stuff as a way of sort of you know keeping people from thinking yeah yeah this was yeah this is like Fordism definitely came out of the like like one

factor was labor militancy this was sort of the capitalist answer to it right they coalesced around after you know it works so well with mass production with ford yeah and ford hated unions um and uh ford the ford motor company was the last uh auto company in detroit to get unionizedized after some actually very bloody battles. Whoa, whoa, whoa. How big are these bowls? I'm not going to move past this quickly. They weren't as big as you would think.

How many people can be at the bowl at once? Four people? Five people? It wasn't from the video I saw. They were maybe, I would say, about 20 feet in diameter, maybe seven feet high. How'd they make that bowl? Probably just like wood. With a door on it, too?

Yeah, there's a door on the side. Yeah. And they'd go in with the suits, and then they'd put them on? No, the suits were probably like laid out inside. I haven't seen inside the bowl. You haven't seen inside the bowl? They go in dressed like stereotypical Native American garb, and then they come out with a suit. Now, how big are these flags? Are they tiny hand

flags or are they big flags? They're medium-sized. I'm holding my fingers up and I'm realizing it's a podcast. I'd say corner to corner, about a foot and a half. Would the person stirring be on a ladder? No, there'd be a little platform at the lip of the bowl.

I don't care about Model T's anymore. All I at the lip of the bowl. Oh, man. I am so like, this is, I don't care about Model T's anymore. All I care about is this fucking bowl actually. Would there be cheese that would be melting over them? Like hot cheese? No, that's cruelly used chocolate. Oh, okay. Yeah.

Not bad. Or champagne. Like champagne. Yeah, like the French. That's nuts. Yeah. That's insane. That's like, you know, we look at that and be like huh what a

kitschy thing but i feel like even then people are like what the fuck are we doing it's like well if you want to keep your job fucking sing the song buddy put the suit on i mean when they imagine being lined up like it's almost your turn to go it's like this is all fucked up what the fuck is this fuck yeah and then they dress you up in a suit and you get to keep the suit and you're like, oh, okay. I would say there's probably a 50-50 chance they had to buy the suit themselves.

But I can't say that for sure. That's fucking cool. I gotta see this video. Keep doing the show. Uh-huh. And along with that that he instituted the five day 40 hour work week which you know little bit of welfare capitalism little bit of he realized that when his employees got leisure

time they were more productive when they were actually at the factory he was willing to go further he wanted to roam around the workplace naked you know really yeah to jerk off and let the rally the troops yeah yeah you could see him no he jerked off um he he ran the numbers in his head and would jerk off you know try to jerk off at least uh 700 different workers in an average day like when when he was when he was a machine there'd be like a little no no he'd use his hand he was he was a really hands-on okay uh yeah because he was a machine, there'd be like a little... No, no, he'd use his hand. He was really hands-on. Okay.

Yeah, because he was like, we don't make things anymore. He was one of those guys. Yeah. The American worker just doesn't make anything. Yeah. Yeah, so he... Let's see. So, yeah, during this time, they managed to get the number of model t's out to like a thousand a

day and uh at first he had a uh like medium-sized factory in detroit and then um he opened up a massive factory in river road and while he was about to open that all the investors tried to revolt they were already pissed off about the um five dollar per day wage uh and he essentially said that if they were going to stop him he put his son in charge of uh ford motor company but then it was just like quote unquote in charge like he was fairly cruel to his son uh He would make his son work in the factory when he was young so that he would get like a real hands-on working man's experience. And then when his son was in charge, he would undermine all of his son's decisions.

Like at one point his son realized that the administrative building for Ford was too cramped and small. So he had the foundation dug for a new building. And then Henry Ford came in and said, yeah, don't do that. You're not going to build that. And Edsel Ford was like, okay, I'll have the hole filled in. And Henry was like, no, you're not going to fill the hole in.

And so he made the hole stay there so that Edsel had to walk by the empty hole every day on his way to work. Look at what you did, Edsel. Yeah. You're a waste of time, Edsel. He also, Edsel would, Edsel was like, you know, he was kind of a rich kid, and so he would party with all the other rich people in Detroit, which Henry Ford hated, and he also hated that Edsel drank, and so he considered Edsel an alcoholic, and he would go over to

his house when he was out of town and smash all of Edsel's liquor bottles with his cane. Really? Yeah. Was Edsel, did he actually have a drinking problem or did he just drink and then he didn't like it? Yeah, I think he just drank casually. He was never like a drunk. Ultimately, Edsel seems like kind of a,

just sort of a well-intentioned, you know, kid born into privilege, but like who would never be happy because his father tortured him his whole life. Well, and he's a misguided liberal. He,

yes. His father actually thought he was not. Built Ford tough. Henry Ford kept on thinking that he was weak. Well, then name like Edsel. You're kind of destined to be a weakling. Yeah. Yeah.

He was asking for it. Skinny arms. Yeah. Yeah. You a bitch, Edsel. Was he named after Edison in some way? I don't know. I mean, where are you spelled? E-T-Z-E-L? E-D-S-E-L. I got that way wrong. Was he named after Edison in some way? I don't know.

How do you spell E-T-Z-E-L? E-D-S-E-L. I got that way wrong. I thought it was E-T-S-O-L. That was closer by one letter off. I'm going to say you're both wrong. We are. We don't.

We're admitting we're wrong. Yeah, but I'm going to be angry about it uh so around this time like ford had set up a whole network of uh dealership franchises and this is part of like getting the model t popular you know he got he had a bunch of uh he would support motorist clubs so that people would get familiar with driving and want to have their own car and uh at all of his dealerships, he also, at this time, he purchased a rather small newspaper called the Dearborn Independent from Dearborn, Michigan. And there were a lot of articles that came out with his name in the byline. He apparently didn't really write any of them,

but he did definitely approve them and their message. And they were wildly anti-semitic um blaming jews for controlling um the uh government the economy uh blaming jews for starting world war one he was actually uh um he was a pacifist during world war one and like hitler he blamed the jew. And eventually all of these articles were collected into one volume called The International Jew that was translated into German and released in Germany. And in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler actually said on two occasions, he said that one of the great fighters for the working man was Henry Ford and his opposition to the Jews. And I might be skipping ahead a little bit, but weren't there Ford factories in Germany that got bombed during World War II and then he sued? I don't remember if he sued, but yeah, there were factories in Cologne. And then what I was joking about earlier was that, yeah, some of them had slave labor. Oh, really?

Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not sure how he got around having a factory that was run by an enemy. Maybe it was taken over by Germany. Sure, sure. But I can't imagine that it was legal for Ford to be running a Ford plant in Nazi Germany while it was actively at war with the United States. I'm reading this Jalopnik article about Henry Ford and the secret police that ruled his workers because apparently when he did the $5 a day thing

that it doubled the average income because it was like $2.34 to $5. But to qualify for that, they had to be model citizens according to Henry Ford. And if they... Strings attached. Yeah, if you were like under a certain age, you had to be married and have kids

and you had to keep your house and your place. I mean, he's building, you know, like an archaic, like, soldier society for his working class, basically. So it's more demonic and megalomania-esque than you would really consider. It's not, he gave more money to the workers. It's, no, he gave them an opportunity to not be themselves, hence why they'd go along with this fucking wooden bowl nonsense.

Yeah, yeah. It's like, do you want to starve, or do you want to get in the bowl? Yeah. Right. Right. But it's, I mean, it's classic bait and switch. You know, at that time, if you heard there's a job that pays double and you have to only do one thing, you're like, fuck yeah, I'll sign up. And then within a few weeks, it's like, all right, if your bet sheets aren't done, you'll get fired.

Yeah. Yeah. There's no asterisks at the bottom. Right, right, right. It just says $5 wage. Yeah. Right. He also tried to build this plant in Brazil

that came to be known as Fordlandia that was going to be a rubber plantation based on kind of ironic sketches about local id know, local idiosyncrasies. You know, I love Fordlandia on Spike TV. It's a great show. Envision the 1920s. It was run by Frederick Armisen I. Yes, certainly.

And so it was kind of the height of Ford's insane social engineering where it was meant to be a rubber plantation in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. He bought it from Brazil, the government of Brazil. And it was to be based on American small-town culture. Oh, God. Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah. Good boy. And there were a number of uprisings

of the people who worked there. One of them was in the kitchen because they all hated American food. Yeah. That's easy to see very quickly. And eventually, it just became such a mess that ford's uh grandson sold it back to brazil immediately once he took power yeah that makes sense at way less than it was worth

because it was just that much of a lost thing yeah this fucking thing beans and rife no butter and bread so uh oh yeah so the dearborn independent running all of its anti-semitic articles uh it was required that every ford dealership had to have the dearborn independent uh stocked and uh henry ford also published and had uh through the dearborn independent and had stocked all his dealerships the protocols of the elders of zion um you know yeah that that classic little book and uh i don't know that book would you explain it for our listeners well you see there's dealerships the protocols of the elders of zion um you know yeah that that classic little book and uh i don't know that book would you explain it for our listeners well you see there's a um global conspiracy of um the sons of david and how does this deal with the four-dimensional part

because really that's what i really want to know because you know with zion you really got to consider the universe of aspect of it you know well you see, there are machines that have people in a simulated world. Oh, okay. And the people who escape that go to an underground city that is controlled by Jews. And I'm pretty sure that's... And they adapted this book in a movie called... World War Z. Sense8.

All right, sure. Passion of the Christ. Passion of the Christ. Mel Gibson will probably make an adaptation of the Elder Scrolls. It's going to murder in the box office, too. You see, there's this alt-right crowd, and they need movies.

I should make the Patterson of the Christ into a franchise. Everyone saw like Marvel how the Joker hysteria was about the alt-right. They need movies.

They have nothing to watch. All right we're going to green light elders of Zion. I don't agree with it but I mean it raises a good point. The weirdest thing about the like anti-Semitic

conspiracy theories is they they bend in so many different directions. They're just so incoherent because like I'm talking about Anders. Well, they're true. Well, they're simultaneously like the lords of finance and banking and communist, you know, agitators. They're like the Bolsheviks and also Wall Street. And they're simultaneously naturally inferior and weak, but also world historically powerful. Yeah, that was like the Nazi ideology was,

part of it was that because this lower creature to them, that's, you know, they saw Jews as this lower creature that was able to control the world through the protocol, by using the protocols. And so they believed that, oh, well, if they could do it with the protocols, then us, the, you know, superior Aryans, we can implement that same kind of, those same ideas,

and we can run the country and take over the world and it turns out when you base your government on a czarist forgery it doesn't work out that way yeah so yeah so eventually especially there there are rumors I haven't seen it confirmed but Ford was a supporter of Hitler possibly financially oh really? I just bought him lunch a couple of times Andy

come on bro didn't they have photos of each other that they would put on each other's desks? oh yeah I know at least Hitler had a life sized photo of Henry Ford it was a life size? Like a cutout? It might have just...

I don't know. All I read... Yeah. He has a full-body pillow. He's doing the pointer finger thumb-like. Right. Cassandra Fairbank's white power symbol. He's the Fuhrerer you're the fuhrer

yo i'm gay relationship but eating between ford and hitler that's what i'm calling right now yeah it's all right you figured it out his waifu adolf and henry listen he only nutted his wife once where do you think the rest of the come with he um so once uh all of all of this came out and people became more aware of it and especially with the rise of the nazis right uh he eventually relented and stopped printing the dearborn independent and released an apology uh and part of the apology was claiming that because all the articles were ghostwritten with him on the byline that he never saw or knew what was in the articles. Sure. Yeah.

Which was a blatant lie. And then also the apology was also not written by Henry Ford. And his it was even the signature on the apology was forged by his head of security, the guy Harry Bennett. Yeah. Guys, I couldn't have written all of those articles. They were just goat-ridden by me. I didn't even write the apology about this. Yeah, yeah.

Jesus Christ. And he was still a notorious anti-Semite all the way to the end. True. But now I guess we could probably start talking about his his boy harry bennett uh basically one of his executives was in new york and um he saw a street brawl and one of the guys i guess was such a the in the fight uh was taken by the police but then one of the executives was like no he didn't start that fight he he was just in it and talked the police out of releasing him and then brought him to meet henry ford oh really and for Ford was so interested in the details of the street fight that he hired Henry Bennett to be his head of security. Wow.

Who before that was just a boxer in the Navy. I guess he's referred to as a Navy boxer. I don't know. I guess you get bored on the boats and you want to punch each other. There was like an Armed Forces Boxing League. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. each other there was like a uh armed forces boxing league yeah yeah yeah yeah so they're not like

they're not just boxing in the army or navy but it's like they have various jobs and they also box because you're right they are bored yeah yeah which you know i bet i could fight you well unless there's a league of people doing it i'm not gonna do it so um henry bennett was kind of the head of the uh ford factory gestapo which was the people in the ford factory started referring to it as a gestapo uh people weren't allowed to talk to each other while they were working uh which henry bennett strictly enforced um henry bennett also got closer to ford than ford's own. Uh, Ford kind of considered him almost more of a son than, um, than Edsel.

And yeah, in fact, after Edsel died, uh, Edsel died before Henry Ford died. Uh, Henry Ford was like, you know,

was I, I, I, I feel like I was unfair, but was I cruel? And apparently Henry said like, I mean, if you treated him me the way you treated him, I would was I cruel? And apparently Henry said, like, I mean, if you treated him, me the way you treated him,

I would have gotten angry. And apparently Ford said, that's what I wanted him to do, get angry. Which, you know, kind of a... Great parenting. Yeah. What an idiot. It's like that guy at the end of 12 Angry Men who's just sobbing because he beat the shit out of his son and now he doesn't talk to him anymore.

Like that kind of thing. Right, right. But... Parents just don't understand so henry bennett uh was just the tyrant of the ford factory if people were uh meeting together in groups they were suspected of union activity and would get fired uh possibly receiving a beating from bennett's uh cronies first yeah bennett is the fucking uh mad dog to the billionaire madness that is henry ford because yes billionaires are often very weak people and they need to hire literal generals and lieutenants of the armed force part of their league bill gates had steve bomber and henry ford had harry bennett you need a mad dog on your team.

No, really, though. All of our billionaires, they've got a mad dog in their crew. And Grub Stakers, I'm the mad dog, all right? If you fuck with us, I'll beat the shit out of you. Mad dog Yogi. All right. Sean needs some kind of protection. Thank you.

Yes. He will shatter. Yeah. He's gagged in the corner. Who do you think did that? Yeah, he was like that when the rest of us showed up. That's right. So Bennett would hire people from local gangs as well as people, other boxers from the armed forces.

Yeah. Yeah. And at one point a newspaper- Jay-Z had Dame Dash. I'm telling you, all of them literally do it. They have a guy that takes care of their dirty work. That's one step removed. I'm sorry I cut you off, Andy.

But like it literally happens every time. It's one guy's like, I think we should do some cool shit. And one guy is just a dedicated worker, right? Steve Jobs has Wozniak. Bill Gates has Paul Allen. And they work pretty well for a while. But then the megalomaniac goes, I need more firepower that scares the fucking dedicated worker to always being loyal to me. So they bring in a fucking guy to fucking mad dog shit,

right? In the Jay-Z case, he had his idol who gave him his moniker, but when Dame Dash comes in, that guy's gone, and then the Dame Dash fucking beats the shit out of people, and Jay-Z goes up and raps. And people are like jay-z's pretty cool and not violent so oh i just remembered i forgot to finish the uh story about how uh so right he's hiring thugs to be part of oh but this this is before that when um he was building his second giant factory and all the stockholders were like stop it he he threatened to make his own car company and make cars for like 300 undercutting ford while at the same time having his son run

ford motor company but also undermining his son and apparently this uh freaked out investors so much that then he was able to convince them to sell all their shares and just did a big stock buyback so that he would have complete control over ford um anyway so sounds kind of like modern day actually yeah yeah definitely yeah when i will use like news cycle when i came across that i was like oh it's a stock buyback right right except like uh apparently he was able by doing like all bullshit, he was able to buy the stock at lower prices than it was probably worth. And Ford was, by the way, the Ford Motor Company during Henry Ford's life was never public. Oh, really? Yeah.

It wasn't until Henry Ford II took over that it went public. I do want to give one anecdote though and i think it's interesting that i found apparently so uh when he was designing the engine um he was working with edison on this and edison was like make this a gas powered engine right and ford is like cool that's what i'm doing but he was very strongly considering doing it electric and it easily could have been electric if they could have said like yeah let's give it like a few more years let's develop because they just the reservation was like the battery wouldn't be strong enough right right yeah he said that it would be way too heavy right

if but if they had tried to like innovate that, then climate change would be completely different. Yeah. That's very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. So during the 1930s then, during the Great Depression, there was a massive union drive. And the UAW managed to unionize all the other major automobile companies

in Detroit but they couldn't break through it forward and part of it was because of Harry Bennett and apparently there was a newspaper interview where the journalist asked him

so if Henry Ford asked you to block out the sun tomorrow, would you be able to do it? And he was like, well, I'm not sure if I could manage that, but I'll promise you this, everyone at the Ford factory would come in wearing dark glasses. So that was his level of control. There were multiple instances.

One of them was in 1937, this fight called the Battle of the Overpass, where UAW leaders would hand out union literature. And it led to about 40 of Bennett's men charging them and beating them with clubs, kicking them downstairs. Yeah. And then shattering. The UAW guys brought journalists, and the Union thugs shattered the journalists' photographic plates. And there managed to be photos that got out because one journalist hid the plates under the backseat of his car. Oh, yeah, sure.

And then when kind of the Bennett thugs surrounded his car, he was like, here are the kind of the bennett thugs surrounded his car he was like here are the pictures and then took some empty plates from his front seat and handed it to him and after that ford became very unpopular yeah and he even threatened to like destroy his company before letting it unionize wow and the own and at that point his wife threatened to divorce him if he didn't allow a union. And the whole time Edsel was, by the way, saying, let's just give in and sign the union contract. Because they were the last company to do it. So everyone else had it at that point, huh?

Yeah, yeah. And finally he relented and actually signed a contract with more favorable union terms than the other companies. And when one of the union guys asked why, Henry Ford said, well, I'm trying to fight Chrysler and GM and now we can fight them together. Yeah, yeah. And so to him, it was just another like a more shrewd business move, just like the $5 workday. However you want to justify it to yourself. Right you didn't win yeah and uh oh there was also another fight

where uh guns were involved and four people got killed uh that was earlier in the 30s um just doing russian roulette for fun i mean they were just hanging out you know bored hanging out at a factory can't talk to each other but gun to your head and you do what you want so um uh for the ford company almost went under during the great depression but then they were saved by some military contracts they were able to make some bombers and uh eventually during the 40s edsel Edsel Ford started getting stomach ulcers. Those turned out to be from stress, but then it turned out to be stomach cancer. Also from stress.

Yeah, and Henry Ford refused to believe he was sick. He thought he was just weak. Faking it, wow. Yeah, up until the day that he died. What? Yeah. And then Henry Ford himself died in 1947. And someone, one person said, I don't know how true this is, that like he'd had a few minor strokes before that. the last one was after he was shown video footage from the concentration camps

and like the Nazi atrocities that he had helped push. Right, right. And just the shock of that kind of sent him into the grave. I don't know how true that is. It sounds kind of apocryphal. It sounds a little bit fabulistic. Yeah. This man that believed in this Nazi vision had a turn of heart right before he died.

He had died cumming in his pants. Look at the efficiency. No, he didn't cum. That's how he got his power. He came once. That's right. And he immediately regretted it. Right.

He was no fab club. Yeah. So, that is the tale of Henry Ford. Built Ford tough. That is the tale of Henry Ford. Da-da-da-da-da-da. Built Ford tough. And with that, this has been Grubstakers. I'm Yogi Paliwal. I'm Andy Palmer.

I'm Steve Jeffries. Anders Lee. Here. Wait, do you have any plugs, Anders? Yeah, follow me at Anders Lee here on Twitter. Pod Damn America is my podcast. I'm also on RT's Redacted Tonight. You want to check that out on YouTube? He's fantastic.

Check him out everywhere. Thank you so much for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. Thanks. We had a nice time in Miami. Fine. That's Mr. Edison. He's looking fine.

Yes, indeed. I'm surprised at the great development of radio. So am I. It's what we've seen here and we also can be thankful appreciate the development mr edison's made in the uh fair tone on uh helping music uh better quality of music in the radio that he's manufacturing so it's a great industry you think the uh this great development we can have, further development, the opportunities for young man? Not as they were a few years ago. I think so.

Yes indeed. If young man makes up his mind to work, there's no limit to what he can do. If he makes up his mind to go at it without reality and work. He has much chance. He must study and work. He must go back in any art as far as he can to pick up the very beginning. The more he goes back, the further he will be able to see ahead. Well, do you think Mr. Edison feels... How does he feel about the chances for young men today? Well, I'll ask him. He's right here. Answer that question now. Now.

Yes. There's more open to the other ones. There's more aim to the evictions and the structures to go on forever. There's more chance for young men to stay in the other ones. Where all the large industries are terribly short of high-grade men. They can get almost any salary they want. There's such an over-shorter. The hard supply of demand is worth a second. I think that's right.

I think he's been right about it. We can just get better men, we can make better developments, and you said that they will just get down and work. And study. And as Mr. Edison said a good many times, that no extremity of man will go to avoid the real labor of thinking. And if we could get that out of their system, why would we have to get it? Or in other words, give them the habit of working. Yeah, that's right.