TRASHFUTURE - Preview: It's Boever ft. Justin Roczniak

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

In this bonus episode preview, Justin and November from WTYP join the gang to discuss all things Boeing, and what happens to your empire when you accidentally apply your own ideology to the most important pillar of your blood soaked globe bestriding war machine? Also, we talk about the UK's ambitious plan to have flying taxis in the air by 2026, and a new Neom region that puts a certain Battersea sky pool in London to shame. Get it at www.patreon.com/trashfuture 

Boeing, for a very long time, has been at the centre of the US Imperial Project. Oh, that old thing. It also- Yeah. Yeah, that old thing. It's deep in the military industrial complex, you know, all the plane stuff is. Yes. It sorta is the military industrial complex, yeah.

It's the industrial, in the military industrial complex. Not the military, weird. That eye. Yes. That eye used to refer to a lot of companies, now it mainly refers to Boeing. Well, Boeing's not been the same since Kenneth Pinion left. He was the true expert that day. What I'm also driving at is, the headlines you've been reading about commercial airliners

are about one thousandth of the problems that they've been experiencing, and I alluded to this earlier, largely because they decided to really live American capitalism. So, oh good. You're sort of like, you are in Yemen and the XM59 puppy killer that's circling you just fails to work and then falls on you. Yeah. And that was so a private equity guy could, you know, build a bigger island. So I suppose I mean, look, we can I mean, we can talk about about like

about all of this. It's also worth saying, like, I don't think that like I think the company that makes the commercial airliners should make the commercial airliners good. I think that the investors would disagree with you on that one. People know even though they fly commercial to people think that the XM 59 poppy killer is named after its targets, but it's actually named after the fosona of the guy controlling it. However, also like Boeing failing to produce things like fight. November, we were talking about this earlier.

You said they have like, a thousand fighter jets backordered for different carriers? Like, they're just not making fighter jets anymore? ALICE Oh, both the civil and the military, like, there are huge huge queues. Like, Boeing owes people hundreds of planes, not to mention other ancillary stuff, yeah. And because this stuff is so compartmentalized, and because, like, Boeing has subsumed so many of its American competitors, both on the civil and the military side, there's not really

other places you can go for this, at a lot of the time? So, if anything, what we would say is, asset management as a professional industry and training managers to respond to the demands of asset managers has essentially done the closest thing to Maoist third-world ism on the American military Yeah, yeah Bill Ackman's daughter speaking in like, speaking in Maoist standard English. Like some hedge fund manager, just like, a hedge fund manager basically joining Black Hammer and talking about like, American...

I tried to navigate the VOR for this airport that I'm supposed to land my Boeing airliner at and it just called me a cracker. Yeah. Right, so. Yeah, three K's and an A at the end. Yeah, like Uncle Cracker. Can you, Roz, give us just like, from what I've just outlined, what exactly happened to take them from the single most important cog in the US military machine

to the single most broken cog in the US military machine and also commercial aviation. So like from from memory, I keep in mind, I'm not the biggest plane guy, but I do know sort of what happened here. This is mostly going from memory. We got to sort of look at Boeing as a builder of planes with legendary reliability, a builder of planes which, you know, have been trusted by airlines, by the traveling public for, you know, half a century, more than half a century at this point.

In the early 90s, they merged with this company, McDonnell Douglas, which had been known for building a lot of lemons at that point. You know, McDonnell Douglas in the in the process of this merger through the sort of the way that, you know, things work out through mergers. Most of the McDonald Douglas management wound up on top here. McDonald Douglas had sort of a different opinion about how planes should be built, which was that, okay, we're a company that makes money, not airplanes.

So they sort of, you know, they're controlled by MBA guys, widget guys, you know? And so they sort of start making decisions which change the culture of the company. They do things like they move the headquarters from Seattle to Chicago. They do things like, you know, we're going to start focusing on cost cutting everywhere. We're gonna do things like spin off parts of the company. Like for example, where the fuselage of the plane is built

was in a facility in Wichita. The fuselage is like the part where the seats are, where everyone sits. So they decided, we're not a company that builds planes, we're a company that assembles planes. So they decided to spin off the entire part of the company that builds the planes into something else called Spirit Aero Systems.

And that's a fun way that you can, I don't know, fiddle with the numbers a bit, while still maintaining sort of a similar supply chain. ALICE Yeah, and you have all that beautiful in-house knowledge and then you sort of hive that off, and it then becomes like, yeah. SEAN Oh, you fuck, fuck those guys, yeah. They did a lot of union busting They tried to move production out from Renton to places like I want to say Wilmington, North Carolina, which has a Less strong union culture, although I believe that plant is trying to unionize just because you should get a union

I Think there is the there's also right this this thing of when McDonnell Douglas and Boeing merge, it's not surprising that the guys who are smarmy business operators who all went to Harvard outfoxed all of the guys who are like, I have had the same haircut for 40 years and I designed planes. The slide roll guys. Yeah. JUSTIN If my engineers say there's a problem, I can walk across the street into the factory and see what's happening.

ALICE See, this is the thing, that's what they teach you at Harvard Business School, you know? You read that book, you can outlive it. JUSTIN Never do that. ALICE And of course, the one man nobody ever thinks about. Douglas MacDonald, the inventor of the Joby. So basically, Boeing's problems, as you say, a big problem was this merger with MacDonald Douglas in 1997 and the takeover of the plane company by the manager company, basically. And also the, just moving to Chicago, I looked into it into it was basically just they were bribed with tax credits to just again

it's how poorly if I was a like if I were right the head of Chinese intelligence in 1997 and I convinced Boeing to 7. And I convinced Boeing to just split up all of its manufacturing processes to put useless MBA consulting people in all of the powerful roles and just hive off all of that knowledge. I would be given... That would be the greatest act of espionage that could ever be perpetrated would be making Boeing follow the rulesionage that could ever be perpetrated, would be making

Boeing follow the rules of American capitalism as they apply to other companies. Essentially. ALICE See, the issue is, the Chinese airlines all use Boeing's. So they're getting fucked over too. ALICE Again, there's like, basically two companies that do this. You can either get it from Boeing, you can get it from Airbus, and then all the other

stuff is like, I mean, there's fucking Embraer and Bombardier and whatever, but like... Yeah, Embraer, yeah, Bombardier. You can buy a Suboy Superjet if you're feeling free to. It's true. And I often am. I mean, they don't have a great reliability record, I don't think. Don't they use, like, General Electric engines? I'm just like, can I can see daylight through the floor. So yeah, if you want to go on a plane that sucks you off, Russian

Airlines wouldn't be a bad choice. Get a nice Illusion or a what's the other one? A Tupolev, yeah. After 2003, the new CEO, Harry Stonecipher took over. Wow, what a name. He said, I want to run Boeing like a business rather than a great engineering firm, which is exactly what he did. Yeah. So, my understanding of how plane design works is very occasionally you will build an entirely new airframe You will then upgrade elements of it until the sort of basic design becomes obsolete

You'll build a new airframe that incorporates all of the developments in aviation up to that point and then begin upgrading that now What Boeing started doing at this point? I believe their last new airframe was created into a new like white up, like the design from blank paper airplane was I believe was in 2004. And it... The 787, yeah. The first carbon fiber composite airframe that was built. And, the, um, but like, when it was time to replace the 727, 737 and 757, they didn't design any new airliner.

They didn't design anything new. It's very simple, the first plane that you make is the Boeing 1, next one, Boeing 2. Just, stop throwing 7s in there. But instead of doing all of that, sort of rebuilding that format of airliner, with the 2-2, the 3-2, etc. They just basically slapped a new coat of paint on the older models, and returned the cash to shareholders.