The Daily Stoic - David Gelles on Jack Welch’s Legacy and the Future of Corporate America

Episode Date: July 2, 2022

Ryan talks to David Gelles about his new book The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America―and How to Undo His Legacy, the importance of developing a strong will, David Gelles is a reporter for the Climate desk and the Corner Office columnist for the New York Times. Before joining the Times in 2013, he spent five years with the Financial Times. At the FT, he covered tech, media and M&A in San Francisco and New York. In 2011 he conducted an exclusive jailhouse interview with Bernie Madoff, shedding new light on the $65 billion ponzi scheme.InsideTracker provides you with a personalized plan to improve your metabolism, reduce stress, improve sleep, and optimize your health for the long haul. For a limited time, get 20% off the entire InsideTracker store. Just go to insidetracker.com/STOIC to claim this deal.The Daily Stoic is now available as a Shortcast on Blinkist. You can revisit past episodes or get through ones you missed—all with a fresh perspective and even a few updates in insight-packed listens of around 15 minutes. Check it out at blinkist.comTen Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. Ten Thousand is offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc/stoic to receive 15% off your purchase.MUD WTR is a coffee alternative with 4 adaptogenic mushrooms and ayurvedic herbs with 1/7th the caffeine of a cup of coffee. Go to mudwtr.com/STOIC and use code STOIC to get 15% off your first purchase.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance and wisdom. And then here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think,

to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Look, the Stilx practice the art of momentum. Moreover, they know that life is short and unpredictable. But that doesn't mean they're trying to die faster. Right? Mark's really says a doctor. He wants to live as long as that's possible, as long as that's within his control.

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Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. It seems like unbelievable to me. It must have been 2013. I, my wife and I went to this event in over New Year's in Charleston, South Carolina. It's called the Renaissance Weekend. And I remember it very vividly, not just because we had a great time and I met a lot of interesting people, many of which I'm still friends with to the stage, but I remember it because I was working in the hotel room on the draft of the obstacles the way. I've been struggling on the book for a long time and I'd finally broken through like in December.

And so I was finally after a lot of being stuck, I'd kind of figured out like the format, the idea of doing it in these sort of short stories with a quote up top, I'd figured out the format. And so finally, it was like off to the races. And it was a great conference, I'd gone to a lot of conferences before then, I've been to a lot of them after,

was cool about Renaissance Weekend. It was sort of actually built around family and spending time together. And that it was over in New Year's, right? It's not just like, oh, go do this thing and learn some work stuff. It was like, hey, it's hard to have plans for New Year's. Why don't you do something in New Year's that whole family can enjoy. And you can learn stuff too. And I ended up going to another Renaissance weekend,

a couple months later in Jackson Hole. And I remember I sat down for dinner there, and I'm just sitting across from gym level of the astronaut. And I was still working on obstacle and I said, hey, I have this chapter about the NASA astronauts or how they control their emotions. And I was saying, you know, I heard this thing that John Glenn's heart rate never went above 100 when he orbited the Earth.

Like, how does that work? And the next thing I know, the guy from Apollo 13 is like explaining to me the insights of the thing that I'd only could have read about or speculated about before, which is why I do go to things and why I, one of the perks, but also, I think, imperatives of the work that I do is getting in, if not in the room where things happen, getting around people who were in the room when things happened, because it shapes what I write about, how I think about it, it's a way to fact check for starters. All of which is to say this is a cool experience, and it's where I met today's guest actually through his wife, Alison. But David Gilles was then

a journalist and went on to do a lot of cool work. He and I reconnected when I was reading his corner office columns for the New York Times. Now he's moved over to the climate desk where he's doing awesome work. I think when I met him, he must have been at the financial times. He was writing about tech and media and stuff like that. But he's a great writer. He famously conducted a jailhouse interview with Bernie Madoff. But in today's episode, we're talking about David's latest book, The Man Who Broke Capitalism, How Jack Welch gutted the heartland and crushed the soul of corporate America and how to

undo his legacy. I know that might not exactly seem like something pertaining to Stoicism, but it actually connects for this reason. For the reason I was talking about earlier about why I went to Renaissance weekend. The philosophy isn't this thing that exists only in the classroom. It's about being a leader. It's about being engaged in life. It's about pursuing success in the financial sense, but about pursuing being engaged, being involved doing stuff. And we can learn a lot of what to do and not

to do by studying the people on the extremes. And I think Jack Welch is almost a Shakespearean character. And certainly David makes the case in this book that is a bad Shakespearean character, a character to learn what not to do. And I suspect different people might have different takes. This isn't exactly a charitable look at Jack Welch, but perhaps that is the correct take. Maybe he is, you know, mostly a villain. I'll leave that to you, and I encourage you to read the book.

But I think we have a great discussion about ethics, about what our obligations are to each other beyond just the bottom line. And this was a great conversation. I very much enjoyed reconnecting with David. And I think it's a reminder too. You never know the people you meet when you might reconnect with them how your paths might cross And it's just a reminder to be nice and chill and cool to everyone and David was certainly all those things to me and here we are in today's interview. Enjoy! Yeah, how you been when I think we saw each other last this would have been in like Jackson Hole in like 2013 maybe.

That sounds potentially right. Yeah, that could be right. I haven't been to Renaissance Weekend in a very long time, but I do miss it. We would love to have you back, of course. It has not changed in 40 years and will never change, but that's part of what makes it beautiful. Well, you know, I went a couple times and I was like, we were like some of the only people there without kids and I think that's like a whole other level of enjoying it.

And now we have kids. So now I'm kind of thinking it would be fun to come back because I'd get like the, you know, I think, this is probably kind of why I set up that way. The hardest thing for me is like, I go to so many conferences or events for work. I'm never like, let's just go for fun or let's just go for like education. Do you know what I'm saying? Because it feels like you're leaving,

it feels very selfish, right? And so to be able to do on where you could bring your kids, I think that is that that's this actually the secret sauce of Renaissance weekend. And they can attend camp Renaissance if they're over the age of three where, you know, people like Charlie Bolden will explain what it's like to go to space to them. I, yeah, that's amazing. I remember walking through the hall and meeting Dr. Ruth and I was like, this is really

weird. This isn't happening anywhere else. Yes, indeed. And just purely anecdotally, we live on the same lake upstate as Dr. Ruth. So Dr. Ruth has like become a big part of our lives, even beyond Renaissance weekend. That's amazing. I'm glad to hear she made it through the pandemic. Yes.

And I do paddle board yoga with her whole family, though Dr. Ruth herself has, while she can perform flips on New Year's Eve in the dance hall, she has not endeavored to try paddle board yoga as far as I know. You know, the reason I thought of Renaissance weekend recently wasn't just because I read the book, but I had Admiral Steph Riddis on the on the podcast. I was telling. He was telling me this story. Did you listen to that episode? Is that

what you said? I did. Yeah. Okay. So, so maybe you can confirm it and I this, but he was telling some story. He was like, you know, I was driving on these ATVs and there was an accident and this person fell off and I rushed to the scene and the next person there with me was like a PhD of Shakespearean literature at Princeton. And I was like, the only conference that could possibly be referencing because he said Jackson, so I was like, that sounds like a real renaissance weekend vibe. It does. I'm going to, you know, I know someone who can actually fact check the details of that. So that'll be my pillow talk tonight. Yeah. Yeah. Your wife would know if there has ever been an ATV accident at one of your events

that involved a former Supreme Commander of NATO coming to the right rescue. The real question is, has there been more than one? I would imagine some of the Renaissance weekend attendees would be very well suited to driving ATVs and then some it would be an invitation for exactly that kind of accident. I think that's right. I think that's right. I remember actually the one I went to in Jackson Hole, my wife and I, we went somewhere after we were walking around and you around and just walking around enjoying the scenery

and this frantically, this park ranger pulled up. He's like, you cannot walk over here. We're like, oh, sorry, sorry. And he's like, no, no, no, it's not like I'm like mad at you. He's like, this is where grizzly bears hang out. And I was like, oh, okay, I appreciate the advice. out. And I was like, Oh, okay, I appreciate, I appreciate the advice. All right. So as I, as I, my last thing on on Renaissance Weekend that I wanted to ask you about is, is it something I do have missed from COVID is there is something special about people in very different worlds,

very different views, getting together and spending time together in person. And it strikes me that obviously a huge part of our polarization, the stratification of society is rooted in driven by social media. But I've got to imagine a big part of it is just people not doing enough stuff like that.

I absolutely concur. And what's so remarkable about Renaissance Weekend of it is just people not doing enough stuff like that. I absolutely concur. And what's so remarkable about Renaissance Weekend, and I think part of what allows for the real listening, and that's how I would characterize what happens at Renaissance that's different than what happens at other conferences, there's so much talking and there's so much projecting at the whole conference circuit that you know as well as anyone. But there's a level of listening

that I find at Renaissance, which does distinguish it. And part of what makes that possible, and this makes it hard to replicate, is that it's off the record. Right? There's no expectation that you are going to be quoted, that anyone has a video camera trained on you. And this, of course, works cross purposes to Renaissance's broader mission and efforts to like get itself and its name out there because no one knows what the heck it is.

Yeah. But it is truly, I mean, this term has been absolutely bastardized in recent years, but it's a safe space. And it's a safe space where you're allowed to explore ideas in the way that the academy I think used to be. And perhaps it is no longer, at least for a lot of people who talk about not finding the same sort of intellectual freedom I experienced when I was a philosophy major and and got into these rabid arguments with my professors and my classmates over really

tense stuff when I was like a dumb 19 year old and didn't and was like working out the ideas but I remember great arguments I've had at Renaissance Weekend, and I remember vividly getting put in my place at Renaissance Weekend by people who knew so much more than me about a subject that I was just out of my depth on. And I had my tail between my legs when that happened, and I vividly remember it because it was about race. And I said something and I hope I wasn't being overtly racist, but I said something that was, you know, I was off. I was missing the mark. And Ben Jevus, I don't know if you know Ben, but former head of the NWACP,

he put me in my place in a public setting. And it was so good. It was so good for me, it was good for the room, and it was good for him to be able to do that in a way that wasn't making an example of me and wasn't trying to get a social media sound bite but was really engaging in the hard work of discussion and bridging divides. Well, it's not a performative event, right? So most of the conferences I go to, it's me on stageative event, right? So most of the conference is I go to,

it's me on stage and then maybe there's a Q and A at the end and maybe, although I skip most of them, there's like a dinner or a breakfast or something. This isn't one person having the spotlight. It's usually like several people having a conversation which the audience can listen to and then join. So it kind of doesn't scale in that sense, like you couldn't have 3,000 people in the room for one of the talks, but it's much, the impact is much higher because the one on one thing

you're just talking about, and also I think, I've talked about this before, but one of the things, one of the reasons I think meditations by Mark Serelysis is this totally unique philosophy book is that he wasn't writing a philosophy book. He was writing notes to himself about what he thought, and in that way, the specific is actually more universal. And so maybe the smaller room with deeper connections is actually allows you to reach more people more deeply. I think there's a lot of truth to that. is actually allows you to reach more people more deeply. I think there's a lot of truth to that.

And then, you know, there's another thing that I think's interesting, which is, it's very easy, especially in the social media world, to be like, well, why don't the Democrats just do X? Or why doesn't Congress do X? Or why can't, you know, whatever. That it would be so easy. This is the same thing sports fans do. It's like, they should trade so and so, or why doesn't he, you know, whatever. It would be so easy. This is the same thing sports fans do.

It's like, they should trade so and so, or why doesn't he just run these routes? And then when you meet the man or woman who actually does that thing, right? Who actually knows it, you realize like how complex it is, and you realize like these are human beings who are making the best of a bureaucratic or flawed or constrained set of choices.

There is something special about like meeting the people behind the people like, I remember one time, I was writing in obstacles the way because I was working on that when I attended. I was writing about astronauts being sent into space and how they do emotional regulation. And then I'm sitting down at dinner and Jim level is just like at the table across from me.

And I was like, Oh, shit, I can just ask him this. I could go read like a thousand books on this topic and do all the research, or I could just ask the guy who was in the capsule when everything went sideways on a fall at 13. And we can just, we can just get right to the middle of it. And then I could, you know, there's something cool about being like, Oh, yeah, like, you know, there's only so many federal judges and there's only so many heads of the N double ACP. And, you know, you get the information straight from the source and you're like, Oh, it's not what I thought. Right. And I will say having been too enough for

an assaults weekends that sometimes it cuts both ways where there have been moments when I have had the opportunity to listen to and engage with people in enormous positions of power. And I came away reminded that they are deeply human. Yeah. Yeah. You know, way that perhaps I sort of wanted them not to be. Well, isn't that kind of what you figure out with your parents?

Like I forget who said this, but your parents are just two random people who met and then had sex. You know, like there, there wasn't like this test that they passed and they're, they were like, room, not remotely qualified to raise a human and bring them into the world. And it does make you a little bit more forgiving. to raise a human and bring them into the world. And it does make you a little bit more forgiving. But I imagine you found that too doing the corner office column where you're just like,

wait, this person is responsible for billions of dollars. Like without this person, we would not have this or that. Like, I imagine it's both empowering and then also quite terrifying. Absolutely. And part of what I've been reflecting on during the book process, but even in the last few weeks, I'm really getting out there and talking about it, is the ways in which I did and didn't evaluate some of the people I spoke with during the corner office column, or over the years I did this,

because there is this natural temptation, which I address in the book, to sort of treat business leaders, almost as heroic figures, because they are these archetypal leaders of organizations, and we have a cult of hero worship in this country. And it's easy to fall into some of these tropes, and I was guilty of it. And

probably still will be in the future because that's at a certain level part of the craft of business journalism, which is a weird thing to acknowledge, but there's some truth to it. And so when I think back on many of the interviews I did, I do believe I was able to tease out some of the real authentic motivations of the leaders of major organizations and companies and try to give readers a better sense of what makes them tick. Because ultimately that matters, these are individuals making choices that have enormous consequences for a broad range of stakeholders. But there are also times when I look back and if I'm honest with myself,

come away with the impression that maybe I wasn't trying to plunge the right motivations. Maybe I wasn't trying hard enough to ask the best question I could that would elicit that sort of an answer about this or that executive's most critical, most influential decisions, such as how they treat their people, right? And so I'm in a moment of self-reflection at which just makes, like I'm primed, I'm really eager to have these conversations. Well, the thing that I kept as I was reading the book and it's really good, I imagine it's tough to write a biography of a person you end up not liking

or that you're disturbed by in a lot of ways. But the thing I was not struggling with, but the big question I had is like, okay, with some exception, right? Because there were some investigations after, et cetera. Like you would argue that 90% of Jack Welch's legacy was not like illegal, right? Like he wasn't breaking the law. He was doing what, you know, business professors recommended.

He was doing, he was maximizing revenue for shareholders, etc. He was even doing, in some cases, what made a lot of logical sense. Like if you're just looking at it at the spreadsheet, it says like, why are we operating this plant? It's not doing well. Why do we employ this person? You know, they are not as good as these other people. But it struck me that really you're making an argument for something I've been thinking a lot about, which is his virtue of temperance. You were thinking about, it's not that he shouldn't have been, it's not that it was wrong for him to do it like ethically, uh, legally, but that it was gray area ethically or it's not that he, like the difference between can and should, right? That he, it's like the thing in Jurassic Park,

you were thinking so much about whether you could, you didn't ask yourself if you should. Like you were just, it seems like your big argument was like, why aren't there other things to value in life? Why did you decide this was the thing to optimize? Do you know what I mean? I do, and if I may, I would even just pull us back a bit further from him in the midst of his career

to acknowledge that when he took over GE, call it 1981, the American economy was on the cusp of profound change, the global economy too. So things were going to be different and it's important to acknowledge that. The way things had been going for the past, call it 35 years, 45 years, after World War II was inevitably going to be disrupted with the rise of Japan and Germany sort of coming online as big industrialized economies with the rise of technology and Wall Street

money was starting to move in different ways. So things were going to change. What troubles me is that Jack Welch faced with an opportunity to essentially take one of America's essentially take one of America's most revered, most influential companies in a new direction and chart a course for it in this new world that we were entering into. He at every turn chose the most brutal option, the option that created the most value for himself and other investors who held a concentrated amount of this company stock. And almost time and again, created some of the worst outcomes for the hundreds of thousands of people who worked at that company.

And so I just keep thinking about the choices, right? There is no law of nature that said he has to do that. There is no law in the Constitution or from the SEC that required him to go about mass layoffs in the way he did. These were choices that an individual made. Epic Titus says that I delight in my improvement day to day. Well, today's sponsor, 10,000, has a mantra that's quite similar.

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to be successful, you have to understand those trends, you have to participate in those trends a little bit. You can't run in opposition to those trends, but there's no law, as you're saying, that says, you have to accelerate and exaggerate those trends. There's nothing that says, you have to take it to the nth degree that, hey, if this is reality television is popular, you don't have to create the Jersey Shore. Do you know what I mean? You can you can say like, eh, I don't like that. I could do it. I think it would be successful. But like, why?

Life's too short. No doubt about it. And also can we pause and talk about our definitions of success? Yes. Because GE is famous, right? For something like 80 quarters in a row, he delivered something like 15% annual growth. I mean, just absurd numbers.

So that was his, that was success as he defined it and as Wall Street defined it. But a 7% growth rate is also tremendously successful and would have left room for all sorts of other benefits. So part of what Welch did was reset expectations for CEOs, reset expectations for corporations. And essentially, in my view, skew our priorities. and with this myopic focus on short-term profit targets to the exclusion of just about everything else. Yeah, you said, it says on page 40,

you said you're quoting, well, she says, a CEO's primary social responsibility is to assure the financial success of the company. I don't think anyone would argue with that. Like, of course, like if you put the company out of business, you've harmed all the stakeholders. But I think, to me, where like, temperance or, again, the difference between legal and moral

is, do you have to ensure the success of the company's finances at the expense of all other variables or do these variables work in tension or balance with each other and could one trade some short-term profitability or profitability being intention with, you know, one's impact on the world. Energy that short-term focus did indeed allow Welch to essentially keep playing the game for an unusually long term. Right? Yes. He did this and essentially mastered the game for the better part of 20 years.

But you only need look at what happened almost immediately after his departure, to understand that the sheep he left that company in was truly, truly dismal. As his successor said, it was a bag of shit. And understand that during that time, he had essentially been hollowing out the company and putting long-term priorities on the back burner for the sake of short-term profits. And so again, that's defined success. If we're talking about the quarter or even the duration of his career, as long as he was able to essentially keep some of these

questionable financial practices, he was going, again, he got lucky because Sarbanes Oxley was enacted just after he retired. And all of a sudden, there was a whole new level of financial scrutiny from investors, from the SEC, but he was able to keep it going for the majority of his career. And yet, immediately after he left, the real consequences of that pattern of decision-making were on vivid display. Although arguably, and you do a good job illustrating this

in the book, the consequences were also felt by ordinary people, sort of quarter in and quarter out as part of layoffs or firings or just the way he was squeezing more and more blood from the stone. It's just, no, it didn't really affect that many rich people or affect the markets until he finally stepped away. That's right. And it's important to remember, he was dubbed Neutron Jack by 1983, right? If you look, and I'd love your thoughts on this, just when we think about the narrative

of great figures in history, because if you pause, if you stop the tape just a couple years into his tenure, he's in really rough shape. He hasn't been able to move the stock substantially. He's been called Neutron Jack. There's negative profiles about him on 60 minutes in Newsweek. There's negative profiles about him on 60 minutes in Newsweek, and yet he's able to essentially shrug that off and keep going and reinvent himself and create this narrative as, you know, what fortune-duped him at the end of this career, the manager of the century, the greatest CEO of all time. And that to me is also a critical part of the story, the way he was able to create an in enable a sense of myth making around his tenure as CEO and the way in which the financial press and the academic press as well played a real hand in that.

Well, I was just going to say that. I think when you look at Trump, when you look at Elizabeth Holmes, when you look at Jack Welch, when you look at a lot of the media often goes like, how could they have gotten away with this as if they weren't the people reporting on him, not even on a quarterly basis, like Welch is putting out quarterly reports, but they're writing about him every day, right? Like Forbes is now like Donald Trump, you know, Condas. And it's like, no, you guys collaborated on a fiction about his net worth for like 30 years, right? And like, this is, you did this with the Kardashians, you did this with Elizabeth, because you wanted a

juicy story. It's like that expression from Upton Sinclair who wrote sort of very critically about journalism in one of his great books called The Brass Check. He was saying like, it's impossible to get someone to understand something that their salary depends on them not understanding. Like, we think about the conflict of interest. Like, you wouldn't want a journalist owning GE stock and then writing about Jack Welch, right? That's a conflict of interest. We're not out of the world. Yeah, but if like the juicy version of the story is also in your self interest, positive

or negative, right? It cuts both ways, but I think as part of the myth making, like there was more incentive to puff Elizabeth Holmes up on the way up, then it eventually reached a point where there was a story to be had in puncturing said, Nith. But in reality, she'd never should have been in that position for someone to expose her. Like, her crime was not done in secret. Her crime was inextricably wound up in getting journalists to write unquestioning, positive, myth-making stories about it. And let's just all be real frank about this because I'm a business journalist who's still

employed in the profession. This is my guilt. We're talking about access journalism here. Something I've done my fair share of. And as I sort of go through this exercise and reflect it on the work I've done my fair share of. And as I sort of go through this exercise and I'm reflecting on the work I've done, the work I'm doing now, by the way, I just changed beats.

I'm now really focused exclusively on covering climate change, in part through the lens of business, but I'm no longer sort of on the business desk. I'm reflecting on the degree to which, again, some of my work, some of the access journalism I did, did I ever pull my punches in order to ensure that next story? Were the corner office columns on balance relatively deferential with the hopes that maybe next time Tim Cook would sit down with me, right? I would argue that I asked serious questions what I needed to.

That on balance, I chose to profile leaders. I'm more or less admired for one reason or another. And so I don't find myself in the position of having done a corner offices with a lot of, you know, Jack Welch protege is, for example. And yet, listen, I'm in the process of sort of doing some self-reflection or all that. No, access is inherently corrupting. And I, it's like, it's not that journalists are specifically guilty of it. It's just, it's more visible, but we're all, we're all that way, right? Like we all want, oh, maybe this person will give me a recommendation at some point. Oh, maybe this

person will connect me with this person or, you know, I want to be a, like access is, I mean, you think about this politically, all the people who will say one thing in private and say another thing in public. It's like everyone's always kind of keeping their powder dry when probably a better policy would just be to say what you think when you think it. I think there's some truth to that, but we don't live in a black and white world. Sure.

And I'm thinking of skillful means here, the Buddhist practice of sort of teaching to the audience in front of you. And that's something I care a lot about because I think we may have talked about this in the past. I've studied Buddhism deeply. I've gone on silent retreat in India for many weeks at a time. And that notion of skillful means, I think it matters and is relevant here

But but I in the way we can hold two truths at the same time. I think like skillful means matter and I think there are limits to sort of unmotorated unfiltered honesty and and it's also true that access is corrupting Well, yeah, like you talked about studying philosophy. I think Dioge and he is the cynic, is this fascinating character of like when you're young, you're like, oh, look at him. He just says what he wants.

He lives how he wants. He spurns, you know, Alexander the great and he doesn't care. And then you're like, also, it's not that this guy is a loser, but that it's like, this dude is not in the mix at all. He's not that this guy is a loser, but that it's like, this dude is not in the mix at all. He's not doing anything. And so he would probably look down at a, you know, a philosopher who's also a politician or a philosopher's a writer or an advisor or whatever. But like, as you said, it's not only not a black and white world.

It's also a world in which it's really easy to sit on the sidelines and talk about it. It's having no access. Isn't inherently noble either. Is that guess what I'm saying? I like that. I like that framing. And listen, I think a lot of us probably have those friends who just say what they think. Right.

And I'm sort of proud of it. And I got to say, they're not always the best interguests. They're not always the people you want at your table for like four hours on a Friday evening. Or they wouldn't be the best people to have it at Renaissance Weekend either, right? Because if you're just a jerk, and that doesn't facilitate connection or collaboration

or shared understanding either. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's worth pointed out here. Basically said what he thought. Whenever he wanted to any audience did not modulate his message. Had one volume that was, you know, set to 11 and was a cheerleading champion for downsizing, deal making, financialization, offshoring all the way through his career and right through retirement. And I think I bring that up because it can be an effective use of a bully pulpit if you have it, right? That for those who have that mix of conviction and power and authority and in Welch's case,

the credibility of one of the great American companies behind him, it makes it enormously powerful. And listen, we've seen this in politics too, right? Like, you put Donald Trump in the White House and all of a sudden like Donald Trump's brain is national policy. And that can be a scary thing. Do you, as you're sort of an alternative history question, because you know, sometimes people argue, oh, these, these are trends or this is structural or this would, you know, this is the direction the world's going in. If Jack Welch had decided instead to follow direction the world's going in. If Jack Welch had decided instead to follow the traditions

of his forebears at GE, does somebody else just do this or did he actually change and shape the world in a new direction? It was one of these moments in history where there was a truly unique individual at a truly unique moment in history with command of a truly differentiated and powerful entity. And you know as a student of history that those moments come along. And in the American business story, this was one of those moments. It's impossible to imagine

Jack at Procter & Gamble having this kind of impact because Procter & Gamble simply didn't have that legacy as the Bell Weather, the Bell Weather Company that set the precedent for all other companies. It's important to remember here that for more than a century, GE had been the company, other corporations, other CEOs looked to for guidance on how to comport themselves. It had this history ingrained in its DNA from the 1890s when Charles Kaufent took over, he was known as the father of professional management. And time and again throughout the early part of the 20th century, as the company got bigger in the middle of the and later in the 20th century, as the company expanded and got more

complex and developed into a true multinational corporation, GE was the place that essentially wrote the playbook on how companies operate. And so that's the context at which this may on comes in with a completely new set of priorities, a completely new way of doing business and implement it. And it's that credibility that he has from GE that makes it such a powerful exemplar to the rest of CEOs and makes it almost inevitable that they fall in line. As a business owner who has my share of employees, I thought a lot about HR, not just enough to hire great people you have to manage and develop and train those employees.

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that he was creating a thousand imitators of the immature bullying genius CEO that Welch was like, look, this is how I'm gonna make the most money. This is, you know, this is what I'm able to do, but you didn't do what sometimes leaders or celebrities get faulted for not doing, which is go like, I'm a role model, and that comes with additional responsibilities and obligations. I think the framing of that question suggests that if he had undertaken that thought exercise,

he would have had a different set of priorities than the ones we know he had. And I don't think that's the case. I think he wanted everyone to be playing that game. I'm reminded of the opportunity I had in 2011 to interview Bernie made off in prison. And I'm not saying Jack Wultz was a Ponzi Schumer, but I essentially asked made off if he was remorseful.

You know, could he take it, you know, do it all over again. What do you know, what do you do it all over again, what do you know, what do you do it? And he essentially made the, some Pablo about sure, like regretting it on some superficial level, but it was clear that he didn't deeply understand or accept the suffering that he had caused. There was, there was a, I could recognize and someone sitting across the table for that he had either the unwillingness or the inability

to truly appreciate the magnitude of the human toll his actions had taken and I think that you know that's something close to the definition of a sociopath, someone who's unable to account for other people's suffering. And well-chead, some of those qualities as well. Do you think in some respects that is, like, what makes this person able to do what they do? Like, what's their greatness? Greatness being a broad term. Like, but the special skill is the indifference or the shamelessness. Like, like, like, I think I've said this before, but like Donald Trump to me, his, that he could get

up there after the Axis Hollywood tape in front of 70 million people and just be, and, and say his bullshit answer in a way, if you zoom out and you put aside again the morality of it and whatever, it's a feat of almost athleticism and will that he could muster through that obvious nonsense answer in front of millions, I mean, even just to say it to his wife, you know, take some balls. But to be able to say it to America being like, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like that is a thing that you and I don't have. And that's why we're in some respects not them. Compartmentalization. Yeah. It can be an enormous superpower. Right. And I'm also thinking, having just listened to the Admost de Vrede's interview about military leaders here, right?

They have to be willing, and many of them really reflect on and carry the burden of the consequences of their actions in a deep and profound way. And yet it's that ability to perhaps understand the toll that is going to be required to accomplish certain aims and still proceed with it that I think is asked of many great leaders across history in a lot of different ways. The question that I would sort of add in here is to what end, right? What are the goals, right? I was just rereading the tremendous Atlantic magazine, Beeswritten, in 1960, about D-Day. And I don't know if you've seen it or aware of it, but it was tremendous piece that was just resurfaced recently on Memorial Day. And it had me thinking about the generals who set that wave in motion and the burden,

the responsibility is extraordinary. But they were doing it for the preservation of the free world. You get art. No, I've read about Ulysses S. Grant. They cycle through all these different generals to finally get somebody that works. And that what was Grant's superpower? It's that grant of all of them, like does the math. He goes, we have the factories, we have a larger population and more money. If we just last longer, we win.

Like, if we fight to a draw every time, it's still to our advantage. Like, if we lose 10,000 and they lose 10,000, we can replace those 10,000. They can't. And like, from a military strategy standpoint, that's a pretty quick and easy place to get to. But from a human standpoint, you have to go wait, the 10,000, we're not talking about horses, or we're not talking about rifles,

we're not talking about horses, we're talking about human beings that I'm willing to trade 10,000 human beings as literally like a chess piece to have the fortitude to do that. In the evil sense or in pursuit of a moral end, that is a superpower or an attribute that not many people have. And like, I've got to imagine, put aside the ethics of Welch's layoffs. I imagine you've talked to a lot of different CEOs, laying off people even when it's absolutely

necessary and there's no way around it, must be a horrendous task that few of us are capable of rendering. It's difficult, and I'm not going to sit here and say layoffs are never necessary. But what distinguishes Welch's tenure is that he was the first one to really do it when the company was doing just fine. Right. He had made a billion dollar profit in 1980 right before he took off, but it wasn't enough for him. And thus begins this perverse practice, which endures to this day of laying off workers in a bid to improve a corporation's profit margins, not because it's unprofitable, not because the factories

you know, absolutely just never going to carry its weight again, but because the executives decided that they and maybe Wall Street wanted better margins. To get to 15% profitability from 7% as you were saying earlier. Right. Which is very different than storming the beaches on Normandy. Yes. Yes. And it's weird.

It's like, again, somebody has to be the police officer who fires at the criminal that they think, like somebody has to do it, but you need a certain amount of, a callousness is, you need a certain amount of sort of compartmentalization there, but if you take it too far, then yeah, you're at the mercy of a psychopath or a sociopath and it can get out of control very quickly. And I just keep coming back to choices, right?

Yeah. There are choices. And what we're seeing now, and I'm not gonna sit here and say stakeholder capitalism is the solution to all our problems, right? This notion that CEOs or somehow enlightened and are gonna care about workers in the environment to communities all of a sudden.

But embedded in that, embedded in this new dialogue, this new sort of line of thinking from CEOs is in my sense, my experience from talking with them, a reassessment of the priorities as they make these choices. There is a growing recognition that corporations have this outsize influence on society. And many CEOs look around and include the degree to which they really graph the extent that they are part of the problem, but many of them are understanding that, on the margins at least, they have the ability

to be a part of some of the solutions. Is this thing all? Check one, two, one, two. Hey y'all, I'm Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur, and a Virgo, just the name of you. Now, I've held so many occupations over the years that my fans lovingly nicknamed me

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And I owe all the entirety of my success and my worldview to the things that I've read. And in some cases, to chance encounters with specific books, Mark's really speaking a good example. And so if you're thinking about reading something and I'm not sure what it's about, you wanna get more than just the gist out of it. Well, then I think you should check out Blinkist.

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And they put it together with their award-winning sound design. You can check out their first episodes with X-Mayou, Chris Bosch, and Barry Weiss, those who are live now, and they're more to come, check it out at Blinkist.com. Yes, that makes sense. And I interviewed John McEwile ago, and I think he's an interesting person. Clearly also cultivated a myth and a narrative as any successful person might, and I'm sure not a perfect person. And there's probably a bunch of stuff I disagree with him on. But he does seem to be perhaps an example of a middle road that we're talking about where you can be extraordinarily successful, and at least not be utterly indifferent to the consequences of the decisions you make or the impact that you have positive or negative on the lives of the

people who your products, decisions, and business interacts with. John deserves a good bit of credit. He was part of this original conscious capitalist movement, which essentially set the table for the business roundtable statement in 2019 that redefined the purpose of the corporation. It helped set the stage for this broader dialogue around stakeholder capitalism that we're seeing today. And yet, I interviewed John as well, a couple of years ago, and his decision to sell to Amazon after an activist hedge fund got in his stock, I think has really challenged his ability, or I should say, Whole Foods' ability, that company's ability to stay true to some of its guiding principles. And it's going to be a fascinating evolution to see whether or not

in five years, we can really say that there is still a whole foods culture, or if those are just the Amazon grocery stores. Well, that is the tension of all of it, right? It's like you, it'd be wonderful if just being a good person was enough, or a good leader was enough, but you also have to have leverage and you have to have power, or other people with more leverage and more power will come and exploit that delta, right? So like if you're running your company at a certain level of sub profitability or inefficiency because you're a bleeding heart or a softie and you just can't get rid of people or close

businesses that aren't working, you working, eventually somebody comes in and this is how capitalism works. Somebody comes in and buys that from you or gets control in such a way that you can't continue to operate the way that you've wanted to operate. So it's like you got to be nice, but you also have to be able to defend and assert yourself. It was amazing to review the history of GE and see that in all of Welch's tenure. No one ever tried to do that, right? No one ever came in and challenged Welch and said, you

know, like, I'm a shareholder activist, I'm a private equity baron, and I'm going to come in and try to wrestle some control of that. And that's because you think about these firms, essentially squeezing companies from the outside, Welch was doing it from the inside. There was nothing these people could do that Welch himself had not already thought of. That's fascinating. What do you think Welch or some of these leaders would say to the idea of no bless oblige? The idea that as a successful, wealthy elite person, it's not just person, it's not just your obligation to make more, but also your sort of duty as a person. Would he have just rejected that idea entirely or did he believe you try to make all your

money privately and then in the markets and then personally, you can be nice and generous. Well, if that's the case, I would like to take a closer look at Mr. Welch's philanthropic track record because there's not a whole lot there. But what I think is actually a somewhat subtle answer, which is that many of these men, they're mostly men, perform a whole lot of mental gymnastics to justify some of their actions. And one of the stories that Welsh told himself, and it was a fiction that maybe held up in the short term, but again, in the long term, just doesn't hold water when you look at GE stock yesterday, is that by making GE a valuable company, everyone benefits, right?

The rise in tide of GE stock lifts all boats. And your 401K is going up. And if we give you a little stock option, that's going to turn into your little nest egg. And listen, for the relatively small portion of the GE population who gets to enjoy stock based compensation, that may well be true, at least as long as GE's stock was up. By the way, it's like crater, something like 80% from its all-time high. But of course, it isn't true for the vast majority of American workers.

And so much of what I've thought about in the writing of this book is just how we distribute the riches of this land, right? Companies make uddles of money and the way in which those profits have been distributed over the last 60 years has changed dramatically. If you look at the 1953 annual report from GE, they proudly lay out exactly how much they paid to their employees. And it was the largest payroll effort. They were so excited about it. They talk about how much money they're paying the suppliers. They thought it was a good thing to pay their suppliers a lot of money. They even talk about how much they were paying in taxes. They were so excited to do their

shares. I'm sure, I'm sure. Love them, right? And you look at what it's like today. Every one of those has done a 180. And it's just not the world we live in anymore. It is funny just as brilliant as humans are and as much as we're able to do, how if you give us the wrong metric, we will take that to a dark fucking place. So you're a Vietnam and they're like,

well, how do you judge success against a guerrilla enemy and someone's like, what about body count? And you know, that gets real dark real quickly. I was talking, I was, I had a meeting with a head coach of a big college football team recently and he was saying, he sort of, he was presenting himself as having reformed and changed a lot of ways and founding some other things that he measured himself by, but he was like

Literally every year of my career. He was like I told my agent like if I wasn't on the list of the top 10 Highest paid coaches in the newspaper and I wasn't making my way towards the top like that he or she had fucked up And I was gonna fire them that like you, he was at the end of the day, he commanded this huge program, he was winning, he got to do this, play a game for a living, but at the end of the day, he wasn't measuring himself on whether the team won, it was where he ranked on a basically a, not apples to apples list

of how coaches were being paid. And I found that, you know, you'll meet someone, you'll be like, wow, this is one of the richest people I ever met. But all they're actually thinking is who is three places above them on the Forbes list that they know is fucking bullshit also. So what are the metrics by which we want to measure ourselves as a nation. And let's look at those. And that, to me, is one of the deep questions that a book like this tries to at least help

us ask, because Welch redefined some of those priorities, Welch introduced and helped popularize a new set of metrics, I would argue, but if you look around, right, there are probably some metrics by which we as a nation and an economy are doing well, but there's also some other ones that I think we got a lot of work to do on. And that, to me, helps render a verdict on the last 50 years of our collective economic story and helps

render a verdict on the legacy of this man who had unique and outsized influence on that narrative. Most of you know, I'm not really a big coffee drinker, but I am always looking for something that helps keep me focused, particularly in the afternoon, so don't crash, and ideally something that doesn't cause that afternoon crash, which is why I like today's sponsor mud water. Mud water is a coffee alternative,

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are the hardest to measure. Right? And Clay Christiansen, one of the great business consultants of all time, I think there's a certain sweetness, but also irony in that the last thing he wrote was this book, How to Measure Your Life. His whole career was about how you measure, if you're not disrupting, you're being disrupted, you know, if you're not making more widgets or you're not dominating this part, like he was very much of, and I don't mean to impune him, I'm just saying he was a metrics driven person. And then, you know, he sits down to talk to these Harvard MBAs and he's

like, none of this matters. You have to measure life by these other things. But the reality is those metrics are much softer and harder to discern. It's like, how do you measure if an athlete is a good teammate? You can see if they get assists or how many points they score, but like, you can't measure if they just make the team better by being on it. But you can almost always measure the whole that they leave behind when they leave. You know what I mean? But yeah, it's tricky.

It's tricky. I think we get distracted by the superficial obvious metrics. Profitability, share price, earnings per share, you know, whatever, it's harder to measure these other things. It is, though there are metrics that I think help tell the broader narrative of, say, the American middle class. So, if you look at, for example, the gap between worker pay and corporate productivity, those two lines were essentially married to one another

for 35 years after World War II. And then right around 1981, they diverged. And productivity kept going up and worker wages essentially started to stagnate. You look at any number of other economic indicators, the minimum wage and executive compensation, for example, right? And one's a hockey stick and the other has barely budged. And so they got to pick our metrics carefully, but I would argue that the most

revealing ones are those that tell the story of the economic well-being of the greatest number of us, not just the most successful. And maybe if it's not a, maybe you have your metrics, but you understand that if you get too much tunnel vision around those metrics, you can lose the forest for the trees. And you have to have questions or standards or a community or a spiritual practice or something that you use as kind of a check or a Break on what happens when those things run am up like I like the famous Jack Bogal question of like where the customers yachts Right like you're like I'm doing well. I should be doing well. I'm working really hard. I'm coming up as blah blah blah, but like what I'm working really hard, I'm coming up with BoboBot. But like, what visible evidence do you have around you

that other people are doing well because you are doing well? Right, right. And, sorry, I was beeping. Now go ahead. I know I'm just making sure that I'm not being disturbed. No, no, you're good. Whoa. And I've asked my trainer for that. So where are the customers, what's your spiritual practice

to make sure that people around you are doing well? Thank you. And we're at this moment with the great resignation or the great switch or whatever we want to call it. Coming out of the pandemic, where I get this sense, that's so many people in all different industries and at different stages of their careers are reassessing their priorities.

And perhaps some of those who were myopically focused on rising through the career ladder, maximizing their own economic well-being in the short-term, you know, through advanced careers, are taking a step back and saying like, actually that's not what I care about. I think it's easy to oversimplify that narrative and essentially project on to like the whole of our economy, what's happening with a few different examples and anecdotes, but there is a sense I get

in talking to professionals and friends that the last two years, maybe help people ask some of those clay Christians in laid-in-life questions, like how are we going to measure this life? Whether or not that lasts, I already get the sense that sort of there's a sense of back to normal.

But in as much as it causes people to ask some of these new questions, I think it will be welcome. Well, I also think these are questions, not just of privilege, but like of also higher up on the hierarchy of needs, right? So if you've got stock options have matured and the stock market's doing, if everything's

going great, you can be like, why do I live here? Why do I work so hard? You can ask these questions. But then as the world suddenly seems to do, it's unpredictable, it's scary, it's uncertain, then maybe you're like, you get back into what got you in that sort of desperate accumulate, don't ask too many questions, just do what you can for yourself mode, that, you know, the only the paranoid survive kind of a vibe. And Welch had no appreciation that when he fired someone out of a compassion from GE,

that they got knocked down a couple of levels on Mazda's hierarchy of GE, that they got knocked down a couple levels on Mazda's hierarchy of needs. That they went from working at a blue chip company with something close to guaranteed lifetime employment and great benefits and a great salary to essentially restarting their careers often laid in their lives. And if they were able to get another job, working for a contractor that was maybe going to pay them a third of what they were making at GE. And this is something, you know, even Jeff Imel, Jack Welch's designated successor acknowledged when I interviewed him for

this book. He talked about, I asked him a version of this question, I was like, why do you think people are so mistrustful at business? And he said, I get it, right? If you go from working in a GE factory, making $35 an hour to go into working for a janitorial service providing company, making $12.50 an hour, that's gonna have real and lasting implications for your own life inevitably,

but also ripple effects in the economy and in your community and in your town for your school board, right, for the tax base of your city. And it's those kind of ripples compounded over a couple generations that in my mind helps explain the kind of country we're living in right now. Yeah, if you read No Mad Land, yeah, you're just like, I remember as I was reading it, you know, there's this part of me, I said this in another interview, I was reading it and I was like, there's a part of me that was sort of like my capitalistic side, like the voice

I got from my parents, how they, their political views were sort of like, I was trying to think like, how is it this person's fault? Right? Like my instinct was like, how did their bad decisions explain how they went here? And I realized that the reason my voice was doing that is that if I could figure out a way it was their fault, then I wouldn't have to care, and then it wouldn't be my fault, right? And then if you can try the more sympathetic view, and again, maybe it's like the traits

that make you a great CEO, fight for the same resources as whatever this trait is. But if you can start to think about like what was done to these people or where the rug was pulled out from under them or where they got a bad break that anyone could get and that it wasn't their fault that it was systemic or a structural, it's a result of the incentives were setting up as society. You go, oh man, this really sucks. I really feel sympathy and pity for you. And, you know, the way that say Amazon is running these warehouses,

that's not okay. That's such a powerful insight for me personally. And if I may, I'll just be really candid and a little vulnerable here. I live in New York City. There's a lot of homelessness on this street right now. I got two little kids who I walk around the city with. And when I see the same homeless people

on the corner, two walks from our apartment, and I have to walk by them with my kids, I have the narrative of what bad choices did they make? Right, right. Put them on that corner, and how can I not let my kids make those decisions, right? And there is the, we're essentially blaming the victim at a certain level right here, which is a deeply, deeply unfair mental habit to get into, but one that we're habituated to, right? One that all

our collective narrative sort of point us to. And so I'm, I'm, I'm thanking you for reminding me of trying to keep in mind these bigger forces that I'm writing about in this book when I see those and those people on the corner. Uh, yeah. And it's like, look, the system is failing us too, right? Like it's in like you San Francisco, which has a very clear and real homeless problem and the inability of politicians to deal with it is creating a backlash. It's going to have really real consequences. And it's why lots of people are leaving San Francisco.

But it's like the fact that the streets are covered in excrement, it's not really the homeless person's fault. It's the people that we pay to solve these problems. You know, it's the people who are not paying their taxes, et cetera. That's who's failed. You know, it's the people who laid employees off or said, hey, I don't want to provide health care and then this person had a mental health thing or what it's like, it's like we're all being failed by this system.

And I think, I think this is a Buddhist practice, it's also a stoic practice. Instead of trying to go like, no, this person is the enemy, they're this other, they're doing something to me, you're like, no, we're in this boat together and we're both being dealt in injustice. And so I'm not going to be mad at you. I'm going to try to direct that energy towards like where it might actually make a difference. And even if I can't, how can I just not contribute to that decision with the choices that I make in my life, in my business where I put my money, etc? And it's that kind of this empathy that we're talking about, that we're talking about,

cultivated and trying to demand about ourselves is something that I believe is sorely lacking in so many CEOs and would come right back to that sense of compartmentalization, right? This ability to essentially block out the human suffering that they are causing. And again, right? Are they of necessary at times? Sure. Are they necessary when you want to increase your profit margin, I would argue probably not. Yes, or there are a thing you can do, but not the only thing you can do. Right. And so what's your default?

And is your default to be more humane and less humane? Yeah. I remember I interviewed a CEO, I remember I interviewed a CEO about his experience during the financial crisis of 2008. He looked at the numbers and he came home and it was just clear to him that he was going to have to fire like 400 people at a company, rather than a midsize company, that had never fired people in all of its history. And he knew these people was a small company and he came home and he was crying to his wife about it as he told me. And it was fraught because it was going to do it the next day.

And she said, well, what if you just didn't? What if you didn't do this? And it stopped in cold because he hadn't actually stopped to consider the answer to that question. He hadn't entertained the possibility that there were other options because he was running on this default set of assumptions about what he was supposed to do as a business person from all the things he had learned to business school. And ultimately he realized, he's like,

wait, there's debt financing available, right? There are other places we can cut costs. Like, there's actually a ton of other stuff we can do rather than continue to expect everything else to say the same, but our labor pool to suddenly shrink by a really substantial number, there's tons of other ways we can adapt to make room for these members of our community to keep their jobs.

And that's ultimately what he did. No, and look, that's why I think the book is great, even just as a thought exercise. So even if you're like a CEO or a leader and you read it and you're like no Still what I know about Jack Welch. I think he did the best you could We even if you disagree I think there's a lot of value in the revisionist history Approach that you kind of took from the thing where you're like let's look at this from a different perspective and By looking at it for different perspective. Maybe we just maybe the reader just comes away with a few, having questioned a few implicit assumptions about defaults or best practices or solutions

to specific problems that were just made up by someone not that long ago, and maybe they were operating under a different moral compass than you or a different set of constraints than you or a different set of constraints than you. And you should really sit down and think, hey, what are actually my options here? What do my peers tend to do in situations like this? Because they might be doing the wrong thing. If people come away from the book asking those kinds of questions, I'll be really, really grateful.

Well, that's what I came away asking. I really enjoyed it. And I loved the quarter office column. I thought it was great. It's exciting that you're on to bigger and better things, but I'll miss that for sure, too. Well, thank you so much for having me, Ryan. This is so much fun conversation. so much fun conversation. It's not that life is short, Seneca says. It's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is.

You built this Memento Mori calendar for Dio still to illustrate that there is. You built this Pimento Mori calendar for Dio Sto to illustrate that exact idea that your life in the best case scenario is 4,000 weeks. Are you gonna let those weeks slip by or are you going to seize them? The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall and every single week that bubble is filled in, that black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show, not just for your years,

but for every single dot that you filled in that you really lived that week, that you made something of it. You can check it out at dailystowke.com slash MN Calendar. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic Early and Add Free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music App today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. plus in Apple podcasts.