“The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy”: https://amzn.to/3zw6BKQ

If everybody in America read this book there would be a revolution.

About fifteen years ago my dream died. You know, where the stars align and you become rich and famous. Because I realized there was no way I could do what I did and become rich. And by modern standards even entertainers are not rich. You can’t earn billions by singing.

Now you want to argue with me. Yes, there is Paul McCartney, but he started eons ago. As for Dr. Dre, he made his money on headphones. But I don’t want to go any deeper here, because this is just what the rulers of this country want, for the hoi polloi to be distracted with petty arguments.

My mother always told me I wasn’t the one. There was always someone smarter, more connected, who knew more. As for my father? He was so internalized from a rough upbringing that all he could do was rage. And then try to make up for it by being loving. He was an outsider, and knew it and owned it. If I was looking for instructions on how to be a man in society, they would not come from him. But he constantly poured out business advice, telling me to dig beneath the surface, for things were frequently not what they appeared to be, what everybody was telling you they were.

So I went to college in the dark ages, when the goal was to be a doctor or a lawyer, so you’d be set up for life, so your parents wouldn’t have to worry about you. I just read in the “Times” this morning that pay for public defenders is so bad they’ve got to take second jobs to make ends meet, never mind since Watergate lawyers have never been respected again. And although you read about MDs making beaucoup bucks, the truth is most are making a good living, far from seven figures, many not even mid six figures, working for the corporation, the paperwork will bury you otherwise. If you’ve got an independent practitioner, you’re one of the few.

So things started to change in the eighties, with Reagan. He’s another person who has to be torn down from his pedestal. This guy ruined the economy forever, single-handedly opened the door for income inequality. And Clinton, after losing traction after the ’94 election, stopped being progressive and endorsed right wing tropes, eliminating welfare benefits. And then the Supreme Court gave the presidency to Bush and it was all over.

Not that any of the foregoing people is that powerful. It’s the corporations that rule this world, and now they’re multinational, beholden to nobody. And their CEOs are seen as laudable titans.

Michael Eisner did a great job rescuing Disney from the doldrums, but was it worth a billion dollars? By time he exited the company he was its largest shareholder. How can that be? You go from being an employee to that big an owner?

You see executive salaries are way out of whack. And we can credit Jack Welch for that.

Jack Welch, the manager of the CENTURY! That’s what they called him. For meeting Wall Street analysts’ numbers year after year.

When I was in law school, my girlfriend’s father gave her a subscription to the “Wall Street Journal.” I saw this as a negative, because of its right wing politics. But as I read it I became more and more familiar with business. It’s a different paper now, the business coverage is often better in the “Times,” but if you read it on a regular basis you’ll get an idea of what is going on. Then you’ve got to connect the dots yourself.

So we’re in the go-go nineties, after the traction of the eighties, and this Welch guy is suddenly an icon and I look a little deeper and I say there is no way this can be true, this guy is obviously cooking the books. But what did I know? Isn’t that exactly what my parents told me, I was an inferior outsider looking in, sans all the facts, these people were GIANTS!

Well it turned out it was true. Now everybody knows. We can ask whether Welch literally cooked the books, as in outright fraud, but it’s clear that financial shenanigans were employed to meet Wall Street’s numbers, SO THE STOCKHOLDERS WOULD BE REWARDED!

Let me tell you how this worked, it’s not too hard. Welch invested heavily in finance. And then he would buy and sell stuff to make his numbers every quarter. Jeffrey Immelt, his successor, ultimately missed his numbers and his excuse was they couldn’t get the usual financial transactions done in the last two weeks of the quarter! I’m chuckling just writing this. People oftentimes reveal their bad behavior if you just let them talk long enough.

So, used to be corporations were a partnership with the public, the essence was its products, and the employees were seen as an asset.

But not under Neutron Jack.

First thing he did was fire employees. Not only causing them to lose their jobs, but decimating entire communities. This made the numbers look better. And when the numbers looked bad, he just bought stuff. You’d be stunned how CFOs can work the books. The recipe was simple: downsize, make deals and financialize. End result? GE stock kept going up and up. As for GE itself? It’s being broken up in the wake of Welch’s efforts. There’s no there there anymore, at least not much. And did I mention Welch made HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS in the process?

Let’s dig a little deeper.

Economist Milton Friedman said a corporation’s only obligation was to its shareholders, to make them money. So America became a casino, all the jobs were shipped overseas and the business of many of these companies was finance.

But it gets worse. These companies were making so much dough that they increased dividends and repurchased their shares to make their stock go ever higher. AND THIS IS STILL HAPPENING! That’s right, you cut until you create a cache of cash, and then you distribute it and buy back shares to make your stock go up AND YOU ARE HANDSOMELY COMPENSATED FOR THIS! You’re making money, but the corporation??

But it gets even worse than this, GE was seen as the bedrock of management skills, you wanted a GE titan in charge. So all these corporations brought in GE talent which then employed the exact same recipe. Can you say BOEING?? People died there, but Welch’s protégés ruined one company after another, while they made tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. Even Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, he was down with firings too, after all he’s an investor first and foremost!

In other words, just about every CEO who is praised, who struts around like a king, and they’re essentially all men, is a crook out for himself. Truly. As for knowing how to run a company? They know how to cook the books and make the stock price go up. The underlying company? WHO CARES! They ultimately get fired and get golden parachutes worth tens of millions of dollars on top of all that money they got paid while they were ruining the company!

Everybody inside knows the above. It’s a club, and as George Carlin said, you’re not in it. Prior to Welch CEOs were not making these outrageous salaries. But Jack convinced Wall Street the pay packages were worth it, after all, look how much money he made for them! Forget building, never mind sustaining the underlying company. One of the other things all these Welch acolytes do to save money is cut R&D, research and development, i.e. the longevity of the company.

It gets worse and worse. Welch fires 10% of the employees every year, resulting in a cutthroat worker environment. No one will take the time to help anybody else, they need to keep their numbers up, they can’t waste any effort.

And it’s not only Welch, how about Jeff Bezos and Howard Schultz? Things are so bad in America that workers are starting to unionize. Not only the uneducated laborers, but the college educated who can’t get a better job themselves, get on the corporate gravy train. And rather than embrace unions, Amazon and Starbucks fight them all the way, they don’t want to give up an iota of power. That’s right, the corporation rules and you’re a fan, after all, who else is there to believe in, musicians hawking perfume and clothing, trying to suck the tit of corporations which laugh at these “singers,” who don’t realize they’re the tools that are being used.

Rather than rebelling against corporations, people EMBRACE THEM! Get tattoos of them. And their leaders, who call themselves “rock stars,” are looked to for answers about anything and everything, tell us they know better, when in truth they’re clueless and helped cause the problems to begin with! Watch “Borgen,” politics is a professional game. You’ve got to negotiate for a result. Instead we’ve got bozos in Congress who believe stonewalling steers the country forward. Hell, they should close down for a week and watch the last season of “Borgen.”

Like I said, people on the inside know all this. But there’s never been a book that’s laid it all out, put it all together in such a damning way. One guy, Jack Welch, set in motion a transformation of society much bigger than the social issues discussed on TV, that too many Americans make their voting decisions upon, if they vote at all.

As for planning for the future? Just in time inventory programs made it so when the pandemic hit…there were no supplies. Yes, to cut costs, to increase the numbers, to make the stock go up, the corporate CEOs took everything off the books. Jobs were outsourced. Someone else built the parts, they held the inventory. Boeing stopped making almost all of its planes in-house and turned over manufacture to outside vendors. Why? Not because Boeing was doing a bad job, but to save money, to make the numbers look good, to make the stock go up, so the CEO could get ever richer! As for the problems this caused… Well, hundreds of people ultimately lost their lives, not that these execs are contrite when this happens. That was another one of Welch’s credos, fight back, don’t own it, it’s not your fault, if there’s even a problem to begin with!

But almost no one will read “The Man Who Broke Capitalism.” Because they don’t read books to begin with. Unless they’re genre tomes, romance, mystery, if that! Or self-help from these same guys who ruined the economy to begin with!

And “The Man Who Broke Capitalism” is not the easiest read, it’s far from tough, it’s highly readable, you’ve just got to be interested. And it’s not even that long.

And it doesn’t matter if you’re left or right, Democrat or Republican. This isn’t a political issue, other than the government letting these companies rape and pillage without even paying any taxes, barely regulated. Everybody is affected by what these companies do.

Be the first on your block. Read “The Man Who Broke Capitalism.” You won’t stop talking about it. We’ve got to start somewhere.

She’s selling the essence, not the penumbra.

A couple of years back I had dinner with John Dick, majordomo of the research company CivicScience. He puts out a weekly newsletter everybody loves, you can sign up here:

http://www2.civicscience.com/l/165381/2019-08-30/bjv6tb

CivicScience consults Fortune 500 companies and John was struggling with writing the newsletter, it was a chore. I told him to make it personal.

Then everything instantly changed. The story about his daughter saying “I love Dick!” was priceless. Also the one where he talked about a family tragedy. You see it’s about people. First and foremost. Want to have success, especially in the arts, MAKE IT PERSONAL!

Everybody can relate, everybody is imperfect, has warts. Once you testify everybody else does too, they’re just waiting for the signal to open up, especially guys.

A few years back I went on the Summit Series cruise. You can research it. And although Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Partners told me I had the best presentation of the weekend at a subsequent Summit event in Utah, the hit of the cruise was Esther Perel.

Everybody knows who Esther Perel is today. Because of her podcast and publications and… She’s the relationship guru. Trained relationship guru.

But this was before all that.

I had to go see her, she had to do a bonus talk because people were turned away from the scheduled one. Esther was relatable, she wasn’t dictatorial, she told it how it was, and it was very interesting.

This morning in the “New York Times” I saw a story about Logan Ury:

“Logan Ury Says You’re Dating All Wrong – From her Oakland commune, a dating coach has made a big business out of her data-driven approach to modern romance.: https://nyti.ms/3tsZpLI

A COMMUNE? You mean hippies in Oregon wearing overalls? Takes balls to live in a commune in the twenty first century. This I had to read.

And that’s when I found out Logan went to Harvard. Yes, growing up on the east coast that still means something to me. A person can go to Harvard and be socially awkward, have no practical sense, but they’ve got to be book smart, they’ve got to be able to read, understand and write. Those are the necessary criteria for admission. So was this the average dating coach?

Absolutely not.

She’s not the usual charlatan. You know, the person who hangs up a shingle whose main goal is to get rich. Like the clairvoyants preying on the hopeful. You see Logan’s approach is based on data, science. And she’s got a degree in psychology. This ticks a few boxes.

As for the commune, Ury says “Research shows that people are happiest when they live in groups.”

Now I’m not sure I want to join a kibbutz, but one thing is for sure, I’m happiest when I’m in a group, especially when the pretexts of society are stripped away, when it’s just people. Where you went to school, how much money you have…take away the bragging and it turns out people are more alike than different, you can relate to anybody. Well, there is Gene Simmons…

Ury doesn’t believe in soul mates. If you’re not settling, you’re not doing it right. Think someone is a perfect match? All you’ve got to do is live with them. Logan is being practical, and so many of the unmarried are not. Reminding me of those great Jackson Browne lines:

“Without dreaming of the perfect love

And holding it so far above

That if you stumbled on to someone real you’d never know”

People don’t want to hear the truth. Not only from Jack Nicholson, but almost anybody. They’d rather hew to their delusional viewpoint.

And Ury’s research says “A recent one (survey) found that 88 percent of the app’s users would prefer to date someone who’s in therapy.”

There you have it! If you want to have a relationship you’ve got to have insight into yourself, otherwise how can you have insight into someone else? Going to therapy is hard for most people, they don’t want to admit to themselves that they’re imperfect, that they can’t do it all by themselves. The truth is you can’t, I’ll just leave it at that.

Now Ury is building a business on relationship coaching. I don’t know the woman, for all I know she could be motivated by money. But one thing I do know is people are looking for answers, especially when it comes to love.

So I decided to dig deeper, to go online.

And that’s when I realized that Logan Ury’s publicist deserves a bonus. Ury is everywhere, the “New York Times” is just the cherry on top. But it’s where I saw the story.

And not only are there stories, there’s Instagram and videos and…

I decided to check out Ury’s Instagram, “loganury.”

It’s all advice. It’s detailed. She’s on a mission. And she’s not obscuring it. Too many people are worried about their image. Who has got time for that? If you’re on Instagram you want Logan’s essence. And what is that?

One of her posts says your profile should be accurate, not aspirational. If you lie, what are the odds you’re going to get what you want?

“Look for a partner, not a project.”

People don’t change. Not that much. So if they tick a lot of boxes, they look great and they’re good in bed, that does not trump the fact that they cannot hold down a job, or are untrustworthy.

There’s a cool video, “How to deal with a ZQ (Zero Questions) dater.” She’s got a lot of good advice, but it’s the most practical thing that stood out… If you’re wary of dates with no questions, no back and forth, PUT IT IN YOUR PROFILE! Yes, put in your profile that you love being asked questions. Brilliant!

Now the truth is all of this is not about finding the perfect partner, but getting your skills up, so if you do bump into someone at the grocery store, or meet someone at a party, you don’t freeze up, you use the tools you’ve been taught to interact. There’s a good chance you’ll meet your love off an app, but there’s also a good chance that you won’t meet anybody if you never go on the apps.

As Logan says:

“‘I’m not presenting myself as a guru,’ Ms. Ury said. ‘I tell people: I will create a system that helps you tackle your blind spots and change your decisions.'”

And Ury’s story is relatable:

“…she was pining over a guy whom she referred to in her book as Brian. She’d made out with him during one of her six trips to Burning Man and had glommed onto him; he rebuffed her. He sent her occasional texts, and she sobbed about his dismissiveness. It was the kind of dynamic she sees her clients repeat again and again, clinging to the illusion of a connection.”

Oh, you’ve been there, the unrequited crush. Eventually you get over it, but you can be hung up on these people FOR YEARS!

And finally, Ury appealed to me because:

“‘I’ve done online dating. I’ve ghosted, I’ve been ghosted, I’ve gone on 8.5 dates in one week,’ she said. ‘I feel like I’m the perfect level of attractiveness — it’s not like I’m so beautiful where it’s like, “Oh, dating was so easy.” You have to be someone people can relate to.'”

Ury knows who she is, that she’s not so desirable that she’s beating men off with a stick. Like most of us. And if you only focus on the exterior, you’re gonna miss a lot of great people.

I’m not in the dating market, and I hope to never be again, but I am absolutely fascinated by relationships. Who people are, what brings them together. I can listen to these stories forever. (However I cannot listen to the same damn story told by the same damn person who never takes action.) Which is why I read this article and Googled Logan.

That’s all there is, people. Your toys won’t keep you warm at night. Some of those billionaires are the loneliest people you’ll ever meet. They can’t trust anyone, and they can’t climb down from the totem pole. Yes, in relationships everybody can be a 10. You’ve just got to stop being aspirational and accept yourself. And know that everybody’s idea of a 10 is different.

If you’re in the market, you should check Logan out, just to get your brain going if nothing else. There’s so much to see, so much to learn.

GO FOR IT!

Tom Petty didn’t want to be the guinea pig, he didn’t want MCA to sell his next album for $9.98.

Although there was radio action on “Breakdown,” Tom Petty’s first two LPs were not commercial juggernauts. He was still somewhat of a secret. Unfortunately going in the wrong direction. You can only be the new thing once, and when the build is at a feverish pitch and your second album is not as good, it’s hard to recover from that.

But Tom and the Heartbreakers (Who should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as their own group if the E Street Band is, but being mainly from Florida and living in California there’s no chance. Didn’t you know they only make serious music in New York?) employed Jimmy Iovine and released a blockbuster, “Damn the Torpedoes.” One must ponder whether the LP would have been as big if it were released by ABC, Shelter’s prior distributor, but in any event Petty didn’t like being traded and declared bankruptcy and that story has become industry legend. But the story of $9.98? That seems to have faded away.

Records were an addiction. This was just before MTV was launched. Sure, there were casual customers who only bought one, based on what they heard on the radio, but the business was driven by those who couldn’t resist purchasing two, three or five. I wouldn’t say records were cheap, but unlike in the U.K. they were not ridiculously expensive, one can argue quite strongly that the U.K. remained a “hits” business, i.e. Top Forty, because singles were affordable and albums were not. A trip to the record store was a weekly ritual. You watched the papers for sales. And if you were paying suggested retail…you were one of the very few. The key was how much of a discount you got. The new releases were always cheaper, which is kind of funny, you’d think they’d be more expensive, and the catalog stuff was the most expensive. But you’d wait for the all label sale, when the entire inventory was at its cheapest. Or if you lived in the metropolis you went to certain indie outlets were the albums were always cheap. Fans were aware of the price of records. And were they going to take a risk for a buck more?

Petty, a customer himself, knew many wouldn’t, so he agitated for the standard $8.98 price on his album, which really meant that savvy customers could buy it for five bucks.

Ironically, “Hard Promises” was darker and not as commercially successful as “Damn the Torpedoes,” and “Long After Dark” even more so. Then Petty put out “Southern Accents” and “Don’t Come Around Here No More” ended up being gigantic, driven by a ubiquitous video with Tom in a giant hat. Tom made the transition from the seventies to the eighties, from AOR to MTV, he started to become the Tom Petty of legend, not that everybody was on the same page until the release of his solo LP, “Full Moon Fever,” in 1989. I’d like to be free fallin’ right now!

Not everybody recovers from hiccups in the road. They can stall a career. You want to make it easy for fans to continue to follow and appreciate you. Like Titus Welliver in “Bosch.”

That’s the reason to watch, Titus is so damn good. Tom Cruise is mostly external, Titus Welliver is mostly internal, but there’s an external element too. You know guys like Titus, who go their own way, not caring what anybody thinks, who seem to be plugged in in a way no one else is, who radiate weird loner charisma. It’s more of an anti-star than a star. It’s the difference between Metallica and the Spotify Top 50. What becomes a legend most? Metallica!

So I got hooked on “Bosch” six summers ago, recovering from shoulder surgery. It was like discovering a new band, where you had to go back and devour all of the catalog. And then I waited every spring for a new season.

Yes, it’s a formula. But you can’t stop watching Titus. And the supporting cast too, it’s quite an ensemble.

But now Amazon, in all of its “wisdom,” has moved the “Bosch” sequel, “Bosch: Legacy,” to Freevee.

HUH?

I’m such a fan that I knew that Amazon’s IMDb TV was rebranded as Freevee and you had to go there to watch the new season of “Bosch.” BUT NOT A SINGLE PERSON I INTERACTED WITH KNEW THIS! They were all fans of the show, they were positively shocked, shocked I tell you, when they found out there was a new season. As far as being on Freevee…they’d never heard of IMDb TV!

But it gets worse, it’s not on Freevee all over the world.

And you know how it is in today’s world, you can’t get the word out. And even if people got it, they had to know to download a new app, and that you didn’t have to register to watch it, but you know Amazon wants all your data. To HELP you. Yeah, that’s right.

So since it’s on Freevee, that means there are…COMMERCIALS!

I pay for Amazon Prime, one of the perks is the streaming TV without commercials, and now you take my favorite original show from the service and exile it to the hinterlands and make me watch adverts after having made the journey?

I know some people are cheap. Actually, a lot are cheap. But most of them will pay for convenience. Which is why they pay for Spotify instead of continuing to steal music. Sure, there’s a free tier with advertising on Spotify, but it’s hobbled, it’s not fully-featured, it’s for casual users only, to be able to pick and choose what you want to hear you need to pay. You need to pay for everything good in this life.

I don’t want to see no stinking commercials.

Talk to a young ‘un, they don’t know what a commercial is! Well, they refuse to watch ’em. And where would they see ’em, they don’t watch network, they don’t even have a cable TV subscription! But they do have a Netflix account, even if it might be their parents’.

Clamp down on password sharing, why not. It’s like when cable went digital, you could no longer steal HBO by removing a filter.

So Amazon was building momentum, a catalog, of “Bosch.” Hell, most of the legendary TV shows were not gigantic out of the box, not only “Seinfeld,” but “Breaking Bad.” It’s harder to reach people today, but the key is to hook ’em, which Amazon did with “Bosch,” and now they’re throwing all that good will away, putting “Bosch: Legacy” on Freevee? The people paying for Prime are the same people who don’t want to watch commercials!

Amazon could realize the error of its ways. And put “Legacy” on the main service right now, most people would have no idea it had been previously released.

As for the commercials on Freevee… They’re less in number than they are on network/cable, but that’s like saying five bee stings are better than twenty, when in truth you don’t want to be stung at all!

Commercials disrespect the art.

We can finally air visual product sans reformatting and editing. Yes, the aspect ratio of your flat screen is akin to the one in the movie theatre, that all the producers create for. And, there are no longer time restraints, in streaming a movie or series episode can be as long as you want. This is liberation!

But the powers-that-be, out of touch with the public, think otherwise.

Have you seen “Tehran”?

The first season was pretty good. But I haven’t watched the second yet, I can’t watch anything week to week, you forget too much, it’s not the same experience. And is there any buzz on “Tehran”? NO! Maybe if they had released it all at once there would be. The only damn show with buzz on Apple TV+ is “Ted Lasso.” Meaning they must be doing something wrong. Forget good reviews, there is no word of mouth, because Apple is stifling it. To think that Steve Jobs was about breaking norms, being ahead of the customer, and Apple is going backwards.

But in any event, watch “Bosch: Legacy.” Titus can carry the show alone, but the usual suspects are there too, Maddie and Money, and even cameos from Crate and Barrel. And there’s a breakout star, Stephen Chang, who is so unknown he doesn’t even have his own Wikipedia page!

Eventually all albums were sold for $9.98. And then CDs for twice that price. And the labels were rolling in dough, laughing all the way to the bank after selling catalog all over again and cutting out singles if they hit, forcing consumers to purchase the whole overpriced album, can you say “Chumbawamba”? And then came Napster.

Don’t force the public to do what it doesn’t want to. You only build resentment. And I resent the fact that “Bosch: Legacy” is on Freevee!

Elliott Murphy was one of the new Dylans of 1973, along with his friend Bruce Springsteen. But despite being on three major labels, Murphy never broke through in the States. However, Elliott was big in France, so he moved there in 1989 and has been living the life of the independent troubadour ever since, making records and touring to acclaim all over Europe. Listen to the story of how one man was spit out of the machine but found a way to survive by doing it himself.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/elliott-murphy/id1316200737?i=1000565794856

https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/9ff4fb19-54d4-41ae-ae7a-8a6f8d3dafa8/episodes/7cf40a66-ccf2-4020-899b-a9fca10562d8/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast-elliott-murphy

https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-bob-lefsetz-podcast/episode/elliott-murphy-203922764