Latest / Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People / Henry Ford - Automotive Pioneer With A Dark Side

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Henry Ford - Automotive Pioneer With A Dark Side · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

0:07
SPEAKER_00: Hello everybody.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: Hi Alex.
0:11
SPEAKER_03: Hi Kelly, what's going on, man?
0:14
SPEAKER_03: Oh man, well, I I don't know if it'll be the case when our listeners are listening, but today is cold.
0:20
SPEAKER_03: It's a cold snap, not the 25.
0:23
SPEAKER_00: So people don't know that we sometimes um stack a bunch of these on top of each other.
0:29
SPEAKER_00: You know what we should do next year?
0:30
SPEAKER_00: We should do on January 1st.
0:33
SPEAKER_00: We should just do all 52, right, in a row.
0:36
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, and then and then we won't have any clue what's going on in like October or November, so there won't be any current events to muck it up.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: And every now and then we can talk about oh, it's hot outside or it's cold outside.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: Oh, you mean just pretend like a different day?
0:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because I think I heard that Alex Trebek used to do the whole season of Jeopardy in like two weeks, and then spend the rest of the time just screwing around on his yacht, you know.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, maybe that's how we should.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: I'd screw around on your not your yacht.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: I think it would take more than 24 hours, though.
1:08
SPEAKER_00: It would probably take you know a full 48 hours of not sleeping.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: But that could make the ones in December kind of fun that we would be delirious.
1:18
SPEAKER_03: Let's say we do 50 um episodes and it takes us an hour each.
1:24
SPEAKER_03: It would take us two days.
1:25
SPEAKER_03: 50 hours to to record.
1:28
SPEAKER_03: I mean, that's that and that and that's skipping all the chit chat that we do.
1:31
SPEAKER_00: Do you remember when you were in, I think I think when I was in um maybe middle school, there was you watched a movie on some guy that stayed up for three days.
1:42
SPEAKER_00: It was he was like some uh disc jockey that stayed up and he he like became delirious and uh had all kinds of uh like mental issues for years after that.
1:53
SPEAKER_00: You remember do you remember hearing anything about that?
1:55
SPEAKER_03: Was it was this was he doing it for like the Guinness Work Book of Records or QA?
2:00
SPEAKER_00: I think he was.
2:00
SPEAKER_00: I vaguely remember this, but it it ended up being not good.
2:03
SPEAKER_00: I think he stayed up for like a hundred hours straight without sleep.
2:06
SPEAKER_00: I can't stay up for 12 hours straight without sleep.
2:09
SPEAKER_03: I I need I need me a nap midday.
2:12
SPEAKER_03: So maybe this is a bad plan then that we have.
2:15
SPEAKER_03: Oh, it's terrible.
2:16
SPEAKER_03: It's terrible.
2:16
SPEAKER_03: I would I would not anything that involves me missing a good night's sleep is I'm out, I'm not doing it.
2:22
SPEAKER_03: Well, maybe we could just continue on the the uh sporadical uh run that we're we're on here.
2:28
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and that way it feels more real time too.
2:31
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
2:32
SPEAKER_03: Because we can say with authority it's 2025 right now, we can say that with confidence.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: But some people might be listening to this in 2026.
2:41
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, if you're listening to this in 2026 or beyond 2025, 2027, 2028, first of all, welcome.
2:48
SPEAKER_03: I hope you're a longtime listener, but if you're new, welcome and send us a note.
2:51
SPEAKER_03: Not at dirtnap city.
2:53
SPEAKER_03: I think we'll both still not be at dirtknap city.
2:57
SPEAKER_03: So not at dirtnapcity.com.
2:59
SPEAKER_03: And uh we'd love to hear from people of the future.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: You understand if they send us a note, we won't get it now.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: We'll get it in the future.
3:07
SPEAKER_03: Oh, you mean if somebody okay?
3:10
SPEAKER_00: I was confused.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: That would be cool.
3:15
SPEAKER_00: That would be cool to uh to get a note from the future.
3:18
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, hey, I'm listening to this in 2027, 2025, Alex.
3:23
SPEAKER_03: Um don't take the red pill.
3:25
SPEAKER_03: There's big news, but but I'm not gonna tell you.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
3:29
SPEAKER_00: Well, I have an interesting person, interesting dead person.
3:33
SPEAKER_00: Uh, for those of you who are listening for the first time, this is uh Dirt Knap City, and it's a show about interesting dead people.
3:40
SPEAKER_00: It's really the only two qualifications you have to have.
3:43
SPEAKER_00: Right.
3:44
SPEAKER_00: Um, my name is Alex, and um, this is my friend Kelly.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: Hi.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: And we talk about people who are interesting and deceased.
3:53
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: Uh usually long deceased, usually, usually not too recent.
3:58
SPEAKER_00: Um and uh but we don't usually dwell too much on the manner of death, although sometimes uh it's it's unavoidable.
4:05
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, occasionally you have to explain that part, but for the most part, we're really it's a celebration of life, as they say.
4:11
SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't know.
4:12
SPEAKER_00: Today is not so much a celebration.
4:14
SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm gonna talk about a beloved person, but I'm kind of gonna to to uh to uh drop a little knowledge on you about why this person maybe shouldn't be so beloved.
4:25
SPEAKER_00: Ooh.
4:26
SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, pull back pull back the covers a little bit, peel the onion and see the colour.
4:31
SPEAKER_00: A little bit.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: I think I think that's one of the jobs of dirt nap city sometimes is to uh put people in their place, you know?
4:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
4:38
SPEAKER_00: He is on he was on the Gallups list of the why most widely admired people of the 20th century.
4:46
SPEAKER_00: Oh um, there were 18 people on that list, many of whom we've talked about before.
4:51
SPEAKER_00: You want to take a guess about anybody on that list?
4:54
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm gonna guess Einstein was on there.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: Have we talked about this before?
4:58
SPEAKER_00: I feel like some of this is familiar, but I don't recognize this.
5:01
SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
5:01
SPEAKER_03: I don't know the list, but uh Einstein, maybe Teddy Roosevelt, maybe Kennedy.
5:06
SPEAKER_00: Einstein was number four.
5:08
SPEAKER_00: Um Kennedy?
5:11
SPEAKER_00: Kennedy was not on, but but uh his wife, um the beautiful uh Jacqueline Kennedy was number four.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: I mean number 12.
5:19
SPEAKER_00: Oh wow, okay.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: Um Mother Teresa was number one.
5:22
SPEAKER_03: So she's oh yeah, yeah.
5:24
SPEAKER_03: What about Gandhi?
5:25
SPEAKER_03: Was he on there?
5:26
SPEAKER_00: Mahatma?
5:28
SPEAKER_00: Um yes, number 13.
5:31
SPEAKER_00: I don't know how you rank these.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I guess they they just voted.
5:34
SPEAKER_00: Right.
5:34
SPEAKER_00: 49% said Mother Teresa.
5:36
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
5:37
SPEAKER_00: Um uh MLK.
5:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, was number two.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: Oh, JFK, there he is, number three.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: Okay, Einstein for Helen Keller, number five, okay, FDR, Billy Graham, Pope John Paul II, uh uh our girl Eleanor Roosevelt.
5:55
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, uh Winston Churchill, okay, uh Ike Eisenhower, wow, uh Nelson Mandela, yeah, okay, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Margaret Thatcher.
6:11
SPEAKER_00: And this person, number sixteen, was the person I'm gonna talk about today.
6:16
SPEAKER_00: Number sixteen on the most admired people of the twentieth century.
6:19
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
6:20
SPEAKER_03: Who's missing from that list?
6:22
SPEAKER_03: What arena did this person play in?
6:24
SPEAKER_03: Uh uh an actors business person, okay.
6:30
SPEAKER_00: And um Lee Akoka.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: No, but you're very close.
6:36
SPEAKER_00: You're kind of in the right, in the right uh realm of automobiles.
6:41
SPEAKER_00: Henry Ford?
6:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
6:43
SPEAKER_00: Henry Ford.
6:44
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
6:44
SPEAKER_00: Born in 1863 in Springwells Township, Michigan, kind of a farm country.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: Now it's just the Detroit suburbs, but back then it was uh you know farm country.
6:56
SPEAKER_00: Died in 1947 in uh Dearborn, Michigan.
6:59
SPEAKER_03: I didn't realize he lived that far into the 20th century, 47.
7:02
SPEAKER_03: I mean, you know, it's still the first half of the 20th century, but I didn't I I always thought he died in like 1922 or something.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, he was like 84 when he died.
7:12
SPEAKER_00: Um post-war.
7:14
SPEAKER_00: Went to a one-room schoolhouse uh up to the eighth grade.
7:18
SPEAKER_00: Um so that's the thing about these 20th century people that you know you get an eighth-grade education and you know, because you drive an ambulance in World War I and you're all set for life.
7:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, just one room schoolhouse.
7:30
SPEAKER_00: Have you ever been to a one-room schoolhouse?
7:32
SPEAKER_00: Have you ever like been to a museum or something where they have those?
7:36
SPEAKER_03: Actually, I think last summer um up in upstate New York, they had one on uh you know, some some place we were visiting.
7:43
SPEAKER_03: I think it was a horse show we were at for some reason, and they had a little one room schoolhouse that had been there.
7:50
SPEAKER_03: It was no longer used, but it was still on the property and it had a little stanchion, so you couldn't, you know, you couldn't disturb the artifacts, but they had it still set up in kind of its somewhat original form.
8:01
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it looks all it looks all nice and fun, and this is summer in upstate New York, but imagine that on a day like today when it's you know 36 degrees outside in Texas and probably minus 10 in upstate New York.
8:15
SPEAKER_03: You know, it was probably very cold.
8:18
SPEAKER_03: Or when it's hot, it might be even more unbearable.
8:21
SPEAKER_03: Well, that's why you got summers off.
8:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but you know, um you're fishing and it's not like it's working on a farm summer down here.
8:30
SPEAKER_03: True, true.
8:31
SPEAKER_03: Um, yes, I have been in a one-room schoolhouse and I've got the vibe.
8:34
SPEAKER_03: I I, you know, I immediately also the exterior of it, for some reason I think of schoolhouse rock.
8:39
SPEAKER_03: You know, that's kind of a one house, one room schoolhouse drawn in a cartoon form.
8:44
SPEAKER_00: And you would have like kids from five to eighteen years old in that in that chaos, all the different grades, and one teacher kind of trying to teach all the different um levels, maybe, maybe not to 18, maybe to eighth grade, probably, because they said that he he went to the eighth grade, and maybe there was a different school you go to for high school.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: Um, but uh one of the big moments he said in his life was when his father gave him a pocket watch when he was 12 years old, and he would uh take it apart, put it back together several times.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: And um I found that that's a real big indicator of like engineers, like love to take things apart and put things back together, and and so even back then without a formal education, people that are wired that way are kind of drawn to doing things like that.
9:37
SPEAKER_00: The same year when he was 12 years old, he saw a road engine, which was like a tractor um that they would use, you know.
9:45
SPEAKER_03: Um a lot of these things were like steam engines that they would use on the property, and probably referred to as a road engine because um an engine back then would have been a train engine, right?
9:56
SPEAKER_03: It would have been a train that pulled cars.
9:58
SPEAKER_03: Right.
9:59
SPEAKER_03: This was one that went on the road.
10:00
SPEAKER_03: So yeah, it makes sense.
10:01
SPEAKER_03: So a road engine wasn't the actual motor or the engine, it was the whole machine with wheels and everything, right?
10:06
SPEAKER_00: And when you say road, there weren't like roads, like streets or anything, but there would be maybe road on your farm that you would you would use.
10:13
SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: More of a gravel path.
10:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: So he was kind of drawn to those those things.
10:19
SPEAKER_00: He was taking his watch, taking it apart, put it back together, and he was tinkering around with with engines.
10:25
SPEAKER_00: And so uh when he was 16, he went to work as a machinist in uh in Detroit and really learned the steam engine, the ins and outs of the steam engine.
10:36
SPEAKER_00: And then um and then after he kind of did that apprenticeship, he went back to the family farm and tinkered around on the engines, but he didn't love farms, he didn't love the farm life.
10:47
SPEAKER_00: Um he said when his mother died, he realized that he didn't love the farm, he loved the mother on the farm.
10:53
SPEAKER_00: Um, but he wasn't really into that.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: So he was kind of drawn towards steam engines and eventually was hired by Westinghouse to service their steam engines, they're still around, I think.
11:04
SPEAKER_00: Westinghouse.
11:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they are to service service their steam engines.
11:09
SPEAKER_00: So he had a garage in his uh or work workspace in his his farm and he was um doing some tinkering around with with steam cars and trying to get things that you could kind of ride, you know.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: Um well the thing about a steam car, if you think about trying to make a car out of a steam engine, well, it's got a big boiler on it, right?
11:31
SPEAKER_00: Um that's probably heavy, a big pot of boiling water, probably, right?
11:36
SPEAKER_00: Um, would probably be too dangerous.
11:39
SPEAKER_00: And it was real heavy, so if you're trying to make a light car, it wouldn't be able to go anywhere because uh that stuff just weighed a lot of money.
11:47
SPEAKER_00: Electricity was another option, but that was too expensive.
11:50
SPEAKER_00: They would use like trolley wires for electricity, and there weren't any batteries at that time that were small enough to really make a make a car um go.
12:01
SPEAKER_00: So they actually had combustion engines, like in Germany.
12:05
SPEAKER_00: I think they were messing around with combustion engines um for for tractors and things like that.
12:11
SPEAKER_00: So he started messing around with combustion engines.
12:14
SPEAKER_00: Um got married in 1888, so he's like 25 now, and by 1892, he built his first what we'd call a car, I suppose.
12:26
SPEAKER_00: I saw a picture of it, it's pretty cool.
12:28
SPEAKER_00: It looks like uh, you know, they were called horseless carriages back then, they weren't called cars, yeah.
12:31
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's a really terrible name, but I guess it made sense.
12:34
SPEAKER_00: Well, it totally made sense.
12:35
SPEAKER_00: That was the only reference that you had, and right um, it was a two-cylinder, four horsepower motor.
12:43
SPEAKER_00: Interesting thing about horsepower is um I always think it's funny that that we're still kind of using horse.
12:50
SPEAKER_00: Still use the term, yeah.
12:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but at the time it made sense because if you think about it, steam engines replaced horses.
12:57
SPEAKER_00: So if something was two horsepower, it was literally replacing the work that two horses could do.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: So it was really a convenient thing.
13:06
SPEAKER_00: Nowadays it doesn't really make sense to refer to things in the hundreds of horses, but um that's just the that's just the metric that we have now.
13:15
SPEAKER_00: But what it made sense at first.
13:17
SPEAKER_00: Do you know how much how many horsepowers like a car is today?
13:21
SPEAKER_03: Um I think somewhere between maybe 75 and several hundred, you know, if it's a sports car.
13:28
SPEAKER_03: Does that sound about right?
13:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, so like a Toyota Corolla is like 138 horsepower.
13:35
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
13:35
SPEAKER_00: In order to go 55 miles an hour, it probably has to be like at least like 100 or some I don't know.
13:42
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, somewhere in there.
13:43
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so like a land cruiser would be like 325 horsepower.
13:51
SPEAKER_03: And can you imagine having 325 horses trying to keep trying to feed them all and and pick up all their poop?
13:57
SPEAKER_03: That would be a lot.
13:58
SPEAKER_00: The fastest current car that I could find is uh uh uh I think it's a uh Swiss car called the uh Kenisig uh Jamera.
14:09
SPEAKER_00: It's 2300 horsepowers.
14:12
SPEAKER_03: Whoa, yeah, and it's uh internal combustion engine.
14:15
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
14:17
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
14:18
SPEAKER_03: Well, you know, I mean that's the big thing with with those type engines versus um electric engines.
14:24
SPEAKER_03: Electric engines are a lot more torquey, they have a lot more um, you know, get up and go off the line.
14:30
SPEAKER_03: Um, I wonder if as electric cars become more popular, we'll stop calling it horsepower.
14:36
SPEAKER_03: You know, there will be some other unit of measurement that we're no, I think we're kind of stuck with that now.
14:42
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's gonna last.
14:43
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's not gonna be a dead end.
14:45
SPEAKER_03: Maybe not.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: What was horsepower?
14:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is kind of quaint that we still talk about things like that.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: So this car in 1892 was two cylinders, four horsepower.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: It would go about between 10 and 20 miles an hour, depending on what gear you had it in, I guess.
15:03
SPEAKER_00: Um, and it had 28-inch bicycle wheels with rubber tires, okay, foot brake, and a three-gallon tank.
15:12
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, three-gallon tank um doesn't get you very far.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: So he had a son in 1893.
15:18
SPEAKER_00: You know what his son's name was?
15:20
SPEAKER_00: He only had one kid.
15:20
SPEAKER_00: You know his kid's name was uh Henry Ford Jr.
15:23
SPEAKER_00: No, there was a Henry Ford II, but that was his grandson.
15:27
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
15:28
SPEAKER_03: Uh I do not know his son's name.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: Edsel.
15:30
SPEAKER_00: Edsel Ford.
15:32
SPEAKER_03: Oh, so that's why there's an Edsel vehicle.
15:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Edsel was his kid's name.
15:38
SPEAKER_03: And that was a guy, that was a boy, yeah.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: Edsel.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
15:42
SPEAKER_00: So that's worse than Kelly.
15:44
SPEAKER_00: So between 1895 and 1896, he took this car and he drove about a thousand miles, probably just tooling around in his little neighborhood.
15:54
SPEAKER_00: Um, and he built another two uh while he was doing that.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: Um so uh during all this time he became an engineer with the uh Edison Company, the it was a like a lighting company, as you've uh previously established.
16:09
SPEAKER_00: Um and he built something called the Ford Quadricycle in 1896.
16:15
SPEAKER_00: Now there were other in other countries in France and a lot in Europe, there were people tinkering around with cars, building things.
16:23
SPEAKER_00: They called them quadricycles, I think in France.
16:25
SPEAKER_00: It was basically a gas engine on top of four bicycle wheels.
16:29
SPEAKER_03: So this was not a horseless carriage, it was a quadricycle.
16:32
SPEAKER_03: Quadricycle.
16:33
SPEAKER_03: Kind of like that name because bicycles were really the um rage back then.
16:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there was a big bicycle craze in the 1890s, I think.
16:41
SPEAKER_00: So that same year that he built the quadricycle, he went to a meeting of executives over at Edison and he met the big man.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: He met Thomas Edison and told him what he was up to, and Thomas told him to keep at it.
16:55
SPEAKER_00: Um I kind of like when our uh when our I like the jib of your the cut of your jib, Ford.
17:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: And I kind of like it when our Dirt Knap City residents kind of have a brief meeting with each other, even if just for a fleeting second.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: I think it's kind of it makes the continuity of the show.
17:11
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, absolutely.
17:12
SPEAKER_03: And and you know, the longer we do this, the more that's gonna happen, especially with people from the same, you know, time period, and and the high rollers from the time period, because they all helped each other out or knew each other or knew of each other.
17:26
SPEAKER_03: You might say they were the tech bros of the day, right?
17:28
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
17:29
SPEAKER_00: And Ford and Edison and and uh Tesla and West House and Firest Harvey Firestone, yeah, you know, the rubber magnet, he um his granddaughter married Henry Ford's granddaughter.
17:44
SPEAKER_00: So like the current Ford's the uh Henry Clay Ford II is the is like the the Ford that's the patriarch now.
17:53
SPEAKER_00: Uh not anymore, but he was the last Ford to be the CEO.
17:57
SPEAKER_00: He is a Firestone and a Ford because his wow his grandfather was Henry Ford and his other grandfather was Harvey Firestone.
18:04
SPEAKER_00: Wow, imagine when those two got together.
18:06
SPEAKER_00: Not to be confused with Harvey Firestein.
18:10
SPEAKER_00: Who's that?
18:11
SPEAKER_00: Totally different guy.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: The uh you don't know him?
18:14
SPEAKER_00: I don't.
18:15
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
18:16
SPEAKER_00: Well, look him up.
18:18
SPEAKER_00: Um, so, anyways, uh, so he built another uh car.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: Thomas Edison told him to keep it up.
18:24
SPEAKER_00: He built another quadricycle in 1898.
18:27
SPEAKER_00: He's left to start the Detroit Automobile Company, 1899, and it was out of business by 1901.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: It was just too expensive, poor quality.
18:38
SPEAKER_00: You can imagine you had to make these things one at a time, you had to make them to order.
18:42
SPEAKER_00: And he founded it.
18:47
SPEAKER_00: These cars take a long time to make, though.
18:50
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
18:50
SPEAKER_03: They weren't there there.
18:51
SPEAKER_03: Well, you know, as we know, he pioneered the assembly process, but this was prior to that, right?
18:59
SPEAKER_00: Didn't exactly pioneer it, but we'll we'll get to that.
19:02
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
19:03
SPEAKER_00: Um so the other thing that was happening with cars back then were every time somebody built a car, somebody would go race it, you know.
19:09
SPEAKER_00: Uh car races were starting to get popular as cars were starting to prop up all over the country.
19:15
SPEAKER_00: So in 1901, the same year his company went out of business, he built and raced a 26 horsepower car um and started the Henry Ford Company.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: So we're going from you know two horsepower, and you know, 10 years later, we're already at 26 horsepower.
19:34
SPEAKER_00: That's a big that's a big jump, right?
19:36
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
19:37
SPEAKER_00: Um, well, the Henry Ford Company uh brought in, they they weren't real business savvy, and they brought in a consultant, and he had creative differences, so he left the company with his name on it, and they renamed that company the Cadillac Automobile Company, which later became General Motors.
19:57
SPEAKER_00: Wow, okay, but that was actually his company that he started.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: Um, but he wasn't there very much started it.
20:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he called it the Henry Ford Company.
20:05
SPEAKER_00: Wow, okay.
20:06
SPEAKER_00: Um, but not the Ford Motor Company, that was later.
20:09
SPEAKER_00: By 1902, he made an 80 horsepower car.
20:12
SPEAKER_00: Now that's almost where we're at now.
20:14
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean that's a Kia or or uh or a uh like a Volkswagen bug, maybe.
20:19
SPEAKER_00: Uh-huh.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: And he worked with the machine shop there owned by John and Horace Dodge.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: And it was impossible to uh kind of uh do this stuff with your own money, so he had lots of investors that would that would help him along.
20:35
SPEAKER_00: Um so he started the Ford Motor Company in 1903, the same Ford Motor Company that we know today, with$28,000 capital.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: Which was about a million bucks today.
20:48
SPEAKER_00: Okay, yeah.
20:49
SPEAKER_03: A lot of money, but not not a lot to start a car company.
20:53
SPEAKER_00: I was gonna say, try starting a car company with a million bucks today.
20:57
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, probably wouldn't be very successful.
21:00
SPEAKER_00: Well, something that was cool that he did when he first started the company, he demonstrated a new car by driving one mile in 39 seconds on late on a frozen Lake St.
21:13
SPEAKER_00: Clair.
21:14
SPEAKER_00: That he drove it, it was 91 miles an hour.
21:17
SPEAKER_00: He was driving.
21:21
SPEAKER_03: So yeah, 90 90 miles an hour.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: And what's cool about that is when you think about it, there were no paved roads, right?
21:28
SPEAKER_00: There was no asphalt that he could take it on.
21:31
SPEAKER_00: So the only place you could probably get up to 91 miles an hour without blowing out a tire would be on a frozen lake, you know.
21:38
SPEAKER_00: And Lake St.
21:38
SPEAKER_00: Clair is one of the great lakes, it's huge.
21:41
SPEAKER_00: You could go a mile with you know without stopping on this frozen lake.
21:46
SPEAKER_00: When you think about it, that's the only way you could ever get to those kind of speeds.
21:50
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
21:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
21:51
SPEAKER_03: Nice flats.
21:51
SPEAKER_03: I mean, it's like the salt salt flats, right?
21:53
SPEAKER_03: Where they do all the speed tests or or they did in the 60s and 70s.
21:57
SPEAKER_03: Um now Yeah, but imagine trying to stop.
22:02
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
22:03
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
22:03
SPEAKER_00: Uh on those bicycle tires.
22:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
22:06
SPEAKER_03: On ice.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but he was the one that drove it.
22:10
SPEAKER_00: You gotta give him props for that.
22:12
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
22:12
SPEAKER_00: Um, and it wasn't like sporty looking.
22:15
SPEAKER_00: It basically looked like a Model T, probably, you know.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: So 91 miles an hour on the ice.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't know how much of that was just the ice doing its job, you know, just letting you skid pretty fast.
22:26
SPEAKER_00: But uh, anyways, that's pretty cool.
22:29
SPEAKER_03: It would actually be harder to go fast on ice because you have you know, if you if you took off too fast, your wheels would just spin.
22:36
SPEAKER_03: So you probably had to start off really slow and build up speed slowly and then stop really slowly, like basically just coast to a stop instead of trying.
22:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's that's I wish there was some of that.
22:46
SPEAKER_03: I would love to see that.
22:47
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that would be quite a that would be like an episode of Jackass.
22:51
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: Well, he was quite the jackass, and we'll get to that.
22:55
SPEAKER_00: Um, so he called that car the 999, um, and uh took it around and toured the company.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: Was that 999?
23:05
SPEAKER_00: I think it was.
23:06
SPEAKER_00: I think it was 999.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: Was that pizza?
23:10
SPEAKER_00: Was that it was uh he was a god father pizza guy, but he like was trying to promote an economic plan.
23:17
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, he had some sort of plan that was nine million Americans will save nine million dollars with nine simple steps or something like that.
23:26
SPEAKER_00: I forgot about that.
23:28
SPEAKER_00: So he ripped that off of Henry Ford, huh?
23:31
SPEAKER_00: Well, in 1908, everything changed when Henry Ford came out with the Model T.
23:37
SPEAKER_00: Another another name they used to have for the Model T was the Tin Lizzie.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: Tin Lizzie.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: Not to be confused with uh thin Lizzie.
23:45
SPEAKER_00: Thin Lizzie, uh hard rock band from the 70s.
23:48
SPEAKER_00: Um, but you know why it was called the Model T?
23:52
SPEAKER_03: Well, I know they I know they had um letters, like there was a Model A.
23:56
SPEAKER_03: Uh Ford had a model A and maybe a Model B.
24:01
SPEAKER_03: I don't know how like if they went all the way through the alphabet or if T stood for truck, maybe.
24:05
SPEAKER_00: No, you're right, no, you're right.
24:06
SPEAKER_00: He actually started with Model A, and then the next version was Model B, and then all and then by the time he got to T, that was like when he perfected it.
24:15
SPEAKER_03: So it's like a Model K and a Model I.
24:19
SPEAKER_03: Sure.
24:19
SPEAKER_00: But they don't they didn't necessarily they weren't all sold or produced them.
24:23
SPEAKER_00: They didn't produce them.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: They were prototypes.
24:25
SPEAKER_00: No, they were just like prototypes, and then um there was never a model U, though.
24:30
SPEAKER_00: Once they perfected the Model T, the next model was the model A.
24:35
SPEAKER_00: They started all he said, now that we've got this, let's start over.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: Uh they started with model A.
24:40
SPEAKER_00: Um, but back then it wasn't like now where um it was like, oh, this is a 1908 model T.
24:46
SPEAKER_00: It's the model A Mark II.
24:48
SPEAKER_00: They wouldn't come up with different years for the for they didn't change the design every year like they do now.
24:55
SPEAKER_00: Right.
24:55
SPEAKER_00: That's that came like in the 30s, right?
24:58
SPEAKER_00: So they started with model A after that, but it was a Model T.
25:01
SPEAKER_00: And when you think about what you're having to make, like we said before, the road there were no roads, you know, there were no paved roads, so it had to be all terrain.
25:11
SPEAKER_00: You had to be able to negotiate all kinds of you know, um mud and rocks, dirt, dirt, and rocks, and even go through like rivers and streams, you know, up to the other side.
25:23
SPEAKER_00: And of course, when you did that, the car would probably, you know, the wheels would come off, and you'd have to be able to, you know, change the tires and do those things pretty quickly.
25:33
SPEAKER_00: But it was very easy to do all that.
25:35
SPEAKER_00: It was uh easy to drive, it was easy to repair.
25:38
SPEAKER_00: I mean, literally, you could just repair it on the side, you know, you'd come out of a river, you'd come up the ravine, it would fall apart, and you'd just put it back together and keep going.
25:48
SPEAKER_00: That was very common.
25:49
SPEAKER_00: And the steering wheel was on the left, just kind of that's the way you did it, and that became the convention for everyone except for the British and it's uh and it's um you know uh the British, the United Kingdom.
26:04
SPEAKER_00: But um it was eight hundred and twenty-five bucks.
26:08
SPEAKER_00: Wow, which is equivalent to about twenty-eight thousand dollars today.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, not too far off what uh you know, a uh car would cost today.
26:19
SPEAKER_00: Now, by the 1920s, a majority of Americans had learned to drive on a Model T.
26:25
SPEAKER_00: Um, and some years they had like double sales from the previous year, like 100% year over year.
26:32
SPEAKER_00: So it was a big growth curve during that time.
26:35
SPEAKER_00: Big growth.
26:35
SPEAKER_00: And what happened was by 1913, so five years into producing the Model T, they came up with the assembly belts.
26:44
SPEAKER_00: Now he wasn't the first.
26:46
SPEAKER_00: A lot of people say, well, it used to be all the people say he invented the car, and then people kind of got refined on that and said, No, he actually invented the assembly line.
26:55
SPEAKER_00: He didn't actually invent either one of those.
26:58
SPEAKER_00: What was kind of new or novel for that though is that most assembly lines the people would move along, and this assembly belt would like the people stayed in place and the belt would move.
27:11
SPEAKER_00: And you know how they made the belt move?
27:14
SPEAKER_03: Horses that hooked up to a pulley with some horses.
27:20
SPEAKER_03: Wouldn't that be funny?
27:22
SPEAKER_00: Um I bet it's true.
27:24
SPEAKER_00: No way, uh, I don't know.
27:26
SPEAKER_00: No way.
27:27
SPEAKER_00: Uh theme.
27:29
SPEAKER_00: So it this enabled really low-skilled jobs, people with very little education and uh very little prospects to be able to stand in one place and just do a single repetitive turn of a wrench five thousand times a day, you know?
27:45
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
27:46
SPEAKER_00: Um so in a s just to give you an idea, uh an assembly of a chassis, you when the Model T first started, it took about 12 hours to make a chassis.
28:00
SPEAKER_00: And by the time they got these assembly belts perfected, it took about 90 minutes to make a chassis.
28:05
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
28:06
SPEAKER_00: So to go from 12 hours to yeah.
28:08
SPEAKER_00: So by 1914, the year after the assembly line, they were selling about 250,000 of these Model T's a year.
28:17
SPEAKER_03: Wow.
28:17
SPEAKER_00: And by 1916, all this efficiencies made it where the car only cost$360.
28:24
SPEAKER_00: Oh, so the price went down.
28:26
SPEAKER_00: Way down.
28:27
SPEAKER_00: And by and that's about$10,000 today.
28:31
SPEAKER_00: I don't think you can buy a new car for$10,000 today.
28:34
SPEAKER_00: No, no.
28:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, and they were they sold a half a million in 1916.
28:38
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and you know, at that time too, keep in mind the population of the US was quite a bit less than it is now.
28:44
SPEAKER_03: So what is we were at like$330 million at this point?
28:48
SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, maybe we were half of that in the early I don't know.
28:52
SPEAKER_03: It feels like we've our I don't know what the population was, but uh that's a large percentage of people in America.
28:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
29:00
SPEAKER_00: By 1918, half of all cars that were made were Model Ts.
29:04
SPEAKER_00: So I mean, talk about uh making your imprint on uh you know industrial world.
29:10
SPEAKER_00: Now they were all black.
29:12
SPEAKER_03: Uh I don't know if you've ever heard a quote about that.
29:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I've heard the quote.
29:16
SPEAKER_00: Any customer can have a car painted any color he wants as long as it's black.
29:20
SPEAKER_00: Now, before the assembly lines, between 1908 and 1914, they did make them in other colors because it was a lot easier to do back then.
29:28
SPEAKER_00: So you will see some red, I think particularly red.
29:32
SPEAKER_00: That was the one that they used a lot, but you'll see them in other colors.
29:35
SPEAKER_00: They're either painted after the fact or it was pre-pre-assembly line.
29:39
SPEAKER_00: Those are probably worth a lot today.
29:41
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
29:42
SPEAKER_00: Um but and the Model T's were actually available, they were selling them until 1927.
29:48
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
29:49
SPEAKER_00: And they were they ended up selling about 15 million of those things.
29:53
SPEAKER_00: 15 million.
29:55
SPEAKER_03: And if you see, you know, if you see a collector, car collector, or a parade of these old cars, I'll bet a lot of them are model teas.
30:02
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
30:03
SPEAKER_00: Now that record of 15 million stood until 1972, another car broke the record of 15 million sold of one type of car.
30:15
SPEAKER_00: Do you know what that was?
30:16
SPEAKER_00: 1972?
30:18
SPEAKER_03: Um Ford Mustang.
30:20
SPEAKER_00: Nope.
30:21
SPEAKER_03: Uh hold on.
30:22
SPEAKER_03: A Chrysler Cordoba.
30:24
SPEAKER_00: No, it was a not an American car.
30:26
SPEAKER_00: Oh, was it a Honda Civic?
30:29
SPEAKER_00: No.
30:30
SPEAKER_00: 1972.
30:31
SPEAKER_00: Honda's became big like in the 80s, I think.
30:34
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
30:34
SPEAKER_03: Uh, was it a Fiat?
30:36
SPEAKER_03: No, it was a German car.
30:38
SPEAKER_03: Oh, Volkswagen.
30:39
SPEAKER_03: The the Beetle.
30:41
SPEAKER_03: Beetle.
30:42
SPEAKER_03: The Beetle broke the record.
30:45
SPEAKER_03: My parents had a Beetle, actually, when I was a kid, and we we lived in Germany when my dad was in the Air Force, and we drove a little Volkswagen Beetle.
30:53
SPEAKER_00: Uh, we're gonna get back to the Beetle.
30:55
SPEAKER_00: Uh, the slug bug, as it were.
30:57
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
30:58
SPEAKER_00: Uh we'll get back to the Beetle in a second, because it turns out that's uh that's a big um plays a minor role in this in this story.
31:07
SPEAKER_00: In uh eight 1918, uh he turned over the presidency to Edsel Ford, uh, his son.
31:15
SPEAKER_00: Um, but he micromanaged the hell out of them and sometimes reversed the decisions that Edsel would make.
31:21
SPEAKER_00: Um and then he started his own company called Henry Ford and Son, even though his son was the president of the other company, and he took all his best employees with him.
31:33
SPEAKER_00: Now turns out there was a method to his madness.
31:38
SPEAKER_00: He had a goal where he would scare all the stockholders.
31:42
SPEAKER_00: Now, this was not a publicly traded company, he just had all the people that invested um that were making lots of money off of him.
31:50
SPEAKER_00: He wanted them to be scared that Ford was in trouble, and he wanted them to sell all their shit their stock, and they did.
31:57
SPEAKER_00: So they sold all their stock, he bought up all the stock, and then ensured that the family had sole ownership of the company.
32:07
SPEAKER_00: Like he basically created this ruse that he and his son were on the outs, um, that his son couldn't be trusted, he was gonna start his own company, it was all a big act just so he could buy up all his stock and have it under family control.
32:22
SPEAKER_00: And they had control until like 1956, that's when they finally went public.
32:26
SPEAKER_00: But you know, basically for 40 years they took control.
32:30
SPEAKER_03: He didn't like other people having stock in his his company, so even though these people had given him seed money to get it started and should have you know been able to hold on to it and grow with it, but whatever.
32:42
SPEAKER_00: Pretty worthless, ruthless, you know.
32:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
32:44
SPEAKER_00: And um, that's just one kind of of the first of many examples I'll tell you about how this guy was did things that I guess are really indicative of you know 20th century American capitalism, but um, you know, that's that's pretty hardcore to do something like that.
33:04
SPEAKER_00: Uh here's a pretty cool piece of trivia that they used the wood scraps um of these when they were making, you know, there's a lot of wood to be to make these cars.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, weren't the wheels like wooden-spoked wheels?
33:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, a lot of a lot of the car was made of wood.
33:20
SPEAKER_00: They would use the scraps and they would burn them and make charcoal briquettes.
33:26
SPEAKER_00: And then they started their own subsidiary company called Ford Charcoal.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: Later on, they changed the name of that company to Kingsford Charcoal.
33:36
SPEAKER_00: Oh, wow.
33:37
SPEAKER_00: So that's how it started.
33:39
SPEAKER_00: Kingsford was his cousin who supplied all the wood, who like it was a lumber guy, and he supplied all the wood.
33:46
SPEAKER_00: But Kingsford charcoal, which is still around, I think it's probably the I can't even name another charcoal briquette company.
33:54
SPEAKER_00: Um, and they um that started as Ford charcoal made from the remains of uh you know Model T scrap.
34:03
SPEAKER_03: I wonder, is that Kings spelled K-I-N-G-S-F-O-R-D?
34:08
SPEAKER_03: Like, is there Ford at the end of it?
34:10
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but that was his cousin's name, was uh something Kingsford, yeah.
34:15
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
34:16
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
34:16
SPEAKER_00: So in 1927 is when they came out with the Model A.
34:20
SPEAKER_00: So it was a number of years before they actually came out with the next model.
34:24
SPEAKER_00: Um, and it wasn't until 1931 where they did like annual model changes like they do today, where somebody would be referred to as a 1934 or whatever.
34:34
SPEAKER_00: Um 1932, we came out with the flathead V8 engine.
34:39
SPEAKER_03: Um before before 1934 or the 1930s, pretty much all model T's were the same, they didn't really change them much.
34:49
SPEAKER_00: Right.
34:50
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
34:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they didn't really dawn on anybody to like make design changes.
34:54
SPEAKER_00: I think what they were doing was make the they were just making the production more efficient, they were trying to make the price more affordable, right?
35:03
SPEAKER_00: Because it's in their best interest for everybody in the world to have a car, right?
35:07
SPEAKER_03: Right, but if they change the formula, then they have to change the production and it costs more, and yeah, that makes sense.
35:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, in fact, Edsel, throughout Edsel's life, he was always interested in like luxury cars or making like a different kind of line.
35:22
SPEAKER_00: And Henry Ford never really he was always lukewarm to that.
35:25
SPEAKER_00: Our boys at Cadillac were making the uh the Cadillac and then they made the Lincoln.
35:31
SPEAKER_00: Right.
35:31
SPEAKER_00: Uh and then um there were but he was never really interested in in design changes or anything, he was just more interested in making it more efficient to produce this one car.
35:43
SPEAKER_03: And I guess if you think about it, you know, today Chevy has different levels of, you know, there's there's Cadillac, there's GMC, there's Chevrolet, um Buick, etc., are all part of General Motors, whereas Ford just has Ford.
35:58
SPEAKER_03: You know, I don't think there's a you know how you know how like there's uh there's like a um Acura and Honda, you know, they're kind of the same thing, or yeah um Toyota and Lexus, I think are kind of the same thing.
36:11
SPEAKER_03: Um luxury version of Ford, it's just a Ford.
36:16
SPEAKER_00: No, you know, I mean you could they have um they have cars and they have trucks, you know.
36:21
SPEAKER_00: Um and they have electric vehicles now too, I guess.
36:25
SPEAKER_00: But uh yeah, but it was in his best interest back then to just make sure that everybody was driving a car.
36:31
SPEAKER_00: Not it didn't really care what kind of car.
36:33
SPEAKER_00: Um by this time, by like the 30s, he was making a third of the cars in the world were wow, were Model T's.
36:42
SPEAKER_00: Um now here's something interesting about him is that he did not believe in accountants.
36:48
unknown: Okay.
36:49
SPEAKER_00: Now you now you have your own uh business.
36:51
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure accountant, it wasn't very long into having your own company that you probably realized you needed an accountant, right?
36:58
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
36:59
SPEAKER_00: Um he never knew exactly the company never knew exactly how much money they were taking in or spending.
37:06
SPEAKER_00: Well, they didn't have an accounting department.
37:08
SPEAKER_03: He probably didn't QuickBooks either.
37:10
SPEAKER_00: There's a rumor that they used to they used to just weigh their receipts and see generally how much money they were making.
37:18
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, okay.
37:19
SPEAKER_03: So this weighs each one is worth this amount, it weighs this much.
37:23
SPEAKER_03: Calculate.
37:24
SPEAKER_03: Okay, wow.
37:25
SPEAKER_00: Now, this was probably before the IRS, you know.
37:28
SPEAKER_00: This is this in the Wild West.
37:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this is Wild West.
37:32
SPEAKER_00: Or Chismbop.
37:33
SPEAKER_03: You know what Chisholm is?
37:34
SPEAKER_03: No.
37:35
SPEAKER_03: You never seen that?
37:36
SPEAKER_03: It's like a way of doing math with your fingers where you where you um tap on a table.
37:41
SPEAKER_03: No, uh sounds like a dead end.
37:43
SPEAKER_03: It is a dead end, yes.
37:46
SPEAKER_00: Stay tuned for Chisambop.
37:48
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: Uh now he was a proponent of what they called back then welfare capitalism.
37:54
SPEAKER_00: Now, welfare capitalism, which is that idea that um we have to take care of our workers that in order to produce all these cars that we want to produce, we have we can't have a lot of turnover.
38:07
SPEAKER_00: We have to retain the best and brightest or just the best workers that we can.
38:11
SPEAKER_00: They don't have to be bright, they're working on an assembly line, yeah.
38:14
SPEAKER_00: But we have to make sure they stay, they don't go anywhere.
38:17
SPEAKER_00: So he offered a five dollar daily wage.
38:21
SPEAKER_00: Now, at the time, that was huge.
38:23
SPEAKER_00: At the time, people were making$234 a day.
38:27
SPEAKER_00: Uh it was double, more than double, and everybody else was probably less than that.
38:33
SPEAKER_00: So five dollars a day was like a big shot through the bow of American companies.
38:39
SPEAKER_00: Like, we're gonna pay these people more than everybody.
38:42
SPEAKER_00: That is about$150 a day today, in today's money, which is like$15 an hour.
38:48
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, okay.
38:49
SPEAKER_00: Um, or a little bit less than$15 an hour, but minimum wage today is you know, that's a less than that, right?
38:57
SPEAKER_00: So um, I don't think uh that's kept pace with inflation or whatever, but um, but that was the deal.
39:05
SPEAKER_00: Five dollars a day was kind of a lot of money.
39:08
SPEAKER_00: Um, and he offered profit sharing for anybody that's worked there more than six months, like true profit sharing, pretty, pretty, pretty quick uh ramp up for that.
39:17
SPEAKER_00: Like you didn't have to work there long, sounds progressive, right?
39:20
SPEAKER_00: But there was a catch to that.
39:23
SPEAKER_00: He had something called a social department, and this is why we're gonna make a left turn now into the the weird part of Henry Ford and the not so great part, and the reason that he's not one of my most admired Americans.
39:36
SPEAKER_00: So he had what they called a social department in at Ford, and that was 50 investigators that would keep tabs on his employees and make sure that there was no heavy drinking, no gambling, and no what we call to the deadbeat dads.
39:54
SPEAKER_00: You know, people didn't like pay pay for their kids.
39:57
SPEAKER_00: And if they were found to be that way, he would either fire them or not allow them to do their profit sharing.
40:05
SPEAKER_03: Like that was a there's a financial penalty to be in any of those things.
40:10
SPEAKER_00: This whole social engineering thing that I want my people to act a certain way, and I'm gonna have my goons make sure that they are.
40:19
SPEAKER_00: These investigators were, I mean, I think by today's standards, they crossed all kinds of privacy lines and um just just pretty awful stuff.
40:30
SPEAKER_00: Um, but he also came up with the idea like, look, let's have a six-day work week.
40:36
SPEAKER_00: Why do people have to work seven days a week?
40:39
SPEAKER_03: Oh, okay.
40:39
SPEAKER_00: So he was going he was going down a day with six, not in 1922, he reduced the work week to six days, and then in 1926, five-day work week, 40 hours a week.
40:52
SPEAKER_00: That was revolutionary.
40:54
SPEAKER_00: We kind of had a class system in those days, and people in the working class work seven days a week, you know, yeah, 60 hours a week, maybe 80 hours a week.
41:05
SPEAKER_00: You know, you didn't there was no such thing as leisure time for for men in the in you know, prior to that to that.
41:11
SPEAKER_00: Well, especially men that that were not rich.
41:15
SPEAKER_00: Exactly, exactly.
41:16
SPEAKER_00: So his idea was leisure shouldn't be a class privilege, and let's give people a couple days off a week and they can go buy things and help the economy and make you know and make everything flourish and drive around in your cars, take your Sunday drives.
41:34
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
41:35
SPEAKER_00: He was he was also against unions.
41:37
SPEAKER_00: They were Ford was the last of the auto companies to recognize the UAW.
41:43
SPEAKER_00: Um, in fact, he was so against that in 1941.
41:47
SPEAKER_00: They finally let him in, but in 1941, the UAW um was on strike, and it almost killed the company, and he was just would just not budge.
41:58
SPEAKER_00: And it took his wife telling him that she was gonna leave him if he like if he didn't like he was gonna ruin the the legacy that he had built, right?
42:08
SPEAKER_00: His the the generational wealth they had built up um if he didn't do something soon and and buckle.
42:15
SPEAKER_00: So she threatened to leave him.
42:17
SPEAKER_00: Um and that's the only thing that settled that strike.
42:22
SPEAKER_00: So that's the business part of Henry Ford.
42:25
SPEAKER_00: All right.
42:26
SPEAKER_00: Now um the problem is as a tech bro, he felt like become because he was a tech bro, maybe he could uh uh have opinions about the way the world was run, too.
42:41
SPEAKER_00: The ear of the president?
42:42
SPEAKER_00: I don't know about that actually.
42:44
SPEAKER_00: Um, not a president of this country, but um he was a pacifist and an isolationist.
42:50
SPEAKER_00: And back then, if you're an isolationist, that means you didn't want anything to do with foreign wars.
42:55
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's what it means now, too, but um, you know, that was after a one world war before another world war.
43:03
SPEAKER_00: He was also a big conspiracy theorist.
43:06
SPEAKER_00: And when I say conspiracy theorist in the 1930s, what I'm really saying is he was an aggressive, virulent anti-Semite.
43:16
SPEAKER_03: Oh, wow.
43:17
SPEAKER_03: So he thought he thought the Jews ruled the world and um were doing terrible things to everybody else.
43:23
SPEAKER_00: Way worse than that.
43:25
SPEAKER_00: And it wouldn't, it'd be one thing if it was just his personal opinion, but he broadcast that to the world at a cost.
43:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, in his view, if everyone just made things at low cost and low prices, he thought there wouldn't be any, and nobody would need a war, nobody would need to take over anybody else's land, nobody would need a different market to invade because everybody would be all the countries would be doing well.
43:54
SPEAKER_00: So if every businessman was like Henry Ford, the world would be a better place in his mind.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: Um he didn't want to go into World War II and he did business with Nazi Germany.
44:06
SPEAKER_00: He wanted he didn't think there was any need for war, and he was very kind of head in the sand guy about this.
44:12
SPEAKER_00: Once the war started, he lined up and he built Ford Motor Company built B-24 planes and they built them in like 18 hours.
44:21
SPEAKER_00: Um did a good job with all that, but um he was he was pretty anti-war before that.
44:29
SPEAKER_00: Um when Etzel Ford Etzelford died at a young age, he had cancer, and he died at um while Henry Ford was still, you know.
44:39
SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah, yeah, uh Henry outlived his son.
44:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and he took control back of the company.
44:46
SPEAKER_00: Um and then his wife, like in 1945, his wife got him to turn over the to his grandson, and there was this guy um kind of that ran the uh security, that service department they called it.
45:01
SPEAKER_00: His name was Harry Bennett.
45:04
SPEAKER_00: Um Harry Bennett recruited like gang members and boxers and football players to like rough up employees that weren't weren't in line.
45:13
SPEAKER_00: And anything, anytime there was mostly union stuff, anytime anything needed to be done, Henry would say, uh, can you take care of that, Harry?
45:23
SPEAKER_00: And you know, Harry would, you know, a lot of times this stuff ended in like in with guns and and uh you know fist fights and uh people getting hurting shot.
45:33
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
45:34
SPEAKER_00: Um, but Harry was like a loyal soldier.
45:37
SPEAKER_00: Somebody asked him one time, if Henry Ford asked you to black out the sky tomorrow, would you do it?
45:42
SPEAKER_00: And he thought for a minute and he said, Well, I might have a little trouble arranging that one, but I guarantee you'd see a hundred thousand workers coming through the plant gates with dark glasses on tomorrow.
45:54
SPEAKER_00: Like I'll get it done.
45:56
SPEAKER_00: Well um Henry Bennett Harry Bennett.
46:02
SPEAKER_00: Okay, he was just a thug, and when Edsel died, Henry Ford tried to get him uh installed as president of the company.
46:11
SPEAKER_00: He didn't know anything about cars, he wasn't an engineer, he was just a thug, and um there was a big corporate kind of um fight over that, and finally he stepped stepped down and Henry Ford II took over, and Harry told him, You're taking over a billion-dollar company that you haven't contributed a thing to, and then and then walked out.
46:34
SPEAKER_00: He said he was ready to he said I was ready for Harry to blow my head off when I when I fired him.
46:39
SPEAKER_00: Like that was wow, I really thought that might happen.
46:42
SPEAKER_00: He didn't, he just turned around and walked away.
46:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so back to the MI anti-Semite stuff.
46:47
SPEAKER_00: Do you do you ever do square dancing in school?
46:50
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, like in in gym class, right?
46:52
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we had to do that in middle school, and then we also did it at summer camp.
46:56
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, Henry Ford started that and he was funded that to public schools.
47:02
SPEAKER_00: He funded square dancing because he hated jazz and he thought that jazz was pro-Jewish, and that by getting kids to square dance that would get them away from jazz back to their back to their roots.
47:16
SPEAKER_00: Now, the truth is the the worst thing you could do to a kid is expose them to square dancing, is expose them to square dancing.
47:26
SPEAKER_00: Um, the very word square, like being a square, probably comes from square dancing.
47:31
SPEAKER_00: Like, yeah, yeah, there's nothing more uncool than square dancing, and it probably drove all kinds of people into the arms of jazz.
47:39
SPEAKER_00: Um, he said, if baseball fans want to know the trouble with American baseball, I can tell you in three words, too much Jew.
47:48
SPEAKER_00: Like he was a virulent anti-Semi, hated Jews.
47:53
SPEAKER_00: So it'd be one thing if this was just this guy's personal beliefs, he's an awful guy.
47:59
SPEAKER_00: But he bought the newspaper in Dearborn and he changed it into his own, like uh um well, the only thing I could compare it to now is like Twitter, right?
48:12
SPEAKER_00: If you had if you bought a company like Twitter and changed the name of it and used it to broadcast your own, for example, yeah.
48:20
SPEAKER_00: Um and um he would publish his own like anti-Semitic thoughts and he would require every Ford dealership in the country to carry it and send copies to every one of the customers, and he would just write this anti-Semitic garbage.
48:37
SPEAKER_00: Um he wrote he he He must have had Jewish customers, right?
48:43
SPEAKER_00: Uh don't tell him that.
48:45
SPEAKER_00: I guess he didn't think about that.
48:46
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
48:47
SPEAKER_00: He he took he took a lot of these articles and he put them into one um book, and he he it was a book called The International Jew, the World's Foremost Problem, and where it basically blamed all the world's problems on Jews.
49:01
SPEAKER_00: And so he wasn't covert about this at all.
49:04
SPEAKER_03: Like he just was just out there and just said it and just like here's how I feel.
49:10
SPEAKER_03: Check this out.
49:11
SPEAKER_00: He's the only American that's mentioned favorably in Hitler's book, Meinkampf.
49:17
SPEAKER_00: Hitler loved Henry Ford.
49:19
SPEAKER_00: He said, I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration.
49:23
SPEAKER_00: He kept a picture of Henry Ford on his desk.
49:27
SPEAKER_00: Hitler did.
49:28
SPEAKER_03: All I can think of is that Ario Speedwagon song.
49:34
SPEAKER_03: You're my inspiration.
49:37
SPEAKER_00: I think that's Chicago, actually, but it doesn't matter.
49:40
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter.
49:42
SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, he um in fact the Beatle was designed by Hitler.
49:47
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you knew that.
49:48
SPEAKER_00: We were talking about the Beatle before.
49:50
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know it was the people's car, you know?
49:53
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Volkswagen.
49:55
SPEAKER_03: That's that means it's people's car.
49:56
SPEAKER_00: And he said he wanted a car that was affordable, that could fit two adults in the front and three children in the back.
50:03
SPEAKER_00: This was Hitler's um thing.
50:04
SPEAKER_00: He's he's he he uh told Volkswagen that I want a car that can do that, and I want it to be modeled after the Model T, kind of like in terms of maybe not the way it looked, but right, modularity, easy to repair, efficient, yeah, yeah, yeah.
50:21
SPEAKER_00: So Hitler used Henry Ford's thoughts to influence the German citizens and turn them against Jews, and he would distribute this book, this international Jew book that he wrote.
50:38
SPEAKER_00: Hitler would distribute Henry Ford's books throughout Germany, and that's one of the things that fomented hate among Jews, among German citizens.
50:49
SPEAKER_00: He was directly involved with turning the Germans against Jews.
50:53
SPEAKER_00: Like um that was Hitler's tool that he used because Henry Ford was a respected person and he was an American.
51:01
SPEAKER_00: And if anyone thought to look up to American, well, here's an American who agrees with us or agrees with me, um, Hitler would say.
51:09
SPEAKER_00: Um he was given Henry Ford was given the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, which was the highest medal a Nazi could give to a foreigner in 1938.
51:18
SPEAKER_00: He was presented with this with this award.
51:21
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
51:22
SPEAKER_00: So he was, you know, uh he didn't set out to to influence the German people, but when you write something, your words are you know, they get out.
51:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and just because you're a tech bro doesn't mean that you know anything about world order or how to affect uh world events, and you gotta watch what you say because you have a big platform if you're a tech bro.
51:48
SPEAKER_00: But fortunately, that was the end of that, and that's never happened again um in American history.
51:57
SPEAKER_00: Once once Henry Ford saw the films of the concentration camps and he saw what was going on in the um in the camps, and somebody told him, like, oh, you kind of have this is kind of on you, um and he realized what he saw, he had a stroke, like literally had a stroke while he was watching these films and um never really recovered, and finally he had a lot of mini strokes after that.
52:26
SPEAKER_00: Um he collapsed, he had a lot of many strokes, and he finally died in 1947.
52:32
SPEAKER_00: But a lot of people say that's kind of what killed him was knowing that he had a a hand in and he had been part of that, and yeah, which is kind of good that he knew that at the at some point at the end, that he retribution, at least his body took credit for it, you know, it it turned on him because um the platform when you're a tech bro or any kind of a big businessman, when you the platform that you have is big, and you can't just throw things out there and um and think that it's funny or that it's not you know carrying its its its weight across the world.
53:12
SPEAKER_00: Uh people like that have a lot of influence, and just because you're a tech bro doesn't mean you should be influencing world events.
53:19
SPEAKER_03: Well, and and especially uh in a hateful way, right?
53:23
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, thank you.
53:26
SPEAKER_03: If you can influence world events in a more positive way, but you know, I guess what is positive, most people have it.
53:33
SPEAKER_03: The thing is, maybe up to that point he justified his hatred and his really terrible writings and language in some way in his head, but then when he saw what had happened at the concentration camps, that justification maybe just went away.
53:51
SPEAKER_03: I I don't I'm not trying to I'm not trying to defend what he did.
53:55
SPEAKER_03: I'm just thinking of how could you even how could you even accept a medal from the Nazis, you know, as an American back then, you know, and and I it's interesting that I've never heard any of this.
54:07
SPEAKER_03: This is all new.
54:08
SPEAKER_03: This is all new to me.
54:10
SPEAKER_00: I think it's one of those things that like it's I'm not the first one saying this, but but you know, I think it's one of those things that people overlooked for a long time, and then they didn't realize until you know the the time passes a little bit and you realize the influence that somebody has, and they read, you know, the the the the head of the um um Hitler youth said when he was on trial in Nuremberg, he was talking about how you know I didn't used to be an anti-Semite, and then I read Henry Ford stuff and it made a lot of sense, you know.
54:42
SPEAKER_00: Oh wow, they were you know, the Germans were really attracted to Henry Ford because you know Germany is famous, kind of uh really worships efficiency, right?
54:52
SPEAKER_00: And he's the model of efficiency.
54:55
SPEAKER_00: Like he did things like a German in terms of the way he um built built this great company and made things cheaper, and the whole idea of wanting a car for everybody and uh welfare, capitalism, and all those things are things that I think Germans love, you know, that's um that's uh in a way counter to a lot of the you know Rockefellers and those types, but to what end, right?
55:22
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he probably admired the Germans, they admired him.
55:25
SPEAKER_00: And um, if you blame the world's problems on a uh one type of person, man, that that's when you're always always doomed to go sideways, right?
55:35
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
55:36
SPEAKER_03: No, that that's uh it it is really disappointing.
55:40
SPEAKER_03: I you know, he's never somebody I've thought that much of, but I would have said before that I agree he's very admired and you know should be admired, but now I see um you could admire some of the things he did, but maybe his uh personality and his politics were not that great.
55:57
SPEAKER_00: Right.
55:58
SPEAKER_00: And I think a lot of times we give a halo effect of some type to people who, if they're good at business or if they're you know a particularly you know smart engineer or entrepreneur or something, we just assume they must know everything about everything else, too.
56:12
SPEAKER_00: They must know how to, you know, to to run a country or cut a budget or whatever.
56:17
SPEAKER_00: And those things aren't necessarily, you know, um, you know, transferable.
56:22
SPEAKER_00: And you know they're smuggling coke in the trunk.
56:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I hate to rain on your parade about Henry Ford, everybody, but um, you know, I gotta tell the the whole story.
56:34
SPEAKER_00: And like I say, we'll put him in a nice bunk with uh Evil Kinevil and uh Andre the Giant, and they can uh you know roughly.
56:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, let's let's let Einstein get some licks on him too.
56:46
SPEAKER_00: Definitely Einstein have something to say about it too, for sure.
56:52
SPEAKER_00: I love our fan.
56:53
SPEAKER_00: I wish somebody would write fanfiction about some of our uh if you're writing DNC fan fiction.
57:01
SPEAKER_00: Um send it our way in 2027.
57:04
SPEAKER_03: Please uh please email us because we'd love to talk to future fanfiction writers.
57:10
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
57:11
SPEAKER_03: All right, that's all I got about Henry Ford.
57:14
SPEAKER_03: Hong Kong beep beep rattle rattle.
57:18
SPEAKER_03: Bye.
57:19
SPEAKER_01: And nine, two, three, four plan, open its doors, each new bit of technology better than before.
57:29
SPEAKER_01: A tank stanley steam sale and pistol flu each every stand by your bones and let go.
57:44
SPEAKER_01: There's a group and free cut on the wheel to learn it, on the back force lift, like be the board board gateway People used to sing the sound of hands if he kept the rhythm.
59:16
SPEAKER_01: Early forwards were known to turn on whenever they wanted to.
59:22
SPEAKER_01: People used to sing, we used to We used to be a little bit.