Henry J. Kaiser

New Deal is o- Doctor New Deal is over, and Doctor War War is on.

And he basically called in, as I said, Henry Kaiser and DuPont and Ford and Knudsen, all hyper-capitalists.

He said, "You hate me, and I hate you." I'm kind of simplifying it.

"You go into Michigan at Willow Run and build a million dollar...

Just take the land, and I need a bomber an hour.

You, Henry Kaiser, just plow out Al- Alameda.

Make a, a ship assembly line.

I need a liberty ship every three days.

He called in William Knudsen from GM.

He called in Henry Kaiser from Kaiser Aluminum and cars and things.

He called in Henry Ford and he said, all I care about is, this is FDR speaking, the socialist.

I want the output.

We can do it.

We can produce one every two days.

But are you going to let me do that? And Henry Kaiser said, I got to go out to Willow Run and make a million square foot and tear up everything.

You want me to do that? And he said, I don't care what you do as long as it's in the United States interest and we win the war.

I mean, this was starting to happen in the 50s.

And Henry Kaiser was the entrepreneur who did the Hoover Dam and a few other things and the Liberty Ships in Richmond.

And he wanted to build an estate up in Lake Tahoe.

And he was older by that point.

And statehood then allows for those private interests and individuals to capitalize on the political moment.

And so I think about someone like Henry Kaiser, who is this kind of an individual

that

after statehood is building and purchasing land to create suburbs and housing developments.

But he also is investing in infrastructure like a sewage plant and other types of things that are associated with the actual venture of building housing.

So there's an incredible profit motive that is at the bottom and center of someone like Henry Kaiser's push for development post statehood.

And he actually gets in bed with a trust known as the Bishop Estate.

And the Bishop Estate and Kaiser launch a joint venture out of land holdings that the Bishop Estate maintained at this point in time to convert largely agricultural land on the east side of the island of Oahu into housing that we now call Hawaii Kai today.

But it was the idea, I think it comes from the frontier, and that you have to be able to be independent, autonomous, and there's also the idea that the people who created our machines or the peop- in the business class, at least until recently, they weren't part of a class system.

There were people like Henry Kaiser, Henry Ford, William New-- all of these guys, ma- you know, s- Carnegie, they were all self-made people, and they kn- were very practical people, and they had some kind of affinity.

As crazy as Henry Ford was in some of his ideas, he had an affinity for the middle class, and he paid more than the unions did just because he wanted to empower the middle class.

There's our bridge to the counterrevolution.

See how mild and good-tasting a cigarette can be.

And then there were the Kaisers, whose construction company built the Hoover Dam, but also who later established the, uh, healthcare, uh, initiative, Kaiser Permanente.

No kidding.

Yeah.

He goes on, "Loss is nothing but transformation." This goes into the quote that Charlie Munger talks about.

Actually, it's from Henry Kaiser.

I've heard it so much on David Senra's podcast, Founders.

This quote from Henry Kaiser is, "Problems are just opportunities dressed up in work clothes." So problems are opportunities, but you're just working, right? You're working.

You know, it's people think, oh, it's another problem, but that is an opportunity for you to go solve it.

Now, he keeps on going.

Supplies bound for Britain and the Soviet Union were going down by the hundreds of thousands of tons.

Henry Kaiser saw a solution.

Kaiser was the man who built the Liberty ships, the industrialist who understood production at wartime scale better than almost anyone alive.

His idea was to build flying boats so large they could carry troops and cargo across the Atlantic above the reach of any submarine.

And it was kind of like the war production board where FDR went to people who hated his guts, literally.

Henry Kaiser, Henry Ford, William Knutson, the head of GM.

He said, look, forget politics.

I just need 12,000 tanks a year.