It's A Saturday Morning Bonus Podcast For 03-15-25

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Michael Berry Show.

Speaker 2 (00:01):
Welcome to the Saturday Podcast. I think you're gonna like
this one. I would like to start with a trivia
question for you, Jim. Maybe you know the answer to this.
Why does a chicken coop have two doors? Because if
it had four, it would be a chicken sedan my
old car Club, Gaisel get a kick out of that one. Yes,

(00:25):
it's cringeworthy. That's the point of a dad joke. It's
supposed to be cringe worthy. So earlier this week we
played just one clip from Howard Lutnick and it was
the subject of an entire show because it was so important.
Let me tell you who Howard Lutnik is. To start,

(00:45):
He's President Trump's Commerce secretary. You may or may not
know that. He's not one of the more controversial of
the cabinet secretaries. Yet he's not a Pete Hexeth, right.
He not going to walk in the room and be brash.
He's not cash Buttel trying to put bad guys away,
not even Pam Bondy, who's getting a lot of attention

(01:06):
as as Attorney General head of the Department of Justice.
He's not one of these folks that is, you know,
bombastic per se, but he has the opportunity to become
the greatest commerce secretary, certainly of my lifetime. He was
the chairman and CEO of a firm called Canter Fitzgerald,

(01:31):
and you might remember that was the financial services firm
that nearly seven hundred of their employees were killed when
the towers collapsed in New York. Lutnick himself was not
in the building that morning. He was actually talk about

(01:52):
this is a Run, Lola Run movie kind of inspired moment.
He was at a school event for his son. You
think after that, you start to consider, Hey, maybe God's
telling me something because I wonder how many school events
for his son he attended. I tried never to miss him.
I dropped my kids off, picked him up from school

(02:14):
one or the other. My wife would do the other.
But that's I don't think I'll ever find joy like
that again. That's those are the fun time, That's what
you live for. So he happens not to be in
the office, he's dropping his or he's attending an event
at his kids school. When almost his entire firm, a storied,
legendary financial services firm, almost everyone dies. And he became

(02:39):
a person that was much talked about after that. Because
of his leadership role, he began the process of rebuilding
the firm. We're talking about a human capital firm. This
isn't a firm you just buy another building and start over.
He managed to lead Canter Fitzgerald through a period of recovery.

(03:00):
Imagine the people that were lost and the relationships you
think about that. Hey, thanks for the call, Howard, But look,
my guy was was Don Cohen at y'all's firm, and
he's been my guy for fifteen years. And I wish
you luck with the firm. But without Don Cohen there,
he was my guy, I'm gonna have to move over

(03:22):
here to this other firm. I hope you understand. I mean,
you're talking about people's money. People will will will. We'll
talk a good game about a lot of things, but
when it comes to their money anyway, Howard Lutnik became
sort of a symbol of resilience for the nation after that.

(03:43):
He's also been an advocate for good working conditions for employees.
Employee kind of empowerment he provided. He promised that the
firm would provide for niential support to the families of
those who died, even though the firm itself took a

(04:06):
huge loss from the devastation and from the loss of
revenues as well. This is Howard Lutnik telling that story.
And I say all that because I want you to
understand this is the kind of person that Trump has
brought into his inner circle. This is the guy who

(04:29):
is arguing to do away with the irs and have
an external revenue service, so the outside nations pay for
our country's government instead of us. And I think it's
important to understand that unlike past administrations, this isn't some
guy that well, he was a governor of some state
and he delivered that state for us in the election,
or this is a guy who's a big donor like

(04:51):
to bring him in. He's brought in some of the
best and brightest from across the spectrum of American life
to be a member of his cabinet. And this is
just one of those examples. So, without further ado, this
is Howard Lutnik, our Commerce secretary with Anthony Pompeleiano.

Speaker 3 (05:10):
We're only hiring our friends. I own the company. I'm
putting all my money into the company. The company's incredibly successful.
It's killing it. We are growing fast. And furious. I'm
hiring all the talent in the world. We're making a
million a day. That's in two thousand. Low. I'm a
super rich guy. I have the famous one hundred million

(05:32):
dollars set aside just in case, like super rich, super rich,
and the rest of my money just feed the beast.
Feed the beast, golden goose, Feed the golden goose. Cana
Fitzgerald has no debt. Howard Lutnik has no debt. Why
I make a lot of money, Why would I need debt? Right?
No debt? Rockstar Company, winning in every way on the

(05:56):
top of the World Trade Center, have expanded and expanded,
expanded one hundred and first to the one hundred and
fifth floor as the World Trade Center. Right September eleven.
I've heard all my friends. My brother works there, my
best friend Dounk works there, My roommate from college his
brother works there, my other best friend, his brother in law,

(06:18):
works there, and my other best friend his brother in
law works there. I turned forty that summer, so before then,
it's April of two thousand and one, I'm going to
turn forty. During the summer, I declare victory. I win
in life. I'm making all the money in the world.
It's my company. I work with all my friends, and

(06:39):
they work with all their friends. Everybody works with their friends. Okay,
I win. I take each of my senior executives, six
of them, out to dinner alone, each one alone. I
get up from my table, I walk around the other
side and I kiss him. I tell I love him,
I said, but I win. So here's and I give
me each twenty twenty five million bucks worth a stock.

(07:00):
I said, I win three. Here's the way it's going
to go. Every day my kids are out of school,
I'm out. I'm going to live my life with my
kids when they're in. I'm in, same as I always am,
but I'm just gonna be out way more often. You
guys are great. Here's a stock. I give him mine. Okay,
that's April. I have my birthday party that summer. Not

(07:23):
sixty five couples at my birthday party. So my fortieth birthday.
So your fortieth birthday. One hundred and twenty people come. Yeah, yeah,
one hundred and twenty hundred and thirty people. There's a
nice party. And and it's September eleventh, It's July July fourteenth,
is my birthday, and three months later, twenty people are
at my party get killed. So my friends, my brother

(07:47):
gets killed, My best friend Doug gets killed. All those
people I listed before, they all get killed. We employ
fifty sets of brothers and we lose, you know, more
than a dozen brothers, meaning loses two sons. I have
one father. He lost two daughters because they work together.
And six hundred and fifty eight people out of I

(08:11):
have nine hundred and sixteen New York, six hundred and
fifty eight people get killed. Six hundred and fifty eight
people get killed.

Speaker 1 (08:18):
Why not all nine hundred whoever.

Speaker 3 (08:21):
Wasn't in the office, So every single person who's in
the office gets killed. There's no way out. I am
here because I'm taking that oldest boy who I held
up first day kindergarten five years old, kindergarten, new school
called Horseman ninetieth Street. First day is September twelfth. My
best friend Doug, his son's first day, not my first

(08:46):
day is September eleventh, so I'm not there. His kid's
first day September twelfth, if I go into it. By
the way, and he pushed me to try to go
to that school called Riverdale which great school. But for
whatever reason, I chose horse Man and that choice saved
my life because his school started twelfth, so he was

(09:08):
on in the eleventh he and he got killed. He
was planning to take the next day off, yeah, to
take his kid to school. So I'm at the school.
And those days when you took a picture, when you
developed the picture, it often had the timestamp and the
low right hand corner and like an LED display, like
your LED clock. And I have that picture is eight

(09:32):
forty six of me and my boy, him wearing his
like little backpack with his little hair, right in front
of the school, right, I have of that picture, and uh.
And then I go up in the school and then
they tell me a plane hit the building. But I
think it's like a piper cub or something. So I
get in the car and I drive until my driver,

(09:53):
you know, let's go to Fifth Avenue because that's the
soonest place where you can see the tower. I mean,
I've been working them a whole life, and I know
I know the building by heart. And I see just
fire and smoke just pouring out of my tower, the
one with the antenna on the top. So I'm the
top floors and my driver starts crying, and then he

(10:15):
starts crying to start. I go, let's just get there,
let's just get there. We have to get there, We
have to get there. He's a retired police officer detective,
so he uses badge and we get all the way
to the building and I get out of my car
and I go to the door. And it's the door
on Church Street, you know, on this side. And I'm
grabbing people, asking them what floor they're on. Just keep

(10:35):
grabbing them because I know there's like twenty doors, and
if I get one coming out of this door, then
they're pouring out of all the doors. And I have
everyone yelling out the floors. And people didn't have anybody
standing around. They had no idea what to do, so
they were all yelling out the floors and the highest floor.
I got to his ninety second floor and then and
then I hear the loudest sound I've ever heard of
my life. Now I haven't seen this. Remember, there's no video,

(10:57):
there's no time, and I got a flip phone at
the time. So I start running. I'm dressed like this
suit and tie shoes on. I'm running my ass off.
I'm running as hard as I freaking can from what
I don't know. I look over my shoulder. Tornadoes chasing me,
remember that black cloud. You guys have seen the video.

(11:18):
So I'm running. I'm running all my might. Now I've
gone from a sunny day in New York City with
the blue sky to hearror film. I'm in a suit
in a horror film. And we all know how the
guy in the suit with the horror film works out.
It's not a pretty sight. So I'm running. The tornado
is coming. I see it coming from the right, so

(11:40):
I dive under a car and then whoosh, well black,
the world's black. My eyes are open. It's black. I
think to myself, I'm dead. This is dead and it's
black and silent. So I go like this fah, and

(12:03):
I stab myself in the eyes and it hurts. So
then I figure, okay, I'm not dead, I'm blind and death.
I'm not blind and death, but I'm alive. So I
get up. But of course I'm hiding under a car,
and I slam my head like so hard, you know,

(12:23):
And now I feel the blood like running down my face,
So like, I climb out and I stand up, and
then I start to run, but of course it's pitch black.
So what do you think I run into park car,
just hammered into some park I'm like running in the
pitch black and I just run into some park car.

(12:44):
So I hit the right quarter panel. The things go
flying over the hood, smash this and now I'm like, now,
like I get up for the ground. I'm like, I'm bleeding,
I'm limping all self imposed. Right, this is all just
happened to me. And I'm walking in the darkness away
from the World Trade Center, and so I just I

(13:08):
just walk and eventually, you know, the black turns to
gray and you can see it literally drops down. And
the event, of course, was the collapse of two World
Trade Center. If one World Trade Center collapse, I don't
tell the story. If I run that way, I die.
If I run that way, I die. I just ran

(13:30):
this way. My driver ran that way too, but I
didn't see him. I just found in my half hour later.
He found me, and we walked uptown till people were clean.
And then so there's this line on a payphone and

(13:51):
this woman's talking on the phone. So I go up
to the front of the line and I remember I'm
like covered it looks like I was flushed down some
chimney a bunch of times. Plus I'm bleeding down my
face and limping, and like, I'm like I am a
horror movie, but now I'm like the character in the
harbor instead of So I just hang up the phone

(14:12):
from her, and I take the cradle out of her hand,
and she turns around me, and so it's cursing at me.
And then she looks at me and go back the way.
And I called my wife. It's been like two hours.
I call her and she hears my voice and she
makes this noise I'll never forget. And because she said

(14:37):
when she was watching on TV when the when the
trade Center collapsed, she knew I'd be in the building.
She knew I'd be there. And so she said when
that collapsed, she fell to the ground and she thought
I died. And it was two hours. So when I
called her, she made this noise, you know, she she
understood what it was that people died. And then and

(15:01):
then I told her everybody's dad it was in the building,
because I thought I was suffocating to death outside. So
I didn't buy this whole rescue recovery stuff for my
people who are up a quarter mile, so nobody's rived,
nobody's scribing. So the only people who lived were either

(15:21):
in the lobby. So I think my lawyer, my general counsel.
He was in the elevator going up from one to
seventy eight was like a speed elevator, big speed elevator,
and then you switched and you had a sky lobby
and you switched. So he's in the big elevator. Plane
hits the building. Elevators don't collapse. They have like a

(15:42):
mechanical arm that goes out like this and slows it down.
It rolls it down and then the door's open. He
goes running out of the elevator. Fireball from the gas
falling down, explodes to the lobby. Fireball goes across the
front of the elevator. He's running out, fireball run. Glass

(16:02):
goes flying by. He steps out and gets covered in blood.
So thinking about it, he stepped out between the glass
and the blood and gets splattered with blood. So I
call my wife. I'm talking to my wife. She says,
Stephen is alive and he lives in the village. All right,

(16:25):
So I walked to the village. Wow, okay, Well, so
I walk I go to his apartment. I ring the belly,
ANSWER's noise. Covered in blood. It's like three hours after
the attack. The guy's covered in blood. So I grabbed
my you're right, you're right, He goes, yeah, I'm all right.
Whose blood is it? He goes, I don't know. He's

(16:46):
in his apartment. He could wash his face, but he's
sow in shock. He's just wandering around and uh. And
then there's the TV and I look on the TV
and I see the giant plane at the for the
first time. So you know, that day I lost. I

(17:07):
lost everybody in the office, six hundred and fifty eight
spectacular human beings out of nine hundred and sixty. And
the only reason the other people didn't die is because
they weren't work at they were So if you think
about it, on Wall Street, the show is on at
about you know, seven fifteen, seven thirty latest, So everybody

(17:28):
who's a money maker is in. So who comes in
like after eight forty five finance department, compliance department, and
legal department. You know, all the support staff comes in later,
but all the talent of revenue comes in when the

(17:48):
show's on, right, So I lost everybody who made money
in New York, and we were a hub and spoke,
you know, and the hub is obliterated from the face
of their So the challenge of survival becomes infinite because

(18:08):
everybody who's alive thinks they're still going to get paid
and there is no revenue. It's gone. It's gone. So
I trying to figure out what to do. And remember
these six hundred and fifty eight people. These are my colleagues,

(18:29):
and they're my coworkers, but they're my friends. And they're
everybody's friend. Everybody who survives, best friend, college, roommate, brother
in law, everybody had that relationship. It wasn't one big,
happy family. And so we've got to take care of

(18:52):
their families. We have to. But woh can't, I can't.
We have no money. We went from making million a
day to losing a million a day in like that, right,
because all these people are alive. You got to pay them.
You know, all the other offices around the world, you
got to pay them, got to pay rent everywhere else,

(19:13):
got to pay them. What money? No money. So we
come up with our plan. We'll try to rebuild the
company and we'll give twenty five percent of our profits
to the families.

Speaker 1 (19:29):
But you came up with this plan just real quick.
You came up with this plan that night, right, didn't
you do a phone call with the employees that were
remained that night?

Speaker 3 (19:38):
So I don't I don't know. It was probably the
twelfth at night, because I doubt I was capable of
doing anything the eleventh at night, but I can't remember.
And we did a phone call and everybody at the firm,
and we put it out on the news. If you
work at Cana Fitzgerald, call this number, because like we
have no HR department. I have no one's phone number.
I don't know, you know, but the women, they you know,

(20:00):
they went to their mother's house. When their husband gets killed,
you go to your mother's house. I'm never going to
find them. I get everyone on the phone and say,
we have two choices. We can shut the firm down
and go to our friend's funerals, because there's going to
be twenty funerals a day every day for thirty five
straight days, like thirty five straight days. Like I couldn't

(20:22):
even go to my friend's funerals because they would be
literally my best friend from college's brother and my other
best friend's brother in law were buried, had their funeral
in different funeral homes, one in Westchester and one in
Manhattan at the exact same second. So I went to

(20:43):
one and my wife went to one. I couldn't even
go to my friend's funeral. How horrible is that? So,
you know, we decided, or we'll go back to work,
and we have to work harder than we've ever worked
before in our lives, but we got to do it
to take care of their families. And so we decided
we would give twenty five percent of our profits to
the families. We'd pay for their healthcare for ten years,

(21:06):
and I promised them all it would be at least
one hundred thousand family because if I didn't make enough
profits in five years, I worked for the rest of
my life for it. And so we announced that, and
a weird thing happens. The media, which had said lovely
things about us, you know, trying to rebuild the company,
trying to take care of the families, and they had

(21:27):
the mass murder of six hundred and fifty eight people
who work for us. They say, because a guy who
looks like me can't be a human being, can't actually cry,
can't actually be a person, just you're not, so he
must be lying. He's crying crocodile tears. The murder of
my brother, my best friend, all my surrounding people, and

(21:50):
all the people I hired is insufficient to get a
guy who wears a suit to cry. So I'm crying
crocodile tears because I'm giving twenty five percent of our profits.
But of course there's never gonna be any profits, So twenty
five percent of nothing is nothing. Bill O'Reilly every night,

(22:11):
death threats calling me names, Rosie O'donnald calling me names.
Everybody's calling me names. All I did was that everyone
around me get killed, and I tried to help them.
But you know, the media builds you up and then
they rock you down. And so, but we have a
different idea. We have twenty five percent of our payroll.

(22:35):
All my employees who we hire, we say, look, we
got to take care of the families. So if I'm
trying to hire you for two hundred grand, I can
only pay one hundred and fifty. But we're going to
take fifty grand, and we to send it to the
families every two weeks. We're got to just send the money.
We're just going to send them money. You know, I
think we send it every month. We just send them money,

(22:56):
and uh, we send them and then three or four
people will we hired, said yes, and then one at
four they just didn't take the job. It was okay, like,
if that's not your gig, don't come. So everybody who
comes think about Walson there. They're giving twenty five percent

(23:19):
of their pay to someone they don't even know because
I asked him to. I mean, they're this is this
is a story of a miracle. I have another story.
So we have a big we have a big memorial
in Central Park. Rudy Giuliani comes, he comes on the backstage,

(23:39):
comes up on the stage, and there's five thousand people
there because six hundred and fifty eight people have husbands, wives,
sons and daughters, friends, cousins. They know. He walks out,
He comes up to my ear. He goes, the fuck
are all these people? Because he thought he was like
going to some little you know. And so we have
this big memorial and my LA office my most productive

(24:02):
office in the Hub, and spoke right La. These guys
make millions and now the firm is destroyed. They could
easily go across the street, set up shop, work for
anybody else. They pay them a fortune to come and
and I know they're gonna leave. So they say to me,
we're going to close the office. We're coming in for

(24:23):
the memorial and we need to see. So we go
to the memorial and then they say they're gonna come
over my apartment. And my heart is exploding out of
my chest because I know what's going to happen. They're
going to come in, they're gonna tell me that they're leaving,
and then the whole thing's gonna unravel and I can't
do anything of that. I walk into my living room.

(24:45):
There's twelve of them, and then closing the offices is
not a good thing. It's not good. They come in
and they surround me say we'll never leave. See this
is not this is not what people do. This is
what superhuman people do. This is what he rest can'st

(25:07):
So they stayed and I it was on their shoulders.
We're able to rebuild the company. And then we hire
all these other people and we we rebuilt the company.
The press beat the crap out of us. When did
it stop the end of October? I take one hundred million.
Remember that one hundred million just in case. Well, I
got one hundred million, just in case. I sent it

(25:30):
to the families, just give me away. I give it
directly to them. I pay them their bonus for two
thousand and one. Can't if it's Cherlle's, I gotta pay
a bonus. There's no money, it's out of business, it's destroyed,
it trued. So I send them the money that they
would have made had they lived, and I send them

(25:52):
my money. And then the media just stops because what
do you what do you do with someone who does
what they say they're going to do. That's like crazy.
The guy actually says what he's going to do after
everybody's been murdered. What a shock. So they'll leave me alone.
And then at the end of the year, because now

(26:13):
I'm paying the families once a month, I'm sending them money.
The employees are, you know, we're going to survive. And
the business is, you know, surviving. Let's not overdo it.
There's no profits, by the way, because if you think
about it, are you gonna make a profit? The Financial Times,
you know, the sort of the orange pinky newspaper names

(26:35):
me the man of the year, like I don't know,
Angela Merkel is another year, you know, like and then
The New York Times writes a multi thousand word apology
to me January third, two thousand and two. Basically, the
man who did what he said he would do is
if that's a high moral bar, you just do what

(26:55):
you save your to do so company survives, and then
to end that story for you. So we do that
for five years. We'd give the families one hundred and
eighty million dollars and pay their health care for ten years.
So now it's two thousand and eight. The financial crisis's

(27:16):
going on, but we avoid it. We understand it. I
see it coming. We avoid it, and we're making real money.
So one of our divisions is now strong enough to
take and go public. It's called BGC. I named it
after Bernie Canner's initials b Gerald cantor Bernard Gerald cantor
still public. It's worth about five billionaire and it's strong

(27:40):
enough to take of public. And so we do an IPO,
but a very different kind of IPO, so pages and
pages of selling shareholders. So what I do is I
take my shares and I pay all the employees back
who donated. Remember that you gave fifty grand. Then the

(28:02):
next year they got to raise, so they paid fifty five,
and then they paid sixteen, and then they paid sixty five,
and they paid seventy, and they gave I don't know,
three hundred thousand dollars over those five years to the
families they don't even know them. How great is that person?
How am I supposed to go on with my life
and be a rich guy when I have these people

(28:25):
who gave so much? So I give them. At the IPO,
we sell about one hundred and eighty million dollars worth
of shares, and I give them back all their money,
which was not the deal. They didn't expect it. And
then I give them on top of that. So I
sell my shares and give them the money, and then
I give them all another one hundred and eighty million

(28:47):
dollars for the shares, so they should have I could
say thank you. So they doubled their money, so their
generosity doubled their money, and I squared it with them
so I could go on with my life. I can
become successful as I have become. And but I'm square
with my employees. And okay, what's the turnover the firm

(29:14):
low lost in the world. What percentage of the company
to the employees own of BGC thirty percent? Now they
never sell why and then I have It's twenty years later,
but I have lots of new people. But the new

(29:34):
people like they go out with the old people and
they like get the story of the company. And so
the company is owned who works for who? Right? My employees.
I'm thirty percent of the public company, so I work
for them. They work for me. So when I go
and say, like, you know, I go on like CNBC
and I say, I've got the best employees. You know,

(29:56):
people think, Ay, it's just the CEO's like platitudes. No,
I can't if it's shut out. We have the best
of boys, because these are the greatest. See they stitched
my soul back together on their shoulders with their money.
They saved my life. And I am forever indebted to

(30:18):
my employees because they are super human spectacular. But so
are you? Thank you? Right?

Speaker 1 (30:30):
It kind of in that entire story, it takes both sides.

Speaker 3 (30:33):
I don't tell that story too off. It doesn't really
kind of it's kind of my but like if you
if you think twenty three years later, I'm not gonna cry.
I'm a beast, but I'm not supposed to cry.

Speaker 1 (30:47):
We have to do and what you have to do
is come up with a hundred million dollar idea of
this week and you'll be okay. The uh no. But
I do think that there is in these stories.

Speaker 3 (30:57):
You know.

Speaker 1 (30:57):
One of the interesting things about leadership is like it
is in service to other people and so you took
care of employees and employees take care of you, and
it kind of nets out positive and so you get
loyalty and both directions because you're just as loyal as
to them as they are to you.

Speaker 3 (31:12):
Yeah, so that's you know. So I have we have
two public companies and the employees on thirty percent of
both because one spun off of the other. All my
employees they own it. It's cool, it's It's why I'm
religiously in favor of your employees owning your company, because
it you know, I love the idea of I'm the

(31:33):
boss and you own the company. So who works for who? Right?
Think about it. Let's say I screw all the employees.
We're gonna pay you all less and all your stock
goes up and you get the same exact amount of
money back in the afternoon. How dumb could you be? Right?
You're so aligned that you all work together. It's it's

(31:55):
how it's supposed to be your life.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
The Michael Berry Show and Podcast. Please please tell one friend,
and if you're so inclined, write a nice review of
our podcast. Comments, suggestions, questions, and interest in being a
corporate sponsor and partner can be communicated directly to the
show at our email address, Michael at Michael Berryshow dot com,

(32:20):
or simply by clicking on our website, Michael Berryshow dot com.
The Michael Berry Show and Podcast is produced by Ramon Roeblis,
The King of Ding. Executive producer is Chad Knakanishi. Jim
Mudd is the creative director. Voices Jingles, Tomfoolery, and Shenanigans

(32:46):
are provided by Chance McLain. Director of Research is Sandy Peterson.
Emily Bull is our assistant listener and superfan. Contributions are
appreciated and often incorporated into our production. Where possible, we
give credit, Where not, we take all the credit for ourselves.

(33:07):
God bless the memory of Rush Limbaugh. Long live Elvis,
be a simple man like Leonard Skinnard told you and
God bless America. Finally, if you know a veteran suffering
from PTSD, call Camp Hope at eight seven seven seven

(33:28):
one seven PTSD and a combat veteran will answer the
phone to provide free counseling