 All right, let's jump in. I mean, the holiday weekend, as I think I told you over the weekend, it was like the only news was this big storm that was going on in the Midwest and the East Coast, and much of America freezing weather, lots of snow. I mean, not that unusual, maybe a little colder than usual, but generally we get storms on a regular basis. But it seems like the airline industry struggled to cope, and again, not unusual. This is kind of where the disrupts flight patterns. It strands pilots and crews. It makes it difficult to manage a system, a complex system, like how airlines, American Airlines, the American Airlines have. But most airlines recover quickly, and because this is pretty standard practice, this does not happen that this is not that way, almost all the airlines recovered quickly. You can see I've seen charts where they show how quickly and how few flights have been canceled as we moved away from the thrust of the storm, except for one airline. And that is Southwest Airlines. Southwest Airlines, it has been an unmitigated disaster that has not gone away, and they're still struggling. They've canceled 13,000 flights since last Thursday, probably more because it's about a day old. This is 60%, I think, of the flights have been canceled. There were days in which it was much more than that. They are struggling to come back. The airline is really, really, really on its heels. And this is a massive, unquestionable, massive business failure. It is a specific business, Southwest, that has failed. And it's particularly sad because I think Southwest has an amazing history. It's one of the great business successes of the 20th century. It started as a keller, who started the airline. It started as a small airline flying routes within Texas. It expanded in the 19 once deregulation, hit the airline industry. It started expanding into the 1980s. A massive expansion in the 90s and into the 2000s. And today, it's one of the largest airlines in the United States, and it has some international routes. I think Canada and Mexico and some Caribbean islands. But it is being also a favorite airline for many people. Because it's been fun to fly, which you can't say about almost any other airline. It's fun to fly in the sense that the flight attendants have always been friendly and happy and focused on customers. Flights tended to be on time. Southwest always set records in terms of turning flights around, unloading them and reloading them. They had this attitude of the plane is a bus. You get a seat wherever you want, come for a serve, or at least if you can pay a little bit to get a higher number in terms of boarding, but generally. And it's just been, in the old days, I remember the 1990s, they used to play practical jokes on each. There's flight attendants used to play practical jokes on each other, they used to play practical jokes on the passengers, the announcements over the loudspeakers, those stupid standard announcements that you heard 3,075 times. Those, they used to embed those with humor and make them funny. I have a feeling that some of the funny stuff got eliminated because of regulation. Because I think the FAA came after them. But there was always this vibe, very casual, in the summers they used to wear shorts. I don't know if they still do. I haven't flown Southwest in a long time. But this is an airline that really stood out. It's the only major US airline that does not have a spoken hub system. So it does not have hubs. Like American has, Chicago, Dallas, LA, I don't know, Charlotte, Philadelphia, and Miami on the East Coast. And all the flights emanate from there. And you go from hub to hub. And then you take your spoke to where you need to go. That's how all the big American airlines are organized. Southwest was never like that. Southwest is point to point. It just flies. Now, granted, the point to point is part of the problem they had this last week. Point to point is far more difficult to manage. It's far more difficult to manage. But it really is sad what happened to Southwest. And the question, of course, is why? And the approximate cause, the immediate cause that we know of is basically a failure of the computer system, the computer system that matches crew with flights. So the computer system should know where the crews are, where the pilots are, and where the flights are, where the planes are that need crews. And it matches them up. And almost always, the system works fine. Even in Thanksgiving week, the system would grate matching up crews and flights. The storm disrupted flying so much that basically, it disrupted everything so much that the system just collapsed. The system could not match crew, pilots, two airplanes. It could not allocate the crews to the right airports. There were plenty of planes. There were plenty of crews. I mean, Southwest was fully manned. There were plenty of people ready to go. Everything was set. But they couldn't match the people to the planes. And this became evident in the midst of the storm. And they tried to transition to a manual. So throughout Christmas weekend, in the Dallas headquarters of Southwest, they were manually trying to match, as they did in the old days, match crews to the airport. Sorry, Southwest has over 60,000 employees. I don't know how many airplanes. This is impossible. Now, the advantage Southwest has, this is one of the things that made Southwest so profitable. And it was possible. It was profitable for the longest streak while other airlines were bankrupt over and over and over again. Southwest was profitable until 2019. I think until COVID, it was a profitable airline. And part of that was the fact that it only flew on plane, basically. It flew Boeing 737s of different varieties with 737s. Some maintenance was easier. And seating was easier because all the planes are laid out the same way. But this manual matching just didn't work. It fell apart. So the proximate cause of all this was clearly that the computer system called Skysolver is a computer system that maybe worked in the 2000s. But in the 20s and the 2020s, antiquated, slow, it could not deal with the capacity. And the obvious question then is, what the hell? Why is Southwest running a computer system that can cope with an emergency? Again, it's not like winter storms are unheard of. It's not like winter storms like this are one in 1,000 years. This is maybe one in every five years. Maybe this one was one in a decade. But still, one in a decade for an airline is not that bad. And here the reason, I think, is management. From whatever had, first of all, the founding CEO, the founder of the airline, Keller, I mean, he was just a fantastic CEO. I mean, he's the guy who built it, established it. I think he retired in 2001. I've seen 2004 listed some way. But I think it's 2001. He was a front line kind of CEO. He would go and he was at the airport. He would get on planes. He would be part of the practical jokes often. He would either be playing the practical joke on the crew or they would be playing it on him. He was often sighted on airplanes sitting in a regular seat. He was very, very attuned to the operational needs of the airline. And since then, there have been a series of CEOs that I think over the years have gotten further and further away from the operating side of the business and become more financed people and less operating people. Now, the current CEO, the CEO who just came in a few months ago, who you really can't blame this for, is more of an operating CEO and has been committed to replacing SkyScore Solva as the software program, but just hadn't had the time to do it. These changing software takes years, now months, years for a big company. So I think the ultimate cause of this is a management team becoming removed from the day-to-day operations for the actual challenges. Pilots and crew have been complaining about SkyScore Solva for years now, for about 10 years. It has created all kinds of weird sending crews to places and circling them back to where they originated from and all kinds of things that didn't make any sense so we're clearly losing the company money and didn't make any sense from operations perspective. But it was small numbers, it was at the margins so I guess management didn't focus on that. Now they upgraded things like customer-facing software, reservation software, they upgraded a lot of those experiences but the backend, the operating, the thing that actually runs the airline that makes it possible to run, they messed up and they are paying the price. By the way, this conflict between a CEO who's a visionary, operator, product-oriented and a CEO who's oriented towards finance and you know I love finance and I think finance is crucial but the orientation in terms of what a CEO should be is amazingly beautifully dramatized in one of my favorite movies and one of the best movies about business you will ever see. I think it's in the 1950s, it's called Executive Suite. If you can find Executive Suite, watch it. It is a real treat, it is a movie that in the opening scene and the opening scene of the movie, you never see the CEO but the CEO drops that and now the question is who is going to replace him? It's with William Holden, Barbara Stanwyck, Frederick Marsh, Walter Pigeon and it's directed by Robert Weiss. Robert Weiss is an excellent director, he did some really good westerns as well. 1954, I think Barbara Stanwyck won best actress in a supporting role for this but oh, she was nominated, she didn't win. William Holden is brilliant, Frederick Marsh is brilliant. It's a great movie, highly recommended. If you wanna understand what happened in Southwest in a sense or in a lot of American businesses, imagine that at the end of the movie, well, I don't wanna give away. Imagine the wrong guy gets the job at the end of the movie. So, check out the movie. Anyway, one more thing about Southwest, right? I think there's a saying, isn't there saying like don't let a good crisis go to waste, something like that? Well, Pete Boutiger, Boutinger, Boutiger, whatever his name is and the transportation department and Democrats in Congress certainly wouldn't want this crisis to go to waste. They're already proposing new regulations and controls. Maybe Pete would have done a better job running Southwest than the current management of Southwest, he certainly thinks so. They are going to make Southwest be held accountable. By the way, the attorney generals of 34 states that has to include some red states, 34 states are jumping in on this and they want more power to regulate the airlines and regulate customer service and penalize them for being late. Southwest stock is down 11%. I mean, a lot of people who got stuck this weekend are gonna hesitate ever to use Southwest again. Do you think Southwest is suffering? Do you think Southwest is being held accountable? We need politicians to hold that accountable. Politicians who've never really run a business who have no clue how to run a business who don't understand customers, don't understand markets wouldn't know a software program like this from an app on their phone, if their life depended on it. This is exactly why you need a separation state from economics so politicians can't dabble with this kind of stuff. Do companies fail sometimes? Absolutely. Did the US soccer team not do well in the World Cup? Absolutely. I think politicians should get involved in running it. I mean, things don't always go as planned. Companies fail. And there is an amazing way in which to keep them accountable. An amazing way in which to have them pay. And that is, that is markets. Markets are beautiful things. And they're the best way to make the accountability match the problem. And the solution be matched with the problem versus government, which would just, this would be an unmitigated disaster. But Democrats are gonna jump all over this. They're gonna try to pass new regulations. They're gonna try to somehow fix this through laws and new regulations. And again, this is true of left, right, and attorney generals and federal government and the whole bunch of them. Just butt out, stay out. Markets are really dealing with this. Southwest is already trying to fix it. Indeed, the reason Southwest appointed this new CEO a few months ago is exactly because of this. They needed somebody who was more of an operator to deal with the issues that Southwest was starting to face. All right, so sad to see. Sad to see Southwest has always been a great company, but it is a challenge to move from a founder, operator, hands-on CEO, particularly over the decade, well, two decades later, and keep that same level of engagement going at the executive suite. Southwest has also grown dramatically, and that creates its own challenges. It's not the same. Managing a medium-sized business and managing a massive business are not the same. They are complicated and difficult and challenging. Southwest has also gone through a couple of mergers. Mergers are hard and they often have negative impacts on the corporate culture. So, lots of challenges. I hope that Southwest recovers from this. I hope it returns to its glory days. I hope it figures out how to solve these problems and head off into the right direction. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com slash support. By going to Patreon, subscribe star, locals, and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see the Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.