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Did you know that you can save up to half on your wireless plan when you switch to consumer cellular? They offer unlimited talk and text with a flexible data plan starting at just $20 a month, with the same premium coverage as the nation's largest carriers. Plus their award-winning customers' support makes switching a breeze. Go to consumersegular.com slash podcast25. And for a limited time, get $25 off when you use promo code podcast25. Hi there, I'm Dr. John White, WebMD's Chief Medical Officer and host of the Spotlight On Series from our Health Discovered Podcast. In this special episode brought to you by Cousentics, we'll dive into psoriasis. It's accompanying comorbidities and its impact on mental health. It's much more than a skin condition and I experienced many of the things that can come along with psoriasis. Obesity, metabolic syndrome, anxiety and depression, high blood pressure and high blood sugar. My cholesterol levels were not normal. Anxiety and depression were part and parcel of dealing with chronic disease overall. I kind of had the full bouquet of all of those things. Sort of that unmitigated like inflammatory condition is really dangerous. Cousentic to help discover on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you live with psoriasis or psoriatic arthritis? The National Psoriasis Foundation has everything you need to live your best life with psoriasis disease. You can find their sound bites podcast wherever you listen. Or at psoriasis.org. MPF can also help you find specialists or navigate insurance hurdles. No matter your challenge with psoriatic disease, MPF has solutions for you. Visit psoriasis.org or call 800-723-9166. Well, you know, I just, I don't know, Sophie. I think that you're kind of being unfair when you say the audience is just terrible people and you hate them and you want to throw boiling water from a cast iron skillet on them. I don't know that that's fair, Sophie. That seems kind of mean to me. But Robert, I would never say that. That was a direct quote from your diary. That was, that was weren't my words. That's what you said. So, but you can't prove that. I mean, it's in your blog. I mean, it's in your blog. Yeah. Well, who know? What's a blog? It was a Zengicide. I remember I followed you. Wow. Wow. Okay. I feel attacked in my own podcast, my own podcast that I built with my own two hands. Unbelievable. Welcome to Behind the Maskers. Welcome to Behind the Maskers. I'm going to say our guest is Samantha Bigger. The podcast where I, Robert Evans, am slandered to a terrible degree unfairly despite having never done anything wrong. Ever. Hello, Samantha. How are you doing? Samantha McVeigh. Hello. And again, I age myself with the Zengicide reference. So, I know people are going to be like, oh my god, what is wrong with you? Oh, yeah. We're all this hell. Everybody here is old as shit. You're welcome. I'm really glad to throw it back at this early. Yeah. Samantha, what's, what's, what is that's your whole, that's your whole question. What is, what is, what is, what is it? Yeah. Exactly. That's what, and what is how? Is there an answer? That's a question. There never was. That's great. Are you asking if she's the host of a podcast, stalled, stuff mom never told you on this video? Is she, well, is she, is she, this is why I keep you around, Sophie. I know that you've got this better than I do. This has been a great introduction for all of our fans. This has been a great introduction for all of our fans. I guess you'd probably never have gotten there. Never. I would have gotten there. It's not. It's not. I love our audience. I love all of everybody except for our audience. You love our audience. You love our audience. You love our audience. You love our audience. I'm sorry. So this is a podcast. It's about bad people. Normally, we're doing a little bit of a different thing today, Samantha. And I brought you on, I've brought you on because, as I can tell right now, you exist in a black void based on your human backyard. I am a black void. And I assume that that's what goes on in the heart of anybody who understands math. I feel like that was racist. Is that racist because I'm Asian? Whoa. Whoa. It's because you exist within a black void. Oh, okay. Okay. I didn't say anything about you being Asian. Whoa. Jesus. You're welcome. This is how we work on this. We have so much more planner. Like obviously, for the people listening to this podcast, there's a pretty good chance. They're renters. They're about 30 renters are about 36% of households nationwide or renters head 36% of households nationwide. Although those numbers are a couple of years old, I don't know if it's that was like pre pandemic. Do you renter? Do you own Samantha? I now officially own because we were kind of pushed out from the rental that I had because he went up by, want to say 40% on our rent. Jesus Christ. Oh, yeah. So you have been, that's, we're talking today about why the rent is so damn high. And some of the people who are responsible, we're going to try to drill into specific people whenever possible because that's our, our bit. But I am also in my first year of home ownership. I've been a renter the first 15 years of my adult life. And for me, I don't know about you. Most of the living situations I was in were like the broadly criminal, like a legal, like the landlord was breaking a law. And so my rent was cheaper. We actually like had to, I've told the story a couple of times. We had to like talk a city of Los Angeles inspector out of reporting fire hazards in our apartment because we were like, dude, I live a minute and a half away from Santa Monica. And we're paying like a thousand bucks a month for a room. Wow. You got to, you got to like, you got to just keep quiet. Like we'll burn to death if we burn to death, bro. Right. We'll risk the life or death for this situation because it's cheap. Because it's cheap. Yeah. But nothing is cheap anymore. And his gotten, Rint has gotten higher at a ridiculous rate since the pandemic in particular. Not that it wasn't raising before, but it's really raised a lot. Say as you just said, you just were about to go up 40% year over year. In Miami and Tampa, Rint has up about 50% of its pre-pandemic numbers. And nationwide, median Rint has topped $2,000 a month for the first time ever, which is in set. When I was, you know, a kid 14, 13, 14, 15 years ago living in my first apartment, two grand a month is like, that's a rich person's rent. Yeah. Like that's a crazy rich, but I remember going to like a friends apartment in Manhattan that was $2,500 a month and being like, what the fuck is wrong with you people? Right. I pay $700 a month for a three bedroom. Like, yeah. Now, the fact that median Rint has topped $2,000 a month is heavily influenced by the poll of the big cities. These are very skewed numbers that may not reflect most individual people's experience because of how big some of the big cities are and how high the Rint is there. So San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Los Angeles, Miami, etc. Are the places that are skewing the numbers and the places where Rint has surged the most. But Rint is still up basically everywhere. It is currently increasing at the fastest rate since 1986. And one of the things that happened during the pandemic is we had all these people moving to cities that they thought would be a better place to live because it was remote work, which helped spread out some of the increases. And there was a brief period of time where evictions were tamped down on somewhat by federal rental assistance, even though Rint was rising. It was hard to kick people out of their houses. But that has started to run out this year. And in 2022, eviction filings hit pre-pandemic levels and in many places exceeded them greatly. So does that have an impact? Does the impact of like what's called pandemic pricing on rent have an influence there where like a lot of places they, especially in like big cities such as Los Angeles and New York, they were trying to fill places so they gave a lower price. And then the next year the increase was offensively high. Yeah, that's one of the things that's happened. Speaking from personal experience. It's one of the things that's contributed to evictions. Some cities it's like Houston in particular is one city I know where eviction filings are like 200% of pre-pandemic levels. Yeah, it's massively higher in a lot of cities. And this is all said to you. Yeah, Lina got hit a lot with that. And immediately as soon as it dropped the amount of evictions that came, it was absurd and obscene. Yeah. And that's fed into the homelessness crisis. That's this huge political thing and also just like thing thing everywhere in the country right now. And it's kind of difficult to grok in absolute numbers how many households people are in in canments and other situations because those aren't easily recorded in federal and state statistics. But homelessness is surging in a number of American cities. And all of this is ancillary to the question why is the rent so damn high. Now if you get a like then yeah, exactly why is there a city? I know we're about to go down to this. There's going to be black hulk mentioning, zillow mentioning, Airbnb mentioning. Are we going down these routes? We're going to be talking about some of these. We're going to be talking about a number of those. This is I want to say right now we're going to be this isn't going to be a comprehensive list of all of the different things affecting rent prices. We're focusing on some particularly bastardie ones. But we'll cover a lot of it. So please don't get on and be like well you didn't cover this or that. It's like yeah man, it's a big topic. Do you want us to all be just one boring broad overview of problems? You do want us to drill into some weird fucked up assholes. Which is what we're going to do. Well yeah, I got time today. So let's go. Yeah. So if you go to say the New York Times or most of other big legacy publications to try to like, you know, type into Google, why is the rent so damn high? You'll get various versions of the same answer. And I'm going to quote from a New York Times article here. The origins of the current homelessness crisis go back decades to policies that stop the US from building enough housing experts said 7 million extremely low income renters cannot get affordable homes according to the national low income housing coalition. Now experts like these tend to place a lot of the blame on what we call nimbis, which stands for not in my backyard. And it references the fact that in cities like San Francisco, there's a lot of like upper class liberal types who make it very hard to build anything besides single family housing because they don't like big buildings and they don't like being in a dense urban environment. Los Angeles County devotes 76% of its residential land to single family homes, which is bug fuck. This leads to sprawling cities, which also require huge road systems, lots of parking, yada yada, and it leads to higher rent prices because there's simply less space to build housing. The New York Times also notes quote, homeowners also often protest proposed housing effectively blocking it. They fear that more housing, particularly for low income families, will change the makeup of their communities or reduce the values of their home. Now in San Francisco, what David Chappelle did supposedly, I know that was like a small bloop and it was a misunderstanding, but he like blocked the housing like, yeah, right? Yeah, he says it was a misunderstanding. Okay. On the opposite end of this, George Lucas built a bunch of low income housing, specifically to fuck with his neighbors. His rich neighbors, he had had like noise complaint problems with his rich neighbors, as a result of like the studio he ran. So to fuck with them, he built a bunch of low income housing in the neighborhood because he knew it would piss off the other rich people. That's so nice of him. Yeah, based George Lucas. He's a perfect, unproblematic king. So right. Yeah. And there's like, they're not, the New York Times and stuff, they're not wrong when they say that Nimbis are part of the problem in San Francisco. There were recently a bunch of protests to stop a project to convert 131 room hotel in Japan town into housing for homeless people. Like a bunch of shit like that happens. California has about 23 available affordable homes for every 100 extremely low income renters, which makes it one of the worst of any state in terms of that problem. So they're not wrong when they say that like, yeah, the Nimbis are a problem. People are not allowing like multi-family development and lots and stuff is a huge problem. And I've reluctantly come to see that like they have a point. I don't want to, I don't like living in high-density areas. I would prefer to live out in the woods. But this argument is broadly correct. A huge part of the problem is that there's denser cities as that we need to have denser cities with more multi-family zoning and residential areas. However, there's also a lot of bullshit in the argument that the New York Times is making here and in this argument in general because the way it tends to get pushed and it gets pushed by people like developers and by intellectuals who take on the attitude of developers because the developers are their uncles or whatever. Because that all of the homelessness problem is to blame on these liberal city policies that just aren't letting developers develop enough. And while again, zoning is a part of the issue. This analysis exercises a great deal of the actual problem. For one thing, the whole we're not building enough housing thing, it tends to lay all the blame on zoning and these darn Nimbis. But one of the other problems is that like, there's not actually people to build that housing. This is a major problem in the industry. And I'm going to put it from a write up on NPR's website. By one estimate, the US is more than 3 million homes short of the demand from would-be home buyers. Pandemic-related supply chain problems aren't helping. They're adding tens of thousands of dollars in cost to the typical house. But the roots of the problem go back much further to the housing bubble collapse in 2008. What I call a bloodbath happens, says Klaus, who's a contractor. It was the worst housing market crash since the Great Depression. Many home builders went out of business. Klaus was building houses in Florida when the bottom fell out. A lot of my tradespeople found other work, went and got retrained for new jobs and law enforcement, all sorts of jobs. So the workplace force was somehow decimated. So more cops, less construction workers, nobody to build the fucking houses that they want to have built, which is not a problem that you can lay on zoning or Nimbis. That's right. Because there was a fraudulent banking industry that existed to sell people's subprime loans on houses that were low quality, massive and built in terrible locations. When that fell apart, suddenly all of these people had to find something else to do. You can't blame that on the fucking Nimbis in San Francisco. Right. There's all this conversation about funding as well as who is actually going to be able to afford it. Is it truly affordable in actuality? Which it often winds up not being. There's like loopholes in Portland right now. There's a building that's supposed to be affordable housing, but one of the deals the city gets is they get or the gifs that it developers that they can increase rent at a greater rate than other places could for a certain set amount of years. Which like, yeah, it's all, there's all these fucking ways that it like affordable housing winds up not being affordable that is not due to zoning. Or they just back out. So we had a whole project here called the Atlanta Belt Line, which is supposed to stretch around our metro area. And it was supposed to build up the city, have this walkable area, maybe get a rail station. I don't know. All these great things, but they had to buy out a lot of the areas, which is predominantly urban. And therefore, you know, it was, it was red line once upon a time. And it's now valuable because it's within the city. So they bought out these houses, pushing people out. Hello. The deal they had was they were going to put in affordable housing as well. They did not. They actually backed out of the deal so much. The originators who proposed this plan created this huge plan. That was going to be like a 30 year plan. It's still ongoing, by the way, multi million dollars from the city. So many things that they stepped down and said they were no longer a part of this project because it went so ugly and that people had come back with, sorry, just kidding. We're not giving you this property back. We're just going to make millions and millions and millions of dollars without any going back to the city or the people who we promise that we would help. It was back. Shocking. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that sounds like the way it tends to go. So yeah, we have this fucking financial crash and home buying eventually slowly recovers after it. But building rates never do, right? They stay below normal after the crash. This continues for like, you know, more than a decade because the workers simply aren't there to buy houses. So when millennials start to hit what should have been their prime home buying years, not only our houses more expensive than they had been, but there's less houses being built. And that's again, it's just not due to zoning. It's the result of the home building industry tanking because a bunch of people who should be in prison sold and bundled up subprime loans. And then those same people go to people in the New York Times pretending to be experts and say, no, we got to change the zoning so I can develop cities more. And it's frustrating that that's the only argument you tend to fucking here. Now even then, even if you like, because again, the New York Times, the angle here is not entirely wrong. But it also leaves a lot out even if you're just looking at their numbers because the numbers we see that are like the US is missing this many million homes, right? We're short three million homes or seven million homes are if not kind of fucking, which I would argue, then at least presented in a way that does not provide people with clarity as to what the numbers actually mean. When I say the US is short three million homes, which is something you'll hear on the New York Times a lot, that suggests that like, well, there's three million people who don't have, who can't get housing because of sheer lack of availability, right? Or at least, you know, X number of people, however many people fit into three million homes. And that's not really true. There's a lot of people that have started, yeah, where are these homes from? Where are these numbers? And who I'm kind of confused. I'm like, who actually says, all right, I've gone and taken statistics and we figured out that yes, this amount of people need as many houses, but do we actually have a number on how did it come up to that? Yes, we're about to get to that. I'm going to talk about it. It does not work the way you would think it does based on the way it tends to get summarized, right? But yeah, there's folks who will argue just in general that the problem is not the way it's often presented. Kevin Drum is a writer from other Jones. And I think kind of on the more libertarian end of things with a lefty tinge, his big claim to fame is that he helped solidify the idea that there's a connection between the drop in violent crime and the removal of environmental lead, like getting lead out of gas. He's like the journalist who is big on that. And he points out that while construction never recovered after the 2008 crash, that's because the crash led to the bursting of a housing bubble. And since housing wasn't deed a bubble in that period, why would construction have returned to the rate that it was being added at when everyone lost their minds building trash houses as part of a shell game? Right? Right. It's not a problem isn't that housing construction didn't return to previous levels because those levels were insane and fundamentally based on irrationality. Quote, during the early Aughts, housing supply grew far faster than population. After the bust household formation caught up by around 2013. And since then, housing supply has matched household growth and has exceeded population growth. So do we have a housing shortage? Everyone keeps saying we do, and the housing groupies keep yelling at me that my chart is meaningless. But why? It's right to me. By the way, I was browsing through some OECD stats the other day looking for healthcare information and I happened to run into their league rankings for housing. Guess how we compare. Based on indicators such as rooms per house, basic facilities and affordability, their rank is number one in the entire OECD group of rich countries for the year 2020. We must be doing something right and something wrong. According to the OECD, we rank second from last among housing affordability for low-income tenants. So what he's saying is that like, well, the evidence that we're short on housing is weaker than the evidence that prices and housing are being jacked up and inflated. It's like the, there is inflate, it's like with the grocery store. There is inflation that's affecting the price of your groceries. Those grocery stores are also making record profits because they have jacked up prices specifically to make more money with the cover of inflation. Yeah. Drums work is quoted favorably by Brian Potter, who works in the wonky side of the construction industry and writes a popular substack for weirdo construction nerds who want to know about things like why his wood got so expensive and why did agriculture mechanize and not construction. Those are the kind of things he writes about. He's also a member of the Institute for Progress, which is a right-wing libertarian shaded think tank, who pushed the idea that a lot of social and political policy should be tested by having prominent people tweet shit. What I'm trying to say is that I'm not going to totally back this guy up, but he certainly knows more about construction than me. He has an angle, which is why I laid out what he writes for. But he does, he does the best job I've seen of answering the question of like, what does the statistic like where three million houses short really mean? Quote. We'll start with some context. The US has roughly 330 million people living in roughly 141 million homes or about.42 homes per person. One thing worth noting about this is that previous rates of home building in the US were partly driven by falling average household size. But there's a limit to how much average household size can fall. You can only add so many new households to a given population size. At the extreme end, you can't have more households than there are people. Average household size can't be less than one. In a world where a children live with their parents until they're 18 and b, most people live with a romantic partner and c, the population isn't declining, is a world with a higher floor on how small the average household can get. What happens if this world changes to one where the average household size is two? In the final condition, you'll be building twice as many houses. If you add four people to the population, you're now building two homes instead of one. But to get to that second world, you need to build 100 additional houses. Even if this process takes 50 years, that's an extra two houses per year on top of the ones you're already building, which will temporarily juice your building rate. But once you work through that backlog, your building rate will drop off. Turning back to the real world, in 1960, the US had a population of 180 million with an average household size of 3.33. By 1980, average household size had dropped to 2.76. This means that between 1960 and 1980, over 550,000 homes per year were needed just to keep up with changes in household size. By contrast, from 2001 to 2021, average household size only went from 2.56 to 2.51. We thus can't infer much from the fact that US home building rates per capita are lower than they were in the past, because we would expect that to happen at some point soon, regardless. Are you, do you see what he's saying there? Explain it to me, because I'm trying to keep up with all of these numbers. Yeah, this is very wonky. I don't know any other way to say it, but the gist of what he's saying is the average from like the 60s to the 80s, household sizes on average got smaller, which means more people were living in more houses, so there were fewer people on average per house. That, the number of people per house, by comparison, barely changed at all from 2001 to 2021. So we didn't, it would have been unreasonable for the housing rate to continue at the same rate. It had been from the 60s to the 80s, because we were not, like the household size was not decreasing by much, right? The social changes that led to us having more smaller households had already happened. And so it would have been unnecessary housing to a large extent. It's a, you basically, you can't infer a housing shortage by looking at housing construction rates and isolation, which a lot of people do. And it's, you know, I think the point here is that there's a lot of money in convincing you that this problem is simple and that the only thing to do is deregulate, right? If we deregulate construction, if we deregulate zoning restrictions, that will solve the problem, right? And what, what, and obviously like Potter, I think is, because he does conclude that like zoning changes are one aspect of helping with the crisis that we're in right now. But the thing that he and drummer both saying is that the people who are saying this is just about a lack of households or a lack of quote unquote affordable households aren't actually looking at the numbers as they really exist. They're, they're taking like these kind of broad summaries and they're trying to torque the actual numbers to say something that they don't. In order to make a more, a simple, in order to present a simpler picture, right? And it's a picture specifically, it is a picture that reduces the problem and removes solutions like rent control and eviction moratoriums, right? That's what's going on here. And yeah, there's, there's a lot else, one of the other major issues here is that, and this is something that Potter points out when we're talking about missing housing, we're not talking about a lack of houses. Like you'll hear a lot of people say there's X number of empty houses in the United States more than enough to, and that is true, but that's not necessarily vacant housing, right? Vacant housing is housing that is on the market and available for people to purchase. And right now the US does have a historically low vacancy rate. So there are fewer houses, like per capita fewer houses available for people to rent than there have been in the past, even though there's plenty of actual empty houses. Right. Because if those houses aren't available to be rented, they're not vacant. And a big reason why there's so much empty housing that is not technically vacant is Airbnb. Yep. Yep. So that is a major factor here. Point for me. Yeah. Yeah. And we're going to talk about that. But first, you know what's not Airbnb? I hope not. Maybe. Super awkward. Any of our sponsors, probably. Sophie, are we sponsored by Airbnb? Not that we would have, not that we would have approved or signed off on, but like we don't, as we don't have control. Do the random ads. So randomly in Airbnb. Yeah. Look, if you, if you hear, here's what I'll say, if you hear an Airbnb ad on the podcast, find your nearest Airbnb rental and huckum all of the top cocktail through the window, whether or not there's people inside it doesn't matter to us. Legally, this is a joke. Yep. Just going to send the background here. Yeah. It's fine. It's fine. Yeah. Set something on fire today. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like, I feel like that mean of everything's fine with the dog and the fire. And that's my face right now. Everything's fine. Now, this is your face right now. You know what? I would enjoy this moment. Robert, excuse me. And now a word from our sponsor, Better Help. Mental health problems are obviously really tough and it can get easy to just sort of set yourself in the mindset that things are bad. They're going to stay that way. But that's not the way it has to be. A therapist can help you become a better problem solver, which can make it easier to accomplish your mental health goals, no matter how big or small. If you're looking at getting into therapy, Better Help is a great option. They offer online counseling that's efficient and affordable and is available to people kind of no matter what you want to do. If you want to be on the phone, if you want to do it through a video chat, Better Help has options. It's convenient, accessible, affordable and entirely online. 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And what's best, it comes in a wide variety of delicious flavors so you never get tired of it. Discover the key to better workouts with Extend OG, the world's best BCAA brand. Get 25% off with code POD25 at official xtend.com. That's promo code pod25. Oh gosh. What a great day to be an American. We're bad. I don't know. I did when I watched those Philly fans sliding down those greased up light poles. Every time I see Philly Delphi, I celebrate anything. I'm proud to be an American. I was proud of the New Yorkers at the Yankees Astros game that heckled Ted Cruz. I was delighted. I was delighted. I'm proud of that too. And I'm proud of Forbes for reporting on how bad Airbnb's are for housing vacancy rates. And I'm going to quote from them now. Research conducted by the Harvard Business Review across the US found that Airbnb is having a detrimental impact on the housing stock, as encourages landlords to move their properties out from the long term rental and for sale markets into the short term rental market. A separate US study found that a 1% increase in Airbnb listings leads to a 0.018 increase in rents and a 0.026 increase in house prices. It may not seem like much on the surface, but there's a cost creep for those looking to rent long term or buy. So it's just, again, I'm not saying the times is wrong when they say that nimbis are part of the problem we have here. But be cautious whenever somebody talks about the housing shortage issue and just throws that out there or just frames it as a housing shortage issue, rather than a costs are creeping up because a bunch of different kinds of capitalists are finding new ways to fuck people, which is the thing that's actually happening. Another thing that's happening is that rent, like the rent surge and the way it looks and stuff. And the fact that the rent surge is being attributed to a lack of housing, construction and whatnot and zoning issues, that's heavily skewed by outlier cities by San Francisco. In other words, rent is increasing everywhere, right? Everyone in every city is dealing with rent prices that are surging. Rit prices that are surging in San Francisco and a couple of other big cities because of zoning issues, but rent prices in Atlanta or in Houston are not necessarily surging because of those issues. But because of how big like San Francisco, New York are and how much rent, they're outliers and they fucked the data up. And so the picture they present in large is not accurate to why is most people's rent raising, right? Does that make sense? Yeah. And I'm going to quote again from Potter's analysis here. There is essentially zero correlation. The metros with the largest rent increases had added population and added housing ratios, no different than metros with smaller rent increases. For example, between 2001 and 2019, San Francisco Bay area added around 336,000 people, but only built 94,000 new housing units. This gives an added population added housing ratio of about 3.54, much higher than both the national and regional average household size. This seems like it would indicate many more households than homes got added, which we'd expect to push prices up. And indeed, San Francisco saw a rent increase of over 53% during this period, one of the highest in the country. The problem? The Atlanta metro area saw almost the same added population over added housing ratio, but it had a much lower rent increase. Atlanta added 653,000 people over the same time period and only built 186,000 homes. For an added population added housing ratio of 3.51. And Miami added almost 500,000 people, but only 98,000 homes. For an added population housing ratio of over 5. But Atlanta and Miami saw a rent increase of just 22% and 17% respectively. So again, it's just not as simple as that number alone. And I don't know, I'm probably harping on this too much. So we're going to get out of the number shit now. I apologize. I just wanted to make the point that the people who just say this is all about zoning, this is all about housing construction, are trying to fuck you. Right? Right. And you should not take them at their word. I mean, this is the classic trick in trying to blame someone else so that the people who are actually profiting and making the most money look innocent. Kind of like the whole recycling bit. We know, we know what they're trying to blame the individual and civilizing. These huge corporations are fucking over the environment, but they don't want to talk about it because they don't want to lose money. So we're going to we scope this. Yeah, we're going to we're going to scope. This is like there's too much regulation. Not like, yeah, but you guys are also jacking the prices up, right? Like you're also like you're also like colluding to fuck people over by yeah, anyway, and you're doing shit like Airbnb. Like you've done a buck capitalist, the found a bunch of different ways to fuck with housing in the last 15 years. And it's not just a construction issue or a zone. Anyway, saying that rents high because of the lack of quality of places available, but like it's really not the case. No, otherwise it would be raising its similar rates in these other cities where the numbers are either worse. You'd have to stand the math. That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, you can it whatever. I know what? It's rent is high. Rent is. Oh, you wrote that in your shirt. Rent is 2 damn high. Rent is 2 damn high. Yeah. And there's a number of reasons for it. And anyone trying to say it's this one simple thing that is also really good for developers is probably trying to fuck you. So now we're going to start talking about assholes, which is fun. Let's go. And more are strong suit than numbers. So the first thing you need to know about or the first person you need to know about is a guy named Jeffrey Roper. Jeffrey is a businessman who describes himself as a numbers nerd and formerly worked as Alaska Airlines's director of revenue management in the 1980s. Anybody anybody who says there are numbers guy to you? Just like him immediately. I don't know. I like my accountant, my aunt, the guy who does my taxes. But if somebody is like, if that's their first thing that they want you to know about them, red flag, red flag, red flag, red flag, date that person. Okay. Also, having the last name Roper, that makes me think of the guy who used to be Ebert's friend and probably killed him. That's my head. Can they mention anything about like their credits? Yeah. Throwback. I'm just saying they mentioned anything about their credit score. If they mentioned anything about numbers, they mentioned anything like that in their getting profile, do not match with them. Wait, have you had someone? Girl, put their credit score. Oh my gosh. Yeah, more, more, more when I was living in Los Angeles. But okay. Yeah, that was a thing. Maybe a late. Maybe a late is are not impressive. So therefore they leave it out on purpose. I don't know. Because I did not see that. That's a new one to me. So all right. Robert, tell us about the numbers guy. Roper. The numbers guy. Our money is what we're calling him actually. Our money, okay, tell us about our money. Yeah. Yeah. So he's a numbers nerd. He used to work as Alaska Airlines director of revenue management in the 1980s. And look, Alaska is like the least shitty domestic airline that we have. Great. Great, great airline. But when Roper was there, dragging people off the plane so. Yeah. They don't do that now. I will say this. They absolutely, while Roper was director of revenue management, robbed us all of about a billion dollars back in the 1980s. So we're going to talk about how that happens like robbed us consumers like stole illegally, criminally stole a billion dollars. It's cool. Yeah. So compete. They're not the only actually with a number of airlines stole collectively a billion. But Alaska was kind of leading the pack. Anyway, competing airlines, what happened is competing airlines started using price setting software. And they're different computers, but all kind of shared data on planned routes and prices with each other to make sure that like nobody was undercutting anyone else. And Jeffrey was a big part of this. He brings in price setting software to Alaska and he helps set up this system, which they're very happy with because it helps avoid a price war in the 1980s. And when you frame it as a price war, it sounds like, oh, they avoided a price war with this software. That's good. No, it's not. What a price war is is companies competing to give you the best price so that they will choose their service, right? It's good for consumers when a price war occurs. When you avoid a price war, it means you're getting fucked. Right. That war amongst each other so they cannot have to compete for businesses unless they're in like, I'm guessing they're doing like the price is right type of where there's just a dollar or less. Yeah. Well, that normally what would happen is you would not, it would kind of be a little bit of a black box and they would set their rates just based on this is what we think is fair. And then kind of over time as they see what consumers are choosing, you know, then like maybe we need to lower our rates. So maybe we can raise them a little. But they're doing with these softwares is they're all communicating with each other to be like, this is what we are charging. Oh, we can all afford to charge more. So the price is just start raising and just start raising and just start raising, right? Price wars occur when corporations fight to lower prices while still staying profitable. This is good broadly speaking for consumers. If capitalism worked the way my high school textbooks said it did, then this would be an example of why it's a good system, right? But that's not what happens, what really happens is that companies like these airlines do things called, do so what's called price fixing, which is illegal. Alaska under, well, you know, the system that roper helps set up is illegal price fixing. The Department of Justice says these companies are all illegally fixing prices. I'm not like declaring this price fixing because I don't like it. The Department of Justice says they did a crime. Did anybody actually get this? Absolutely not. Well, a little bit. So the DOJ accuses Alaska and several other airlines of artificially inflating prices using the system, which costs taxpayers about a billion dollars between 1988 and 1982. The government gets settlements and consent decrees out of eight airlines, including Alaska, which is like, again, when you're a big company, you have lawyers, nobody goes to prison for this shit. Right. Sometimes you kick the government some money. Yeah, exactly. Now, during this investigation, federal agents remove a computer and documents from ropers office because again, he's kind of one of the ring leaders of this. He will later claim an interview quote, we all got called up before the Department of Justice in the early 1980s because we were colluding. We had no idea. Of course. Of course. Of course. Yeah. Sure, buddy. Yes, I'm certain you had no idea what that was. Oh my God. We were price fixing. I didn't know all our price fixing was price fixing. I didn't know how we got all that money. Oh my God. Yeah. It was hard. It seemed like we were just making a lot of money. We were just so good. It's very funny that he says that. Nobody gets really punished again. Whatever, whatever settlements they make are kind of slap on the wristy. After this, roper leaves the United States for Central and Eastern Europe to fuck with people's lives and post Soviet Europe. He's helping. He's one of these capitalists who goes over there because he's like, oh, there's a lot of money to be made in setting the stage for Vladimir Putin's rise to power by fucking with all these newly privatized industries and siphoning money and access to future money away from any kind of like regular people or social safety net that might be built, which will create ideal grounds for authoritarianism. Anyway, it's whatever. It's good stuff. He made money. Don't worry about that. He makes a lot of money doing this. Then he gets back to the US and he's like, you know, when I realize the US apartment rental industry is stuck in the past, it looks like these emerging markets over in Europe. You know, it's old fashioned. It's too slow. And the thing that he finds that really disgusts him is that apartment managers are quote, basically pricing their product on a paper napkin, which he seems to have found viscerally offensive. Now, what's going on here is that to some extent, renting is more of a human business back then. So people are like coming in and sitting down and their landlord saying, well, like this is what again, there's haggling and stuff and back and forth. And if you've ever haggled with a small landlord or gotten one to give you a break because like shift got fucked up in your life, you know what I'm talking about, right? You can say what you will about how inherently predatory landlording is or isn't or whatever. But like at the end of the day, it's better when you can be a human being sitting across the table from another human being because sometimes that matters, right? Like sometimes. Sometimes. Small landlords can be shitty and terrible too. But as a general rule, I always, every time I had the least from a huge company, I found the monolithic, slow to respond to problems and cruel in their application of things like fees and penalties where I was able to like talk shit out of little landlords and, and you know, now that I never had a small landlord fucking steal shit from me, but if I prefer one situation to the other, right? I think out of the 28, 20 years that I rented, one one was a big corporation and I hated it. It fucking sucks. I want to at least be able to call my goddamn landlord on the phone and get a person and deal with a problem, you know? Well, I also had the age old problem where the guy who came to fix things and maintenance man was hitting on me. So I had a feeling he was just coming to my house. So he got no. I had that. There was that. I had the, the handyman in my last, and my last one didn't hit on me. No, no, no, he would lecture, he would come and lecture me about life choices and tell me about, you know, he was just really misogynistic. It was, oh, it was worse. Totally opposite experience. I think it's, it's equally bad. I had a gloriously opposite experience. And so when I was renting a slum, it was legally owned servants, borders, it was one room. I lived in it with two other men falling apart. The ceiling collapsed on me while I was showering. And the next day I called a landlord and I'm like, Hey, the ceiling fell in on me while I was showering. You waited the next day? Well, it was like night time. I, I tend to show like, it was like, I would have called. It was like 10 or 9, I mean, immediately. I don't remember if I called him, maybe I called him immediately and he wasn't right. Anyway, I get, I get in touch with him and he's like, I'll get, I'll get my guy right over. So he sends over a repair man and then he's just kind of this like old hippie looking dude and he comes over and he looks up at the hole and he's like, yeah, we're not going to be able to fix this for a while and then he says, do you want to buy some weed? And I said, yes. And he was selling $50 ounces of pretty solid popcorn. That's like, it was good. It was a good deal. It was worth it. It was like several months where we didn't have a ceiling over the shower, but it was a pretty good weed hookup. We were poor as shit. So a $50 ounce of minz, that's not a bad deal. You know, well, it must be wonderful to have to, again, you don't get that, you don't get that experience with a big corporate landlord. That's the kind of landlord you get when your landlord is breaking a number of different laws, but basically chill. Yeah. Look, again, this is, yeah, again, you can have whatever Marxist opinions you want to have on landlords. I'm talking about like from a human being perspective, it's always better to deal with a person than a giant edifice. So whatever, Jeffrey Roper's entire business attitude revolves around making that kind of thing where like if you're living on the margins, you can kind of skate by because you're able to like talk to someone on a human level. He wants to make that impossible, right? Because that is a barrier to profits. No compassion and the ill. Exactly. You have predicted where we're going here. So in 2004, he gets hired by a company called Reel Page as its principal scientist. They bought software from Camden Property Trust, which is a large owner of apartment buildings that was supposed to help them maximize profits. Now previously back in the napkin days, we'll call them, even big corporate apartment managers had kind of been left to guess, you know, they, they, even if you were working with a big corporation, it was still kind of like eventually some guy's going to sit down and just kind of guess what he thinks he can get out of you, right? No per knew that he could do better just as he'd done at Alaska by introducing machines and price fixing to the, well, legally not price fixing yet, although it might prove to be price fixing in the future. We'll see what the DOJ says, but legally, he has not committed price fixing in the rental industry to an extent that has been proven. I'm going to quote from a pro public investigation. Roper quickly realized he required data, a lot of data to get the algorithm working properly. He began building a master data warehouse that pulled in client data from other real page applications, such as those for leasing managers. A proof of concept version of the software had performed well in tests at townhouses. Camden offered for rent in its home city in the, of Houston. At the time, the, the street behind Camden's townhouses was shut down while the grocery store was being built. Leasing staff wanted to discount rent for the townhouses because of the nuisance said Kip Zechariahs, who worked with Camden as a consultant. Instead, yield star, which is the company that's selling the software, suggested boosting rents. We were like guys, just try it, Zechariahs said. The units ended up renting for significantly more than staff had expected. He said, that was kind of the Eureka moment. If you listen to your gut, you would have lowered your price. Such agents sometimes hesitated to push rents higher. Roper said they were often peers of the people they were renting to. We said there's way too much empathy going on here. This is one of the reasons why we wanted to get pricing off-site. Unimpeded by human worries, yield star's price increases sometimes the lead to more tenants leaving. He's literally saying what you were saying. There's too much empathy in the process as it exists. We got to get rid of that shit so we can really fuck people. Right. We need to get rid of the human aspect. I like that part too. If you're a small man or if you're just a person at a leasing office with discretion and a person comes in and they're like, you know, they remind you, your mom, you're onto your cousin, your friend, or like, you know, you have a good rapport with them. They're like, yeah, I want to make sure you can do it. I work. Again, I've had that happen to me. It's like this is, and the system, by the way, that system, the one I'm describing, was not idyllic. It was still bad. Rick was still too high, but this has made it much worse. Right. So he's the one that began like, no, really, every year you should increase by 15% and they'll never question it. We just do it to every single person uniformly. And then, you know, nobody's, it's not personal. This is just the price of housing now. And this is just the way that it works. And you know, we're just trying to, we found that you're underneath the, and this is what it means also when like you get that letter saying, you know, your house is under priced or lower than like market value or whatever. So we have to increase it by X amount. That's what the value they're quoting on is the shit that this software hands them. Which is not necessarily a real thing. It is made up prediction by this machine. It is a thing that the machine calculated by doing the machine version of price fixing. Then again, as of yet has not been ruled to be price fixing by the DOJ, but may prove to be ruled price fixing by the DOJ in the near future. We'll see. It will soon. Okay. Camden noted their turnover was about 15% higher in 2006 after it started using yield star, which is again, that's the software that Roper is, is, is managing. Despite this, revenue grew by 7.4%. So 15% of their, of their clients like leave the apartments that they're in, or 50% more of the clients leave their apartments that year, like don't renew their leases, but revenue still grows. And that all sounds fine when you treat it like numbers, right? That like, oh, we had more turnover than number, but revenue still grew. But that 15% of tenants who turned over includes people who got evicted because they couldn't pay their rent and people who had to leave a neighborhood or even a city they loved because they'd been priced out. And it also, the added rent that these people paid, the reason why profits were still up, means money those tenants aren't spending elsewhere. Money they're not saving for a house themselves or contributing to the local economy, rather than pumping more cash into a massive corporation whose shareholders all live far away from the communities where this decision is impacted. Yep. Rick Campo of Camden Property Trust is one of the people who doesn't see things this way. He summarized the impact of yield star like this. The net effect of driving revenue and pushing people out was $10 million in income. I think that shows that keeping the heads and beds above all else is not always the best strategy. Wait, man, we put some people on the street, but we made $10 million. Fuck them people. It's funny. So pro public does this big investigation and they're the ones who bust this story. They find this quote from Campo where he's like heads and beds, fuck it. And they're like, hey, this guy, this guy that makes you sound like a monster. Kind of. I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to quote from their article. Campo told pro public it sounds awful and doesn't reflect how he or Camden views renters today. We fundamentally believe our customers and the most important part of the business. He said, we're not about pushing people out. Of course, you think customers are important. They're the ones you're jacking money from. Like customers are important to Camden the way somebody with a nice watch is important to a man with a handgun and a fucking desire to get a fix by robbing him at gunpoint. Like, yeah, that guy is important to him. The liquor store I might rob later tonight is important to me. This is at same level of like child training kid children to work and you're like, yeah. And how you think it is and they're exclusive like, no, but if the children didn't work for low wages, they're family wouldn't have any money. So we're doing a good thing. We're doing a good thing. I'll put them out. Yeah, it's it's it's gul logic. And it's I also I don't want to I don't want to be unfair here and compare a guy like Rick Campo to somebody who robs people at gunpoint or holds up liquor stores because that individual robbing people at gunpoint or holding up liquor stores, that's honest work, right? You know, yeah, no, no, no, no, it's unfair to the guy with the 38. She the person who was desperate and trying to get anything. All right, I got you now. I'll take that. Yeah, I'll take that one. And again, that's a human interaction as a general, you can probably talk your way out of the worst parts of the right. Yeah, there's more confession there. Yeah, it's not an algorithm deciding whether or not you get stuck up, you know. Yeah, because you know, it's not heads and beds. Yeah, exactly. Speaking of heads and beds, we sell a lot of mattresses on this podcast. We do, but I have yet to go on. Yeah, yeah, they don't give it a lot like they used to. That's what I'll say. Yeah, sounds so bougie. Let's get to the ads. 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So obviously he says that they're not about pushing people out, but that is objectively what the software did. And it began to take off like wildfire in the real estate industry, which led to articles about it like this in the landlord-focused news website yield pro yields is the profits you jack out of people for housing, which they will die without. Yeah. So here's them writing about this positively. Equity residential, which completed installation of LRO. So LRO is the other kind of software. There's a yield star and there's LRO. And they both do the same. They're both competing at this point competing software. So it's talking about both of them. Equity residential, which completed installation of LRO across its 165,716 unit portfolio in Q4, 2006, found it extremely useful through the turning point in the apartment market. We've raised rents hundreds of dollars in some markets and I don't think people on site given the way we'd trained them to think about pricing would have had the courage to push it as aggressively as this program has. CEO David Neethercut told panelists during a Deutsche Bank conference in January, Keith Odin, Camden property trust president and COO, agreed. It's not in their DNA to raise pricing $150 to $200 per unit on a lease turn, he said. Camden completed rollout of yield star across its 64,384 unit portfolio in the Q4, 2005. Both Camden and Equity so far report 1 to 2% lifts to net operating income that they attribute to the use of yield star and LRO respectively. Again, this is the very start of it because these algorithms, the way they work like any other algorithm, they get more effective at the thing they do, the more often they do it, the more data they get. Again, they get better at raising rent by more the longer they're doing it. The more they are, I'm guessing the more they are raising the prices as it gets higher and higher, they're going to use that as a factor. Because it raises all the average prices everywhere else. Again, their price fixing but not legally, so don't sue us. I just wanted you to say everything that you name, the corporations, individuals are all the bad guys in history of the world right now. This is bad. Yes, these are bad guys. If you are currently in an apartment complex and you've seen your rise by a surprising amount, you might want to look into whether or not your landlord uses LRO or yield star. While many companies don't use these programs, the fact that they're in use in major markets increases pricing for everybody. There's one real estate executive told yield pro in 2007, a rising tide lifts all boats. The way Jeffrey Roper sees it, landlords who don't jack their prices up are ripping off all the other landlords. Quote, if you have idiots under valuing, it costs the whole system, which is the same logic that led to the price fixing girfuffle with the airlines, right? My face is turning red. My face is turning red. It is dark void of mine. My face is turning red. This is why you lie. Why? To us, anybody who says there are numbers nerd because when it's one of those things, if this guy's logic is being, I don't know, if he's like works for a company that makes premium bourbon, right? And like he's applying this logic to like get the most profits out of people who want to buy nice bourbon, whatever, right? Like it's discretionary. I'm going to, people die if they don't have housing. Yeah, safe housing. Safe housing. Can we put that as the marketer? Yeah, because a lot of these houses that are for rent who are with the more personable are probably not in its safety. Yes, they're fire hazards like half of the houses I lived in when I was a renter. Exactly. Like there's so many things I can have. And you're like, you literally are giving up safety for the price. Once again, as you had said, you're like, you know, I'm living in a place that doesn't have to be. I'm under the nice neighborhood for fucking nothing, you know, or not then. That was not a particularly nice neighborhood. Not the name. We do not the week and act. No, I was okay. So the way Jeffrey Roper sees it. Yeah. So anyway, initially Roper's competition in this horrible business was LRO or least rent options, right? I quoted about them earlier, but you'll start purchased LRO in 2017 with the Justice Department's acquiescence. They were flagged for high level review, but ultimately passed. Surprise. Pro-Publica writes, the approval allowed real page to acquire its only significant competitor, Roper said. And I was surprised the DOJ let that go through. So 2017. 2017. Yeah, 2017. When you really surprised. Yeah. But like those like organizations bought that. I mean, that ability. That should tell you what a fucking scam this is, right? That like even he's being like, yeah, man, I can't believe they didn't call that price fixing. I can't believe they said that wasn't monopolistic. I'm glad we did it. It's fucked up what we did. So real page was pricing one and a half million units and the acquisition of LRO would double that. Steve Win, real pages CEO at the point at that point said in a 2017 investor conference, I don't think there's any concentration enough concentration of buying or pricing power here to warrant the DOJ stepping in. Yeah. So that's cool. Cool. And they made a lot of money. Real pages influence that year like they are not in the firm's target market was multifamily buildings with five or more units made up 19 million of the nation's 45 million rental units. And a huge share of those buildings were owned by firms backed by Wall Street investors who were the first adopters of this pricing software, right? So he is specifically going to jack up the pricing of like housing for families that is tradition like should have been more affordable, right? Like he's he's actually directly this business directly is targeting and jacking if the prices of what we call affordable housing. Again, not all is owning issue. So real page renamed its combined pricing software, AI revenue management. And by the end of 2020, the firm was reporting in an SEC commission filing that its clients used its services and products to manage 19.7 million rental units of all types, including single family homes. The private equity firm, Toma Bravo brought the company public a few months later for $10.2 billion. And again, it's all that's enough to affect everyone, right? 20 million housing units, that's enough to raise everybody's rent price. And by God's hands, so are you talking about the Camden department complexes that are everywhere? Yes, yes. Okay. Okay. So this monster software into the world, you've been having the people. I'm fucking listening, Bradley Linda. I can't hold it. Right there. Burn it down, y'all. Yeah, burn it down. Burn it down. Burn it down. Sorry, Sophie. Yeah, add to this. It's cool. So cool, cool. The good, the good stuff is that, I don't know, basically the attitude these companies were able to realize because of the software is that previously, even though they'd always wanted to get as much money as they could out of people, the number one priority was keeping occupancy full, right? So we'll make deals with people, we'll cut prices if we can get another person in another unit, right? Because the worst thing is an empty unit, right? An empty unit is just a total waste of money. This software and Roper comes in and Roper's attitude is, no, it's not. Empty units are fine as long as we're jacking up the prices of other units more. If we have to keep more units empty, as long as we're getting more total money out of the, the built the complex, that's all that fucking matters. And what this actually means in, in reality is that people are winding up on the street or they're being forced to move or forced to double and triple up somewhere else just to survive and profits still raise for the company because everyone who gets to stay in housing is just getting built for more money. In one analysis, ProPublica did, if a building owned by a company that used a yield star, next door to a building that didn't rent for the yield star building rose 42% since 2012 as opposed to 33%. So like these are substantial increases and you've got to also admit or note that like the average in that, like the gap between the yield star and non yield star buildings is higher because the average rental price is also being affected by the fucking yield star price, right? Right. Like it's not just that yield star buildings are higher than non. It's that they're raising rental prices for everybody because the whole market is surging. So because that's the conversation is that yeah, these look well, I say that's this all inclusive maintenance apartment complexes, they have their steady prices with no negotiations. But even though they're significantly higher, whatever you were paying with these mom and pop landlords is still going to increase because no matter what, even if it was like, let's say cheap $800 going $1,200 is still significantly cheaper than the 1800 apart apartment that's gone in. So it sounds cheaper, which is what's happened everywhere. Yeah. Because I've promised that I left literally as cheaper than everywhere in Atlanta, but it still went up 40%. Exactly. So everything's good. Is it? Yeah. Everything's good. Everything's good. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. It should always be acceptable to turn things that to turn pricing for things that people die without into a fucking algorithm game, just like everything else that's terrible in our society. Nothing should matter more. I love making people die and like risk. We're such safety for white men to be continued to get rich. That's amazing. I love that. That's my favorite thing to do. It's not just white men. You have to assume they're not all white, you know? Okay. So that's fine. That's true. Yeah. It's good. So anyway, we're going to talk about an even more entertaining piece of shit next episode. And we're going to talk about some other important stuff, including what you might call it, rent control. That is still there. Oh yeah. In some places, although there's some fuckery going on there too. But yeah, these are some of the assholes who have made rent be so damn high. And also the assholes. The assholes who, because the assholes in this, you know, Roper is the one we're really digging into in this episode. But other assholes are just like all of the journalists who blively report like, well, experts say there's just not enough housing and we have to change zoning. It's like, no, no, no, not that that's not part of the issue. But don't pretend that's everything that's going on. That's going on. That's going on. You fucking dishonest pricks. Woo. I'm going to have to go run or something. What do I do? Yeah. I don't know. Go rent a house. Everybody go out and sign a lease. I quit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, anything you want to plug? Oh, sure. Oh, let me gather my thoughts. Yes, you can come find me at my podcast with Annie. Stuff Mom never told you if you like to talk about feminist issues where you want to rage about how the US hate women. A lot of people hate women apparently in general and those who identify as female, you know, they think they do essentially or any issues dealing with those who identify as female. Come on over. Listen to us. Yeah, I also you can find me on Instagram, McVeigh.CM or on Twitter. I believe McVeigh Samantha. Yeah. Yeah, you can see pictures of my dog. Well, go with Christ, my children. And we'll be back for part two. Oh, there's a hell yeah. Well, maybe. What just happened? Okay, bye. Bye. Okay, bye. Behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone media. For more from Cool Zone media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you live with psoriasis or psoriatic arthritis? The National psoriasis foundation has everything you need to live your best life with psoriasis disease. You can find their sound bites podcast wherever you listen or at psoriasis.org. N-P-F can also help you find specialists or navigate insurance hurdles. No matter your challenge with psoriatic disease, N-P-F has solutions for you. Visit psoriasis.org or call 800-723-9166. Let me guess. Unknown caller. You could reduce the number of unwanted calls and emails with online privacy protection. The latest innovation from Discover will help regularly remove your personal info, like your name and address from 10 popular people search websites that could sell your data. And we'll do it for free. Activate in the Discover app. See terms and learn more at discover.com slash online privacy protection. Check out the podcast Good Assassins, the unbelievable but true story of the greatest spy of World War II. A mysterious agent is strategically dismantling the Nazi's violent grasp on France. They don't know her name, but they want this woman dead. They send a devious double agent to hunt down the limping lady, but Virginia Hall was tougher than they expected. Listen to Good Assassins on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcast.