Listen to Episode

Read Episode Transcript

There's so much news happening around the world that we're somehow supposed to stay on top of. That's why we launched The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio that turns down the volume a bit to give you some space to think. I'm Wes Kosova. Each weekday I dig into one important story and talk about why it matters. Listen to The Big Take on The I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. My name is Joshua Topolsky and I have a new podcast called What Future. But I want to tell you that I'm being forced by my producer to record a promo telling you about my show. And I'm not trying to force you to listen to it. And maybe you're not interested in internet culture and the future of life on planet Earth and why John Carpenter movies are so good. You may just want to listen to a podcast about sports or whatever Joe Rogan talks about. And that's fine. No judgment. But if you like what you're hearing and I know that you do, you can listen to all of what future on The I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Curtis Fittis in Jackson. And I'm Charlie Webster. Listen to the podcasts surviving El Chapo, the incredible true story of the identical twins from Chicago, who built America's biggest drug trafficking empire. The only reason El Chapo is now in prison and they've never spoken publicly until now. My brother had the only legal recording of Chapo's mom. Listen to surviving El Chapo, the twins who brought down a drug lord on The I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, yeah, it's behind the bastards. Please, please, Jesus Christ. It is. It was a whole man's heart stop. Samantha, do you see how she treats me sometimes? I was just fucking it. It's two o'clock on a Tuesday when we're recording this. I don't need the drama. No. I believe I have civil rights, Sophie. I'm sorry. Do I not have civil rights? What is that I have to do with you doing? What would I have? I think I have the word civil rights. I think I have the right voice I've ever heard. Well, that's your opinion. This isn't taking away from you. I feel that I did that. This feels like my rights are being violated. Samantha McVeigh, how are you doing? How are you doing? I am wonderful. How are you doing here? Is it true that where I listening, looking for a podcast about things that my mother had never told me, that you could help me with that? Yes. As in fact, you can just put stuff mom never told you and you will find my face and some other faces. As a host, and yes, you can come and listen about things your mother may not have told you. If you have a cool mom, maybe they did tell you. I don't know. That is extremely based. I'm happy that we're talking today about why they're into so damn high. But you know what else is too high right now, Samantha? Tell me. The great lakes. They actually hit record highs this year, which is causing serious problems for all of the communities who live near those lakes. And Samantha, that's why we got a newcom. This is revenge for me, telling him. Have you thought about? Have you thought about how many nukes the United States has that are just sitting around doing nothing? We spent a lot of money on those nukes. I understand that there is a lot and it's one of those that I'm like, I really hope I'm in the center of it. So I'm just decimated if it, you know, this happens with all of them being the goal. I want to be right there in the middle. We're going to shoot those missiles right at Lake Superior Lake Ontario. The other ones take them out. Doesn't even know the names of the great lakes, but wants to nuke them. Right. I haven't. Yeah. May I ask why? What have they done to you other than for one thing? They're at record highs, which is dangerous for another thing. You were listed to the Gordon Lightfoot song, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald? No. Well, maybe you should. Samantha, it's about a boof full of brave men who are killed. By the vicious Lake Superior during a storm that we could have nuked away. But what were they doing there? And what were trying, they were trying to take steel from some place to some other place. They're just being good sailors. Well, we have a lot of great lakes sympathizers. This is not a bit, Sophie. This is a serious political exercise. I believe I have the right to advocate, Sophie. If I'm remembering, if I'm remembering, it's not even good. The company thing that we had to do recently, you are violating my civil rights by trying to force me to hold a political belief. Did you actually do that video? No, I have not. I have not. No way you fucking did that on time. There's no fucking way. Absolutely not. I know there is a video and it probably says that you can't stop me from wanting to nuke the Great Lakes. I haven't seen it either. I haven't done the training either, so I can't conform. I did it. That's good. Well, you know, I did it. It didn't count it and I had to do it again. I'm very upset about this. Wow. I'm so sorry. I'm so upset about this. Samantha, I'm going to play a little bit of politics here. I'm going to play a little bit of politics. What if I add making us not have to do this thing to the bill that will nuke the Great Lakes? You know? See? That definitely it. A little bit of pork. A little bit of pork. Exactly. Exactly. This is how we make sausage, baby. Sorry to the residents there. No, no, it's good for them. It'll keep the lakes off their backs. Yeah, it'll be fine. I don't think it's good for them. I don't think they would say that. Water soaks up radiation real well, so it'll be good. It'll just, you know what it'll be like. It'll be like everybody's got a hot tub for a little while. That's going to be nice. Anyway, today we are going to start by talking about a bastard. Samuel Zell. Z-E-L-L. Now, he was born schmooly Zelonka. I think I'm saying that close enough to write. On September 28th, 1941, his parents Rukla and Barrack were Jewish immigrants from Poland. If you hadn't guessed that they were Polish by the last name Zellonka. Yeah, his father had made good money as a grain merchant and when Germany was gearing up to invade in 1939, he was one of those guys who was like, probably isn't going to go well. Probably, probably time to begin that. You're missing a good name. You're missing a good name. Yeah. This is the time we've all. Yeah. Yeah, time to bounce. That was a great time to leave Poland. So Zell, our, our Zell, Samuel Zelonka, Schmooly, Samuel, he gets raised in Chicago where his father takes up a new business. Oh, good. Okay. So you guys are both, you guys are both chitown babies. You know, no, I'm not. No, no, no, no, no, I just said, oh, Sammy. There's no, I wish. Oh, I thought you were saying that you would also grown up in Chicago. No, not that cool. I'm not that cool. Well, I don't know. Chicago is certainly a city. So yeah, his dad takes everybody. That's right. That's right. There's only one city we like on behind the bastards and it's Pittsburgh, where I have never been. So his father takes up a new business as a jewelry wholesaler from early on. Samuel is very interested in business. He's one of these kids who decides as a child, capitalism is the thing for him, which another warning sign, right? I look, this kid is a refugee from more turn Europe. I have a lot of sympathy for that. But no matter what your background is, if at age, let's say 12, you're talking about how you want to be an entrepreneur. We got to slow those kids down. Maybe like put some wasps spray and like the school ventilation ducts or something, but we got to slow those kids down. They're not doing any good for us. They're just hustling. Come on. Well, that's what he's going to do. I don't know. If you just like gotten a little bit more lead maybe or maybe a little less oxygen, maybe a little bit more CO2 in the house. Anyway, he doesn't. So his things are fine for him. He starts his first business at age 12. He realizes that local kids in his upper class suburb craved pornography, but they couldn't purchase it in any of the stores that they could reach on their bicycles. So Sam found a place in the city where he could buy Playboy magazines in bulk for $0.50 each and then resell them for between $1.50 and $3 each. Holy crap. Yeah. Okay. Wow. It's impressive. Well, it's impressive, but also that's a bad sign. So he later called this. It's a bad sign, but damn. Yes. Yes. It's a good grift, but it's a bad sign. He later called this his quote first, less than supply and demand, breaking into a 2013 meeting of the Urban Land Institute. For the rest of that year, I became an importer of Playboy magazines to the suburbs. Now again, normally I think this is a good thing because the suburbs are desperately boring and they needed the mid-core porn that Samuel offered. I need that pool. There's an entirely good look. When I was a kid, my first pornography was porn. We found in a little stretch of the woods in the middle of our suburbs that all of me and my cousins would like run to and you could go like, there's just like this box of Playboys. I've many people. There's the legend of Johnny Pornos seed, you know? Somebody seeded the- In the way it was in the woods. Yeah. It was porn is a thing. I have. Okay. There are so many questions. I guess we don't have the time. I don't think Gen Z has this because they've got the internet, but like I encountered my first porn before the internet was common and it was porn that was found like- Oh, definitely. It was kind of in like a little wooded area behind the housing development, you know? Everyone had that experience. This is Texas, right? Yeah, this is Texas, but I don't think other people have found woods porn. Wood porn, yeah. Yeah. Which at least nobody- I didn't have to pay for my woods porn. Sure it was kind of moldy and like crumbling and all of the colors weren't clear. Thank you. Okay. I was pretty sure you could see some nipples in there, you know? I was like, seven. Wait, it's kind of like the, uh, because you would watch how to watch porn on static TV. Yeah, exactly like that. Yeah. It's the physical version of static TV. Yeah. Oh, my God. All right. Let's go. So he is pedaling- He is pedaling mid-core pornography to the suburbs. Samuel graduates from Highland Park High School, uh, because again, his parents are rich. That is a nice part of Chicago. He's accepted by the University of Michigan. He is less interested in his studies than he is in finding new ways to make a buck. His roommate mentions to him one day that their landlord was developing a new property, an apartment complex. Samuel thought it would be easy to manage, later saying, quote, I had plenty of faith in my own what I call salesmanship. I could rent them in most important of all. I was a student and it was student housing. I thought I could relate and return for running and maintaining the building. This friend of mine and I each got an apartment. So number one for an idea of kind of how this kid works. He's able to talk a landlord into this arrangement. And then he's able to turn this arrangement into a business that's shocking size. But the time he graduates in 1966, Zell had managed with his partner more than 4,000 apartments and personally owned between 100 and 200 of them. This is a huge business. He's very good at this. Now he sells his share of the property management business he'd started to his partner and he moves back to Chicago where he passes the bar exam and he joins a law firm. The law was what he'd studied to do in becoming a lawyer had been his goal for years. But like now that he sells his real estate business and he starts working as a lawyer, he's like kind of fucking hate being a lawyer. This guy, the sucks ass. Yeah. Right. So pretty much immediately he quits and decides to go back into real estate and make it his full time career. In 1968, he founded a company and brought in his old business partner and he started buying properties. Now he happened to get into the market right as it was hitting, it was on an over building spree like again, one of these times when like they're building way more housing than is needed because there's this irrational exuberance of investors and buyers and whatnot, which leads to a market crash in 1973. Multi-family residential real estate plummeted in value first and a lot of commercial property loans went into default. So numerous properties are abandoned mid construction right? Companies like suddenly we can't finance finishing this house. So there's just this lot with like a basement dugger, some shit on it and Zell sees this as an opportunity. He can buy up valuable real estate for nothing and cheaply put it into a portfolio that he can profit from later when the market recovers, right? Oh, yes. Yes. Tail is old as time. So he has other businesses as the years go by. He purchases an agricultural company that's closing and then a nitrogen plant that's going into bankruptcy. Then he buys a potash plant and starts like making fertilizer. So he's buying these businesses that are failing and then he integrates them together into one bigger business that's able to succeed. This is a pattern that asserts itself over and over again. Samuel Zell looks for misfortune, finds a business or a property that's fallen on hard times, buys them up at a very low price, then repackages them and sells them for a profit. And an article for the New York University Review, Zell described his strategy as dancing on the skeletons of other people's mistakes. This earns him the nickname. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's what he's doing. And he gets the nickname grave dancer as a result. Oh, he's back. Oh, no. Yeah. I mean, that's funny. That is kind of cool. But it's not about debate. So sometimes he has to make the grave to dance on it. So he buys a controlling interest in the Tribune company, which owned the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. And I want to quote now from a New York Times article, talking about the guy that Zell brings in to run the Tribune. A man named Randy Michaels. But after Mr. Michaels arrived, according to two people at the bar that night, he sat down and said, watch this and offered the waitress $100 to show him her breasts. The group sat dumbfounded. Here was this guy who was responsible for all these people getting drunk in front of senior people and saying this to a waitress who many of us knew said one of the Tribune executives present who declined to be identified because he had left the company. It did not want to be quoted. I have never seen anything like it. So Mr. Michaels denies this happened. He's saying the people who told the Times the anecdote were lying or mistaken. But boy, a lot of people have similar anecdotes about this guy who Zell brings in to run the Tribune. Now, Zell's plan seems to have been that he buys this company and he finances the deal. This might sound familiar. So the Tribune massive media company. He's only able to buy it by borrowing heavily. That's how he finances it. He gets a bunch of banks to front the money that he can't put up front. And then as soon as he buys it, his plan is to engage in aggressive cost cutting that can make the venture profitable after trimming all of the employees. It's almost exactly like what Elon Musk is about to do with Twitter, right? Right. Exactly. Yes. Yes, that's familiar. Yeah, it sounds really familiar. Zell is doing this same thing. And when he buys the company, he allegedly tells the employees there's a new sheriff in town, which is like, you don't actually say that. You don't really say that. He says that. What? So in buying and tanking the Tribune, Zell brought harm to a number of hugely influential local papers. In addition to the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, the Tribune owned the Baltimore Sun, the Hartford Current, the Orlando Sentinel, as well as the Tribune and the LA Times. So he has bought up the most influential local news sources in the country. And he's about to run them into the ground. So as soon as he buys them, he goes on like a tour through all of these different properties, these different newsrooms, giving speeches. He's famous for cursing a lot in his speeches, I think to try to be entertaining and stuff. But over and over again, the thing he tries to sell his new staff on is the fact that he's going to make them rich with his new management skills. At one point, he writes to the Tribune's employees, I've said repeatedly that no matter what happens in this transaction, my lifestyle won't change. Yours, on the other hand, could change dramatically if we get this right. They're not going to get this right. So for one thing, these are all newspapers, right? That's the business. Right. Fairly large newspapers. The team he brings in to take over management are all radio people. In particular, they're all shock jock DJs. So I know it. Yeah. Mr. Michaels, who's running it, is a former shock jock. He's like a Howard Stern type. And so that's the people he's like, you know, who can run a bunch of local newspapers is like drive time radio DJs who curse on the air. That's who will turn the newspaper business around. Now since Mr. Michaels is a shock jock, the people that he brings in to help him run the company are also all former shock jocks. And one of the first things they do is they rewrite the employee handbook. Quote, working at Tribune means accepting that you might hear a word that you personally might not use. You might experience an attitude. You don't share. You might hear a joke that you don't consider funny. And it's because it lose fun non-linear atmosphere is important to the creative process. This should be understood and should not be a surprise and not considered harassment. Now, yes, of course, if you're working at a creative enterprise based around like writing, people should be aware that they're going to encounter things that are uncomfortable and stuff they might not like and being open-minded and people being able to bat. But if you're putting that in your handbook specifically to lead to you shouldn't ever complain about harassment. Because you want to sexually harass a bunch of people, right? That's why you're putting that in the ass. And then you're going to be racist. So all of those things are going to happen. So go ahead and expect it. Pretend like it's 1919 or 1909, essentially. Yeah. It's everything else. Yeah. So they took this, don't call our harassment, harassment seriously. Mr. Michael's hired a woman named Kim Johnson to be his SVP of local sales. In the news release announcing her hire, he said that she was a quote, former waitress at Nockers, the place for hot racks and cold brews. I think this was a joke based on a fake restaurant chain. But anyway, it's a weird thing to say about someone you brought on as a VP. Right. But they can say we have a woman. We have a woman. We're not sexes. Exactly. We have a woman and we only a little bit complimented her Nockers and the press release we announced. We put out in the press release announcing her hire. For this. Press release. So this is like what they're putting out publicly to the industry. We hired this lady because of her tits. That's literally you're welcome. Yeah. This is not like people might have thought at first like, oh, this is just like a thing he said at like an office party that was inappropriate. No, no, no. They published it in a press release. Yeah. So in his first two in the company, Zell promised there would be no job cuts. But of course, there were many of them. And what's worse, his business acumen appeared to lead him to try to like refocus all of these legitimate newspapers on cheesy game show tactics. Quote from the New York Times. The company introduced promotions that seemed to have been drawn from the radio handbook at four of the company's television stations. An event called cash grab in which the viewer was led into a bank vault and allowed to scoop up dollar bills was inserted in the middle of the station's newscasts and WPIX TV in New York. The viewers were cheered on by clapping Hooters waitresses giving the station the appearance of Tel Aviv shock radio. He literally, you know, like, you were seeing Robocop. No. Sorry. Have you ever seen like idioshe? No. Oh, okay. Both of those movies have like fake TV news that has like, that's just like super trashy and gross and stuff because it's dystopian societies. He's just done that for real. He's just actually made that as a. Wasn't there an Eastern European station that actually had women stripping as they were telling news in order to engage viewers? I'm sure. But they're trying to do real news. I feel like I saw this a while ago. I mean, what is happening? I feel like that's like a thing that happened. To be honest, having just being like, hey, we're the news and also people will strip on the news is way less gross to me than, hey, we're going to split the news up with cash grab where people stuck in a bank vault have to grab dollars. That's much grosser to me than just like, yeah, it's not people will be naked. Yeah. It's, it's pretty cool. So Zell hired a chief innovation officer who was like a maniac and would regularly write 5,000 word typo riddled memos to journalists and editors that they would be forced to read. Stuff like rock and roll musically is behind us. All caps, news and information is the new rock and roll. This is like a corporate memo. Their director of innovation is like the boomer Joe. Guys, we got to make the news be rock and roll. Yeah. At one point in a meeting, they're talking about the war in Iraq and somebody brings up that like Los Angeles Times reporters are actually in Iraq, you know, covering the war I like you do. And he's shocked that this is allowed. He has no idea that this is how like journalism works that reporters go to war. What? This is the director of innovation for one of the largest newspaper companies in the country. Or they won't step away of just become a tabloid at this point. Yeah. He's trying to do. He's trying to like his ideas that we just make it profitable by yeah, turning it into a tabloids, stick some tits on there, stick some game show stuff in there. It'll be great. I hate this guy. Yeah, I don't like this guy. You know what I do like though. I like the fact that the great lakes being the largest freshwater bodies on the planet, plenty of room for the US nuclear arsenal. Yeah, apparently. Yeah. I try to get it there. Sophie. Sophie. I just like don't care anymore. I care about your hometown and I'm trying to stop it from being in my LA. No, just the lakes. Just the lakes. Just the lakes. My hometown isn't there. So. Well, then everything's going to be fine. All right. Here's some ads. Up next, we're getting some breaking. There's so much news happening around the world that we're somehow supposed to stay on top of and with the constant flood of information coming at you, it can feel impossible to make sense of it all. That's why we launched the Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and I heart radio that turns down the volume a bit to give you some space to think. I'm Wes Kosova. Each weekday, I dig deep into one important story and talk about why it matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg's journalists and analysts around the world and the people at the center of the news that affects all of us. And we do it in plain English. Listen to the Big Take on the I Heart Radio app. And we're going to be able to do it in a couple of podcasts or wherever you listen. My name is Joshua Topolsky and I have a new podcast called What Future. But I want to tell you that I'm being forced by my producer to record a promo telling you about my show. And I'm not trying to force you to listen to it. And maybe you're not interested in the kinds of things that I'm going to be discussing on this show. Like internet culture and the future of life on planet earth and where technology is taking us and why John Carpenter movies are so good. Those may be things you're not interested in. You may just want to listen to a podcast about, I don't know, sports or whatever Joe Rogan talks about. And that's fine, no judgment. But if you do want to listen to a podcast about really interesting topics concerning your life on planet earth now and tomorrow, then you know, you could try my podcast. You can listen to all of What Future on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Curtis Fitzsensex and I'm Charlie Webster. Listen to the podcasts of Fiving El Chapo, the incredible true story of Jay and Pete Flores, the twin brothers from Chicago, who built America's biggest drug trafficking empire. My brother, we probably easily pushed over 130, 140 tons since 1998. And the pantheon of drug prosecutions in the history of the Northern District of Illinois, this case stands at the highest level. Jay and Pete went on to become El Chapos, right hand men. They liked it, they liked it, they looked at it as like their sons and she just like family. This story made international news because they are the reason El Chapo is now in prison and they've never spoken publicly until now. My brother had the only legal recording of Chapo Lisman they ever had. Listen to Siviving El Chapo, the twins who brought down a drug lord on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or whatever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. Sophie agreed off screen that my political career has a lot of promise. Everything's good. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the great legs, the middle of climate change. Uh huh. It'll stop it. It'll, it'll, it'll, it'll make the world darker. It'll, you ever see snowpiercer? Yeah. I only watched the first one and a half seconds of snowpiercer, but that's basically my idea. Okay. Eating roaches. So cool. Things children to work. I didn't see any of those parts of the movie, but I assume all of those things were also positive because it sounds like it started with a great idea. Super positive. So, um, James Warren, the former managing editor and Washington Bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune set of Zell's time running the company, quote, they wheeled around here doing what they wished, showing a clear contempt for most everyone that was here and used power just because they had it. They used the notion of reinventing the newspapers simply as a cover for cost cutting. Now during his time running the company, Zell also became a pioneer of clickbait advertising. Quote. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, he helps make this happen. Advertising has been inserted into the Los Angeles Times in new and unsettling ways. In March, an ad mimicking the front page for Disney's Alice in Wonderland was wrapped around the first section. And in July, a fake version of the newspaper section for late breaking news called LAT extra was wrapped around the real one, promoting universal studios king Kong attraction, with a lead story that read universal studios partially destroyed. In April of 2009, an advertisement posing as a news article about NBC's new show South Land appeared on the front page. In July, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, the governing body of the County of Los Angeles, sent a letter of protest saying the use of advertising disguised as news makes a mockery of the newspaper's mission. Some might argue that yes, that's exactly what it does, but that's kind of the point. Now, what's interesting though is that none of this makes the business profitable. It actually making all of these newspapers much worse does not make people more likely to use them. Zell also had loaded the Tribune with so much debt by the deal, right? That bankruptcy was basically inevitable. It was almost impossible for the company to ever turn a profit because of how much debt he'd loaded it up with. So I would assume with the clickbait that he's getting money from the advertisers and that's how he was going to make money. Well, because people stopped visiting the website because it's shit. Okay. Yeah, investors hurt by the deal later accused him of basically loading the company up with debt and then sinking it on purpose. And I'm going to quote now from the Chicago Tribune. One company, the predecessor company to Tribune Media, filed for bankruptcy in December 2008. One year after Chicago billionaire Zell took the company private and heavily leveraged $8.2 billion deal. At the time, Zell blamed a perfect storm of industry and economic forces, the great recession. But the bankruptcy case turned on charges leveled by junior creditors that the debt burden was unsustainable. Now one of the things again, I found interesting here, 2008's prior to the social media age taking off really. When we have our last big economic crash, local newspapers are the primary way people get news. And Zell absolutely crashes them in this multi, but he gets to banks to back him in this multi billion dollar deal that he could never make a profit on. And then he sabotages the companies that he's bought and destroys them and fucks over a bunch of people and then blames it on the recession. Elon Musk is currently carrying out a tens of billions of dollar deal on what is a lot of people's source of local news. Right as we're about to have a recession and has been talking about how he plans to fire 75% of Twitter staffers. It's cool. It's neat that these billionaires get to just keep fucking with people's ability to get news because of their own egos when they want to. Yeah, they'll be fine. They're going to have like a fun year of stories and then a lot of people's lives will be worse and they will not suffer any consequences, which is good. Yeah, it's great. So obviously legally, nobody ever accepts responsibility for anything. However, there's a bunch of litigation like 10 years of it over this. Zell starts to call it the deal from hell because of all of the people suing him over this. And eventually the litigation trust gets around 200 million dollars to redistribute to creditors. As long as no liability or wrongdoing is assumed by Zell and other defendants. So there you go. Now I want to read to you that above or I read to you an above excerpt from the Chicago Tribune, which is a summary of the deal 10 years on. I think it's interesting how this New York Times article, which actually focuses on the working people hurt by the deal, describes it more viscerally because that one is just kind of like, you know, they lost this amount of money and now there's a big bankruptcy. The New York Times quote is going to be a lot grittier. Okay. Less than a year after Mr. Zell bought the company and tipped into bankruptcy listing $7.6 million dollars in assets against a debt of 13 billion, making it the largest bankruptcy in the history of the American media industry. More than 4,200 people have lost jobs since the purchase while resources for the Tribune newspapers and television stations have been slashed. The new management did transform the work culture, however, based on interviews with more than 20 employees and former employees of Tribune, Mr. Michaels and his executives use of sexual innuendo, poisonous workplace banter and profane, invective, shocked and offended people throughout the company. Even Tower, the architectural symbol of the state company, came to resemble a frat house complete with poker parties, jukeboxes and pervasive sex talk. So they crashed this company, lost 4,200 people their jobs, caused the largest collapse in the history of American media, but they got to be playboys for a little while. Yeah. They just paid $7 billion to have a frat house. Yeah, a frat house where they also got to fuck with serious people who were trying to report on important local news issues. Right. So number one, this helps destroy local news nationwide. Like now it is effectively dead as a meaningful force. This is not the only reason for that, but it is a big part of it. So that's pretty cool. But obviously for Zell, fucking with the Tribune was only ever a side project. His chief love remained real estate. And while all this is going on, he had very savagely sold his profile or his portfolio of properties off to the Blackstone group for $39 billion. The largest leveraged buyout in history at the time. So he makes a fuckload of money after this. And he sells off a bunch of these rental properties of his to Blackstone right before the sub-prime mortgage crisis hit, crashing the real estate market and earning another feather in the cap of the grave dancer. When the market was at its lowest point, he used some of the pile of cash that he'd earned to buy up more properties. He currently owns some 78,280 apartments in San Francisco, Southern California, New York, all of these places were rents has surged over the last decade. He is a big part of that. Given what happened with the Tribune, you won't be surprised to learn that Sam Zell has decided to pour millions of dollars in spreading propaganda to stop the spread of rent-controlled housing in any form. So again, he destroys all these local news companies and then he starts putting money in order to like... Back into it. And he starts putting money into basically pushing propaganda that will lead voters not to select different ballot measures and stuff that will allow for rent, put caps on rent increases and shit. Right. Like destroys the local media, then bribes his way into trying to push against any kind of housing justice or anything that will reduce the cost to renters. So was this a big conspiracy for him to actually tank? As they said news media so that he can go on and say if they actually do good research and come out with good journalism and say, hey, the housing market and all this is not just because of these things, in order for him to control the data and be like, see, they're lying. They're not trustworthy. I'm not going to say... Because the Tribune did. I'm not going to say whether or not there was intention there because I can't... There's no evidence of it certainly. But I don't know. That's what happens. Like, that's the end result of it, right? Yeah, he... Like all this shit gets fucked up. So it's good. Now before we get further into this with Zell and other billionaires are doing to try to stop the passage of like laws that could actually make housing affordable, we should probably talk a little bit about rent control. This is a subject that is controversial today largely because of landlords like Zell, who claim it cuts into their profits so much they can't afford to do stuff like handle basic repairs and maintenance. But rent control has a long history of helping people avoid disaster. During and after World War II, federal rent control in Los Angeles froze rents and narrowed the scope of evictions so that housing construction could catch up to the population and make the city more affordable, right? It's this thing where you've got like, yeah, the population's growing by X amount, housing isn't keeping up. So you institute rent control and you reduce like the... And you like make it harder to evict people so that folks can hang on until there's more housing. And this is the reason why we need to increase the housing supply. Well that's not all we need to do. There's other things that have been proven to stop people from winding up on the fucking street and you're ignoring those in favor of just saying deregulate shit. Alyssa Katz, a researcher at UCLA, examined rent control and housing affordability in LA going back to the 1940s. She found that rent control successfully stopped people from becoming unhoused in the 40s and then again in the late 70s when inflation rose again and rent spiked. At that time, a rent was a stabilization ordinance quote, Inded dramatic rent increases for incumbent tenants by limiting the rate by which rents could be increased. When looking at California's modern homelessness epidemic, she put the blame directly on rent prices and urged a repeal of statewide rent control restrictions and the expansion of rent regulation. She isn't the only academic making these claims. Nicole Montoya and Stephen Barton released a study through UC Berkeley looking at which of the different proposed solutions to the housing crisis were likely to bear fruit. They found quote, While other proposed remedies to the housing crisis may take years before they impact housing costs, only expanding rent control can offer immediate relief to tens of millions of people in danger of being forced from their homes. Another write up on rent control measures from LA Progressive goes on to add, They noted that rent control can stabilize rents for existing tenants, improve affordability for tenants in the future and preserve the existing affordability of housing that may otherwise become unaffordable. And the researchers found that claims that rent control has negative effects on development of new housing are generally not supported by research and that rent control can provide a timely solution to a housing affordability crisis that the market will not. In a statement Barton further pointed out that quote, When the housing market is as dysfunctional as it is in many parts of California, tenants are effectively subsidizing landlords with rent payments above would have fully competitive market would allow landlords to charge. And what we're actually seeing here with stuff like these fucking program algorithms that allow landlords to jack up prices with guys like Zell putting millions of dollars into propaganda to kill rent control ballot measures in the state. And he's been very active in that in California in particular is that the money that is being extorted out of people to keep a roof over their head is being used to fund, like to basically fund propaganda campaigns to stop any kind of rent control. Right. Right. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. I like that you use that term a lot in this episode. I find it fascinating with exactly what they're doing is just paying into a way to keep money in their pockets, but they're not keeping money in their pockets as well as the fact that there's so many other conversations like you're keeping people in a house and you're still getting money. Yeah. I don't understand. So we're using the thing that's most fucked up to me. I didn't really thought about it this way is that and I like that LA Progressives frames it this way is that tenants are subsidizing the campaigns of these landlords to stop housing reform. Right. Like their money is paying to keep rent high. Their money is paying to deregulate the system in order to like make it possible to continue to jack up the rent. Yeah. But that's the whole scheme of renting. Yes, it is. It is the entire scheme of renting. Yes. You never get anything for it. You're just giving it to the landlord. You've now by this time paid off their property. They have taxes, sure, but they still not anywhere near what you're getting in rent from your renters. So what the hell? And then you can as a renter, especially in this market, you can't save enough as you said in episode one, save enough to get your own house. No, you don't technically own it anyway for 30 years. What you're doing here and what guys like Zell are doing is you're recreating feudalism. You're making peon, you know, like it's keeping the cast system. Yeah, I want to continue this quote from LA Progressive because I think it's good. The tenant subsidy is paid for extravagant lifestyles of many, for many of California's largest corporate landlords who spend tens of millions of dollars to kill rent control ballot measures in the state. Billionaires Sam Zell, for example, owns posh homes in Chicago, Sun Valley, New York and Malibu. Collects motorcycles and flies around the world in a private jet. Another billionaire corporate landlord, Stephen Schwarzman, owns mansions in St. Tropez, Jamaica, East Hampton and Palm Beach, and throws lavish parties for celebrities in high society friends. At the same time, a sky high rinsed force more people onto the streets. Nearly 1500 homeless people have died in Los Angeles in the Los Angeles area between 2020 and 2021. So that's half a 9-11 in a year. That's good. Now when you start talking about, yeah, I was going to say you're being too sympathetic, stop it. Yeah, I mean, that's what our old buddy, Roper would say. Now I mean, come on. When you're talking about rent control any time you talk about rent control, you're going to wind up talking about New York City. Rent control started there too as an emergency measure during World War II. At present, around 45,000 tenants in the city began their, who began their leases before 1971, have rent control departments. These people are like children or even grandchildren of their people who started the lease because you can pass it on that way. Their landlords are forbidden from increasing rent beyond a very mild rate, which means that many of these folks pay rents that are thousands of dollars a month underneath the present market rate. Rent control in New York has allowed for some peculiar situations where people will have apartments the size of small palaces for what amounts to peanuts by modern standards. It's also led to several murders. In 1998, Mark Glass, a landlord based out of Downhound Manhattan, grew frustrated that his tenant Bridget Marks wouldn't leave her rent control department in a former tenement that he bought and renovated. He hired a hitman to kill her, but that turned out to be a scam so he tried to kill her with a heroin to overdose. That failed too. Eventually, she realized he was trying to murder her and got the police involved and they carried out a sting operation and he wound up put in prison for like seven to fourteen years. In 2002, a New York landlord named Lewis Hubert grew enraged after trying to bribe and could Joel his tenants to leave. This worked on everyone but Miss Barbara Kinna, a 67 year old school librarian. So Hubert shot her six times with a 38 caliber revolver. He was convicted of murder and sent to prison for the rest of his life. Two years later? Yeah, well, you got that red, right? Now your kids can fucking renovate the apartment. A few years later, a few years later, one of the kids went to the hospital and he assumed his father's lease. He hired two other tenants to break into the apartment and stabbed brothers who narrowly survived. Now, when did you give him free rent? The tenants he hired to murder? I think he was probably given him a break on their renter. You get like six months off of rent if you stab these guys to death. I got you. I'm going to throw in water for free. I got a bill. If you'll murder these people at the end of the day, it does not work out. So obviously, these are spectacular, but not the only case. You could find a surprising number of cases of landlords murdering or trying to murder tenants over rent control departments. I mean, that's my solution. Murder? Yeah, murder. Well, that's actually the only real solution that any landlords use in stuff like this, because the landlords who go about things the proper way by like evicting stuff legally are also killing a shitload of people. We can look at that in terms of like how being houseless raises the rate at which you're likely to die early, how being evicted makes it harder to get housing. There's a number of different things that we could talk about. But because we're in the middle of what year three of the pandemic right now, I want to talk about that. So I'm going to quote from a write up by Judd Ligum and Testnam Zakiria. Quote, a new study by public health researchers at John Hopkins UCLA and other institutions looked at the impact of the expiration of state-based moratoriums during the summer of 2020. The researchers tested whether Lig lifting eviction moratoriums was associated with COVID-19 incidents and mortality. The results are chilling. The study concluded that lifting eviction moratoriums amounted to an estimated 433,700 excess cases and 10,700 excess deaths between March 13th and September 3rd. The infections and fatalities occurred across 27 states that lifted eviction moratoriums during the study period. In Texas alone, the study found that there were 4456 excess deaths after the state lifted its eviction moratorium on May 18th. The researchers accounted for stay-at-home mortars, mass-corder school closers, testing rates, time trends, and other state characteristics to better isolate the impact of eviction moratoriums. Now that's 4456 deaths in Texas alone as a result of the lifting of the eviction moratorium. Nationwide pandemic evictions alone have led to at least 10,000 deaths in the last couple of years. So, yeah, no matter what you're talking about, even if you're not shooting them with a 38, you're still killing people in the eviction game. And the amount of those people are marginalized women oftentimes and they are passed from single mothers. It is so high. Yeah, we had a whole episode about housing and how it's affecting single moms. It's more than it's marginalized black women, essentially, or anyone else and how this has been impacting them. Let's not talk about the fact that the credit score is a racist system in itself, but all of these things have been impactable and racist as hell and who they are trying to kill. I mean, and when you talk about credit scores too, because credit scores, there's a lot of like racism in who, like that system has a lot of problems with it, but also because an increasing number of apartments are owned by these gigantic corporations that are backed by finance industry money by companies like Blackstone that means that more often and often when I was younger, even when you went with a corporate, you didn't have to do, they didn't care what your credit score was. That's what you need for a mortgage, but that didn't matter for renting a fucking apartment. Now it does. You think I got to use phone, these are credit score. Yeah. Yeah, it's out. I mean, again, all of these are weird, not trying. I hope nobody thinks I'm trying to give like this is it. All of the reasons that Rint has gotten high, but these are some big ones. These are major factors in it and these guys are major factors in it. That's going to leave me to talk about Steven Schwarzman. Now, I mentioned him earlier, right? When we talked about he's one of the billionaires in Los Angeles throwing money into stopping rent control ballot measures. Schwarzman is not as interesting as Zell. Zell is at least a pretty entertaining piece of shit. Schwarzman is kind of a boring, soulless corporate goal, but he's probably more influential in why you're rent his raised. So Schwarzman's dad was a dry goods store owner like Zell, like his family's kind of upper middle-class business owners. He grew up in Philadelphia, but was inspired to become an entrepreneur when he traveled to Israel for the first time as a 14-year-old. In a recent interview, he said this, quote, Israel has an incredible entrepreneurial community. Of course, it had to, because when it started, there was almost nothing there. Everything had to be invented by somebody. Now, you might be saying to that, wasn't there like a whole society of Palestinian people there with like universities and businesses and like homes and wasn't there like a lot of stuff there actually? You know, you just can't use space on forever. Wasn't there, in fact, communities where thousands and thousands of Jewish refugees fled to during World War II and were able to survive because there was stuff there? Some stuff including like wealthy Palestinian families who helped fund the construction of the first Jewish university in Palestine. Anyway, wasn't all of that there? Anyway, whatever. Fuck, like this is pretty normal, like shitty guy stuff. Like this is not an abnormal attitude, right? But you get what this guy's coming from. So like Zell, Schwarzman is also a child entrepreneur. Again, the worst warning sign. He started a lawnmowering business where he very quickly stopped mowing any actual lawns and instead he got his brothers to do the work while he brought in clients. One of those, yeah. Yeah, yeah. One of those. Again, look, if you see a kid doing this kind of stuff, I don't know, you just got to poison him a little bit, a little bit of poison, a little bit of child poison. They water as well. Well, it wouldn't be the worst thing. So anyway, I don't know, we can, I'm still got, I still have to tweak my poison. And I think there's a lot of future in it. I think it'll, what, Sophie, you were just complaining about how, how your rent is, you know, what if we could have stopped that with a little bit of poison? Not a lot of poison. I think you could write a book. I think you could write a book on this. You can do another book on this. Yeah. Yeah. The poisoning children driven life with me smiling in a suit. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's going to be good, Sophie. This is going to be what takes us into the mainstream. It's going to get you money. It's fine. Can you just do an ad break? You know, what else? I need a pause. Look, when it comes to poisoning children, nobody does it. That's for this. Like our sponsors at whoever our sponsors are. Up next, we're getting some breaking. There's so much news happening around the world that we're somehow supposed to stay on top of. And with the constant flood of information coming at you, it can feel impossible to make sense of it all. That's why we launched The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio that turns down the volume a bit to give you some space to think. I'm Wes Kosova. Each weekday, I dig deep into one important story and talk about why it matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg's journalists and analysts around the world and the people at the center of the news that affects all of us. And we do it in plain English. Listen to The Big Take on The I Heart Radio Have. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen. My name is Joshua Topolsky and I have a new podcast called What Future. But I want to tell you that I'm being forced by my producer to record a promo telling you about my show. And I'm not trying to force you to listen to it. And maybe you're not interested in the kinds of things that I'm going to be discussing on this show. Like internet culture and the future of life on planet earth and where technology is taking us and why John Carpenter movies are so good. Those may be things you're not interested in. You may just want to listen to a podcast about, I don't know, sports or whatever Joe Rogan talks about. And that's fine, no judgment. But if you do want to listen to a podcast about really interesting topics concerning your life on planet earth, now and tomorrow, then you know, you could try my podcast. You can listen to all of What Future on The I Heart Radio Have, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Curtis Fitzsense. And I'm Charlie Webster. Listen to the podcasts of Fiving El Chapo, the incredible true story of Jay and Pete Flores, the twin brothers from Chicago, who built America's biggest drug trafficking empire. My brother, we probably easily pushed over 130, 140 times since 1998. And the pantheon of drug prosecutions in the history of the Northern District of Illinois, this case stands at the highest level. Jay and Pete went on to become El Chapos, right hand men. Chapo, we really like this. They like this. Look at it as like their sons and she just like family. This story made international news because they are the reason El Chapo is now in prison and they've never spoken publicly until now. My brother had the only legal recording of Chapo Llamon, they were ahead. Listen to Siviving El Chapo, the twins who brought down a drug lord on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or whatever you get your podcasts. We're back and we're better than ever. So yeah, I think we're doing good. Sophie. I'm proud of this. Thank you. Thank you. I'm glad that you at least can be positive towards me while Sophie's being so mean. So we're talking about Stephen Schwarzman, who has started a law-and-going business where he mows no actual lawns because he is that kind of kid. Again, poison. His hunger to make a shitload of money did not run in the family. I find this really interesting. His dad is apparently a very different guy as this right up from FinTech magazine makes clear. In an interview with the Washington Post in 2019, Schwarzman explained how his childhood taught him that not everybody was going to be the same. When pushed by a young Schwarzman as to why he didn't want to expand his successful business or open more stores across Philadelphia, Schwarzman's father answered simply because I'm happy the way I am. I thought that was sort of hard to take in. Schwarzman told the newspaper. His contentment is what made him a remarkable human being. Maybe you should have learned something from your dad. Right. He doesn't need all that. He doesn't need all that. The endless source to extract more wealth and resources out of an area is actually what's going to kill us all and not a healthy attitude. But anyway. I mean, this is why you know like it's not always a nurture. No, no. His dad seems to be like, I have a, I have a, I have a, I have a, I have a, I have a thriving small business. We live a comfortable life. That's all I need. Everybody's happy. You're healthy. Let's move on. His kid is going to become a cruel and high-storder. Yeah. So Schwarzman goes to Yale, which is probably where a lot of the ghoul stuff comes in. He joins skull and bones. So he's one of those fucking kids. And then he goes on to do finance and a big fancy firm after getting his MBA. His first major employer was Lehman Brothers, which he described as quote, full of interesting characters. He's a CIA agent, ex-military, strays from the oil industry, family, friends and randoms. He rose. He's a lun. Yeah, very quickly. He becomes a managing, unbelievable red flags. I know. Like again, for making. If there's a company like that, I don't know. Again, poison, poison them. Once again, once again, if you're on a dating app, you see somebody have their job listed at that company. No. Yeah. It's just, like, yeah. So if he's giving all the realistic advice while Robert's over here with his dreams, just poison them. Look, if we had just poisoned the water at a Lehman Brothers company party in the late 1980s, a lot of problems wouldn't have happened. That's all I'm going to say. No comment, but yeah. Yeah. No, this is not the dream. Look, if the CIA's MK Ultra program had been about poisoning Lehman Brothers and other similar corporations with doses of random hallucinogens that destroyed people's minds, nobody would think of them as bad guys. Would be like, oh yeah, those guys you got rid of the finance industry. Yeah, I like those guys. Those guys are chill. I'm just letting you know, people would still consider the CIA as bad guys. Well, I don't know. Right. Less of the bad guys. Look, if the CIA takes out like McKinsey, you know, we're happy. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever. Anyway. He leaves, he becomes managing director of acquisitions at Lehman Brothers at age 31, but then he leaves the company to co-found an advisory firm which he calls Blackstone. Quote. Though it started like this. Oh. Yeah. He's the guy who founds Blackstone. Yeah. I mean, co-found, but yeah. Samantha is hyped. Yeah. This is, these are some bad dudes. I know. It started life as a boutique M&A advisory firm within a couple of years Blackstone had launched its first private equity fund and later by 1990 had branched out into hedge funds using partners' own money. The time of Blackstone's initial public offering in 2007, the business headmore, the 88 billion dollars worth of assets under management. The IPO saw shares finish it over $35 each, valuing the firm at around $39 billion and enriching the personal fortunes of both Shorzman and Peterson. Peterson's the guy he starts the company with. So, today, Blackstone claims to have $880 billion of assets under management, including 260 billion in private equity and 280 billion in real estate. Steven A. Shorzman is still the company's chairman and CEO and has indicated he has no intention to retire. He has two children, the film producer Teddy Shorzman and writer and podcaster Zibi Owens. Um, I'm just happy that his daughter is a podcaster. Hey, you know what? Let's all learn something together. What does Zibi Owens is podcast? I don't know, but did you just put us on a target list? Maybe. Sophie, what did you do? Sophie. Oh, boy. Oh, no. Well, I don't know. I don't know what's good. You know what? Um, I don't know much about this, but her podcast is called Mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books. And I'm like, I don't know, but I know that doesn't sound great. But I'm on her website. She's doing it. It's a top. It's a top literary podcast. She's an author. Oh, but she interviewed just you might. Um, yeah, she interviews. She interviews. She interviews. Yeah, she's a book fluencer, which is a term. If you're a writer and you ever write the word book fluencer, you should not be a writer. Um, I'm going to say that right now. I don't know, but is all her books like a shot of a week child? Should I leave you whatever? No, I think she's like reviewing books as like a mom book reviewer. You should think like she's doing. No, no, I don't, I don't think she's going to be a big fan of my book. Um, I don't, I don't think she's got. Let's see what essays, Zivi writes. There's a picture of her in her chair. Um, let's see. This rabbit hole is. Yeah, these are mostly just lists of books people can read. So it seems a lot of it's like SEO listed. She's trying to, she's trying to make her own like Oprah magazine. Oh, of course, she's a book fluencer. Yeah, she's very much like Oprah. Her, she's like interviewing Ralph Machio. That's the karate kid guy, right? There's nothing wrong with that. He just wrote a book. Yeah, he just wrote a book. She's just like a book influencer. Oh, she's hiring. Zivi media is expanding. They're hiring superstars in YC area. If they end up JK Rowling, I bet she's a big fan of JK Rowling. She must be because she's in YC's most powerful book fluencer according to what she's got. She's a book fluencer. So I don't think that's real. It's also just like if you're saying someone has an influencer, you can be an influencer in the literature industry. You don't have to call someone a book fluencer, which is a stupid. That's not on Zivi, but she brags about it in every page of her website. So it is a little bit on her. Yeah, Zivi media is hiring a fuckload of people it looks like. So get on the zip train. Oh, man. Fast. Oh, she does classes. She does classes. I don't know why we're attacking her so much. Her dad's the bad guy. Oh. But she has she never mind. I actually, there's nothing. We're laughing about this. I can't find anything that's like offensive about her or anything like that. She just, we know nothing. She could be a lovely individual. She seems fine. I'm sorry. It's just big. She could be a lovely individual. It just, you know, you can't, you know, people. If somebody, I will say this. If you claim to a family, if you claim to love a larger, and somebody calls you a book fluencer, you do have a moral responsibility to the art of writing to say no. You're like, you're not wrong. That's not a term we're going to use. Book fluencer is not a word. You can be a worst skit robber as a book fluencer. Nothing is a fluencer. You're probably having a hard time even saying the words. I'm so angry about that. That's all. Honestly, Zibi has done nothing wrong, but use that word. I think that one word, which I've never heard of. I've heard TikTok book. She booked TikTok. Book talk or something like that. Book talk. Yeah. Book talk is fine because you're. Man. That makes sense. Book fluencer is fucking nonsense. That's new. I've never been angry here. I've never been angry here in my entire life than I am right now. I will get back to the program. This is so much worse than word crimes. Okay, so it's better her father who is a lot worse. Well, but I bet he doesn't use the word book fluencer. So most of you probably know what happened to Lehman Brothers, which was forced into bankruptcy after helping to cause the 2008 financial crash. Lehman had been a major driver of the fraudulent mortgage-backed security business, backed by subprime loans and their collapse nearly took the global economy with them. Shoresman had been out of the company for quite a while by this point and he and Blackstone did very well as a result of this recession. They lose a little bit of money up front, but they're heavily invested in companies like Starwood Waypoint and Invitational Homes, which merged in 2017 and start buying up all of these fucking properties that are suddenly fucking bargain-bend. A website for tenants of Invitational Homes, InvitationalTenance.com notes, they've benefited from the deception and fraud that saddled so many families of color with subprime and booby-trapped mortgages leading to foreclosures that disproportionately affected African-American and Latino families. Lower post-crisis home prices could have been an opportunity to increase affordable home ownership, but too often instead Wall Street buyers swept in while neighborhood families were left out of the game altogether, and able to compete with cash buyers or denied access to credit. With these Wall Street speculators, with Blackstone being the biggest one, the recession of 2008 was not economically and emotionally devastating as it was for all the families that lost their homes. It was a market opportunity. Blackstone was one of the first private equity firms to begin buying up foreclosed homes in the wake of the financial crisis, fixing them up and renting them out. The firm, which began buying homes and earnest in 2011, is estimated to have spent $10 billion in its foreclosed home to Rincelbet. So that's cool. In the years since the financial crisis, Blackstone Group has more than doubled the assets under remandagement from $90 billion to $218 billion of real estate assets and its first five years after the financial crisis alone. As a result, Blackstone today is among the largest corporate landlords in the United States, and it reported its highest earnings every this year on the strength of rising Rincs and its real estate portfolio. Here's Quartz. Quote. January 27th, call with investors, Blackstone's executives explained Rincs for real estate sectors in their portfolio had risen as much as two or three times faster than the overall inflation rate. Relatively short leases on their properties have allowed them to raise prices quickly, capturing more value for mentors, even as the inflation rate in the US topped 7%. Awesome stuff. Really, really good. So again, I don't know much about real estate nor do I know much about the corporations especially like Blackstone, and it was been a recent thing that I'm like understanding all of these giant buyouts, and I do know they profited off the, yes, 2008 crash. Oh, yeah, they did great offer that she doesn't acre. Right. For closing on families and believing them homeless, and we know all of that and houseless, and without houses. But what's Blackstone involved with all the military by, they wore profit years as well? Or is that just in the back of my imagination? Oh, I think you may be thinking of Blackwater. Let me double check. Okay, that's too neat. I mean, they did a lot of, they manage a lot of investments. So I wouldn't be surprised if there's some degree to which they involved in different one second. I feel like maybe again, yeah, I might be confusing that like they had private organizations. Yeah, I mean, they're involved. Developing. They're involved. They invest in, like they're private equity firms. So they have investments in aerospace and defense companies. But I mean, so you could call them, they're definitely like profiting off of the defense industry. But that's not kind of their primary thing. It's just sort of a side effect of what they do, which is that they invest in businesses that have reliable rates of return. And that includes the defense industry. Yeah. So I want to close by noting from a write up in the Atlantic in 2020, which kind of makes the point that the nature of Blackstone's business, both its scale and its single-minded pursuit of profits, means that tenants nearly always come last. Quote, some evidence suggests that private equity firms in contrast are willing to engage in predatory practices to realize short-term returns. Blackstone's target properties in Southern California suggest an investment strategy similar to flipping single-family homes. Biled properties invest in cosmetic upgrades such as new appliances and facade improvements and then increase the rents. Furthermore, some anecdotal evidence also indicates that private equity firms are less conscientious landlords in the single-family rental market. Researchers and journalists have documented concerns about poor quality housing, difficulties raised by tenants trying to communicate with landlords with problems arise and higher rates of evictions. And we can thank Mr. Schwarsman for an awful lot of that. Yeah. So that's it. Yeah. That's some people who have made the rent high. Oh. Stephen Schwarsman, that Zell motherfucker, Roper, all these assholes. So let me ask you, as we are looking at possibly repeating history in the next couple of years, where do you see, do you think we're coming upon a crash as well? I mean, everyone seems to say we're heading for a recession. That would make sense. Except for the fact that they're seemingly trying to hedge it off by again, charging the individuals and homeowners and renters instead of actually trying to get the corporations to pay out with their billions of dollars and or stop stopping the inflation by donating. Well, it sounds like what's happening is they're trying to, the Fed is trying to cut inflation by raising interest rates. And a bunch of companies are using inflation as a hedge for rising prices and making record profits right now. And part because I think they're getting ready for what you might call an ugly winter in which they're going to take those profits and continue doling them out to their shareholders and executives while they cut staff and fire a lot of people in the unemployment rate rises. I think more or less, winter's coming. What's probably going to happen? I don't know. We'll see how it is. Like, 2020 was pretty ugly too. That was a gnarly recession, but it didn't last very long. I don't know. I'm not an economy guy. And I kind of think most of the people who are economy guys are just engaged in some kind of con or another, but yeah, it's probably going to be pretty ugly in the near future. And these are the people who are going to make sure that a lot more folks wind up on the street when it does. So solution poison. No poison is a good solution. Keep an eye on kids who express an entrepreneurial desire. Don't trust that. Yeah. And I don't know if you don't call yourself a book fluencer. Is it me? That's a set of set of Robert Bells. Oh, man. I'm livid. Oh, okay. So his son, Teddy, not the other kid that he had is the producer who made the imitation game. Invitational or imitation? Invitational. Yeah. Are you with Samuel Luce? You win Samuel Luce? I guess. I haven't seen that movie. But, oh no, I have seen that movie. That's the movie about touring that came out. That was actually pretty good. Yeah. So, you know, what? You win some, you lose some, right? Yeah. Speaking of women, he's a film fluencer. He's a film fluencer. Movie. Apparently, he produced at least one good movie while his dad was buying up all of the housing that was briefly affordable after the financial crisis. Like I said, you win some, you lose some and speaking of winning some, Samantha, do you have any pluggables? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I've never told you, you know where near the same mom reads, doesn't read things. I don't know. I'm not a book fluencer. I'm so sorry to say. Yeah. I can't read you, Robert. Oh, well, that's a new one. And my Twitter is McVeigh, Samantha. And then, Instagram, McVeigh.Samantha. So, if you want to see pictures of my dog and me complaining about things, come visit me. Yep. Yeah. Find Samantha on the internet, find the kid in your neighborhood who starts a lawn mowing business where he doesn't mow any lawns. And I don't know. Just like smoke around him. Smoke? Yeah, smoke real close to that kid. Just hang out next to that kid and smoke a shitload of cigarettes. Oh, my God. Okay. It'll be good. You should load a cigarette. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, we have a new podcast on cool zone media. It's called Inner Hitting. Wow, do we? Wow, do we? Wow, do we? And it's hosted by the one and only Bridget Todd. It is. Check it out. It is. You know, the I hit radio app, ApplePodcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah. I have to say that a lot. Yeah. Fucking do that. I also have a book called After the Revolution. You do. You can buy it. Which, by the way, my partner loved. He just popped it. Because he wanted to tell you how much you liked the book. Oh, thank you. Oh, maybe he can help, maybe you can help bookfluencer, Zippy. Yeah. So this is Joe. I hope you can get to see him on this podcast. He really likes the book. He cannot hear you because I have an earpiece in. Oh, you don't have it. Okay. Thank you. Just to tell him all smokes and meats. And thank you for that offer of illegal drugs. Oh, my God. No, no, no, no. Bring it back on. Bring it back on. I want to bring it back on. I want to get a neutral opinion about this. Okay. Let me give him an earpiece. Okay. Yeah, I get work. Joe, Joe, this is Rob. Joe, I'm going to say a word that a person is using to describe their job. And I just want you to give me the emotion that hearing this word for the first time inspires in you. Okay. Oh, nervous. No. Tell me. Bookfluencer. Oh, no. I'm going to color that. Intimately, I hope you know that. It's a horrible word, right? It's a terrible word. So do you get that often? No, no, no, no. That's what we're going to call Robert. It's a bookline. Absolutely not. How dare you? No, it's from a lady with a bookline cast. I'm now. Prohibiting. Prohibiting to come up to this podcast again. No, you're coming back every week. Keep it happy. I'm happy that you added bookfluencer to my vernacular. Also, it is now going to be under your titles. Thank you, Robert. Robert Evans bookfluencer. Bookfluencer. All right, everybody. Why don't we all go through this? Come do it. Some motherfucking books. I will come do it. Yeah. All right. Goodbye. Behind the bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. From more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. There's so much news happening around the world that we're somehow supposed to stay on top of. That's why we launched The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio that turns down the volume a bit to give you some space to think. I'm Wes Kosova. Each weekday, I dig into one important story and talk about why it matters. Come to The Big Take on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. My name is Joshua Topolsky and I have a new podcast called What Future. But I want to tell you that I'm being forced by my producer to record a promo telling you about my show. And I'm not trying to force you to listen to it. And maybe you're not interested in internet culture and the future of life on planet Earth and why John Carpenter movies are so good. You may just want to listen to a podcast about sports or whatever Joe Rogan talks about. And that's fine. No judgement. But if you like what you're hearing and I know that you do, you can listen to all of What Future on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Curtis Fittis in Jackson. And I'm Charlie Webster. Listen to the podcasts surviving El Chapo, the incredible true story of the identical twins from Chicago, who built America's biggest drug trafficking empire. The only reason El Chapo is now in prison and they've never spoken publicly until now. My brother had the only legal recording of Chapo's mom. Listen to surviving El Chapo, the twins who brought down a drug lord. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcasts.