Click on the q a icon at the bottom of the screen in the chat column find a link fors, purchasing his book. As peter does in his prologue many people at the lives of billionaires outlandish tidies, the trophy estate the divorce settlement. We watched fiction live tv shows based on their excessive lifestyles, applaud their philanthropy and elect them to Public Office peter makes a detailed case that the richest people in the world have done great harm to the rest of u us. And describe how installing philanthropy and social justice deliberately engineered systems of business and government to serve their own interest in doing so and the expense of the welfare and Economic Security and many, many others. The more that peter search during the pandemic. Implications of this peter argues they havent simply been a widening of economic inequality there been political consequences including intensified public anger and threats to democratic governments. To illustrate and personify peter focuses on five billionaires whom you will hear more about here in a minute all in all peter delivers a scathing account of hypocrisy and narcissism and the rights with the authority and journalistic skill that come from covering the Global Economy r from decads in recent years for the New York Times he began as a freelance reporter of Southeast Asia followed by three years in alaska at the Anchorage Daily News and then joined the Washington Post where he spent ten years at bureau chiefsh correspondent and washingtonin covering telecommunication during the. Com bubble of the 1990s he played a leading role and awardwinning coverage of the Global Financial crisis and Great Recession in three years he shifted and four years later global editorinchief of International Business times and returned to the New York Times in 2016 as european economics correspondent based in london last august Global Economics correspondent based in newark. He is also the author previously in 2009 of the economic and Financial Access that led to the Great Recession. Conversation with peter this evening will be alex and accomplish documentary film director and producer whose one number of awards included in oscar, multiple enemies and p bodies. Most recently alex directed the hpl twopart documentary the crime of the century about the opioid crisis. Thank you so much brad. Peter is a delight to talk to you you have written a riveting book is really prone and its given me a lot to think about i want to start to where you got, did you process right off the bat vacated would be double standard anthropological look at a new species of Economic Management you start different and it appeared . Thats a question i just want to say what ans honor having you as moderators such a skilled interviewer, you asked a question right off the bat. I did not comment the story originally as the story of doubles andas doubles man i wasn europe to cover the exit, trump been elected president i was finding myself writing about the rightwing populism across europe and italy and francey in germany. Even in sweden of social democracy there was a party that was born in the neonazi movement evolving into mainstream status i was writing with the breakout of the liberal democratic order and asking how this happened. I was in dallas of january 2017, 6 months into the torture of brexit trump was elected and there is a sense of monks don bossman and the altar billionaires to write the rules for all of us, there are forces that are refashioning in the Global Economy that we better take note of, davos is a bunch of things in this earnest program of seminars that most of the cool kids dont go to and second badge emphasis dictation that you never step foot in the Conference Center this particular year populism and inequality, capitalism 2. 0 and the wealthy people are wandering around trying to figure outha whats happening i decide to sample what the solutions are on an offer i remember listening to this conversation with the head ina giant consulting based india workers need to take rispones ability for their own problems and trained themselves. I listen to ray dolley a Hedge Fund Investor with 17 billion suggesting the solution inequality was a deregulatory process that would unleash the animal spirits of the market to generate more conducive atmosphere forak making money which was a curious thing to hear from somebody who seem to figure out how to make quite a bit of money. I listen to myy onetime boss who just launch this new website sponsorshipsng up from spas, wellness and her solution involve m meditation in pillows. I heard everything except for the richest people in the world maybe have to give something up and this was classic doubles it was all winwin as long as we are doing well then we invest in this cosmic life that will trickle down it was the beginning of an explanation for what was happening in the world. As i continued my reporting it was almost a reaction to something on the surface. Why was sweden convulsed with hostility, acrimony, despair of collectivism because there was this tremendous influx of migrants, they were suddenly blamed by the rightwing neonazis it was a lot of racist rhetoric with newcomers in the mist but it was always package we dont want to pay taxes for people who are going to work in similar explanations for the demonizing for the immigrants in italy to scarcity trump comes from you have to reckon with the fact huge numbers have been o validated of economic and security such that they may nots understand exactly what is happened to them but they understood the people running the system dont really care that much about whats happening to them and each of these cases we have this opportunity for political opportunist who could demonize the other, immigrants, whoever it is always some other besides the people were in our midst. I wanted to understand what sort of stories these billionaires tell themselves to justify they take an Economic System that used to function pretty well you get up for work, standard trouble, get a little bit of education and you can find a job that will allow you to support your family and that is broken down, what were these guys who had systematically dismantled Public Infrastructure through lobbying campaigns to the financing of friendlyf think tanks by hiring regions of accountants to find new tax loopholes and using lobbyist to write new went dismantled Public Infrastructure and transferred the proceeds to themselves leaving huge numbers of people in the state of desperation of happiness, what were they telling themselves, that ultimately became my book. We will get to trump a second i would get toy the main characters i find it intriguing. I recall rational is a rationalizing. I remember the police have aided expression of noble cause disruption once you determine it will allow yourself to be more corrupt. The other thing i found i ran across psychological experiments where people cheat more when they imagine you doing it for good cause. I thought whatever stories are the key characters in your books that tell themselves to imagine what theyre doing is so good that it allows them, mark manning off his head within the heroes of a codependent and the ceos did not even recognize the carnage. Im giving you some psychological paradigm, how do you describe the t psychological paradigm of davos man. It is a gift. To make a billion dollars you gotta be pretty good at selling ssomething as a prophylactic against redistribution, we can do anything and they need them to save us and that if you think about not paying taxes at some public service, you are sparing us from wasting our money on gbureaucracy while theyre telling us about their philanthropic endeavors that will be so r much. Many house who is a particularly complex character real philanthropist and has fought significant fights. And het hangs out with the metallica drummer, his treating pictures of themselves in the pacific on the sailboat with a metallic drummer, he is a dream force in San Francisco his own vedavos privacy he flies the executives to hawaii and their blessing ceremonies and ohana that means family. He is a guy that will tell you the inspiration from his company came from going to Southern India when he was having an expert essential crisis and visiting the hugging saints who told him he needs to give something back, that has got to be his ammo he found this Company Makes all this money and he donates 1 of all the revenue and 1 of all the staff time to voluntary all worthy causes he financed about initiative that raised several Million Dollars to taxing Big Companies like his own in San Francisco. Guess what he pays as a company the modest sum of to the federal government in taxes on several billion dollars worth of revenue not once but twice in all the other stuff compared to that. How are we supposed to pay for all the stuff that created them fortune infrastructure, the internet the universities that are financed by public dollars that are truly not graduate news is something he doesntt engaga with he will tell you how in the first waves in the pandemic to source 50 million pieces of ppe, gowns, facemasks to fly back to the states and distributor frontline medical workers. Why exactly are we dependentli upon a tech blow worth 10 billion for frontline medical workers and the worst pandemic it a century and what is supposed to be the most powerful country on the earth. It happens because people like mark benioff have and pillage the system through tax cuts, he tells the story. You just pointed out last year he said ceos are the heroes of the pandemic not frontline medical workers and he specifically said the government did not save you, we saved youen and he said we did it not for profit but to save the world. Hes worried a about 30 billio. Disaster that you know, you just did this fantastic podcast on meltdown. He will tell you as an investor who bought up, you know, literally thousands of homes a day on the courthouses of america took possession of them rented them out to people with this pleasing name invitation homes, and hell say oh this was just an active, you know c and he will say this was just an act of civic responsibility. I do this for my nation. These homes were eyesores, there were rodents run around and overgrown lawns. We fix them up, put on fresh coats of paint and we put families in them. You can almost hear the soundtrack for a a life insurane commercial with a golden retriever puppy running arounddd on a lawn with an adorable toddler. Invitation homes jacks up the rent for all of these people, cuts maintenance, makes it impossible to get hold of anybody if something goes awry. Sportsman runs off with the money, sells billions of dollars of bonds through wall street, uses of money to then go follow the same Business Plan around the world, refers to how once theres blood in the streets of europe that will be the time to buy into real estate. And guess what. Right now schwarzman, not right now but in the last couple of years during the pandemic he has been saying publicly this is fantastic time to be a landlord. You can jack up the rents. Uy theres all these distressed assets we can buy. Hes buying more realistic. Hes got a new plan, this rent to own model which seems like a repeat of the last one. H and yet if you ask him again he will tell you that he is doing a favor to society. This is not the robber barons content to put their name on a building. Heres Carnegie Hall but we will stay to ourselves safely protected while we enjoy all the money. These guys are playing for the whole thing. They won our adulation. They seem to believe their own narratives, and naturally the function of davos more than anything. Its like a coming together of the tribe just being there is a signaling of their own virtue. They y go there, they engage in things like simulation of the syrian refugee experience. You can go to davos and watch billionaires get blindfolded and let around in the dark while somebodys yelling at them in languages they dont understand demanding papers, and they all feel really good about themselves and then they gog off to dinner thrown consulting form with the eat lobster and drink caviar. Then they go home feeling we really are the good guys which armors them to continue the real fight which is protecting the privileges against the tax collector. Think when when people whether it be betty off or schwartzman, you know concocting these narratives about how they are in fact the good guys and and spending a lot of time burnishing those narratives whether it be on on the facade of the New York Public Library or or through these stories, but theyre very thin skin when it comes to criticism or even even more so when it comes to attacking their money making plans, i think it was seen shorts and wasnt it who who compared the end of the carried interest or hedge Fund Loophole to hitlers invasion of polite. He had to walk that one back that didnt go over so well, jamie diamond one year in davos after you paid a big fine involving i believe hes the london whale this disappearance of multibillion dollars of funds based on. Derivatives bad and this was you know right after he had settled the libor scandal another scandal and having paid, you know other fines to settle mal fees and stirring the mortgagebacked securities crisis went back to dallas and said, you know, my feelings were really really hurt. I feel i feel misunderstood. Yeah these guys dont take having their halo challenged well because halo is so important, you know, its not just about their feelings. Its the way they protect themselves from democracy. Its the way they prevent the public getting the things that the public clearly wants like healthcare like Affordable Housing like help with education, you know, all of these things that were told we cant afford because baked into it is this narrative that davos man is sold us on that taxes are evil that he can take care of all of our problems that if we if we try to operate like other major democracies other large economies, we you know, will Monkey Wrench the whole thing. Were full of these kind of false binary choices where like we can either have covid vaccines and we accept that part of that is we pay through the nose to pharmaceutical Companies Like pfizer and moderna. Were gonna sell them to the highest bidder. Theyre gonna leave most of humanity unprotected and open invitation to variance like omicron. Well, we can either have that or we can all die because we wont have any vaccines at all, you know, we can either accept that jeff bezos is gonna end up with all of our money and the people in his warehouses are gonna labor without any protection. Theyre not gonna have paid sick leave, but were gonna have the wonders of ecommerce for those of us lucky enough to work from home, you know, we can either have that or we can be venezuela we can go diving into dumpsters for our dinner and you know, there are some other options on the menu, but these guys are very skilled at convincing us and and its not by accident. Its systematic that if we try to change this system, we we you know, all of them modern. Are just luddites, you know in the thrall of backward ideas. You know, i think it is fair to say in the case of covid that the federal government at least in the beginning of the pandemic didnt exactly cover itself with glory particularly the trump administration, but its carrying on a little bit with Steve Schwartzman talk a little bit about how his Business Model actually found a way to profit rather enormously from from the covid pandemic. Oh, i mean, i think its worse than that. I mean i think schwartzman in particular is part of the Investor Group thats responsible for for worsening and extending the pandemic. I mean schwartzman is a lot of things but hes no dummy and he he has a masterful instinct for going where the money is and he figured out early on that healthcare, you know, this is a fantastic arena. He sunk six billion dollars into a staffing company. Thats a dominant supplier of staff to american Emergency Rooms back in 2016, and this was part of a huge wave of private Equity Investments in healthcare that injected considerations of profit into a sphere where the stakes are obviously a whole lot higher than like how your local starbucks runs or how mcdonalds or your airline runs and yet suddenly the same, you know sense of patience or customers doctors and nurses or costs to be cut as much as possible so we can return profit to shareholds. We need to maximize our revenue which means moving quickly and we need to eliminate capacity like in the same way than an airline wants that plane to be full because that allows them to charge more for seats the private equity magnate who owns a hospital wants that place to be stuff to the gills, which is how we ended up reducing. Are are stock of hospital beds in the United States by roughly a third for the decade plus leading up to the pandemic and you know in schwartzmans case going to Emergency Rooms. I mean what a stroke a genius and the same way that he has invested in lowincome housing because he understands hes dealing with desperate people who will pay the extra fee who will suffer the crappy maintenance because they dont have any recourse, you know, he understands that the people coming into Emergency Rooms boy. They may not be in the best state to wonder like does their medical insurance cover this or they get in the best dea