Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Sam Zell: the Elon Musk of Real Estate
Aired: 2022-11-10
Duration: 01:16:45


=== Samuel's Business Obsession (15:05) ===

[00:00:00]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[00:00:02]  Guaranteed human.
[00:00:04]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[00:00:11]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:00:15]  I doctored the test once.
[00:00:17]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:00:22]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:00:24]  Greg Goespie and Michael Mancini.
[00:00:26]  My mind was blown.
[00:00:27]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:00:29]  This is Love Trapped.
[00:00:30]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:00:32]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:00:37]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:00:44]  10-10 shots five, city hall building.
[00:00:47]  How could this ever happen in City Hall?
[00:00:49]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:00:50]  A shocking public murder.
[00:00:52]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[00:00:58]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[00:01:00]  Those are shots.
[00:01:02]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[00:01:04]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
[00:01:07]  That may have been about sex.
[00:01:09]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:18]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[00:01:26]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:01:29]  He is not going to get away with this.
[00:01:31]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:01:33]  We always say that.
[00:01:35]  Trust your girlfriends.
[00:01:38]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:01:39]  Trust me, babe.
[00:01:40]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:01:50]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[00:01:54]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:01:58]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
[00:02:05]  An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
[00:02:09]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:02:12]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:02:22]  Oh, yeah!
[00:02:25]  It's behind the bastards.
[00:02:27]  Please, Jesus Christ.
[00:02:29]  It is a false heart.
[00:02:31]  Stop.
[00:02:31]  Samantha, do you see how she treats me sometimes?
[00:02:35]  It's two o'clock on a Tuesday when we're recording this.
[00:02:37]  I don't need the drama.
[00:02:39]  I believe I have civil rights, Sophie.
[00:02:41]  I'm sorry.
[00:02:41]  Do I not have civil rights?
[00:02:43]  What does that have to do with you doing quite like a bad thing?
[00:02:46]  I think I have a creative voice I've ever heard.
[00:02:49]  Well, that's going to take them away from you.
[00:02:52]  That's why she has a right to do that.
[00:02:54]  This feels like my rights are being violated.
[00:02:56]  Samantha McVay, how are you doing?
[00:02:59]  How are you doing?
[00:02:59]  I am wonderful.
[00:03:01]  How are you?
[00:03:01]  Samantha.
[00:03:02]  Is it true that were I listening, looking for a podcast about things that my mother had never told me, that you could help me with that?
[00:03:10]  Yes, as in fact, you can just put stuff mom never told you, and you will find my face and then some other faces as the host.
[00:03:18]  And yes, you can come and listen about things your mother may not have told you.
[00:03:22]  If you have a cool mom, maybe they did tell you.
[00:03:25]  I don't know.
[00:03:26]  That is extremely based.
[00:03:28]  I'm happy that we're talking today about why the rent is so damn high.
[00:03:31]  But you know what else is too high right now, Samantha?
[00:03:34]  Tell me.
[00:03:34]  The Great Lakes.
[00:03:35]  They actually hit record highs this year, which is causing serious problems for all of the communities who live near those lakes.
[00:03:41]  And Samantha, that's why we got to nuke them.
[00:03:45]  This is his revenge for me telling him I couldn't get away from you.
[00:03:48]  Have you thought about it?
[00:03:50]  Samantha.
[00:03:51]  Have you thought about how many nukes the United States has that are just sitting around doing nothing?
[00:03:58]  We spent a lot of money on those nukes.
[00:04:01]  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.
[00:04:07]  So I'm just decimated if it, you know, this happens with all of them being deployed.
[00:04:12]  I want to be right there in the middle.
[00:04:13]  We're going to shoot those missiles right at Lake Superior, Lake Ontario.
[00:04:18]  The other ones, take them out.
[00:04:20]  I mean, someone doesn't even know the names of the Great Lakes, but wants to nuke them.
[00:04:24]  Robert Evans.
[00:04:25]  Yeah.
[00:04:26]  May I ask why?
[00:04:27]  What have they done to you?
[00:04:29]  For one thing, they're at record highs, which is dangerous.
[00:04:32]  For another thing, have you ever listened to the Gordon Lightfoot song, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald?
[00:04:37]  No.
[00:04:38]  Well, I feel like maybe you should.
[00:04:40]  Oh, Samantha.
[00:04:41]  It's about a boat full of brave men who are killed by the vicious Lake Superior during a storm that we could have nuked away.
[00:04:50]  But what were they doing there?
[00:04:52]  They were trying to take steel from some place to some other place.
[00:04:57]  They're just being good sailors.
[00:04:59]  Well, Robert.
[00:05:01]  Wow.
[00:05:01]  We have a lot of Great Lakes sympathizers.
[00:05:04]  This is not a bit, Sophie.
[00:05:06]  This is a serious political exercise.
[00:05:09]  I believe I have the right to advocate politics.
[00:05:12]  Sophie, if I'm remembering 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.
[00:05:25]  Did you actually do that video?
[00:05:27]  No, I have not.
[00:05:28]  I have not done that.
[00:05:29]  There's no way you did that on time.
[00:05:30]  There's no fucking day.
[00:05:31]  Absolutely not.
[00:05:32]  I know there is a video, and it probably says that you can't stop me from wanting to nuke the Great Lakes.
[00:05:39]  I haven't seen it either.
[00:05:40]  I haven't done the training either, so I can't conform to it.
[00:05:43]  That's good.
[00:05:44]  And when you know I did it, it didn't count it, and I had to do it again.
[00:05:47]  I'm very upset about this.
[00:05:48]  Wow.
[00:05:48]  Wow.
[00:05:49]  I'm so sorry.
[00:05:51]  I'm so upset about this.
[00:05:52]  Samantha, I'm going to play a little bit of politics here.
[00:05:54]  I'm going to play a little bit of politics.
[00:05:56]  What if I add making us not have to do this thing to the bill that will nuke the Great Lakes?
[00:06:01]  You know, you know, see, that doesn't mean a little bit of pork.
[00:06:06]  Yeah, exactly, exactly.
[00:06:07]  This is how we, this is how we make sausage, baby.
[00:06:10]  Sorry to the residents there.
[00:06:13]  No, no, it's good for them.
[00:06:14]  It'll get keep the lakes off their backs.
[00:06:16]  Yeah, it'll be fine.
[00:06:17]  I don't think it's good for them.
[00:06:18]  I don't think they would say that.
[00:06:19]  Water soaks up radiation real well.
[00:06:21]  So it'll be good.
[00:06:24]  It'll just, you know what it'll be like?
[00:06:25]  It'll be like everybody's got a hot tub for a little while.
[00:06:27]  That's going to be nice.
[00:06:28]  Anyway, today we are going to start by talking about a bastard, Samuel Zell.
[00:06:35]  Z-E-L-L.
[00:06:36]  Now, he was born Shmuly Zielonka.
[00:06:40]  I think I'm saying that close enough to write on September 28th, 1941.
[00:06:45]  His parents, Rukla and Berak, were Jewish immigrants from Poland.
[00:06:50]  If you hadn't guessed that they were Polish by the last name Zielonka, yeah, his father had made good money as a grain merchant.
[00:06:58]  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.
[00:07:05]  Probably, probably time to begin getting out of Poland.
[00:07:08]  Yeah.
[00:07:08]  I think we should leave now.
[00:07:09]  This is a good time to leave, y'all.
[00:07:11]  Yeah.
[00:07:11]  Yeah.
[00:07:12]  Time to bounce.
[00:07:13]  That was a great time to leave Poland.
[00:07:16]  So Zell, our butt, our Zell, Samuel Zell, Shmuly, but Samuel.
[00:07:21]  He gets raised in Chicago, where his father takes up a new business.
[00:07:25]  Oh, good.
[00:07:25]  Okay.
[00:07:25]  So you guys are both, you guys are both Chi-Town babies.
[00:07:28]  You know, no, I'm not.
[00:07:29]  No, no, no, no.
[00:07:30]  I just, oh, Sammy.
[00:07:31]  There's no show.
[00:07:31]  Oh, I thought you said Sammy.
[00:07:33]  I thought you were saying that you had also grown up in Chicago.
[00:07:36]  No, not that cool.
[00:07:37]  I'm not that cool.
[00:07:39]  Well, I don't know.
[00:07:40]  Chicago is certainly a city.
[00:07:42]  So, yeah, his dad.
[00:07:45]  Everybody.
[00:07:46]  That's right.
[00:07:46]  That's right.
[00:07:47]  There's only one city we like on Behind the Bastards, and it's Pittsburgh.
[00:07:52]  Oh, really?
[00:07:52]  Okay.
[00:07:52]  Where I have never been.
[00:07:54]  So his father takes up a new business as a jewelry wholesaler.
[00:07:57]  From early on, Samuel is very interested in business.
[00:08:00]  He's one of these kids who decides as a child, capitalism is the thing for him, which another warning sign, right?
[00:08:09]  Look, this kid is a refugee from War Turn Europe.
[00:08:13]  I have a lot of sympathy for that.
[00:08:14]  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, I don't know, we got to slow those kids down.
[00:08:23]  Maybe like put some wasp spray in like the school ventilation ducks or something, but we got to slow those kids down.
[00:08:28]  They're not doing any good for us.
[00:08:30]  They're just hustling.
[00:08:31]  Come on.
[00:08:31]  That's what he's going to do.
[00:08:32]  I don't know.
[00:08:32]  Somebody, if he just like gotten a little bit more lead, maybe, or maybe a little less oxygen, maybe a little bit more CO2 in the house.
[00:08:39]  Anyway, he doesn't.
[00:08:41]  So things are fine for him.
[00:08:45]  He starts his first business at age 12.
[00:08:48]  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.
[00:08:56]  So Sam found a place in the city where he could buy Playboy magazines in bulk for 50 cents each and then resell them for between $1.50 and $3 each.
[00:09:05]  Holy crap, this kid.
[00:09:07]  Okay.
[00:09:07]  Wow.
[00:09:08]  That's impressive.
[00:09:09]  Well, it's impressive, but also that's a bad sign.
[00:09:12]  So he later called this...
[00:09:13]  But damn.
[00:09:14]  Yeah, yes.
[00:09:15]  Yes.
[00:09:15]  It's a good grift, but it's a bad sign.
[00:09:18]  He later called this his, quote, first lesson in supply and demand, bracking it to a 2013 meeting of the Urban Land Institute.
[00:09:24]  For the rest of that year, I became an importer of Playboy magazines to the suburbs.
[00:09:28]  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.
[00:09:36]  They need that porn.
[00:09:36]  There's an entirely good.
[00:09:37]  Look, when I was a kid, my first pornography was porn.
[00:09:40]  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 you.
[00:09:47]  There's just like this box of playboys and many people.
[00:09:50]  There's the legend of Johnny Porno Seed.
[00:09:52]  You know somebody seeded.
[00:09:53]  Wait, it was in the woods.
[00:09:55]  Yeah, woods porn is a thing.
[00:09:57]  Okay, there's so many questions, but I guess we don't have the time.
[00:09:59]  But I don't, I don't think.
[00:10:00]  Well no, I don't think Gen Z has this because they've got the internet, but like, oh no, I encountered my first porn before the internet was common and it was porn that was found like it was kind of in like a little wooded area behind the housing development.
[00:10:12]  You know everyone had that.
[00:10:14]  This is Texas right yeah, this is Texas, but I I know many other people had had had found woods porn.
[00:10:20]  Um, wood porn yeah yeah which, at least nobody.
[00:10:23]  I didn't have to pay for my woods porn.
[00:10:24]  Sure, it was kind of moldy and like crumbling and all of the colors weren't clear, but okay, I was pretty sure you could see some nipples in there.
[00:10:33]  You know what I was like seven wait, it's kind of like the?
[00:10:36]  Uh, because who would watch?
[00:10:38]  How to watch porn on static tv?
[00:10:40]  Yeah yeah, it's exactly like that.
[00:10:41]  Yeah, physical version of static tv.
[00:10:46]  Oh, my god, all right, let's go keep going.
[00:10:49]  So he is, he is, he is.
[00:10:50]  He is peddling mid-core pornography to the suburbs.
[00:10:54]  Um, Samuel graduates from Highland PARK high school.
[00:10:57]  Uh because again, his parents are rich.
[00:10:58]  That is a nice part of Chicago.
[00:11:00]  Uh, he's accepted by the University OF Michigan.
[00:11:03]  He is less interested in his studies than he is in finding Finding new ways to make a buck.
[00:11:07]  His roommate mentions to him one day that their landlord was developing a new property, an apartment complex.
[00:11:12]  Samuel thought it would be easy to manage, later saying, quote, I had plenty of faith in my own, what I call salesmanship.
[00:11:18]  I could rent them, and most important of all, I was a student, and it was student housing.
[00:11:22]  I thought I could relate.
[00:11:23]  In return for running and maintaining the building, this friend of mine and I each got an apartment.
[00:11:28]  So, number one, for an idea of kind of how this kid works, he's able to talk a landlord into this arrangement.
[00:11:34]  And then he's able to turn this arrangement into a business that's shocking size.
[00:11:38]  By 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.
[00:11:47]  This is a huge business.
[00:11:49]  He's very good at this.
[00:11:51]  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.
[00:11:59]  Law was what he'd studied to do, and becoming a lawyer had been his goal for years.
[00:12:03]  But like now that he sells his real estate business and he starts working as a lawyer, he's like, I kind of fucking hate being a lawyer.
[00:12:09]  This guy just sucks ass.
[00:12:10]  Yeah.
[00:12:12]  So pretty much immediately, he quits and decides to go back into real estate and make it his full-time career.
[00:12:17]  In 1968, he founded a company and brought in his old business partner and he started buying properties.
[00:12:23]  Now, he happened to get into the market right as it was hitting, it was on an overbuilding spree.
[00:12:29]  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.
[00:12:40]  Multifamily residential real estate plummeted in value first, and a lot of commercial property loans went into default.
[00:12:46]  So numerous properties are abandoned mid-construction, right?
[00:12:49]  Company's like, suddenly we can't finance finishing this house.
[00:12:53]  So there's just this lot with like a basement dug or some shit on it.
[00:12:56]  And Zell sees this as an opportunity.
[00:12:58]  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?
[00:13:07]  Yes.
[00:13:08]  Tale is old as time.
[00:13:09]  So he has other businesses as the years go by.
[00:13:12]  He purchases an agricultural company that's closing and then a nitrogen plant that's going into bankruptcy.
[00:13:17]  Then he buys a potash plant and starts like making fertilizer.
[00:13:20]  So he's buying these businesses that are failing and then he integrates them together into one bigger business that's able to succeed.
[00:13:26]  This is a pattern that asserts itself over and over again.
[00:13:29]  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.
[00:13:39]  In an article for the New York University Review, Zell described his strategy as dancing on the skeletons of other people's mistakes.
[00:13:47]  This earns him the name.
[00:13:49]  Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's what he's doing.
[00:13:50]  And he gets the nickname Gravedancer as a result.
[00:13:55]  Oh, he's bad.
[00:13:55]  Oh.
[00:13:56]  Oh, no.
[00:13:57]  Yeah.
[00:13:58]  I mean, that's funny.
[00:13:59]  That is kind of cool.
[00:14:02]  But it's not about to be.
[00:14:04]  So sometimes.
[00:14:07]  Yeah.
[00:14:08]  Sometimes he has to make the grave to dance on it.
[00:14:11]  So he buys a controlling interest in the Tribune company, which owned the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.
[00:14:18]  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.
[00:14:25]  Quote, 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.
[00:14:34]  The group sat dumbfounded.
[00:14:35]  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.
[00:14:47]  It did not want to be quoted.
[00:14:48]  I have never seen anything like it.
[00:14:51]  So Mr. Michaels denies this happened, saying the people who told the Times the anecdote were lying or mistaken.
[00:14:58]  But boy, a lot of people have similar anecdotes about this guy who Zell brings in to run the Tribune.

=== The Shocking Radio Incident (07:44) ===

[00:15:05]  Zell's plan seems to have been that he buys this company and he finances the deal.
[00:15:09]  This might sound familiar.
[00:15:11]  So, the Tribune, massive media company, he's only able to buy it by borrowing heavily.
[00:15:17]  Like, that's how he finances it.
[00:15:18]  He gets a bunch of banks to front the money that he can't put up front.
[00:15:22]  And then, as soon as he buys it, his plan is to engage in aggressive cost cutting that can make the venture profitable after like trimming all of the employees.
[00:15:31]  It's almost exactly like what Elon Musk is about to do with Twitter, right?
[00:15:35]  Right.
[00:15:36]  Exactly.
[00:15:37]  It's super familiar.
[00:15:38]  Yeah, it sounds really familiar.
[00:15:40]  Zell is doing this same thing.
[00:15:42]  And when he buys the company, he allegedly tells the employees there's a new sheriff in town.
[00:15:47]  Which, like, you don't actually say that, Sam.
[00:15:49]  You don't really say that.
[00:15:51]  Nobody says that.
[00:15:52]  What?
[00:15:55]  So, in buying and tanking the Tribune, Zell brought harm to a number of hugely influential local papers.
[00:16:00]  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.
[00:16:12]  So he has bought up the most influential local news sources in the country and he's about to run them into the ground.
[00:16:20]  So as soon as he buys them, he goes on like a tour through all of these different properties, these different newsrooms, giving speeches.
[00:16:26]  He's famous for cursing a lot in his speeches, I think, to try to be entertaining and stuff.
[00:16:32]  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.
[00:16:39]  At one point, he writes to the Tribune's employees: I have said repeatedly that no matter what happens in this transaction, my lifestyle won't change.
[00:16:47]  Yours, on the other hand, could change dramatically if we get this right.
[00:16:51]  They're not going to get this right.
[00:16:52]  So, for one thing, these are all newspapers, right?
[00:16:54]  That's the fairly large newspapers.
[00:16:59]  The team he brings in to take over management are all radio people.
[00:17:03]  In particular, they're all shock jock DJs.
[00:17:06]  So I knew it.
[00:17:08]  Yeah.
[00:17:09]  Mr. Michaels, who's running it, is a former shock jock.
[00:17:11]  He's like a Howard Stern type.
[00:17:14]  And so that's the people he's like, you know, who can run a bunch of local newspapers is like drivetime radio DJs who curse on the air.
[00:17:23]  That's who will turn the newspaper business around.
[00:17:26]  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.
[00:17:33]  And one of the first things they do is they rewrite the employee handbook.
[00:17:37]  Quote, Working at Tribune means accepting that you might hear a word that you personally might not use.
[00:17:42]  You might experience an attitude you don't share.
[00:17:44]  You might hear a joke that you don't consider funny.
[00:17:46]  That is because a loose fun, non-linear atmosphere is important to the creative process.
[00:17:50]  This should be understood and should not be a surprise and not considered harassment.
[00:17:55]  Now, yes, of course, if you're working in 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 that.
[00:18:10]  But if you're putting that in your handbook with specifically to lead to you shouldn't ever complain about harassment, that's because you want to sexually harass a bunch of people, right?
[00:18:19]  That's why you're putting that in.
[00:18:21]  And then you're going to be racist.
[00:18:22]  So all of those things are going to happen.
[00:18:23]  So go ahead and expect it.
[00:18:24]  Pretend like it's 1919 or 1909, essentially.
[00:18:28]  Yeah.
[00:18:28]  It's like everything else.
[00:18:30]  Yeah.
[00:18:31]  So they took this don't call our harassment harassment seriously.
[00:18:36]  Mr. Michaels hired a woman named Kim Johnson to be his SVP of local sales.
[00:18:40]  In the news release announcing her hire, he said that she was a quote former waitress at Knockers, the place for hot racks and cold brews.
[00:18:48]  I think this was a joke based on a fake restaurant chain.
[00:18:51]  But anyway, it's a weird thing to say about someone you brought on as a VP.
[00:18:57]  Right.
[00:18:57]  But they can say, we have a woman.
[00:19:00]  We have a woman.
[00:19:00]  We're not sexist.
[00:19:01]  Exactly.
[00:19:02]  We have a woman, and we only a little bit complimented her knockers in the press release we announce we put out in the press release announcing her hire.
[00:19:12]  The press release, yeah.
[00:19:14]  So, this is like what they're putting out publicly to the industry.
[00:19:17]  Like, we hired this lady because of her tits.
[00:19:20]  Like, that's that's literally you're welcome.
[00:19:23]  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.
[00:19:29]  No, no, no, they published it in a press release.
[00:19:32]  Yeah, so in his first tour of the company, Zell promised there would be no job cuts, but of course, there were many of them.
[00:19:39]  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.
[00:19:47]  Quote from the New York Times: The company introduced promotions that seem to have been drawn from the radio handbook at four of the company's television stations.
[00:19:54]  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 at WPIX TV in New York.
[00:20:06]  The viewers were cheered on by clapping Hooters' waitresses, giving the station the appearance of televised shock radio.
[00:20:12]  He literally, you know, like, you ever seen Robocop?
[00:20:16]  No, have you ever seen like Idiocracy?
[00:20:19]  Nope.
[00:20:20]  Oh, okay.
[00:20:21]  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.
[00:20:31]  He's just done that for real.
[00:20:33]  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, but they're trying to do real news.
[00:20:45]  I feel like I saw this a while ago.
[00:20:46]  I was like, what is happening?
[00:20:48]  Absolutely.
[00:20:48]  It seems like a thing that happened.
[00:20:50]  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.
[00:21:04]  That's much grosser to me than just like, people will be naked.
[00:21:08]  Yeah.
[00:21:09]  It's, it's pretty cool.
[00:21:12]  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.
[00:21:23]  Stuff like, rock and roll musically is behind us.
[00:21:27]  All caps, news and information is the new rock and roll.
[00:21:30]  This is like a corporate memo.
[00:21:31]  Their director of innovation is guys.
[00:21:36]  We got to make Zimbabwe's be rock and roll.
[00:21:40]  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 like you do.
[00:21:51]  And he's shocked that this is allowed.
[00:21:54]  He has no idea that this is how like journalism works, that reporters go to war.
[00:21:58]  What?
[00:21:58]  This is the director of innovation for one of the largest newspaper companies in the country.
[00:22:03]  Were they one step away of just becoming a tabloid at this point?
[00:22:06]  Yeah, I mean, that's what he's trying to do.
[00:22:08]  He's trying to like, his idea is that we can just make it profitable by, yeah, turning it into a tabloid, stick some tits on there, stick some game show stuff in there.
[00:22:16]  It'll be great.
[00:22:19]  Yeah, I don't like this guy.
[00:22:20]  You know what I do like, though?
[00:22:22]  Oh, I like the fact that the Great Lakes being the largest freshwater bodies on the planet, plenty of room for the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
[00:22:32]  Yeah, apparently.
[00:22:33]  Yeah.
[00:22:34]  I try to get it there, Sophie.
[00:22:35]  I try.
[00:22:35]  Sophie.
[00:22:36]  Sophie.
[00:22:37]  I just like don't care anymore.
[00:22:39]  I care about your hometown and am trying to stop it from being eaten by a lake.
[00:22:45]  Well, no, just the lakes.
[00:22:47]  Just the lakes.
[00:22:48]  Just the lakes.

=== Musicians With Secrets (04:48) ===

[00:22:49]  My hometown isn't there.
[00:22:51]  So.
[00:22:52]  Well, then everything's going to be fine.
[00:22:53]  All right.
[00:22:54]  Here's some ads in 2023.
[00:23:01]  Former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[00:23:06]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[00:23:11]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[00:23:15]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:23:18]  I doctored the test once.
[00:23:20]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[00:23:23]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[00:23:27]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfected.
[00:23:30]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:23:32]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:23:34]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
[00:23:36]  My mind was blown.
[00:23:38]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:23:40]  This is Love Trap.
[00:23:42]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:23:43]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:23:48]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[00:23:55]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[00:23:59]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:24:09]  10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
[00:24:12]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:24:16]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
[00:24:22]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:24:24]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:24:25]  Jeffrey Good.
[00:24:27]  July 2003.
[00:24:28]  Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:24:33]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:24:36]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:24:45]  Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
[00:24:48]  A shocking public murder.
[00:24:49]  I screamed, get down, get down.
[00:24:51]  Those are shots.
[00:24:52]  Those are shots.
[00:24:52]  Get down.
[00:24:53]  A charismatic politician.
[00:24:54]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
[00:24:57]  I still have a weapon.
[00:24:59]  And I could shoot you.
[00:25:02]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:25:04]  He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
[00:25:07]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:25:09]  That may have been about sex.
[00:25:11]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:25:24]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:25:28]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:25:31]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:25:34]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:25:37]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[00:25:41]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:25:45]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:25:47]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:25:52]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:25:54]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:25:55]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:25:58]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:26:00]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:26:02]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:26:04]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:26:09]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:26:11]  Trust me, babe.
[00:26:12]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:26:21]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:26:27]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:26:32]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:26:37]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:26:47]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:26:52]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:26:55]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:26:58]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:27:00]  So funny.
[00:27:01]  Sherry, stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:27:10]  Say you love me.
[00:27:13]  You know I.
[00:27:14]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:27:25]  We're back.
[00:27:27]  Sophie agreed off screen that my political career has a lot of promise.
[00:27:32]  Everything's good.
[00:27:33]  Yeah.
[00:27:34]  Nuke the Great Lakes in the middle of the climate change.

=== Fighting For Rent Control (14:55) ===

[00:27:37]  It'll stop it.
[00:27:40]  It'll make the world darker.
[00:27:42]  You ever see Snow Piercer?
[00:27:44]  The first two seconds.
[00:27:45]  Yeah, did you see?
[00:27:48]  I only watched the first one and a half seconds of Snow Piercer, but that's basically my idea.
[00:27:53]  Okay, eating roaches, so cool.
[00:27:55]  Putting children to work.
[00:27:57]  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.
[00:28:05]  Super positive.
[00:28:07]  So James Warren, the former managing editor and Washington Bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, said 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.
[00:28:22]  They used the notion of reinventing the newspapers simply as a cover for cost cutting.
[00:28:27]  Now, during his time running the company, Zell also became a pioneer of clickbait advertising.
[00:28:32]  Quote, advertising.
[00:28:34]  Yeah, oh, yeah.
[00:28:35]  No, he helped make this happen.
[00:28:37]  Advertising has been inserted into the Los Angeles Times in new and unsettling ways.
[00:28:41]  In March, an ad mimicking the front page for Disney's Alice in Wonderland was wrapped around the first section.
[00:28:46]  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.
[00:28:59]  In April of 2009, an advertisement posing as a news article about NBC's new show Southland appeared on the front page.
[00:29:05]  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.
[00:29:16]  Some might argue that, yes, that's exactly what it does, but that's kind of the point.
[00:29:22]  Now, what's interesting, though, is that none of this makes the business profitable.
[00:29:26]  It actually making all of these newspapers much worse does not make people more likely to use them.
[00:29:34]  Zell also had loaded the Tribune with so much debt by the deal, right?
[00:29:38]  That bankruptcy was basically inevitable.
[00:29:40]  It was almost impossible for the company to ever turn a profit because of how much debt he'd loaded it up with.
[00:29:46]  I would assume with the clickbait that he's getting money from the advertisers and that's how he was going to make money.
[00:29:52]  No, because people stopped visiting the website because it's shit.
[00:29:56]  Okay.
[00:29:57]  Yeah.
[00:29:57]  Investors hurt by the deal later accused him of basically loading the company up with debt and then sinking it on purpose.
[00:30:06]  And I'm going to quote now from the Chicago Tribune.
[00:30:08]  Tribune Company, the precursor company, the predecessor company to Tribune Media, filed for bankruptcy in December 2008, one year after Chicago billionaire Zell took the company private in a heavily leveraged $8.2 billion deal.
[00:30:20]  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.
[00:30:30]  Now, one of the things, again, I found interesting here, 2008's prior to the social media age taking off, really.
[00:30:36]  It's when we have our last big economic crash.
[00:30:40]  Local newspapers are the primary way people get news, and Zell absolutely crashes them in this multi, like he gets to get banks to back him in this multi-billion dollar deal that he could never make a profit on.
[00:30:53]  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.
[00:31:00]  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?
[00:31:07]  As we're about to have a recession, and has been talking about how he plans to fire 75% of Twitter staffers.
[00:31:13]  It's cool.
[00:31:13]  It's neat that these billionaires get to just keep fucking with people's ability to get news because of their own ego when they want to.
[00:31:20]  Yeah, they'll be fine.
[00:31:21]  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.
[00:31:30]  Yeah, it's great.
[00:31:32]  So obviously, legally, nobody ever accepts responsibility for anything.
[00:31:37]  However, there's a bunch of litigation, like 10 years of it, over this.
[00:31:40]  Zell starts to call it the deal from hell because of all of the people suing him over this.
[00:31:45]  And eventually, the litigation trust gets around $200 million to redistribute to creditors, as long as no liability or wrongdoing is assumed by Zell and other defendants.
[00:31:55]  So there you go.
[00:31:57]  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.
[00:32:04]  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.
[00:32:11]  Because that one is just kind of like, you know, they lost this amount of money and now there's a big bankruptcy.
[00:32:17]  The New York Times quote is going to be a lot grittier.
[00:32:20]  Okay.
[00:32:21]  Less than a year after Mr. Zell bought the company, it tipped into bankruptcy, listing $7.6 billion in assets against a debt of $13 billion, making it the largest bankruptcy in the history of the American media industry.
[00:32:33]  More than 4,200 people have lost jobs since the purchase, while resources for the Tribune newspapers and television stations have been slashed.
[00:32:40]  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.
[00:32:54]  Tribune Tower, the architectural symbol of the stayed company, came to resemble a frat house complete with poker parties, jukeboxes, and pervasive sex talk.
[00:33:03]  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.
[00:33:14]  Yeah.
[00:33:14]  They just paid $7 billion to have a frat house.
[00:33:19]  Yeah.
[00:33:20]  Yeah.
[00:33:20]  A frat house where they also got to fuck with serious people who were trying to report on important local news issues.
[00:33:26]  Right.
[00:33:27]  So number one, this helps destroy local news nationwide.
[00:33:31]  Like now it is effectively dead as a meaningful force.
[00:33:35]  This is not the only reason for that, but it is a big part of it.
[00:33:39]  So that's pretty cool.
[00:33:41]  But obviously for Zell, fucking with the Tribune was only ever a side project.
[00:33:45]  His chief love remained real estate.
[00:33:47]  And while all this is going on, he had very savvy 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.
[00:33:59]  So he makes a fuckload of money after this.
[00:34:01]  And he sells off a bunch of these rental properties of his to Blackstone right before the subprime mortgage crisis hit, crashing the real estate market and earning another feather in the cap of the grave dancer.
[00:34:13]  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.
[00:34:18]  He currently owns some 78,280 apartments in San Francisco, Southern California, New York, all of these places where rent has surged over the last decade.
[00:34:27]  He is a big part of that.
[00:34:29]  Given what happened with the Tribune, you won't be surprised to learn that Sam Zell has decided to pour millions of dollars into spreading propaganda to stop the spread of rent-controlled housing in any form.
[00:34:39]  So again, he destroys all these local news companies and then he starts putting money in order to like back into it.
[00:34:47]  Well, he starts putting money into basically like pushing propaganda that will lead voters not to select different ballot measures and stuff that will allow for rent, like put caps on rent increases and shit.
[00:35:00]  Like, destroys the local media, then bribes his way into trying to like push against any kind of housing justice or anything that will reduce the cost to renters.
[00:35:11]  So, was this a big like 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 network and be like, see, they're lying.
[00:35:28]  They know, they're not trustworthy.
[00:35:30]  I'm not going to say that.
[00:35:32]  I'm not going to say whether or not there was intention there because I can't, there's no evidence of it, certainly.
[00:35:38]  But I don't know.
[00:35:40]  That's what happens.
[00:35:41]  Like, that's the end result of it, right?
[00:35:44]  Is that, yeah, he, it, like, all this shit gets fucked up.
[00:35:49]  So it's, it's good.
[00:35:51]  Now, before we get further into this, what 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.
[00:36:03]  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.
[00:36:13]  But rent control has a long history of helping people avoid disaster.
[00:36:17]  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?
[00:36:28]  It's this thing where you've got like, yeah, the population is growing by X amount.
[00:36:31]  Housing isn't keeping up.
[00:36:32]  So you institute rent control and you reduce like the eviction and you like make it harder to evict people so that folks can hang on until there's more housing.
[00:36:42]  This is the piece that's always missing from those articles.
[00:36:45]  That's like, we need to increase the housing supply.
[00:36:47]  Well, that's not all we need to do.
[00:36:49]  There's other things that have been proven to stop people from winding up on the fucking street.
[00:36:53]  And you're ignoring those in favor of just saying deregulate shit.
[00:36:57]  Alyssa Katz, a researcher at UCLA, examined rent control and housing affordability in LA going back to the 1940s.
[00:37:04]  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 rents spiked.
[00:37:11]  That time, a rent stabilization ordinance, quote, ended dramatic rent increases for incumbent tenants by limiting the rate by which rents could be increased.
[00:37:20]  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.
[00:37:30]  She isn't the only academic making these claims.
[00:37:33]  Nicole Montoyo and Stephen Barton released a study through UC Berkeley looking into which of the different proposed solutions to the housing crisis were likely to bear fruit.
[00:37:41]  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.
[00:37:54]  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.
[00:38:08]  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.
[00:38:21]  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 what a fully competitive market would allow landlords to charge.
[00:38:35]  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.
[00:39:04]  Right.
[00:39:06]  It's pretty cool.
[00:39:08]  It's pretty cool.
[00:39:10]  I like that you use the term a lot in this episode.
[00:39:14]  I find it fascinating because 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.
[00:39:31]  Yeah.
[00:39:32]  I don't understand.
[00:39:33]  Well, you're using the thing that's most fucked up to me, I hadn'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.
[00:39:47]  Right.
[00:39:47]  Like their money is paying to keep rent high.
[00:39:51]  Their money is paying to deregulate the system in order to like make it possible to continue to jack up the rent.
[00:39:58]  Yeah.
[00:39:59]  But that's the whole scheme of renting.
[00:40:01]  It's the entire scheme.
[00:40:05]  You never get anything for it.
[00:40:06]  You're just giving it to the landlords who have now, by this time, paid off their property.
[00:40:11]  They have taxes, sure, but it's still not anywhere near what you're getting in rent from your renters.
[00:40:19]  So what the hell?
[00:40:20]  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.
[00:40:27]  No.
[00:40:27]  And you don't technically own anyway for 30 years.
[00:40:29]  What you're doing here and what guys like Zell are doing is you're recreating feudalism.
[00:40:35]  You're making peons, you know?
[00:40:37]  Like, it's, it's keeping this caste system.
[00:40:40]  Yeah.
[00:40:40]  I want to continue this quote from LA Progressive because I think it's good.
[00:40:44]  The tenant subsidy is paid for extravagant lifestyles for many of California's largest corporate landlords who spend tens of millions of dollars to kill rent control ballot measures in the state.
[00:40:54]  Billionaire 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.
[00:41:02]  Another billionaire corporate landlord, Stephen Schwarzman, owns mansions in St. Tropez, Jamaica, East Hampton, and Palm Beach and throws lavish parties for celebrities and high society friends.
[00:41:11]  At the same time, as sky higher rents force more people onto the streets, nearly 1,500 homeless people have died in Los Angeles in the Los Angeles area between 2020 and 2021.
[00:41:22]  So that's half a 9-11 in a year.
[00:41:25]  That's good.
[00:41:26]  Now, when you start talking about, yeah.
[00:41:29]  I was going to say, you're being too empathetic.
[00:41:31]  Stop it.
[00:41:32]  Yeah.
[00:41:33]  That's what our old buddy Roper would say.
[00:41:35]  Now, I mean, come on.
[00:41:37]  When you're talking about rent control, anytime you talk about rent control, you're going to wind up talking about New York City.
[00:41:42]  Rent control started there too as an emergency measure during World War II.
[00:41:46]  At present, around 45,000 tenants in the city who began their leases before 1971 have rent-controlled apartments.
[00:41:53]  Some of these people are like children or even grandchildren of the people who started the lease because you can pass it on that way.
[00:41:59]  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.
[00:42:08]  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.
[00:42:17]  It's also led to several murders.
[00:42:19]  In 1998, Mark Glass, a landlord based out of downtown Manhattan, grew frustrated that his tenant Bridget Marks wouldn't leave her rent-controlled apartment in a former tenement that he bought and renovated.
[00:42:29]  He hired a hitman to kill her, but that turned out to be a scam.

=== Murders Over Evictions (03:34) ===

[00:42:33]  So he tried to kill her with a heroin overdose.
[00:42:35]  That failed too.
[00:42:37]  Eventually, she realized he was trying to murder her and got the police involved, and they carried out a sting operation.
[00:42:42]  He wound up in prison for like seven to 14 years.
[00:42:45]  In 2002, a New York landlord named Louis Hubricht grew enraged after trying to bribe and cajole his tenants to leave.
[00:42:52]  This worked on everyone but Miss Barbara Kinna, a 67-year-old school librarian.
[00:42:57]  So Hubrick shot her six times with a.38 caliber revolver.
[00:43:00]  He was convicted of murder and sent to prison for the rest of his life.
[00:43:04]  Two years later?
[00:43:05]  Yeah, well, you got that rent, right?
[00:43:08]  Now you can, now you're now your kids can fucking renovate the apartment, get an extra couple of grand out of that place.
[00:43:15]  You know, so two years later in 2004, Juan Basiya Goita pled guilty for hiring two of his tenants to murder two other tenants who lived in a rent-controlled three-bedroom apartment in his building.
[00:43:25]  They'd lived there since they were kids and had legally assumed his father's lease.
[00:43:29]  This enraged Basia Goita.
[00:43:31]  So he hired two other tenants to break into the apartment and stab both brothers who narrowly survived.
[00:43:37]  Now, wouldn't he have had to give him free rent?
[00:43:41]  The tenants he hired to murder?
[00:43:43]  I think he was probably giving them a break on their rent or something.
[00:43:46]  Like, you get like six months off of rent if you stab these guys to death.
[00:43:51]  I got you.
[00:43:52]  Like, I'm going to throw in water for free.
[00:43:54]  I got that bill.
[00:43:55]  If you'll murder these people at the end of the day, it does not work out.
[00:44:00]  So, obviously, these are spectacular, but like not the only cases.
[00:44:05]  You could find a surprising number of cases of landlords murdering or trying to murder tenants over rent-controlled apartments.
[00:44:12]  I mean, that's my solution: murder.
[00:44:14]  Yeah, murder.
[00:44:15]  Well, that's actually the only like that's 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.
[00:44:28]  And we can look at that in terms of like how being houseless, you know, raises the rate at which you're likely to die early, how being evicted makes it harder to get housing.
[00:44:37]  There's a number of different things that we could talk about.
[00:44:40]  But because we're in the middle of like what, year three of the pandemic right now, I want to talk about that.
[00:44:44]  So, I'm going to quote from a write-up by Judd Legum and Tesnim 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.
[00:44:58]  The researchers tested whether lifting eviction moratoriums was associated with COVID-19 incidents and mortality.
[00:45:04]  The results are chilling.
[00:45:06]  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.
[00:45:17]  The infections and fatalities occurred across 27 states that lifted eviction moratoriums during the study period.
[00:45:23]  In Texas alone, the study found that there were 4,456 excess deaths after the state lifted its eviction moratorium on May 18th.
[00:45:30]  The researchers accounted for stay-at-home orders, mask orders, school closures, testing rates, time trends, and other state characteristics to better isolate the impact of eviction moratoriums.
[00:45:39]  Now, that's 4,456 deaths in Texas alone as a result of the lifting of the eviction moratorium.
[00:45:47]  Nationwide pandemic evictions alone have led to at least 10,000 deaths in the last couple of years.
[00:45:54]  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.
[00:46:01]  And the amount of those people are marginalized women oftentimes, and they are single mothers.

=== Deaths From Lifting Moratoriums (04:19) ===

[00:46:07]  It is so high.
[00:46:09]  Yeah, we had a whole episode about housing and how it's affecting single moms more than marginalized black women, essentially, or anyone else, and how this has been impacting them.
[00:46:20]  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.
[00:46:30]  And when you talk about credit scores too, because credit stores, 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 like finance industry money by companies like Blackstone, that means that more often and often, when I was younger, even if I, when you went with like a corporate, you didn't have to do, they didn't care what your credit score was.
[00:46:57]  That's what you need for a mortgage, but that didn't matter for renting a fucking apartment.
[00:47:01]  Now it does.
[00:47:02]  Now you're getting a goddamn phone needs a credit score.
[00:47:05]  Yeah.
[00:47:05]  Yeah.
[00:47:06]  It's outrageous.
[00:47:07]  I mean, again, all of these are, we're not trying.
[00:47:10]  I hope nobody thinks I'm trying to give like this is all of the reasons that rent has gotten high, but these are some big ones.
[00:47:16]  These are major factors in it.
[00:47:17]  And these guys are major factors in it.
[00:47:19]  And that's going to lead me to talk about Steven Schwarzman.
[00:47:23]  Now, I mentioned him earlier, right?
[00:47:24]  When we talked about he's one of the billionaires in Los Angeles throwing money into stopping rent control ballot measures.
[00:47:32]  Schwarzman is not as interesting as Zell.
[00:47:34]  Zell is at least a pretty entertaining piece of shit.
[00:47:38]  Schwarzman is kind of a boring, soulless corporate ghoul, but he's probably more influential in why your rent is raised.
[00:47:46]  So Schwarzman's dad was a dry goods store owner, like Zell, like his family's kind of upper middle class business owners.
[00:47:53]  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.
[00:48:00]  In a recent interview, he said this: quote, Israel has an incredible entrepreneurial community.
[00:48:05]  Of course, it had to, because when it started, there was almost nothing there.
[00:48:08]  Everything had to be invented by somebody.
[00:48:11]  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?
[00:48:24]  And wasn't there like a lot of stuff there?
[00:48:29]  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?
[00:48:38]  Stuff including like wealthy Palestinian families who helped fund the construction of the first Jewish university in Palestine.
[00:48:44]  Anyway, wasn't all of that there?
[00:48:46]  Anyway, whatever.
[00:48:47]  Fuck, like this is pretty normal, like shitty guy stuff.
[00:48:52]  Like, this is not an abnormal attitude, right?
[00:48:56]  But you get where this guy's coming from.
[00:48:58]  So, like Zell, Schwarzman is also a child entrepreneur.
[00:49:01]  Again, the worst warning sign.
[00:49:03]  He started a lawn mowing business where he very quickly stopped mowing any actual lawns.
[00:49:08]  Instead, he got his brothers to do the work while he brought in clients.
[00:49:13]  Yeah, one of those.
[00:49:14]  Again, look, if you see a kid doing this kind of stuff, I don't know.
[00:49:19]  You just gotta poison him a little bit.
[00:49:21]  A little bit of poison.
[00:49:23]  A little bit.
[00:49:23]  A little bit of child poison.
[00:49:25]  Their water as well.
[00:49:26]  Well, it wouldn't be the worst thing.
[00:49:30]  So, anyway, I don't know.
[00:49:32]  We can, I'm gonna, I'm still gonna, I still have to tweak my poison plans.
[00:49:37]  Yeah.
[00:49:37]  Ambitious children plan, but I think there's a lot of future in it.
[00:49:41]  I think it'll look, Sophie.
[00:49:43]  You were just complaining about how high your rent is.
[00:49:46]  You know, what if we could have stopped that with a little bit of poison?
[00:49:49]  Not a lot of poison.
[00:49:50]  I think you could write kids.
[00:49:51]  Another book on this.
[00:49:52]  Yeah.
[00:49:53]  You can do another book on this.
[00:49:54]  Yeah.
[00:49:55]  Yeah.
[00:49:55]  The poisoning children-driven life.
[00:49:59]  Why?
[00:49:59]  With me smiling in a suit.
[00:50:01]  Yeah.
[00:50:02]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:50:03]  Yeah, it's going to be good, Sophie.
[00:50:05]  This is going to be what takes us into the mainstream.
[00:50:08]  It's going to get you money, so it's fine.
[00:50:09]  Can you just do an ad break?
[00:50:11]  You know what else is going to be?
[00:50:13]  I need to pause when it comes to poisoning children.
[00:50:18]  Nobody does it.
[00:50:19]  Like our sponsors at whoever our sponsors are.

=== CIA Sponsors And Poisoning (08:55) ===

[00:50:27]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[00:50:33]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[00:50:39]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[00:50:42]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:50:46]  I doctored the test once.
[00:50:47]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[00:50:50]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[00:50:54]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[00:50:57]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:50:59]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:51:01]  Greg Oespi and Michael Marancine.
[00:51:03]  My mind was blown.
[00:51:05]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:51:07]  This is Love Trap.
[00:51:09]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:51:11]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:51:15]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[00:51:22]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[00:51:26]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:51:36]  10-10 shots fired.
[00:51:38]  City hall building.
[00:51:39]  A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
[00:51:44]  From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
[00:51:50]  How could this have happened in City Hall?
[00:51:51]  Somebody tell me that.
[00:51:52]  Jeffrey Hood did.
[00:51:54]  July 2003.
[00:51:56]  Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
[00:52:01]  Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
[00:52:03]  And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
[00:52:12]  Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
[00:52:15]  A shocking public murder.
[00:52:16]  I screamed, get down, get down.
[00:52:18]  Those are shots.
[00:52:19]  Those are shots.
[00:52:20]  Get down.
[00:52:20]  A charismatic politician.
[00:52:22]  You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
[00:52:24]  I still have a weapon.
[00:52:26]  And I could shoot you.
[00:52:29]  And an outsider with a secret.
[00:52:31]  He alleged you.
[00:52:32]  A victim of flat down.
[00:52:34]  That may or may not have been political.
[00:52:36]  That may have been about sex.
[00:52:38]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:52:51]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:52:55]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:52:58]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:53:01]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:53:05]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:53:08]  I'm Anna Sinfield.
[00:53:10]  And in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:53:12]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:53:14]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:53:19]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:53:21]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:53:23]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:53:25]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:53:28]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:53:29]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:53:32]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:53:36]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:53:38]  Trust me, babe.
[00:53:39]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:53:49]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
[00:53:55]  This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[00:54:01]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
[00:54:08]  From power to parenthood.
[00:54:10]  Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
[00:54:13]  This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
[00:54:15]  From addiction to acceleration.
[00:54:18]  The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
[00:54:22]  You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
[00:54:29]  And it's a multiplayer game.
[00:54:31]  What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
[00:54:38]  Find out a Mostly Human.
[00:54:40]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[00:54:43]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[00:54:54]  Oh, we're back and we're better than ever.
[00:54:57]  So, yeah, I think we're doing good.
[00:55:00]  Sophie?
[00:55:01]  I'm proud of you.
[00:55:03]  Thank you.
[00:55:03]  Thank you.
[00:55:04]  Thank you, Samantha.
[00:55:05]  I'm glad that you at least can be positive towards me while Sophie's being so mean.
[00:55:09]  So we're talking about Steven Schwarzman, who has started a lawnmowing business where he mows no actual lawns because he is that kind of kid.
[00:55:18]  Again, poison.
[00:55:20]  His hunger to make a shitload of money did not run in the family.
[00:55:23]  I find this really interesting.
[00:55:24]  His dad is apparently a very different guy, as this write-up from FinTech magazine makes clear.
[00:55:29]  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.
[00:55:36]  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.
[00:55:46]  I thought that was sort of hard to take in, Schwarzman told the newspaper.
[00:55:49]  His contentment is what made him a remarkable human being.
[00:55:53]  Maybe you could have should have learned something from your dad.
[00:55:55]  Right.
[00:55:56]  Like, 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.
[00:56:07]  But anyway.
[00:56:07]  I mean, this is why you know, like, it's not always a nurture.
[00:56:11]  No, no.
[00:56:12]  His dad seems to be like, look, I have a thriving small business.
[00:56:16]  We live a comfortable life.
[00:56:17]  That's all I need.
[00:56:18]  Everybody's happy.
[00:56:19]  You're healthy.
[00:56:19]  Let's move on.
[00:56:20]  No, his kid is going to become a highest order.
[00:56:23]  Yeah.
[00:56:24]  So Schwartzmann goes to Yale, which is probably where a lot of the ghoul stuff comes in.
[00:56:28]  He joins Skull and Bones.
[00:56:30]  So he's one of those fucking kids.
[00:56:32]  And then he goes on to do finance at a big fancy firm after getting his MBA.
[00:56:37]  His first major employer was Lehman Brothers, which he described as, quote, full of interesting characters, ex-CIA agents, ex-military, strays from the oil industry, family friends, and randoms.
[00:56:48]  He rose.
[00:56:49]  Yeah, very quickly.
[00:56:51]  He becomes a manager.
[00:56:52]  Unbelievable red flags.
[00:56:55]  I know.
[00:56:57]  If there's a company like that, I don't know.
[00:57:00]  Again, poison.
[00:57:01]  Poison them.
[00:57:02]  Once again, once again, if you're on a dating app, you see somebody have their job listed at that company.
[00:57:09]  No.
[00:57:09]  Yeah.
[00:57:10]  It's just okay.
[00:57:11]  Yeah, Sophie's giving all the realistic advice while Robert's over here with his dreams.
[00:57:16]  Just poison them.
[00:57:17]  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.
[00:57:24]  That's all I'm going to say.
[00:57:26]  No comment, but yeah.
[00:57:31]  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.
[00:57:43]  Would be like, oh, yeah, those guys who got rid of the finance industry.
[00:57:46]  Yeah, I like those guys.
[00:57:47]  Those guys are chill.
[00:57:48]  I'm just letting you know, people would still consider the CIA the bad guys.
[00:57:52]  Well, I don't know.
[00:57:54]  Right.
[00:57:55]  Less of the bad guys.
[00:57:56]  Look, if the CIA takes out like McKinsey, you know, you win some of your losers.
[00:58:03]  We're all happy.
[00:58:04]  Yeah.
[00:58:05]  Yeah, whatever.
[00:58:06]  Anyway, so 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.
[00:58:18]  Quote, though it started life as a boot.
[00:58:21]  He's the guy who founds Blackstone.
[00:58:23]  Yeah.
[00:58:23]  I mean, co-founds, but yeah.
[00:58:25]  Samantha is hyped.
[00:58:27]  Yeah, this is this is these are these are some bad dudes.
[00:58:31]  No it started life as a boutique MA advisory firm.
[00:58:34]  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's own money.
[00:58:42]  The time of Blackstone's initial public offering in 2007, the business had more than $88 billion worth of assets under management.
[00:58:49]  The IPO saw shares finish at over $35 each, valuing the firm at around $39 billion and enriching the personal fortunes of both Schwarzman and Peterson.
[00:58:58]  Peterson's the guy he starts the company with.
[00:59:01]  So today, Blackstone claims to have $880 billion of assets under management, including $260 billion in private equity and $280 billion in real estate.
[00:59:11]  Stephen A. Schwarzman is still the company's chairman and CEO and has indicated he has no intention to retire.
[00:59:17]  He has two children: the film producer Teddy Schwarzman and writer and podcaster Zibby Owens.

=== Zibby As A Bookfluencer (04:08) ===

[00:59:23]  I'm just happy that his daughter's a podcaster.
[00:59:25]  Hey, you know what?
[00:59:26]  Let's all learn something together.
[00:59:27]  What is Zibby Owens's podcast?
[00:59:29]  I don't know, but did you just put us on a target list?
[00:59:32]  Maybe.
[00:59:32]  Sophie, what did you do?
[00:59:34]  Sophie.
[00:59:35]  Oh, boys.
[00:59:36]  Oh, no.
[00:59:36]  What did you do to me?
[00:59:37]  Well, I don't know.
[00:59:38]  I don't know what's going on.
[00:59:39]  You know what?
[00:59:40]  I don't know much about this, but her podcast is called Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[00:59:46]  And my no, but that doesn't sound great.
[00:59:51]  But I'm on her website.
[00:59:55]  It's a top literary podcast.
[00:59:57]  She's an author.
[00:59:58]  Oh, but she doesn't.
[01:00:00]  She interviewed Jill Biden.
[01:00:04]  Yeah, she interviews.
[01:00:05]  It seems like she interviews.
[01:00:06]  Yeah, she's a bookfluencer, which is a term.
[01:00:09]  If you're a writer and you ever write the word bookfluencer, you should not be a writer.
[01:00:15]  I'm going to say that right now.
[01:00:17]  I don't know.
[01:00:18]  But is all her books like how to write your child shudderingly or whatever?
[01:00:21]  No, I think she's like reviewing books as like a mom book reviewer.
[01:00:28]  You should be able to do it.
[01:00:28]  Is that what it sounds like she's doing?
[01:00:31]  No, no, I don't think she's going to be a big fan of my book.
[01:00:38]  I don't know.
[01:00:39]  I don't think she's going to.
[01:00:39]  Let's see what essays Zibby writes.
[01:00:41]  There's a picture of her in her chair.
[01:00:46]  Let's see.
[01:00:48]  This rabbit hole is.
[01:00:49]  Yeah, these are mostly just lists of books people can read.
[01:00:52]  So it seems a lot of it's like SEO list of people.
[01:00:56]  Is she trying to make her own like Oprah magazine?
[01:00:58]  Yeah, Oprah's pick.
[01:01:01]  Of course, she's a book fluencer.
[01:01:02]  Yeah.
[01:01:03]  She's very much like Oprah.
[01:01:05]  She's like interviewing Ralph Macchio.
[01:01:10]  That's the karate kid guy, right?
[01:01:12]  There's nothing wrong with that.
[01:01:13]  He just wrote a book.
[01:01:13]  Yeah, he just wrote a book.
[01:01:15]  She's just like a book influencer.
[01:01:17]  Oh, she's hiring.
[01:01:18]  Zibby Media is expanding.
[01:01:20]  They're hiring superstars.
[01:01:21]  NYC and Reality.
[01:01:22]  She's a fan of J.K. Rowling.
[01:01:24]  I bet she's a big fan of J.K. Rowling.
[01:01:26]  She must be because she's NYC's most powerful book fluencer, according to Vulture.
[01:01:32]  She's a book fluencer, Sophie.
[01:01:34]  I don't think that's real.
[01:01:35]  It's also just like if you're saying someone is an influencer, you can be an influencer in the literature industry.
[01:01:43]  You don't have to call someone a bookfluencer, which is a stupid thing.
[01:01:45]  That's not on Zibby, but she brags about it in every page of her website.
[01:01:49]  So it is a little bit on her.
[01:01:52]  Wow, yeah.
[01:01:53]  Zibby Media is hiring a fuckload of people, it looks like.
[01:01:57]  So get on the Zib train.
[01:01:58]  Oh, man.
[01:01:59]  Fast.
[01:02:00]  Oh, she does classes.
[01:02:01]  She does classes.
[01:02:02]  I don't know why we're attacking her so much.
[01:02:04]  Her dad's the bad guy.
[01:02:07]  But she's has she never mind.
[01:02:09]  I actually, there's nothing.
[01:02:11]  Look, we're laughing about this.
[01:02:12]  I can't find anything that's like offensive about her or anything like that.
[01:02:15]  She just we know nothing.
[01:02:17]  She could be a lovely person.
[01:02:20]  She seems fine.
[01:02:21]  I'm sorry.
[01:02:22]  He's a lovely individual.
[01:02:23]  It just, you know, you can't, you know, people can't pick your own family.
[01:02:27]  I will say this.
[01:02:28]  If you claim to claim to love literature and somebody calls you a bookfluencer, you do have a moral responsibility to the art of writing to say no.
[01:02:39]  You're like, you're not wrong.
[01:02:40]  That's not a term we're going to use.
[01:02:42]  Bookfluencer is not a word.
[01:02:44]  Robert as a blue bookfluencer.
[01:02:48]  Nothing is a fluencer.
[01:02:51]  I'm really having a hard time even saying the word.
[01:02:54]  I'm so angry about that.
[01:02:56]  That's all.
[01:02:57]  Honestly, Zibby has done nothing wrong but use that word.
[01:03:01]  That one word, which I've never heard of.
[01:03:03]  I've heard TikTok books.
[01:03:07]  Book book talk or something like that, which is fine.
[01:03:09]  Yeah, book talk is fine.
[01:03:11]  Because you're a bookfluencer is fucking nonsense.
[01:03:16]  I've never been angrier.
[01:03:17]  I've never been angrier in my entire life than I am right now.
[01:03:21]  Get back to the program.
[01:03:22]  This is so much worse than Warflow.
[01:03:24]  Back to her father.
[01:03:25]  Okay.
[01:03:26]  Who is a lot worse?
[01:03:27]  Well, but I bet he doesn't use the word bookfluencer.

=== The Ugly Economy Con (06:39) ===

[01:03:31]  So most of you probably know what happened to Lehman Brothers, which was forced into bankruptcy after helping to cause the 2008 financial crash.
[01:03:38]  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.
[01:03:46]  Schwarzman 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.
[01:03:52]  They lose a little bit of money up front, but they're heavily invested in companies like Starwood Waypoint and Invitation Homes, which merge in 2017 and start buying up all of these fucking properties that like are suddenly fucking bargain ben.
[01:04:07]  A website for tenants of innovation of Invitation Homes, InvitationTenants.com, notes, They 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.
[01:04:23]  Lower post-crisis home prices could have been an opportunity to increase affordable homeownership, but too often instead, Wall Street buyers swept in while neighborhood families were left out of the game altogether, unable to compete with cash buyers or denied access to credit.
[01:04:35]  For 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.
[01:04:44]  It was a market opportunity.
[01:04:46]  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.
[01:04:53]  The firm, which began buying homes in earnest in 2011, is estimated to have spent $10 billion on its foreclosed home to rental bet.
[01:05:01]  So that's cool.
[01:05:03]  In the years since the financial crisis, Blackstone Group has more than doubled the assets under management from $90 billion to $218 billion of real estate assets in its first five years after the financial crisis alone.
[01:05:15]  As a result, Blackstone today is among the largest corporate landlords in the United States, and it reported its highest earnings ever this year on the strength of rising rents in its real estate portfolio.
[01:05:26]  Here's Quartz.
[01:05:27]  Quote: On the January 27th call with investors, Blackstone's executives explained rents for real estate sectors in their portfolio had risen as much as two or three times faster than the overall inflation rate.
[01:05:37]  Relatively short leases on their properties have allowed them to raise prices quickly, capturing more value from renters, even as the inflation rate in the U.S. topped 7%.
[01:05:46]  Awesome stuff.
[01:05:47]  Really, really good.
[01:05:50]  So again, I don't know much about real estate, nor do I know much about the corporations, especially like Blackstone.
[01:05:56]  And it's been a recent thing that I'm like understanding all of these giant buyouts.
[01:06:01]  And I do know they profited off the 2008.
[01:06:05]  They did great off of the 2008 corporation.
[01:06:07]  Right.
[01:06:08]  For closing on families and leaving them homeless.
[01:06:10]  And we know all of that and houseless and without houses.
[01:06:14]  But was Blackstone involved with all the military buyers?
[01:06:17]  Are they war profiteers as well?
[01:06:18]  Or is that just in the back of my imagination?
[01:06:21]  Oh, I think you may be thinking of Blackwater.
[01:06:23]  Let me double check.
[01:06:24]  Okay.
[01:06:25]  I mean, they do a lot of, they manage a lot of investments.
[01:06:28]  So I wouldn't be surprised if there's some degree to which they're involved in this.
[01:06:31]  One sec.
[01:06:32]  I feel like maybe again, yeah, I might be confusing that like they had private organizations.
[01:06:39]  Yeah, I mean, they're involved.
[01:06:40]  Developing.
[01:06:43]  They invest in like they're private equity firms.
[01:06:47]  So they have investments in aerospace and defense companies.
[01:06:51]  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.
[01:06:58]  It's just sort of a side effect of the thing they do, which is that they invest in businesses that have reliable rates of return.
[01:07:05]  And that includes the defense industry.
[01:07:08]  Yeah.
[01:07:09]  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.
[01:07:23]  Quote, some evidence suggests that private equity firms, in contrast, are willing to engage in predatory practices to realize short-term returns.
[01:07:30]  Blackstone's target properties in Southern California suggest an investment strategy similar to flipping single-family homes.
[01:07:36]  Buy-old properties invest in cosmetic upgrades such as new appliances and facade improvements and then increase their rents.
[01:07:43]  Furthermore, some anecdotal evidence also indicates that private equity firms are less conscientious landlords in the single-family rental market.
[01:07:50]  Researchers and journalists have documented concerns about poor quality housing, difficulties raised by tenants trying to communicate with landlords when problems arise and higher rates of evictions.
[01:07:59]  And we can thank Mr. Schwarzman for an awful lot of that.
[01:08:04]  Yeah, so that's it.
[01:08:05]  That's some people who have made the rent high.
[01:08:10]  Steven Schwarzman, that Zell motherfucker, Roper, all these assholes.
[01:08:16]  Fuck them all.
[01:08:17]  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?
[01:08:27]  I'm just everyone seems to say we're heading for a recession.
[01:08:32]  That would make sense.
[01:08:33]  Except for the fact.
[01:08:35]  I was just 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 vibe.
[01:08:51]  It sounds like what's happening is they're trying to, the Fed is trying to cut inflation by raising interest rates.
[01:08:59]  And a bunch of companies are using inflation as a hedge for rising prices and making record profits right now, in 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 and the unemployment rate rises.
[01:09:22]  Like that's, I think more or less what's probably going to happen.
[01:09:26]  I don't know.
[01:09:26]  We'll see how it is.
[01:09:27]  Like 2020 was pretty ugly too.
[01:09:29]  That was a gnarly recession, but it didn't last very long.
[01:09:32]  I don't know.
[01:09:33]  I'm not an I'm not an economy guy.
[01:09:36]  And I kind of expert of all things, Robert.
[01:09:39]  I know.
[01:09:40]  I kind of think most of the people who are economy guys are just engaged in some kind of con or another.
[01:09:45]  But yeah, it's probably going to be pretty ugly in the near future.
[01:09:48]  And these are the people who are going to make sure that a lot more folks wind up in on the street when it does.
[01:09:55]  Right.
[01:09:55]  So solution, poison.
[01:09:59]  Poison is a good solution.
[01:10:01]  Keep an eye on kids who express an entrepreneurial desire.
[01:10:04]  Don't trust that.
[01:10:07]  Yeah.

=== Win Some Lose Some (06:34) ===

[01:10:10]  And I don't know if you don't call yourself a bookfluencer, Civi.
[01:10:15]  Well, that's not going to be high on his list now.
[01:10:18]  Oh, man.
[01:10:19]  I'm livid.
[01:10:20]  Oh, okay.
[01:10:21]  So his son, Teddy, not the other kid that he had, is the producer who made the imitation game.
[01:10:30]  Imitation or imitation?
[01:10:32]  Imitation.
[01:10:33]  Yeah.
[01:10:33]  You win some, you lose some.
[01:10:35]  You win some, you lose some, I guess.
[01:10:37]  I haven't seen that movie, but.
[01:10:39]  Oh, no, I have seen that movie.
[01:10:40]  That's the movie about Turing that came out.
[01:10:42]  That was actually pretty good.
[01:10:42]  Yeah.
[01:10:43]  It was.
[01:10:44]  So, you know, yeah, you win some, you lose some, right?
[01:10:47]  That's speaking of fluencer.
[01:10:52]  He's apparently who produced at least one good movie while his dad was buying up all of the housing that was briefly affordable after the financial crisis.
[01:11:00]  Like I said, you win some, you lose some.
[01:11:02]  And speaking of winning some, Samantha, do you have any pluggables?
[01:11:05]  Yeah.
[01:11:05]  Yes.
[01:11:06]  Come and visit me over stuff mom never told you.
[01:11:08]  Nowhere near the same mom reads, doesn't read things.
[01:11:13]  I don't know.
[01:11:13]  I'm not a book fluencer.
[01:11:15]  I'm so sorry to say.
[01:11:16]  Yeah.
[01:11:17]  And I can't read it.
[01:11:18]  Oh, well, that's a new one.
[01:11:21]  And my Twitter is McVay Samantha and then Israel McVay.samantha.
[01:11:27]  So if you want to see pictures of my dog and me complaining about things, come visit me.
[01:11:34]  Yep.
[01:11:35]  Find Samantha on the internet.
[01:11:38]  Find the kid in your neighborhood who starts a lawnmowing business where he doesn't mow any lawns.
[01:11:44]  And I don't know, just like smoke around him.
[01:11:50]  Yeah, smoke real close to that kid.
[01:11:52]  Just hang out next to that kid and smoke a shitload of cigarettes.
[01:11:56]  My God.
[01:11:58]  It'll be good.
[01:11:58]  Load of cigarettes.
[01:12:00]  Anyways, oh, we have a new podcast on CoolZone Media.
[01:12:03]  It's called Internet.
[01:12:04]  Wow, do we?
[01:12:05]  And it's hosted by the one and only Bridget Todd.
[01:12:09]  Check it out on, you know, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:12:15]  I've had to say that a lot.
[01:12:18]  Yeah.
[01:12:18]  Fucking fucking do that.
[01:12:21]  I also have a book called After the Revolution.
[01:12:23]  You do.
[01:12:23]  You can buy it.
[01:12:24]  You know what?
[01:12:24]  Which, by the way, my partner loved.
[01:12:26]  He just pumped it because he wanted to tell me how much you like the book.
[01:12:30]  Oh, thank you.
[01:12:31]  Well, maybe he can help.
[01:12:33]  Maybe you can help book fluencer Zippy.
[01:12:36]  Yeah, so this is Joe.
[01:12:38]  I hope he gets a stay on this podcast.
[01:12:40]  He really likes the book.
[01:12:42]  He cannot hear you because I have an earpiece in.
[01:12:44]  Oh, you don't have it.
[01:12:44]  Okay, would you have to tell him I'll smoke some meats and thank you for that offer of illegal drugs.
[01:12:50]  Oh my God.
[01:12:51]  No, no, no, no.
[01:12:53]  Samantha, bring him back on.
[01:12:54]  Bring him back on.
[01:12:57]  I want to get a neutral opinion about this.
[01:13:00]  Okay.
[01:13:01]  Let me give him an earpiece.
[01:13:02]  Okay.
[01:13:03]  Yeah.
[01:13:03]  Well, I think it worked.
[01:13:04]  This is Joe.
[01:13:05]  Joe, this is Robert.
[01:13:06]  Joe.
[01:13:06]  Hi, Robert.
[01:13:07]  I'm going to say a word that a person is using to describe their job.
[01:13:11]  And I just want you to give me the emotion that hearing this word for the first time inspires in you, okay?
[01:13:18]  Nervous.
[01:13:19]  No.
[01:13:19]  Tell me.
[01:13:20]  Book fluencer.
[01:13:22]  Oh, no.
[01:13:24]  I'm going to call her that intimately.
[01:13:26]  I hope you know that.
[01:13:29]  It's a horrible word, right?
[01:13:30]  It's a terrible word.
[01:13:33]  So, do you get that often?
[01:13:34]  Is that a no, you do?
[01:13:36]  That's what we're going to call Robert.
[01:13:37]  It's a book podcast.
[01:13:38]  Absolutely not.
[01:13:39]  How dare you?
[01:13:41]  No, it's from a lady with a book podcast whose dad forbids to come up to this podcast again.
[01:13:47]  No, you're coming back every week.
[01:13:48]  You made me happy.
[01:13:51]  I'm happy that you added book fluencer to my vernacular.
[01:13:55]  Also, it is now going to be under your titles.
[01:13:57]  Thank you, Robert.
[01:13:58]  Robert Evans, book fluencer.
[01:14:00]  Book fluencer.
[01:14:02]  All right, everybody.
[01:14:03]  Why don't we all go influence some motherfucking books?
[01:14:06]  I will come to Atlanta.
[01:14:07]  Yeah.
[01:14:07]  All right.
[01:14:08]  Goodbye.
[01:14:11]  Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
[01:14:15]  For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:14:24]  In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
[01:14:32]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[01:14:35]  I doctored the test once.
[01:14:37]  It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
[01:14:42]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[01:14:44]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
[01:14:46]  My mind was blown.
[01:14:48]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[01:14:49]  This is Love Trapped.
[01:14:51]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[01:14:52]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[01:14:57]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:15:04]  10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
[01:15:07]  How could this ever happen in City Hall?
[01:15:09]  Somebody tell me that.
[01:15:11]  A shocking public murder.
[01:15:12]  This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
[01:15:18]  They screamed, get down, get down.
[01:15:20]  Those are shots.
[01:15:22]  A tragedy that's now forgotten.
[01:15:25]  And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
[01:15:29]  Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:15:39]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
[01:15:47]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:15:49]  He is not going to get away with this.
[01:15:51]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:15:53]  We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
[01:15:58]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:15:59]  Trust me, babe.
[01:16:00]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:16:10]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
[01:16:15]  This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
[01:16:18]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
[01:16:25]  An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
[01:16:29]  My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
[01:16:32]  Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
[01:16:41]  This is an iHeart podcast.
[01:16:43]  Guaranteed human.