Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Sam Zell: the Elon Musk of Real Estate

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

Robert is joined again by Samantha Mcvey to continue to discuss why the rent is so damn high.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh yeah, it's behind the bastards. Oh my heart stopped. Samantha, do you see how she treats me sometimes? It's a fucking, it's two o'clock on a Tuesday when we're recording this. I don't, I don't need the drama. I believe I have civil rights, Sophie. I'm sorry, do I not have civil rights?

What does that have to do with you doing quite literally the worst radio voice I've ever heard? Well, that's your opinion. This feels like my rights are being violated. Samantha McVeigh. Hi. How are you doing? I am wonderful. How are you?

Samantha, 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? 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. And yes, you can come and listen about things your mother may not have told you. If you have a cool mom, maybe they did tell you. I don't know. That is extremely based.

I'm happy that we're talking today about why the rent is so damn high. But you know what else is too high right now, Samantha? Tell me. The Great Lakes. They actually hit record highs this year, which is causing serious problems for all of the communities who live near those lakes. And Samantha, that's why we got a nukem. This is his revenge for me telling him.

Have you have you have you thought about my feelings when he does it? Have you thought about how many nukes the United States has that are just sitting around doing nothing? We spent a lot of money on those nukes. I understand that there is a lot and it's one of those that I'm like, I really hope I'm in the center of it. So I'm just decimated if it, you know, this happens with all of them being deployed. I want to be right there in the middle. We're going to shoot those missiles right at Lake Superior,

Lake Ontario, the other ones. Take them out. Doesn't even know the names of the Great Lakes, but wants to nuke them. Right. Yeah. May I ask why? What have they done to you other than for one thing? They're at record highs, which is dangerous.

For another thing, you were listed to the Gordon Lightfoot song, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. No. Well, maybe you should, Samantha. It's about a boat full of brave men who are killed by the vicious Lake Superior during a storm that we could have nuked away. But what were they doing there? They were trying to take steel from someplace to some other place.

They're just being good sailors. Well, we have a lot of Great Lakes sympathizers. This is not a bit, Sophie. This is a serious political exercise. I believe I have the right to advocate. Sophie, if I'm remembering... This is dangerous. I never knew I needed it.

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 that I don't hold... Did you actually do that video? No, I have not. I have not done it yet. I was going to say there's no way you fucking did that on time. There's no fucking way.

Absolutely not. I know there is a video, and it probably says that you can't stop me from wanting to nuke the Great Lakes. I haven't seen it either. I haven't done the training either, so I can't conform more than I. I did it. That's good. I want you to know I did it.

It didn't count it, and I have to do it again. I'm very upset about this. Wow. I'm so sorry. I'm not doing it. I'm so upset about this. Samantha, I'm going to play a little bit of politics here. I'm going to play a little bit of politics.

What if I add making us not have to do this thing to the bill that will nuke the Great Lakes? You know? You know what? See? See? It's not a pork. Exactly.

Exactly. This is how we make sausage, baby. Sorry to the residents there. No, no. It's good for them. It'll keep the lakes off their backs. Yeah, it'll be fine. I don't think it's good for them.

I don't think they would say that. Water soaks up radiation real well, so it'll be good. You know what it'll be like. It'll be like everybody's got a hot tub for a little while. That's going to be nice. Anyway, today we are going to start by talking about a bastard. Samuel Zell. Z-E-L-L.

Now, he was born Schmooley Zilanka. I think I'm saying that close enough to right. On September 28, 1941, his parents, Rukla and Berak, were Jewish immigrants from Poland. If you hadn't guessed that they were Polish by the last name Zilanka. Yeah, his father had made good money as a grain merchant, and when Germany was gearing up to invade in 1939,

he was one of those guys who was like, probably isn't going to go well. Probably time to be getting out of Poland. I think we should leave now. This is a good time to leave, y'all. Yeah, time to bounce. That was a great time to leave Poland. So, Samuel Zell.

Samuel. He gets raised in Chicago, where his father takes up a new business. Oh, good. Okay, so you guys are both chitown babies. No, I'm not. I said, oh, Sammy. There's no shot.

Oh, I thought you said, Sammy. I thought you were saying that you had also grown up in Chicago. No, not that cool. I'm not that cool. Well, I don't know. Chicago is certainly a city. So, yeah, his dad. He's just trying to bend everybody.

That's right. That's right. There's only one city we like on behind the bastards, and it's Pittsburgh, where I have never been. So, his father takes up a new business as a jewelry wholesaler. From early on, Samuel was very interested in business. He's one of these kids who decides, as a child,

capitalism is the thing for him, which another warning sign, right? Of course. Look, this kid is a refugee from war-torn Europe. I have a lot of sympathy for that, but no matter what your background is, if at age, let's say 12, you're talking about how you want to be an entrepreneur,

we got to slow those kids down. Maybe like put some wasp spray and like the school of ventilation ducts or something, but we got to slow those kids down. They're not doing any good for us. They're just hustling. That's what he's going to do. I don't know.

If he'd just like gotten a little bit more lead maybe, or maybe a little less oxygen, maybe a little bit more CO2 in the house. Anyway, he doesn't. So, things are fine for him. He starts his first business at age 12. He realizes that local kids in his upper-class suburb craved pornography,

but they couldn't purchase it in any of the stores that they could reach on their bicycles. So, Sam found a place in the city where he could buy Playboy magazines in bulk for 50 cents each, and then resell them for between $1.50 and $3 each. Holy crap, this kid. Okay, wow, that's impressive.

Well, it's impressive, but also that's a bad sign. It's a bad sign, but damn. Yes, yes, it's a good grift, but it's a bad sign. He later called this his quote, first lesson in supply and demand, bracking it to a 2013 meeting of the Urban Land Institute. For the rest of that year,

I became an importer of Playboy magazines to the suburbs. Now, again, normally I think this is a good thing because the suburbs are desperately boring and they needed the mid-core porn that Samuel offered. They need that porn, yeah. Look, when I was a kid, my first pornography was porn. We found in a little stretch of the woods in the middle of our suburbs

that all of me and my cousins would like run to and you could go like, there's just like this box of Playboys. Many people, there's the legend of Johnny Porno's seed. Somebody seeded. Wait, it was in the woods? Yeah, woods porn is a thing. Okay, there are so many questions.

I guess we don't have the time, but wow. Well, I don't think Gen Z has this because they've got the internet, but like I encountered my first porn before the internet was common and it was porn that was found like, it was kind of in like a little wooded area behind the housing development, you know?

Everyone had that experience. This is Texas, right? Yeah, this is Texas, but I know many other people had found woods porn. Wood porn, yeah. Yeah, which at least nobody, I didn't have to pay for my woods porn. Sure, it was kind of moldy and like crumbling

and all of the colors weren't clear, but I was pretty sure you could see some nipples in there. You know, when I was like seven. Wait, it's kind of like the, because who would try to watch porn on static TV? Yeah, yeah, it's exactly like that. Showtime or Max? It's the physical version of static TV.

Yeah. Oh my God. All right, let's go. He is peddling mid-core pornography to the suburbs. Samuel graduates from Highland Park High School, because again, his parents are rich. That is a nice part of Chicago. He's accepted by the University of Michigan.

He is less interested in his studies than he is in finding new ways to make a buck. His roommate mentions to him one day that their landlord was developing a new property, an apartment complex. Samuel thought it would be easy to manage, later saying, quote, I had plenty of faith in my own,

what I call salesmanship. I could rent them and most important of all, I was a student and it was student housing. I thought I could relate. In return for running and maintaining the building, this friend of mine and I each got an apartment. So number one, for an idea of kind of how this kid works, he's able to talk a landlord into this arrangement.

And then he's able to turn this arrangement into a business that's shocking size. By the time he graduated in 1966, Zell had managed with his partner more than 4,000 departments and personally owned between 100 and 200 of them. This is a huge business. He's very good at this. Now he sells his share of the property management business

he'd started to his partner and he moves back to Chicago where he passes the bar exam and he joins a law firm. Law was what he'd studied to do in becoming a lawyer had been his goal for years, but like now that he sells his real estate business and he starts working as a lawyer, he's like kind of fucking hate being a lawyer. This guy just sucks ass.

So pretty much immediately he quits and decides to go back into real estate and make it his full-time career. In 1968 he founded a company and brought in his old business partner and he started buying properties. Now he happened to get into the market right as it was hitting, it was on an overbuilding spree.

Like again, one of these times when like they're building way more housing than is needed because there's this irrational exuberance of investors and buyers and whatnot which leads to a market crash in 1973. Multi-family residential real estate plummeted in value first and a lot of commercial property loans went into default.

So numerous properties are abandoned mid-construction, right? Companies like suddenly we can't finance finishing this house so there's just this lot with like a basement dug or some shit on it and Zell sees this as an opportunity. He can buy up valuable real estate for nothing and cheaply put it into a portfolio

that he can profit from later when the market recovers, right? Oh, yes. Tail as old as time. So he has other businesses as the years go by. He purchases an agricultural company that's closing and then a nitrogen plant that's going into bankruptcy. Then he buys a potash plant and starts like making fertilizer.

So he's buying these businesses that are failing and then he integrates them together into one bigger business that's able to succeed. This is a pattern that asserts itself over and over again. Samuel Zell looks for misfortune, finds a business or a property that's fallen on hard times, buys them up at a very low price,

then repackages them and sells them for a profit. In an article for the New York University Review, Zell described his strategy as dancing on the skeletons of other people's mistakes. This earns him the... Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's what he's doing. And he gets the nickname Grave Dancer as a result. Oh, he's bad.

Oh, no. Yeah, I mean, that's funny. That is kind of cool. But it's not about to be. So sometimes... Oh, he called it cool. Yeah, sometimes he has to make the grave to dance on it. So he buys a controlling interest in the Tribune Company,

which owned the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. And I want to quote now from a New York Times article talking about the guy that Zell brings in to run the Tribune, a man named Randy Michaels. Quote, after Mr. Michaels arrived, according to two people at the bar that night, he sat down and said, and offered the waitress $100 to show him her breasts.

The group sat dumbfounded. Here was this guy who was responsible for all these people getting drunk in front of senior people and saying this to a waitress who many of us knew, said one of the Tribune executives present who declined to be identified because he had left the company. It did not want to be quoted. I have never seen anything like it.

So... Mr. Michaels denies this happened, saying the people who told the Times the anecdote were lying or mistaken. But boy, a lot of people have similar anecdotes about this guy, who Zell brings in to run the Tribune. Now, Zell's plan seems to have been that he buys this company and he finances the deal. This might sound familiar.

So the Tribune, massive media company. He's only able to buy it by borrowing heavily. That's how he finances it. He gets a bunch of banks to front the money that he can't put up front. And then as soon as he buys it, his plan is to engage in aggressive cost cutting that can make the venture profitable

after trimming all of the employees. It's almost exactly like what Elon Musk is about to do with Twitter, right? Right. That sounds super familiar. Yeah, it sounds really familiar. Zell is doing this same thing. And when he buys the company, he allegedly tells the employees,

there's a new sheriff in town. Which, like, you don't actually say that, Sam. You don't really say that. Nobody says that. What? So in buying and tanking the Tribune, Zell brought harm to a number of hugely influential local papers. In addition to the Los Angeles Times

and the Chicago Tribune, the Tribune owned the Baltimore Sun, the Hartford Current, the Orlando Sentinel, as well as the Tribune and the LA Times. So he has bought up the most influential local news sources in the country. And he's about to run them into the ground. So as soon as he buys them, he goes on, like,

a tour through all of these different properties, these different newsrooms, giving speeches. He's famous for cursing a lot in his speeches, I think, to try to be entertaining and stuff. But over and over again, the thing he tries to sell his new staff on is the fact that he's going to make them rich with his new management skills.

At one point, he writes to the Tribune's employees, I have said repeatedly that no matter what happens in this transaction, my lifestyle won't change. Yours, on the other hand, could change dramatically if we get this right. They're not going to get this right. These are all newspapers, right? That's the business.

Fairly large newspapers. The team he brings in to take over management are all radio people. In particular, they're all shock jock DJs. I knew it. Mr. Michaels, who's running it, is a former shock jock. He's like a Howard Stern type. And so that's the people,

he's like, you know, who can run a bunch of local newspapers is like drive time radio DJs who curse on the air. That's who will turn the newspaper business around. Now, since Mr. Michaels is a shock jock, the people that he brings in to help him run the company are also all former shock jocks. And one of the first things they do is they rewrite the employee handbook.

Working at Tribune means accepting that you might hear a word that you personally might not use. You might experience an attitude you don't share. You might hear a joke that you don't consider funny. That is because a loose, fun, nonlinear atmosphere is important to the creative process. This should be understood and should not be a surprise and not considered harassment.

Now, yes, of course, if you're working 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... But if you're putting that in your handbook specifically to lead to

you shouldn't ever complain about harassment, that's because you want to sexually harass a bunch of people. That's why you're putting that in there. And then you're going to be racist. So all of those things are going to happen. So go ahead and expect it for 10, like, it's 1909, essentially. Yeah, it's like everything else. Yeah, so they took this

don't-call-our-harassment-harassment seriously. Mr. Michaels hired a woman named Kim Johnson to be his SVP of local sales. In the news release announcing her hire, he said that she was a, quote, former waitress at Knockers, for hot racks and cold brews. I think this was a joke

based on a fake restaurant chain, but anyway, it's a weird thing to say about someone you brought on as a VP. Right, but they can say, we have a woman. We have a woman, not sexes. Exactly, we have a woman and we only a little bit compliment in her knockers

in the press release we put out. In the press release announcing her hire. Jesus. The press release. So this is like what they're putting out publicly to the industry. We hired this lady because of her tits. That's literally...

You're welcome. People might have thought at first, oh, this is just like a thing he said at an office party that was inappropriate. No, no, no. They published this. So in his first tour of the company, Zell promised there would be no job cuts,

but of course there were many of them. And what's worse, his business acumen to try to like refocus all of these legitimate newspapers on cheesy game show tactics. The company introduced promotions that seemed to have been drawn from the radio handbook at four of the company's television stations

an event called Cash Grab in which the viewer was led into a bank vault and allowed to scoop up dollar bills was inserted in the middle of the station's newscasts. At WPIX TV in New York, the viewers were cheered on by clapping Hooters waitresses, giving the station

the experience of televised shock radio. He literally, you know like, you ever seen RoboCop? No, sorry. Have you ever seen like Idiocracy? Nope. Oh, okay. Both of those movies have like fake TV news that has like,

that's just like super trashy and gross and stuff because it's dystopian societies. He's just done that for real. He's just actually made that as a Wasn't there an Eastern European station that actually had women stripping as they were telling news in order to engage

viewers, but they're trying to do real news. I feel like I saw this awhile ago and I was like, what is happening? It seems like a thing that happened. To be honest, having just being like, hey, we're the news and also people will strip on the news is way less gross to me than, hey, we're gonna

split the news up with Cash Grab where people stuck in a bank vault have to grab dollars. That's much grosser to me than just like I guess not people will be naked. Yeah. It's pretty cool. So Zell hired a chief

innovation officer who is like a maniac and would regularly write 5,000 word typo riddled memos to journalists and editors that they would be forced to read. Stuff like rock and roll musically is behind us. All caps, news and information is the new rock and roll.

This is like a corporate memo. Their director of innovation is like the Boomer Joe. Guys, we gotta make the news be rock and roll. 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 and he shocked that this is allowed. He has no idea that this is how like journalism works that reporters go to war. What? This is the director of innovation for one of the largest newspaper companies in the country. Were they one

step away of just becoming a tabloid at this point? Yeah, I mean, that's what he's trying to do. He's trying to like his ideas that we make it profitable by, yeah, turning it into a tabloid, stick some tits on there, stick some game show stuff in there. It'll be great. I hate this guy. Yeah, I don't like this guy. You know

what I do like though? I like the fact that the Great Lakes being the largest freshwater bodies on the planet, plenty of room for the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Yeah, apparently. I try to get it there, Sophie.

Sophie. Sophie. I just like don't care anymore. I care about your hometown and I'm trying to stop it from being eaten by a lake. Well, no, just the lakes. Just the lakes. Just the lakes. My hometown isn't there, so.

Well, then everything's going to be fine. Here's some ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting

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we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good-bad-ass way.

He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass

and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild

stories. And there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev

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days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see

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when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI

on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Sophie agreed off screen that my political career has a lot of promise. Everything's good. Nuke the Great Lakes

the middle of climate change. It'll stop it. It'll make the world darker. You ever see Snowpiercer? Yes, I have seen that. Did you see? I only watched the first one and a half seconds of Snowpiercer

but that's basically my idea. Eating roaches? Putting children to work? I didn't see any of those parts of the movie but I assume all of those things were also positive because it sounds like it started with a great idea. Super positive.

So James Warren, the former managing editor and Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune said of Zell's time running the company they wheeled around here doing what they wished showing a clear contempt for most everyone that was here and used power just because they had it.

They used the notion of reinventing the newspapers simply as a cover for cost cutting. Now during his time running the company Zell also became a pioneer of clickbait advertising. Advertising? He helps make this happen. Advertising has been inserted into the Los Angeles Times

in new and unsettling ways. In March an ad mimicking the front page for Disney's Alice in Wonderland was wrapped around the first section and in July a fake version of the newspaper section for late breaking news called LAT Extra was wrapped around the real one promoting Universal Studios' King Kong attraction

with a lead story that read Universal Studios partially destroyed. In April of 2009 an advertisement posing as a news article about NBC's new show Southland appeared on the front page. In July the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, the governing body of the County of Los Angeles, sent a letter of protest

saying the use of advertising disguised as news makes a mockery of the newspaper's mission. Some might argue that yes that's exactly what it does but that's kind of the point. Now what's interesting though is that none of this makes the business profitable and actually making all of these

newspapers much worse does not make people more likely to use them. Zell also had loaded the Tribune with so much debt by the deal that bankruptcy was basically inevitable. It was almost impossible for the company to ever turn a profit

because of how much debt he'd loaded it up with. I would assume with the clickbait that he's getting money from the advertisers and that's how he was going to make money but not even that? No, because people stopped visiting the website because it's shit. Investors hurt

by the deal later accused him of basically loading the company up with debt and then sinking it on purpose and I'm going to quote now from the Chicago Tribune. 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 and heavily leveraged a $2.2 billion deal. At the time, Zell blamed a perfect storm of industry and economic forces, the Great Recession but the bankruptcy case turned on charges leveled by junior creditors that the debt burden was unsustainable.

Now one of the things again I found interesting here 2008's prior to the social media age taking off really it's when we have our last big economic crash local newspapers are the primary way people get news and Zell absolutely crashes them in this multi

he gets to banks to back him in this multi-billion dollar deal that he could never make a profit on and then he sabotages the companies that he's bought and destroys them and fucks over a bunch of people and then blames it on the recession. Elon Musk is currently carrying out a tens of billions

of dollar deal on what is a lot of people's source of local news right as we're about to have a recession and has been talking about how he plans to fire 75% of Twitter staffers it's cool it's neat that these billionaires need to just keep fucking with people's ability to get news because of their

own egos when they want to. They'll be fine they're going to have a fun year of stories and then a lot of people's lives will be worse and they will not suffer any consequences which is good yeah it's great so obviously legally nobody ever

accepts responsibility for anything however there's a bunch of litigation like ten years of it over this Zell starts to call it the deal from hell of the people suing him over this and eventually the litigation trust gets around 200 million dollars to redistribute to creditors

as long as no liability or wrongdoing is assumed by Zell and other defendants so there you go now I want to read to you that above I read to you an above excerpt from the Chicago Tribune which is a summary of the deal ten years on I think it's interesting how this New York Times article

which actually focuses on the working people hurt by the deal describes it more viscerally because that one is just kind of like they lost this amount of money and now there's a big bankruptcy the New York Times quote is going to be a lot grittier less than a year after Mr. Zell

bought the company it tipped into bankruptcy listing 7.6 billion dollars in assets against a debt of 13 billion making it the largest bankruptcy in the history of the American media industry more than 4,200 people have lost job since the purchase while resources for the Tribune newspapers and television stations have been

slashed the new management did transform the work culture however based on interviews with more than 20 employees and former employees of Tribune Mr. Michaels and his executives use of sexual innuendo poisonous workplace banter and profane invective shocked and offended people throughout the company

Tribune Tower, the architectural symbol of the state company came to resemble a frat house complete with poker parties, jukeboxes and pervasive sex talk so they crashed this company lost 4,200 people their jobs the largest collapse in the history of American media

but they got to be playboys for a little while yeah they just pay 7 billion dollars to have a frat house for adults a frat house where they also got to fuck with serious people who were trying to report on important local news issues right

so number one this helps destroy local news nationwide like now it is effectively dead as a meaningful force this is not the only reason for that but it is a big part of it so that's pretty cool but obviously for Zell, fucking with the Tribune

was only ever a side project his chief love remained real estate and while all this is going on he had very savally sold his profile or his portfolio of properties off to the Blackstone Group for 39 billion dollars the largest leveraged buyout in history at the time

so he makes a fuckload of money after this and he sells off a bunch of these rental properties of his to Blackstone right before the subprime mortgage crisis hit crashing the real estate market and earning another feather in the cap of the grave dancer when the market was at its lowest point

he used some of the pile of cash that he'd earned to buy up more properties he currently owns some 78,280 apartments in San Francisco Southern California, New York all of these places were rent has surged over the last decade he is a big part of that given what happened with the Tribune

you won't be surprised to learn that Sam Zell has decided to pour millions of dollars into spreading propaganda to stop the spread of rent controlled housing in any form so again he destroys all these local news companies and then he starts putting money in order to like back into it

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 what rent increases and shit 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 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 they're lying they're not trustworthy I'm not going to say whether or not there was intention there

because I can't there's no evidence of it certainly but I don't know that's what happens like that's the end result of it right like all this shit gets fucked up so it's good

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 this is a subject that is controversial today largely because of landlords like Zell

who claim it cuts into their profit so much they can't afford to do stuff like handle basic repairs and maintenance but rent control has a long history of helping people avoid disaster during and after World War 2 federal rent control in Los Angeles froze rents and narrowed the scope of evictions

so that housing construction could catch up to the population and make the city more affordable right it's this thing where you've got like yeah the population is growing by X amount housing isn't keeping up so you institute rent control and you reduce like and you like make it harder to evict people

so that folks can hang on until there's more housing this is the piece that's always missing from those articles that's like we need to increase the housing supply well that's not all we need to do there's other things that have been proven to stop people from winding up on the fucking street and you're ignoring those in favor of

just saying deregulate shit Alyssa Katz a researcher at UCLA examined rent control and housing affordability in LA going back to the 1940s she found that rent control successfully stopped people from becoming unhoused in the 40s and then again in the late 70s when inflation rose again and rent spiked

that time a rent stabilization ordinance quote ended dramatic rent increases for incumbent tenants by limiting the rate by which rents could be increased when looking at California's modern homelessness epidemic she put the blame directly on rent prices and urged a repeal of statewide

rent control restrictions and the expansion of rent regulation she isn't the only academic making these claims Nicole 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 they found quote

while other proposed remedies to the housing crisis may take years before they impact housing costs only expanding rent control can offer immediate relief to tens of millions of people in danger of being forced from their homes another write up on rent control measures from LA Progressive goes on to add

they noted that rent control can stabilize rents for existing tenants improve affordability for tenants in the future and preserve the existing affordability of housing that may otherwise become unaffordable and the researchers found that claims that rent control has negative effects on development of new housing are generally not supported by research

rent control can provide a timely solution to a housing affordability crisis that the market will not in a statement Barton further pointed out that quote when the housing market is as dysfunctional as it is in many parts of California tenants are effectively subsidizing landlords with rent payments above would have fully

competitive market would allow landlords to charge and what we're actually seeing here with stuff like these fucking program algorithms that allow landlords to jack up prices with guys like cell putting millions of dollars into propaganda to kill rent control

ballot measures in the state and he's been very active in that in California in particular is that the money that is being extorted out of people to keep a roof over their head is being used to fund like to basically fund propaganda campaigns to stop any kind

of rent control right right it's it's pretty cool it's pretty cool I like that you use the term a lot in this episode I find it fascinating with exactly what they're doing is just paying into a way to keep

money in their pockets but they're not keeping money in their pockets as well as the fact that there's so many other conversations like you're keeping people in a house and you're still getting money yeah I don't understand and you're using the thing that's most fucked up

to me and really thought about it this way is that and I like that progressive frames it this way is that tenants are subsidizing the campaigns of these landlords to stop housing reform right like their money is paying to keep rent

high their money is paying to deregulate the system in order to like make it possible to continue to jack up the rent but that's the whole scheme of renting it seems it is the entire scheme of renting you never get anything for it you're just giving it

to the landlords who have now by this time paid off their property they have taxes sure but they're still not anywhere near what you're getting in rent from your renters so what the hell and then you can as a renter especially in this market you can't

save enough as you said in episode one save enough to get your own house you don't technically own anyway for 30 years what you're doing here and what guys like Zell are doing is you're recreating feudalism you're making peons like it's cool

you're keeping the caste system I want to continue this quote from L.A. Progressive because I think it's good 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

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 landlord Steven Schwarzman owns mansions in St. Tropez, Jamaica, East Hampton and Palm Beach and throws lavish parties for celebrities and high society

friends at the same time a sky high rents force more people onto the streets nearly 1500 homeless people have died in Los Angeles in the Los Angeles area between 2020 and 2021 so that's half a 9-11 in a year that's good now

when you start talking about yeah I was gonna say you're being too empathetic stop it that's what our old buddy Roper would say I mean come on when you're talking about rent control anytime you talk about rent control you're gonna wind up talking about New York City rent control started

there too as an emergency measure during World War II at present around 45,000 tenants in the city who began their leases before 1971 have rent control departments 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

their landlords are forbidden from increasing rent beyond a very mild rate which means that many of these folks pay rents that are thousands of dollars a month underneath the present market rate rent control in New York has allowed for some peculiar situations where people will have apartments the size of small palaces

for what amounts to peanuts by modern standards it's also led to several murders in 1998 Mark Glass a landlord based out of downtown Manhattan grew frustrated that his tenant Bridget Marks wouldn't leave her rent control department in the former tenement that he bought and renovated he hired a hitman to kill her

but that turned out to be a scam so he tried to kill her with a heroin overdose that failed too eventually she realized he was trying to murder her and got the police involved and they carried out a sting operation and he wound up in prison for like 7 to 14 years in 2002 a New York landlord named

Lewis Huberk grew enraged after trying to bribe and cajole his tenants to leave this worked on everyone but Miss Barbara Kinna a 67 year old school librarian so Huberk shot her six times with a 38 caliber revolver he was convicted of murder and sent to prison for the rest

of his life two years later yeah well you got that right now you can now you're now your kids can fucking renovate the apartment get an extra couple of grand out of that place you know so two years later in 2004 Juan Basia Goida

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 they lived there since they were kids and had legally assumed his father's lease this enraged Basia Goida so he hired two other tenants to break into the apartment and stab

both brothers who narrowly survived now wouldn't you have to give him free rent the tenants he hired to murder I think he was probably giving him a break on their rent or something like you get like six months off of rent if you stab these guys to death

I got you I'm gonna throw in water for free if you'll murder these people at the end of the day it does not work out so obviously these are spectacular but like not the only cases you could find a surprising number of cases

of landlords murdering or trying to murder tenants over rent controlled apartments I mean that's my solution murder yeah murder 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 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 there's a number of different things that we

could talk about but because we're in the middle of like what year three of the pandemic right now I want to talk about that so I'm going to quote from a write-up by Judd and Testim Zakiria A new study by public health researchers at John Hopkins UCLA and other institutions looked at the impact of the exploration of state-based moratoriums during the summer of 2020. The infections and fatalities occurred across 27 states that lifted eviction moratoriums

during the study period. In Texas alone the study found that there were 4,456 excess deaths after the state lifted its eviction moratorium on May 18th. The researchers accounted for stay-at-home orders mask orders, school closers, testing rates, time trends and other state characteristics

to better isolate the impact of eviction moratoriums. Now that's 4,456 deaths in Texas alone as a result of the lifting of the eviction moratorium nationwide pandemic evictions alone have led to at least 10,000 deaths in the last couple of years

so yeah no matter what you're talking about even if you're not shooting them with a 38 you're still killing people in the eviction game. And the amount of those people are marginalized women oftentimes and they are parents and single mothers.

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. 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. And when you talk about credit scores too because credit scores there's a lot of racism in who that system has a lot of problems with it but also

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 when you went with like a corporate they didn't care what your credit score was

that's what you need for a mortgage but that didn't matter for renting a fucking apartment now it does. You didn't even got a damn phone needs a credit score. Yeah it's again all of these are we're not trying I hope nobody thinks I'm trying to give like this is it all of the reasons

that rent has gotten high but these are some big ones these are major factors in it and these guys are major factors in it and that's gonna leave me to talk about Stephen Schwarzman. Now I mentioned him earlier right when we talked about he's one of the billionaires in Los Angeles throwing money into stopping

rent control ballot measures Schwarzman is not as interesting as Zell. Zell is at least a pretty entertaining piece of shit Schwarzman is kind of a boring soulless corporate ghoul but he's probably more influential in why

your rent is raised. So Schwarzman's dad was a dry good store owner like Zell like his family's kind of upper middle-class business owners he grew up in Philadelphia but was inspired to become an entrepreneur when he traveled to Israel for the first time as a 14-year-old in a recent interview

he said this quote Israel has an incredible entrepreneurial community of course it had to because when it started there was almost nothing there. Everything had to be invented by somebody. Now you might be saying to that wasn't there like

a whole society of Palestinian people there with like universities and businesses and like homes and wasn't there like a lot of stuff there actually? 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? Stuff including like wealthy Palestinian families who helped fund the construction of the first Jewish University in Palestine. Anyway wasn't all of that there? Anyway whatever. Fuck like this is pretty normal

like shitty guy stuff like this is not an abnormal attitude right but you get where this guy's coming from. So like Zell Schwarzman is also a child entrepreneur again the worst warning sign. He started a lawn mowing business

where he very quickly stopped mowing any actual lawns. Instead he got his brothers to do the work while he brought in clients. One of those, yes. Yeah one of those. Again look if you see a kid doing this kind of stuff I don't know you just gotta poison him

a little bit. A little bit of poison. A little bit. A little bit of child poison. Their water as well? Well it wouldn't be the worst thing. So anyway I don't know we can I'm still gonna I still have to tweak my poison

ambitious children plan but I think there's a lot of future in it. I think it'll. Look Sophie you were just complaining about how high your rent is you know what if we could have stopped that with a little bit of poison not a lot of poison. I think you could write another book on this. Yeah

you can do another book on this. Yeah. Yeah the poisoning children driven life with me smiling in a suit. Yeah exactly yeah it's gonna be good Sophie. This is gonna be what takes us into the mainstream. It's gonna get you money so

it's fine. Can you just do an ad break? You know who what else I need a pause from this bit. When it comes to poisoning children nobody does it like our sponsors at whoever our sponsors are. During the summer of 2020 some Americans

suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series alphabet boys. As the FBI sometimes

you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of alphabet boys we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this

story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then

for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to alphabet boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was

23 I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me.

About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth his beloved country, the Soviet

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The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

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How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back and we're better than ever. Yeah, I think we're doing good. Sophie? I'm proud of this. We made a lot of plans. I'm glad that you at least can be positive towards me while Sophie's being so mean.

Yeah. We're talking about Stephen Schwarzman who has started a lawn-blowing business where he mows no actual lawns because he is that kind of kid. Again, poison. His hunger to make a shitload of money did not run in the family.

His dad is apparently a very different guy and the magazine makes clear. In an interview with The Washington Post in 2019, Schwarzman explained how his childhood taught him that not everybody was going to be the same. When pushed by a young Schwarzman as to why he didn't want to expand his successful business or open more stores across Philadelphia,

Schwarzman's father answered simply because I'm happy the way I am. I thought that was sort of hard to take in, Schwarzman told the newspaper. His contentment is what made him a remarkable human being. Maybe you should have learned something from your dad. He doesn't need all that.

The endless source to extract more wealth and resources out of an area is actually what's going to kill us all and not a healthy attitude. But anyway... I mean, this is where you know it's not always a nurture. No, no. His dad seems to be like,

look, I have a thriving small business. We live a comfortable life. That's all I need. Everybody's happy. You're healthy. Let's move on. No, his kid is going to become a guru for the highest order. So Schwarzman goes to Yale, which is probably where a lot of the ghoul stuff comes in. He joins Skolin Bones.

So he's one of those fucking kids. And then he goes on to do finance at a big, fancy firm after getting his MBA. 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. He rose... He's a villain. Yeah, very quickly. He becomes a managing... Unbelievable red flags. I know. Unbelievable in the making. If there's a company like that, I don't know. Again, poison them.

Once again. Once again. If you're on a dating app, you see somebody have their job listed at that company. No. Yeah. Sophie's giving all the realistic advice while Robert's over here with his dreams. Just poison them.

Look, if we had just poisoned the water of this company party in the late 1980s, a lot of problems wouldn't have happened. That's all I'm going to say. No comment, but yeah. I know. 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. It would be like, oh yeah, those guys who got rid of the finance industry. Yeah, I like those guys. Those guys are chill. I'm just letting you know

people would still consider the CIA the bad guys. Well, I don't know. Right. Less of the bad guys. Look, if the CIA takes out like McKinsey, you know. You win some, you lose some. We're all happy.

Yeah, whatever. Anyway, so he leaves. He becomes managing director of acquisitions at Lehman Brothers at age 31, but then he leaves the company with a firm which he calls Blackstone. Quote. Oh, he is old.

Yeah, he's the guy who founds Blackstone. I mean, co-founds, but yeah. Samantha is hyped. This is, these are some bad dudes. They started life as a boutique M&A advisory firm within a couple of years Blackstone had launched its first private equity fund

and later by 1990 had branched out into hedge funds using partners' own money. The time of Blackstone's initial public offering in 2007, the business had more than $88 billion worth of assets under management. 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. Peterson's the guy he starts the company with. So, today Blackstone claims to have $880 billion of assets under management, including $260 billion in private equity and $280 billion

in real estate. Schwarzman is still the company's chairman and CEO, and has indicated he has no intention to retire. He has two children, the film producer, Teddy Schwarzman and writer and podcaster, Zibi Owens. I'm just happy that his daughter's a podcaster.

You know what, let's all learn something together. What is Zibi Owens's podcast? I don't know, but did you just put us on a target list? Maybe. Sophie, what did you do? Sophie. I don't know. I don't know much about this,

but her podcast is called Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Am I... That doesn't sound great. But I'm on her website. Is she Q9? It's a top literary podcast. She's an author.

She interviewed Jill Biden. What does she write? She interviews... It seems like she interviews... She's a book fluencer, which is a term... If you're a writer and you ever write the word book fluencer, you should not be a writer.

Um... I'm going to say that right now. Is all her books like how to write your child or kindly or whatever? No, I think she's like reviewing books as like a mom book reviewer. You should send her your book, Robin.

No. No, I don't think she's going to be a big fan of my book. Um... I don't know. Let's see what S.A.'s Zivvy writes. There's a picture of her in her chair. Oh, no.

Let's see. This rabbit hole is... Yeah, these are mostly just lists of books people can read. So it seems a lot of it's like SEO listed bullshit. She's trying to make her own like Oprah magazines. Of course, she's a book fluencer.

Yeah, she's very much like Oprah. Her, she's like interviewing Ralph Macchio. That's the Karate Kid guy, right? There's nothing wrong with that. He just wrote a book. Yeah, he just wrote a book. She's just like a book influencer. Oh, she's hiring.

Zivvy Media is expanding. They're hiring superstars. She's a big fan of J.K. Rowling. She must be because she's NYC's most powerful book fluencer according to Fulcher. She's a book fluencer, Sophie. I don't think that's real.

It's also just like, if you're saying someone is an influencer, you can be an influencer in the literature industry. You don't have to call someone a book fluencer, which is a stupid, that's not on Zivvy, but she brags about it in every page of her website. So it is a little bit on her.

Wow, yeah. Zivvy Media is hiring a fuckload of people it looks like. So get on the Zip train. Oh, man. Oh, she does classes. She does classes. I don't know why we're attacking her so much. Her dad's the bad guy. Aw.

Never mind. I actually, there's nothing. We're laughing about this. I can't find anything that's offensive about her or anything like that. We know nothing. She could be a lovely individual. She seems fine. I'm sorry. She could be a lovely individual.

You know, you can't, you know. Look, if somebody... You can't choose your family. If you claim to love literature and somebody calls you a book fluencer, you do have a moral responsibility to the art of writing to say no. You're like, you're not wrong.

That's not a term we're going to use. Book fluencer is not a word. Let's get Robert as a blue book fluencer. Nothing is a fluencer. I'm really having a hard time even saying the words. I'm so angry about that.

That's all, honestly. Zibi has done nothing wrong but used that word. That one word which I've never heard of. I've heard TikTok book talk or something like that. Which is fine. Book talk is fine because

that makes sense. Book fluencer is fucking nonsense. I've never been angry. I've never been angry in my entire life than I am right now. This is so much worse than war crimes. Back to her father who is a lot worse.

I bet he doesn't use the word book fluencer. Most of you probably know what happened to Lehman Brothers which was forced into bankruptcy after helping to cause the 2008 financial crash. Lehman had been a major driver of the fraudulent mortgage-backed security business backed by subprime loans and their collapse

nearly took the global economy with them. Shoresman had been out of the company for quite a while by this point and he and Blackstone did very well in this recession. They lose a little bit of money up front but they're heavily invested in companies like Starwood Waypoint and Invitational Homes

which merged in 2017 and start buying up all of these fucking properties that are suddenly fucking bargain-ben. A website for tenants of Invitational Homes www.invitationaltenants.com notes, they benefited from the deception and fraud

that saddled so many families of color with subprime and booby-trapped mortgages that ultimately affected African-American and Latino families. Lower post-crisis home prices could have been an opportunity to increase affordable home ownership but too often instead, Wall Street buyers swept in while neighborhood families

were left out of the game altogether, unable to compete with cash buyers or denied access to credit. 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.

The company firms to begin buying up foreclosed homes in the wake of the financial crisis, fixing them up and renting them out. The firm, which began buying homes in earnest in 2011, is estimated to have spent $10 billion in its foreclosed home to a rental bet. So, that's cool.

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. 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. Here's Quartz. 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. Relatively short leases on their properties have allowed them to raise prices quickly, which has dropped 7%. Awesome stuff. Really, really good. Again, I don't know much

about real estate, nor do I know much about the corporations, especially like Blackstone. It's been a recent thing that I'm understanding all of these giant buyouts, and I do know they profited off the 2008 crash. They did great off of the 2008 crash.

For closing on families and leaving them homeless, and we know all of that is pointless, and without houses. But was Blackstone involved with all the military buyouts? They wore profiteers as well, or is that just in the back of my imagination? I think you may be thinking of Blackwater.

Let me double check. They manage a lot of investment, so I wouldn't be surprised if there's some degree to which they're involved in one sec. I feel like maybe again, I might be confusing that they had private organizations

developing things for them. They invest in private equity firms, so they have investments in aerospace and defense companies. You could call them, they're definitely profiting off of the defense industry, but that's not kind of their primary

thing, 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, and that includes the defense industry. Yeah, so I want to close by noting from a write-up in The Atlantic in 2020,

which kind of makes the point that the nature of Blackstone's business, both its scale and its single-minded pursuit of profits, means that tenants nearly always come last. Quote, some evidence suggests that private equity firms in contrast are willing to engage in predatory practices to realize short-term returns.

Blackstone's target properties in Southern California suggest an investment strategy similar to flipping single-family homes. Biled properties invest in cosmetic upgrades such as new appliances and facade improvements, and then increase the rents. Furthermore, some anecdotal evidence also indicates that private equity

firms are less conscientious landlords in the single-family rental market. Researchers and journalists have documented concerns about poor quality housing, difficulties raised by tenants trying to communicate with landlords when problems arise, and higher rates of evictions. And we can thank Mr. Schwarzman for an awful lot of that.

Yeah, so that's it. That's some people who have made the rent high. Stephen Schwarzman, that Zell motherfucker, Roper, all these assholes, fuck them all. So let me ask you, as we are looking

at possibly repeating history in the next couple of years, where do you see, do you think we're coming upon a crash as well? I mean, everyone seems to say we're heading for a recession. That would make sense. Except for the fact

that they're seemingly trying to hedge it off by, again, charging the individuals and homeowners and renters instead of actually trying to get the corporations to pay out what their billions of dollars and or stop

stopping the inflation by no means. It sounds like what's happening is they're trying to, the Fed is trying to cut inflation by raising interest rates and a bunch of companies are using inflation as a hedge for rising prices and making

record profits right now 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 in the unemployment rate rises.

I think more or less what's probably going to happen, I don't know. We'll see how it is. 2020 was pretty ugly too. That was a gnarly recession, but it didn't last very long. I don't know. I'm not an economy guy and I kind of think...

You're an expert of all things, Robert. I kind of think most of the people who are economy guys are just engaged in some kind of con or another, but yeah, it's probably going to be pretty ugly in the near future and these are the people who are going to make sure that a lot more folks wind up on the street

when it does. Solution. Poison. Poison is a good solution. Keep an eye on kids who express an entrepreneurial desire. Don't trust that. And I don't know, if you... Don't call yourself a book fluencer.

That is not going to be behind as well as now. I'm livid. Oh, okay. So his son, Teddy, not the other kid that he had is the producer who made the imitation game.

Invitation or imitation? Imitation. You win some, you lose some. I guess. I haven't seen that movie, but oh no, I have seen that movie. That's the movie about Turing that came out. That was actually pretty good. Yeah. You win some, you lose some.

You win some, you lose some. Is he a film fluencer? He's a film fluencer. 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 crash. Like I said, you win some, you lose some.

And speaking of winning some, Samantha, do you have any pluggables? Yeah. Yes. Come and visit me over stuff Mom never told you. Nowhere near the same mom doesn't read things. I don't know. I'm not a book fluencer. I'm so sorry to say. Yeah. And I can't read.

Oh, well, that's a new one. And my Twitter is McVaySamantha and then it's where I'm at McVay.Samantha. So if you want to see pictures of my dog and me complaining about things, come visit me. Yep.

Find Samantha on the internet. Find the kid in your neighborhood who starts a lawn mowing business where he doesn't mow any lawns and I don't know, just like smoke around him. Smoke?

Smoke real close to that kid. Just hang out next to that kid and smoke a shitload of cigarettes. My God. It'll be good. Shitload of cigarettes. Anyways. Oh, we have a new podcast on CoolZone Media. It's called Internet Hate Machine

and it's hosted by the one and only Bridget Todd. Check it out on, you know, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts where you get your podcasts. I have to say that a lot. Yeah. Fucking do that.

I also have a book called After the Revolution. You do. You can buy it. Which, by the way, my partner loved. He just pumped it. Because he wanted to tell you how much he liked the book. Oh, thank you. Well, maybe he can help maybe you can help bookfluencerZippy.

Yeah, so this is Joe. I hope he gets to see part of this podcast. I did not hear you because I have an earpiece in. Oh, you don't have a. Just tell him I'll smoke some meats and thank you for that offer of illegal drugs. Oh, my God. No, no, no, no. Bring him.

Samantha, bring him back on. I want to get a neutral opinion about this. Okay. Let me give him an earpiece. Okay. Yeah, we'll make it work. This is Joe. This is Robert. I'm going to say a word that a person

described their job. And I just want you to give me the emotion that hearing this word for the first time inspires in you. Okay. Nervous. No. Tell me. Bookfluencer. Oh, no.

I'm going to color that intimately. I hope you know that. It's a horrible word, right? It's a terrible word. Do you get that often? No, no, no. Absolutely not. How dare you? No, it's from a lady

with a book podcast whose dad destroyed the rental market. Forbidden to come up to this podcast again. No, you're coming back every week. You made me happy. I'm happy that you added Bookfluencer to my vernacular. Also, it is now going to be under your titles. Thank you, Robert.

Bookfluencer. Bookfluencer. All right, everybody. Why don't we all go fluent some motherfucking books? You will come to Atlanta. All right. Goodbye. Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season,

we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time,

and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted

pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.