Grubstakers - Episode 204: Jonathan Tisch & the Tisch Family feat. Alex Ptak

Episode Date: November 24, 2020

This week with Alex Ptak of Pod Damn America we cover the life and misdeeds of Jonathan Tisch. Find out all about how the Tisch family initially made their riches, (Friends & Family LLC) the 6 billion dollar net worth of the family does all sorts of horrible things including a insurance racket where they wouldn’t pay out on hazard insurance to contractors in warzones. Find out all that and more right here on Grubstakers. https://www.propublica.org/article/us-insurance-firm-neglects-survivors-of-iraqi-translators-may-face-criminal

We find people that basically can't make enough to eat before they go into the fields. I don't believe that. I think that you're looking at other places that are not Central Romana. People actually who focus on and who like getting an orgasm never get one. Pull up your socks and figure out what you're going to do. Any chance we'll ever get to be a complete red state? Oh yeah. For the future is always uncertain. But more uncertain now.

Listen, Blue Ivy is six years old. Beyonce's days, she tried to outbid me on a painting. Everybody in Atlanta right now at the Louis Vuitton store, if you black, don't go to Louis Vuitton today. That's why you need to take a meeting with Kanye West, Bernard Arnault. Hello and welcome to Grubstakers. I'm Andy Palmer and I am joined by my friends Yogi Pollywalt, Steve Jeffries, Sean P. McCarthy, and today we have special guest Alex Patak. Hi, I'm Steve Jeffries.

Today we have a special guest, backup Steve Jeffries, here to talk about the Tisch family. We're covering the Tisch family this week, basically to return to a theme that we were doing during the presidential campaign regarding the people who were funding Joe Biden. And we never named this kind of segment, but I'd like to suggest who's who of who's Biden, Biden's a Biden. Who's a Biden Biden. Who Biden's a Biden. Yes. Let's learn more about the people who are building back better. Yes.

So of note is Jonathan Tisch. He is the richest member of the Tisch family who has donated over $11,000 to the Biden campaign. And the total Tisch family net worth is $6 billion, with Jonathan Tisch being worth $ 1.3 billion steve tish 1.1 billion laurie tish 1.1 billion and then uh there are a couple other tish brothers uh who are the son of this guy larry tish who was more stingy with his will than the father of the other guys um and so they have andrew tish has 30 million and james tish has 10 million sad very sad um how could you even live on 30 million oh that's so funny because it's like not an amount of money where you would materially notice a difference in person meeting with those people but i bet what they're in the room with their cousins or what have you they're just like i have 900 million less.

You have to imagine the millionaire-titious are very frustrated thinking things like, I'm never going to get in Jeffrey Epstein's black book at this rate. Yeah, what's the ultra-rich equivalent of I'll never own a home? I'm trying to think of it. It's got to be the same dynamic of when you go to your high school reunion as a comedian

and everybody else has settled down. I'll never be able to purchase a private army. Which you can tell because they make you feel safe. It's a qualitative difference. I'll never get to hold the knife at the adrenochrome sacrifice. Now, we have Alex here for a very special reason reason besides the fact that he's funny and charming he also attended the tish school of the arts at nyu uh named after larry and bob tish both dead now uh and we were wondering if uh what what was it like attending the tish school of the arts how

how was that experience in In a word, prestigious. There weren't a lot of people in my major, in my concentration of podcasting, but they do provide you with the classes to achieve excellence upon graduation. And I like to think I followed through with that. There is a whole element to going there because I kind of got in on a fluke because i didn't have

the grades to get in um the i applied to the screenwriting program and they wanted you to send in like 30 or 40 pages of your scripts you'd written and i didn't have any scripts written so i just uh got like a word document and wrote a long uh story in 2009 about if like bears were zombies or something very invaders in style random like that sure and i sent it in and i didn't hear from them for a long time and i got a special email that was like we want you to know how bold it was to only send one sample for your portfolio but that kind of guts is what we want here at Tish. And so they let me in on academic probation, and then it turns out make-believe classes are very easy, and that wasn't a problem.

Do you find your time at Tish was, because you say you were in those make-believe classes, so what was your daily life like at Tish? Okay, so I had minors in sociology and game design because i got to pick and um uh excluding those classes uh my my curriculum was like i'd have one or two that were either television writing or screenwriting where you pick your concentration so you're working on a long-form project like that over the course of like a that were either television writing or screenwriting where you pick your concentration. So you're working on a long-form project like that over the course of like six months.

And then aside from that, they do things like forms of drama where an old man who later gets Me Too'd would go and tell you about how Greeks invented romance or whatever. And I actually really liked those. Those were really cool. And we had one or two that were like live performance kind of classes where you'd write little sketches essentially and cast other classmates in them. And it was very fun. I don't think most of this translated into applicable skills you should be using.

But in terms of like an arts camp, you pay $120,000 for a year. It was great no was it in the screenwriting or the game design where you met our um our mutual friend who was austin power's personal assistant oh darren i he was in all my screenwriting classes okay the game design classes where i met dylan sprouse which is cool i have his number he won't answer me but i have it and, and that means I win. Who is he? What did he do? He was in The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. He's like a child star. His brother is in Riverdale.

Oh. Any of this? You fucking autists. Have any of you ever watched TV? I know what you're talking about. I've seen Riverdale, a modern-day spin on the Archie comics with romance and thrillers, and the other show being a children's show where children watch it and feel like children.

I know things. Right, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Riverdale's like the checkout line comic book with murder. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't watch the thing, but it's very, like a lot of people have seen it. Yeah, people love it.

It's stupid. He's Jughead? Wow, he's my favorite. I mean, that's the one you want to be. Jughead or Moose. There's a front door. Right. No, yeah, Darren was in all my screenwriting classes.

The entire screenwriting group or whatever was the smallest thing in the entire department. We only had like 75 people per class. Which, because the school is huge is very irregular minuscule minuscule i mean compared to like the 10 000 actors they have for every graduating class who are like the most deluded young people you will ever come across in your life even at that school like standing just like, like half of them seeming like they've never learned to read, but we're just put on Broadway at the age of like four and are just willing to cut each other's throats for it.

I made this girl cry once. Cause I was ranting about how dumb I thought actors were in my apartment. Uh, when I was drunk with my friends and then, my friend Francisco, who's very social went out and just, uh, was,

he like went out drinking and came back with some random people we didn't know. And so I was just ranting about how dumb actors were, and this girl just starts crying next to me. I'd been going out for like 15 minutes, and she was like, how could you say that? And I was like, I didn't mean it. And she was like, yes, you did! At that point, you just have to be like yeah yeah dude welcome to my house yeah it's such a big school it's gonna be hard for my experience to kind of sum up anything there but um i do think in retrospect since've graduated, like a few people in the tiny department I was in with are like now SNL writers and super connected people. I think either she was in, the girl who made Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

was either in the grade above or below me. Gotcha. So this is like the classical role of college, right, is to form like an elite class. Right. If you go to like a school like this where you get in and you meet the son of the guy who invented mayonnaise and together you rule the media together. Right. You write a cartoon about mustard and how mustard's terrible and mayonnaise and ketchup are the only things that people need. Yeah, this is an aside, but I remember the year after I graduated,

some guy I was friends with put out a video with Dennis Quaid's son where they were trying to start a sketch group, and their whole big thing was they had a video with Dennis Quaid that wasn't even a sketch. That was just them hugging Dennis Quaid and him being like, these guys are pretty funny. They probably have a lot of money now, but I think about that a lot. Hugging Dennis Quaid? Oh, that's like the Midas touch.

That Quaid touch. Those are the things that can happen when you don't submit a sci-fi related screenplay for your admission. Absolutely. You just submit a copy of Dennis Quaid's headshot and they just let you in uh but we were talking before we started about how i guess apparently one of the nyu tish schools classrooms takes place in the same building that is famous for the triangle

shirt waste fire is that correct yeah that's the Arts and Sciences building. So I would go and learn about World War II in a room where 100 Irish girls were trapped in flames. And that puts you in the history, I think. It's really beautiful. In fairness, burning Irish women does combine both art and science. The sweet science, they call it. No, there's a real feeling. It's an old building and you're in there and you're thinking, like, I could picture

myself burning to death in here. I see how it happened. Hard to find the exits. Yeah, big cavernous rooms with, like, thick doors. Sure. Picture that. It'd be funny if it burned down again. Yeah, big cavernous rooms with thick doors. Sure. Picture that.

It'd be funny if it burned down again. Well, would it be funny, Steve? Would it be funny or would it be a classical error? You get up in the middle of your class. You're in the middle of textiles 103. And the fire alarm goes off. You like, you like get up in the middle of your class to try to go to the bathroom. And then you're like,

ah, I can't get out. I know exactly what this was like now. I actually do remember being in there when a fire alarm went off. And, uh, it did work. The exits worked that time.

Okay. Whenever the alarm goes off, basically it would be funny to me, I guess is what I'm saying. Oh, yeah. From that point of view, I see it. It was probably pretty weird when you walked into your World War II history class and they sat you down at a sewing machine

to make shirtwaists. And they locked the doors to make sure that you did it right even even just historically it is funny that you would lock the doors on the room until the shift is over how little trust do you have on those girls they might walk out enjoy clean air we can't have that on the clock they might pocket some shirtwaists even like how much money would that cost you if the girls like take a i'm writing a critical letter to the barons of the 1890s or whatever what year did this happen uh 1911 i think so so the reason that the uh triangle shirtwaist came up uh was actually during my research of the tish family because as a as a coincidence um the two major players in the tish family uh preston robert tish or bob tish

and larry tish their father abraham solomon uh owned a garment manufacturing business and basically ran sweatshops in new york with now a building from the most notorious um i i tried to see if i could connect him to triangle shirtwaist but it doesn't look like there was any connection um i got out of this one yeah but they uh uh i guess we they ran different better run sweatshops in new york city in the 19th century ones you could be proud of that's right yeah sweatshops with a human face that is just so that is just so funny to me though that it's like nyu bought the fucking triangle shirt waste fire building like this horrific human tragedy where, you know,

a hundred-some people were burned to death, and they're like, let's just charge people $50,000 a year to learn how to screenwrite for television comedies here. I mean, it's right by the park. You're not going to find better real estate than that. They got the area on lock.

Just get inspired by the ghosts in the room all around you and open your third eye and hear the pitches that they are giving you for your friend's pilot. Yeah, ghosts are a very important and dramatic process, so I commend them for their decisions. And I'm willing to sell out any time anyone will have me, if you're listening from the Illuminati right now.

So on that, let's go into the bio. As I mentioned, the two main patriarchs of the Tisch family are Bob Tisch and Larry Tisch. Bob Tisch was born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn on April 29th, 1926. Larry Tisch was born on March 5th, 1923. And their father owned garment manufacturing businesses and also bought two summer camps in New Jersey, which their mother helped run. And apparently the family moved every three years to get three months of free rent, which was a... Yeah.

Apparently you used to be able to do that in new york um that's like a city law you move and they give you free rent what's happening here yeah you move every three years and you get three months of free rent this is in i don't know pre-war uh new york you know before uh before giuliani ruined before pearl harbor before giuliani um that is actually it's kind of been happening again with covid like a lot of manhattan buildings have been offering you three months of free rent just so they don't have to reduce their rent oh that makes sense yeah oh that has not trickled down to brooklyn yet yeah very unfortunate no the uh well yeah what is it manhattan has the rents are dropping partially because of like NYU where students aren't coming in.

And also they're not getting a refund on tuition. But the head of the Tisch School is dancing to Losing My Religion on the internet. Which you guys brought up and I could have swore happened five years ago apparently it was in march um that this is really the double-edged sword so the the president of the school there was a big uh attempt to oust him while i was there john sexton um because the direction they've been taking because these for-profit private schools are essentially just corporations that happen to also teach you things at this point. And their decision to just become real estate monsters is now blowing up in their face now that no one can pay rent or the students can't come in. So it's kind of nice in a way.

I mean, just from this one angle. This was the only way this investment was going to backfire like that they did the opposite they kind of did the opposite of the free rent thing we're like tell you what here's what i can do i can offer you 60 of what i did before for the same price you have to take it i mean but the gall to be like oh we're going to rob students of their money how about i put a dance online like i've never been in a situation where i thought to myself you know what this situation needs me dancing this never happened i think part of that is just the mind of someone who teaches at an art school. You know what I mean?

Sure, yeah. You've been rewarded for these thoughts for so long that you hear about a terrible virus, and you're like, the world needs my dance. They need to see it. I'm going to heal the soul of the nation. You can get away with it because how else are you going to get

the experience of taking a class with Tim Allen's son? It is true, though. That is like the pure mindset of an arts teacher at a $60,000 a year school and that hears about a problem.

It's like, well, you know, I was listening to R.E.M. last night, so what if i just film myself dancing and that'll make up for the 250 000 dead people the people bring the solutions so okay uh back to bio yeah so uh bob tish he joined the Army and then he went to the University of Michigan after his discharge in 1944. And Larry Tisch was also involved during World War II where he worked in the Office of Strategic Services, which was the precursor to the CIA. Yeah.

So we've already got right off the bat, we got a CIA connection. So just to kind of like jump it ahead for CIA connection. Um, so I, uh, just to kind of like jump it ahead for CIA connection. I do want to note that, uh, the current two of the current patriarchs, Andrew and, uh,

Jimmy also known as James Tish are both members of the council on foreign relations. And, uh, apparently Andrew's daughter is named Sarah or sorry, Jessica Sarahatish. In November 2019, she was appointed commissioner for the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunication by Mayor Bill de Blasio. Before that, in February 2014, she was the deputy commissioner of information technology for the NYPD. And so, you know, when you hear the word information technology and NYPD,

get nervous because she's the one reading your text messages. She's the one who, like when I went to a protest right after Trump got elected, mentioned it on Twitter, I suddenly got like five different follows from accounts that only retweet other things you don't you don't think susan137947 is a real lady you're saying i try to get no dms and this is somewhat of a tangent but can the cops can the nypd specifically uh track your eyes still i went to a protest in like 2014 where uh they were warning us that because they were planning on getting arrested that that they might try to take your

uh your like an eye scan and so there's a whole training that was like if you go in tell them no you'll be in jail a little longer but then they won't have your eyes and then when we actually got arrested, it was just like, hey, look here, get on the bus. And it was like, shit, that was it. Oh, fuck. This lady has my eyes. Donna Tish, or whatever her name was.

You guys were expecting him to be like, can you look into this camera so that we can have your eyes? For our technology, which can track eyes. I didn't expect the cops to be rude. The NYPD didn't plan on me removing one of my own eyes. I can imagine you getting famous and then someone like a new hire at the NYPD is trying to impress a girl and he's like, hey, you want to see Alex Patak's retina scan?

We can spot him whenever he goes through a traffic light yeah uh anyone with um a street named after them in new york city has definitely collaborated with a fascist government at some point oh yeah i mean it is just sort of funny like basically any rich family that had members involved in the OSS is in the Illuminati. Like, just look for the Council on Foreign Relations or look for, like, major political appointments. But, you know, it's OSS, CIA. Once you're in, it's like a family business. You know, you're in for life and your generations after you are in as well. Well, Sean, that's what that dance was all about.

Who else would be setting up the Illuminati? It's just them. They buy the coffee. Stepping back to bio, we've actually got a paper route story for Bob Tisch. His wife, she recalled meeting him when he was selling keychains for a dime or two for 15 cents in front

of the university's football stadium, and they married in 1948. So from that, it sounds like, you know, it was kind of a hardscrabble life for Bob and Larry and their parents. And then the very next thing in Bob's obituary is that in 1946, his brother Larry saw an advertisement for a resort in Lakewood, New Jersey called Laurel and Pines and persuaded his parents to put up $125,000 to buy it. And a family friend threw in another $50,000 to take one-fourth interest.

You know, I read she actually didn't change her last name at marriage. She changed her last name after she went horseback riding one day. Really? Wait, so Andy, this was $175,000 in 1946 with the $125,000 and then plus the $50,000? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, Steve and I did the math.

That is $2.4 million in today's dollars. You could buy a hamburger for a nickel. But yeah, that is the amount of money that they were loaned at that time 2.4 million oh man what a fucking crazy life it's so funny when you try to like trace these legacy fortunes back to like who had the first money and then you're like okay well somebody already had two two and a half5 million in 1946. So, like, and what? We just have no idea what they married into a rich family? Or how did all this happen?

I think it was from putting Irish ladies to work. To the torch. You know, $2.4 million seems like a lot, but then you consider you skipped three months New York rent two or three times. There it is. Yeah, that's true. So, as Oliver Cromwell found out, when you light Irish women on fire,

there's gold inside of them. Tell me, tell me where the end of the rainbow is you lying fiendian bitch so uh the first thing that larry tish did was he uh refurnished this hotel uh added a swimming pool and had a promotional scheme where he imported three reindeer from Finland to pull sleighs in the snow. Um, and so by the time Bob joined the business in 1948, the hotel was prospering. Um, the family then expanded by purchasing unprofitable properties, making improvements and raising rates where, um, in the business larry would make the deals and bob would run the companies and they built their first hotel in 1956 the americana at ball harbor florida um and apparently they didn't need to borrow any money to build it because they were doing pretty

well at that point they had their own reindeer yes they didn't need to buy any more great resale value on reindeer reindeer work is gonna make this entire project go yeah most most most of the fortune that we're gonna get into here is from flipping reindeer they they bought Santa's factory at the North Pole and then demolished it and sold the underlying real estate. It's actually far more valuable than the actual loss-making operation of giving children toys for free. I mean, that's where Bob came in, too, because you have him running the company. He's looking at a high reindeer demand area like Florida. He's saying, we just got to set up shop, let the money come to us so in 1961 um they acquired the lowes corporation which

is uh now where they make most of their money um uh what happened in 1961 is there was an antitrust decree that legally separated theaters from movie studios maybe the last antitrust decree uh in american history and it's since been reversed. But previously, theaters would have exclusive rights to play movies from specific studios. And after that was broken up, the Tisch brothers swooped in and bought the Lowe's Corporation of Cinemas for cheap. Oh, and when I say Lowe's,

it has nothing to do with the hardware store. It's spelled slightly differently. The E is on the other side of the w yeah so i've been to both and that's our privilege showing andy what year did they buy the lows uh theater corporation 1961 so the thing you're mentioning where it would have been the specific production houses i believe believe Sumner Redstone was a part of the lawsuits that allowed it so that, we covered some of this in the Sumner Redstone episode, where the movie production companies

would no longer have the monopolies that they previously had with theater houses. So some of this goes back to the fucking leather face of Sumner Redstone that's now dead. So what they did with the theaters was, they, well, at the the time multiplexes were the trend where they're you know multiple theaters and um a lot of these low theaters were ornate movie theaters that you know you see them in old movies um big fancy places maybe you've been in

one but they're not very common now and part of of the reason is the Tish's knocked them down for the property value and built hotels in their place. Wow. And... Those bitches. You're going to make Quentin Tarantino cry if you do that. In 1985, after regulations got relaxed, they sold the theaters that were left to TriStar Pictures,

which was a joint venture owned by Coca-Cola, CBS, and HBO. But in the interim, the brothers decided to turn Lowe's into a conglomerate. In 1968, the family acquired Lorlard, the nation's fifth largest cigarette company, and we'll talk about that in a minute. They also invested $ million dollars in franklin national bank which they then sold to uh michael sedona an italian financier who then looted its assets and lowes was sued by the fdic for breach of fiduciary duty and misuse of inside information and ended up paying uh 1.2 million in a out-of-court settlement wow uh that's one

tuition at tish in 1974 they bought the cna financial corporation which at the time was a nearly bankrupt chicago-based insurance company and uh sean's going to talk about that and uh some of their fun antics and uh by 1980 lowe's had a revenue of 4.5 billion earnings of 206 million uh in the early 80s the tish has bought five super tankers for 25 million when the oil market was depressed um and apparently the deal carried no risk because even if oil prices didn't rise the scrap value of each tanker was five million and that's how the tissue has gotten to the oil company and so if you're kind of wondering uh into the oil business so uh if you're wondering why maybe biden's a bit wishy washy about say fracking um these are the kinds of people who are fun who funded his campaign

uh oh jonathan tish also donated to the lincoln project um great king yeah he was behind uh all those uh stolen tweets i guess yeah the lincoln project is fat jews new thing right and it's like the same level of uh a clout to it i don't know it makes sense to me if he was somehow involved oh in 1986 um bob tish became postmaster general under reagan which is a position he held for two years and according to the times he used his marketing skill to come up with the idea of selling stamps by phone and stressing sales of commemorative stamps which are financially advantageous to the postal service because collectors seldom use them as postage and then in 1991 bob tish bought the new york giants and he had the genius idea of making the giants more profitable by increasing ticket prices oh

yeah that's the kind of know-how you're gonna get from one of america's oldest cartel families so um larry tish uh also he uh in the 80s purchased cbs and actually helped facilitate the deal to acquire david letterman david why don't you come by nyu and see some of the students there. I think that he did do that while I was there. Oh, really? I remember him dropping in somewhere. Oh, just trolling for posts? Just dropping in,

trolling for posts. I'm doing my Paul Schaefer voice. I don't know why. Innocent man, Paul Schaefer. Let me see those worldwide pants. Patek is having an existential realist realization that he missed the moment he could have become a writer on david letterman's show

absolutely when letterman was plowing interns do you think paul schaefer was in the corner on his keyboards doing sound effects yeah it's a little something I like to call pulling hair. All right. Just doing live commentary. So most of Larry Tish's obituary is about his time at CBS, at least in the New York Times obituary, mostly centered around how he destroyed CBS while he was CEO for 10 years.

So in 86, he purchased a strong minority stake, about 25%, as a rescue from an assortment of corporate raiders, was invited to join the board, and then elevated to acting chairman and chief executive and um after he became chief executive uh the president of cbs news van gordon sauter stepped down because tish accused him of putting audience ratings over quality of the news division and larry that son of a bitch larry tish declared whether the news loses money or makes money is secondary to what we put on the air then he said the news division would get total support from me in every way financially morally and months later he laid off 230 of the 1200 news employees and cut the news

budget by 30 million which according to business week was the biggest single staff and budget cut in network news history he also sold off cbs's publishing units and magazines and under his leadership cbs went from first in the country to third behind abc and nbc and was struggling against fox and then he claims that he was a success because by the time CBS was sold to Westinghouse Electric Corporation, CBS stock had climbed at an annual rate of almost 15%. And according to Alex S. Jones, host of On the Media, not the other Alex Jones, quote, he took an institution that was important in this country and he strangled it. But what if it was the other Alex Jones, though? Wouldn't that be great? He strangled it, folks. He took it out on live TV and he strangled it with his two hands.

Trying to get the gold inside because he thought it was an Irish girl. They're unrelated. Look into it, Oliver Cromwell. That must be great. If you could reach the other Alexis Jones' voicemail, it probably starts with, like, okay, so first, if you're calling about the Newton, Connecticut shootings, that's not me, that's the other guy. I did not say there's a false flag.

I do CBS reporting. Yeah, I looked him up. He's like this old public radio host who, I guess he used the S in his name, but now he really got fucked in the last 10, 20 years. Oh, yeah. He changed his name to Mike Jones to avoid confusion. Who?

Mike Jones. Oh, who? Mike Jones. So, we got, um... GameCube, Nintendo. Both the Tish brothers are all dead now. And so, their children have taken up the family company uh jonathan tish

is the main guy he's worth 1.3 billion uh as i mentioned earlier he's the former ceo of lowe's corporation the chairman of the united states travel association which is a lobbying group for the travel and hospitality business co-owner of the giants and was uh vice chairman of the welfare to work partnership which uh we can detail in a bit uh then there's steve tish uh one point worth 1.1 billion the son of preston robert tish he is a film producer who produced risky business forrest gump american history History X, The Pursuit of Happiness, and directed an episode of the 1989 television series Dirty Dancing. A couple of hits before the Dirty Dancing came out. Yeah, yeah.

No, he's got a pretty good resume as a film producer. Yeah, I guess he just took his money and went to Hollywood. Then there's Andrew Tisch, worth $30 million, co-chair of the Lowe's Corporation, and James Tisch, $10 million, CEO of the Lowe's Corporation. Oh, and James was also a former supporter of Rudy Giuliani and Joe Leota, who ran against Bill de Blasio in the most phoned-in mayoral campaign way back in, what was it, 2014? Yeah, and just according to Forbes, I guess they say the Lowe's Corporation is currently run as a triumvirate between James, also known as Jimmy, Andrew, and Jonathan, with, as Andy mentioned, Jimmy being the CEO. But I did just want to note

regarding Epstein connections, in Epstein's Black Book, you can find Jimmy and his wife Meryl. You can find Andrew and his wife Anne. And you can find David Tisch is apparently their nephew born in 1981. But no Jonathan Tisch in the Black Book. Jonathan is pure. But I did want to note actually Leland Naley is a reporter at mother jones and in october she

published an article called i called everyone in jeffrey epstein's black book and she uh highlighted some of the responses apparently she called the number given for jimmy and meryl tish and she got meryl tish on the phone what and i could just read the transcript of the call, quoting here, Meryl Tish, the former chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents and heir to the Lowe's Corporation. Quote, me, hey, I'm doing a story on Jeffrey Epstein. I was wondering if you ever met the guy or interacted with him. Meryl Tish, I don't know who you are. How did you get my number?

Me, I got it from Epstein's contact book. Tish. From who? Me. Jeffrey Epstein's contact book. Tish. All caps. No. This is ridiculous. Who are you? What's your name? Me. My name's Leland. I'm doing a story for a magazine. Tish. Oh my god, you have got to be kidding me. No, I can't help you out. Thank God. I mean, really? Me? Me. Meryl and Jimmy were listed with an address and this number. You're Tish, right, with a C?

There's a David Tish listed as well. Don't know if you're related. Meryl Tish, huh. Goodbye. And she hung up. Yeah, we got Meryl Tish on the phone, and then REM just started playing, and there were thuds. Can I just say, we had a bit of trouble at first kind of finding dirt on the Tish family,

but I've learned doing a billionaire podcast and Googling their name plus Jeffrey Epstein is like when you find a busted combo in Tekken and just spam it every match. It really fixes the finding dirt about billionaires problem, having that black book out there. It's the Raphael and Soul Calibur triangle, triangle, triangle combination. We also learned that a great way to find dirt on a billionaire is to type their company name and then asbestos. Yes. That's been my other technique, is you take the company name, then you try fraud, then you try asbestos, then you try union, then you try dead people, then dead babies specifically. We didn't have any dead babies on this one, just drilling engineers. So let's talk about the L the lowes corporation and what that

really is so we mentioned there's cna financial which deals in insurance um they actually recently got sued for not paying out covid losses to their clients their corporate clients um the clients didn't even sue for damages just the payouts that they were owed by the company. Motherfuckers. They have Boardwalk Pipelines, which is a natural gas pipeline company, Lowe's Hotels, and Altium Packaging, which is a plastic packaging company. They also have, as we mentioned, Large Stake and Diamond Offshore Drilling, though that's a public company. It's not completely owned by Lowe's. So I guess we can get into some of the different controversies with Lowe's. As we mentioned with asbestos, there's a quote from James Tisch in an interview in the Washington Post where he said,

we have asbestos lined pockets. We don't let cash burn a hole in them. And incidentally, the Tisch family has two major asbestos crises. In 1968, Lowe's acquired Lorillard, the nation's fourth largest tobacco company and maker of Kent cigarettes. And in the 1950s,ent cigarette filters were made with uh crocell crocell i'll get it on the fifth one uh crocell delight the most lethal form of asbestos known uh hell yeah that's that good shit yeah it's unleaded they they ran that ad campaign where they went marlboros are for pussies. You're not a real man if you're not smoking asbestos. Oh, man, even just hearing that name takes me back to NYU, and you'd go to the parties after class.

We'd all be passing around Crosilda Light and taking bumps. And then they also have Diamond Offshore Drilling, which is being sued by former workers who were knowingly exposed to asbestos. What happened is when they acquired Diamond Offshore Drilling in 1989 for $48.5 million, which is one of the largest offshore drilling companies. They got sued later by engineers because the engineers were not informed that the drilling mud that was used to cool drills in offshore drilling was filled with asbestos. And apparently you get it in the form of a powder and then mix that up with water to make it into the mud. So they just had lots of powder full of asbestos floating around and no one told them there was asbestos. So they didn't have any kind of respirators. And then about 20 years down the road, 30 years down the road, they get mesothelioma and asbestosis and filed a lawsuit. And Diamond Offshore Drilling argued in 2013 that they were not liable in the case because the company was purchased in 1989 and that was after the asbestos exposure so they claimed that because the company changed

hands they didn't have to pay anyone who worked for the company um for their treatment for asbestos exposure um i couldn't actually find any updates on this so my guess is that either they settled out of court or they were legitimately able to thwart the lawsuit on that basis. But that's because their argument's not like we stopped using asbestos. It's just like, well, we bought it at some point during the ongoing. So we're no longer liable. Yeah. I paid good money for that asbestos.

Yeah. No, they even acknowledge in the court documents. They're like, yeah, there was some asbestos, but it wasn't our asbestos yeah no they even acknowledge in the court documents they're like yeah there was some asbestos but it wasn't our asbestos at the time i'm just holding it for a friend yeah i liked um from that same washington post article you quoted um james tish saying that thing about we have asbestos lined pockets which like of all the fucking metaphors yeah what's going on in your subconscious buddy but they in that same article they also quote andrew tish with i think another revealing quote he says about the company quote we want to be as collaborative as possible um he uh who adds uh said andrew tish who adds that face-to-face discussion is favored over memos and reports.

Quote, keep it simple. Open doors, shirt sleeves, and talk about it. Don't write about it. And in terms of other revealing quotes, don't write things down is another pretty revealing quote to give to the Washington Post. Was that shirt sleeves? What? Yeah what yeah i mean because he's giving this quote in context of like we have a casual office environment anybody can just kind of walk in and talk to anybody you're not all you don't have to wear a suit that kind of stuff david letterman could come in and fuck the interns i'm now getting this vision this entire narrative of a roaming David Letterman. Going from office to office around New York. Taking his due like the Reaper. This Wall Street interns, he doesn't care.

You know who I am, don't you? You'll let me in. I need no introduction. I'm going to have to rough you up. He's followed around by the CBS orchestra. From New York, the greatest city in the world, it's serial rapist David Letterman. Yeah, after they passed the late show to Colbert,

there's been a spike in David Letterman related sexual so criminal justice system there are two distinct and important factions David Letterman and the prosecutors who prosecute Andy when when does the Tish family get this school named after them do we get there yet it's got to be after the OG Tish's Andy, when did the Tisch family get this school named after them? Did we get there yet? It's got to be after the OG Tisches. Honestly, I didn't write it down.

I have it. It's just from Wikipedia. In 1985, the NYU School's second dean, David Oppenheim, solicited a donation from Larry and Bob Tisch that made possible the acquisition of 721 broadway where most of the tish school's programs are housed and in recognition of the generosity of the donation the school was renamed the tish school of arts and it's across from all lids oh nice do you get any lids 85 uh i didn't ever get any lids but I did hang out

and look at all the lids and touch them and then decide not to get any a bunch of times they loved me they loved me over there get the Patek discount at lids five finger lids discount getting out of my hugely expensive college and then stealing hats every day if you take the sticker off it's yours this belongs to the next generation

so uh the tissues they may not like having anything written down in the corporate offices but uh it's a little different say if you're a hotel employee um for instance in 2018 uh there was a class action lawsuit against lowe's hotels uh for the use of biometric data, where the lawsuit alleges that the Chicago-based hotel did not comply with Illinois Biometric... The lawsuit alleges that the Chicago-based hotel did not comply with the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. What they did is the Lowe's Hotel in Chicago implemented a fingerprint-based timekeeping system for employees to punch in and out because they claim it was to cut down on time-tracking fraud,

which I'm sure was just costing them tons of money. Yeah, $7.25 an hour. That adds up, Andy. Yeah, yeah. And in point of fact, the fingerprint data was given to third parties without the employee's knowledge or consent, lending the employees to a risk of identity theft, especially if third party companies also had the social security numbers associated with the fingerprints, which they often did. The fingerprint data was given to payroll processors, vendors, and other third parties. Workers also noted that they have no way to ensure that these third parties are protecting their private data.

And state law requires that employees must give their approval in writing after the company has informed them in writing about how the biometric information will be stored, how it will be collected, and how long it will be maintained. And Lowe's finally settled in Julyuly 2020 for 1.05 million dollars so they basically admitted yeah we were taking your data and giving it to weird companies um and uh here's you know with a number of employees they probably got maybe a couple thousand each yeah well alex watch watch for the check for your eye scan data okay ready at any time to take that check so um another interesting thing about the tish family is jonathan tish who uh the guy who gave

the most money to biden um he served as vice chair to this company called the Welfare to Work Partnership. Jonathan Tisch is a longtime Democrat donor. He's a friend of Bill Clinton's. And even he was listed in an article in The Washington Post as one of the people who has donated to all six national Clinton campaigns, so both Bill and Hillary. But the Welfare to Work Partnership specifically, it's a private sector organization that was founded to, quote, take the lead in the new mandates of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, aka the welfare reform law that impoverished a bunch of people.

The Welfare to Work Partnership was founded by Burger King, Monsanto, Sprint, United Airlines, and UPS. And it provides, according to their website, innovative workforce solutions for U.S. companies of all sizes and industries to successfully hire, retain, and promote welfare recipients and other unemployed and low-income workers, including information, technical assistance, and support. I guess we should go over a brief history of welfare to work. It replaced the New Deal-era Aid to Families with Dependent Children Act, and after Clinton vetoed two

Republican proposals to drastically cut that program's funding he signed into law the personal responsibility and work opportunity act i do feel like uh welfare to work bill was a big improvement over their original title hamburger wage slave decree that's what that's what you see when you put on the they live glasses you just see the king everywhere and you gotta catch them it's like that game they had on that xbox cd in 2008 that's right well that's why they make the big bucks for naming this these things you know you got to be a real genius to come up with patriot act instead of reichstag fire enabling act 2.0 yeah i don't know do you ever think about like where you would fit into

the machine you know like i feel like i could come up with a very a bunch of like great soft names to give horrible calls you'd be one of the namers? Yeah, I'd be in the names room, shooting out names. How about Opportunity Clause? That's on my card I give people. You're hired. I would be paid to psyop the left through my podcast oh that would be up sean shut the fuck up no we can edit this out too oh we never learned how to edit the cia never gave us

editing software all right all right we're gonna stop the recording and then we're gonna start it up again and the listeners won't know it's so funny to imply that any diy podcast is a cia op because i mean and i mean this lovingly we are all so badly run like even if you were the handler you'd be like this is a terrible return on investment we should do this again what's uh what we're gonna do is we're gonna indoctrinate about 5 000 people and they are all going to fight to the death with each other the entire time the worst thing is though alex is that as we've been doing this all of us like the more i see like oh and now obama has a podcast oh and now matthew mcconaughey has a

podcast and then you listen to those pieces of shit and they're not much better and then a party who's like wait is everyone inept and we are doing as good as everyone else even with millions of dollars or do they suck or do we all suck it really blurs the lines on making a creative thing and realizing no one knows how to do anything. What do you mean the president can't edit? Malia went to Harvard. Let her edit.

Thanks again for returning to the show. I finally figured out the reverb button was on. Thanks to Shorty with the cash on that feedback. They're watching the YouTube tutorials as well. It's like, okay, you might

be here to edit, and we're teaching you Audacity 102. I guess this is where I'm going to learn how to split cut. Now, you can edit out that thing about me smoking crack in the back of the limousine, right?

Yeah, it's right before the Grubhub ad. I love the idea that somebody's being paid to edit Obama's podcast. It puts the same level of attention into it I do when I'm playing games on my phone. So now you say I need an RSS feed. What the fuck is that? Listen, we killed Osama Bin Laden, but I can't figure out the iTunes podcast beta analytics.

What were we talking about welfare welfare to work um so okay here's what bill clinton did uh it converted the afdc uh uh aid to families with dependent children into a flat funded block grant and sent it to states to administer. And that was known as the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program or TAMF, T-A-N-F. A block grant is a fixed sum of money that the federal government gives to state governments to administer program subject federal guidelines. And what that means is that the TANF block grant has been flat funded at $16.5 billion since the law was initially implemented 20 years ago, despite increases to cost of living. It doesn't increase with cost of living. And as a result, the block grant has actually lost more than one third of its value since 1996.

And now fewer than one in four families with children living below the federal poverty line are helped by TANF today, which is down more than two thirds since 1996. They're also on block grants are also unable to respond to economic downturns. So during the Great Recession, the number of families on TANF only increased by 16%, despite the number of unemployed workers spiking by 90%. And due to the money going to local governments, much of it is treated as a slush fund

and diverted. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, only one in four TANF dollars goes to needy families. And in terms of actually getting people work, which is, you know, the welfare to work part, only 8% of TANF funding goes to employment preparation services. States aren't even allowed to provide job search and job readiness assistance for more than four consecutive weeks and six weeks in an entire year. And vocational training only counts toward required work activity for 12 months. As for where Tisch fits into this, in 1999, in a press release on HospitalityNet, Jonathan Tisch said that to address the labor shortages in the hospitality industry,

he would be hiring people directly out of welfare to work. Quote, there are hundreds of thousands of able-bodied, enthusiastic, work-ready welfare recipients looking to re-enter the mainstream economy. His words, not probably theirs. In order for this country to move more than 4 million people from welfare to work, the business community must take the lead. So basically, he just used it to fish for cheap labor from people who, you know, were probably on welfare because they needed to take care of children during the day, and then forced them to fold towels in his hotels. Well, Andy, nothing you've described seems related to the subsequent rise in extreme poverty after the law was signed. But I was going to say, Christopher Hitchens,

actually, before he went clinically psychopathically insane, wrote a book called No One Left to Lie To about Bill Clinton, and he covers welfare reform in a chapter of it. And he talks about how welfare reform basically ended up creating, I mean, it was intended to create a slave labor pool for employers like the Tish's. And he talks specifically about Tyson Foods, which, you know, working in a Tyson Foods factory, it's a very difficult, very dangerous job. And he talks about how basically they're creating these slave labor pools. And you say no well you're fucked you're going to starve to death um and they can get rid of you for any reason you can't unionize there's just like uh you know countless people ready to take your place

because everybody's so desperate and i just wanted to kind of update that with tyson foods recently uh managers were found to be um gambling or betting on which of how many of their employees would contract covet and five employees actually died of covet so you know i mean it's just it's created this absolutely horrific situation for low-wage workers in this country right they had a they had a strike system you got like five strikes and then you can't come back to the chicken holocaust factory anymore just cool guys fun bros uh speaking of covid uh diamond offshore drilling um got uh money from the cares act then filed for bankruptcy um and in the interim they used that money from the cares act to give out bonuses to executives kings it's funny a little bit

so uh i think finally sean you did some looking into their insurance company and some of their hijinks with regards to the Iraq war. Yeah, so they own 90% of what's called CNA Financial. It's based in Chicago. It's primarily a commercial insurer. And I just wanted to kind of note, it is interesting what the new generation have done since they took over. As we mentioned mentioned they sold off their asbestos uh tobacco cigarettes company they sold off their they sold off their watchmaker what are their pockets lined with now uh bolova was their watchmaker they sold that off in 2008

and um as we've kind of mentioned here primarily primarily they moved into oil drilling, natural gas pipelines. According to Washington Post, they provide about 11% of the natural gas in the United States as of 2012. So we might do a follow-up episode on some of those other areas. But just with regards to the insurance, it seems like the only two big legacy businesses they're still in is they're still in hotels. And then since the 70s, they're still in this insurer, CNA Insurance. And I took a bit of a look at CNA Insurance, and it was pretty interesting. So CNA Financial Corporation actually dates all the way back to 1897 in Chicago. Apparently in the 1960s, CNA covered one of the Beatles concerts

in the event of inclement weather at Shea Stadium. So I just kind of skimmed through CNA's Wikipedia and defrauding Iraqi translators who were blown up by insurers is not on their Wikipedia. You have to look elsewhere to find that part of the story.

I wonder why that is. Yeah. But so as we mentioned, the Lowe's Corporation purchased 56% of the stock of CNA in 1974. Now they own 90%. And to kind of start the story, just on Yelp,

even for an insurance company, they have extremely low Yelp reviews. I actually went through, I read every single one of these they have 46 yelp reviews every single one except for one is one star the one the one that is not one star is two stars and uh it's because they answered a phone call. So, you know, there's like business owners reviewing them. There's car insurance owners.

There's long term care owners basically all saying the same story of they were denied claims based on excuses and paperwork and runarounds. Like you'll find a couple stories of people cancel their policy via phone and then four months later get a fat bill saying they never canceled their policy. There was a guy who said he bought a one year small business insurance policy, which they then sent to him as a contract for a six month small business policy at the exact same price. And then he spent six months arguing with them, with them threatening to audit him throughout the entire time. Wow. So just like this kind of bullshit, you know, a guy says, I've been going through them for workers comp claims for four months. They will make you go through hoops and still deny your claim. In 2012, somebody writes, in my opinion, you shouldn't expect the very nice voice answering the phone to be on your side.

And you may never speak to the same person or hear the same thing twice so record conversations as they do carefully log dates times details of everything take photos and still expect a big fight for coverage um please note that i didn't wish to give them any stars but the system wouldn't allow it and like the most horrifying reviews are the ones about their long-term care policy insurance because basically you know if you are worried about having to put your mom in a home or whatever you buy an insurance policy and there's just a bunch of stories about i paid them this premium on time every you know every billing cycle for 20 straight years and then when i went to put my mom in a home they were like fuck, we're not paying for that. Oh, wow.

So, just a bunch of stories like that. 2018, here's a Yelp review, quote, I am a hospice social worker and routinely deal with submitting information needed to process long-term care claims for patients who need the money to pay for their treatment. Avoid, avoid, avoid. They avoid phone calls, avoid customers, avoid ever paying anything out. The only thing consistent about them is their denial of claims. What this company does to seniors should be considered fraud. They do everything possible to delay or deny a claim.

I've actually had someone from this company say, quote, well, if you just wait long enough, then they die and we won't have to pay out, unquote. I don't know how these people sleep with themselves at night and you know like god there's and there's so many just horrifying stories like this i won't that's also their approach to joe biden uh i won't go through all of them a guy says i bought a long-term care policy from cna in 1998 so uh my parents had uh paid into this for 20 years before I needed dementia slash assisted living care for my mom. The claims process is built on the premise of delaying, denying, and dragging out the payment as much as possible. They will first put you and the facility through bureaucratic hell with needed forms, et cetera. Then once you've followed the processes, they've laid out and submitted everything.

They said they need it for the claims to be paid they come up with something to justify a rejection usually another random required form they pull from their ass to make matters worse they won't call you or email you to let you know there's a problem they say they can't make outbound calls they will send you the rejection notice via u.s mail so that buys them an extra few days on top of the time they've already wasted. This process happens two to three times per claim. And then there was like one other story I'll summarize regarding long-term care. They rejected an invoice because it was submitted two weeks early. So he got them on a conference call with the long-term care facility uh to agree to resend the invoice after

june 1st cna agreed to this well two weeks later i get a rejection notice saying the invoice was a duplicate wow so they rejected the invoice then he resubmitted it and then they rejected it because it was a duplicate so you know you can just only imagine what it's like dealing with this fucking insurance company. Jeez. This is what you get when you're not allowed to just have Irish six-year-olds in a factory. It's an either-or. America made its decision. But the most horrifying kind of story that I found regarding this is a reporter named T. Christian Miller in ProPublica. He wrote about kind of what happened with regards to these Iraqi translators,

Iraqi and Afghanistan. It's an interesting story where there's a federally funded program based on the World War II era Defense Base Act. Defense Base Act. Base Act. That basically says all civilian contractors operating in a war zone are required to have hazard insurance, you know, like an equivalent of workers' comp, basically. So, you know, if they die, some sort of insurance is supposed to pay out benefits to the survivors. And CNA is kind of the second player in this market. It's primarily AIG. But the thing is, unsurprisingly, like every single Pentagon post-9-11 program,% more in premiums than it paid out in profits.

And he says for Contax, typical domestic insurance profit rates are in the single-digit percentage margin. So, CNA and AIG were making like 35% to 50% profit ratios doing this private sector insurance for contractors in war zones. And of course, how they were getting these crazy profit ratios is going through this same process of rejecting and denying claims for people who had their leg blown off in Iraq or for translators who got blown up in a bus.

And you can imagine it's hard enough if you're domestic to get your money from them. If you are an extremely impoverished person in Iraq who is relying on your translator's son for income, it's damn near impossible. Right. But isn't this all worth it so that John Early can play his drag character Vicky at Amy Schumer's wedding and be the officiant? Isn't her laughter worth the asbestos, Irish women killing,

CNA insurance embezzlement system that Sean's describing here? Isn't it worth it to see Amy Schumer happy just for a moment? It was particularly insidious the way the Tisch family offered to officiate that wedding and then just threw in Sean early

at the last second. I think what makes it worth it is the 1989 television adaptation of Dirty Dancing. Just quoting from one of the T. Christian Miller articles, they talk about a specific case where a federal judge in 2011 said that CNA should be referred to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution. They were, of course, not criminally prosecuted, but an actual judge from the bench said, this is clearly fraud. People should go to jail for this. The Department of Labor should refer them for criminal prosecution. And were they referred for criminal prosecution? They were not referred for criminal prosecution. They talk about one specific case in October 29th.

Another great day in the American justice system. In October 29, 2006, insurgents boarded a bus and killed 17 Iraqi born translators working in Basra for Sally Port Global Services, a security contractor. CNA under the law was responsible for paying death benefits to the translator's dependents. CNA paid when the translators had children and spouses, but not to other survivors. In such cases where there's not children or spouses, the Labor Department demands proof

that survivors relied on contractors' earnings. CNA hired investigators who interviewed nine families, confirmed their eligibility, and even set up bank accounts but cna withheld portions of the investigators findings when it submitted the claims to the labor department one cna file shows that the slain translator had supported his mother a widow since his father was killed in the iraq iran war the town council even issued a statement of support confirming the translator was his mother's, quote, sole provider. Another CNA file shows that another translator killed in the ambush was sole support for his family, which, quote, could be described as very poor, unquote. But those pages were missing from the information CNA submitted to the Labor Department. As a result, labor officials accepted cna's declaration that there were no dependents to pay in any of the

nine cases they saved uh five hundred thousand dollars doing this and you know again these are some of the most desperately poor people on earth and uh some of the richest people in the world at the uh the tish family and they're just shorting five hundred thousand dollars that they owe under the law and getting away with it it's what we call new york excellence the top of the heap again baby that one that one movie described earlier with the uh the the television station is directly ripped out of succession oh really no where they just can uh like a third of the department so they can make off with the money and watch the line go up and like you know again i i do encourage people to read these articles uh just for the sake of time

i'll only kind of summarize but they there's so much fucking fraud in this program they talk about some sort of special fund that was set up by the insurers. In one case, CNA paid $5,000 of this special fund and only $518 to a translator's family for burial expenses, but it was reimbursed $9,289 by the federal government for investigating and handling the claims. So, they paid out death benefits, but actually made a healthy profit from the federal government when they actually paid out $5, but actually made a healthy profit from the federal government when they actually paid out $518 to a translator's family for death benefits. And why they get away with all this is probably noted by T. Christian Miller, who says in 2009, unlike insurance giant AIG, which promised to cease lobbying after receiving billions

in bailout money, Chicago-based carrier CNA still works hard to influence lawmakers. The company has spent more than $6 million in lobbying since 2001, including more than $300,000 in the first quarter of this year, 2009, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And then there's just a bunch of other cases of them just refusing to pay for people's prosthetic legs,

both, you know, Iraqis and Afghanis, but also American contractors who end up in those war zones. Right. But on the other hand, Jonathan funded the Lincoln Project, and they're making Republicans respectable again. That's right. Right. Well, you can't put a price on respect, Sean. And that's what this whole episode's about. Yeah. And then the last T. Christian Miller article is from 2009. It was actually shared on Bernie Sanders' Senate webpage. But it just talks about actually a Pentagon study found that Congress could save as much as $250 million a year

through a sweeping overhaul of how insurance is provided to civilian contractors injured in war zones. And basically, unsurprisingly, the U.S. pays, as of 2009, about $400 million annually to AIG and a handful of other carriers, such as CNA, to purchase this special workers' comp insurance. It would be much cheaper for the U.S. government to just provide the insurance directly instead of going through this private system that has all this waste and fraud. But of course, they have not changed that system. And the Pentagon, quote, denied a Freedom of Information Act request by ProPublica to release documents submitted by the firms as part of the review, claiming that the information

is proprietary business data. So basically, the Pentagon, unsurprisingly, is working with these big insurers to ensure that their slush fund is protected and the revolving door and the lobbying and everything kind of goes through. And it's just another little small example of just how much money is wasted in these war zones. Well, that's very important. But I also want to note that Steven's cat Leon walked across the camera and Alex, that looks a lot like Alex's cat Waffles and Alex made a face and then looked at Waffles.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's another example of private-public partnerships. Baby, that's how we won the space race. Woo! But, you know, that's how they got that money to afford that building where those Irish women were burned to death. They don't own NYU.

I am just going to chime in here. They just bought, they gave them money for the one building. Alex, you tow the line or we cut you out of the episode. I'm just saying you have to do a different episode on that. It's not the same people. It's only loosely related. Their name is on the building, Alex. They own the building. Their name is on the, you know what? Irish people aren't people. I don i'm why i'm going out on a limb for this it doesn't matter this episode as you said is about respect and we didn't bring you on here to uh disrespect our uh points about the tish family owning all of nyu yeah nyu shill alex patak comes home from his comfy podcasting gig.

So what, just because you graduated from the most prestigious film school in America, you think you can come on our podcast and correct us? They have a lot of great things to offer. Their dining halls are second to none. Patak just wants to protect his Riverdale connects. He wants to make sure that he gets that side role as Jughead's friend Cole if you're listening I could be Jughead's friend

I know you can make it happen Cole you're a very handsome man we met once Alex gets a text message from his friend whose brother's on Riverdale just like I heard what you said about NYU being owned by the Tisch family

and I'm gonna have to end this relationship right now no it's not what I said I was the only one shilling I was the only one they do fake insurance or something now. I was sort of listening. When I hear dead Iraqi translators, I just tune out. Not really my business. Yeah, you're going to need a translator to make it interesting, pal. Get your poor mother on the line. All right. This was fun. Yeah, this was a good time.

Thanks for joining us, Alex. Where can people find you? Anytime. You can listen to my politics show, Poddam America, that I am on most of the time with the wonderful Anders Lee and Jake Flores. Or if you'd rather talk analytically about the hit show Dragon Ball Z Kai, you can listen to Ballin' Out Super. Or if you'd rather just have a 1920s style radio drama,

you could listen to my original radio drama, Theater of Delights. I have three podcasts. Wow. Lovely. No one asked for this. I texted you and specifically asked for this. And with that, this has been Grubstakers. I'm Andy Pollner.

I'm Yogi Poyle. I'm Steve Jeffers. I'm Shumpy McCarthy. Thanks for listening. And if you have other dirt about other Tisch companies, such as Lowe's Corp, Diamond Offshore Oil Drilling, or Boardwalk Natural Gas Pipelines, or just anything we didn't get to on the episode, Bye-bye.