Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Private Equity Is Destroying America

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

Private equity has quietly been gutting major sectors of the American economy, from healthcare, to housing, retail, our news media, and more. The industry is a multi trillion-dollar powerhouse that ultimately shapes all of our lives. Journalist Megan Greenwell has been covering the rise of Private Equity, and her new book reveals how private equity takeovers have disrupted industries, eroded job security, and undermined essential services across our country. Megan joined me to dig into the rise of private equity, how and why it has  infiltrated every aspect of American life, and what average people can do about it. ***** Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co ***** Buy Megan's book: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/bad-company-megan-greenwellSubscribe to my newsletter: ⁠⁠https://www.usermag.co⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenzhttps://bsky.app/profile/taylorlorenz.bsky.social

Private equity is not playing a long-term game. They're playing a short-term game. And if they can get theirs and get out, that is exactly what they will do. Over the past few years, private equity has quietly been gutting major sectors of the American economy. From health care to housing to retail, our news media, and more. The industry is a multi-trillion dollar powerhouse that touches all of our lives in ways we might not realize. Journalist Megan Greenwell has been covering the rise of this industry. And her new book, Bad Company, Private Equity and the,

the death of the American dream reveals how private equity takeovers have disrupted industries, eroded job security, and undermine essential services throughout our country. Today we're going to dig into the rise of private equity, talk about how and why it's infiltrated every aspect of our lives, and what average people can do about it. Hi, Megan. Welcome to Power User. Hi, Taylor. Thanks for having me. Okay, so Megan, you've written this fantastic book that's really a deep dive into private equity, how it works, how it's affecting our economy and all of this. When do you you start to get interested in this topic and when did private equity first come on your radar? I had no background in finance reporting. I've reported on almost everything, but somehow never

finance or economics. And I knew nothing about private equity until it came into my life. So I was the editor-in-chief of Deadspin, the sort of like snarky sports website that was the sister site to Jezebel and Gizmodo and all of those wonderful Gawker media sites. And we got bought by private equity firm in 2019. And honestly, originally, I did not think it was the worst case scenario. We were in a bad ownership situation before. Deadspin itself was doing really well by every metric, including money. And so I thought, great, they're talking a big game about how they're going to come in, strengthen up the business side, offer us some good opportunities to expand the things that we can monetize. Why not, right? And what happened was it all went to hell just immediately. These guys

came in, had no idea what we did and had no curiosity about what we did, even though, like I say, we were doing well and just really wanted to issue directives for the sake of issuing directives. So it was clear pretty immediately that I was not going to be able to remain in this job, and I was driven out of my job within about three months. But I couldn't stop thinking about it. I wrote this piece on my way out the door called The Adults in the Room that was about my experience and that was about how private equity works in media a little bit, but it was not deeply reported. And then when I left, I just kept reading about how it works in media and how it works in other industries. And I got really obsessed. And I think it was maybe a little bit just out

of spite. But partially just, I wanted to know this thing had happened to me and I did not understand what had happened. And that was a really unsatisfying feeling. And so, yeah, that's how I feel like pretty much everyone has heard the words private equity at least in recent years, but not everyone understands exactly what this industry does. So before we get into how private equity is warping so many industries in America, I want to talk about how it works. Private equity essentially is a system of private financing that bundles money from outside investors. So those could be university endowments, pension funds, ultra wealthy individuals, all of these types of people, and uses that money to buy companies.

The trick is that they use that money in combination with a huge amount of loans. And so if I want to buy the Power User Podcast, I'm going to take out probably 80% of what I'll pay you will be loans. And the weird part about private equity that is unlike other types of financing is that those loans will not be taken out in my name

as the private equity firm, but they'll be taking out in the name of the Power User podcast. So if I drive your podcast into the ground with my bad management as the private equity firm, I'm not responsible for paying any of those loans back. Only your company is responsible for paying them back. And so it's this system of financing where the incentives of the parent firm and the incentives of the company that's getting acquired get split in this way that I think makes it really dangerous for companies, their workers,

and the communities in which they're based. When you look at the private equity landscape, who are the main power players in this space? Oh, man, there are so many. So some of the big ones in the U.S. are Blackstone. Blackstone is by far the biggest. Carlisle is a big one. KKR is huge.

Bain and Company founded famously by Mitt Romney. And one thing that is really interesting is aside from the firms, a lot of their CEOs and founders are real power players in their own right. So I live in New York, you can look at the board of any major hospital, cultural institution, whatever it is, and it's just this long list of private equity names, right? So these are people with a huge amount of power, not just through their formal roles, but also in terms of like how intertwined they are with our cultural institutions and our society. And I think that is a major hurdle toward getting significant regulation because they're rubbing else.

with all the right people and funding all the right children's hospitals and whatever it is. Right. These are big, powerful people, even if their companies are a little bit more behind the scenes. Yeah, exactly. How is this so profitable? Because it seems like, based on that business model, as you said, the incentives would be kind of messed up. And yet these people are taking home millions and millions of dollars a year. So the nice thing if you're a private equity firm is that you don't need the company that you own to make money for you to make money, right? So the incentives really do get dissociated in that way. There are a bunch of reasons for that. One is the tax breaks are extremely favorable. So you're very rarely paying significant taxes on bonuses, even straight profits, which they called carry

interest, all of this stuff. Another is that I, as the private equity firm, if I'm buying your company, I make my management fee no matter what. I could be making catastrophe. I could be making catastrophic business decisions for your company, but I'm still going to get paid 2% of the deal every single year. There are performance bonuses on top of that, so I will make more money if your company does well. But there are so many other ways I as the private equity firm can make money too that I almost don't need that. So for example, in real estate intensive industries, like retail, like hospitals, like local newspapers, the private equity firm will very often sell off the land that those companies used to own and then start charging the company rent.

So that is something where the incentives are exactly opposite, right? The private equity firm is now getting the profits of those real estate deals. Whereas the company, many of them take local newspapers, for example, they had owned those grand old buildings in downtown of whatever city it is for decades. So they weren't paying mortgage payments, right? They just own them outright. now they're paying rent payments, so now they're deeper and deeper in the hole, but the private equity firm is literally profiting off of that.

So there are so many ways for a private equity firm to make money through these fees, through the tax breaks, through bonuses, through all these like financialization tricks like selling off the real estate, that it's very hard for them to lose money on a given deal, even if the company goes into bankruptcy and liquidates, which a fairly stunning number of them do. What did you find when you looked into what private equity was doing sort of more broadly in media? The media stuff is wild because it is the quintessential industry where the bad business decisions on media leaders part really did usher private equity in the door.

I started in media shortly before the 2008 recession when every newspaper in America had these exciting, still relative. new websites, and they thought nothing of dumping all of their content on their websites for free and still expecting people to pay for a print subscription. That was not a private equity problem. That was just a problem created by bad leaders. And so shortly after that, when private equity started to get involved, essentially it was to profit off of the scraps. Many newspapers were still profitable, but the profits were on a pretty steady downward slide. And I think private equity really just saw that there were a fair number of folks, especially older folks, who would continue to pay for their local newspaper out of some sense of obligation, no matter how little news was in there. So there's this whole class of what researchers call ghost newspapers, which are papers where the product exists.

You can subscribe to the print newspaper, but there is literally zero local news in it. There are no reporters. There is nothing that is specific to that community. So everything in the print newspaper is wire copy coming from somewhere else. And so then you have no staff costs functionally. You have very small costs to put out the paper and to subscribe to the wire services that get you your content. But it's a really easy way to just keep making some money. It will run out for sure because that generation of folks who will all,

always subscribe to their print newspaper is dying out. But private equity is not playing a long-term game. They're playing a short-term game. And if they can get theirs and get out, that is exactly what they will do. It seems like it's been most devastating for local news, as you mentioned, where it's just like gutted the last sort of breadth of the local news industry, where it's just like it's every single bit is chopped up for profit. And I was looking on fiber the other day because I needed help with something. And I was like, maybe I'll try to use fiber for the first. time. And I saw, I was looking at these people's profiles that do like content marketing or whatever. And a lot of them have local news experience. And I was clicking into their profiles. These are people

in Bangalore and all that, you know, just very far. They're writing very like kind of, I don't want to say low quality, but it seems kind of just like very generic content for these weird conglomerates that just sort of like publish content across lots of local media outlets. It reminded me of what you set because I was like, God, if you subscribe to this stuff, you're literally just getting sort of like generic copy. And I'm sure a lot of that also will be like outsourced to AI even soon. Like it's just sort of like content for content's sake. And there's no real journalism or investigative reporting or accountability focused stuff that's happening in these like local areas. Yeah. No, there's nothing. I mean, I talked about those ghost newspapers that are in

small towns and rural areas. But even in pretty major cities, the staffs have just been cut to the bone. So I write a bunch in the book about the Austin American statesman, which for generations was like a major daily, multiple award winning, a big deal paper owned by Gannett. And now they're down to, I think it's nine journalists on staff. It's just you can't cover a city the size and the importance of Austin, Texas with nine reporters. It's just not possible. And so one of the things that I think is really important. to remember about private equity firms is they have zero investment in the places where they own companies, right? So they're buying chains. But if you're buying a chain of newspapers and you end up with the one in Austin, Texas, you don't live in Austin, Texas. You may never have been to Austin, Texas. And that's Austin, right? Like, set aside the rural communities where there might have only been three reporters on staff originally, and now it's down to zero. They don't care about those places. Why would they care about those? those places. And so it is very easy, I think, without that investment to forget about community

needs and to just say, great, we can cut and we can cut and we can cut and that will give us some profits and then we'll get out. So private equity isn't just affecting news. It's also affecting other industries. And I want to get into some of those. We can start with hospitals because I feel like that's been something that's really affected people's lives recently where they're coming in and buying up these hospitals. Can you talk a little bit about when private equity entered into the healthcare market and what its effects have been? Private equity was not in health care in a serious way until the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care Act had all sorts of wonderful benefits,

and it also had this problematic side effect of making it much more lucrative for private equity and other financial firms to go into health care because more of the payments were guaranteed, right? So that was just super attractive to them. And so that was really when private equity started to explode in the health care market. And it went especially hard at rural hospitals, which is what I write about in the book, because more rural residents are on Medicaid and Medicare. And so those looked like really attractive offerings. It was also the case that a lot of rural hospitals were struggling, frankly, and that looked like a nice opportunity for private equity because their goal is not

improve the fundamentals of the business over many years or decades. Their business model is pull out as much money as you can up front, and then whatever happens to the business happens. So rural hospitals paradoxically were struggling, which is exactly what made them attractive to private equity. And so now it's really, really common that if you live in a rural area, your closest hospital is owned by private equity. And what have the effects of that been on patient care and other services that the hospitals provide?

So the biggest effect is just a lot fewer services, especially at rural hospitals. So the one I write about in the book, a town of 10,000 people had a very basic no-frills hospital. If you had some sort of complicated condition, you were never going to get treated there, right, long before private equity was in the picture. But basic surgery, right, getting your appendix out, delivering a baby, getting your kids' heads stitched up when he fell off the coffee table and split open his forehead. Those were all things that every rural hospital could provide. And what happened was when private equity came in, they just started getting more and more and more of those services stripped.

That's a super common story. It turned into what the locals now call a Band-Aid station rather than a true hospital. The other factor, and there is less data on this, although there was a landmark study at the end of 2023, is that patient care does get worse. There are all of these factors that are the classic preventable complications in hospitals. One of the biggest ones is what they call central line infections. So if they need to put an IV, like, straight into your central system,

as opposed to in a vein in your arm, those are an incredibly preventable complication. They usually result from improper cleaning or improper cleaning, or improper insertion. And these researchers from Harvard and the University of Chicago found that those central line infections go way, way up

after private equity takes over a hospital. So that is just like a thing that should never happen in a hospital that is up to standard and you see this dramatic increase because there is less staff, there is less money for additional equipment. All of these cutbacks

have real effects on patients. This is horrifying. Obviously, when we're talking about healthcare, tell me about the retail industry as well, because I feel like this is another one where we always hear about private equity coming in. Like, I don't know, I keep hearing about like my favorite brands from the 2000s, right? It's like, oh, it was bought by a P firm and now it's shutting down or now it's coming back. It seems like they're really active in that industry as well. What have they been doing in retail and what have the effects been? Yeah, so retail compared to hospitals, housing and media was an early sector for,

private equity. They got into that a while ago and are actually now much less active than they used to be, although they still have plenty of deals. They recently bought Walgreens. But retail is a tricky one because they target the exact same businesses that used to themselves be the boogeymen for putting mom and pops out of business. So I write about Toys R Us in the book and there was a time when a lot of people were super skeptical of Toys R Us because it meant that the little adorable toy store on Main Street was no longer there. But then Toys R Us became an institution. This term was actually invented to describe Toys R Us called Category Killer, which is essentially

one business that is so big that it shuts off any opportunities for any competitor to exist. And that's how big Toys R Us was. And private equity got involved because retail looked super exciting. There was a moment where Brick and Morton. retail was a very hot commodity. It feels long ago now, but it wasn't. The Toys R Us deal, which was an absolutely massive deal, was in 2005. And KKR and Bain Capital and Vornado Realty Trust said, look, sure, Amazon is coming. That's a problem. But we can save this company. We can return this company to its glory days. And that wasn't what happened in large part because, again, the

loans were so crippling that there was no money to try to compete with Amazon. There was no money to improve the in-store experience to bulk up their website, any of these things that have been successful for a huge number of brick-and-mortar stores, right? We talk about the dominance of Amazon, but there's still plenty of big box chains that are doing great. And the ones that aren't are very often private equity owned. The most common type of tag I get from strangers online is, did you see such and such company retail chain just went out of business because of private equity? Joanne Fabrics was one of the most recent ones. And everybody freaked out because if you're in the crafting world, I'm not. But if you are in the crafting world, everybody loves Joanne Fabrics,

right? It feels like something you have an emotional investment in in the way that a lot of big box stores are not. And I think for people who are interested in drawing attention to the problem of private equity, that's actually been a big benefit because when people love these chains, they feel invested. And so that was what happened with Toys R Us was that people were so outraged because it was a store they genuinely loved. And that led to a lot of outrage in a way that actually help generate some meaningful pushback against private equity in the retail space. I feel like, yeah, people start to care when you mess with their favorite brands. I saw a bunch of the Joanne's backlash too on TikTok and people just being like,

God, they're ruining another company. I guess another more high stakes industry similar to health care is housing. And it seems like private equity is also eating up an increasing share of our housing market. I know this was a big topic of conversation maybe a year or two ago when there was some stat that came out that said that PE firms were like buying up all of these houses from boomers and we're never going to be able to afford housing. So how did they enter into the real estate market and what is private equity doing in that area? Yeah, this is something I was really curious about because for a long time private equity was in commercial real estate but not housing. And I couldn't

quite figure out why housing was so attractive because on one level, it's a hard business, right? You have to buy up individual parcels, individual apartment buildings, individual houses, whatever it is. And I think the real key to it is private equity figured out that they were eligible for low-interest loans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Those loans are designed to help ordinary Americans buy homes, right? That was the genesis of those two agencies back in the 1920s. But there's nothing stopping private equity from taking advantage of those low interest loans, too. And the great thing about government loans is then you're only responsible for paying back that low interest rate. You don't have investors who are expecting a certain percentage of your profits, right?

So it looks like this beautiful deal for private equity because the cost of getting in is so low. And so if you start snapping up thousands upon thousands of single-family homes plus massive apartment complexes, plus mobile home parks, now all of a sudden, your cost of acquisition is really low and your potential profits are really, really high. And so that's what started driving that interest. And they really are in every sector of the housing market now. It started really with mobile homes, but now it's very big in both single-family homes. and in huge apartment complexes, which is what I focus on in the book. And it's what you would expect, right? They buy an apartment complex.

They jack up the rents. They make the kind of millennial gray improvements that don't improve the fundamentals of the building but help you rent to a different category of people who are likely to pay more money. The apartment complex I write about in the book is in Alexandria, Virginia, where Amazon's big new corporate headquarters is going to be opening. And so this is an apartment complex that catered largely to fairly recent African immigrants. And all of a sudden they're jacking up the rents because, of course, all of these well-paid Amazon engineers are going to be moving into Alexandria.

And if you can capture a share of that market, like your profits go through the roof, right? So it really has been a very attractive market for the most simple reason, which is just that it's a good way to goose profits. I feel like another area that it's infiltrating and affecting a lot of people on sort of like a personal, visceral level is child care and all of these like daycare centers. Why would a private equity firm be buying into these random businesses? Like daycare just doesn't seem like super high profit or even like dentist's office or I know private equity is also taking over like, veterinary clinics and stuff. So how do they decide, like, what industries to enter and why do they seem to enter all of these, like, kind of weird sectors of our economy? I think it's a lot of sectors where there is a captive audience, right? So I am a childless dog owner, which means that

I will spend whatever it takes on my dog. You know, exactly that philosophy has driven private equity into veterinary care because they know that people like me will pay whatever they need to for their dog. The other thing is, they go into a lot of industries where the American social safety net has failed us in one way or another, right? So preschool is a great example of this where you have to pay something to get your kid into daycare if they are too young for kindergarten. That is a societal failing, but that is absolutely the world in which we live. So the potential profits there are actually crazily high because you have all of these people who literally just need somewhere to stash their kid so they can work. And so that's one where a couple of the biggest daycare chains

in America, including one that is all over Brooklyn where I live, are owned by private equity. And I'm not sure how many of the parents whose kids attend daycare there even know. I've had multiple friends text me, you know, months after their kids started going to a certain daycare saying, hey, did you know? And I was like, yeah, unfortunately, I did. Dentistry, too, like, so few people have comprehensive dental insurance. And so if you have an emergency situation with a tooth, you're just going to have to pay no matter what that takes, because you can't just remain in the agonizing pain that this tooth problem is causing you. And so again, it's like this weird combination of desperation, no functioning social safety net, and that combines to make a really nice chance for profits.

It's so depressing. It's like they're kind of like vultures feeding off this economy. I hate to put it that way. But as you said, they're really profiting off this lack of a safety net. Are there any safeguards in place to protect people who are actually like the patrons of these businesses or people, for instance, that are, you know, having to rely on private equity driven services now? because it feels like no matter where you go, you're sort of encountering these decaying businesses that where like the services are just depreciating and depreciating. Honestly, there are not a lot of legal protections right now. And the reason there are not a lot of legal protections is because the private equity lobby is big and powerful and has done a really good job, sort of keeping elected congresspeople and senators under their thumb. In the 2020 election cycle, only 12% of people who ended up.

up winning election to Capitol Hill did not take any private equity money. So 88% of people on both sides of the aisle did. That's just hard to combat, right? There have been super interesting ideas for legislation, some industry specific and some more general. So Elizabeth Warren has proposed what she calls the Stop Wall Street Looting Act three, four, five times since she originally proposed it in 2018. Without a pretty dramatic, change in the composition of Congress, that's never going to get through, right? But the idea is out there. She's ready. There is more happening on the state level. So one thing I'm really interested in is in Massachusetts. There was this disastrous bankruptcy of a health care company called Stewart.

The Boston Globe did some incredible reporting on this story. And Stewart was not private equity owned at the time that it went under, but had been private equity owned just before that. and then they sold it to their CEO. And it became clear that they sold it to their CEO because they had driven it so far into the ground that they just wanted out, right? The company goes under, dozens of hospitals across several states close,

and the legislature of Massachusetts where the company was based said, look, we have to do something about this. And they passed a pretty revolutionary bill to regulate private equity in health care in that state. Now, Massachusetts is a blue, blue, blue state, right? So that is not the type of regulation that can happen everywhere and would never happen on the federal level. But there are things happening.

And one thing I wanted to make sure to do with this book is shine a little light on the things that are happening because it is a topic where it's very easy to feel defeated and feel like, well, everything sucks, bye, you know? And I really didn't want to do that. And I really don't believe that, right? There is interesting stuff happening. Well, what other type of interesting stuff is happening? So there's a lot of work to rebuild industries from the ground up, which is something I'm just always attracted to because I take great pains to say in the book

that private equity did not create the problems of this industry, right? So if we talk about the media industry, which I write about in the book, there were all sorts of catastrophic business decisions by media leaders long before private equity. entered the picture. We both know that very well. What has happened now that private equity is very big in local newspapers is that people are trying new models, right? And that's interesting and exciting and doesn't require congressional approval. So the biggest one I write about in the book is the wave of nonprofit startup local newsrooms. That is just like a genuinely exciting thing that is happening. The Baltimore banner, which is part of this group, just a just won a Pulitzer in their third year of existence, right? And is, by all accounts, doing well financially. So I am really interested in regulatory efforts and court cases and all of those things. But I'm also just really compelled by people who are doing the work to reinvent their

industries without the problems that ushered private equity in the door in the first place. You're talking about some inklings of reforms, I guess, in places like mass. Massachusetts and others. Are there any more like grassroots movements against private equity? It feels like a lot more people at least are aware of private equity and frustrated by it. Like are people trying to do anything else to bring more like transparency even to this industry? Yeah, there is movement. And I think one of the inspiring things for lack of a less cheesy term is that a lot of it is really coming from the ground levels. So we talked a little bit about the story at Toys R Us and what happened when Toys R Us went out of business. is the 33,000 workers at the retail stores were told that even though their contracts guaranteed severance,

they weren't going to get severance because this was not a normal layoff. This was a bankruptcy. And so they fell low enough in the list of creditors in the event of a bankruptcy that they weren't guaranteed any severance. And so that was a case where, you know, we're talking about people making minimum wage. all of a sudden they're out of a job and have zero cushion to deal with that, even though they took this job understanding that they would always have a cushion if something terrible happened. And what happened was the workers banded together and said, no, we're not going to take this.

And they started these huge protests against the private equity firms that had taken away their jobs. They would like go protest in front of KKR's offices in New York. course nobody ever let them up, but those protests drew some headlines, right? Especially when there were like, the woman I write about in the book was like an Alaska native had moved to Oregon to make a better life for her family, had this incredibly compelling story of how she had supported her family of five on a Toys R Us salary, and was incredibly well spoken about it. And so when she started talking, the media paid attention. They also started appearing in front of pension boards.

So public pension funds have worker representatives. So if you're a pension fund and you pay out the retirements of teachers and firefighters and nurses and whoever, there are people from those groups on your board. And those people are much more likely to be sympathetic to rank and file workers than other billionaires are, right? So the Toys R Us workers did this incredibly smart thing where they started showing up at meetings of public pension board. towards registering to speak during the public comment portion and just giving these incredibly powerful testimonies. So at one point the pension fund in Minnesota actually temporarily stopped any investments into KKR, one of the firms that had owned Toys R Us, precisely because the workers had convinced

them that KKR screwed them, essentially. And the result was they got, legally they refused to call it a severance, fund. They called it a hardship fund. But the workers got money. And that does not happen unless this group of rank and file retail workers stand up and say, this is not something that we're going to take. We should not have to put up with this. And we're going to stand and fight until we get treated better. And so that is a pretty cool example of it actually paying off. There have definitely been other examples, but that's just one I really like because the effects were so direct. Yeah, that's amazing and good for those workers.

It is such a villainized industry because it is doing such awful stuff. But is it helpful in any way? I mean, is there anything good? I'm picturing like some private equity executive, not that they probably isn't in my podcast, but what would they say? Like, are there any sort of benefits where they've come in and actually helped things? No, there are. The private equity's chief lobbying group loves to say that we are fundamentally in industry

about helping small businesses. And they have these statistics about how the majority of all private equity deals are actually at small businesses, not at giant companies like a hospital chain or Toys R Us or whatever it is. That is absolutely true. And it does seem true that in small businesses, private equity can be helpful because if you run a business that would benefit from expansion, but you don't have the capital to do it, a private equity firm coming in and saying, great, here's some capital. let's improve it is helpful. The biggest problems, the most problematic private equity deals, are the biggest ones. And so that means that those affect the most people, and that means that they're also the ones most likely to go badly. And so to me, it's a little bit of a dodge, though technically accurate, to say that most of our work is in small businesses, because in terms

of number of deals, that is absolutely true. But in terms of amount of money, that is certainly not true. And so, private equity started in the 60s with what they called bootstrap deals, which was essentially investing in small family-run companies that would benefit from expansion. Had it stayed with that model? Sure, okay, maybe it's a totally functional industry. But the need was to expand and make more and more and more money. And that required going to ever bigger businesses. Right. So it's sort of built upon itself. And now we've created a monster. Was there anything that wrote this book that really surprised you? I mean, obviously you said you didn't like follow as much about private equity before writing it. But is there anything that I guess like really changed your beliefs on

something or was really unexpected? I think one thing that really surprised me was actually like how many reasons for hope there were. I was really nervous about ending this book on a note of, wow, isn't this terrible? You know, it just didn't feel productive. But nor am I an advocate. Like, nor was I going to offer policy prescriptions at the end of the book. And so my solution to this was to find characters who are working on the problem in interesting ways. The, like, most interesting reveal in the book to my mind is the last chapter of the hospital section. And so I'm not going to spoil it here. But this small town in Wyoming, the neighbors banded together and did something pretty radical that paid off in like major, major ways. And I just think

it's cool. And I think if you hear about that or read about that or talk to the people involved, it's hard not to get kind of excited about the fact that there are people putting themselves on the line to tackle this in a real way. And these were not people with any real power, right? These were like middle and lower middle class folks in small town Wyoming. And they pulled off something pretty close to a miracle. And so I think that the big thing I wanted to do with the book is make people aware both of, of what the problem is, but also what their potential options are. And private equity wants to stay private, right?

They do not want people to understand how they work. Not that this is some big, like, investigative book. It's much more narrative than investigative. But I'm hoping that it gives people sort of the tools to start to understand, here's where private equity is in my life, and here's what I could potentially do about it. And that seemed hard at the beginning of my reporting process. And then it ended up feeling totally natural because there really is a lot out there.

Yeah. And it seems like there's just a lot more power than people think in collective action when you're fighting against these big corporations and them coming in. Oh, absolutely, which is cool. I mean, in the media stuff, I focus mostly on nonprofit local newsrooms, but I also talk a little bit about worker-owned collectives, right? which is a thing that did not exist until a few years ago. And can that model fundamentally transform the broken media business model? No, probably not. But as an ingredient to a more healthy media ecosystem, yeah, it's great. And that's just collectives of people saying we're going to do the work together.

All right, Megan. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks so much for having me. It was a fun conversation. All right. That's it for this week's episode. you can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. And don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, UserMag.

That's usermag.co, usermag.com, where I talk about all of these things and more. If you like this show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and we'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Power User. See you then.