The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World by Peter S. Goodman

Episode Date: January 23, 2022

Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World by Peter S. Goodman From the New York Times’s Global Economics Correspondent, a masterwork of explanatory journalism that exposes how billionaires’ systematic plunder of the world—brazenly accelerated during the pandemic—has transformed 21st-century life and dangerously destabilized democracy. "Davos Man will be read a hundred years from now as a warning. ... Deliciously rich with searing detail, the clarity is reminiscent of Tom Wolfe." —EVAN OSNOS The history of the last half century in America, Europe, and other major economies is in large part the story of wealth flowing upward. The most affluent people emerged from capitalism's triumph in the Cold War to loot the peace, depriving governments of the resources needed to serve their people, and leaving them tragically unprepared for the worst pandemic in a century. Drawing on decades of experience covering the global economy, award-winning journalist Peter S. Goodman profiles five representative "Davos Men"–members of the billionaire class–chronicling how their shocking exploitation of the global pandemic has hastened a fifty-year trend of wealth centralization. Alongside this reporting, Goodman delivers textured portraits of those caught in Davos Man’s wake, including a former steelworker in the American Midwest, a Bangladeshi migrant in Qatar, a Seattle doctor on the front lines of the fight against COVID, blue-collar workers in the tenements of Buenos Aires, an African immigrant in Sweden, a textile manufacturer in Italy, an Amazon warehouse employee in New York City, and more. Goodman’s rollicking and revelatory exposé of the global billionaire class reveals their hidden impact on nearly every aspect of modern society: widening wealth inequality, the rise of anti-democratic nationalism, the shrinking opportunity to earn a livable wage, the vulnerabilities of our health-care systems, access to affordable housing, unequal taxation, and even the quality of the shirt on your back. Meticulously reported yet compulsively readable, Davos Man is an essential read for anyone concerned about economic justice, the capacity of societies to grapple with their greatest challenges, and the sanctity of representative government.

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And a ton of people have signed up for the past few weeks. See our big 132,000 group on LinkedIn. Today we have an amazing author, a stellar, stellar journalist with us, Peter S. Goodman. He's a correspondent for the New York Times, and he's coming to us with an amazing new book, one that I'm going to really appreciate, probably give all to my friends that I argue with. The book is called Davos Man, or Davos, Davos, what am I doing? Davos Man, How the Billionaires Devoured the World. I knew i was in someone's stomach elon must probably january 18 2022 this book just came out by peter s goodman and let me give you a rundown

on who this gentleman is he is based in new york like i mentioned as the global economic correspondent for the new york times over the course of three decades, count those up, he has covered some of the moments of economic history and upheaval in the global financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recessions as the Times bureau chief for the Washington Post, the advent of the web, followed by the dot-com crash as technology reporter for the Post based in Washington, and during a five-year stint in London for the Times, he wrote about Brexit, the rise of right-wing populism in Europe, the impacts of Trump's global trade war, and the catastrophe of the coronavirus pandemic. He began his career as a feature writer in Japan for freelancing from Southeast Asia. His first full-time news job was in Alaska as a reporter at Anchorage Daily News. That's awesome.

And he's reported from 40 countries during stints in conflict zones in Iraq, Cambodia, Sudan, and East Timor. Welcome to the show, Peter. Wow. Your passport is something else. It is thick in places. Yeah. Thanks for having me.

It's great. Yeah. Is there any place you haven't gone? Is there any place you missed there? I've never been to North Dakota. It's the one state in America I've never visited. Got to figure out a reason to get there. There's probably no reason to go there.

That's my opinion. Anyway, I'm just kidding. Oh, man. We just lost the North Dakota crowd. Anyway, of all five of them. So welcome to the show, there. That's my opinion. Anyway, I'm just kidding. Oh, man, we just lost the North Dakota crowd. Anyway, of all five of them. So welcome to the show, Peter. We certainly appreciate it. Congratulations on the new book.

Give us your plugs, your.com, so we can find you on the interwebs. Appreciate it. Twitter, Peter S. Goodman. Facebook, just my name in New York Times. You'll find your way there. LinkedIn, same. And my website is Peterersgoodman.com. There you go. So what motivated you on the right to...

We're living in a global emergency. That's the pandemic. And I was working on this book before the pandemic, but the pandemic turned it into a pandemic book. I think it's pretty obvious, to me at least, that this is a pandemic that has been worsened, intensified, and extended by the fact that a handful of people, a group of people I call Davos man, this is the uber rich who flock to the World Economic Forum and who are not simply content with all the money. They want our adulation. They want our praise as the saviors. They've

organized our economies so that more and more of the value of the economies flows to them at the expense of everyone else. And as a result, you look at something like vaccine distribution, where Pfizer effectively monopolizes the gains of publicly funded research. Thank goodness for the vaccines. Thank goodness for their brilliant researchers. But we're living in a world where 7% of people in Africa, including frontline medical workers, have access to these vaccines at a time. And we're now giving booster shots to kids in America. And this is not just a humanitarian catastrophe. This is a catastrophe for all of us, even in wealthy countries, because this is not just a humanitarian catastrophe. This is a catastrophe for all of us, even in wealthy countries, because this is how we got the Omicron variant.

We are effectively subsidizing the monopoly profits of Pfizer through our shuttered schools, in some cases, continued death, hits to livelihood, fear. And this is a pattern we see throughout the economy. Last year at Davos, Mark Benioff, who of course is the CEO of Salesforce, actually said, we, the CEOs, are the heroes of the pandemic. He didn't single out frontline medical workers. He singled out CEOs. And he said, we've gotten together with our vaccines and credit for companies that have otherwise gone bankrupt to save the world, not for profit, he said, but to save the world. You think about that's effectively an elaborate prophylactic against redistribution of wealth. That's a preemptive.

Don't tax me because I can take care of your problems. Don't try to stick me with antitrust enforcement because you'll muck up the dynamism that I can provide. And so this is the pattern that we've seen again and again. And the pandemic has exposed this reality that our economy has been organized by this handful of billionaires and it's intensified it. That's why I wrote the book. There you go. So give us an overview about Davos, man. And maybe we'll have a foundation for people who don't know what Davos is and where the origin of that title comes from. Sure. Okay. So the World Economic Forum is this gathering in the Swiss Alps, in the village of Davos, started in the early 1970s by a guy named Klaus Schwab. It began as just a bunch of kind of geeky academics meeting on the mountaintop to talk about all these lofty issues. It's become the ultimate gathering place for billionaires,

along with heads of state, now Hollywood stars. One year I ran into Peter Gabriel, who was telling me over dinner how he's making music with chimpanzees. You run into Matt Damon. You can run into anybody there. It's the rare place on the calendar where Mick Jagger's appointment book intersects with Bill Clinton's and Greta Thunberg's. So the forum plays a key role, I argue, in the book of enabling the billionaire class to signal their virtues, not just to the public, and maybe we see through it, but to themselves. So they're full of this idea. The mantra of the forum is committed to improving the state of the world, which is an incredible irony, considering that these are the people

who are the greatest beneficiaries of the status quo. And I argue repeatedly in the book from Benioff to Steve Schwarzman, the world's largest private equity magnate, to Larry Fink, who now manages $10 trillion in investments. These guys are constantly casting their investments as a kind of civic virtue. Steve Schwarzman would tell you he bought all these foreclosed properties after the foreclosure crisis, not for the money, but so that we wouldn't have this eyesore, rodents running through overgrown lawns in front of people's houses. Benioff telling us that he and other CEOs are the heroes of the pandemic. And they go to Davos, where there's the series of earnest panel discussions about all the things you would

expect, climate change, gender inequality, systemic racism, new models for corporate governance. But the cool kids, the CEOs who are there really to schmooze, they will actually tell you as a kind of badge of honor that they never even set foot inside the Congress Center. They don't go to any of these panels. They basically hang out at these banquets and cocktail parties thrown by global banks, every consulting company you've ever imagined. And they pay literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in memberships to Klaus Schwab, who is at least nominally running a nonprofit. He plays matchmaker. If you pay enough, you get access to these secret lounges where annoying people like me

with my regular participant, Landard, can't venture, let alone the lowly working press. They can't get anywhere. So there's no regulators, there's no journalists, there's nobody annoying to interfere as Klaus Schwab will match up the members of the Saudi monarchy with energy companies trying to get access to fields, meeting quietly. Investment bankers meet with tech CEOs and they hash out deals. It's the ultimate place where, as a former forum official put it to me, we meet in secret to write the rules for the rest of the world. Wow. Yeah, it's crazy.

I see that at Ellen and Company's Sun Valley thing too, where they all get together. Disney flies in, the poor Disney, and they all hobnob and share stuff and things. And it's pretty interesting. And I guess you talk about in your book about how these guys have benefited greatly. Well, all of us have gotten poorer, according to the stats, and these guys have just gotten richer during the biggest pandemic of the last 100 years.

And the mission of my book is to bring home that is not by accident. This is not by lucky happenstance. This is not some sort of conspiracy. It's not that the billionaires are like the puppeteers in this master conspiracy, but the economy has been engineered over decades to produce the results that it has. Amazon, for instance, now employs 100 lobbyists in Washington, D.C. They all hire accountants and lawyers by the dozen, and they look for tax loopholes. They write new tax loopholes. They're constantly lobbying against regulations. They'll adopt the guise of free marketeers when it's served their interests, when they're able to

take pandemic rescues or global financial crisis rescues and forge them into corporate welfare for companies. They're very happy to do that. They don't really believe in any particular ideology beyond the bottom line. Yeah. You mentioned that. I think it was Samuel Perry on the show who talks a lot in his book about, he calls them pan-globalists, I think, where these guys, they're not really concerned about democracy and saving democracy. They do business with anybody, no matter how dirty you're around. And so they don't care. And he also, we had Tom Harmon on the show who talked about how we live in an American oligarchy. I think Jimmy Carter, President Jimmy Carter said, we are in an oligarchy now. And with the rulings of some of the different SCOTUS rulings over the

years, where you can just buy your politician with whatever you want, they really are the donor class that runs this country. There's no question that our democracy has been corrupted by the cash that's moving through it. And it's reasonable for regular people to look on and say, I may not understand what exactly is going on, but I do understand that I don't have as much a say over it as some other people. And it's also true that the lived experience, I think, of most Americans in recent decades is that the average person's needs, the average person's ability to make a living and support their family, the middle class standard, that just doesn't really count for very much. And it's not that these guys don't believe in all the good

things that they talk about. It's that they're steeped in this idea that every solution needs to be a win-win solution. This is the ultimate kind of Davos man thought. And when every solution is a win-win solution, then no one has to sacrifice. So they can sit in these rooms in Davos talking about what is the solution to inequality? I went there in January 2017. Trump had just been elected. Brexit had just happened in Britain. And even the billionaires were vaguely aware that, oh, people seem to be unhappy with globalization. Maybe we should at least make a show of wondering how we deal with inequality and long-term unemployment and manufacturing workers getting

thrown out. So the agenda that year was full of sessions about inequality. But they had people like Sheryl Sand, the Facebook executive at the time when Facebook was being implicated for instigating hate crimes that were actually killing people around the world through fake news. And she was leading this panel on the search for better models of governance. It's all very earnest. So I went around sampling the suggestions on offer for how to deal with inequality, according to Davos Man. And I listened to the head of, I believe it was Infosys, a large Indian consulting company. Workers need to train themselves. They need to take responsibility for their own training so they're more suitable for the opportunities.

I listened to Ray Dalio, a hedge funder who was then worth about $18 billion. The solution is to strip away regulations, to unleash the animal spirits of the market, to create a more conducive atmosphere for making money, which is not the sort of thing you expect to hear from someone who has somehow managed to make $18 billion. I listened to my former boss, Arianna Huffington, who had just launched this new wellness site that was all about vacuuming up sponsorships from spas, moisturizing lotion companies. And her solution was better pillows, nicer night's sleep, meditation. I heard everything except for maybe some of the people here need to give up some of their money there was no conversation about progressive taxation there was no conversation about antitrust enforcement there was no conversation about labor there's all this talk at davos about stakeholder capitalism like this idea that

milton freedmanism is dead companies aren't just catering to shareholder interest, maximizing profits with the fantasy that this will all trickle down. That's over. Now, companies, back to Benioff's point that CEOs are the heroes of the pandemic, companies will lead the way with these progressive policies in which everyone will win, except they're not willing to give anything up. So where's the stakeholder if there's no labor unions, if there's no government, if tax avoidance is the name of the game? It's just a lot of kind of virtue signaling and talk that's really about preempting any kind of attempt to equitably distribute the wealth. I had this image just pop into my head while you were saying that of me walking up to a homeless person in the street, handing them $5 and then parading about that I solved homelessness. It's worse. It's not even – it would be like you're handing that homeless person a coupon that they could exchange like at your store toward a book about how they could take responsibility for their own lack of skills. And then you could send them to some for-profit college where they could be deeply indebted

and you could securitize their debt and everyone will make money except them. That's how it would work. Those colleges, like, indentured servitude is the way they're set up these days. It's interesting. You write in the book basically the 50-year trend of wealth centralization and how this has gone down. I've watched since I was a young boy studying the middle class dissolving, which used to be the backbone of this country, and it just keeps getting worse. And like you mentioned, there was, I believe, Georgia, Amazon,

the locales in Georgia were trying to unionize for Amazon, got busted. Was it Alabama? Yeah. I was close. But all over, they're still trying to unize workers. They're still trying to get stuff going on. And I remember seeing part of the dissolving of the middle class was the dissolving of Main Street. I grew up watching the Wall Street era of what was it?

The upgrade is good. And living through that whole thing and watching just everything slowly get whittled away, trickle down economics, all that sort of stuff. And now it's gotten worse, I think, for Main Street and even small employers because they can't compete because Amazon can just devour all the employees and I think helps control some of our stuff. Oh, the pandemic has intensified that trend because Amazon has capitalized on the fact that we're all stuck in our homes trying to entertain kids who should be in school. And that's our lifeline to the rest of the world in terms of

feeding and entertaining ourselves. So they've got more people than ever. I mean, while smaller companies are dealing with things like the supply chain disruption, which is partially about the pandemic, Amazon's chartering their own container ships. They're looking into buying their own planes. The economy that emerges from this pandemic will have reinforced the power of the biggest companies. And Amazon's worth really looking at because in the summer of 2019, before the pandemic, Benioff, Larry Fink, and Jeff Bezos, and 180 somewhat other CEOs signed this statement of a purpose of a corporation led by the Business Roundtable, this lobby shop comprised of large CEOs. And they actually declared Milton Friedman is over. Now it's all about stakeholder capitalism. It's all about thinking about labor, thinking about local communities, thinking about the environment. And a lot of creditless people, my colleagues,

wrote this up as this incredible landmark. This is a huge change in capitalism. CEOs get it now. They're going to solve our problems. Pandemic was the first huge test of these principles. And boy, it was an abject failure. And you look at Bezos in particular, who runs these warehouses where he's got people laboring without basic protective gear in the first wave of the pandemic. They don't have face masks. They don't have hand sanitizer even. And when some of them start complaining, in Staten Island, there was this real labor uprising led by a guy named Christian Smalls who leads a walkout. He gets fired officially for violating quarantine, which is incredible considering that he was essentially saying we should all be quarantined except we should have paid sick leave. And Amazon has lobbied for years against paid sick leave.

So they fire this guy. And then Bezos sends out a letter that says, you know, dear Amazonians, yes, it's true. We're suffering. We're struggling with all of the difficulties. This is the everything store, right? We can't get hand sanitizer. We can't get sufficient quantities of gloves and gowns and masks. Meanwhile, Christian Smalls and his colleagues are putting this stuff into boxes. They're aware that this stuff can be gotten. It's just that they

don't matter. What matters is the customer. Moreover, Bezos doubles down and says, but thank you for your sacrifice. We're engaged in this like holy enterprise of saving other people's grandmothers. We've reprioritized the inventory so that we're sending out all this critically needed stuff to people. And Christian Smalls tells me, I talked to him quite a bit for the book, he says, this is just totally made up. We can see what's going in the boxes. His quote was, it's baking goods, it's video game consoles, it's sex toys. It's like all the same stuff that you would expect a nation cooped up in its own house for months would be buying. And yet, not only does this not shame Amazon into a different mode, they even double down.

Christian Smalls is an African-American guy who had spent his life working for mostly white managers. Vice News gets hold of notes of a meeting where the general counsel of Amazon with Bezos present advises that they put all the attention on Smalls. And the quote is, he's not intelligent or articulate to the extent to which we can put the focus on him. We will benefit. When I pushed Amazon for explanation on that, they told me, oh, the general counsel regrets those comments and did not know Mr. Small's race. Wow. And this is a company that's officially pledged stakeholder capitalism.

I remember how that all went down because I was like, I wonder what Amazon is going to do. Because there was like a day or two where it's, are they going to squash him or are they not? And that all came out. It was like, holy crap. I think he was waving a dildo or something around outside of Amazon because he was making a point about the sex toys. About the sex toys, yeah. And so it was a really interesting battle. Since then, I've seen Amazon. They're out.

Hey, we're paying people 15 bucks an hour to come to work. And they can buy all the workers they need. Meanwhile, Main Street, normal people, even some bigger corporation businesses can't compete. Everywhere I go, I see these signs. Even Walmart can't compete. Yeah. Walmart has labor shortages in part because Amazon, for now, can shell out more. And then when they don't have to anymore, if it's not collective bargaining, they're not going to pay more than they have to pay.

Yeah. And it almost seems like they need some sort of monopolistic regulation. But like you write and talk about, they paint themselves as these great endears to society. And one of the things I came to see in writing the book, it's not we all fall for that, right? It's not like we're all just a bunch of clueless sheep and we hear that the richest people in the world are going to the mountaintop in Switzerland to solve problems. Oh, thanks for that. That's really great. I think most of us can see the absurdity and certainly those of us who go to Davos. I've been there 10 times. I have seen

billionaire CEOs engage in a simulation of the Syrian refugee experience where they're literally like led around blindfolded in the dark while people are screaming at them in languages that they can't understand, demanding papers. And then they leave with a sense of, oh, I feel such empathy and I'm such a good person to have gone through that. Now I'm going to go eat lobster and caviar and drink champagne at the banquet thrown by the global consulting company. But we can see through that, be titillated by these.

But what I've come to conclude is that these guys get something out of being there themselves because it reinforces for them. This is their particular psychology. They tend to have kind of messiah complexes. And then they sit there even just around a seminar about climate change. And they internalize, well, I've taken care of climate change. Here I am. So now I can go back to my real job, lobbying against regulations on use of fossil fuels, lobbying for more tax cuts because I'm such a good guy that why should I be deprived?

The more I've got, the more good I can do. Why waste it on government? And it plays this role in emboldening them to just double down on their basic mode. Yeah. I'm a capitalist. You're a capitalist. Sure. The problem is when you start talking about some of this stuff and going, maybe unbridled capitalism isn't a good thing. Capitalism is a good thing. Unbridled capitalism maybe is not a good thing. And then is a good thing. Unbridled capitalism maybe is not a good thing. And then people start calling you a socialist or communist or whatever. They start throwing that word around.

You're like, no, but maybe too much of anything is not good. But I don't even accept that it's too much. I feel like we're buying into Davos man talking points if we accept that what we have isn't capitalism. What we have is welfare capitalism. We have corporate welfare for billionaires and rugged individualism for everybody else.

They've used not only the financial crisis bailouts, but now the pandemic ballots are better because we've got emergency unemployment benefits in the U.S. But by and large, they get the government to throw money at putting a floor below assets, which saves the bacon of billionaires. They want state intervention all the time when it suits them. It's just that they don't actually believe in any particular ideology. They just believe in the bottom line. We should have capitalism but and it would be great but capitalism needs somebody to make sure there's rules there needs to be regulations because otherwise you just get monopoly yeah yeah and the one of the problems i think i've heard people talk about non-british capitalism one of the problems we have in american society is we don't want to hold rich people accountable because we

live that American delusional sort of dream. It's become a delusion of I could be there someday too. And I don't want to overtax the millionaire because I plan on being a millionaire. And just like my favorite, one of my favorite lines from Fight Club is we're generation taught that we'll all be millionaires. We're slowly waking up the fact that we're not. But there's that kind of mentality when I argue with people about this. Yeah, I think there's something to that. But my mission in the books is to show that all of our

ideas in this area didn't get there by accident. So it's over time. If you go back to Reagan, who first said the government isn't the solution, the government's the problem, and then cut everybody's taxes. And then over time, that rhetoric took hold, has been seized on by the billionaire class as a way to drop taxes for themselves, such that the people in my book, Steve Schwartzman, worth $35 billion, pays a lower effective tax rate than the people scrubbing his toilet. Jeff Bezos, his income is about $83,000 a year from Amazon. So on straight-up income taxes, he's paying on income that's equivalent to what a public school teacher in California earns in a year.

His wealth is $200 billion, but we don't tax wealth. We only tax middle-class people's wealth through houses. If you own a house, you do pay a wealth tax. It's called property taxes. But we don't tax the unsold shares that Bezos amasses that he can borrow against. He could lose, like you lose a nickel on a sidewalk, enough to vaccinate the world multiple times over. But we don't tax any of it. And yet we've internalized this idea that government's bad,

therefore taxes are bad, therefore philanthropy from billionaires is the solution, even though they never actually deliver all the money that they like to talk about in their press releases. And meanwhile, the worst part is we've accepted, I think, this is really deeply insinuated into our political discourse, this series of false binaries where we can either have the kind of global capitalism we've got, where Pfizer takes our publicly financed vaccine research, turns it into a profitable good. They sell it to the highest bidder around the world, which leaves most of humanity unprotected. We all pay, even those of us in America, with variants. We can either have that or we won't have any vaccines and they'll all die of COVID. Or we can either accept that Jeff Bezos is going to end up with all the money. There's going to be tremendous inequality. So the

huge numbers of people can no longer make a living and they're angry and they're willing to accept crazy conspiracy theories. And we're full of anger and polarization and bitterness. And it totally undermines democracy because nobody believes in anything. Nobody trusts anybody. How can you sacrifice to deal with things like climate change, pandemics? If we don't really believe in it, we can either have that or we can be Venezuela and we can dive into dumpsters in pursuit of which would you like? At least the first one, you have the convenience of Google, Uber, air conditioning. That's all good. But life's not like that. There are other choices. So part of why I wrote this book is to wake people up to

the reality that, no, we can have all the conveniences. We can have our central air and our internet, and we can even have some people who can make a lot more money than other people. That's all fine. But we can't have this degree of inequality where so many people legitimately understand that they just have no piece of the action. They've been kicked out of the economy.

And guess what? They're pissed off about it. And when you leave tens of millions of people pissed off and feeling like they don't matter to the powers that be, we don't really know how it's going to play out, but some of it's not going to be very nice. And they're going to be susceptible to political opportunists offering all kinds of cockamamie solutions to very real problems. It's just very hard to modern society like this. We've got to share. Yeah. And when people, like you say, start getting disillusioned, then they start turning a authoritarian rule or some guy who promises to save everybody, which ironically was a

billionaire or quote unquote billionaires, but I think Forbes kicked him off the list. But maybe it has to get to a point where it's like the French Revolution, where we just pull out the guillotines and we just have at it. We don't need a revolution. And the solution to our problems, which are huge and difficult to solve for political reasons, are actually quite simple in execution. Like, we've been here before. We had the robber barons dominating the American economy, monopoly power, squashing labor. Oh, they gave us a couple of things. They built Carnegie Hall. They built university campuses. They put their names on things. But by and large, they gave us a couple of things. They built Carnegie Hall. They built university

campuses. They put their names on things. But by and large, they took all the spoils and they brutalized anybody who stood in the way. And guess what? People used democracy and they broke up monopolies. They put a floor beneath people in the form of Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. We got progressive taxation. Now, I don't want to go back to post World War II America. I'm not looking for a time machine back to 70 years ago. But in one key regard, the three decades that followed the end of World War II until the mid-70s, there's something going on there that we need to get back to, which is there were labor unions, there was collective bargaining, and workers could count on getting a share of the productivity gains.

And that's vital. And a couple of years ago, I went to and I went to this big mining operation where truck drivers were threatened with the loss of jobs because they were going to bring in self-driving trucks. And I was really struck by how these guys said, yeah, that's fine. We don't care. Oh, really? You're not troubled by the loss of your job? No, as long as it makes the company more competitive. I mean, if we lose our jobs, we'll get trained for something else. And if the company's more competitive, that'll mean more higher wages for everybody because that was their lived experience. Because their situation in Sweden where roughly 70% of the workforce is unionized,

they sit across the table from members of these employers associations and everyone understands that wages must reflect productivity gains. Productivity gains must be passed through. And as a result of that, that's actually a more entrepreneurial society. We love to think of ourselves in the US as,

oh, the land of Schumpeter, creative destruction. We're not nanny state Europeans. It's totally backward. In the States, you're not going to hear a union say, because there's less than 10% of the workforce, oh, yeah, sure, bring in the robots. No way. They're going to oppose everything. They're going to stop any kind of progress. And they're not crazy for doing so because they know that if they lose jobs, there's a good chance their people are going to end up in lower paid jobs. The unemployment benefits will run out. Their house might be underwater. Yeah, we can tell coal miners that they're supposed to give up their jobs and go train to become solar panel installers. But where are they going to get the money to move? And

where's their health care going to come from? Like in a society that actually taxes wealthy people and provides a social safety net, you can actually have more creative destruction, not less. Yeah. The other thing is most Americans aren't educated enough to know what foundations are. And when they hear that Mark Zuckerberg gave $100 million to his foundation, they don't understand that's just basically moving his money around and putting it in a tax shelter. It's still like his money. No one understands what that is. And you'll see people on Facebook, they'll be like, hey, he did something good for the world. And you're like, no.

I mean, look, some good is done by philanthropy, but it's done by discretion. There's no guarantee that there's any kind of... We can't run a healthcare system. We can't run a school system based on, yes, maybe some billionaire will decide that it's time to give us something. We need to have rules. And we need to understand that nobody makes a billion dollars without drawing on public support. The public's paying for the roads, the electrical grid, the internet. We're educating people who are smart enough to go and do the coding for companies like Facebook and Amazon. And if these guys are going to privatize

all the gains and meanwhile tell the rest of us that like, well, we're losers if we can't get where they are. That's a prescription for a lot of unhappiness and a lot of dysfunction. And it's just simply not fair. And basic belief in the values that are supposed to be governing our society break down. A lot of this, you studied for 50 years. I saw it coming out of Silicon Valley, the Ubers of the world and everything else, where we changed the world. We made the world better. We gave people freedom to work for themselves. And it really just came out to be an enslavement, if you're familiar with the whole,

at least the initial few years of the Uber system. The whole gig economy thing. Yeah, the whole gig economy has really turned into just a flex. Who benefits from flexibility? Yeah, some workers do that's fine i mean we can find cases like that all the time but by and large management wants flexibility because it's a way of not paying people for the time that they don't need them and when there's all these drivers out there competing against one another it gives good

response times for a company like uber while meanwhile you have all these drivers sitting around waiting for work. It's the same thing in the trucking industry, where we've been told now that the reason for all the supply chain disruption is because there's a shortage of truck drivers. There's no shortage of truck drivers. There's a shortage of people who haven't been burned by the crappy job that is driving a truck and the debt peonage that a lot of them get into when they sign off on leasing vehicles that then indenture them to their companies to make payments back. We've run out of people willing to say yes to that deal. And the pandemic has severed a lot of them

and they've found other things to do. That's the case throughout the American economy. And a lot of our problems have been problems all along, but the pandemic has simply exposed them. But take somebody like Steve Schwarzman, this private equity magnate worth $35 billion, who has sunk huge amounts of money into American healthcare and has been part of a wave of investment into American healthcare that has turned it into an industry really that operates not a hell of a lot differently than Starbucks or McDonald's or your favorite area. Customers are profit centers, people where you maximize the revenue. The people who work in hospitals

are costs to be minimized by diminishing them. And the reduction of capacity is the way you jack up prices. This is why we went into the pandemic with a third fewer hospital beds than we had in the United States 20 years ago. This is why nurses are quitting in droves and saying they just can't handle it because there just aren't enough of them. This is why doctors, especially in emergency rooms, where Blackstone, this is Schwarzman's company, bought into a company called Team Health that dominates staffing, have just given up because they're under pressure to administer unnecessary tests, to move quicker through patients. And this was already a problem before the worst pandemic in a century.

And that pandemic has really just revealed it. And guess what? Schwarzman is now saying publicly he's sitting on billions of dollars that he's going to plow into distressed assets, including more healthcare. Wow. One of the things I've been seeing, and I think it was reported, I can't remember who reported it, but basically Florida has reached a point where the average person there can't afford rent. And I saw that in the dot-com boom. I saw that in Las Vegas in 2008 and stuff. They were having to subsidize public workers like police officers, teachers, and everything else because they couldn't afford to buy a home. And if you can't have teachers to take care of a growing city and police officers and firefighters, that doesn't work.

And evidently, one of the big new things is these huge investment pool conglomerates are going up, taking advantage of the COVID crisis and buying up huge swaths of real estate. And it's almost like a new version of indentured servitude where everyone's going to be renting. I saw someone break down. Yeah. I saw someone break it down about how we went from owning this to renting, owning this to renting. And it's just gone down the line about everything. And here we are that maybe one of the greatest wealth growth opportunities for the middle class or lower class is we're all going to be renting someday in the future.

Yeah, and Davos Man Style, Steve Schwartzman's Blackstone, just in the last few weeks has dropped $300 million into South Florida to buy up affordable housing. So they're taking this affordable housing and they're not simply saying, we'll rent it out, which is what they did after the foreclosure crisis. And then you're right to critique that. No, they're now selling the dream of ownership through this new model of rent to buy. And what we're discovering is that the terms are set such that people are sinking into debt. There are huge fees if you're late, the rents are set so high that it's a sucker's bet, but they're selling people on the dream of ownership and then locking them into these

debt relationships. And all we have to do is look at how things have played out in the past. After the foreclosure crisis, when Schwarzman first went big into distressed housing in America and started renting them out, in his memoir, he goes on about how, I didn't do this for profit. This was an act of civic virtue. I went into neighborhoods where all these homes were abandoned. The lawns were overgrown. There were rodents and eyesores. And we fixed them up and we put on fresh coats of paint and filled them with families. You can almost hear the soundtrack for a life insurance commercial with, you know, an adorable golden retriever puppy romping on the lawn with a toddler. In fact, he set up this subsidiary called Invitation Homes that invited all the tenants to pay higher rents,

stuck them with fees, and limited the maintenance. This is how the story tends to play out. It sounds like a Jared Kushner story for his rentals. Yeah, it was the Washington Post. Florida's middle class can't even afford to pay the cheapest rent in town, and it's becoming least affordable. And I'm like, wow, man. And I was actually talking about this on Facebook, and I had friends that mentioned that that's also going on in Canada. It's also going on in Australia. This is a pan-globalist thing. This isn't just like here in America.

These guys are all over the place buying up stuff, taking advantage of people that have really crashed during the pandemic. Back to your question about Davos, man. Samuel Huntington, the political scientist who came up with the term, really referred to it as people whose wealth was so complicated that it spread across jurisdictions so that they really didn't have any allegiance to any particular nation. And one of the great ironies of the pandemic is people like Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, who's been going on about how CEOs are the heroes of the pandemic. One of the most striking things he said, and you got to understand,

Benioff is famously this touchy-feely guy. It's a Silicon Valley cliche, like all this bohemian rhetoric. He refers to his workforce as the Ohana. He's co-opting a Hawaiian term that roughly translates to kinship. He will tell you that he got the idea for his company when he was on this sabbatical in Southern India and he met the hugging saint who gave him a hug. And as he was searching for meaning in his life, whispered in his ear, you must give back, you must give back. So he's organized his company around 1% of all the hours and 1% of the revenues are given to philanthropy. Now, that part's true.

Like, that actually happens. During the worst of the pandemic in April of 2020, Benioff goes on Jim Cramer's show and says, I'm paraphrasing, but I'll get some of it. He says, the pandemic, it's such a unifier. We're all united as one species. All of humanity is vulnerable to this virus. And this part I remember for me, he says, it's erased the illusion of our borders. Some Salesforce guy who read my book reached out to me the other day to remind me that Salesforce, which makes software used by companies and allows people to work from anywhere, does a lot of business with ICE, an entity for whom borders do not appear to be illusory.

And Benioff is sitting at that point in his, I can't remember if it was his oceanfront mansion on the big island of Hawaii or his $28 million residence overlooking San Francisco Bay. He's telling us, we're all in this together, magic carpet ride to one great humanity. I mean, give me a break. First of all, the people who are really out there, people working in slaughterhouses, emptying bedpans in senior homes or hospitals, people working in supermarkets, delivering the packages, all we got to see is these people, like Christian Smalls at Jeff Bezos' warehouse, they're not all in it with us together. And even those of us who are lucky enough to be able to

work from home and do our jobs on Zoom, we're dealing with kids who are tortured by distance learning. We have no work-life balance whatsoever. We're fearing for our lives to even open the door to get the package for Amazon. Give me a break. And meanwhile, the Mark Benioffs of the world are buying additional oceanfront properties. There's a great boom in private jets, private islands. Steve Schwartzman is inviting people over to his Hamptons residence for dinner parties, giving them rapid tests at a time when the New York City public schools can't open because they have no plan for tests. This is just, it's just very difficult to take this idea that's a unifier. It's the opposite. This is enhancing the incredible gaps between Davos man as a species.

And I argue in the book, we have to see Davos man as a species. this is a taxonomy of a species that is a predator that is skilled at biting our faces off by adopting the guise of a friend sounds like my first seven ex-wives and that's an interesting analogy of calling them a species and stuff i remember when the coronavirus started they were like a bunch of them just went to their private islands and were in boats off of the coast like well we're just gonna hang out here for the apocalypse and the zombies to finish, and then we'll come back to shore. I like the idea of your book because it peels back that layer of worship that a lot of my friends, especially in the Silicon Valley industry and social media and NFTs and all this,

they're on those tech stuff. They really worship this guy. Elon Musk is like the one they worship the most. And it's almost religious behavior where they're really drinking the Kool-Aid. I've often said if Tim Cook stood out on the corner and pooped on a CD, there'd be a line of Apple people to buy it because, oh, Tim Cook. And so I like how this book peels back that layer and opens people's eyes and says, look, these guys aren't all because they buy all that PR that you've talked about

where the delusion of the, oh, they're doing the great things for the world. So I think it's, I'm not here to demonize CEOs or tech people. And let me just say, there's a lot of brilliant people in Silicon Valley. There's a lot of brilliant people who go to Davos who have all kinds of great ideas, and they're making genuine contributions to society. But that doesn't mean that we should trust them to fix all of our problems. We should trust them to run their companies, and they should be rewarded for running their companies.

Look, Jeff Bezos is a certifiable genius. This guy's revolutionized e-commerce, and it's incredibly convenient. Nobody wants to go back to a time when guy's revolutionized e-commerce and it's incredibly convenient. Nobody wants to go back to a time when we don't have e-commerce. And how would we have gotten through the pandemic without it? I'm fine with Jeff Bezos making a lot of money and living comfortably.

Great. But I'm not fine with Jeff Bezos making a lot of money, not merely while his employees are suffering, but because his employees are suffering. That's not okay. And not just because, again, on humanitarian grounds, that's wrong, because society can't function that way. It's a legal form of grift to pay taxes like you're a public school teacher in California while you're worth $200 billion and you can literally fly into space while you're thanking the employees you left behind who didn't have any PPE in the first wave of the pandemic. That's just simply not sustainable.

I thought that was incredulous just watching it. And just the fact that it was shaped in a phallus symbol was indicative of the whole thing. But yeah, I don't know. Maybe they got a couple extra floor P buckets on the Amazon floor there. I don't know. That's the thing. So do you give us any advice in the book at how we should resolve this or steps we should take? Or is that book too? Yeah. Yeah. No, we were starting to get into this. First and foremost, we need to restore some things that we already had. We need progressive taxation. We need to enforce our antitrust laws.

We need to strengthen the power of labor so that workers can actually organize for their piece of the action. And if you did those three things, you'd fix a lot of problems. Now, none of those things are easy because that involves actually having to take on Davos man and his apparatus. And it's formidable. He's got us outnumbered in terms of the money that's coursing through democracy. So I don't say that like that's some sort of, let's just do that tomorrow. That's a long-term play. But in the meantime, there are some things we can do. It's interesting that universal basic income has emerged as something that in an American context,

only just a few years ago, sounded like just a pie in the sky fantasy. The U.S. government might just as well pledge handing out a unicorn to every American. When we start talking about a $10,000 payment potentially to every American as a basic form of security. But given that we've just come through this period of the pandemic where the federal government's just been writing checks worth trillions of dollars left and right, it suddenly doesn't seem so crazy. And that's an idea that has some support now across the political spectrum. For reasons that should concern us a little bit, the people in tech world like Benioff like it in large part because it's like compensation for putting you all out of a job through automation as opposed to enabling more people to participate. But there's something going on there.

I spent some time looking at some strategies that have come out of austerity in the UK, specifically in a city called Preston, the Preston model, where local governments have gotten together and they've said, instead of centering our development plans, they had a situation where they had a hollowed out downtown, manufacturers had shut down, there was rising poverty. And then they bet big on this big redevelopment scheme where this international developer was supposed to come in and build this giant shopping mall. And then the financial crisis happened and the developers split and nothing happened.

And out of that came, we better figure out how to do something for ourselves. And so they came up with this compact. All the local governments agreed in their procurement to reorient their spending toward local companies, like with a real bias toward local companies. And they dramatically increased the amount of money that stays in the community. So now local construction companies get money when the police department needs a new police station. I went and talked to the police chief who said, look, I don't normally think about things like redevelopment, but if I'm arresting people for robbery in Blackpool,

this coastal town that's like a beach resort that also has high crime, it's not like I don't notice that these are people who don't have any jobs and have no opportunities and can't pay their bills. So if I'm going to spend money to build a police station, why not spend it where the same people I might be arresting could pick up a wrench and go build something and pay their families that way? So this ethos took over. Now, I don't think that's enough, right? If we don't deal with the tax question and the labor question, these things are in the margins, but they can be meaningful. And I sketch out some of those ideas in the book. That's really interesting. And that's bringing back Main Street, basically. Before the pandemic, there was a big to-dos about Amazon running around. I think New

York was a place they were talking about putting up a thing, but lording around there, we're going to put an office facility in your place. Who wants it? Every state's falling all of themselves, offering all these discounts. And what if you offered that to the main street people, maybe some sort of benefit to expand their businesses and do more. So maybe there is a call for more of that. Yeah, for sure. We've got to think about the fact that if you're chasing after multinationals, if you're centering, unless you're like a giant city like in New York or in L.A., most communities, they're going to lose that battle anyway.

And if you're centering your plans on some giant corporation that's answerable to shareholders, they just don't really care what happens to your people. And I'm not saying that critically like they're bad people. Again, I'm not demonizing anybody. It's just a question of the incentives. Jeff Bezos is not thinking about your town. Jeff Bezos is thinking about returning profit to his shareholders. That is his job.

And it's up to the public to then put incentives in place that benefit the public. The public can't abdicate its role. And so, yeah, communities have to think about strategies that will keep wealth in their communities. Cooperatives are another potential solution. It's a word that sort of sounds like some kind of European-style socialism. This is a word that sort of sounds like some kind of European style socialism. There are a lot of very successful cooperatives. It's an outfit called Evergreen in Cleveland that has gotten a contract to handle the washing of linens for the Cleveland Clinic, this major medical center. And this is a real job. This is not like some sort of hippie dippy fantasy. Like these guys are running a laundry service.

But because they don't have to return dividends to shareholders, because they don't have to think about margins, because ultimately they're organized to give people jobs, but they have to be competitive, they can still compete with the national change that do have to return dividends. And they can get the deal and still pay people good wages. I mean, we have to explore these kinds of models while focusing on the outcomes. And the outcomes have to be vibrant communities with sufficient jobs for people. We can't solve any problems when we get huge numbers of people constantly worrying about paying their bills. And I like that you shed a light on this because too many people look to politicians. I have a million conversations with people over years where they're like yeah but the politician is going to give me jobs i'm like do you understand that millionaires the politicians don't really create jobs i mean yeah maybe if you expand the u.s government hire more postal workers or something a little bit but

really when it comes to job creation this country it's not doing like a president and uh so it's crazy anything more you want to touch on peter about your brilliant book before we go out oh in this country. It's nice. I'm doing like a president. And so it's crazy. Anything more you want to touch on, Peter, about your brilliant book before we go out? Oh, you're very kind. I just want people to realize that the world that we're living in has been carefully engineered

by the people who've ended up with most of the money, that it hasn't happened by accident. It's happened through a perversion of our own democracies. And we've got the power to take those democracies back. The solution to our problems is really the people using democracy to get the things that they want. And we've been here before. This is all of these fights. fights, the American public stared down the robber barons and built an economy that was real good for

rich people and plenty good for everybody else. There's nothing wrong with wealth. Capitalism is part of the solution. It's not the problem. But we need rules in our capitalism to spread the gains more equitably for more people. And if we don't do that, it's going to be awfully hard to solve any of our problems. And I really appreciate your attention. Thank you. Perfectly said, too, because we just seem to be further on the climb. It doesn't seem to be. We're not going up at all.

So there you go. Thank you very much, Peter, for being on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. Could you give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs? Sure. So my website is PeterSGoodman.com, and my new book is called Davos Man, How the Billionaires Devoured the World. There you go. Out January 18th, 2022. So just hit the shelves. You can be the first one on your reading club or book to read it.

Be sure to wrap wherever fine bookstores are sold. But remember, stay in those alleyway bookstores. There's needles in there and stuff. You might hurt yourself broken glass. Go to wherever fine bookstores are sold. Order it up, guys. Be sure to watch the video version of this. Go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisfoss.

You can find my books over there and everything we're reading and reviewing. Go to all the groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those places the crazy kids are doing and all that activity we're doing there on LinkedIn, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those places the crazy kids are doing and all that activity we're doing there on LinkedIn. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.