1865: Are You Recession Ready? Peter Goodman's Davos Man Part 2

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Welcome empowered investors. This is episode 1865. Thanks for joining us today. We have Peter Goodman back with us today. He is the author of Davos man and it is a fantastic book. And he's back with us today, so we'll get to him in just a moment. On Also, I don't want to forget to tell you like I did the other day, about our upcoming interview with the author of Woke Inc. Which by the way, I'm almost finished with that book, finished Davos Man, a few weeks back. But Woke Inc. Is excellent. I mean it is just one of the best books in a while for me. I'd highly, highly recommend you get a copy of this to really understand how the Woke industrial complex works. I don't know if he used that phrase, but hey, I'm using it and it's truly shocking. You know, like the Watergate conspiracy back in the early 70s, right? Deep Throat said follow the money and it's all about following the money. And this is such a distraction that these companies engage in with their wokeness to hide all of the evil, awful, despicable stuff that they are doing. It's nothing more than a distraction, folks. That's exactly what it is. It is beyond ridiculous. And there are so many things that I did not understand about this. You know, it it puzzled me as to why these companies engage in this craziness. Just nonsensical behavior. But when you get through this book, you'll really understand it a lot more. And our interview with him is coming up again. Like I said, maybe we'll publish that next week, maybe the week after, but we'll get it out to you. It was a great interview, but the book is also worthwhile as is Davos man, our guest today. So we're going to get into Davos man here in just a moment, but last night on our Empowered Investor Inner Circle Zoom meeting, which, by the way, we're changing the name of the Inner Circle to the Pro Group, so it's Empowered Investor Pro. A little bit fewer syllables, right. A little easier to say. And I'm telling you, if you are not a member of this group, you're just totally missing out. Go and join it. Go to empoweredinvestor.com and get yourself a membership. This is one of the cheapest and best investments you will ever make. Phenomenal. But one of the things I shared, and I'm not going to go into the detail I did last night here, but I just want to quickly mention it. And if you're looking at this on screen, if you're seeing the video portion, this is the population clock from the U.S. census Bureau. And this is a static image. You know, normally it's moving. The one I showed last night is the moving version. But the point I want to make here is that in the US in a country of almost 333 million people now, a person is born every eight seconds, a person dies every 11 seconds. An immigrant comes into the country every 130 seconds. Under Joe Biden, it's probably every two seconds illegally, by the way. But that's neither here nor there at the moment. But this results in a net gain in the population of one person every 26 seconds. Every 26 seconds, we add another person and that person consumes resources. Hopefully they grow the economy and grow the GDP as well as their consumption. And they need shelter. They need a place to live. Look at this massive pool of new renters coming into the market. And last night I went over the demographic pyramids of some different countries, the U.S. china, India, et cetera. And what you notice here is that the US Just has such favorable demographics for rental housing or for purchase housing as well. I mean, look, we're interested in both sides of this market as real estate investors because, of course, we want more buyers out there in the marketplace that'll push our prices up, our values up, right? But mostly we want more renters because those renters increase rental prices and increase rental demand and put constant upward pressure on rents. And like I've been saying, folks, whatever you think the rents are today, they are dramatically behind. They are lagging the prices. Let me give you an example. And you know, since Sarah, our investment counselor, is not here with me at the moment, she was on the Zoom meeting last night and told the specific story. But one of our clients who you've heard on the podcast, Bruce, he is in the lumber business. And one of the new homes he's purchasing through our network had a price escalation clause in it. And he's already had, like, another price escalation because it's a very long construction and escrow period. And what he said is he, you know, he sent us a message and he said, hey, you know, and by the way, Bruce, hi. I'm sure you're listening to this. I know you listen to all the episodes. He said, hey, you know, I don't know if I should go forward with this deal because it's another price increase. And what was interesting about that is the original pro forma rent on his deal. Now, don't quote me on the exact number. I might be like 50 bucks off or something. Okay. But it was something like $2,300 a month. That was the original pro forma rent. But the new rent, just since the time since he made the purchase decision, is now projected at $3,100 per month. Wow. Okay, wait, we need to really notice that. Yeah, 2,300 to $3,100 a month, roughly. Last night, I was teaching our Empowered Investor Inner circle members about adjustable rate loans because we're moving more into an adjustable rate market where it actually, as much as I love fixed rate loans, you know, I've taken many adjustable rate loans throughout my investing career since I was 20 years old, because sometimes they actually make more sense. And I was teaching the Empowered Investor pro members about how to evaluate adjustable rate loans, how to understand them. You know, with the. With the lifetime cap, the periodic cap, the margin, the index, the fully indexed rate. And that fully indexed rate is what you'd call maybe the real rate on an adjustable rate mortgage because it's not tethered to a periodic cap. And look, if you don't know what I'm talking about. I've discussed this to some extent on past episodes. Of course, if you join the Empowered Investor Pro group, all of these monthly meetings are in the archive. And sometimes we have more than one meeting a month. And they're in the archive and you can watch them anytime. But the point being that the fully indexed rate on an adjustable rate loan is like the real rate. And I made the comparison to rents. The rents we have now lag housing prices by two to three years. I've said that very often. Nothing new there. But we are not even close to the fully Indexed rate for rent, for rents. Rents are going a lot higher, folks. Mark my words. This is a prediction. I will be right on the money about. Okay, you're going to see much, much higher rents in the future. Okay, all right, so that's that. Now, I am in several mastermind groups, of course. One is my own mastermind group that I run with Ken McElroy and George Gammon, that's called the Collective Mastermind. But I'm also just a member, a paying member of several other groups and I've been members of many mastermind groups over the years and it has been a phenomenal experience for me. I have learned so much from the doers, the people that are really out there doing it instead of listening to a lot of my friends who probably aren't listening to the show. So I'll, I'll give them a hard time, who are kind of those armchair quarterback type people. You know, we all have friends like that who aren't actually doing the thing, but they sure seem to know everything about the thing like real estate investing and they know all the reasons why it won't work. And they've become very bitter because they've missed the last 12 to 14 year boom time in the real estate investment world. And, you know, they instead put their money into some stupid mutual fund and, you know, they got a little bit of return but, you know, not tax advantaged, wasn't a very good return. Well, real estate investors doing the right thing, listening to the stuff I share, the good techniques, the prudent techniques, well, they've made a fortune, right? They've made an absolute fortune. So these people are the new experts. They've become very, very jealous of the people who've done it and made it right. But listening to the doers and being a member of like their private forums, maybe private Facebook group or they're on some other platform as a private forum, what I noticed is there were a few things a lot of them were doing. Like someone asked a really good question the other day. They posted, you know, what are you doing to prepare for a possible recession and possible transition in the economy? And I looked at all of the answers just reading the thread, which was very, very enlightening. And knowing these people personally and knowing how successful many of them are, I mean, tremendously successful people in many cases. And I wanted to come up with a few little steps that I think all of you should take, steps that I'm taking that I think are really just prudent steps. Before we get to our guest today, and number one is look for ways to cut expenses. Look, if you've been living the high life and just kind of blowing money, it's time to be more careful. I think that is kind of obvious, right? Be more careful, be more prudent, and spend money on the things that really bring you joy. And mostly those things are you're probably going to find they're more centered around experiences than they are around things and stuff. Okay. Although, you know, hey, things and stuff are good too, but experiences are the things we really remember. Number two, secure credit lines. Folks, this is some of the best advice out there because if we move into a world, an opportunity where assets go on sale, they might be stocks, they might be bonds, they might be real estate. I kind of doubt they're going to be real estate, but hey, we'll see. You've already heard me talk extensively about that. You want to be in a position where you have credit available to you. And one of the best sources that I can recommend for this is that you simply take advantage of our free funding workshop. Okay? And by the way, let me find that link. Yeah, it's Jason hartman.com fund Jason hartman.com F U N D for fund and learn about how you can get really quite easily $50,000 to $250,000 worth of credit for real estate, for business, for anything you want for free. This is no interest credit for a period of maybe 12 to 18 to even like 20, 22 months of no interest credit. And it's not credit. You don't have to use the credit. Just have it ready for opportunities that come along or emergencies that come along. Maybe you get into cash pinch and you need credit. Look, folks, there's a great saying and a great book title from years ago from one of our prior guests, Harvey McKay. You know, you remember the author, Harvey McKay. He's written a whole bunch of great books with really funny, unique titles like how to Swim with the Sharks without being Eaten Alive. Beware of the naked man who offers you the shirt off his back. But the title of one of his books that I like best is this, and it is a lesson for life. Dig your well before you're thirsty.

Dig your well before you're thirsty. That's what step number two is. You need to be thinking right now before you need it. You might be thinking, hey, I'm cash rich. I don't need any cash right now. You know, but let me tell you something, folks. You want to secure credit lines in advance of needing them, check out the free class jason hartman.com fund f u n D secure credit lines. Okay? Set up entities to protect assets. This is one of those other things in life that you must do in advance. It's very easy, it's very cheap, but you got to do it in advance. You can never do this thing after the fact. Okay? You can never do it after the fact. And that is really, really important that you do this in advance. And for that one, we've got a great partner for you. Another partner. Check out his free class at Jason hartman.com/protect Jason hartman.com protect. You must take care of this stuff in advance. Dig your well before you're thirsty. And that one's Jason hartman.com protect. Okay? Make educated investments. Step four. Make educated investments. Look, if you're listening to this show, I'm sure you already have that figured out. If you're new to the show, maybe you don't have that figured out. So if you go to Jason hartman.com on the front page of the website, there is a great 30 minute video on basically how to analyze a real estate deal. Okay? And we want you to know how to make prudent investments. So go there, check out that free video, Jason hartman.com on the front page right there in the middle. Watch that video. Really, really good. And of course there are more things. There were a lot more things that my friend shared in this great thread I was reading the other day, but I just wanted to share that stuff with you. Get your credit secured, look for ways to cut expenses. Be lean and mean right now. Set up your asset protection plan in advance. Set up your credit lines in advance. Those things you must do in advance. And make educated investments. Keep listening to the show, go back, listen to old episodes, et cetera, old videos. And by the way, comment below if you're watching this on YouTube with any questions or thoughts you have. And we will try to get to those on a future show. And of course there's going to be more to follow on that. Okay, so I wanted to play this little clip. It's only 30 seconds long and you're probably going to recognize this guy's voice. You probably love him. But in case you don't, just listen with an open mind. I've talked to you many times before about how the government and the corporatocracy wants you to be single. And if you're married, they want to break you up. Your marriage is under attack.

Think about the problem the corporatocracy was facing. Of course they wanted to gain more market share. For their products. Of course they wanted more workers.

They.

But you know what problem they used to have that I haven't talked much about, and that is that before women really came into the workforce, wages for men were going up a lot. They were increasing rapidly. And guess who didn't like this? The corporations didn't like it because they want cheap labor. And they thought, how are we going to put downward pressure on these wages for all these men working in the workforce? Think of, you know, a show like Mad Men during that era. Right? Or even before that era and after it to some extent, but all around that, you know, era, okay? They wanted to suppress those wages because the bargaining power was in favor of the employee. Now, what better way to do that than. Than to get the other half of the population to enter the workforce so that there would be more competition for a limited number of jobs. They do this also by not controlling the borders because that puts downward pressure on wages and hides real inflation and makes it cheaper for employers. Folks, this is such a vast conspiracy. It really is. And you know, I don't want to hear the conspiracy crap, okay? There are lots of conspiracies going on that are quite real. We just celebrated the 4th of July here in the United States of America. The United States of America was a conspiracy to rise up against the British crown. Okay? A conspiracy is simply something that, you know, two or more people are planning and trying to keep under wraps. It's really not complicated. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist or wear a tinfoil hat. Grow up. There are conspiracies all around us, and they are hurting you. They are hurting your marriage, they are hurting your family. They are stealing money from you. They are all over the place. Here's the 30 second clip.

Corporate America wants you childless. And this is a big change. A hundred years ago, big companies built housing for the families of their employees and then schools and libraries to educate them. It was the humane thing to do. But it also seemed to make good business sense at the time. If you wanted workers you could count on, you had to take care of them and their offspring. But over time, that arrangement got expensive. Employees with families demanded higher wages as well support their children. And in many cases, they formed unions to get those raises. So labor costs soared.

So there you go. That's just a little insight into it of a very big long story. All right, let's get to Peter Goodman and talk about Davos. Man, here we go.

Certainly there are plenty of people like that. We know people like that. It's I'm not saying that they don't exist, but there are plenty more people who simply came of age where they're raising families in major American cities where there are huge speculators like Steve Schwarzman who are bidding up the price of real estate and they're told there's a societal imperative to send their kid to quality schools. To be in a quality school district, they have to pay the freight. And the prices are set by a million other people, some of whom are availing themselves of home equity lines of credit to buy families fancy new cars they don't need, many of whom are speculators because the money's so available. And so, you know, families are having to sign here to get themselves in a decent school district. And a lot of those people need to be understood in the context of what is and isn't moral hazard. And along comes the Obama administration. They say, well, we got money for Goldman Sachs, we got money for aig. We're not going to prevent bonuses from being paid out to the very bankers who caused the financial crisis. The but we're not going to bail out homeowners because somehow that would be morally wrong and bad politics. And then to your point, the punchline is the very financiers who participated in the speculative orgy that wrecked the housing market now have all this cash to buy up the properties and they end up profiting on the other end. Well, just to connect the dots with Steve Schwarzman, in more recent times, Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone have found their way into American healthcare. And this is key to understanding why American healthcare performed so poorly during the pandemic. Schwarzman spent $6.1 billion back in 2018, I believe, to buy up a company called TeamHealth, which is a company that is one of two giant private equity owned firms that dominate staffing in emergency rooms. Now, in the same way that Schwarzman understands, if you're going to be a landlord, it's good to be a landlord over people who have no other options. And any casino magnate can tell you good to make your money in a dark room where people don't know what time it is and they're drinking. If you're going to be in health care, good to be in the part where a lot of the customers come in on gurneys where they're not in the mood to ask about the particularities of their health insurance policies. They just sign the clipboard that's proffered so they can go see the people in the white coats who can relieve them of Their pain. Well, Schwartzman's company is at the center of this so called surprise billing scandal. The surprise is not of the happy variety. It's, you know, you think you are within your health insurance network and you sign away the right to see. You essentially sign off on seeing somebody outside a network, and it turns out you get billed at these extravagant rates and then bill collectors hound people for months after. This is part of this wave of private equity investment into health care that has transformed our health care system into something that functions much more like an airline or a fast food chain than what most of us would think about as a place where you're going to get medicine. In the same way that United Airlines wants every seat filled so they can charge more for the flight, a private equity company that owns a part of a hospital wants all the rooms filled. This is why in the two decades before the pandemic, the US Loses roughly a third of its hospital rooms. I tell the story in the book of a guy named Ming Lin. He's an emergency room doctor who is working for Blackstone's Team Health, who in March of 2020 at his hospital in Bellingham, Washington, notices that nobody's wearing a mask. There's no triage system. He asks his administrators, hey, what's up with that? He's essentially told, we don't want to freak out the customers coming in for lucrative elective surgeries. He goes to Team Health, he says, why, in the middle of a pandemic, when the state of Washington is already under state of emergency, are we letting people come in for elective surgeries? And he's told, oh, well, we work for the hospital. That's our client. Well, he goes public as a whistleblower with the warning that the entire American health care system and American society is being put at risk because of the interests of profit for his employer, and he is fired. This underscores that Davos man love to talk about their virtue signaling. They love to talk about. I mean, Schwarzman would tell you that Team Health is part of the solution to American health care. And yet here we see with this fired whistleblower, the real interests are about profit. And everything else takes a back seat. Even the worst pandemic in a century.

Yeah, no question about it. And you didn't talk about this in your book. That I recall. But Davos man, I'm sure, is in the privatized prison business as well, where they take people's freedom away for profit.

That's right.

It's just like a hotel or an apartment complex and listen, I'm a real estate investor. I think this way, you know, you want the lowest vacancy rate possible. But imagine if you could lobby the government to make stricter laws that are these obscure laws that people don't even know they're disobeying. I interviewed the author of Three Felonies a Day on my show before. And then you could imprison them and make all kinds of money off of that. I mean, it's just disgusting the way these cronies and rent seekers act. It's unbelievable.

Well, it is grotesque. And yet they wrap themselves in the flag. They tell us we're not nanny state loving European socialists. This is real capitalism. And to your point about rent seeking, because I think it's really important.

Let'S just pause and note that business is a source of social good in many instances. Real businesses, if you think about the average small business, I mean, people have ideas, they employ people, those wages get cycled through our economy. This is the kind of capitalism that needs to be celebrated. The people we're talking about, they essentially figure out how to manipulate our democratic process to produce policies that are often at odds with societal interests. Whether we're talking about how do we deal with mass incarceration in America, how do we deal with climate change, how do we provision for health care? They're at odds with our social interest, yet they pervert our process to generate profit opportunities for themselves at social expense. And then when we say, well, maybe we should regulate, maybe we should study, maybe there should be progressive taxation so we can actually finance some of the things people want, they say, oh, no, no, no, no, that's, that's, you know, you might as well be a Trotskyist to propose, you know, oh, radical income redistribution. I mean, Schwarzman once likened simple taxation to Hitler invading Poland. I mean, very quick to bat down any attempts at the public using the levers of democracy to have a say over what kind of society we're living in to, you know, accuse us of being anti business, anti capitalist.

Like, I mean, no one could be more pro business than me, right? But this is not business, folks. What goes on at the high levels, it's not. Davos man is not engaged in business or free markets. Davos man is engaged in cronyism and fascism. Okay? That's what Davos man is. And one of the speeches, not really a speech, but like on a panel that I love, that took place at Davos, I think you mentioned in your book, was Rutger Bregman, the historian who just lambasted these people. And I also have to mention I loved Ricky Gervais. Comments. I think it was the Academy Awards. Yes. Few years ago when Tim Cook was in the audience and he said, oh look, you're violating all sorts of things that would be illegal with child labor in the United States, but you just offshore that to China and abuse people there and everybody worships you here in the U.S. you know, it's, it's just unbelievable. Yeah, but go ahead.

Well, the Bregman point I think is really interesting. So Rucker Bregman is this Dutch academic who is attending his first Davos, I think it was in 2018, 2019, can't remember. And he breached protocol because the understand the act of understanding at Davos.

I mean I'm surprised you can even obtain that video frankly with the censorship on YouTube. And you know, they're all part of.

The, oh, you're happy to show it. It's part of the whole ethos of the forum that free flowing, you know, anyone could say anything but, but it was a breach of, of decorum in the, the understanding of you're at Davos is we're all very well intentioned, we're all puzzling over how to solve these problems. You know, I've been to, I make this point in the book. I've been to gatherings of pharmaceutical executives discussing, you know, why are drug prices so unaffordable for most people? And they'll, you know, they'll really earnestly discuss, well we, maybe we haven't come up with the right business model yet. This requires more study. We need more stakeholder dial.

Somehow they're less expensive in other countries.

You know, it's never like, well, we've all conspired to make the prices unaffordable because that's good for our shareholders. So here's Bregman who's on this panel where he's supposed to be talking about universal basic income and he's asked for his opinion on inequality. And he says, he says, I feel like I'm at. Yeah, he says taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to use that word.

That's essentially what he said. Yes, that's exactly what he said is the word bullshit.

And then he says, I feel like I'm in a firefighters conference and I'm not allowed to discuss water. Now your viewers may remember that because that clip went viral. I went and rewatched the whole thing. What's fascinating is what happens after. So this panel is moderated by a guy named Edward Felsenthal, who worked. Who is the editor in chief of Time magazine, by then owned by Marc Benioff, one of my five key characters, the Salesforce CEO who is on the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum and loves to talk about Win Win solutions so that no one has to sacrifice. And Felsenthal turns to Jane Goodall, the naturalist. Now, think about my Davos Man. I species.

I watched the whole panel, too. It was about an hour long.

And he says. He says to Goodall, he says, what is it about us as a species that, you know, we know how to solve these problems and yet we somehow can't? And she, you know, gamely plays along and says something about evolution. I mean, it's an incredible punchline to that because, again, he rebuilds this wall that. That protects Davos man from ever being held. It's not that you're greedy. It's that you haven't settled on the right messaging yet or we haven't consulted the right stakeholders yet. It's always a process that will eventually yield solutions if we just have more talk.

Yeah, I know. They'll be talking for the next hundred years, and they'll have the what, the 150th Davos conference, and everybody will be poorer and they'll be richer.

Well, by then, they'll be in space. Yeah, it'll be like District 9 or one of those Matt Damon movies where they're on the comfortable space colony.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's truly incredible. Well, Peter, just wrap this up for us. Anything I didn't ask you or anything else you want to mention.

Well, what do we do?

Actually, before you do that, before I. Let me ask you about one thing that puzzles me about the book. You're critical of pretty much every presidential administration in the book. I'm a little bit surprised. And I know he ruffles a lot of feathers, but Trump, Because Trump, in many ways, is sort of the anti Davos man and he's the anti globalist, and I'm kind of surprised. I know. Listen, you know, I'm not gonna defend Trump. And the shit he says is some of it's very outlandish and immature, for sure, no question. Right. But I'm kind of surprised you were as critical of him as you were. And, you know, maybe it's your New York Times background, I don't know. But, you know.

No, I mean, you know, we don't work for any particular party or any figure. I mean, we go after the fact pattern Yeah, I am critical of Trump because Trump does offer himself up as the anti Davos man guy, you know, so does Steve Bannon, who was his leading advisor for the first years of as administrators. He loves to talk about, you know, the globalists and he's all about nationalism and making America great again, all that great stuff. Well, what does Trump actually do for the people he supposedly championing the interests of? He vacuums up campaign cash from Steve Schwarzman. He delivers the largest package of tax cuts in American history, lavished not on the working people whose interests he's supposed to be serving, but on people like Steve Schwarzman and Jeff Bezos and Marc Benioff. He then engages in this kind of photo op trade policy where he sticks tariffs on China.

He's a classic populist. He's going to blame the external forces for American problems. So if you distill the Trump message to working people who are quite correct in concluding, and this is why they're happy to embrace this anti establishment figure like Trump, they're quite correct in concluding that the elites don't care about them, that for decades their interests and their ability to support their families doesn't amount to much, if anything, in the halls of Congress. But then he tells them, the source of your problems. It's these immigrants streaming over the borders. We're going to build a wall. It's China. China's trying to steal our lunch. They've devastated us. Now, China is a complex challenge for the global trading system and China does need to be reckoned with in a sophisticated way. But Trump engages in this completely false narrative that American living standards have been downgraded and they have not by the people who actually did it, the Davos men who are financing his campaigns and are delighted recipients of his tax cuts and deregulation. He says, it's China, it's immigrants. Look, our problems are made in Congress, in boardrooms, in New York, in Seattle, in companies that have undermined the labor movement. Our problems are domestic. The US Is a massive winner in globalization. The US has allowed a handful of billionaires to set up our system, to rig our system so that they get all of the benefits. I mean, I tell the Bezos story in the context of he's ultimately a huge beneficiary of international trade. I mean, oh, no question he's tapped the factories of China. Where does the money go? It goes into his pocket, in the pockets of shareholders. It doesn't get distributed through the workers. So I'm critical of Trump because he's correctly diagnosing a problem that most people know in their bones, which is that they've been abandoned by the elites. Well, basically just tap dancing for the very elites who did the job. And handing out goodies to people like Steve Schwarzman and Larry Fink, who we haven't talked about, the world's largest asset manager.

And Jeff Bezos.

Gosh, Peter, I could talk to you for hours. I love this conversation. I'm curious, would you be a supporter or would you have been against nafta, for example, Same token, China coming into the wto.

Look, I think trade is vitally important. I think it's clear that the history of trade going back to the end of the Second World War is when there's more trade, there's less military conflict. When there's shared dependence upon trade, we're less likely to take up arms.

People don't like to kill their customers.

That's right. And trade creates export opportunities. And companies that export tend to pay more, they tend to make more, they tend to be more innovative and they have to compete. And that's all to the good. I think we've allowed our trade policy, again, not by accident, because of the lobbying of companies to tilt very much toward the shareholder class and away from the working class. And nafta, in retrospect, it was clearly a mistake to not have much tougher rules on working standards to make it much more difficult for companies to simply avoid American wage scales, American environmental and workplace safety rules.

That's exactly what I've been saying forever about the free trade. Look, I like free trade too. I agree with you in concept. The problem is there's this old biblical principle about being able to equally yoked. Right. And I think it's mostly relates to a marriage. Right. But you know, a trade deal is a marriage too, and it's. So is any business deal. And the parties have gotta be equally yoked. China, Mexico, they're not equally yoked. The US has all the yolk and they don't have any yolks. China can destroy their environment, they can abuse their labor, and the US can't do that. So how are you. Of course, when you, when you have these free trade, you're going to have Ross Perot's giant sucking sound.

We needed to have much tougher conditions in China's WTO accession than we did. And it's important to remember China's WTO accession was sold to us by Davos man, by the shareholder class who told us, by the way, that it wasn't even about just about the Money. I mean, we heard from people like Clinton and his treasury secretary, Larry Summers that, you know, oh, no, this is about democratizing China. I mean, once we integrate China into the global trading system, we're going to have a growing Chinese middle class, and they're going to demand what every middle class demands, including economic freedoms. Well, that. That was a sham because, I mean, China trade with China changed American business a lot more than it changed Chinese politics.

Couldn't agree more.

And we turned, you know, I mean, Google assented to its own censorship. I tell the story in the book of going to see Bill Clinton deliver a talk when he's flown over by Alibaba back In the early 2000s, right after Yahoo, which at that point is. An Alibaba partner, has given up the IP address for a Chinese journalist who has leaked a document to a human rights group and has been sentenced to 10 years in prison. This is a guy with a kid he sent away. And I tried to ask Bill Clinton, how do you square taking several million dollars from Alibaba with this Chinese journalist being sentenced to prison? And he sort of pantomimed that he couldn't hear me as he fades into the security corridor. I mean, China's WTO session was driven by the interests of American shareholders who were using it to weaken the American labor movement, to weaken wage standards, to get out from under various regulations, including workplace safety and environmental, and to lower the costs of production so they could send more money to the shareholders. And the public should have had a say about how that went down. But our political system has essentially been captured by these corporate interests who've used their money. I mean, Dallas man. And I tell the story in the context of Schwarzman very directly. And they've amassed their money and they've used their money to purchase political power, which they've used to protect their money and make their money get that much more voluminous.

I want to put out an invitation. If any Davos man is listening to this or sees this, you're invited on the show. I'd love to come and hear your side of the story, but I have a feeling my invitation won't be accepted, so. So I'll just throw that out there. Okay. Wrap this up for us, Peter. It's been a great conversation and really interesting views on all of this.

Well, you know, the answer to our problems is staring us in the face. It's democracy and that. You know, it's easier said than done to fix our problems. But what we need to fix, I mean, we're Living in a time when our own democratic society is under threat from this inequality. I mean, the breakdown that we're experiencing in faith and institutions.

The breakdown in faith that the elites are looking out for the rest of the people. These issues are very real. They're not going to go away until we deal with our economic scarcity and the way we do that. We don't need some sort of revolution. We don't need some utopian flight of fancy. We need what we already had. We need antitrust enforcement, progressive taxation, and workers right to bargain for a piece of the action, which is what we had from about the end of the Second World War till the mid-1970s. I don't have a fetish for the 60s and 70s. We don't want to go back to Jim Crow law and the Vietnam War. We made a lot of social progress we want to hang on to, but we need to get back to a time when people can work for a living and support themselves and middle class standard. And the solution to that is just not that exotic. We need those three things. Progressive taxation, antitrust enforcement, and collective bargaining. But that's going to involve mobilizing to take on the entrenched power of Davos man. Because they're not giving up their, their claim on the political system without a fight.

Yeah, they're not going to. You know, it's interesting, I shared a post about the Simpsons, the fictitious family. Right, The Simpsons. And if you look at the Simpsons, you have Bart, who's kind of a loser, obviously, right? He's an idiot. It's one person working. They have a nice suburban house, they have a car. They can support the whole family on that one income. We used to be able to do that in the US and what happened, like, it's just impossible now. Nobody can do that anymore. And I think squarely Davos man is to blame for this. It's just a different world. So, Peter, thank you for sharing all of this. Thank you. Jason. Yeah. Do you have a website you want to share?

Sure. Petersgoodman.com or you can find me on Twitter @petersgoodman.

Yep. And folks, get the book. You'll love it. I highly recommend it. And Peter, really appreciate having you on the show.

Great to talk. Thank you so much, Jason.

Thank you, Jason. Jason, I would not have as much money today if it wasn't for you. You know, Sissy and I both made a ton of money and you know, thanks to you and your guidance and your show and everything, it's been great. And now cash flow for all your clients on top of it. Not only appreciation, but cash flow. You made a lot of people rich, my friend. You're a good man. Thank you, Jason.

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