1995 FBF: CW 394: Educating Elites with William D. Cohan Columnist for Bloomberg & Vanity Fair - Author of 'House of Cards' & 'The Last Tycoon'

Welcome to this week's edition of Flashback Friday. Your opportunity to get some good review by listening to episodes from the past that Jason has hand picked to help you today in the present and propel you into the future. Enjoy.

Welcome to Creating wealth with Jason Hartman. During this program, Jason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven't thought of before. And a new slant on investing, fresh new approaches to America's best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happy than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine self made multimillionaire who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. He's been a successful investor for 20 years and currently owns properties in 11 states and 17 cities. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to financial freedom. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome to the Creating wealth show. This is your host, Jason Hartman. This is episode number 394. Thank you so much for joining me today. Really always appreciate having you listen to the show and a lot of you are listening lately. As you know, we've got listeners in 164 countries, which is awesome. And I notice there's been a lot more downloads lately of the show. So we appreciate your support and we appreciate you staying tuned to the show and recommending it to your friends and your enemies, even they need it. Today we're going to talk with William D. Cohen on the Price of Silence and the Last Tycoons. I think this will be a pretty interesting interview for you. And the next episode, number 395, we're going to talk all about some great real estate investing techniques. Really specific, as you've noticed, of course from listening to maybe the last few shows or the last 393 shows, as you've noticed, sometimes we talk about some more esoteric economic concepts and things like that and sometimes we talk about really specific tactical things and also strategic things on how you can be a better investor and specific techniques you can use in your investing career. We like to keep a balance and do both of those things and we will continue to do so as we've got more and more great stuff coming up for you. So we'll get to our guest in a minute, but I just want to mention be sure to go to jasonhartman.com and register for our Little Rock Property tour. It's coming up quick. We're less than two months away from that. And do you know that Kiplinger magazine rated Little Rock as the number one place to live in the United States. I know that would probably surprise a lot of people. It's sort of an under the radar city. You don't hear much about it. And many times these are the best markets in which to invest because the institutional investors aren't running wild in there. They haven't run the prices through the roof. A lot of good benefits for stability in these markets. Kiplinger, number one place to live in the United States. The fourth strongest economy in the U.S. one of the 10 strongest markets in the U.S. according to Forbes magazine, the second cleanest city in the U.S. i wonder what number one is. I'm almost thinking that could be Irvine, where I used to live. It's funny because Irvine frequently wins all the awards for like the safest city. You know, the FBI does these ratings on the safest cities to live in America based on different sizes and so forth. And I always like to joke and say, yes, Irvine is the safest city, so you'll never die there. The only problem is it's so boring that you may never actually live in the first place. I can make fun of it because I lived there for many years. Also Little Rock, low taxes and low unemployment. Before we get to our guest, I want to play the audio from a video I recently found on YouTube. And this is kind of controversial, okay? So I've kind of hesitated on whether or not I should play this video because frankly, I couldn't believe it myself when I first saw this video. And the soundtrack will do justice to it for you. It's on YouTube. You can find this and we'll get it posted on our YouTube channel as well at Jason Hartmanmus Media YouTube channel. So we'll have it posted there as well. So you can see it. It's pretty shocking. And why it's pretty shocking is because it shows how massively landlord friendly Arkansas is in terms of a state to be a landlord. Whereas New York, California, they would be the complete opposite. Chicago would be the opposite. At least in the city of Chicago, some of the outlying suburbs aren't that bad in terms of landlord friendliness. I think Arkansas, I can't believe it. I might actually say it's gone a little bit too. This is a rather amazing soundtrack you're about to hear here. That reminds me too of the quote for the day. Here's a great quote for the day as you're thinking of this because even though the law is so massively in your favor as an investor in this market, it doesn't mean you have to actually use every aspect of the law to be in your favor. But we do like landlord friendly markets. We like markets where we know the governmental and the legal climate is going to be friendly to our cause. If we have a deadbeat tenant, of course, as a landlord, we want to be able to get them out of there quickly and re rent the property to a tenant who is going to fulfill their contractual obligations. That's just fair. That's how civilized society works. People have got to live up to their contracts or we have anarchy. There's two sides of the spectrum now. Here the pendulum swings massively in favor of the landlord. So here's the quote for the day. It made me think of it when I was, when I was watching this, this video that you're about to hear. A gentleman is someone who has the adv advantage but doesn't take it. A gentleman is someone who has the advantage but doesn't take it. And that's the whole concept of graciousness, right? And being gracious and being a good ethical person, regardless of what the law may allow you to do. So at least you know, going in, when you are a prudent investor in a place like Little Rock, Arkansas, you've got the advantage going in and you've got the law on your side. So you're a lot less likely to, say, suffer from the ills of having a difficult tenant experience. So let's listen to this video and I'll come back on and talk to you some more about it.

The police came to our house on Tuesday. I never received an eviction notice. We came in and I explained the situation. They offered him 90 days in jail because of failure to vacate. It's unconstitutional.

It's a hard life for renters in Arkansas. It's the only state in America with no implied warranty of habitability. Or in other words, landlords are not required to make repairs or maintain their properties. Perhaps more radical, it's the only state where you can be prosecuted, fined and jailed for not paying rent on time. Every year, more than 2,000 people are charged under Arkansas's failure to vacate law. Dustin Duke is a legal aid attorney. He specializes in representing tenants in failure to vacate cases.

Failure to vacate was passed at the beginning of the last century. That the bequest of landlords is an easy, cheap method to dispossess tenants of their property with really minimal effort on the landlord's part because the state is, is taking over that role for them.

If a tenant is Even a day late on rent, the landlord can begin the eviction process. Tenants are given only 10 days to vacate the property. A conviction can carry a fine, up to $100 for each day the tenant remains in the property and up to 90 days in jail.

It's just black and white. Is your rent due? Yes or no. Did you pay the rent? If the answer is no and you haven't gotten out in 10 days, then you can be convicted under the statute. It's a crime.

Welcome to this week's edition of Flashback Friday. Your opportunity to get some good review by listening to episodes from the past that Jason has hand picked to help you today in the present and propel you into the future. Enjoy.

This makes things difficult for the third of Arkansas's residents who are renters and have legitimate concerns about the properties they're occupying. Tenants are required to pay rent even if their landlords aren't maintaining their properties. Arkansas is the second poorest state in America, and the 18% of the population that live below the poverty line are now being swept up into the criminal justice system. Kim Barnes was evicted for being late on rent.

They actually fingerprinted me and took a mug shot like I was a criminal. I said all of this just because of failure to vacate.

Barnes claimed she had paid the rent on time, but the landlord refused to take her payment.

With me and my situation, I'm gonna make sure my kids have a roof over their head. That rent gonna be the first thing I pay out. I had proof that I had the money order. She just wanted us out.

Under Arkansas's criminal eviction statute, Barnes was given 10 days to move. Despite claiming she moved before the time period ended. Her landlord pressed charges for failure to vacate.

I had already moved once I got my eviction notice and she wouldn't work with us. We just said, okay, we'll move. Then I had to go to court today. He asked me, how do I plead unfair to vacate? And I said not guilty. Because, I mean, I'm not guilty because I was out of this woman's place in reasonable time, like she asked me to be after she still wouldn't accept my payment. I have to go back in April. Hopefully by then I have all my paperwork showing what dates I did exactly move out.

Challenging a criminal eviction is tricky. If a tenant like Barnes wants to plead not guilty and take their case to trial, they first have to pay the full amount of rent that the landlord claims they owe into the court.

So there's a real incentive there for the tenant to just to leave to get out of the premises. And especially considering that they're now facing a crime. Most of the time it's just the matter of the tenant getting out. And you might say, well, what's wrong with that? If they owe money, maybe they should get out. But the problem is the way the system is set up. It allows landlords to abuse the system. The tenant very rarely gets a chance to give their side of the story. It might be withholding the rent because the landlord promised to make repairs. You never get to raise those claims, of course, because this isn't a civil matter. You don't get to raise counterclaims in a criminal lawsuit. Let's just assume that it's just a straight up non payment of rent case. Even then, you gotta question the wisdom of deciding in this particular case that the state wants to pick up the tab.

The state of Arkansas bears the cost of deploying members of law enforcement to serve evictions and providing prosecutors for court proceedings. The only cost to landlords is a small processing fee. That is good news for landlords and their representatives. Jason Bolden is a real estate attorney and a landlord with more than 60 properties.

The criminal method is not as radical as it may seem. I've been handling hundreds of evictions over the years. I've never once seen a tenant ever serve a day in jail due to the criminal eviction statute. I would say 90% of all evictions in Arkansas use the criminal method. It's fairly simple and easy and inexpensive. If the tenant is staying in your property and not paying the rent, essentially the tenant's allowed to steal from you. It's a crime akin to a parking ticket. You park at the meter, you don't put any money in to that meter. Well, then you can be ticketed.

I don't live in my car. Maybe the people who are comparing it to a parking ticket do live in their cars. But this is somebody's home that's being taken away from them and their conduct is being criminalized. Tenants are sometimes jailed under this statute.

Currently, the data on the number of tenants jailed in cases related to Arkansas's criminal eviction statute is not available to the public. In fact, much of the information available about the reality of landlord tenant relations in Arkansas has not come from the state, but from legal researchers like Lynn Foster.

With the landlord tenant situation, you have kind of the poorest segment of our society being penalized for this behavior, which in every other state is not criminal behavior. I think that's one reason why? Nothing much has been done and not much attention has been focused on it.

In 2011, Foster joined a state assembled commission of tenant advocates, industry groups, lawyers and judges to recommend modifications to Arkansas's landlord tenant law. Their report released in the winter of 2012 recommended repealing failure to vacate.

What the commission recommended unanimously was that a better civil eviction statute be put into place. Then the failure to vacate statute should be repealed by the legislature.

The commission's recommendations were approved by representatives of all parties, most importantly tenants rights advocates in both major associations representing landlords and realtors. But implementing the recommendations would prove daunting.

My initial thought when I received the commission's recommendations was that we might be able to turn that into legislation and try to get something passed during the session that we were currently in. It became clear to us pretty quickly that the realtors and the landlords were very vehemently against this issue and would lobby hard against it. I don't think I expected that kind of opposition to happen so quickly and so strongly. It seemed like the recommendations were the result of consensus.

The Arkansas Realtors association proved to have an influential lobby. They circulated a letter around the legislature in opposition to the commission's recommendations. After that, few lawmakers would consider the proposed changes. In a letter to their membership, the association celebrated that they had stopped the bill. It mentioned that they had fought legislation intended to fundamentally change landlord tenant practices in Arkansas and that the municipal eviction process would have been eliminated and warranty of habitability imposed. In other words, evictions in Arkansas could no longer be criminalized and landlords would be required under the law, like the rest of the United States, to maintain their properties. After repeated requests for an interview or a statement, the Arkansas Realtors association refused to comment.

There is at least one very, very powerful lobby that works on behalf of folks who are landlords, and tenants do not have any correspondingly powerful lobby. On the other hand, of course, if you're counting votes, there are more tenants in Arkansas than there are landlords. About a third of all Arkansans are tenants, so the numbers would be on the tenant's side. The money may be on the landlord's side.

Lawmakers in Arkansas meet only for a few months every two years to pass legislation. The failure to vacate law won't be debated again until 2015.

It's embarrassing for Arkansas to be an outlier in this way. To use law enforcement to enforce a private contract is pretty unheard of. We don't have debtor prisons in the United States anymore.

It is not a violation of international rights. Rather, it is simply a tool that allows people to cost effectively remove a tenant who is failing to pay the rent and admitting before a judge that they have refused to pay the rent and remained in the property. When we're allocating resources, are we really wanting to supplement their profits? Are we really wanting to supplement the landlords when we can use these resources for so many other things are so much better. The tenant, they're intimidated by the process, they don't have lawyers most of the time, and they're facing not only the prospect of owing a lot of money, but even the possibility of jail time.

Things come up. Kids get sick, parents get sick, you get sick and stop trying to bring cops into it. That really not that big their concerns is the streets.

It's my pleasure to welcome William D. Cohen to the show. He is a columnist for Bloomberg View and Vanity Fair. He's also author of the new book the Prince of the Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite and the Corruption of Our Great Universities, as well as a few other books we're going to talk about, especially one entitled the Last the Secret History from Wall street that I think you'll find very interesting and we're going to dive right into it. William, welcome. How are you?

I'm great. Thank you for having me.

Let's talk about your most recent book first, if we can. There's an interesting connection between the Duke lacrosse scandal and Wall street that surprised me. Tell us more.

First of all, it's probably not a surprise that finance and accounting and economics are very popular courses of study among Duke undergrad and that many Duke graduates go to work on Wall Street. In fact, I once wrote an article for the Duke Alumni Magazine about how any number of heads of Wall street firms were Duke graduates, like Alan Schwartz at Bear Stearns and John Mack at Morgan Stanley when the financial Crisis hit in 2008. So it's no surprise that Duke sends a lot of graduates to Wall Street. But what I discovered as part of writing this book about the lacrosse scandal is that part of the compact with young students when they come to Duke to play lacrosse is the idea that if you play lacrosse at Duke, we will help you get jobs on Wall Street. And so many there's always been an interesting link generally between lacrosse players and Wall Street. I don't know whether it's because they're team players or they're athletes or they're smart or whatever it is, but there does seem to have been historically a link not only at Duke, but Generally among lacrosse players who go to Wall Street. But at Duke, it was pretty much understood that if you played lacrosse and you wanted to go to Wall street, they would help you get a job on Wall Street. And in fact, two of the three players that were ultimately indicted and then exonerated for any wrongdoing, two of the three of them work on Wall street now. And I would not be surprised to discover that a majority of the people on that 2006 team are now working on Wall Street.

You had mentioned to me before we started that Duke spent a lot, I mean, really was rather mind blowing a lot of money on this situation to fix it, to make it go away, if you, if you would. And then just generally how would you characterize the estate of the American university system nowadays?

So maybe I'll take the second part of that first. My three previous books were about Wall street, and I'd spent 17 years working on Wall street as an M and a banker. So people said to me, well, why did you write a book about the Duke La Crosse scandal? Why didn't you just write another book about Wall Street? And the answer is, because this is an amazing story about what happened. And I was curious about what had happened, and so I wanted to investigate it sort of free of all of the incredible passion that exists around. What I found though, is there really isn't that big a gulf between what happens in our big financial institutions that I've written about and where I work and places like Duke, Duke, these elite colleges and universities are incredibly powerful institutions on a global basis. There's not that much difference, frankly, between Goldman Sachs, the subject of my third book, and Duke. I mean, they're both very powerful institutions. They both have a lot of myths that have been created about them. They both have their strange customs and mores. They both have a lot of capital to play with with. Dukes endowment is approaching $9 billion at Goldman, they have $72 billion in equity capital. So there's frankly more similarities than there are differences. They're both very secretive organizations. Even though Goldman is a public company. It's really hard, frankly to know very much about them, despite their disclosure to the sec. And of course, Duke is not public at all, doesn't have to disclose much of anything, and really doesn't. And what we think of Duke, we think of incredible academics and we think of the basketball team. So there really isn't that much difference. And in fact, major unit universities in this country are really no different than big corporations. They're very powerful. They're Very secretive. They've got a lot of money and they care a lot about their brand. So the state unfortunately now is that they are run like businesses, which maybe they need to be run like that. But when you find sort of a gold mine like Division I athletics and if you play it at the top level like Duke does in basketball and lacrosse and even now this past year in football, there's a lot of money. We all know the NCAA basketball tournament generates billions of dollars for the NCAA of millions of that trickles down to the universities. And that's not a pool of money that these organizations are willing to ignore. It's a differentiating strategy for Duke and Stanford to be both strong academically and athletically. That is what distinguishes these two schools from many of the others. And they take that very seriously.

It's very interesting that you alluded to that. They're run like private businesses. And where I really object is number one, very few, if any, private businesses have their prior employees donating money. Their alumni, if you will. Although you could argue that this is true in maybe like the housing market or anywhere where you've got government insured loans. But when you look at the university system, I mean, it is just absurd to me the price of an education nowadays. In my opinion, that's largely the government's fault because they insured student loans and they created this huge pool of money chasing a limited supply of services. And these universities did what any business would do. They hired branding consultants, they made great gyms and things that would attract students facilities. And they make this whole mystique about them. I think it's just corrupted the whole system. We've got to get the government money out of here and the tuition prices need to drop to market levels.

I've thought about this a lot. I'm trying to think whether it really is a market for college tuition. The fact that it costs 52,000 or 55,000, is that the market force is working or is that the result of sort of cartel pricing? The fact of the matter is that Harvard could fill the seats in its undergraduate school how many times over? 5, 10 times over. People willing to pay 52, 55. They opened it for purely a market bid. It would go well above $55,000. It would probably go very quickly to more than $100,000. If all you had to do to qualify to go to Harvard was to be able to pay the tuition and people could bid in the marketplace for it. I assure you. Don't you think that the prices would be much higher than they are now. So believe me, as a parent of two kids in college, it's very painful to make those tuition payments because, of course, those are after tax dollars, and it's an awful lot of money, and it's an awful lot of one's net worth. So I don't like the fact that tuition payments are so high. But on the other hand, one has to step back and say, at least it. Some colleges and universities, people would be willing to pay to get that branding a lot more than they're charging now.

But I'm not sure I understood, because when you said cartel pricing, I thought you were going to mention monopolistic or antitrust practices. And I agree with you that some people would pay more. Wealthy families with dumb kids would pay a lot just to send their kid there so they could get that somehow.

Foreigners.

Yeah, foreigners for sure.

But I do agree that there is an element of cartel pricing because they seem to all raise their prices in lockstep. They never explain themselves. You just get a note saying, oh, by the way, the board of trustees has announced that we're increasing tuition 5% next year.

Yeah.

If you don't like it, you can do exactly zero about it.

Yeah. It's amazing to me with all the modern technologies, that the cost has not dropped dramatically. I mean, I know college kids who are taking online courses. What does that cost the college? It's completely scalable. It's amazing. You know, when you can go get the same education at the Khan Academy for free, you just can't get that degree.

But of course, it's about. It's about branding, it's about revenue building. And the Khan Academy doesn't have the same cachet as Duke or Harvard.

I agree.

And people are willing to pay for that because they think it makes a difference in the job market.

And it does.

We'll see whether it does or not. And it might still, but it could be changing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I hope that changes. You talk about the elitist bad boy attitude that plagues many of these campuses. What's going on there?

It's clearly an epidemic. And it's not only at Duke. I mean, every day we see more stories in the paper. You know, for the last two weeks, we've been sort of inundated with sexual assault stories on campus, whether it's the result of President Obama's task force that he pulled together in January. But every day we see more examples of bad behavior on these college campuses. And in the back of my book, I list 10 or 15 different examples, whether it's at Vanderbilt or Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Wesleyan or Amherst or the Naval Academy or American University where there have been incidents of sexual assault that leave everybody extremely dissatisfied with the outcome. And so this seems to be a rampant behavior. And as I explained in my Duke book, clearly with the lacrosse players who were put on a pedestal at Duke, they make up 1% of the undergraduate population, but were responsible for something like 25% of one kind of bad behavior or 50% of another kind of bad behavior that got reported. And, you know, the coaches didn't do anything, the administrators didn't do anything. So when this incident came along, they probably thought, well, you know, we can do whatever we want with impunity. And so if we want to have a party all day where there's underage drinking, then we'll do it. If we want to hire strippers to come and perform for us for two hours and pay them $400 each, we'll do it. What they didn't bargain on, of course, is what happened after that. But unfortunately, I think with the drink age being 21 forces administrators at colleges and universities to turn the other cheek and to pretend that this isn't happening or they do take steps to try to deal with the underage drinking, which is of course an epidemic. What happens is the drinking, of course, takes place anyway. More than 40% of students now say they binge drink. So what's happening is they drink a lot in a short period of time to get really drunk and then, you know, so called hookup culture that we live in apparently can take place and other bad things happen. So we need to get our minds around the fact that the drinking age 21 doesn't work for anybody at the moment. And people need to take, as I talked about with Jon Stewart the other night on the Daily show, people need to take personal responsibility for their behavior. We saw with Jameis Winston, the Heisman Trophy winner from Florida State University, in that New York Times expose. It looked like the police completely botched the investigation because it was Jameis Winston. And the other day we hear that he's now shoplifting crab legs or something. I mean, what is going on? Why isn't somebody like that in control of his behavior? Don't want to read about it on the front page of the New York Times? Don't keep. It's really mind boggling.

It sure is. There's a whole other class of people who many would say view themselves as immune to the system and not having to follow the rules. And your book a House of A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street. Let's talk about that in the Last Tycoons and some of the Wall street stuff.

The three books that I've written about Wall street, the Last Tycoons about Lazard, House of Cards about the collapse of Bear Stearns, and Money and Power about Goldman Sachs. These are books really. First of all, I think they're great stories. That's number one. I mean, they're great narratives about the people who work there and the history of, and in the case of Bear Stearns, how it all collapsed in March of 2008. But it's, of course, tales of hubris and people who make a lot of money who think that they are immune from the rules of the road that the rest of us have to live under. You know, they're not necessarily bad people. Some of their behavior is repugnant, but they just get this sense that they're supermensches, you know, in the Nietzschean phrase. I mean, that they're somehow better than the rest of us and they don't have to follow the same rules. And that leads to behavior, whether it's quasi illegal behavior that we sometimes saw at golden and at Bear Stearns. It just led them to blow up the firm. And so getting back to sort of what I talked to Jon Stewart about, I mean, this lack of personal responsibility, taking responsibility for your actions, making a good example for your children. I mean, we just seem to have, in many instances, maybe east of the Hudson or something, maybe west of the Hudson, people have more wholesome behavior. But I don't understand why a virtual epidemic of bad behavior, and not just in finance, and not just on college campuses, but in sport. Look at the whole disgusting episode with the owner of the Los Angeles Angeles Clippers. The fact that this still goes on in this day and age continually blows my mind. I mean, it's a full employment act for me because I'll be able to continue to write about this kind of crazy behavior. But I really don't understand why people behave this way when they know better. It's incredible. Look at the rash of insider trading. I mean, you know, Preet Bharara, the US Attorney in the Southern District of New York, has an 80 and 0 record. He is undefeated in prosecuting insider trading cases since he took over that office. How can you in 2014, engage anything remotely that looks insider trading is beyond me?

Well, I would agree with you. I wonder, though, how much of it is just a symptom of in, in some ways Us having a better media today. And I'm not saying that the media per se is better, of course, we're both members of the media to one extent or the other. But, you know, with the Internet and the blogosphere and podcasting and so forth, you know, a lot more of this stuff kind of leaks than it used to. With social media, etc. The stories grow. And I think a lot of them were just unknown before or unrepl.

We live in the famous 247 media cycle, and Sarah Palin refers to it as the lame stream media. No question. In, like the Duke lacrosse case, the whole thing was incredibly inflamed by the media and the cable news channels that just like took to this like a duck to water and couldn't get enough of it. I mean, it was literally the combination of Flight 370 and Bridge Gate all wrapped into one for a period of time there for about a year. And there's no question that it used to be that there were three networks and you had. The nightly news was a half hour. You had to be very selective about the stories that you put on. Now between Fox and MSNBC and cnbc, I mean, you know, it could be all day, day and night, Bloomberg, all day, all night. Anytime anything happens, it's going to find its way on and they're going to run with it. Look at CNN with the plane, with the jet. I mean, even though there's literally nothing to report, they're continuing to report.

There have been some really funny parodies of the CNN reporting about Flight 370. You know, just, we have nothing to say, but here we are again.

That's what happened with the Duke lacrosse case. There always seems to be one or two stories that are in the sweet spot for these guys, and they just go after it on, you know, can have a detrimental effect on the situation. Not that they care about that, but I mean, it can really be detrimental.

Anything else you'd like to share? You'd like people to know your hopes or predictions for the future on any of this. Whatever you'd like to kind of wrap up with.

One of my themes lately is that despite all the complaining that goes on from Wall street executives, I think in many ways we're about to enter into a golden age of Wall street again because there's very little competition. Their cost of goods sold, that is their cost of money is close to zero. The economy is improving. When the economy improves and there's very little competition, then firms like Goldman Sachs are just going to do incredibly well. That doesn't mean I would invest in Goldman Sachs. But if you're a Goldman Sachs employee, you're lucky enough to get a job there, you'll probably make a lot of money in the next five years.

The problem with the whole game of investing in someone else's company or someone else's deal is that the insiders, they get all the money before it trickles down to shareholders. You know, maybe the shareholders get to fight over the crumbs, the executive and the employees. I mean, these Goldman Sachs bonuses are of course, astronomically insane.

Great if you work there.

Yeah, it sure is. It's great. In general, if you're an insider in almost anything but Goldman Sachs, it would be especially true. So I want to ask you to give out websites you'd give out. Vanity Fair.com, bloomberg View.com, any others.

My website, William Cohen, c O-A-N.com has all the articles I've written, my books and links to all sorts of interesting things. That's why one place you can go, there's a. There's a Facebook page related to the book the Price of Silence, my book about the Duke lacrosse case, if people are interested in more information.

Well, William Cohen, thank you for sharing this with us today and keep up the good work. Start working on another book soon.

I'm gonna take a little break after this one, but soon enough, I hope. Yeah.

All right, great. Well, we'll look forward to seeing it and hearing more from you. Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

I've never really thought of Jason as subvert. But I just found out that's what Wall street considers him to be. Really? Now how is that possible at all? Simple. Wall street believes that real estate investors are dangerous to their schemes because the dirty truth about income property is that it actually works in real life. I know. I mean, how many people do you know, not including insiders who created wealth with stocks, bonds and mutual funds? Those options are for people who only want to pretend they're getting ahead. Stocks and other non direct traded assets are a losing game. For most people. The typical scenario is you make a little, you lose a little and spin your wheels for decades. That's because the corporate crooks running the stock and bond investing game will always see to it that they win. This means unless you're one of them, you will not win. And unluckily for Wall Street, Jason has a unique ability to make the everyday person understand investors investing the way it should be. He shows them a world where anything less than a 26% annual return is disappointing. Yep, and that's why Jason offers a one book set on creating wealth that comes with 20 digital download audios. He shows us how we can be excited about these scary times and exploit the incredible opportunities this present economy has afforded us. We can pick local markets untouched by the economic down, exploit packaged commodities investing and achieve exceptional returns safely and securely. I like how he teaches you how to protect the equity in your home before it disappears and how to outsource your debt obligations to the government. And this set of advanced strategies for wealth creation is being offered for only $197. To get your Creating Wealth Encyclopedia Book 1 complete with over 20 hours of offer, go to jasonhartman.com store if you want to be able to sit back and collect checks every month. Just like a banker. Jason's Creating Wealth Encyclopedia series is for you. This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company. All rights Resources for distribution or publication rights and media interviews, please visit www.hartmanmedia.com or email mediaartmanmedia.com Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own and the host is acting on behalf of Platinum Properties Investor Network, Inc. Exclusively.